The Gykr had evolved within an environment utterly hostile and alien to human sensibilities, and to do so they would have evolved a native sense of discipline as thorough and as rigorous as that of any human Marine. They had to have done so.

Marines are the way they are because of training, and that gives them a certain amount of flexibility. The Gykr are the way they are because of breeding, the way their brains are hardwired from birth or hatching or whatever it is they do.

And that was the tactical advantage I was looking for.

"I'm not the leader of this group," I told the Gykr. "I'm not in charge, I don't give the orders. I can't order everyone off our vessel. The others would never agree."

All of the Gykr stirred uneasily. " 'Leader'?" the one said. "We are having . . . trouble . . . understanding this."

Well, of course that would be true. The concept was so deeply rooted in their evolutionary design they might not even be aware of it . . . like a fish unaware of the water within which it swam.

"Do you have a word," I asked, treading carefully, "for the one of you who makes decisions for the group? Who speaks for the group?"

I heard a harsh clack in my in-head, evidently the Gykr word itself, untranslated. "It means . . . 'chosen.' "

"I see." That made sense. Not "chosen" as in democratically elected or anything so cerebral as determining who was best to lead. "Chosen" as in chosen by circumstances, or by an uncaring universe. A group of Gykr finds itself isolated, and one among them becomes the leader, making decisions for the entire group, which automatically rallies around the flag. Perhaps there were subtle biochemical cues that nudged the process along; the selection process probably wasn't due to chance.

I remembered reading of certain species of fish in Earth's oceans. Clownfish schools have a female fish at the top of the hierarchy; when she dies, the most dominant male in the school will change into a female and take over. Among wrasses, the largest female will turn into a male and take over the harem if the school's male leader dies. The choosing of a Gykr leader might be similar, although apparently the condition was temporary. A leader is needed, and one appears, with all others falling into line and following orders.

As a survival tool, the process would neatly avoid the dangers of warring tribes or egoistic posturings or the idiocy of power for power's sake alone within a deadly and unforgiving environment.

"Among humans," I told the Gykr, "we're all chosen. We agree to cooperate to achieve certain goals, and we'll agree to accept orders from one trained or experienced individual . . . but if I give orders that the others disagree with, like leaving the submarine, they will not do what I say."

"But . . . if the Akr strikes, you would be devoured!"

I could actually hear the emotion shaking behind the Gykr's words. Human individuality must be sheer insanity from the Gykr point of view.

"You've been a Galaxy-faring species for a long time," I said. "You must have encountered other species who think . . . who behave the way we do."

"Not . . . we, personally. We have heard . . . stories . . ."

I remembered that the Gykr had something like 10 percent fewer synaptic connections within their brains. Knowledge might circulate within the entire species as hearsay or legend or be accessed, as with us, through a download from the local Net, but in general they would respond more to habit, to tradition, or to biochemical tides within their neural makeups than they did to education.

It was tempting to think of them as stupid, but I resisted the thought. Their system worked well enough for them, as proven by the fact that they'd not only survived the night-shrouded world of their birth, but freed themselves from it.

The distinction was bogus in any case. One version of the IQ scale designated normal as anything between 85 and 115, so an average species IQ of 90 certainly qualified as human-normal.

"Your ship abandoned you here, didn't it?" I said in what I hoped was a light and conversational tone. "You need to get back to the surface, so your ship can return and pick you up?"

"My submersible . . . has not returned . . . as expected. The . . . Akr . . . might have attacked. . . ."

That was the second time the being had used that untranslatable term. In context, I assumed that it was the Gykr name for some sort of sea monster in the ancient ocean of their world. It took me a moment longer to realize that the Gykr must be referring to the cuttlewhales.

And that was an entirely different piece of the puzzle. We'd battled cuttlewhales on the surface ice-and I'd watched a Gykr devoured by one. And yet, a cuttlewhale had . . . helped us, if that was the word, by swallowing the Walsh and transporting us hundreds of kilometers deeper into the ocean, to bring us here.

"Then let me offer you this: Our vessel can't take all of you back to the surface at once. We can provide transport for you to the surface . . . one at a time. Each trip our submersible makes will carry one of you, plus several of the humans trapped here, to safety. Our pilot will then return for another load . . . and another, until all of us have reached safety."

It was a monstrous gamble on several levels. By limiting each trip to one Gykr, I knew we could maintain control over them-Gunny Hancock or Dr. Montgomery watching it with a plasma weapon in his good hand. It would also avoid letting the Gykr remaining below know that I'd exaggerated the number of armed humans on board the Walsh.

But each trip would take a hell of a long time unless one of the cuttlewhales decided again to intervene and shorten the passages for us. Would a lone Gykr assume the role of leader during the long voyage to the surface, and perhaps make its own decisions about whether or not to go along with the process?

I was reminded of an ancient riddle. A man reaches a ferry on a river with two chickens and a fox. The ferry will carry two at a time; if the fox is left alone with a chicken, the chicken will be killed. So how does the man get across with his livestock intact?

Obviously, you took the fox across first, went back for one chicken, carried it across, then brought the fox back with you to the near bank and left it there when you picked up the second chicken. You could then make a third crossing to retrieve the fox.

This situation wasn't quite that simple, but there were ways to guarantee the safety of the human chickens.

"You and I will remain here," I added, "until the very last trip. So that you can trust me."

"We do not . . . understand . . . the term . . . 'trust.' "

Well, that stood to reason, didn't it? "You trust your chosen to make the appropriate decisions in a group," I suggested.

"No. We accept that . . . necessary decisions . . . are made."

"Close enough." The Gykr appeared to be far more passive in their relationships with one another, again, the result, I guessed, of the biochemical imperatives that had arisen through their evolutionary history. "If we're going to get out of this trap, humans and Gykr together, we're going to have to cooperate. That is a necessary decision, agreed?"

"A decision might be made . . . to kill . . . all of you here," the Gykr replied, impassive, "and take your vessel . . . for my own use. Or . . . you all remain here . . . while we and your vessel's guide . . . make the ascent."

The Gykr's curious, broken mode of conversation was fast becoming annoying. It was as though the being had to stop and think about each phrase before speaking it.

"We won't agree to that," I said. "We don't trust you. But we have a means of working together, so that all of us can get out of this."

I wondered, though, about that Gykr starship. On board the Haldane, we'd assumed that they'd be back, probably with a larger fleet. There was the distinct possibility that we would return to the surface and find Haldane fled, with a Gykr fleet in complete possession of the surface of GJ 1214 I.

"We could . . . kill all of you."

"Can you?" I said. "All of us in here, yes. You have the weapons. But can you attack our submarine, and everyone on board? Without damaging the vessel so badly that it can't undock? And I promise you . . . if you kill the humans on this station, the humans on board our submarine will never trust you, never work with you, never agree to cooperate with you. You will be trapped down here in the darkness, at the mercy of the . . . of the Akr, forever. . . ."

The Gykr stirred, again uneasy. They were definitely on new and uncertain ground. The question was, Were they flexible enough to overcome hardwired evolutionary conditions and try something as alien to them as interspecies cooperation?

"Tell you what," I added. "If your ship is waiting for us when we reach the surface, we can agree to turn control of the transfer over to one of them . . . a new chosen, one of yours."

"Doc!" Ortega said, startled. "What are you saying?"

I shrugged. "It's a foregone conclusion, isn't it?" I asked him. "If the Gykr are in control up there, they'll take command of the Walsh anyway, no matter what we do. We'll be forced to trust them to come get the rest of us."

"I don't like it . . ."

"Neither do I. You have another suggestion?"

"What you offer . . . is acceptable," the Gykr chosen said after another long moment's pause. "I see no . . . reasonable alternative."

"You will permit us full contact with our vessel."

"Yes."

"You will put down your weapons. As have we."

"Yes."

"And we will work together in order to survive."

"Yes."

As an interstellar treaty, it had a few shortcomings, but it was the best we could hope for at the moment. I exchanged thoughts with Hancock, back on board the Walsh. As it happened, they'd been able to follow most of the exchange, having picked up on the fact that both Ortega and I had killed our privacy interlocks.

"You done good, Doc," Hancock said. "We'll make a Marine of you yet."

"Thanks, Gunny. There are still twenty of you over there, heavily armed, right?"

"Right."

That, I knew, was the weakest part of the plan. It seemed unlikely that we'd be able to get one of our weapons over to the Walsh without the Gykr knowing about it. Once the first Gykr came on board the Walsh, he would realize that things were not as I'd represented them. If he was in communication with the other three Gykr, the whole situation could change in an instant.

As it would if a landing party from the Gykr starship was waiting for us topside.

"Tell 'em, Doc," Hancock said, "that we've removed all weapons from the Walsh's bridge, and that there's just four of us here, okay? And the Gykr and the base survivors can ride up with us. The armed Marines are in the main compartment aft."

"Did you hear that, Chosen?" I asked the temporary Gykr leader.

"We . . . did."

How long could we carry off the bluff? Well . . . once the Walsh decoupled from the docking collar, submarine and base would be cut off from each other. It would be up to Hancock to continue the deception on the Walsh. Maybe he had a means of cobbling together something that looked like a weapon. Or maybe he actually had a holdout somewhere on board; Marines often did.

The idea was to keep the Gykr here calm and reasonably satisfied as we transferred them, one by one, to the surface.

One of the uncommunicative Gykrs went through the airlock into the access tunnel, along with eight human survivors and one M'nangat. I braced myself for some sort of protest or scene . . . but eventually we heard some muffled, metallic sounds and felt a distant tremor through the deck. Walsh had just cast off from the station and was on her way to the surface.

Unfortunately, the base did not have any outside nano to provide us with vid images of what was going on. Whatever had been out there had been encased in the ice shell deliberately woven around what was left of the base, so we were blind to everything outside the base's crumpled interior.

I would have liked to see if one of the cuttlewhales had moved in to give us another assist.

"So . . . Dr. Murdock," I said. "What the hell happened here?"

His eyes shifted to the remaining Gykr. "We were . . . attacked," he said. "A bombardment from orbit. The ice around and under us melted enough that the weight of the main base caused us to break through and sink."

"But how did you end up here?" Ortega asked. "Floating . . . but a thousand kilometers down!"

"Our specific gravity," Murdock said with a wan smile, "the ratio of CM hull to internal air space, was . . . low enough that we sank fairly slowly. It was a near thing, though. The pressure was seriously beginning to deform the hull before we could reprogram the external hull nano to begin adding layers of ice . . . a jury-rigged pressure hull."

I'd not closely examined the base interior, not with all of the back-and-forth with the aliens . . . but I could see now what he meant. The main lab occupied perhaps a quarter of the original dome, but the bulkheads had been crumpled inward under tremendous force, buckling and folding to give the compartment the feel of something more like a natural cavern than an architectural structure. I estimated that well over half of the original internal space had been taken over by collapsing CM hull structure.

"As for why we're motionless here," Murdock continued, "we couldn't see out, didn't know what was happening. Before we were attacked, we'd probed as deeply as we could with sonar, and discovered what we think is a layer of exotic ice at this depth. Maybe we're aground on that."

"That is the case," Ortega told him. "We're hypothesizing a kind of soft slush of exotic ice in an amorphous state . . . maybe ice VII or ice VIII . . . maybe something even stranger."

"We've learned that the cuttlewhales are made of ice VII," I added. "Certain metals and other exotic ices mixed in . . . but it's organic ice VII. I think it likely that what the base is resting on is a layer of organic ice VII."

"Wait-wait," Ortega said, startled. "Organic ice? Like the cuttlewhales?"

"The cuttlewhales evolved somewhere," I said, "and somehow. The entire substrate of compressed amorphous ice VII might actually be alive."

"I don't think I can accept that," the environmental planetologist said.

I shrugged. "It may not matter. I've just been wondering about how something as unlikely as the cuttlewhales could have come about. Dr. Murdock . . . how about your people? How many are there, anyway?"

He looked stricken. "Thirty-five," he said, "plus four of our M'nangat. "Most of the others were caught in compartments that flooded in the first few moments of the attack."

"Are there injured?" I patted my M-7 kit. "I'm a combat medic."

He nodded. "Six serious ones. We put them in a berthing compartment, through here."

"We should have evaced them first," I said, "with the first load."

He sighed. "We're not sure any of them are going to make it," he said. "I thought it more important that the living escape this trap. . . ."

And he had a perfectly valid point. Triage-determining who lives and who dies based on available supplies and seriousness of wounds-can be a heartbreaking aspect of field first aid. I learned that three of the four medical doctors assigned to the base had been killed, and the fourth was one of the unconscious injured. I checked all six of them, four men, two women, and found there was little I could do for them. Automated systems had pumped them full of nano to control the pain and keep them unconscious. Three were hooked up to full life-support units that were doing their breathing for them. Skinseal and injected nano had controlled bleeding and stabilized them all . . . for now. I could use my N-prog to further tweak the nanobots to facilitate healing, but more than anything I could do, they all needed extensive surgical intervention . . . and that meant a sick bay at least as good as Haldane's, and someone with surgical training at least as good as Kirchner's, but without the insanity.

In the meantime . . .

I'd just emerged from the improvised sick bay. I wanted to discuss with the chosen Gykr the possibility of moving the wounded as soon as the Walsh returned for a second load, when the burst of static in my head came out of nowhere, as suddenly as the last one, and much sharper, more wrackingly painful. I couldn't help myself; I dropped to my knees, my hands uselessly over my ears.

Through the pain, I could see, barely, that three remaining Gykrs were being affected as well. All were on the deck, curled up tightly, as if their armor could block out the thundering blast of white noise. The human survivors too, all of them, were down.

And through the noise I could still hear the Gykr's electronic voice. "The Akr! The Akr! It is the Akr . . . !"

Chapter Twenty-Two.

If anything, the static became worse, louder and more intrusive, searing down into the very core of my being, drowning thought, burning reason. And this time, I could hear the voice as well.

I wondered if it had made a difference, my switching off my privacy filters earlier. The . . . Voice, a booming but muffled thunder, was deeply imbedded within my in-head circuitry. Someone, I knew, had figured out how to interface with my cerebral implants, had learned at least the shape of my language, and was now trying to insert words . . . phrases . . . alien concepts from my hardware directly into my left parietal lobe.

I felt . . . adrift, as if in a vast and achingly empty abyss. That was my right parietal lobe, a part of me thought, trying to make sense of spacial relations.

My left parietal lobe was just trying to make sense of the words. What I was hearing was . . . something very like a schizophrenic's word salad, but as isolated sounds that were almost words, achingly close to words . . . somehow just beyond the boundaries of the intelligible.

We . . . kam . . . off . . . in . . . try . . . shan . . . no . . . kray . . . shem . . .

The boom of nonsense syllables filled a cosmos. I had the impression that each syllable was a burst of sound, filled with content.