Sitting didn't reduce the tension much. Nor did ordering our lunch. However, I watched as they sparred verbally. Brenda, mid fifties, a little heavy b...t still attractive and very happily married, and Teri, late twenties and looking younger, superficially mousy despite her rich colouring. Teri held her own easily, I saw, and was happy to let them sort out the feminine equivalent of dominance games. By the end of our meal they were chatting easily.We parted, though not without a kiss for me that,. Except for fish and eels and a hundred other things living down under her boat, she sensed no other life around, which only exacerbated the lonely feeling, as if she were the only person in the world. The distant honking of geese drifting across the lake was something of a comfort; land must be close, now.The sky was lightening behind her when she felt the docks of Cartuga approaching. Quickly suppressing her vala, she rowed the final few hundred paces - or whatever the nautical term was for. Even so, she had retained a preference for riding the bus whenever possible. She enjoyed leaving the driving to someone else, bringing along a novel or magazine for the ride, or just closing her eyes and relaxing. She'd stuffed some reading material in her handbag, and expected a nice, quiet, uneventful thirty-minute ride across town.At the bus stop, which was abnormally crowded for a Saturday morning, she glanced at her watch: she had just made it in time. And in fact, she could see the bus. The arousal of that human man plugged into their ship, the sparks from a fuse box as a colleague hastily prepared a small part of the craft for take off. It felt a hundred significant and in-significant experiences at once. And in turn the hive mind felt its pain as it struggled to flee an unseen, fast approaching danger.The tunnel bug never saw what killed it. A sudden change in air density. A slight odour, a coursing stinging pain. And then death. A hundred different experiences stopped and.