I'm so cold. Weak. The soal is warm – waves hiss and plume into mist against it. Thank goodness. Tears, hot against my cheeks. They drip onto the blood splattered inside my visor. I think it's mine. The gravity siphons hold me against the soal. It's rough, pockmarked, scratched. But it's warm. I cling to the warmth. It's dark all around except above. Stars. Moon.

No sign of that psycho ship.

I'mma kill it. I'mma pull it out of the ocean and shoot it in the face.

Can't lift my body. Shaking. Up and down, up and down, water against my legs, wind against my body. Glimpses of white far-off to the east, distant roaring.

Rocking, rocking, rocking. Cold. Wet. Blood on my tongue. Swollen lips. Joints ache. Everything aches.

The roaring is louder. Rocking heavier. Can't see stars ahead. Just darkness and flashes of white. Salt is bitter in the air. I gag.

The smell of earth. Heavy and rich and musty. I can taste it.

Rocks.

Below, striking the soal. On either side, slick and glistening. Rising high, high, high, out of sight.

Water.

Sucking, churning in the darkness. Pulls at my legs, flings me around with the soal. I'm bucked, flung, spun upside-down. Doesn't matter. Water is everywhere. Even in the air. Spurting through the crack in my visor. Up my nose. Down my neck. Doesn't matter. I'm already wet. I cry, anyway.

So tired.

-----

Light turns my eyelids red. I draw in a breath and the air, bitter and thick with moisture, slips into my lungs as slow and heavy as syrup. A constant roar and hiss makes it through the ringing in my ears. Then a faint, high-pitched note over and over. Screaming?

I try to move. Pain swells through my entire body to gather, bloated and nauseous, in my stomach and head. I stop, lie still, feel the shifting, but hard surface beneath me and focus on breathing. Gradually, things become clearer. My lips are cracked. Clothing, damp. When I try moving again, the grit of sand in every nook and cranny grinds against my skin, which is swollen and leathery. Except for my face. That's dry, tight, pinched. My visor is twisted, stuck to my right cheek by a thick crust of dried blood. I can tell it's blood. I can taste it now that I've wet it again with my tongue.

My eyes are gummed shut, too, and I have to blink hard before I can pry them open as I slowly lift my head. The pain's still there, but I can compartmentalize it, now. There are bigger concerns. I remember that, now.

I long to open the comm link, hear Core's voice. It'd make things easier. But I can't. The Guild. They'll be looking for me.

My vision clears. I'm lying on a thin strip of black sand amongst a jumble of driftwood, dirty foam, seaweed, and fishbones at the inmost end of a fjord, still attached via gravity-siphons to the ashen, cigar-shaped mass of the soal. Above me, the Sentinel mountains rise to scratch the morning sky. Screaming seabirds wheel and dive, calling my attention to the sky, and I see evidence of just how massive yesterday's vapour storm was. The clouds are explosive-hued plumes of red and orange, and the sky is a hazy purple that only bleeds into dark blue far out over the sliver of ocean I can see between the cliffs. It's fairly early. Maybe zero five, zero six hundred hours.

How long have I been out?

I drop my gaze from the sky and slide it down the fjord sides. Rust-coloured beyond the brilliantly-green jungle foliage clustered at their top, they're wrinkled with exposed sediment layers, and turn black lower down. Their roots, exposed by the low tide that left me here, are slick and dark, bristling with sour-green seaweed and sharp white and orange shells. The smell of brine and rotting fish is choking. Thank goodness my visor kept most of the water out – who knows how many things have been pounded to pulp against these cliffs. If I hadn't been attached to the soal, I would have joined the bloody soup, myself.

I disengage the gravity siphons, and my arms and legs slide off the soal and fall onto the scattered fishbones in the sand beside me. They're useless, dead from my bruised hips and shoulders down. So I lie and stare up at the sky, breathing slowly through the waves of pain as feeling returns to my limbs. Then, as the sky turns a more normal gold and blue, I'm finally able to sit up. My body is as heavy and clumsy as a half-carved wooden doll. I think I'm cold. I'm shaking. But I can't tell. I can't really feel anything aside from the all-over pain.

Slowly, I wrestle out of the buffer's harness and let it drop into the sand beside me. The little turbine is smashed and scraped almost beyond recognition, one of the blades even missing. My back would have been broken if it hadn't taken the beating of being washed up on shore for me. The pilot's pack is still strapped to me, as well. Though my borrowed trousers and tweed jacket are soaked and torn, the pack is still intact. It's waterproof as well, so all the emergency supplies within it are battered, but useable.

Dragging myself out from the tangle of flotsam, I curl up with the heat-saving blanket in a nook in the rock, and shoot myself in the arm with one of the injections. It spreads like fire through my body as it jump-starts my adrenaline again. Soon I'm twitching, panting, furious for action. But even in the frenzy of renewed strength, I know I've got to be smart. These injections last a hour, max. I've got to prepare for when the buzz dies. If I'm a big enough of a threat to them to justify throwing a ship into the ocean, the Guild will be looking for me. For me, and the soal.

The fjord is deep, but hardly wider than seventy metres at its mouth, I'd guess, so it's little more than a narrow slice into the mountains that are the coast. Aside from the driftwood, the only cover I can see is at the inland end. Rocks jut up from the water there, the sand giving way to jagged pieces of the cliff protruding out over the water. If I can find a concealed ledge or hide-hole above the high-tide line, it would be an ideal place to take cover from Guild surveillance.

I pack the blanket in the pack and strap it to my shoulders, wipe what blood off my visor I can, and get to work. The soal is too heavy for me to move on my own, even with the injection soaking my muscles. So I dig a trench through the black sand, gloves snagging on fishbones and the sharp edges of buried shells. The seawater seeps into my trench slowly until, at last, it laps underneath the soal. Then I set my shoulder against it and shove. Unhurried, it slides back into the water. Already as wet and gross as the situation can make me, I grab a piece of driftwood about as tall as I am, and slosh back into the brine after. I'm dunked three times before I get astride the soal again, but it's necessary to be on top of it. There's no other way to enter among the boulders.

Since it's still early, the shadow of the Sentinels prevents the sunlight from glaring off the water, and I can look straight down to the bottom of the fjord as I punt the soal along with my driftwood. Beneath my reflection and the ripples of my movement, the bottoms of the boulders disappear among other rocks and more black sand. The small bright shapes of fish dart against the dark mass of the rocks, and colorful tentacled things sway and pulse. There are murky pale-yellow clouds of tiny wriggling things, too, drifting with the currents like smoke. When my driftwood disturbs them, they scatter, sparkling like flecks of silver. I see nothing larger, however, so as far as I can tell, the water poses no threat.

Then the overhangs slide past above me, and the sound of surf dulls behind as I enter the cave-like end of the fjord. Now there's only the percussive dripping of water off the tiered ceiling of rock above and the splash of my punting as the light fades reflecting softly off the water and onto the rocks in pale dancing lines. I round one last boulder, and the light dies, only a metre or so of reflective water visible ahead of me before the echoing darkness takes over.

I turn on my headlamp. Florescent pale green streaks across my vision, smeared across the rocks and even glittering in the water.

"Damn."

I smack the side of my visor. All electronics I touch lately are going haywire.

"C'mon, visor. Headlamp, not DNA trace filter!"

Nothing changes. So I try the DNA trace filter intentionally this time. Gonna give the old 'turn it off turn it on' trick a go. But instead of vanishing, the glowing white-green turn orange. I check my visor. The DNA trace filter is on, now, not off. I turn it off. The glow returns to its previous florescent hue. So I do have my headlamp on. It's on, and the light is making the rocks glow.

Phosphor?

I stop the soal beneath a low overhang that's zigzagged thickly with the glow, and turn on the DNA trace again. It all turns orange, again, and the filter pinpoints what it is. Mirror shrimp.

Bioluminescence!

They're the tiny glittering things I saw swimming in the water. Clustered thick in the ridges of the rock, their minuscule bodies ripple with light. Working in unison, they mimic the glow from my single headlamp throughout the entire cave, swelling the light from a small circle to filling a space about as large as a hangar. The cave is bigger than I thought. And, illuminated now by the mirror shrimp, I can see that the rocks give way to sand again at the far end. I punt the soal halfway to it across the calm, dark water before I can really see beyond it, however, and then I stop. The soal drifts. The mirror shrimp ripple and glisten. And there, above the stretch of black sand, reflecting off the ripples around me, hangs a rope stretched from left to right across my way. Suspended from it are balls of stone as big as my head, and etched into their smooth surfaces are the same symbols as the beads on my year-bracelet. Slowly, the soal drifts beneath it, and the same sudden dread and excitement that filled me when I snuck into the hangar past curfew during training hits me.

I shouldn't be here.

Then I see the stones set on a shelf above the high-water line above the sand. They too are carved, the lines shining bright as the soal drifts closer and my headlamp awakens the mirror shrimp packed into them. The carvings are beautiful in their simple, geometric design, and easy to identify. They're of humans. Placed between the stones and draped over them are strings of shells, stone bowls, pieces of rusted metal. I see more tokens and carvings hanging from the ceiling by thin chains when I tilt my head back again, but then the soal noses into the sand.

I can't slide my feet down to rest on the underground shore, though. I sit there, silent ripples reflecting the light of my headlamp and the mirror shrimp widening into so many thin half-circles of silver.

I'm in a tomb.

My first thought is to open the comm link to tell Core – both that I'm alive, and what I've stumbled upon. I can't, though. The Guild would probably overhear and end up bombing the place to tie up the loose end that is myself. And I've got to keep moving, anyway. The injection will start wearing off within another forty minutes.

You're supposed to respect the places of the dead, speak poetry to honor the beauty and silence of the place, and pay a tithe for crossing the set-apart land. I know that from leaving flowers and flat golden coins at my ancestors' tombs back outside of Platinova City. But my brain can't remember any of the prayers I was taught when little, and neither do I have anything to give. So I just whisper the chorus of the last song I heard on a recorodion as I dismount the soal and my boots grind the black sand under the water. When I turn from pulling the soal onto the shore after me, however, I look up at the three carved tombstones looming over me, and suddenly am very aware of how dirty I am. Tugging my torn and blood-stained blazer straight, I put my heels together and lift my chin.

"I'm sorry to disturb you," I say to the stones, and wonder who is buried beneath that black sand. "And that I, ah, can't make this whole trespassing thing very formal."

Contrary to all my public-speaking classes, I fidget, tapping my fingers against my thigh. The tombstones glow, their sides glistening with water trickling from cracks in the ceiling, and the blushing shame of being sacrilegious still burns me. I try again, stammering out the only poetic historical phrase I can remember.

"Seekda, star-gatherer, life-bringer, spark of humanity."

The words echo with the dripping and gentle wash of ripples against the sand. Then I spin around as the sound of a soft crack and crumbling bounces off the wet stones, as well. Almost at the same instant, a prickle like static races up my arms and raises the hair at my nape. I whirl around, hand to the pistol in my belt. The static vanishes. But the cave is empty behind me. It's circular aside from twisted channel that leads back out o the shore, with relatively smooth sides, so there's no places for anybody to hide. I ease my hand on the pistol handle.

Then, simultaneously with another wave of static, my visor flickers. A notice icon glows into being. Sonar. The pistol is out of my belt and cocked and ready in front of me before I know what I'm doing. I sweep the cave again, check over my shoulder. Still nothing.

Slowly, I back up until the middle of the three tombstones is behind me. Another wave of static hits me, then two more in rapid succession, and each, I realize, not only stands my hair on end, but prickles my nape, itself. My cortex. My comm link implant.

I'm gripping the pistol so tight now, my arms tremble.

As a fifth wave of static slides over my skin, I open the sonar in my visor. The window widens to show the coastline, then zooms in and down, glitches, and focuses. Readings appear. In my location.

Long, fluttering, then short, staccato. Wailing. Chirruping.

It's biological sonar. No – Core's echolocation whale.

It followed me.

Gently, so gently, I lift one foot and set it down closer to the water. I peer at the dark ripples. There's no telling how deep this cave is. Anything could be down there.

I wait.

Nothing.

The sonar pulses on, fluctuating like the flight pattern of a butterfly.

I can't afford a standstill, though. Time is running out in my veins – already my arms and head are starting to feel heavy. Stepping right up to the edge of the water, I lower my pistol a little and clear my throat.

"Hello?"

Drip, drip, drip, the cave answers.

Then:

Chirp.

Audible this time, not sonar. I stiffen.

"Hello?"

Chirping responds again, louder this time. Then a mechanical hum vibrates the close air, and motion flickers in my left periphery. Leaping back from the water, I fire.

The report pounds my eardrums repeatedly in echo and I drop to my knees at the ping of ricochet. Across the cave, rock cracks and splashes into the water. Waves foam and ripple out to lap at the black sand shore. Then all is silent, my ears buzzing. The soal stopped moving.

Is it dead? My hands begin to shake and I have to lower the pistol so I don't drop it. Can you kill a meteorite? Is soal still processable if there's gunpowder in it? Will it explode the vaporizing unit? I'll get fined for breaking base machinery. I'll lose my job.

STOP IT.

I close my eyes and breathe deep to calm my racing thoughts.

"It's soal," I tell myself aloud, my voice high pitched with tension. "It survived atmospheric entry. A gunshot will do nothing. It's fine. You're fine. Everything's fine. Just ignore the soal and prepare for a long day of coming down off your injection."

But when I open my eyes again, I can't ignore the soal.

It's got a giant bloody crack, right down the middle, and my visor's heat-signature filter spikes.

Oh no. Oh no, no, no.

I stuff the pistol in my belt and hurry to kneel beside the soal. I've got to get the soal crystals off before it detonates or something. But as soon as my knees hit the wet sand and I look into the crack, I freeze.

It's not a crack. It's straight-sided, geometric, and opening onto a curved, smooth, black surface that's so slick the light of my headlamp and the mirror shrimp slide along it as oily reflections.

It hits me that I may be the first person to ever look into a soal egg, and my breathing grows shallow. My eyes flutter.

No. Stay calm. Focus. Breathe. In. Out.

As soon as my own vision is no longer fuzzy, I turn on my visor's visual recorder. I state my name, Fire-keeper identification, the date, and my location. Then I touch the smooth black interior off the soal, the warped reflection of my glove reaching back towards me.

Something deep within the soal shudders, heaving into life like a horse about to get to its feet, and I start to my own. The black fades, turns grey, smokey. Then light flickers from within, so sudden I have to throw my arms up over my face. Shifting squares of yellow and blue swim before my eyes, but a soft humming draws me out from behind my arms. The soal is doing something. It's moving, purring inside. An engine. The black surface is entirely gone now, glowing a beam of bright light straight up into the cave like a yellow pillar, and the mirror shrimp go crazy, pulsing like the neon on main drag. The entire tomb glows, the water beside me reflecting it all so I'm surrounded by light in the patterns and glyphs of old stories and names.

I lean over the soal again and look into the light. Positioned deep in the middle of it is some sort of pod. It's oval, light grey, and slightly reptilian with its leather-like surface and blue veins. Then something beeps. The light turns whiter. The blue veins glow and suddenly, flickering across the surface that was previously black, a face appears.

A human face.

A human face with brown skin and black hair and a clean-shaven chin and grey eyes. A small scar on his lip. Sunburn on cheeks and nose. Tech at his ears and medallions and bits of ribbon on the small section of his collar visible on the screen. He's got a throat-apple. It bobs. He speaks.

I only understand one word.

Seekda.