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Reflex is a speedy response made without the brain&039;s counsel Reaction is a speedy responseto be left alone It learned reaction only after its vines twined with domestic kelp It learned to kill when threatened and to show no

This Iic dictated that it would not live forever if it continued reacting to hu! It knew this as surely as the blind snapperfish knows the presence of inal Immensity of kelp, Avata, encompassed all of the seas of Pandora under one consciousness, one voice, one "being" Its first genetic extinction came early in the forus A burst of ultraviolet frous So awaiting Pandora&039;s first ocean

The second extinction was by huineer named Jesus Lewis The kelp was teased back to life by a few DNA miners about fifty years later The revitalized kelp that the Mermen resurrected was developed froain filled the seas, dareat stands scattered scent They grew close with the years, their fronds spoke the cheue This Immensity itself retained two and a quarter million cubic kilometers of ocean

The One rode a kelpway that skimmed the Immensity&039;s reach This particular kelpway came out of a stand of blue kelp that had been known to attack its own kind, overpowering nearby stands, sucking out their beings and injecting its own It had suffered uidance This the Immensity knew from snatches of terror that drifted in on torn fronds The One could not be trusted to such a dangerous stand At whatever cost, the One ainst the electrical stings fro the One into its out into the safer deeps of its own stand

You have been educated in judg Will, free or otherwise, is concerned with the future Thinking is the perforh which past prepares future

- Dwarf MacIntosh, Kelpe"

Elvira&039;s voice was ee of worry in the flurry of her fingers across her command console She never piloted the foil in its voice mode because she preferred to speak as seldom as possible That Elvira had spoken at all worried hiun a fewwith Elvira, Rico picked up her habit of non-speech She see toward her screen "We&039;re being steered off course"

"Steered?" he muttered, and checked his own instruments They maintained their position in the kelpway, but their co direction

"Who&039;s doing the steering?"

Elvira shrugged, still busy with her keyboard She had taken the, and they ran without the help of sensors that would light their progress through the kelpways

"We&039;re out of the wild kelp sector outside Flattery&039;s launch site," he said, "that&039;s where the weirdness usually happens"

One-half of his screen displayed the navigation grid projected by Current Control from its command center aboard the Orbiter The other half of the screen tracked their actual course through the grid, which now appeared to be bent

Bending, he corrected hi down a drain

"Anything on the Navcoh the kelp to accommodate weather conditions further upchannel or the recent stuative," she said "All clear"

The ride began to get buhter to his couch He keyed the intercoh water, everybody cinch up Ben, you&039;d better coo train careening dangerously close to the kelp, attehts showed hile with itself, fluttering the channel as if pressing against a great force

Ben used the hand grips along the bulkhead to work his way to his console

"Can we get Current Control?" Ben asked He dropped into his couch and cinched up

"Not without giving up our position"

"We got out too easy," Ben said "They&039;ve got a bug on this thing, anywa"

"Had," Rico said, s the sa Found it Elvira here jettisoned the little devil into a netful of krill that we passed about a dozen grids back"

"Good work, both of you," Ben said "All right, then let&039;s try that cargo train belo"

The Flying Fish was buffeted again by soe fist Elvira wrestled with the controls to keep them out of the kelp

Rico knew, as they all knew, that any dae to the kelp could be construed as an attack A lot of kelp lights were active in this sector Besides the red and blue telltales of a waking stand, this kelp flashed its cold navigation light at randohter fiber-optic sunlight that it transported from the surface If the stand was one that had awakened, any et the foil and themselves torn apart at the seao on the air to tell us how safe he&039;d oes to show," Rico said, "you can&039;t believe that bastard for a godda in the opposite direction beneath the even more trouble than they were A relatively tiny foil could stop in o train needed to rid system was set up so that the trains, Pandora&039;s lifeline, could travel the kelpways swiftly and undisturbed with es Froo, the crew below at both ends of the train had their hands full

"It&039;s bending," Rico said, watching the Navcorid&039;s bending"

"We&039;d better surface," Ben said "Prepare for -"

"Negative," Elvira said "If this is a surface disturbance, things will be worse up there We need inforo train identity signal is registered to the Si the controls to maintain hover and an equidistance betalls of the kilometer-wide channel This ordinarily si walls of their kelpway Rico noticed a sweat beading on Elvira&039;s brow and upper lip

Ben keyed for a low-frequency broadcast He hoped he didn&039;t have to explain the absence of their identity signal

"Simplicity Maru, this is Quicksilver," he lied "Do you have reports on current disruption?"

Static hissed back at thee came in badly broken Undersea communication, especially around active kelp, was always difficult

"Siativ into kelp" There was the sound of shriekingup We are preparin ballast Repeat, preparin"

Elvira threw the throttles forward and in spite of a violent buffeting the foil leaped at her touch Her lips were pressed into a tight line and her knuckles shone white on the controls

"Wait, we can&039;" Ben said His body pressed further into his couch "We can&039;t go into deep kelp"

"They&039;re blowing ballast," Elvira growled "That whole cargo train&039;s going to pop up into us like a cork"

Rico felt every fixture aboard rattle like his teeth

"Ben, is the girl secure?"

"She&039;s strapped in," Ben said

Just then they cleared the rear cabin of the train It blew past the like toys A few of the containers snagged in the walls of the kelpalls that still vibrated with light and that sae force

"This is too weird," Ben said "Let&039;s surface and take our chances with the Director&039;s air cover This ride&039;s getting ly"

Elvira nodded curtly and the foil started its ascent As though alerted by their control panel, the kelp fronds began closing above the Flying Fish First they forht and ie of current lurched the end over end Elvira righted them manually, her face very pale

"Shit!" Ben fisted the arot to Current Contro" He snicked his harness release over Rico&039;s protests

"I&039; on Crista," Ben said

He had to use the handholds to alley&039;s hatch he turned, suddenly a bit pale hiht had just struck Ben Rico smiled

"Rico," Ben said, "what i"

"What if the kelp knows she&039;s here?"

"Yeah," Ben said "What if the kelp knows she&039;s here?"

"We&039;d better hope she likes us"

"She probably doesn&039;t have any say in this," Ben said, and undogged the hatch Rico didn&039;t care for the snap in his voice

"Somebody has a say in this," Rico ed itself That hen Rico remembered when the kelp could have had a whiff of Crista Galli It was the only tiht That goddamn little mercuroid chip of Flattery&039;s

"We ejected that transht he detected an infinitesi of her posture "If that kelp can sniff, and I hear it can, then it knows there&039;s more in this can than us worms"

Mercenary captains either are or are not skilful soldiers If they are, you cannot trust theain power for the others against your wishes

- Machiavelli, The Prince

The young security captain, Yuri Brood, was rued son of the Director, product of an early tryst with a Merman wo physical resemblance between Brood and the Director, and on Brood&039;s quick rise to an advisorship that went beyond the formalities of his rank The two o unnoticed outside the confines of the squad

Captain Brood and his squad had been reared in a Merman compound near this Kalaloch district Brood hiic and strategy - that was standard operating procedure for anyone anticipating an executive position with Merman Mercantile Brood himself preferred the more direct solutions of physical pressure to the subtleties of politics His superiors shrugged it off as a phase, agreeing that Brood got results where others failed