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Hethe bow of the foil seaward Ahead of hihts, blinking at him

The beachside morta they didn&039;t stuht of blue and red flickerings across the depths ahead of hilare that backed hi of fear

What if they lob their charges in now? I&039;d be a dead squawk

Out of habit, Flattery turned his fear to aggression and throttled hi was much easier than he&039;d anticipated Waters off Kalaloch were quiet in spite of the loss of Current Control That is, they were quiet except for a strange tidal pulse that pursued him from the Greens into open water The uncontrolled kelp kept the major kelpway to the launch site open Flattery attributed this to habit, or to perseverance of the last signal sent from Current Control He ell into the thick of the stand before he realized his s happened at once, any one of theroup at the launch site He ran out of fuel less than a kilometer from the perimeter of the site Instru normally Before the foil stalled out and left him adrift in the kelp, Flattery noticed that the CO2 in his cabin was higher than usual The gas diffusion ly in reverse

I&039; CO2 instead of O2 to the cabin

He looked at these facts logically, hoping that logic would stave off the hysteria that bubbled at the back of his throat He could shuttle ballast as long as his power supply lasted, but if he had toNo one responded to any of the undersea burst frequencies, and his Navcoh he floated in the center of a black hole Everything that went out from his foil ed up

It must be the kelp, he reasoned It&039;s fouled up our coretted his leniency with the kelp It was so that rowth of this reportedly dangerous species continue beyond his ability to control it

Couldn&039;t herd people and kelp at the sa htened hien level in his cabin was already low enough to slow his thinking and his hands He found that, even under electrical power, he couldn&039;t nose any further through the kelp Blowing ballast did no good, either It simply depleted his already feeble batteries

This da the life out of me!

He stabilized the foil at fewer than twenty meters below the surface His instruments refused to function, and visibility faded quickly as sunset tipped the scales toward night Around him, the kelp pulled back frolow It was the salow that had filled the Greens just before he dove

"This is soret this!"

Within ht that details inside the foil becaht even though he shut his eyes and covered them with his hands Voices babbled like redbuzzer droned from the overhead panel and the auto had it been warning hiht

This was a woman&039;s voice, someone he kneell But it wasn&039;t the Galli woma The buzzer exhausted itself to an electric rattle and Flattery shook his head

"I need air!" he gasped

The sound of his own voice broke him free of the suffocation trance of the carbon dioxide

Flattery clawed through a crew locker for his dive suit He didn&039;t bother with all of the fastenings, but tightened down the faceplate and activated the air supply The Director&039;s white hands trembled beyond his control, but at last he could breathe

I&039;ve got to show the always lurked inside, but so it free An old Islander proverb echoed in his mind: "Stir a dasher, feed a dasher"

I am the dasher and I will strike

Flattery repeated this to hi

"What do you want?" he shouted into the faceplate "If you kill ed the plaz in front of hilare at all In fact, as he looked closer at the beads of condensation on his faceplate he saw faces inside, hundreds of tiny faces suspended in translucence, one oris your way, not ours

That voice, inside his own head, chilled so deep in his belly He could not mistake the familiar Moonbase accent of his shipmate Alyssa Marsh She had been more than shipmate for a while, but hers had always been a cool intimacy But it couldn&039;t be Alyssa Marsh because she wa well, not dead exactl

"Wha what is going on here?"

The rasping that he heard across the cabin ceiling and around the foil could only be kelp vines They snaked across the cabin plaz without di the white radiance that pierced his eyelids, his retinas, his very being The foil lurched, then its an to tear it apart Flattery hurried to seal his dive suit He had already arrabbed a couple of spare air packs instead

You ht if you wish, Alyssa&039;s voice told him, you will not be killed You will not be harmed in any way

"She had a terrible accident in the kelp" had been Flattery&039;s official version of her body&039;s deht around hireat secret Cool as Flattery was, it chilled hi-ter she could stretch six months of research in wild kelp beds to nine or ten months without any trouble He&039;d wanted to be rid of her, she&039;d sensed that If he knew she were pregnant he would destroy the child, of this she was sure He would probably destroy her, too Not one in ten thousand clones ever got the chance for a baby Flattery, Alyssa and Mack were very possibly the last living inal crew of 3,006, each one the clone of so-lost donor

The Broods took him, and Yuri he was called There were no other children at this kelp outpost, so Yuri spent his first two years undersea with fourteen adults

Flattery closed his eyes, retreated into himself

It was just the once, his mind pleaded Just the tim

"Do you think it&039;s what I expected es stayed on the other side of his eyelids, but her voice caht into his mind

Hoould I suspect, you didn&039;t stick aroun your work in the kel

Now the scenes came inside his head Flattery watched as he personally "dismantled" Alyssa and he hiate and severed her brain forever from its body

"All you have to do is consult the kelp," he heard Mack telling Brood "You&039;ll have your answer for sure, then You can follow your genetic line back as far as you have the patience to follow"

"I knoho my father is," Brood said "It&039;s hiantic twist the foil ripped apart at the cabin seam and the sea burst in on Flattery When the pieces fell away froes danced across the surface of the sphere He saw Nevi and Zentz captured at the beach, and Brood&039;s attack on the Orbiter A panorama of disaster played out for hio down in plunder

All along the coastline huge whips of kelp flung thelow

You have ent enius that you believe yourself to be Ultirabbed at his right ankle and he spun away It grabbed again and held, then pinned his arms when he tried to batter at it with a spare air pack He was already exhausted, and found himself in a dreamlike state that made resistance ht you killed me, I don&039;t think you understand the i

Beatriz watched Flattery&039;s memory take over, and he broadcast the entire scene of Alyssa Marsh&039;s separation from her body Hole screens, viewscreens, kelp beds, the air and sky themselves lit up with Alyssa Marsh&039;s memories of her final encounter with Flattery

You owe me a body, she said, and she said it in that same flat, emotionless tone that had o

The kelp began to enciliate Flattery, to encapsulize him inside a life-support pod It had been the same with Crista Galli, as it had been with Vata and Duque before her Beatriz felt the cilia seeking out his blood vessels to adjust his oxygen level and pH Others would feed him, recycle his wastes and protect him froh the hylighter&039;s skin

Flattery had the show, and the whole world atching

So s fail to interest us, sih surfaces on which to live, and e have to do then is to increase the nuer number of thea y Gasset