When the island is finally in view, its tall white cliffs jutting high above the water, Xiao slows our approach. Dusk and dawn are safest for shore actions, due to the lower miasma levels, so he’s timed our arrival to give us the light of early morning. Since the island is small, its miasma levels are probably not that much higher than out here on the water, but he’s a cautious man.
Xiao signals an order to Gale for a wind adjustment so that the ship can approach more closely. She’s circling around for the new tack when suddenly she lets out a piercing wail and jerks herself in a wild aerobatic about-face. So much for good nesting and nice tasty fish—something on that island is freaking her out. She and Xiao have a good enough working relationship now that they can communicate simple concepts back and forth, and what he announces is that she hears some sort of awful screaming coming from the island. She refuses to get any closer, and he doesn’t blame her. She’s not hurt, but whatever she hears makes her extremely uncomfortable. “Take care of yourself,” he calls to her, waving her away. “We’ll investigate it. You got us here; we can finish the approach.”
I steady myself with both hands on the rail and close my eyes, shifting my own senses to perceive whatever it is Gale heard, once again dipping into what I call miasma-vision though it’s not really sight-based. Maybe more like resonance-sonar? Anyway, I do hear something, and thankfullly it is not the piercing wail I’d braced myself for. It might just be that Gale and I are processing this input differently, but to me, it seems a constant, low hum—like I feel it reverberating in my chest. I can see why Gale would find this annoying, and I’m glad that I can just shut off my perception of it once I’m done taking its mark. There’s also some consistent thumping that reminds me of the drilling Shu-Fen was doing near our cryopods. It’s all muted by distance, or maybe by water. Whatever’s going on, none of these things are natural. There’s not a large amount of vegetation on the island for me to listen through, but what plants and fungus there are, are not accustomed to these sounds and vibrations.
“There might be some machinery active on the island,” I report, splitting my attention between what I’m sensing and life here on the ship. “There’s some vibration, some sort of humming. I’m going to guess it’s subsonic. Is anything weird showing up on the sonar?”
“Good question,” Xiao says. He leads the way into command center. Cleve and I tag along, but I stay just outside, still tuned to the island. I share what details I can, to help them know what to look for on the screen. They confirm what I already know or suspect, that there’s a sound below the range of human hearing coming from somewhere within the island. And that there are spikes consistent with some kind of hammering drill.
Cleve nods to himself. “Drilling and breaking,” he mutters, summing up the human activity. “And not the Stepdaughters of Chiron way.”
“Absolutely not, no,” Xiao says. “Mining has to be done very carefully, if at all, and we certainly wouldn’t do it on an island like this. This isn’t on our charts, so we haven’t settled it, though I suppose it could be considered within our borders.” International water limits are not well established on Chiron yet.
“Unity didn’t ship with that kind of equipment, did it?” Cleve asks, wondering if these sounds imply that someone else has set up on the island.
“Unity was equipped with every sort of equipment we could possibly need,” I tell him, well-versed as I am in its advertising copy. “It could be people using stuff that was in the colony pod that crashed.”
“Regardless, we can find people there,” Cleve says, honing in on the essentials. And after consultation with some references, he and Xiao decide the sound isn’t just the by-product of power generation. The signature doesn’t match any known systems.
“If the noise is intentional, then maybe it has served its purpose by shooing Gale away,” I suggest. “If xenodragons like to hang out here because of the good nesting and fish options, and the people here don’t want xenodragons or other large creatures getting in the way of what they’re doing, maybe this is their solution, a pest repellant.”
People more wise than me in the ways of ships and sonar spend some more time studying the results, and then Xiao orders a circumnavigation of the island. We get maybe two-thirds of the way around it before the mariner in the crow’s nest announces a good landing spot for the tender that lines up with proximity to the source of the noise.
Xiao asks his crew for a volunteer to pilot the hydrofoil that will carry Cleve, the ranger, and me to land. He barely gets the question out before Ensign Redd steps eagerly forward, eyes wide at the chance to directly serve the Child of Chiron. I fail to get an answer from her to my question of whether I can call her Redd or if it needs to be Ensign Redd. The light show was apparently too enrapturing.