For several minutes, the two of them stood there, waiting for what would happen next. Finally, Altantsetseg’s voice crackled over the commlink.

“The attack is over. You can leave the safe room.”

The door’s lock clicked open.

Chapter 47

I think what we fear most about finding a mind equal to our own, but of another species, is that they will truly see us—and find us lacking, and turn away from us in disgust. That contact with another mind will puncture our species’ self-satisfied feeling of worth. We will have to confront, finally, what we truly are, and the damage we have done to our home. But that confrontation, perhaps, is the only thing that will save us. The only thing that will allow us to look our short-sightedness, our brutality, and our stupidity in the face, and change.

—Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

47

EVRIM STOOD OVER ALTANTSETSEG on the hotel terrace.

The terrace was covered in broken glass, tiles torn from its surface. Altantsetseg was naked, slick with the control fluid of her tank. A weapon like a bloated machine pistol lay by her side on the tile. She was pouring a packet of coagulant into a cut that ran from her wrist up to her elbow. Another slash below her eye still bled, obscuring the lower half of her face with smeared blood.

She said something in Mongolian and tapped her shoulder. Evrim went into her security module and came out with the translator.

It was the newer model. Altantsetseg switched it on.

“Stupid,” Altantsetseg said. “That’s how I feel. I underestimated my opponent. When the second alarm, the shore alarm, went off only a few hours after the first, I thought we were dealing with something related to the ship I had destroyed at the perimeter, so I went to the tank. I didn’t expect it was our undersea friends.”

“They did this?” Ha leaned down and held a compress against the cut beneath Altantsetseg’s eye.

All of the windows on the ground floor of the hotel were smashed.

“They pulled the tiles up and flung them through the windows. I should have hardened those long ago, but I didn’t think there was a need: I thought a defense in depth was better. Then one of them got into my module as well—through the vent, a hole no larger than a fist—and started pulling all the connective wiring out of my tank’s interface. The tank system is destroyed. But how could they have known where the control was coming from?”

“Because they have been watching,” Ha said, “from closer than we think, and for longer. They may not have known exactly what was going on in your control module—but they understand it is important to us.”