Nile gave the otter caller on her wrist another turn. Sweeting should be here quickly. A receiver embedded in her skull transmitted the signals to her brain, and she homed in unerringly on the caller.
“Nile—”
“Over here, Sweeting!”
Sweeting came up out of the water twenty feet away, shook herself vigorously, rippled along the side of the floatwood bole and settled beside Nile.
“These are new bad guys!” she stated.
“Yes,” said Nile. “New and bad. They don’t belong on our world. What can you tell me about them?”
“Much,” Sweeting assured her. “But found two Nile-friends. They tell you more.”
“Two—” Nile broke off. In the surging sea five yards below, two dark whiskered heads had appeared on the surface, were looking up at her.
Wild otters.
Chapter 6
The wild otters were a mated pair who’d selected the floatwood lagoon as their private preserve. The male would nearly match Spiff in size. The female was young, a smaller edition of Sweeting. They might be three or four generations away from domestication, but they used translingue as readily as Sweeting and much in her style. Interspersed were unfamiliar terms based on their independent oceanic existence, expressing matters for which no human words had been available. Usually Nile could make out their sense.
When the Parahuans arrived, the curious otters had made a game of studying the unfamiliar creatures and their gadgetry. There was a ship anchored to the island under the floor of the lagoon. It was considerably bigger than the average human submersible, chunky and heavily built—evidently a spaceship. Its lock was always open on the water. A second ship, a huge one, was also in the vicinity. Normally it stayed deep in the sea, but at times it had moved up almost to the island. Ticos had said that the headquarters ship of the Parahuan expedition seemed to be accompanying this floatwood drift.
Above sea level the Parahuans had set up ten or twelve posts in the forest. Most of them were small, probably observation points or weapon emplacements. The exception was in the island section to which Nile wanted to go. “Big house,” Sweeting said. It was set near the edge of the lagoon, extending well back into the floatwood and completely concealed by it. Perhaps a fifth of the structure was under water. Nile got the impression of something like a large blockhouse or fort, a few hundred yards beyond the rookery of the sea-havals. She wouldn’t have selected the giant kesters as neighbors herself—the rookery was an evil-smelling and very noisy place—but alien senses might not find that disturbing.
The immediately important thing about the blockhouse was that it told her exactly where Ticos could be found, unless he’d been taken away after her arrival. He’d said his captors had shifted him and his equipment to such a structure and described its location.
The wild otters knew nothing of Ticos, but they did know about the tarm. When the Parahuans first came, there’d been two of the pale monsters in the lagoon from time to time. One of them evidently had been taken away again shortly afterward. The description they gave of the other one matched that of the records. It was an aggressive beast which fed heavily on sea life and made occasional forays into upper forest levels.
“Have you had any trouble with it?” Nile asked.
The question seemed to surprise them. Then they gave her the silent otter laugh, jaws open.
“No trouble. Tarm’s slow!” Sweeting’s small kinswoman explained.
“Slow for you,” Nile said. Hunting otters had their own notions about water speed. “Could I keep away from it in the water?”
They considered.
“Jets, heh?” the big male asked.
“Sadly, no jets!” Sweeting made a stroking motion with her forelegs, flipped hind feet up briefly. “Human swim . . . ”
“Human swim! Tarm thing eat you!” the female told Nile decisively. “You hide, keep no-smell, Nile! How do the no-smell? Trick, heh?”
“Uh-huh. A trick. But it won’t work in the water.”
The male grunted reflectively. “Tarm’s back under big house. Might stay, might not.” He addressed the female. “Best poison-kill it soon?”
Poison-killing, it developed, involved a contraption put together of drift weed materials—hollow reeds and thorns chewed to fit the hollows and smeared with exceedingly poisonous yellow bladder gum. Wild otter tribes had developed the device to bring down flying kesters for a change of diet. The female demonstrated, rolling over on her back, holding an imaginary hole-stock to her mouth and making a popping noise through her lips. “Splash come kester!” They’d modified the technique to handle the occasional large predators who annoyed them too persistently—larger thorns, jammed directly through the hide into the body. Big sea animals didn’t die as quickly as the fliers, but they died.
“Many thorns here,” the male assured Nile. “Stick in ten, twenty, and the tarm no trouble.”
She studied him thoughtfully. Sweeting could count . . . but these were wild otters. Attempts had been made to trace the original consignment of laboratory-grown cubs to its source. But the trail soon became hopelessly lost in the giant intricacies of Hub commerce; and no laboratory was found which would take responsibility for the development of a talking otter mutant. The cubs which had reached Nandy-Cline seemed to be the only members of the strain in existence.
For all practical purposes then, this was a new species, and evidently it was less than fifty years old. In that time it had progressed to the point of inventing workable dart blowguns and poisoned daggers. It might have an interesting future. Nile thought she knew the yellow bladder gum to which they referred. It contained a very fast acting nerve poison. What effect it would have on a creature with the tarm’s metabolism couldn’t be predicted, but the idea seemed worth trying.
She asked further questions, gathered they’d seen the tarm motionless under the blockhouse only minutes before Sweeting got the first caller signal. It was the creature’s usual station as water guard of the area. Evidently it had been withdrawn from the hunt for the Tuvela. Groups of Parahuans were moving about in the lagoon, but there was no indication they were deployed in specific search patterns. . . .
“Waddle-feet got jets,” remarked the male.
“Slow jets,” said the female reassuringly. “No trouble!”
But armed divers in any kind of jet rigs could be trouble in open water. Nile shrugged mentally. She could risk the crossing. She nodded at the dark outlines of the distant forest section.
“I’ve got to go over there,” she said. “Sweeting will come along. The waddle-feet have guns and are looking for me. You want to come too?”
They gave her the silent laugh again, curved white teeth gleaming in the dusk.
“Nile-friends,” stated the male. “We’ll come. Fun, heh? What we do, Nile? Kill the waddle-feet?”
“If we run into any of them,” said Nile, “we kill the waddle-feet fast!”
A few minutes later the three otters slipped down into a lifting wave and were gone. Nile glanced about once more before following. A narrow sun-rim still clung to the horizon. Overhead the sky was clear—pale blue with ghostly cluster light shining whitely through. High-riding cloud banks to the south reflected magenta sun glow. Wind force was moderate. Here in the lee of the forest she didn’t feel much of it. The open stretch of sea ahead was broken and foaming, but she’d be moving below the commotion.
In these latitudes the Meral produced its own surface illumination. She saw occasional gleams flash and disappear among the tossing waves—colonies of light organisms responding to the darkening air. But they wouldn’t give enough light to guide her across. Time to shift to her night eyes. . . .
She brought a pack of dark-lenses from the pouch, fitted two under her lids, blinked them into position: a gel, adjusting itself automatically to varying conditions for optimum human vision. An experimental Giard product, and a very good one.
She pulled the breather over her face, fitted the audio plugs to her ears, and flicked herself off the floatwood. Sea shadow closed about her, cleared in seconds to amber half-light as the dark-lenses went into action. Fifteen feet down, Nile turned and stroked into open water.
Open but not empty. A moving weed thicket ahead and to the right . . . Nile circled about it, a school of small skilts; darting past, brushing her legs with tiny hard flicks. She brought her left wrist briefly before her eyes, checked the small compass she’d fastened to it, making sure of her direction. The otters weren’t in view. If the crossing was uneventful, she shouldn’t see much of them. They were to stay about a hundred feet away, one of the wild pair on either side, Sweeting taking the point, to provide early warning of approaching danger.
A cloud of light appeared presently ahead; others grew dimly visible beyond it . . . pink, green, orange. The Shining Sea was the name the sledmen gave the Meral as it rolled here down the southern curve of the globe toward the pole. Nile began to pass thickets in which the light-bearers clustered. Each species produced its own precise shade of waterfire. None were large; the giants among them might be half the length of her forearm, narrow worm bodies. But their swarms turned acres of the subsurface to flame.