She looked down at the crude humanoid shape, still plain against the mat. A part of her wanted to stay and study it, but her nerves screamed get away!
React later, she reminded herself. Think ahead.
During the ride up she opened the screws on her Airbus tank. It spewed out, a moist plume condensing immediately into crisp snow. Water in the compressed tanks froze on expanding. The air around them was still very cold.
This vapor is from the mat itself, not coming up in warm gas from below. The mat is releasing it…why?
The unseen oxygen made gusts in the foggy banks around their beams. She glided upward through a universe unlike anything she had ever imagined—a shadowy, clouded world of diffuse light that throbbed with a slow, softly radiant energy.
No easy explanations here. No immediate explanation for the deaths. This was life unlike any analogy with Earthly biology, still evolving from forms older than the continents, still hanging on, indestructible, still dealing in its own strange way with the hard conditions dealt it, still coming.
She directed the Airbus tank spout at a nearby outhanging. Frosty gas vented onto it. The mat jerked visibly.
“Good,” Marc called, and did the same.
They approached the valve membrane, drawing up through a somber fog that thickened toward the ceiling. Their lines slid easily through the narrow puckered center of the membrane.
“I’ll give it a squirt,” Marc said.
Playing the Airbus reserves over nearby thick mat surfaces produced a curious rippling revulsion. The glow heightened here, ebbed there, in no apparent pattern. In her beam she saw tubers seem to swell with liquids, like fat roots. Without a sound she caught the sense of growing agitation.
“Now to knock on the door.” Marc brought himself up to the membrane and slammed his gloved hand into it. Nothing. He took a screwdriver out and punched a hole in the leathery pale skin, but it was thicker than the tool. He could tear away some fragments but the strength of the valve was obvious.
“Marc, stop!”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t think we want to send the wrong signal. We want to tickle it open, induce it to cooperate.”
“What’s wrong with a little force?”
“It’s not a threat, and I don’t want it to become one.”
“No, huh? It just killed two of us.”
“Accidentally. Their inexperience was probably as much to blame.”
“Chen was sawing some big chunks off just before. Maybe it reacted to that.”
“I really don’t know. But I don’t want to find out what a full protective reaction is. Okay? Let’s try it my way for now.”
He grumbled something inaudible, but put the screwdriver back in his belt pack.
Julia took her turn. They were both bleeding Airbus oxy and she could think of nothing more to do.
Yet she felt around them the same gathering sense of urgency.
Glowing patterns flowed in the mat nearby.
“Hey, pressure’s building,” Marc said. “Fast.”
The atmosphere around them was thicker. Their beams now penetrated only a few meters into it. A wind brushed the banks of murky haze. Wind?
“It’s giving off gas,” Marc said, reading his instruments. “Must be, to build this fast. And—what’s blowing?”
“A breeze from below,” she said. “Look down, you can see currents coming up.”
The cavern now brimmed with light. Vapor, glows—all somehow coupled in the complex system this place had evolved to…what? Survive. Irritate an organism and it will—
A crack formed. The membrane valve abruptly began to open.
Immediately the wind tore at them, rushing past.
She could hear the rising roar of a hurricane gale.
“What?” Marc looked down in alarm. “Hold on—”
“No, spread your arms. Catch the wind.”
“Catch—?”
The valve snapped open with an audible pop.
The blast of pressure from below swept them up, through the hole. She got tangled in her own winch cable and tumbled through the opening feetfirst. She slammed into the side, whirled, scrambled for a grip on anything. A piece of mat came away in her glove. She got a grip on a rock and pivoted, out of the direct wind.
A fountain of vapor sprayed up into the dark vent. Moisture turned to snow, a white gusher that drove upward in eddies.
“Marc!”
