A Darkling Sea by James Cambias Read Free Book Online Page A

on a camping trip with his cousins, so on a whim he had packed a hundred grams of egg powder.
“I’ve still got some powdered eggs left. We could have scrambled eggs.”
    “What about an omelette? I have cheese and there are some fresh mushrooms.” When Rob looked uncertain, she laughed. “I will do the cooking.”
    So Rob grated cheese and sliced mushrooms while Alicia put some synthetic oil in the pan and got it hot.
    Cooks on Ilmatar had to follow an entirely different set of rules. The tremendous pressure at the bottom of the ocean affected everything. Water didn’t boil until it was hot enough to melt tin, bread didn’t rise, and foods like rice and pasta practically cooked themselves at room temperature. Added to that were the limits on what was available. The hydroponic garden produced plenty of greens, tomatoes, potatoes, and soybeans, but no grains. They had shrimp and a few catfish but no meat. Dairy products and eggs existed only in powdered form.
    For bulk, the staff could always fall back on the pure glucose and synthetic lipids produced by the food assembler. You could have them separately, or combined in a kind of greasy syrup which sounded utterly nasty until you came in from a day in freezing water and wanted nothing but calories in their purest form. Without the hydroponic farm morale would suffer; without the assembler the crew of Hitode would starve.
    Alicia was a good cook, at least on Ilmatar. Rob watched admiringly as she flipped the omelette out onto a plate one-handed. It was by far the best thing he’d eaten since leaving Earth.
    “So what’s up?” he asked after getting a few mouthfuls into himself. “Why the little statues?”
    She looked a little embarrassed. “I thought they might cheer you up,” she said. “But I didn’t want to disturb you.”
    Rob tried to make sense of the situation. They weren’t friends—at least, he didn’t know her any better than anyone else at Hitode. Why was she being nice to him?
    “Thanks,” he said. “It was really nice of you.”
    They met again for breakfast the next day, and as they finished their toasted bean cakes, Rob cleared his throat and tried to sound casual. “You know, you don’t have to get up early. We could meet at 0100 tomorrow if that’s better for you.”
    “Everyone else will be up.”
    “I know.”
    “It’s hard to flirt when there’s an audience,” she pointed out.
    “We’re flirting?” he asked, startled. She laughed, and he joined in, trying to pass it off as a joke.
    They agreed to keep having breakfast together early, but that eve ning at 1500, when most of the staff were relaxing after dinner, Rob sat with Alicia in the lounge playing cards. There were half a dozen others in the room, and aside from a few furtive glances, nobody reacted to Rob’s presence.
    Encouraged, he started joining Alicia earlier and earlier in the eve ning, until they were dining together with the “second seating” in the galley at 1300. Rob realized he looked forward to spending time with her, and rearranged his work schedule to let him see more of her. In the process, he wound up spending more of his time out of his room when others were about, and he found he didn’t mind it so much after all. A week passed, and then another; Rob hardly noticed.
    He was just starting to wonder if she would sleep with him when the aliens arrived.
    THE braking burn was brutal. Tizhos lay strapped to her bed, which for the occasion had extruded itself from what was normally the aft wall of her cabin. The fusion motors roared, and the force mashed Tizhos down into the cushions. She tried to estimate how hard—twice Shalina-normal gravity? Three times as much? How much could the ship stand before it broke apart?
    The entire voyage had a distressingly thrown-together feel to it. Just to get out of orbit they’d used half a dozen strap- on boosters, and there were drop tanks attached to the drive section to allow faster transit in Otherspace. The