It’s not Hubbs and you know it, she told herself. He’s dead. They’re all dead. Probably Orr and his tech above, too, and maybe even the boys up in the drill tower. And you know damn well who or what is behind it.

She did. But it was the how and why that concerned her. Why would the Old Ones kill the others and leave her alive? What would the point be? To toy with her? To study her? To see what happens to the human mind when it begins to disintegrate?

Then she stopped. She would not give the bogies the enjoyment of thinking they had beaten her. Maybe they had, but she would never admit it.

Options.

She sat at the computer console and weighed them out. First off, even though she could not raise the LSB, what she saw on her screen told her that not only was the buoy still up there, but it was still functioning. She was still getting electricity and freshly-scrubbed oxygen from the generators and compressors up there. So no need to panic just yet. If that failed, she could go on emergency life support in the Entry Lock, pressurize it independently. That would buy her time. The microwave telemetry system was offline and so were video, audio, and data connectivity.

Good and bad.

There was always her hardsuit.

Yes, the Exosuit!

She could climb into it and ascend to the surface…but if no one was there, no one was alive on the LSB, then what? The ADS hardsuits were fantastic in the water, but out of it they were bulky and heavy, weighing over a thousand pounds. She would need somebody to winch her out of the water. There was no auto winching like on the habitat. If she surfaced, she would just bob around like a drum.

Emergency release, dummy!

Yes, of course. Why the hell wasn’t her head working right? The Exosuits had emergency release systems. If you were in danger or couldn’t get the suit off, you could override life support and the suit would open to release the pilot. You had to enter preset coordinates to do it, though. The whole process was complicated and necessarily so, otherwise a pilot might jettison his suit at the bottom of the sea accidentally.

“Well,” she said out loud, beginning to feel a bit of the old self-confidence welling up in her. “Maybe my goose isn’t cooked quite yet. Seasoned, but not ready for the pot.”

That’s what she would do. Ascend to the LSB, jettison the suit and climb aboard. Then, if Orr and his techie were dead or gone, she would contact the tower. And if that wouldn’t work, she would activate the cable car that was completely automated. It would drop down and up she would go.

Unless that technology failed her, too.