Uplift - Startide Rising Part 37

He checked the charge on his harness cells. There was only enough for two good shots from his cutter torch. Those would have to be from very short range, and no doubt K'tha-Jon's rifle was almost fully charged.

With his harness-hands Akki plugged his breather back over his blowmouth. Ten minutes of oxygen remained. More than enough.

The high scream echoed again, chilling, taunting.

All right, monster. He clenched his jaw to keep from s.h.i.+vering again. Hold your horses. I'm coming.

74 ::: Keepiru Keepiru raced to the northeast, toward the battle sounds he had heard during the night. He swam hard and fast at the surface, arching and thrusting to drive through the water. He cursed at the drag of his harness, but to drop it was unthinkable.

Once again he cursed the d.a.m.nable luck. Both his and Moki's sleds were used up, worthless, and had to be left behind.

As he entered the maze of tiny islands, he heard the hunt-scream clearly for the first time.

Until now he could tell himself he was imagining things that distance or some strange refraction in the water had tricked him into hearing what could not be.

The screeching cry pealed out, reflecting from the metal-mounds. Keepiru whirled, and it momentarily seemed a pack of hunters was all around him.

Then came another sound, a brave and very faint skirr of distant Trinary. Keepiru swung his jaw about, chose a direction, and swam for all he was worth.

His muscles flexed powerfully as he streaked through the maze. When a rasping buzz told him his breather was near empty, he cursed as he popped the thing loose, and continued his dash along the surface, puffing and blowing with each driving arch.

He came to a narrow meeting of channels and swung about in confusion.

Which way! He swiveled about until the hunt cry echoed once more. Then there was a terrible cras.h.i.+ng sound. He heard a squeal of outrage and pain, and the soft whine of a harness in operation. Another faint Trinary challenge was answered by a s.h.i.+vering scream and another crash.

Keepiru sprinted. It couldn't be far! He dashed, sparing none of his reserves, just as there came a final call of exhausted defiance.

For the honor Of Calafia ... *

The voice disappeared under a scream of savage triumph. Then there was silence.

It took him another five minutes, frantically casting about the narrow pa.s.sages, to find the battleground. The taste of the water, when Keepiru sped into the quiet strait, told him he was too late.

He caught up short and stopped just short of entering a small vale between three metal-mounds. Coppery strands of dangle-weed floated overhead.

Pink froth spread from the center of the tiny valley, with streamers of red in the direction of the prevailing currents. At the center, enmeshed in a tangle of wrecked harness parts, the body of a young amicus neo-fin, already partly dismembered, drifted belly up, teased and tugged at by the red jaws of a giant dolphin.

A giant dolphin? How, in all the time since they had left Earth, had he not noticed this before? He desperately reattached a fresh breather from his harness, and took gasping breaths while he watched and listened to the killer.

Look at the deep countershading, he told himself. Look at the short jaw, the great teeth, the short, sharp dorsal fin.

Listen to him!

K'tha-Jon grunted contentedly as he ripped a piece from Akki's side. The giant didn't even appear to notice the long burn along his left flank, or the bruise slowly spreading from the point where Akki's last desperate ramming had come home.

Keepiru knew the monster was aware of him. K'tha-Jon lazily swallowed, then rose to the surface for air. When he descended he looked right at Keepiru.

"Well, Pilot?" he murmured happily.

Keepiru used Anglic, though the breather m.u.f.fled the words.

"I've just dealt with one monster, K'tha-Jon, but your devolution fouls our entire race."

K'tha-Jon's derision was a series of high snorts.

"You think I have reverted, like that pathetic Stenosss Moki, don't you, Pilot?"

Keepiru could only shake his head, unable to bring himself to say what he thought the bosun had become.

"Can a devolved dolphin speak Anglic as well as I?" K'tha-Jon sneered. ".Or use logic thisss way? Would a reverted Tursiops, or even a pure Stenosss, have pursued an air breathing prey with such determination ... and satisssfaction?

"True, the crisis of the last few weeks allowed something deep within me to burssst free. But can you truly listen to me and then call me a devolved dolphin?"

Keepiru looked at the pink froth around the giant's stubby, powerful jaws. Akki's corpse drifted away slowly with the tide.

"I know what you are, K'tha-Jon." Keepiru switched to Trinary.

Cold water boils When you scream Red jawed hunger Fills your dream.

Harpoons slew The whales, The nets of Iki Caught us, Yet you, alone We feared at night You alone- ... Orca.

K'tha-Jon's jaw gaped in satisfaction, as if he were accepting an accolade. He rose for air and returned a few meters closer to Keepiru, grinning.

"I guessssed the truth some time ago. I am one of the prized experiments of our beloved human-patron Ignacio Metz. That-t fool did one great thing, for all of his ssstupidity. Some of the others he snuck into berths on Streaker did revert or go mad. But I am a successs ... ."

"You are a calamity!" Keepiru spluttered, prevented by the breather from using other words more to the point.

K'tha-Jon drifted a few meters closer, causing Keepiru to back away involuntarily. The giant stopped again; a satisfied clicking emanated from his brow.

"Am I, Pilot? Can you, a simple fish-eater, understand your betters? Are you worthy to judge one whose forebears were at the top-p of the ocean food-chain? And dealt as judges of the sssea with all your kind?"

Keepiru was hardly listening, uncomfortably aware of the vanis.h.i.+ng distance between himself and the monster.

"You arrogate t-too much. You have only a few gene splices from ..."

"I am ORCA!" K'tha-Jon screamed. The cry echoed like a high paean of bugles. "The superficial body is nothing! It is the brain and blood that matter. Listen to me, and dare deny what I am!"

K'tha-Jon's jaw-clap was like a gunshot. The hunt cry pealed forth and Keepiru, under its direct focus, felt a deep instinct well up, a desire to tuck himself inward, to hide or die.

Keepiru resisted. He forced himself to a.s.sume an a.s.sertive body stance and bite out words of defiance.

"You are devolved, K'tha-Jon! Worse, you are a mutant thing, with no heritage at all. Metz's grafts went bad. Do you think-k a true Orca would do what you've done? They do hunt fallow dolphins on Earth, but never when sssated! The true killer whale does not kill out of spite!"

Keepiru defecated and flicked it in the giant's direction with his flukes.

"You are a failed experiment, K'tha-Jon! You say you're still logical, but now you have no home. And when my report gets back to Earth your gene-plasm will be poured into the sewers! Your line will end the way monsters end."

K'tha-Jon's eyes gleamed. He swept Keepiru with sonar, as if to memorize every curve of an intended prey.

"What gave you the idea you were ever going to reportt-t?" he hissed.

Keepiru grinned open-mouthed. "Why, the simple fact that you are a crippled, insane monster whose blunt snout couldn't stave in cardboard, whose maleness satisfies only pool-gratings, bringing forth nothing but stale water ... "

The giant screamed again, this time in rage. As K'tha-Jon charged Keepiru whirled and darted into a side channel, fleeing just ahead of the powerful jaws.

Tearing through a thick hedge of dangle-weed, Keepiru congratulated himself. By taunting K'tha-Jon into a personal vendetta he had made the creature forget entirely about his harness ... and the laser rifle. K'tha-Jon obviously intended to kill Keepiru the way he had finished off Akki.

Keepiru fled a bare body length ahead of the mutant.

So far so good, he thought as the sparkling metal hillsides rushed past.

But it proved hard to shake his pursuer. And the menacing jaws made Keepiru wonder if his strategy had been so wise, after all. The chase went on and on, while the afternoon waned. As the sun set they were at it, still.

In the darkness, it became purely a battle of wits and of sound.

The nocturnal denizens of the archipelago fled in dismay as two swift foreign monsters streaked in and out of the inter-island channels, swerving and darting in streaming clouds of bubbles. As they swept by, they sprayed the depths and shallows with complex and confusing patterns of sound -- compounded images and vivid illusions of echoes. Local fishes, even the giants, fled the area, leaving it to the battling aliens.

It was an eerie game of image and shadow, of deception and sudden ambush.

Keepiru slid out of a narrow, silted channel and listened. It had been an hour since he last heard the hunt-scream, but that didn't mean K'tha-Jon was being silent. Keepiru built a mental map of the surrounding area from the reflections that came to him, and knew that some of those images were subtly crafted constructs. The giant was nearby, using his immensely talented sonic organs to place an overlay of untruth over the echoes of this place.

Keepiru wished he could see. But the midnight clouds cast everything into darkness. Only faintly phosph.o.r.escent plants illuminated the seascape.

He rose to the surface for breath, and looked at the faint, silvery underlining of the clouds. In a dismal, gloomy drizzle, the vegetation on the hulking metal-mounds swished and swayed.

Keepiru took seven breaths then descended again. Down below was where the battle would be settled.

Phantoms swam through the open channels. A false echo seemed to present an opening directly to the north, the direction Keepiru had been trying to lead the chase, but on careful examination he concluded it was an illusion.

Another such fake pa.s.sage earlier had fooled him until, at the last moment, he had swerved away, too late to keep from slamming into the vine-covered verge of a metal-mound. Battered, he had fought free of the tangle just in time to escape a ramming. K'tha-Jon's giant muzzle missed him by inches. As he fled, Keepiru was struck by a grazing bolt from the laser rifle. It had seared a hot burn into his left side. It hurt like b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l.

Only his greater maneuverability had enabled him to escape that time, to find a refuge to ride out waves of pain.

He could probably elude the pseudo-Orca in time. But time was not on his side. K'tha-Jon had dedicated himself to a ritual hunt and spared no thought for anything beyond it.

He did not plan to return to civilization. All he had to do was prevent Keepiru from reporting back, and trust Ignacio Metz to protect his birthright back on Earth.

Keepiru, though, had responsibilities. And Streaker wouldn't wait for him if she got a chance to flee.

Still, he thought. Am I really trying all that hard to get away?

He frowned and shook his head. Two hours ago he had been almost sure he had lost K'tha-Jon. Instead of making good his escape, he had turned around, under some rationalization he couldn't even remember now, until he picked up the giant's sound-scent again. His enemy felt him, too. In moments the hunt-scream pealed forth, and the mutant was after him again.

Why did I do that?

An idea glimmered for a moment ... the truth ... But Keepiru thrust it aside. K'tha-Jon was coming. He barely noticed the thrill of adrenalin that overcame the pain of his bruises and burns.

The illusions vanished like an unraveling bank of fog, dissolving into const.i.tuent clicks and whispers. In a swirl of powerful fluke strokes, the giant entered the channel below Keepiru. The white countershading of the sport's belly showed against the gloom as K'tha-Jon rose for air, then swam past Keepiru's niche, casting pulse-beams of search sonar in front of him.

Keepiru waited until the monster had pa.s.sed, then rose to the surface himself. He blew softly five times, then sank without moving a fin.

The monster was ten meters away. Keepiru made no sound as K'tha-Jon ascended and blew again. But as the Stenos descended, Keepiru aimed a tight burst of clicks to carom off two metal-mounds across the channel.

The semi-Orca swerved quickly and dashed to Keepiru's left, pa.s.sing almost beneath him, chasing the illusion.

Like a diving missile, Keepiru dropped, nose first, toward his enemy.

The hunter's senses were incredible, for all of Keepiru's unnatural quiet. K'tha-Jon heard something behind him and swiveled like a dervish to come upright in the water, half facing Keepiru.

The angle was suddenly wrong for a ramming or raking.

The laser rifle swung toward him, and the giant jaws. To abort and flee would invite a sure laser blast!

Keepiru had a sudden flash of memory. He remembered his tactics instructor at the academy, lecturing about the benefits of surprise.

" ...It's the one unique weapon in our a.r.s.enal, as sentient Earthlings, that others cannot duplicate ... :'

Keepiru accelerated, and pulled up in front of K'tha-Jon, coming belly to belly with the astonished creature. He grinned.

Who can deny An attentive suitor- Let's dance! *

Keepiru's harness whined, and the three waldo-arms snapped out to grab K'tha-Jon's and lock them into place.

The stunned ex-bosun screamed in rage and snapped his jaws at Keepiru, but he couldn't bend far enough. He tried to lash out with his ma.s.sive flukes, but Keepiru's tail flexed back and forth with his adversary's in perfect rhythm.

Keepiru felt an erection begin, and encouraged it. In adolescent erotic play between young male dolphins the dominant one usually took the male role. He prodded K'tha-Jon, and elicited a howl of dismay.

The giant writhed and shook. He bucked and kicked, then sped off in a random direction, filling the waters with his ululation. Keepiru held on tightly, knowing what K'tha-Jon's next tactic would be.

The semi-Orca sped slantwise toward a steep-sided metal-mound. Keepiru held still until K'tha-Jon was just about to slam into the wall, with him in between. Suddenly he arched, and swung his weight to one side in a savage jerk.

A giant he might be, but K'tha-Jon was no true Orca. Keepiru weighed enough to swing them about just before the collision. K'tha-Jon's right flank hit the wall of rugged metal coral, and b.l.o.o.d.y streaks of blubber were left behind.

K'tha-Jon swam on, shaking his head dizzily and leaving behind a b.l.o.o.d.y cloud. For the moment the monster seemed to lose interest in anything except air as he rose to the surface and blew.

I'll be needing air very shortly, Keepiru realized. But now's the time to strike!

He tried to pull back to bring his short-range cutting torch into play.

It was caught! Locked into K'tha-Jon's harness rack! Keepiru tugged but it wouldn't come loose.

K'tha-Jon eyed him.

"Your t-turn now, little-porp," he grinned. "You ssset me off there. But now all I have to do is keep you under water. It will be interesssting to lisssten to you beg for air!"