The whale breached, bigger than she’d expected, gray and magnificent, free, the symbol of everything Earth had lost to the Jao all those years ago. I’m sorry, she told it. You have to submit, just as we all do, but someday—
The harpoon boomed and even as it was racing toward its target, Oppuk’s staff members were readying a second shaft. The harpoon struck just as the whale hit the water, sending a sheet of spray twenty feet into the air. The line sang as it played out from the immense reel. Caitlin blinked hard, strained to see through the fine, driving rain. Had the whale escaped?
The line went taut with a crack. The trawler lurched and sea was stained dark red as their quarry struggled to submerge. With grim efficiency, the second harpoon shaft was loaded. Oppuk put his eye to the sight, then turned to Caitlin, seeming to notice her for the first time in hours.
His eyes flashed an intense actinic green, like sheet lightning heralding an approaching storm. His stance shifted into what she thought was cruel-enjoyment. She wasn’t sure. It was a rare posture, for Jao.
“Miss Stockwell,” he said, “perhaps you would be so good as to fire the next shot?”
Chapter 21
Aille stepped between Oppuk and the Stockwell female, who obviously shrank from taking part in the hunt. Certainty beat through him—if he did not act, she was sure to invoke offense, which was precisely what the Governor intended. Oppuk’s unsanity was obvious, now, especially with that obscene posture.
Aille knew the Pluthrak variant on cruel-enjoyment, of course. His kochan-parents had taught it to their crechelings, so that they would know how to avoid it at all costs. That stance made one vulnerable to folly—and open to enemies.
“Although it is only proper for the Governor to have the honor of the first shot,” he said, “I must confess I wish to claim the second for myself.”
Oppuk’s eyes met his and flashed an intense molten-green. For an instant his body displayed savage-hatred, startling in its purity. Even the normally unflappable Yaut, a few steps away, hissed in a breath at such a revelation before dampening his response.
But the Governor recovered quickly. “Of course,” Oppuk said, abandoning the weapons mount with an air of condescension. “This hunt is after all in honor of Pluthrak deigning to waste one of its celebrated scions on this undeserving world.”
“Alas, I am so newly emerged, I have never had the opportunity to become ‘celebrated,’ ” Aille said. He touched the tender new service bar on his cheek, etched there a mere two nights ago by Yaut. “Although I hope to at least serve well.”
He saw Kralik tow Caitlin Stockwell along the deck until the two humans stood well back. Her hood had dropped onto her shoulders and soaked hair clung to her head almost like golden nap. Aille knew the pair should go below where they would not tempt the Governor to notice them any further, but they seemed unaware of the risk they were courting. They looked small and fragile and dangerously exposed, like offspring released too soon from the creche.
The whale surfaced again, then disappeared with a flick of its massive tail flukes. Up on the trawler’s forward deck, Aille put his eye to the harpoon’s sight and waited, holding on with both hands as the ship lurched. He had been told that whales were air-breathers, not properly fish, so this one would have to resurface again before too long.
The creature was mighty, there was no doubt of that, and he could see why humans had found them fascinating and why some of them objected to the hunt. Now that Aille had seen one, he had grave doubts about the enterprise himself. The whale’s narrow, almost triangular head possessed a strangely intelligent, self-aware gaze. It had never been the custom of Jao to make sport of hunting sentient beings.
But, they were here to hunt this particular beast and hunt it they would. The Governor had so commanded, and for Aille to oppose him directly would be a serious error. Combat between kochan was a delicate thing, with victories more often measured by subtle nuances than direct triumphs. The point, after all, was not to defeat Narvo, but to force them to associate properly.