use water to hide him.”
“Water?”
“Sorry. I mean liquid hydrocarbons.” Yet to Drake, in his present body, they seemed like water. What else should you call a clear, cold liquid that ran in pure streams, that evaporated from surface pools, that you could drink whenever you felt thirsty? He and Carp had a lot in common, even if Drake could not follow the other’s thought processes. But it was the
That existence was now threatened. Milton grunted, and drew Drake’s attention to another display. It was dark enough for the soundbug to waken from its daytime torpor, and it was on the move. It had emerged from its den and was making its way downhill. No sound signal accompanied the display, but the easy liquid movement across the uneven surface gave an impression of silent, ghostly progress.
That was confirmed when the soundbug came on its first prey of the night. The animal was a short, fat version of a polar Snark. It was scrabbling busily in the dirt, tail high in the air. The soundbug seized it before it realized it was in danger. The soundbug’s leathery legs moved the victim to the front constricting rings and compression began. Blood spurted from the blind head end into the waiting maw of the soundbug, but the fat Snark did not die at once. It went on struggling, until the last wriggling tip of the tail was swallowed.
Drake did not look at Milton. He had no trouble imagining the Servitor’s reaction, because he shared it. The original idea had sounded clean and simple: combine Snark ferocity with human cunning, to produce an organism more effective than either in combatting the Shiva. What had been left unmentioned was the question of testing the result.
In retrospect it was obvious: he and Milton would have to expose Carp to more and more dangerous situations, until one of them proved fatal. It was a particularly vicious form of torture, with no escape but death.
Drake made his decision. He might be willing to sacrifice himself to save the Galaxy from the Shiva, but he could not bear to create thinking beings merely in order to kill them. If Carp somehow survived through the night, that would be the end of the experiment. The Snark-human synthesis would live out his days in peace on Graybill. That sounded like a cruel enough punishment, forcing a sentient being to exist without others of its kind, but Drake could change that. It would be easy to develop a dozen copies of Carp in the off-world lab and transport them down for release on the surface of the planet.
More than likely, however, that would not be necessary. Every action of the soundbug seemed to emphasize its invulnerability. Nothing in the flier could penetrate that massive armor. Nothing could sever those tough limbs. Unless Drake flew to the distant site at once and rescued Carp, the chance of the synthesis being alive at dawn seemed close to zero.
Drake glanced from one screen to the other. The fat Snark had apparently been no more than an appetizer for the soundbug’s main meal. It was on the move again, quartering the ground. Long antennas had unfurled above the armored back, to receive returning sound signals and interpret them as images.
The soundbug was closing on the stream. Very soon the pictures on the two display screens would merge and show the same scene. To Drake, who knew exactly where to look, Carp’s head was easy to pick out. It was a lighter gray against the darker turbulent flow. The question was, would the soundbug recognize that feature of the stream as new and different, when natural rocks both upstream and downstream rose above the surface to interrupt the flow?
Very soon, they would know. Thirty meters more, and the soundbug was at the far bank. It had come to the narrowest point of the stream, and it hesitated there. The flier was over in the middle of the clearing. That would be new to the soundbug; but also new, and much closer, a fat cylinder lay on the other bank. As the soundbug paused, the cylinder twitched and jerked a couple of feet along the ground.
The soundbug crossed the stream and pounced in a single movement. As it grabbed the stuffed roll of seat covers, Carp stood upright in the middle of the stream. He pulled hard on the second wire, drawing a noose around the soundbug’s legs and carapace.
The predator felt the pressure at once and reached its head down to grip the cable. The maw snapped shut on the
closed loop.
The wire had an outer insulating layer, but its core had been designed to resist both shear and stretching. It would not break, nor could it be cut through. While the soundbug had all its attention on the confining cable, Carp hauled backward and dragged the struggling creature over the edge of the bank into the fast-flowing stream. Weighed down by its dense carapace, the soundbug plunged to the streambed, where it stood with the current swirling about its broad back.
Drake expected that Carp would now try to pull the soundbug upstream, and would fail. The drag of the current in the other direction was too great. But instead, the Snark-human synthesis began to wade forward and allowed the cable to slacken. With the noose still tight around its legs and hindering its movements, the soundbug scrabbled and splashed and was swept farther downstream.
Carp followed. Still holding the wire, he came dangerously close to the predator. Except that it was no longer quite so dangerous. The antennas, thoroughly soaked, lay flat along the back. When Carp pushed at the edge of the carapace, adding his weight for a moment to the force of the current, and then rapidly jumped away, Drake realized that the soundbug was blind. Its sound-emitting equipment was below the surface, and its wet receiving equipment had no signal to receive.
But the animal could still kill anything within reach. The multiple legs were grasping madly in all directions, while the constricting rings in a reflex of violence were dilating and snapping tight every couple of seconds.
Then the upper part of the leathery legs was no longer visible. The dome of the carapace showed less high above the surface. The current had carried the soundbug downstream to one of the deep pools.
Once the thick shield of the exoskeleton had vanished completely beneath the surface, Carp tightened the cable to prevent the sunken body from moving to shallower parts. Then he stood and waited.
Waves on the surface revealed the desperate activity beneath. Four times the soundbug reared up, and the edge of the carapace became visible. Before the head could appear, Carp pulled the body off-balance. The fourth time, the soundbug flipped over onto its back before it disappeared again. There was one last burst of furious splashing, which gradually subsided. Finally not a ripple showed on the surface of the pool.
Carp waited for another minute or two, before finally wading to the bank and hauling himself out. He sat for a while, hunched over and with his legs in the stream. He was still holding the cable that had trapped the soundbug in its noose.
He looked exhausted. It was not surprising. He had fought a creature that Drake had judged invulnerable; he had fought in a place that was not of his own choosing; and he had fought without weapons.
That was when Drake realized the most astonishing thing of all. He and Milton had watched the fight with the aid of microwave and high-frequency imaging sensors. They could see everything. The soundbug, until the stream drowned its sense organs, had also seen perfectly; but Carp could have seen nothing. It was too dark.
He had fought the soundbug totally blind. And still he had won. It was tempting to ask, what were the limits of Carp’s abilities as a fighter? How far could he be pushed, before he lost?
That was an immoral question. Drake had made his decision earlier, before the fight began. He would not change it now.
“It’s over.” He spoke to Milton, who was staring at the display where Carp had at last roused himself and was hauling the dead body of the soundbug onto the bank of the stream. “We wait for dawn. Then first thing in the morning, we go and get the flier.”
“And Carp?”
“He goes free. Don’t you think he’s earned it?”
“More than earned it. But what about the Shiva?”
“We’ll have to find another way.” Drake took a last look at Carp, who now had the soundbug on its back and was prying open the lower shell casing. There was every sign that the soundbug’s final meal would be as a course and not as a diner. What senses was Carp using to guide him? It could only be touch and smell. If it was anything else, some sense undreamed of by humans, Drake would never find out what it was. Just as he would never know what thoughts
were carried inside that long-haired skull.
