"I think something tapped into our in-head circuitry. I don't know how."

"That's not supposed to be possible!" Montgomery said. "Shit! D'deen is out too!"

Lloyd seemed to be okay, if a bit shaken. I left her and pulled my way up across the steeply slanted deck to reach D'deen's bucket. I tried using my in-head to reach him, but I couldn't pick up anything. "D'deen? D'deen! Are you okay? Write something to me!"

No response. The M'nangat's skin felt clammy and cold . . . but they were always a bit on the chilly side, despite having a body temperature only a degree or so lower than human. The thick, outer integument tended to insulate their body, and felt cool to the touch. The clamminess might just be from the high humidity inside the Walsh. The boat's environmental controls appeared to be having some trouble catching up with the moisture from our breathing after having been shut down for a while.

The truth was, I just didn't know enough about Broc physiology to tell what might be wrong. The data Net running inside the Walsh had only the bare-bones essentials; I would need a link with Ludwig and the full medical AI complement on board Haldane before I could even make some decent guesses.

"Leave it, Doc," Hancock told me. "We have other things to worry about right now."

"At least let me know he's stable," I replied. I took out my N-prog and an injector, shooting a dose of medical nanobots into D'deen's system. Moments later, I could see something of the Broc's internal functions-both hearts beating steadily in a back-and-forth rhythm, circulatory fluid circulating . . . everything looked fine. I ordered my fleet of 'bots to highlight D'deen's brain. The problem we'd experienced, all of us, had been a sudden burst of energy going through our cerebral prosthesis, the nano-chelated electronics grown inside our brains.

I could see the artificial structures inside D'deen's brain now . . . a complex web of bright metal threads, like a spider's web, running through the equivalent of the M'nangat's cerebral cortex. I magnified the image as much as I could, until my in-head was actually showing me strands of what looked like gold rope stretched across masses of living cells, with sub-micron filaments actually connecting the rope with the branching dendrites of alien neurons.

Then I pulled back and had the 'bots do a simple electrical activity scan. I hoped that M'nangat brains operated on the same sort of biochemical-electrical interaction as human neurons. The chemistry, I noted, was different, but there were still exchanges of ions across synaptic gaps, creating what amounted to a very low-voltage current.

I would need a full brain-function scan back in Haldane's sick bay to be sure, but it looked to me like D'deen's brain was working okay . . . but quiescent.

In other words, he was unconscious.

"I don't see any cellular damage in D'deen's brain," I told the others. "Nothing burned out, or bleeding, or anything like that. He's just been knocked unconscious."

I just hoped that what I was seeing wasn't the Broc equivalent of deep coma, or that there was some other serious medical issue that I simply didn't recognize because I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

I made certain that D'deen's seat was holding him securely. "Did anyone else . . . see anything?" I asked. "During that blast of static?"

"I did," Montgomery said. "A white ball against a black background."

"I thought it might be the planet, the planet's nightside, seen from space," Hancock said.

"It looked uniformly lit to me," Ortega said. "And there was no local sun, no stars. I don't know what it was."

"I think I . . . heard something," Lloyd said, hesitant.

"Oh?" Hancock said. "What?"

"It was hard to make out . . . but something like the words . . . 'help us'?"

"Interesting," Hancock said, frowning. "Does anyone have any idea, any idea at all, what happened just then?"

"I'm not sure, Gunny," I said, "but I think maybe somebody was trying to talk to us."

"Who?"

"Whoever . . . whatever is running things down here."

"The cuttlewhale gods?" Ortega said. He laughed, a sharp, almost barking laugh that felt uncomfortably close to hysteria. "And they want us to help them?"

"But how did they do that?" Hancock wanted to know.

"You know, Gunny," I said slowly, thinking it out carefully with each word that I spoke, "if you have something big enough, intelligent enough, powerful enough to create a pseudo life form as impressive as the cuttlewhales . . ."

"Yes?"

"I just wonder if there's anything they can't do."

"Explain that," Hancock said.

I shook my head. "I can't. But . . . okay. Somehow, someone interfered with our in-head circuits, right? That would have to be either a very powerful radio signal, or possibly a focused magnetic induction of some kind."

"You lost me there, Doc," Montgomery said.

"That's because I really don't know what I'm talking about," I replied. "But maybe a cuttlewhale carrying us inside its throat can somehow sense us, and the wiring inside our brains. Or maybe it's . . . someone, something, working through the cuttlewhale, using it like a teleoperated probe or a remote explorer."

"Through a CM hull?" Ortega said. "I don't think so."

I shrugged. "Why not? We use wave induction to send signals through our hull . . . for the outside lights, and to pick up vid images."

"Point," Ortega said. "But this 'someone' of yours would have to be very, very sophisticated technologically."

"So, it sends us a signal. A message. Maybe it's learned enough through our AI's communications attempts to make a guess about how our electronics work."

"Somehow, Doc," Montgomery said, "I find it very hard to imagine an underwater species understanding electronics!"

"Why? Electricity conducts through saltwater."

"They would have had to develop a lot of science first," she said. "Starting with metallurgy . . . smelting metals, developing ways to make wires, electromagnets, radio transmission in a medium that absorbs radio waves . . . uh-uh. No fire, no metalworking."

"The way we did things on Earth, you're right. But maybe this someone didn't do things the same way we did. Maybe it learned to smelt metals at hot, undersea volcanic vents. Maybe it learned tricks with exotic ice shot through with metallic impurities. Maybe-"

The Walsh gave another lurch, and the deck suddenly leveled off.

"I think we've arrived," Lloyd told us. "Look!"

Directly ahead, the light still shining off the Walsh's outer hull was now illuminating a widening tunnel or passage. We felt a kind of surge through the deck as the submarine lurched forward . . . and then . . . my gods. . . .

We'd emerged within a vast, clear, empty volume lit blue-green by the Walsh's external lights. For hundreds of meters in all directions, the water was sparklingly transparent, fading to translucence in the distance.

"Out of the belly of the beast . . ." Ortega said, his voice almost reverently hushed.

"My God," Hancock said. "What is that?"

It was difficult to know exactly what we were looking at, and impossible to determine a scale of what we were seeing. Above us, the blue-green glow faded rapidly into the blackness of the Abyss, but below, the water appeared to be . . . thick. Gelatinous, perhaps, something not quite water, but not solid either, something spreading out in motionless waves and folds and hills and gently rolling valleys extending into the distance in all directions as far as we could see. It reflected our light in odd ways, creating a shimmering, diffuse effect that was indescribably beautiful. Was it ice? Or . . . something like thick water? I couldn't tell.

"Do you think we could have a sonar ping sent down into that translucent stuff?" I asked.

"I advise against it," Ortega said. "Remember what happened when we used sonar from the surface."

"That was at extremely high power and low frequency," I said. "The cuttlewhales weren't reacting to low-power scans."

"Try it," Hancock said.

"Pinging . . ." Lloyd said. "Low power."

Sonar targets appeared on the viewalls, overlaying the shimmering panorama of light and water.

"We're getting odd reflections off that jelly stuff," she said. She paused, then added, "it's more like refractions . . . and the sound waves are moving a lot faster through it."

"Sonar indicates the water beneath us is unusually dense," the AI added. "It appears to be fluid, and may represent an extremely diffuse form of amorphous ice VIII."

I didn't remember offhand the characteristics of ice VIII, except for one. All of the exotic ices from ice III on were denser than water . . . which meant that they would sink rather than float like normal ice Ih. Quite possibly, most of the Abyssworld ocean was a fluid form of ice, solid or semisolid, but dense enough to sink to the seafloor thousands of kilometers below. It was even possible that what we were looking at was not on the list of fifteen known phases of ice, that it was something really exotic-ice XVI, perhaps.

And in this environment . . . why not? I checked with the AI and noted that we were at a depth of close to a thousand kilometers, and that the pressure on our hull was now in excess of ninety tons per square centimeter. At such pressures, the exotic would be commonplace-ice that acted like fluid, perhaps, or water that acted like thick, glassy gelatin.

"What the hell," Hancock said, leaning forward, "is that?"

He was staring at a sonar target forward and slightly below us.

"Can you magnify the image?" Ortega asked.

"Here you go . . ."

The image expanded, centered on the object we'd earlier tagged as target Sierra Five. Lloyd gasped, and I nearly shouted.

Sierra Five was a perfect sphere floating within the glassy-water zone right at the border between ocean and amorphous ice.

A white sphere identical to the thing I'd glimpsed during that burst of in-head static earlier.

"Curiouser and curiouser," Montgomery said, thoughtful. "Miss Lloyd . . . can you perhaps probe that sphere with the sonar? A very tight beam?"

"To get an idea of what it's made of?" she said. "Maybe. Just a sec. . . ."

"Whatever it is," Ortega said, "it must be artificial. You don't get perfect spheres in nature."

"You might," I said. "Remember, sir, down here the absolute best shape to resist pressure is a sphere. The pressure would be evenly distributed over the entire surface that way."

"As near as I can tell," Lloyd informed us, "that thing is ice."

"Ordinary water ice?" I asked. "Or something exotic?"

"Ordinary ice . . . I think. It's under a lot of pressure."

I pulled up the data on exotic ices I'd downloaded earlier. Several ice phases, I saw, could be formed by applying insane pressure to ordinary ice, and it was likely that this had happened here. But there was no way to tell without moving in close and taking a sample.

"That's odd . . ." Lloyd said after a few moments. We were moving slowly toward Sierra Five, which was now only a few kilometers distant.

"What?" Hancock asked her.

"I'm getting . . . I think it's a signal!"

"What kind of signal?"

She put the sound on the cabin speakers. The surrounding water, it seemed, was filled with noise-a kind of low-grade rushing sound, punctuated by creaks, groans, clicks, and whistles. It was possible, more than possible, that we were hearing life out there in those normally lightless depths.

"I don't hear any-" Ortega started to say.

"Shh!" Lloyd hissed. "Wait . . . there!"

I heard it. We all did. A clank-the unmistakable sound of metal striking metal. And again . . . and again. The noise was muffled, and so faint that it almost wasn't there at all.

Clank-clank-clank . . . clank . . . clank . . . clank . . . clank-clank-clank . . .

"The cuttlewhales?" Montgomery asked.

"Shit, no," Hancock said, shaking his head. "That's someone banging on a bulkhead with a wrench!"

"Or a piece of pipe," Lloyd agreed.

"Another Gykr sub?" Ortega suggested.

"If it was, they'd have jumped us by now," I said. "That sound is close. I think it's coming from Sierra Five."

Clank-clank-clank . . . clank . . . clank . . . clank . . . clank-clank-clank . . .

"Christ on a crutch!" Hancock shouted. "That's Morse!"

"What is Morse?" Montgomery asked.

"A kind of code. From centuries ago, before radio. People sent dots and dashes representing letters over wires, and later with primitive radio, wireless transmission."

"So . . . do you know this code?" Ortega asked.

"Don't need to! They're sending SOS!"

"That used to be some kind of a distress call, didn't it?" I asked.

"Not a distress call. The distress call . . . the international signal for help. It means 'save our ship.' "

I was amazed that Hancock knew this bit of historical trivia. We'd had voice radio and in-head transmissions for so long now that this Morse Code he was talking about must by now be of interest only to historians.

"The first use of 'SOS' in an emergency radio broadcast was the HMS Titanic, when she sank in 1912," he went on. "Before that, they'd used a different code group . . . 'CQD.' "

"How the hell do you know this stuff?" Ortega asked.

Hancock shrugged. "I've always been a nut on maritime history," he said.

That made sense. I knew that Gunny Hancock cared passionately for his Marines, and that passion obviously extended to arcane tidbits of Marine history or ancient military technology. When he went in for rejuvenation some year, he'd have his hands full deciding what memories to cull.