Expendable - James Alan Gardner [76]
“I have become a dragon,” she told me. “Haahhhhh! I am breathing fire.”
“How do you know about dragons?” I asked.
“My sister told me.”
“Before or after she met the other Explorers?”
“I cannot remember.”
Idly, I wondered if her sister heard about dragons from Jelca and Ullis, or if the dragon myth was so old, these people remembered it from long-ago days on Earth.
Less idly, I wondered if dragons weren’t a myth on Melaquin: if there really were fire-breathing creatures, created by bored bioengineers. Exposed out here with open space in all directions, would we suddenly see a flying giant in the sky?
Sometimes I hate the way an Explorer’s mind works.
The River
We reached the great river shortly after noon, having seen no further sign of glass-people. Although the day had started clear, gray clouds stole in throughout the morning, making the sky morosely overcast. The river was none too cheerful either: half a klick wide, muddy, and festooned with deadfalls. Every dozen meters or so, bare branches protruded from the water, remnants of trees that had fallen upstream, floated a while, then run aground in shallows. Here and there, larger logs lurked under the surface, their slime-coated wood a jaundiced yellow.
“I do not like this river,” Oar said.
“Because it came close to drowning you?”
“It is also mean and spiky.”
The spiky bits—the deadfalls—worried me too. Before seeing the river, I had planned to cross using some suitably floatable log: Oar would cling to the log, while I dogpaddled to push it from one bank to the other. Now I realized that was easier said than done. Finding a log wasn’t the problem; we could chop down a tree from the many stands dotting the shore. However, threading the log through the erratic palisade of deadwood, without running afoul of sunken obstacles…that would take luck.
I hated relying on luck. When it worked, it made me feel so damned eerie.
To give myself time to think, I led Oar east for a while, tracking the shoreline to see if we’d find somewhere better to cross. Three bends of the river later, nothing had changed: deadfalls in the shallows and sunken trees farther out. Worse, I hadn’t any new ideas and the longer we dithered on shore, the more chance we might be spotted by people we wanted to avoid. The clincher was the sky darkening minute by minute. Rain was coming: rain that would fill the river with fast-running mud.
“Here’s a good place,” I said, trying to sound chipper. “A good straight stretch of open water.” It was only half a lie: the river did run straight for a klick, but it was just as congested as everywhere else.
It took fifteen minutes to find a fallen tree, trim its branches with the axe, then drag the trunk to the river. Oar’s glass muscles did most of the work. Soon we were in the water, positioned on the upstream side of our “boat”—if we did run into a sunken log, I didn’t want us squeezed between the log and our tree trunk. For final preparations, I held the stunner in one hand and slung the recharged scuba device around my neck. Oar wasn’t happy I kept the rebreather for myself, but it was the rational thing to do. She couldn’t die by drowning; I could. The rebreather would also give me a chance to pull us both out of trouble if something went wrong.
The water was not as cold as the stream we’d hidden in the day before, or maybe it just seemed warmer because the air had turned cool. Clearing the shore proved easy enough—we only snagged once on a deadfall, and Oar chopped us free within seconds.
Good axe.
The current was slow but strong, moving about a meter per second. As I flutter-kicked us forward, the far shore slid dreamily sideways. Oar kept up a steady chatter of encouragement. “We are doing very well, Festina. We are going to miss that log there…yes, see? And if we go a little faster…yes, we have cleared that one too. We are doing very well. Very, very…” She stopped. “What is making that beeping sound?”
“The Bumbler,” I panted. “Proximity alarm.”
“Is this