Rarely had words been spoken with which she was in more complete agreement, Murchison thought fervently as she looked around her low, cramped, and highly uncomfortable prison, but returning to the station was not going to be easy, especially for her. She pointed at the ventilator opening.
“Those ships are moving fast,” she said, “and we’re already two hundred meters from the beach. Even if we left now, by the time I swam ashore and ran all the way back, we might not get there until after the fleet arrived.”
The sand container slumped into a more organic shape and rolled up to her feet, growing a rudimentary jaw with very sharp teeth as it came.
“With my assistance we will both go by sea,” said Danalta as it bit through the rope securing her ankle. “Will I enlarge the ventilator opening for you?”
“No,” she replied sharply. “It will open widely enough to let me out. We don’t want to damage their ship unnecessarily. I was trying to make friends with them.”
“Then jump,” said Danalta.
Instead of jumping she made a long, shallow dive that took her about twenty meters from the ship’s side before she had to surface. She heard the splash of Danalta’s less graceful entry into the water, the excited chittering of spiders as more and more of them spotted her, followed by the hissing plop of crossbow bolts striking the water all around her. She took a deep breath and dived again, then wondered if a few feet of water would make any difference to the penetration power of the crossbow bolts when she could swim faster and maybe be more difficult to hit on the surface. But the next time she came up for breath and looked back, she was in time to hear the spider with the speaking trumpet call out a few loud, sharp syllables after which the shooting stopped.
Relieved and grateful, she continued swimming. Then she wondered if her spider captain didn’t want to hurt her, or if it believed that it would recapture her with the others at the station and simply wanted to save ammunition. A green, sharklike shape with a long, corrugated horn growing from the top of its head broke the surface beside her before she could make up her mind.
“Grasp the dorsal horn firmly in both hands,” said Danalta, “and hold on tight.”
She was glad of the extra grip afforded by the corrugations as the shape-changer picked up speed and its wide, triangular tail whipped rapidly from side to side, thrusting it faster and faster through the water. It was exhilarating and uncomfortable and a little like water-skiing without the skis. Danalta was cutting through rather than over the steep, breaking waves in the bay so that she had to twist her body and her head backwards every time she needed to breathe, but doing so showed that the distance between them and the pursuing ships was opening up. Laughing, she wondered what her spider captain would think about her moving so fast through the water that she was leaving a wake.
But she was beginning to feel very cold, and Danalta was moving even faster and the water was slapping and tugging and bursting in clouds of spray over her head, arms, and shoulders. In spite of the warm, morning sunshine reflecting off the waves and spray, her body temperature was dropping rapidly and the hands holding her to Danalta were losing feeling. She realized suddenly that while her equipment belt had stayed firmly in Place, the swimsuit hadn’t.
The spider ships were disappearing behind the curve of the coastline, and the wreck of Terragar and the medical station were corning into sight. Within a few minutes they were in the shallows m front of the buildings and the shape-changer was already turning its fins into legs.
Murchison stamped about on the sand and swung her arms briefly to return some heat to her body, then, still shivering, she sprinted for the largest prefab structure that housed the recovery ward. It was occupied by Naydrad and the three Earth-human casualties. With her teeth chattering, she said, “Charge Nurse, please throw me a set of my whites and …”