“The creatures, the dragons . . . ,” Adele said, switching to the next image. “Fly. You can’t see it very well, but the source says that the animal extends translucent plates, she calls them feathers, out more than a yard along its midline all along its body.”
The dragon in flight was little more than a twisting shimmer in the sky with a dark line running down the middle of it. Adele had allowed her software to sharpen the image somewhat, but going farther than this would’ve been invention rather than improvement. Mist, distance, and the creature’s movement conspired against clear imaging.
“Flying?” Klimov said. He turned to his wife. “This is wonderful! Our captain has done well, little dove.”
Adele blinked at the affectionate diminutive—Klimovna certainly wasn’t little nor could Adele imagine her as a dove, but that was between the couple. Nor was Adele particularly offended by the Count giving Daniel credit for what she had done; she’d read enough to know that Novy Sverdlovsk society was straitjacketed by preconceptions of rank and gender.
But it was also true that it didn’t make her like Klimov better.
A warning whistle blew; red icons pulsed on the displays of those within cancellation fields. The Princess Cecile lurched sideways, then steadied with a slap/slap/slap of waves reflected between the outriggers.
Because in an atmosphere starships used plasma thrusters, whenever possible they landed on enclosed bodies of water. That made it easy to take on reaction mass, and in addition a lake or lagoon absorbed the jets of charged ions harmlessly. A few liftoffs and landings would begin to crater any solid surface, even bedrock or reinforced concrete.
The Princess Cecile was a long cigar balanced by the outriggers which were now extended; after liftoff they’d be drawn up against the hull so as not to interfere with the antennas and sails. She wasn’t a boat, though, but rather a floating solid with no more ability to maneuver than a bobbing cork. All things considered, the yard personnel were doing a competent job of towing the corvette’s 1200 deadweight tons from the narrow slip to the center of the pool where her liftoff wouldn’t damage the other vessels in the harbor, but it was still an awkward task.
“Good,” Adele said with brusque enthusiasm. She wasn’t exactly faking her reaction in order to calm her audience, but in this case the approval she voiced was more intellectual than emotional. She didn’t like being sloshed sideways any better than the Klimovs’ expressions showed that they did. “There’ll be a few final adjustments; then I believe we can expect to lift off.”
She cleared her throat, projected the next two images as a pair, and resumed, “Most of the animals on 4795-C—no one bothered to name the place, of course—are plant eaters. The lesser ones hop—”
You could see a degree of kinship between dragons and the animal browsing sedges at the margin of a lake, but the herbivore was built more like a bipedal egg than a serpent. It showed no sign of alarm at the photographer whose shadow showed in the image.
“—whereas the large ones are nearly sessile and sweep the area around them with their tongues. I doubt you’d find them good sport, though they do get very large.”
The image on the right could’ve been a muddy hillock except for the description Austine had left in his journal. Knowing that it was alive, Adele could see tiny eyes and realize that the curved line at the edge of the image area was the creature’s thirty-foot tongue rather than a branch waggling from the trunk of a fallen tree. The photographer had kept his distance, perhaps realizing as Adele did that being caught in the tongue’s sweep would be fatal even if the creature spat out your remains in disgust a few moments later.
“No, no, nothing there,” Klimov agreed dismissively. “But a dragon, now, that will make a unique trophy.”
“There are also structures on high ground,” Adele said, throwing up the final image. She heard the Countess take a sharp breath.
A tetrahedral crystal pyramid shone on a hilltop. Even in this world’s dim sunlight, the shimmering reflections and refractions had overwhelmed the image until Adele’s software corrected for them. The pyramid’s base appeared to have been cast onto the rocks rising from the slope beneath; rain had splashed mud some distance up the clear sides. In the center of the face toward the camera was an opening, a wedge whose triangular sides paralleled those of the structure itself.