“In all my songs thereafter, Void has sung one of the parts.

But Void must not become the loudest singer in the song,

As it became for me. I feared the loss and pain so much

That I became the cause of loss and pain to my own kin.”

She confessed it all, not hesitating to make herself un-sympathetic. Her purpose could not be served by anything less than brutal honesty. And she needed to drive home the theme of how fear could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By singing of how her own fear of hurting her children had cost her a loving family life, she hoped to underline how their panicked efforts to protect their world would bring just the opposite result.

“We act in fear because we wish to change the course of Fate,

Believing we can stop the surge of oceans if we try.

But if we swim against the Song’s inexorable flow,

We may just smash ourselves upon the shores of death and pain,

Destroyed by our misguided fight against that very doom.

“There is no shame in fear, unless we let it make us deaf.

We’ve all known fear and loss; we need to heed each other’s song

And add the voice the other lacks, fill in the aching void—

Not swim alone in fear until we lose our very selves.

Together, we can bring the Song back into harmony.”

She wasn’t sure it was enough; she was afraid it was hokey, sentimental rubbish. And her voice was raw and failing; she couldn’t imagine it sounded very pretty to the squales.

But she must have poured her soul into it, for she could hear a change in the squale chorus. Cham’s counterpoint had modulated, synchronizing with her part of the song and allowing the chord to resolve at last. It was his way of showing that she’d won him over.

And beyond, in the ri’Hoyalina, the squalesong was changing too. There had been mostly silence for a time, as the squales had paused to listen to her song, with only a few voices raised in protest or anger. But now, new voices were singing, repeating her own song, echoing it even as the multiple reflections of the deep sound channel echoed it, turning the song into a round, a canon. Aili realized they were passing the message along, reamplifying it for the benefit of squales farther away. She wasn’t sure if that meant she had convinced them, but at least it meant they were willing to ensure she was heard. Within six hours, she knew, every squale on Droplet would have heard her plea.

But what would they decide?

Not for the first time this day, Christine Vale cursed the speed of sound for being so slow.

Sure, the idea of a layer in the ocean that allowed effectively global telecommunication simply through a quirk of water density was fascinating and elegant, but why did it have to be the layer with the lowest speed of sound instead of the highest? She was used to subspace radio making it possible to speak instantaneously with people twenty par secs away. The notion of having to wait an hour and a half to know the results of an action being taken less than nine thousand kilometers away was infuriating.

Especially given what had been happening in that hour and a half. The compound floater had been eroded down to its last few segments around the base camp; indeed, the camp might have fallen already if not for Ra-Havreii. He and Y’lira had returned to the base an hour ago, making a daring run of the squales’ blockade and driving the scouter gig clear up onto dry ground—though the Efrosian engineer had insisted that any bravery in the act had been inspired by his greater fear of remaining in the water.

Since then, he had somehow figured out a way to conduct a structural integrity field through the organic shell material of the floaters, making them far more resistant to the icebreaker creatures’ attacks. But it took a great deal of power and couldn’t be maintained for long. And it had the unfortunate side effect of making the remains of the island more rigid, no longer flexing with the constant swells of the ocean. More than one segment had snapped off under its own weight when too much of it had been suspended out of the water, overstraining its connections to its neighbors beyond what the SIF could bear. The squales had seemed puzzled by the change at first, but now had modified their attacks to take advantage of it, waiting for swells and then sending the icebreakers in to strike sidelong at the bases of the suspended floater segments.

“I never imagined myself saying this,” Ra-Havreii told Vale as they and Keru watched a segment adjacent to the base rock and twist under just such a bombardment, “but the island can’t take much more of this.”

“Aili, come on,” Vale muttered through clenched teeth, knowing that whatever Lavena had attempted was already completed by now. They were out of comm range of the surviving hydrophone, without the Marsalisto relay through the interference, so there was no way to get a status report. The shuttle had ferried the captain back to Titanand had then suffered an ill-timed engine failure, the delayed result of an attack by one of the electric-tentacled dreadnought creatures; and replacement parts were slow in coming as long as the ship’s industrial replicators were in full-time probe-making mode. The shuttle was on its way back down to evacuate the base, but there was no guarantee Bolaji would make it in time. At least Vale could take comfort in the knowledge that Captain Riker was alive and safe. One way or the other, I won’t have to be the one giving orders for much longer.