The fins moved her on steadily. She listened to the sea through the audios, sensed its changing vibrations against her skin. Amber dimness of open water for a while; then she went turning and twisting through a soggy dark forest of weed. Beyond it, light glowed again. She avoided the brightest areas—too easy to be spotted there.
Sweeting came to her once, circled about, was gone, a flicking shadow. Not an alarm report; the otter had checked on her position.
Then there was a sound which momentarily overrode the myriad other sounds of the Meral. A deep, distant booming. Half a minute later it was repeated. Closer now.
Nile held her course but moved toward the surface, scanning the areas below and ahead of her. The giant sea-havals were hunting. An encounter with one of the great creatures in the open sea ordinarily brought no risk to a human swimmer or, in fact, to anything but a sizable skilt. Sea-havals hunted by scent and sight; and skilts were their only prey. But when they made that sound, they were driving a major school. To avoid accidents, it was best to keep well out of the way of such a school. . . .
If possible, Nile added mentally.
And there came the first indications of trouble!
A dozen big torpedo shapes hurtled toward her, coming from a line of light-thickets ahead. Skilts—approximately in the three hundred pound class. Preferred size for a sea-haval.
Nile checked, moved quickly to the side, lifted farther toward the surface near enough to feel the tugging surge of the swells—
The sea boomed like the stroke of a tremendous bell.
And the string of light-thickets exploded as the van of the skilt school bulleted through them. Coming at her in a straight line. They were harmless creatures in themselves, but their panic, speed and weight made them deadly now. The impact of any of them would break her body apart. And the sea seemed an onrushing mass of thousands.
The scene was blotted from Nile’s vision as she broke the surface. She rolled herself into a tight ball. There was nothing else she could do. A great wave lifted her. Then came a vast, thudding sensation from below, streaming past, a racing river which threatened to drag her down. Skilts exploded from the sea in frantic thirty foot leaps all about, came smashing back to the surface. Then two final tremendous surges of the water beneath her. A pair of sea-havals had gone past.
Sweeting was there an instant later. The wild otters arrived almost as promptly.
“Nile here, heh? . . . Fun, heh?”
Nile had no comments. She’d pulled off the breather, was gulping long lungfuls of storm air. Dim and remote, more sensed by her nerves than heard, came an echo of the sea-havals’ booming. The hunt had moved on.
Moments later, she and the otters were underway again. For the next two hundred yards, weed beds were ripped and shredded by the passage of the fleeing school. Cleanly sectioned skilts, chopped by the big kesters, drifted about. Then things began to look normal. . . .
Suddenly Sweeting was back, moving past Nile’s face in a swirl of water, dropping a dozen feet, checking to turn, turning again and gliding toward a great limp tangle of weeds below her. Nile followed instantly in a spurt of speed. Come fast! was what that had meant.
She slipped into the rubbery slickness of the thicket. The otter was there, waiting. Far enough, apparently. . . . Nile turned, took out the UW, parted the weeds enough to see anything coming toward her. When she glanced aside again, Sweeting was gone.
She waited. A light-thicket hung twenty yards to her left; about her was dimness. Small skilt shadows slipped past, and something big and chunky drifted up, slowly turning head-on as it came opposite her to stare in at her among the weeds. It paused, moved off. A large weed skilt, perhaps three times the weight of the maddened projectiles which had made up the school. A carrion eater by preference. It should do well in the wake of the sea-havals’ hunt tonight—
Abrupt violent commotion—swirling of water, lifting and sinking of the weed fronds, thudding sensations which suddenly stopped. . . . Nile knew the pattern of an underwater death fight; and this had been one, not many yards away. It was over now. She slipped forward, gun held out, peering up. Dark smoky veils floated down and something bulky came settling through them, grazing the weed tangle. The Parahuan’s head seemed nearly detached from the squat body, blood pumping out through the gashes. Typical otter work.
Sweeting reappeared from above. Together they hauled the unwieldy thing by its harness straps into the weeds. Fastened to the broad back was the Parahuan version of a jet rig. Nile studied it a moment, gave up the notion of converting the device to her own use; she would lose more time over that than it should take her to get back into the floatwood. They left the big rubbery body wedged in the center of the tangle. As they turned away, the first scavenging weed skilt was nosing up toward it from the other side.
A hissing had begun in the audio pickup and was growing louder. Nile halted Sweeting in the trailing fringes of the thicket. Then two other bulky figures were slanting down swiftly through open water toward them, trailed by thin jet tracks. The Parahuans’ guns were in their hands. Possibly they had picked up traces of the brief commotion and were looking for their dead companion. At any rate, they were hardly twenty-five feet away when Nile saw them, and their faces were turned toward her, semicircular water eyes staring. The UW couldn’t miss on such targets, and didn’t.
The immediate vicinity of a sea-haval rookery at night was not for the nervous. Monstrous rumblings and splashings came from within the floatwood walls surrounding it, as the adult kesters left the rookery by a diving hole hacked through the forest’s subsurface root floor, returned presently, beak-spears holding up to a ton of mangled skilts, to be greeted by the roars of their gigantic young.
Upwind of the racket, on the lagoon side, Nile finished recoating herself and her equipment with buti sap. She was down among the massive boles near the water, waiting for Sweeting to return and report. While they were dealing with three members of the Parahuan sea patrol, the wild otters had found and dispatched another three. That seemed to have left no survivors. But the patrol should have been missed by now; and what she did next would depend at least in part on what the Parahuans were doing as a result.
The tarm had been found still at its station beneath the blockhouse. Nile was thankful for that. The sudden near-encounter in the other forest with the pallid sea thing had rammed fear deep into her nerves; the thought of it hadn’t been far from her mind since. The early reports that the Parahuans might have developed the monsters out of their own kind somehow made the tarm more horrible. After seeing what their biological skills had done in creating the form of a Great Palach, Nile thought it was possible. She told herself the buti and reasonable caution would keep the creature from noticing her if she met it again, but she wasn’t at all sure of that. And the buti would be no protection if it came near her in the water.
Her wild allies might presently free her of that particular fear. They’d gone to get a supply of the poisoned thorns and seemed confident that in the underwater tangle of floatwood beneath the blockhouse they could plant a lethal dose into the tarm’s huge body without too much trouble. Sweeting was prowling the lagoon, looking for signs of alien activity there or in the forest near Nile.
“Found Tikkos, Nile!”
“Where?”
Sweeting slipped up along the bough out of the lagoon, crouched beside her. “In boat,” she said. “With little waddle-feet.”
“Little waddle-feet?” Palachs?
“Half-size,” said Sweeting. “Five, six. Tikkos talking to Guardian Etland. Then waddle-feet talking to Guardian Etland. Loud-voice. You Guardian Etland, heh?”
“The waddle-feet think so.” Loud-voice was a loudspeaking device. “Let’s get this straight! First, where’s the boat Ticos and the waddle-feet are in?”
The otter’s nose indicated the eastern end of the forest. “Boat’s coming into lagoon. Coming this way. Got lights. Got loud-voice. Talking to forest. They think Guardian Etland’s in forest. Tikkos say waddle-feet talk, not fight. You talk and maybe they go away. Waddle-feet say they sorry about fighting. No guns in boat. You come talk, please.” Sweeting paused, watching her. “Kill them, get Tikkos now, heh?”
“No,” Nile said. “No, we don’t kill them. I’d better hear what they have to say. You say the boat’s coming in this direction—”
“Coming slow. You don’t listen to waddle-feet, Nile! Trick, heh? You come close, they kill you.”