Hobbes's eyebrows raised. The smaller drones with Marx's craft had their own transmitters, but they were weak and light-speed, intended to be relayed through the main recon drone. Hobbes couldn't remember if she'd ordered anyone to look for their transmissions.
"You have to see it, ma'am," Tyre said. "It is priority, priority."
"I heard you, Ensign."
She ran Tyre's video in a corner of secondary sight, simultaneously scanning the Legis newsfeeds of eight hours ago, Jocim Marx's diagnostics, and composing a message to the marines on Legis. She kept this last simple: "We can't raise the translight array. What the hell is going on down there?"
But through it all, Tyre's video caught her attention.
What was that?
She reran it, and felt her mind stuttering again.
"Captain." "Hobbes?"
"I need to show you something, sir," she managed.
Hobbes cleared the big bridge airscreen. Only at that scale would anyone believe this. She played Tyre's video there, huge and undeniable.
Floating before them was the object, rippling with the sharp lines of dune-shadows from the distant sun. Marx's crafts were a constellation around it. For a moment, the feed was perfectly clear, the images coming through the main drone. Then the radio burst killed it, and the detail on the object's surface disappeared. But the gross undulations of the object's perpetual sandstorm were still visible, caught by the subdrones, which had apparently survived a few seconds longer.
The object began to flex, to change shape.
"Is that a transmission artifact, Hobbes?"
"Not according to DA, sir. This is at one-tenth speed, by the way."
The boloid shape twisted, squeezing its own mass from one extremity into another, like some multichambered hourglass designed to record gravity shifts over time. It shot out geysers that plummeted back still coherent, arches of running sand. The object's surface seemed abuzz with motion, covered with tiny explosions like an expanse of ocean in driving rain. Or perhaps it was forming fractal details that were lost in the low resolution.
Then, just as the object's wild gyrations seemed to be subsiding, sixteen clearly defined columns of sand shot out from it. Each targeted a separate drone, plucking them from space like hungry pseudopods, reeling them into the object's depths as the picture degraded stepwise--one drone dying after another--into noise.
Then the screen went dark.
The bridge was silent, stunned.
"Executive Officer." Zai's voice filled the quiet. Hobbes swallowed, wondering if she'd been foolish to have displayed this monstrous event to the entire bridge crew.
"Sir?"
"Reset the repair priorities."
"Yes, sir?"
"I want acceleration in one hour." That was utterly impossible. But Hobbes was too overwhelmed to protest.
"Yes, sir."
Her fingers formed the necessary gestural commands. Somehow, the shock of what they'd just witnessed made it all easier. It was as if the troublesome higher functions of her brain--logic, comprehension, anxiety--had been erased by that mad and awesome image. All that remained of Hobbes was a smoothly functioning machine.
But in some deep place she heard the screaming of her own fear. And the afterimage of the object's frenzy stayed frozen in her mind, like some troublesome bum-in of secondary sight that could not be erased.
The thing had come to life.
Fisherman
Another wave of torchfish struck him.
The channel that joined bay and tide pool had become a torrent, the tide rolling wildly back and forth between the two bodies of water. Bright fish shot past him like grains of radium in some glowing hourglass.
Jocim Marx looked up.
The moon catapulted across the sky, sucking the oceans of the world along.
Jocim plunged his spear into the sand and clung to it, fighting the current with all his strength. He couldn't remember which way the water was going, to bay or tidal pool. Both seemed to have grown as vast as oceans, their shifting mass choking the raging channel in which Jocim found himself. He knew that he could not let go, couldn't let himself be pulled into the open sea.
Marx looked down, and saw a finger of red join the streaming darts of light.
It was his own blood. The fish were biting him again.
The tracers of rushing light increased, multiplied, climbed an exponential slope. Jocim held on, screaming at the transient violations of small, sharp teeth. The gushing water pulled his spear into a hyperbole, lifting his bleeding feet from the sandy bottom. The sky was red, he saw.
The ocean begged for him to let go. Its tidal strength stretched him out from the spear as if he were an arrow notched upon a bow. The ocean was full of a trillion tiny lights, a trillion voices and images and snatches of effluvial data. It raged with angry journal entries and impulsive sell orders and terrified calls to the police. The ocean wanted to consume him, to lose Jocim in its vast reservoirs of information.
Jocim Marx felt his legs disappearing, shredded by the hungry, passing fish.
His blood curled into the ocean, was turned on the lathe of its currents into a spiral jetty of red.
But he held on.
The torchfish had opened his gut, and were nipping at his flailing entrails, carrying away his soft tissues like a furious wind stripping a dandelion. Bright bullets from some limitless firearm, the fish raked the flesh from his chest, pounded furiously at the insufficient armor of his ribs. They consumed Jocim's heart again.
And finally only his arms were left, then simply a pair of hands holding on with a ghastly singularity of will.
But then the tide slackened. The torrent began to slow, and the spear unbent and lifted up its disembodied, defiant cargo.
Jocim Marx felt himself coming back together. His arms grew from the indomitable hands, eyes and face beginning to re-form, the wild scattering of his flesh and bones reversing. And he knew that by the time the moon would rise again, in a few minutes, he would be ready and whole.
And the channel would rage at him again.
"What do we know about this object?"
Captain Laurent Zai directed this question at Amanda Tyre. The young ensign held his eyes steadily, he noticed. She no longer needed Hobbes as an intermediary.
"On a gross scale, sir?" Tyre answered. "Its volume changes constantly, but averages roughly four hundred thousand cubic kilometers. The outermost layer of sand spins about once every six hours, but like a star or a gas giant, different depths rotate at different rates. Its internal currents are far more variable than any natural phenomenon. Its motion is mathematically chaotic."