“When I climbed out to stop it, it slashed my arm and face with something, and slipped out through the vent again. When I got outside there must have been a dozen of them on the terrace, still flinging tiles at the hotel.”

“You are lucky it didn’t kill you,” Evrim said.

“It wasn’t trying to kill me.” Altantsetseg was wrapping her wounded arm with a bandage.

Ha tore open a packet of coagulant and sprinkled it on a fresh compress. The wound under Altantsetseg’s eye still bled. Ha saw the white of bone in it.

“If it had been trying to kill me,” Altantsetseg said, “I would be dead. It has eight arms, and probably just as many of whatever knives or sharp objects it was carrying. It wasn’t there to kill. It was there to do damage, and then get away. I was in its escape path.”

Ignoring her nakedness, the slime of the control fluid, and the blood still leaking from her wounded face and arm, Altantsetseg stood up. “Come over here.”

The three of them followed to a spot near the hotel entrance. The remains of the cloaked submersible lay there. It was ripped to pieces, torn down to its individual components, its carapace deformed and split, all its parts carefully displayed in a shape that was rough in outline, but clear enough:

“We’ve learned, by now, what that means,” Evrim said. “We may know almost nothing, but we at least know this.”

“Stay away. Get out. Leave,” Ha said. “Pick your synonym: the symbol is clear.”

“I am partial to ‘Fuck off’ as the most accurate translation,” said Altantsetseg. “But I don’t think our intrusion into their territory was the final straw: that predatory AI fishing vessel was. It came into the perimeter less than five hundred meters from their shipwreck’s location. That commotion was right above them. That is most likely what drove them to attack.”

“But that has nothing to do with us,” Evrim said.

“That would make no difference to them,” Ha answered. “It’s unlikely they can distinguish easily between individual humans, and they certainly wouldn’t understand how our society is structured. Us, someone else—it wouldn’t matter to them. It couldn’t matter. What one human does is what all humans are doing, from their point of view.”

“They thought we were attacking them.”

“Yes. They thought they were being attacked—and they responded.”

“And now so much of our work has been destroyed,” Evrim said. “And by what? Some fishing conglomerate’s insatiable greed.”