For the first hundred meters there was still enough light to see each other's faces without the cabin lamps. Kit watched it vanish through the forward port. The blue thinned, darkened, became a thick black with pieces of white matter falling upward through it.
"That's cheerful," he said.
"Marine snow," Hester said.
"I know what it is."
"Then stop looking offended by it."
She had her forearms in the pilot's rests, hands loose over the controls. Mara knew better than to reach past her. The cabin was large for three people who had worked together before, small for what it was supposed to do. Folded patient seats covered the curved rear wall. With all eight aboard they would have knees between knees and no place to be dignified, but they would fit. Mara ran a hand beneath the nearest restraint to check that the webbing had not twisted during stowage.
A muted bang came from outside.
Kit lifted his head.
"Trim weight," Hester said. "Expected."
Mara watched the descending number on the depth display and unclipped the station drawing from her tablet. Sal had obtained the load plan. Someone had marked damage in red, then drawn question marks beyond the bottom foundation shoe.
"Here," she said, turning it toward Kit. "Dock Hub. Living Drum behind it. Bore Room below. Two dry connecting passages. Shelter's in the Living Drum."
He traced the connections without touching the screen. "Where's the fifth person?"
"We don't know which one's in the shelter. Sal's request went through after the last data packet."
"Medical room?"
She enlarged the plan. There was no proper medical room, only a treatment bay in the Living Drum. Beyond the Bore Room a smaller vessel stuck out from the structure like the end of a thumb. Service Control. A narrow crawl tube joined it to the station.
"What about that?" Kit asked.
"Lift-rail controls. Local hydraulics."
A line extended away from the station along the seabed. At its far end a second shape, very small on the plan, was labeled Refuge Bell.
"Nice to have somewhere else," Kit said.
Mara tried to enlarge the far end and got a loading wheel. The connection to the tender was already degrading. She downloaded what remained and put the tablet aside.
Hester's wrist brushed her own cup of coffee. She lifted it, found it empty, and turned it upside down over the holder to prove the offense.
"You took the good one," she said to Mara.
"Sal gave it to me."
"Exactly."
Kit offered her a plastic bottle. "Cold. Very bad."
Hester took it.
They passed five hundred meters. Mara knew the depth because she looked; her body had no opinion. Her ears did not hurt. The air inside remained warm and ordinary, scented with Hester's orange peel and the synthetic smell of new restraint webbing. The pressure outside belonged to the hull. It bore down on every fitting, every weld, every apparently smooth patch of metal beyond her hand. All the small civilized things inside depended on that distinction continuing.
She reached beneath her seat, touched the breathing pack's hard case, and left it alone.
Sal called them. His voice came over the acoustic relay, roughened by water noise as the capsule moved out of the tender's immediate working cone.
"Three-person check."
Hester gave him the vehicle numbers. Kit reported medical packs secured. Mara gave the entry plan, and Sal repeated the docking-abort condition back to her. He sounded irritable. It was his usual way of making sure a thing mattered without saying how much.
"Any word from Imani?" she asked.
"Not yet. Vale's online. Switching you."
Static brushed the cabin. A chime repeated three times, cut off in the middle, started again.
"Mara?"
Leonie's voice was thin and immediate.
"Here. About an hour out."
"Oh, thank God."
Mara looked at Hester. The pilot watched her instruments.
"Leonie, I need the dock clear and everybody accounted for."
"Five of us. Imani's in the shelter. Nessa's at the hub. Benji's setting things out. Jonah's with me."
Jonah. Mara remembered a man at a long-ago hospital picnic, trying to open a bottle with a spoon. His hand had slipped and he had cut his knuckle. Leonie had told him to stop bleeding on the salad. That was almost everything Mara knew about him.
"How's your husband?"
A pause.
"He's alive."
The flatness of it stayed in the cabin after the sound went.
Mara moved the microphone closer. "We received the warning from Imani."
"I know."
"What does she think will happen if we come in?"
Another pause, longer. The capsule passed through a layer of particulates so thick they looked like dust streaming across headlights.
"She's been alone too long. She can tell you herself. Don't be angry with her."
"I'm asking about your air."
"The readings are right. Bring your masks."
"Then how are you talking to me?"
Leonie breathed into the microphone, or made a sound like breath. "You need to see it. I don't have language that makes it reasonable."
Kit's gaze had sharpened. He leaned forward, one hand on his harness.
"Any fever? Bleeding?"
"Is that Kit?"
"Roan. I'm the medic."
"Leonie. No fever. None of the things you're thinking. And Imani hasn't been affected at all."
"Affected how?"
The link hissed. Hester raised one finger, signaling a dropped packet. Mara waited, watching the tiny signal bars struggle back.
"There's a circuit," Leonie said. "Living material. It exchanges something we don't understand. We can show you. Please don't disconnect anyone."
Mara pictured people attached to tubes in a sealed room, the original air gone nine days before. She made herself look at the patient restraints, the ordinary human widths of them.
"We're not coming to disconnect people. Is there any risk crossing your docking seal?"
"We haven't seen anything pass without direct contact. There isn't anything floating about in the rooms."
"Don't touch the docking face before we arrive. We inspect first."
"All right. The rig head—did you bring the one with the local hydraulic drive?"
"Yes."
"And the mechanical shear?"
"Leonie, who's injured?"
"I'll have Nessa send the structural load record. There's a support we couldn't make safe."
Hester moved her thumb, cutting in. "Dr. Vale, I need your collar lights on in forty minutes. Power only to that circuit if you have to choose."
"They're on. I've kept them on."
The connection dissolved in a wash of crackling noise. Sal returned long enough to say he had heard most of it. Then even he was gone, and the cabin settled to the hum of fans and pumps.
Kit eased back. "You ever hear a doctor say bring the shear before bring the blood?"
"There's someone on that support," Mara said. "Or something holding the room up."
She did not like the little space between those possibilities.
By two thousand meters Kit had gone quiet. He checked the seal on a sampling bag, then his own wrist pulse, casually enough that she could have pretended not to see. Mara knew the habits. She sometimes checked a gauge she had just checked because her hands needed to do something that could produce a reassuring answer.
She opened June's recording on the tablet, keeping the sound in one earpiece. Piano notes. A chair scraping. June saying, From the top, seriously this time.
Mara stopped it after the first phrase. She did not want to put this room into that music.
They descended for another half hour. Hester spoke to the acoustic relay in short bursts, waiting between sentences for the tender's acknowledgment. The exterior camera showed nothing but a small gray volume of water. Then a shape crossed the lights, long and pale and jointed, and Kit jerked sideways.
"What was that?"
"Animal," Hester said.
"Your expertise continues to reassure me."
It had vanished before Mara could decide what part of it she had seen.
The seabed appeared as a pale slope, sliding toward them too fast. Hester arrested the descent. The camera found scattered equipment, a pipe, a dark rectangular mat partly buried in silt. A cable lay in a slack curve. Beyond it, light.
The Dock Hub stood above the slope on black legs. No fish. No blue water. The lit collar made a hard yellow ring in the darkness. Below it the station descended away from them, the Living Drum almost level, the Bore Room tilted down toward a field of broken rock. A small exterior crawler rested on a platform with one manipulator raised.
"Holding," Hester said.
Mara leaned until the harness stopped her.
"Take the lower camera left."
The view rolled across the Bore Room. Something covered the long joint where the service frame met the hull. At first she took it for insulation ripped out of a protective case, a pale batting dragged across steel. Then it contracted.
A ripple passed from one end to the other. In its wake the surface opened into thousands of tiny hollows. They filled and closed. Behind them a torn strip of metal, the size of Mara's arm, lifted a fraction and settled against the seam.
Kit said nothing.
Hester backed the capsule half a meter.
Mara watched the strip rise again. The movement did not match the current. It was being carried, eased into place. At one edge the pale tissue split and showed a red-brown interior, branching threads pulsing under a transparent skin.
A light flashed at the collar.
Someone stood in the little round window beside it. A woman's face. Dark hair tied back, eyes very wide in the station light. She held up a tablet with a single word on it.
HURRY.
The camera moved as Hester aligned the capsule. The face disappeared beyond the port's edge.
"Frame's off by two degrees," Hester said. "Within the mate's travel. I'm going to touch, take load, test the seal. You do not open anything because somebody knocks."
"Understood," Mara said.
The capsule edged forward. Its docking skirt filled the view. Metal contacted metal with a dull, intimate knock, as though someone had struck the wall beside Mara's head. Hester set the clamps, watched the loads come up evenly, stopped one, backed it a fraction, set it again.
Mara could hear a second knock through the hull.
Then a third.
Human knuckles, on the other side.