“So what do you need from us?”
“Ore samples, of course, and a low profile until I can show up with some company big wig to buy our method.” He snapped his fingers for the slattern who was serving the booze to bring another round. This was stronger stuff than the blurry, even considering the effect this stupid planet had of neutralizing intoxicants with every other native beverage or food consumed. Fortunately, Satok had had little else to eat or drink for a couple of days. The girl looked familiarone of his cast offs, no doubt. Sure had let herself go, though. Moped around with down cast eyes, ugly shapeless clothes, dirty lank hair, sallow skin mottled with bruises. Some women just had no self-respect. If she’d looked like that when he first came to the village, he’d never have touched her.
“Okay, so when do you need the samples?”
“Now,” Satok growled. “Or haven’t you been listening? I want the shuttle loaded with the best you’ve got.”
“How do we know you won’t just take it and take off?”
“Because there’s a lot more to be made here than what we could gouge out of the ground by ourselves. You have to think big. Besides, I’ll need some of you along to help me unload.”
“So where are you taking this stuff?”
He shrugged. “SpaceBase, for a start.”
The cold of the icy waters was more of a shock than usual because Sean had just been so warmly wrapped about Yana. But it was always the first part of him to enter the water that experienced the trauma. Despite the almost stupefying cold, he forced himself to drop into the freezing dark waters. The change occurred more abruptly than ever: self-preservation at its highest level.
Once the waters closed over his altering head, the sounds he hoped to hear pinged back and forth. He sent out his call and felt the stir of water as a tube whale responded. The brush of the huge mammal against him in human form would have been crushing, but the selkie was less vulnerable. Stroking one flipper on the firm flesh of the whale, Sean-Selkie floated forward until he came to the proportionally small whale eye. One flipper-hand reaching as high up on the skull above the eye as possible, Sean communicated his need.
Do you remember the place before it fell?
Yes.
Take me to the other side.
As you wish.
Sean-Selkie had time to secure a hold on the side fin before he was propelled forward at amazing speed. For what seemed a very long dark time in this lightless medium, Sean-Selkie clung there. Finally the tube whale halted, so abruptly that he was sent flipping end over end, past the whale’s bright unblinking eye and skidding up the icy slope of a tunnel that gaped open onto the sub-arctic seas.
You have been of great assistance and have my gratitude.
You are known and your needs considered.
Then the whale departed, once more singing its weird song, one that Sean-Selkie heard faintly, distantly answered. In that direction the tube whale now swam. Sean-Selkie watched until the churning of its flukes was no longer visible in the dark sea. He climbed up into the maw of this section of the underground link between the continents, with its luminous walls and slightly misted footing.
He had gone no more than a few hundred meters before he knew that both Aoifa and her track-cat had managed to get this far. A neat pile of animal dung, frosted over but identifiable, lay in a little hole, claw marks around it to show that the track-cat had not lost its sense of propriety despite its inability to cover its feces. And four paces beyond the cat’s were human excretions. Sean-Selkie sighed with relief and lumbered on up the long slope, through immense caverns and more upward corridors. He saw other signsfish skeletonsby lakesides and, diving into the same places, found food for himself to keep strong for this long and lonely journey. He saw the crumpled envelopes of travel rations, too.
How far and how long the journey took, Sean-Selkie could not gauge. He traveled more safely and economically as a selkie; having no clothes for his human manifestation was the best reason to continue as he was.