Expendable - James Alan Gardner [77]
“Let me get back to you on that.”
Scanning for Trouble
The alarm scan was still set on its longest range—at least we had ample advance notice for whatever the Bumbler had detected. There were no Skin-Faces on shore, no hypothetical dragons soaring through the sky. That suggested the danger might be in the water with us…and a scary suggestion it was. On this setting, the Bumbler wouldn’t notice anything as trifling as a lamprey, piranha, or water moccasin; it had to be something bigger.
If we were lucky, it might be a freshwater dolphin. If we weren’t…. I told myself the river was too cold for alligators, and snapping turtles seldom bit anything larger than pickerel.
“Keep as still as you can,” I told Oar. “If you don’t move, your legs are almost invisible in the water. You won’t look like anything’s supper.”
She said nothing—her “stay quiet, don’t be seen” instincts had kicked in again. I fumbled with the Bumbler, trying to locate what it was beeping about.
Radio first. No signals.
Visual scan. Nothing.
IR…and immediately it showed a strong heat source in the water, one hundred meters upstream.
The temperature was too high for a reptile; it had to be warm-blooded. That suggested a dolphin; but the heat trace on the screen looked bigger than any fresh-water dolphin I’d heard of. In fact, the bogey looked as big as a killer whale, and as hot as a gas-powered engine.
Holding the Bumbler high out of the water, I dialed “Visual telescopic” and aimed the scanner in the direction of the IR blob. A moment later, the screen showed a sharklike fin cutting the surface in a straight line toward us.
The fin was made of glass.
The Glass Fin
“Have you heard of glass dolphins?” I asked Oar.
Her answer was barely audible. “No.”
I scowled. Possibly, the engineers of Melaquin made glass versions of higher cetaceans as well as humans—the animals were, after all, sentient in their own way. Even so, the blob on the Bumbler’s screen had a furiously bright IR signature. Hotter than Oar. Hotter than any blubber-insulated orca built to avoid leaking body heat into cold surrounding water.
The fin continued straight for us.
Still working with the Bumbler, I tried to resolve a better picture of the thing—particularly its tail. Cetaceans have horizontal tail fins; fish have vertical. The image on the screen was still too blobby for me to be certain, but this tail looked vertical. And the thing’s body wasn’t moving properly: no undulations to provide propulsion. The body stayed completely rigid, more like a submarine than a living organism.
I thought of Oar’s glass coffin boat. Perhaps Skin-Faces had boats too, built with intimidation in mind.
“Shit,” I said.
“Oh shit,” Oar murmured, like the response in a litany.
Raising my voice, I shouted at the onrushing fin, “Greetings! I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples, and I beg…aw, fuck it.”
Lifting my stunner, I shot the beast right in the dorsal.
Accidental Music
Hit by sonics, the fin sang like a glass harp. The sound reminded me of the hum from running a wet finger around the rim of a wine glass, I could actually see the vibrations, strong on the fin’s tip, damped down where the fin entered the water.
Without hesitation, I shoved the stunner into the river and fired again.
Ouch.
My hand tingled with numbness—in water, the tight sonic beam didn’t hold its cohesion, and a fraction of it radiated back at me. My grip didn’t loosen enough to drop the gun, but I couldn’t pull the trigger again till my fingers got over the shock. Still, the incoming bogey took a hard hit too: water conducts sound better than air.
A moment later, the fin disappeared.
On the Bumbler screen, the bogey’s heat signature veered to one side and angled into a steep dive. If it used sonar, it would have quite a headache—maybe enough to send it running in pain. For that matter, it looked like it was going to….
I swear I felt the jar of impact as the bogey’s nose hit the river bottom. The heat blob on the Bumbler dimmed to half, as muck bloomed up from the collision