Ice-Driller took his steed up the long ice crack towards the observatory, the highest structure ever built. As he ascended, he felt the pressure declining. He had to slow anyway, as the ice crack narrowed.

Druk, his darter-squid ride, had no problems with the low pressure. They had been bred and acclimatized to this strange water and its abundance of oxygen. The byproduct seemed to be absurd stamina when fed properly. The creature could pump enormous volumes of water through its mantle cavity. Ice-Driller tentacled himself in low behind just behind the water-collar and held on. He positioned his sound melon between the creature’s two forward fins. At the extreme front, the creature had a series of tiny sound organs running down its sides. These emitted and received sounds from the surrounding space graced the squid with heightened spatial sense.

The squid was conical at the front and, with its tentacles were tucked behind it, gave a streamlined shape. It pumped through the water silently among the creaks and pops of the ice. The noises spooked most who had lived only in deep water.

Ice-Driller sent out pings of sound, looking for the specific crack, worried that the ice shell had shifted and closed the passage. He had no time to drill, Deepvents’ guards would likely search for him.

I need speed, but not haste, he thought to himself.

The darter-squid was unworried; it had ferried many decapods that direction. This route was a deep groove into its spatial memory. The crack went straight up to the plume, which was a tight area of modestly higher pressure which shot water off into the Nullworld. The darter-squid had no intention of going that far, ridden or otherwise. It still had powerful instincts to flee from any disturbance.

At each crooked veer, a round sound reflector hung on the wall to guide them. The recessed number and arrow showed this was the final fracture. The mount stopped pumping and coasted them to a small hole.

Ice-Driller dismounted and tied up Druk next to a borehole and grabbed an empty bag. Then he squeezed his body through into the large interstitial lake. Perceptions warped as his sound melon uncorked through the tight space.

Only a hundred lengths were between them the certain death of Nullworld. It was so close you could feel your sonar go ‘void’ if you tried.

“Stay!” He called back to the squid and went forward to the first door.

Ice-Driller ascended. Emptiness loomed above.

Above, there was silence, but he perceived distant booms and cracks from his sides and below. The impermanent ice reminded him how fragile this location was. He jetted up to the crude-cut walls and finally to the hatch of the Observatory. Thick layers of water had refrozen.

From his pouch, he retrieved a tool.

Nine arms braced on any small crack or melt hole.

Whack, he swung his metal hammer at the ice. The echoes lit up the area around and even carried into the building. A small bit of ice chipped off and floated up.

He swung again. Whack. Above him, the last ice echoed and emphasized the mighty expanse of nothing.

The second hammer blow freed the door. He sent a ping of sonar in and detected a few boxes floating around the basement room.

In the silent, frigid room, he looked over the supplies and saw a small net.

The vertical hallway opened to a series of hatches that led to external drill holes. Inside each, small cylinders containing Study-Up’s exotic life. Every length or so a new experiment lived or died. The ones placed too high in the ice became sterile; likely from the unknown cold heat force, which they assumed emanated from The Great Attractor. Other ones too far down went dormant or died.

Too much exposure to the Overworld caused strange burns on the flesh of any living creature. Even seafloor bacterial colonies died out up here. All except for a strange breed of extremophile that Study-Up had discovered. Deprived of every normal source of energy, those creatures thrived close to Overworld, but died when covered with dense material. They seemed to thrive only within a narrow range of the ice.

Ice-Driller pinged sonar through the hatches, searching for the one.

All life previously known was chemosynthetic and derived its energy from chemical reactions in the scalding seafloor vents. But Study-Up had found a life that did not depend on normal chemical processes, and this life did not fit society’s theology.

He was also searching for his father’s records. One the cache of tablets exposed by Ice-Gazer, which showed a glimpse of The Great Attractor.

He sent soft sonar pings at the boxes and visualized the contents within. He could visualize one showing a swirling crescent on the edge of the horizon. Ice-Gazer had left the best picture on top. Though the entire project had been hit with poor luck. If they built it towards the bulge, everybody would have a full view of The Great Attractor. But recent shifts in the ice—uplifts and drifts—had caused the object to move just out of view. Even building the structure on the other side of the ice ridge would have been better.

With a few more pings, Ice-Driller located everything he needed. Next, he went up to the Observatory but stayed several lengths from the small window into the unknown. His infrared photoreceptors gave no detectable heat. Then he gave a ping out and pictured the room. The Nullworld was ‘empty,’ a sensation totally alien to them. No sound returned from above. A blackness unexplained.

The Observatory had sturdy walls, designed for strength. Everything loose seemed to want to be sucked into Nullworld, but these walls were strong, built with a combination of chitin, ice, and other material. The taste of stale water filled his mouth and felt strangely warmer.

His father, Ice-Gazer, claimed to have been able to see something in infrared, like a fine heat had radiated from The Great Attractor. In addition, he claimed he could detect infrared coming through other directions of Nullworld.

The most sensitive knot of photoreceptors was on a decapod’s underside. They only used these when in intimate contact with another Decapod, and that area was rarely spoken about in public discourse.

Even alone, Ice-Driller felt embarrassed to test the theory. Still at the back of the room, he flipped his underside out, exposing his most sensitive photoreceptors, and pushed his body to the small window. Aiming his sensitive parts toward the hole in the shape of the missing sonar. His ten arms splayed around the roof, levering his body up, mililengths from Nothing.

He took it all in for many moments and focused on the small knot of perception of Nullworld. Having emotional photo receptors all over, their visual perception was a spherical and non-logical perception.

Ice-Driller saw a pin-prick of red. Distant blues, whites even!

Small specks. Like diffuse silt in the otherworldly water.

One bright dot near the horizon where The Great Attractor was last sighted. He thought he could detect some infrared, but was not sure.

Outside of the observatory, the nearest layer of ice sometimes glowed blue the closer it was to Nullworld, but only at high elevation. Ancient cultures equated light blue with nothingness and perceived it to be a warning sign, slowly pulsing on and off with the change in tides.

Ice-Driller absentmindedly shot out a sonar ping. Nothing returned from overhead. It was like he was deaf on one side of his melon. He had been here many times over the course of his research, but the instincts are hard to suppress.

One push moved him away from the null window. He left, still unable to comprehend the experience. He had to limit his viewing time, otherwise one could get more ‘cold burns.’ The phantom energy could kill otherwise healthy life.

In the hall, he examined Study-Up’s research. He could almost hear the living sample, the second hatch from the top and grabbed it. It was a long sealed tube. Dense on one side, but the other side had a very unusual material. The ‘open side’ was made of jelly-fin epidermis, and only then could the strange life survive. At one end of the capsule there was the writing: .

He had proof life could grow and reproduce without a source of known energy. The Academy sealed it to prevent tampering. It was sealed with a fresh culture of the abnormal bacteria and a few dozen dormant ice worms.

Ice-Driller pinged the tube up close. He visualized abundant samples of life and the mass of life contained within.

It works.

He swam back to the sonographic plates.

It created abundant life.

Two free arms grabbed the satchel with every image Ice-Gazer took showing TGA.

If we could farm life near the surface, we could double food.

Ice-worms and bacterial mats were not the favorite food of decapods. They could subsist on them, but they tasted terrible. Long ago, their society developed food-chain-jumping. Instead of feeding bacteria to krill, and krill to smaller fish, and another predator to devour that, and so on, they fed the krill directly to the apex predators they had captured and harvested them.

Ice-Driller exited.

Doubling farmable area had been an overestimate, but wherever cracks did not take them, they could drill into the ice. He knew all about drilling. It was his second namesake. He chose drill as his second name because the engineering challenges fascinated him. Rock rarely moved, and the field had swarms of engineers.

But ice? No, it moved, it boomed, it buckled, always threatening to kill you by heaving up.

Out the hatch and through the lake, he descended. The water more cold than he remembered.

He thought back to when Study-Up defended her research.

The stubborn opposition: All life was chemosynthetic, performing chemical reactions with the aid of other minerals. The Great Center feeds all life. Heat radiates outward and dissipates by a power-law relationship (without currents). Thus, life near the Nullworld has many orders of magnitudes less energy to use. Life can’t live ‘up.’

On and on, all the known and unproven theories accumulated and collected by the Academy to disprove her research. But Study-Up was meticulous as she was stubborn. Her records stood scrutiny.

Only after other scientists had duplicated her research did the Academy begrudgingly accept her discovery. They classified her discovery with such tepid phrases as anomalous, uncategorized, or the death knell: technically true but insignificant.

Without the stress of a hungry populace, it might have been ignored, but military leaders insisted on funding her. Getting this tub full of specimens was important to her, as important as her father’s research was to him.

Past the lake, he located the small hole. Druk chirped back upon hearing him. At the borehole he pushed the tube the netted images through, then squeezed himself through. The sounds of a deformed sound melon were trippy. Tying up both experiments, he and mounted Druk for the journey back.

Out through the holes he detected the plume’s up-shaft, but Druk quivered and silently coasted. The skin of the darter-squid undulated.

It let out a faint . Ice-Driller could barely hear it even touching the creature, and he pressed his head against the squid.

The squid’s sonar organ was larger, with specialized bones, and more sensitive.

Ice-Driller listened to the sounds inside the squid’s head. He heard a faint noise in the water.

Someone’s coming.

Two decapods!

Slowly Ice-Driller guided the darter-squid into the shaft and hugged the wall, too softly to be heard.

Friend or foe? Can’t risk it. He tapped out a command to the domesticated animal, a command it understood. He would need to sink down until they detected them. Afterwards, he’d goad the squid full speed into the chaotic terrain to lose them.