“What is that noise?” Thermal-Rock said. A long loud low rumble fell off the ice above, several kilolengths away from their lodging. The flighty creatures heeded the strange sounds from weak ice.

They swam back close to the building and bobbed their heads left and right to get a fix on the distance. The distant long rumble thundered towards the space near them.

“Something is hitting—no clawing up the ice.”

“What is it?”

“The ice will give away again.” Thermal-Rock cried.

Ice-Driller flashed red splotches of horror. The research was still outside.

“Get back!”

Ice-Driller hung his sound melon back out with the hatch open, trying to listen to the strange sound from above which had only just stopped. “Wait! Listen!” All at once, everything seemed silent.

“Use the top hatch.” He said.

The top hatch was little more than a listening hole and flow regulator. Too small for any decapods to get sucked through. He placed his head as close to the opening as possible and let out the loudest ping he could muster.

“Ah, warn us next time.” Study-Up said. Most of the echoes returned from their interior room, but Ice-Driller got a thin sense of hard mass far off into the distance. Aside from the normal creaking sound of far-off ice, the area was serene. The ice would hold.

“I’m going back out. I think there is another large stone out there.” Ice-Driller said. He pointed to Sand-Stirrer and Thermal-Rock. “Can you ready the seismometers? Let’s take another reading of this object.”

He donned the insulating wraps and swam out, sending a flurry of pings toward the mass above. The broken, chaotic terrain kept him from swimming toward it, in any real sense. The nearby fissures had refrozen and made all progress impossible. Every turn towards the strange mass led to a dead-end while open paths forked away. It was a maze of three dimensions and Ice-Driller didn’t even bring a hammer to break any thin ice, not that he would have dared strike the ice at this height.

He went back to his team. “Okay. Let’s set them up again in a triangle and we’ll follow the same procedure.”

Everyone swam off, in as straight of a direction as they could manage. The clatter of small tools and pathfinding pings echoed around the labyrinthine layers of ice. Ice-Driller parked himself under the object and waited for everyone. Above him, he could detect something unusually heavy. He visualized eight circular deformations in a two by four arrangement, and a long fan of roughed ice behind it.

This is nothing like The Otherworld Stone! He thought to himself. It is unnatural… It can’t be! There must be a physical reason.

The sounds diminished, and he wanted to see if he was mistaken, but waited until everyone else was ready. The three other decapods let out a ‘ready’ call and, from each of their responses, he got another fuzzy view of the large otherworldly object.

Thermal-Rock started off the call with a double ping. From each echo, he became more and more exhilarated but fearful. He could tell from the second set of calls everyone could visualize an unfamiliar thing. The echoes were loud and came quickly. Each decapod received a different visualization of the impossible object from the off-angle echoes. After the last call, Ice-Driller sent up his two.

The echoes returned. Now he could almost visualize up the ‘legs’ of the eight depressions. There were circular disks that led up to a dense object. And the cone-shaped fan of rough ice had a net of sorts that descended off of it.

Ice-Driller went all-arms out in surprise at this revelation and tried to think about the next thing to do. The others were equally stupefied but certain of one thing: this was no natural object. It had form and design.

Ice-Driller rallied from his shock. “Come back, quick!”

When they all arrived via circuitous routes, leaving each time to think about the shape of echoes.

“This is not a rock. This is like a tool.” Sand-Stirrer said.

“—A clockwork object.” Ice-Driller said. “You can hear its movements.”

“If it’s a clock, then who wound it?” Study-Up.

“Otherworlders.” Ice-Driller concluded.