Manta's Gift (21 page)

Either way, it would be worth a nineday or two to check it out. And it wasn't like he had somewhere else he wanted to be, anyway.

He let his fins go limp, letting the wind take him. The air out here seemed unusually warm, but pleasantly so. Maybe that was why Beltrenini could fall asleep so easily.

Eventually, so did he.

The tour Liadof had requested took over an hour. Faraday assumed it was at least somewhat enlightening for her, though she seemed to be quite familiar already with both Changeling's history and its current status.

It was, unfortunately, far less than enlightening for him. Every time he tried to delicately probe into the reason for her unexpected arrival, she either deflected the question or changed the subject entirely. By the end of the tour, about all he'd been able to glean from her comments was that she and the Five Hundred were rapidly running out of patience. But what that actually meant in terms of changes in policy or operation, he couldn't guess.

He'd also rather expected that when the tour was over Liadof would leave, either to return to her quarters or else to launch herself on an inspection of the rest of the station. Instead, she pulled a spare chair directly behind Beach and settled into it, listening silently to the computer give its slightly broken translation as Raimey told Beltrenini about his fiery breakup with Drusni.

It was another two hours before Faraday was finally able to make his excuses and ease his way out of the Contact Room. There was only one man on the station, he had already decided, who might be able to give him a clue to this new mystery.

He found Hesse on his first try. The younger man was sitting at a back table in the smaller of the station's two bars, fingering a half-empty glass of dark beer and staring broodingly into the cheery glow of the faux fireplace in the corner. "Mr. Hesse," Faraday said, sitting down beside him. "Welcome back."

"Oh, thank you so very much," Hesse growled, throwing an almost furtive glance at Faraday and then shifting his gaze back to the fireplace. "It's so good to be back, too. Do you like the present I brought you?"

"You mean Arbiter Liadof?" Faraday shrugged. "Certainly an interesting choice of gifts."

Hesse snorted under his breath. "She's a barracuda with legs," he declared.

"It's not considered polite to talk about your boss that way," Faraday warned, glancing around the mostly empty room. This was
not
the way one talked about a member of the Five Hundred. Particularly not in public.

But Hesse merely gave another snort. "What do I care?" he countered. "She won't be my boss much longer."

He took a sip from his drink. "If you're lucky, she won't be
your
boss much longer, either," he added.

"You telling me you're quitting the project?" Faraday asked.

"No need," Hesse said. "Give her a few weeks, and the whole project will die out from under me on its own."

"Oh, come on," Faraday said, trying to ignore his own misgivings about Liadof. "She can't be
that
bad."

"She can, and she is," Hesse insisted. "She and the people she's fronting for are worse than you could ever imagine."

He shook his head. "I had such high hopes for Changeling, Colonel," he said quietly. "But she and her group are absolutely going to kill it."

"How many drinks have you had, anyway?" Faraday asked, peering closely at him.

"Just this one." Hesse smiled wanly. "Don't worry, Colonel, I'm not drunk. Unless you want to count self-pity and frustration.
Those
I might be drunk on."

Faraday sighed. "Look. If this is about being replaced—"

"This isn't about me at all," Hesse cut him off angrily. "Don't you understand?"

"No, I
don't
understand," Faraday said. "I can see how the Five Hundred might be getting impatient about our lack of progress. But they've also invested huge sums of money in Changeling. No one's going to cancel it simply out of pique or spite. Not Liadof or anyone else."

"I never said she was going to cancel it," Hesse said tartly. "I said she was going to kill it. Unintentionally, maybe, but it'll be just as dead." He pressed his lips tightly together. "And in the process, there's a fair chance they'll kill Raimey along with it."

Faraday stared at him. "I think," he said quietly, "that you'd better tell me what's going on. Starting with what exactly happened back on Earth."

THIRTEEN

Raimey was startled awake by a thin, wailing cry of fear and pain. He snapped himself to full alertness, twisting around to see what the trouble was.

That instinctive move probably saved his life. Even as he spun around, a sharp stab of pain scraped across his left fin; and suddenly he was face to face with a pair of unblinking black eyes.

Vuuka!

He rolled over in midtwist, angling away from the wide mouth already opening for another try. Again the chomping teeth snapped together, this time catching the very tip of his right tail and biting it off.

He spun around again as a second jolt of pain shot through him, turning a tight circle as he tried to assess the situation. It was still mostly dark, with the sunlight glow just starting to appear in the east. But it was bright enough for him to see that three more Vuuka were dodging in among the suddenly awakened Qanska, snapping at them like wolves in a sheep pen.

But even as he completed his circle, all three of the other Vuuka suddenly abandoned their pursuit of the fleeing Counselors and turned toward him.

And as he twisted around to point himself upward, he caught a glimpse of his now ragged tailtip, and the trail of yellow blood droplets dribbling away into the wind.

And he was now officially in big trouble.

He drove upward toward Level Three, twisting like a leaf in a hurricane as he swam. These Vuuka were as big as he was, and in a straight head-to-head race he knew they would eventually run him down.

But while their torpedo-shaped bodies might be faster in a straightaway, his was a lot more maneuverable. As long as he kept twisting and turning, he could hope to keep out of their reach.

Unfortunately, at this point that looked to be a very temporary hope. The Qanskan healing process was quick but not instantaneous; and until his tail healed over, the trail of leaking blood was going to draw them like magnets.

And at four-to-one odds, sooner or later he was going to run out of maneuvering space.

He spun around some more, still heading upward as fast as he could. Vuuka of this size, he knew, were most comfortable on Level Four or even Level Five. The higher he got, the harder it would be for them to keep up with him, let alone match his maneuvering. If he could keep them off him until his tail healed, they might give up and go after easier prey.

Easier prey.
Like maybe one of the bigger but slower Counselors back behind him.

Like maybe even Beltrenini.

And somewhere deep inside him, a part of him that he'd thought was dead suddenly surged back to life.

Evasion and playing herd odds were the standard Qanskan approach to survival. They were the techniques he'd been taught when he was just a Baby, and the ones he'd employed countless times in the hundreds of ninedays since then.

But suddenly it wasn't good enough to just outdistance these predators and hope they picked on someone else. Inside this multicolored carcass, he was still a human being. That made him a predator, too.

More than that, he was a tool-using creature, even if no one this side of the Great Yellow Storm even knew what a tool was. There was a way to defeat a Vuuka; and he was sure as the Deep going to figure out what it was.

Sharp teeth slashed across the back of his right fin, again just missing a solid hold. Raimey cut around in a three-quarter circle, shooting beneath the Vuuka's belly and heading off at right angles to him. The other three predators were coming up hard on the leader's flukes, one of them close enough to take a snap at Raimey as he passed practically in front of their snouts. Close; but now it would take a few seconds of frantic braking and turning for them to change direction after him.

He had that long to come up with a plan.

All right,
he thought, forcing his mind back into the half-forgotten patterns of all those business logic classes he'd taken a lifetime ago.
Profit, loss; inflow, outflow; pluses, minuses.
What were a Vuuka's pluses? Sharp teeth, mainly, plus speed, strength, and stamina. What were its minuses? Lack of maneuverability and a densely packed body type that gave it less vertical range through the Jovian atmosphere than Raimey had. In his mind he laid out a spreadsheet of credits and debits, adding in everything he and that biologist McCollum up on Prime had been able to figure out about Vuukan physiology since his arrival here.

Behind him, he heard a bull-like snort as the four Vuuka got themselves lined up on him again. Another ninepulse, and they would be up to speed and gaining.

Speed, and stamina...

Raimey smiled tightly to himself. Okay. He had a plan.

Now to see if it worked.

He kept going, wiggling and ducking to keep the Vuuka off-balance, until he felt the hot breath of the leader on his tailtips. Then, with a drop-and-flip maneuver he had to basically invent as he performed it, he did a half circle that brought him head-up beneath the Vuuka's lean body.

And ducking his snout, he slammed his bony forehead squarely into the Vuuka's lungs.

The predator's whole mouth seemed to explode outward with an agonized cough as the impact knocked all the wind out of him. A pulse later the other three shot past, snapping angrily at Raimey but going too fast for a quick stop. With lungs and buoyancy sacs both temporarily paralyzed, the winded Vuuka dropped like a rock; twisting around out of his way, Raimey continued his climb.

His tail, he noticed as he rose upward, had stopped bleeding. Theoretically, the loss of the brain-deadening blood trail should now allow the remaining Vuuka to think straight again and possibly reevaluate their chances of actually snagging this particular meal.

But either this group wasn't bright enough for such abstract thought, or else they figured they'd already put too much time and effort into the chase to abandon it now. Still snorting, possibly madder than ever, they charged up after him.

But that was okay. Raimey was feeling pretty righteously indignant himself just now. He'd already taught one Vuuka to be a little more leery about attacking Qanska with impunity. With luck, maybe he could double the class size for that particular lesson.

Again he dodged and ducked and maneuvered until he could feel the breath of the lead attacker on his tail. Then, cutting sharply into his new drop-and-flip maneuver, he swung around into a tight circle on course for the Vuuka's lungs.

But this particular predator had seen Raimey pull this trick already. Instead of continuing on in a headlong charge as his hapless predecessor had done, he braked hard, quickly cutting his forward speed down to nearly nothing.

So that as Raimey came out of his half circle, he was no longer on course for the Vuuka's lungs. Instead, his momentum was about to take him directly in front of the predator's gaping jaws.

But that was okay. What the Vuuka had forgotten was that Raimey
knew
he'd seen the trick already. This time, Raimey was deliberately not going fast enough to deliver the same kind of stunning blow to the lungs. He was, in fact, only moving fast enough that a midair flip was enough to kill his momentum on the spot before he could get in range of those razor teeth.

And in that position, poised directly above the Vuuka, he slapped his tails with all his strength across the predator's eyes.

The Vuuka screamed in rage and pain, thrashing about madly in an attempt to nab his tormentor. But Raimey was already shooting away, a fresh throbbing of pain from his injured tailtip hardly dampening his grim satisfaction. Twice now he, the prey, had taken the battle back to the predator. It felt good. It felt
really
good.

Of course, in the process he'd also used up both Option A and Option B. Unfortunately, at the moment, he had no Option C.

Fortunately, an Option C turned out to be unnecessary. With two of their group out of action, the remaining Vuuka apparently decided they had had enough. Letting their massive flukes come to a halt, they let themselves coast to a stop behind Raimey. Then, rather sullenly, Raimey thought, they rolled over and slid back down toward the lower levels.

Raimey cruised along on Level Three for a while, just to make sure. Then, feeling better about himself than he had in a long time, he dropped to Level Four and headed back.

He found Beltrenini and the other Counselors still in the process of regrouping after their scattering by the Vuuka. "Raimilo!" Beltrenini gasped in surprise as he swam up to her. "Well, I'll be fin-bit. I thought for sure we'd seen the last of you. How did you get away from them?"

"I didn't, really," Raimey said modestly as he came alongside her. "I knocked two of them out of the chase, and the rest decided I wasn't worth the trouble."

"You did
what?"
one of the male Counselors demanded. "How in the Deep did you do
that?"

"Well, the first one I slammed into just over his lungs," Raimey told him. "He wasn't much use after that. As for the other one, I was able to slash my tails across his eyes. Easy as grazing, really."

The male snorted. But it was an amazed, respectful sort of snort. "If you say so."

"You're hurt," a blue-and-green-spotted female said, moving close to examine his mutilated tailtip. "Bleeding's stopped, anyway."

"Yes, it only bled long enough for me to draw the Vuuka away," Raimey said. "It all worked out pretty well."

"Amazing," Beltrenini said. "I always thought there was more to you than met the eyes."

"And he's only a Breeder, too," Blue-green added, still examining his injured tail. "The clouds above only know what he'll be doing once he's a Protector."