trilobites for breakfast.
FORTY-SEVEN
COLD PRICKLED MY NAKED ANKLES as I waded against the incoming tide. Twenty yards seaward from the shanty, I reached the nearest tide pool, where the water deepened until it chilled my knees. Trident at port arms, like the fisherman we had passed in the estuary the previous afternoon, I peered down into water as clear as aquamarine gin. Multicolored invertebrates, some spiked, some tentacled, clung to the rock bottom like an animate English garden. Among them crabbed trilobites the size of flat shrimp. All crust and no filling, the little ones were also too quick to spear, and I bypassed them.
It took me ten minutes to spot a six-pounder, fat and spiny. I slid to one side, so my long shadow thrown by the rising sun wouldn’t cross him, then drew back the trident.
I held my breath, then lunged at breakfast. As the trident’s tines splashed into the water, the trilobite shot away. Into its place, where my trident’s tines struck, flashed a dull red streak.
“Damn!” I lifted my trident two-handed, like a full pitchfork. Impaled on the three tines squirmed a three-foot- long replica of the lobe-finned giant that hung above Celline’s mantel. Fins as sturdy as stumpy legs, which enabled the lober to wriggle across rock from pool to pool and meal to meal at low tide, thrashed, and a mouth filled with needle teeth snapped. No wonder lober fishermen wore leather armor.
My accidental catch weighed ten pounds if it weighed one, and lobers were better eating even than trills. The fish’s struggles subsided, and I cocked my head and said, loud as if the fish could hear me over the tidal rush, “See? If you hadn’t gone after the little fish, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”
The tidal rush had not only grown louder, it had grown irregular, a rhythmic splashing behind me.
I turned with the trident in my hands.
Twenty feet away, a rhizodont as big as the twenty-footer that hung above Celline’s mantel eyed me head-on. With two-thirds of its body above the waterline, its mouth gulped like, well, a fish out of water, and its pincushion of teeth dripped seawater like it was salivating over a snack.
Which it was.
“Crap.” Slowly I turned toward the shanty. What had I just told my victim about the perils of pursuing little fish?
The great fish lunged toward me, lurching on thick, lobed fins, flopping side to side like a GI low-crawling under barbed wire on his elbows. Semi-submerged bulk buoyed by knee-deep salt water, the fish closed the gap between us faster than a man can jog.
I sprinted away like my hair was on fire, screaming. But high-kneed in the tide pool, I was moving slower than a man can jog.
When the gap had narrowed to fifteen feet, I chucked the fish and trident back at the monster as a peace offering.
The trident wedged between teeth in the beast’s lower jaw like a canape on a toothpick but didn’t slow the rhiz.
The shanty ladder was ten yards away, but the rhiz was now ten feet back.
My bare foot came down through the water onto something that exploded pain into my arch like a land mine. I stumbled and fell face-first into the shallows.
FORTY-EIGHT
I THRASHED TO REGAIN MY FOOTING, gasping as I held my head above water. Salt water stung my nose and eyes, my foot burned, and I waited to hear the crunch as rhiz jaws closed around my torso.
No crunch.
I got to my hands and knees in the pool and looked back.
The rhiz lay still as the tide surged around it. Blood coursed from a neat line of three bullet holes above its right eye and spread in crimson tendrils through the gin-clear sea.
I staggered to my feet, balancing on one leg, and squinted up at the shanty deck. Another figure, balanced on one leg, stared down at me, old Pytr’s smoking rifle in his hands.
“I thought that was you I heard! Do you visit this planet only to serve as bait?”
I shaded my eyes with my hand. The face that peered down at me was sharp, silver-haired, and familiar. “Aud?”
“Can you climb the ladder yourself, Jason? I’m afraid I can’t come down to help you up.” Audace Planck, soldier’s soldier turned co-chancellor, whose marksmanship had already saved me from one Tressen monster years before this, sagged against the deck rail, then collapsed.
I knelt in the water to take weight off my foot as Celline, Jude, and old Pytr’s heads poked over the rail. Jude called down, “Stay there! I’ll give you a hand!”
I looked back at the twenty-foot fish. “Good. I’m not cleaning this thing alone.”
In fact, rhiz were sinewy and bony and tasted like muck, according to Pytr. The monster was left to the trilobites, who swarmed it like sailors chasing lap dancers. Pytr did, however, clean and saute the lobe fin that I had landed fair and square, albeit accidentally. Pytr also removed three sea urchin spines the size of popsicle sticks from the arch of my foot, then packed the wounds with moss to draw out the poison. Meantime, my foot swelled to the size and color of an eggplant.
Pytr’s treatment didn’t injure my appetite.
After breakfast, Pytr put Aud back to bed while Celline, Jude, and I lingered over tea in front of the fireplace.
Celline set down her mug and stared at me with her green eyes. “We brought you to the chancellor with few questions, because your people-the quiet ones in the consulate-have earned a small measure of trust by helping us in small ways. Now I must ask you what you want with Planck.”
Pieces of another universe that eat gravity. A moon stolen by an evil empire of giant snails. Black ops line items in budgets on a world so far away that its sun was invisible in her sky. Explain that to a fisherman’s daughter. I sighed. “It’s complicated.”
She smiled. “As you say, General, try me.”
“Our government doesn’t like dealing with the RS butchers any better than you do.”
She raised her hand. “Please. Your embargo has been hypocritical and meaningless. The truth is that a nation, a world, acts in its self-interest. As I see it, suddenly Tressel again has something that the motherworld wants. Your government sent you to get it from Planck, even though you’re as bad a diplomat as you are a fisherman. Your government expected you to trade on the sentimental bond between old soldiers. But now your friend is powerless. You’re farther out of water than that rhiz was.”
Jude and I stared at her.
I said. “Uh. That’s about it.”
Pytr stepped back into the room and stood watching us, a hand cupped around one ear.
Celline nodded, then said, “But I don’t understand everything. You risked your life to come here and to help Planck, because he’s your friend, even though a shrewd man would know your mission is futile. You seem an unlikely general.”
My current boss, Pinchon, agreed. My previous boss, Nat Cobb, agreed. Hell, I agreed. I wasn’t a general, I was a historical accident.
She said, “You’re not like Planck. Not like my father.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Your father was a fisherman.”
Pytr snorted. “Fisherman? His Grace hated this lodge.”
