She had expected suspicion, possibly derision or denial, but not Gishora’s obvious amusement. “Certainly. That you took so long to realize it surprises me. One or more of the humans has decided to harass us.”
Tizhos really was surprised. “I do not understand why. It seems so unlike them.”
“Because they do not want us here. They do these things to make us wish to leave.”
Tizhos felt a rush of anger. The humans were challenging them! She willed herself to be calm, no easy feat under Gishora’s amused stare. For a moment anyway, Tizhos felt the strong half-sexual, half-childlike love of a subordinate for a leader.
“If someone deliberately harasses us, we should complain,” she said.
“Explain to me why. I doubt Vikram Sen knows of these things. If he does know, I am sure he wishes to end them. Complaining only weakens us.”
“Then we should find the person ourselves!”
“Not an easy task. Tell me if you volunteer for it.”
“Yes!” said Tizhos.
Strongpincer and his companions move easily along the old rift. Though it is coldwater, a few of the vents give off trickles of lukewarm flow, enough to support some mats and weeds, and a few grazing swimmers. They catch enough to keep going, and when they stop to rest the ruins of settlements provide lots of good places to hide.
Strongpincer is determined no militia will catch him resting. He leaves one adult on guard, even taking a turn himself while Weaklegs and Shellcrusher have their rest.
So it is Strongpincer who hears the sound of a towfin in the distance. It’s moving toward him, and as it approaches he picks up the sound of adults swimming along with it.
Another militia band! His first impulse is to creep away quietly and then swim as fast as he can. But he can only hear a few adults, and they’re being so chatty it’s hard to imagine them as militia. Traders, then? Perhaps.
He pokes the other two awake, then speaks to them softly. “Towfin coming. Three adults. Get your weapons and prepare to rush them.” Strongpincer wishes the other two understood numbers, so he could tap instead of speaking. He remembers wishing that many times.
They take up their spears. Strongpincer listens. The towfin is less than a cable away now. He lets it get closer, holding back Shellcrusher and Weaklegs with a pincer on each one’s flukes. At a quarter of a cable he says “Go!” and prods them, then grabs his own spear and surges out of the ruin.
Broadtail’s little expedition cruises along above the seafloor, making the easy passage to the next ruined city. Sharphead is in the lead, listening more for any likely food animals than anything else, as bandits are few in these waters. The towfin follows half a cable behind, with Shortlegs steering it and Broadtail trailing behind on a rope, pinging down to study the bottom.
Broadtail hears some interesting echoes from below—worked stone?—and lets go of the rope in order to drop down and get better echoes. From ahead he hears a loud ping. It sounds like Sharphead, but he can’t make out what the hunter is saying. Then he hears the towfin give a cry of alarm and realizes they are being attacked.
There are three bandits, and Broadtail hopes that maybe if he can get together with Sharphead and Shortlegs the three of them can hold off the enemy. He swims hard toward the towfin, listening.
Three bandits coming from ahead. Silence from Sharphead. Shortlegs and the towfin making an incredible racket as the youngster tries to turn the beast. Broadtail passes above the towfin and stops, waiting for the bandits to come on. He tastes blood in the current and realizes that Sharphead is probably dead.
One large bandit splits off from the other two and swims toward Broadtail. He backs up, trying to stay near the towfin but it is thrashing about so much he doesn’t dare get too close. That may keep the bandits away, too. If he can just hold off this one, he hopes they get discouraged and leave.
The big bandit shows no sign of that, though. She rises toward him like a stabbing spear, her pincers folded, aiming to ram. He turns to present his hard back shell, and then she hits. It almost feels like something cracks, but he can’t stop to check. Her pincers are out now, stabbing for his underside, looking for gaps. He grabs one of her pincers in his own and turns his head toward her. Broadtail gives a loud ping, hoping to deafen or confuse her, and pushes free.
But she’s not going to let him go, and comes for him again. She’s trying to grab his shell from the side. Can she really be trying to crack him? He briefly recalls hearing stories of such feats, and she may be big enough to do it. He flexes his body and again gets free. For a moment he can listen.
The towfin isn’t thrashing any more, it’s swimming slowly away. The other two bandits have Shortlegs. One has her pincers trapped while the other is methodically stabbing her.
Then his opponent is on him again, her pincer tips feeling for the edge of his headshield. He locks his head back to close the gap and whacks her with his flukes. Before she can grab him again he swims hard for the bottom, going away from the towfin. He hopes that the bandits prefer to chase the beast loaded with food and supplies rather than hunt down a lone scholar.
She doesn’t give up. He ducks around a cluster of old stones—automatically noting to himself that they seem to be part of a building, probably an outlying child-farm or fishing-station of the ruined city. He grabs a stone with his legs and freezes, hoping she’ll miss him, but she isn’t fooled and dives, pincers open wide.
He doesn’t wait for her. Broadtail swims as fast as he can, not really caring which direction, as long as it’s away from these killers. The big one follows, and Broadtail is afraid that in a long chase she will catch him. Then he hears a faint call from the other bandits, and his pursuer slows, stops, and finally turns back toward them as they follow the towfin.
Broadtail swims on, trying to put as much distance between himself and them as he can. He imagines they might follow him after looting the towfin. He swims and swims into cold silence.
Rob’s double life was a lot of fun for the first couple of days. During the waking cycles he was mild-mannered Rob Freeman, video tech for a great metropolitan research station. But at night he stalked the mean streets of Hitode Station as the Midnight Avenger, righter of wrongs and foe of alien oppressors.
The four of them had agreed to try at least one prank each per day, and Dickie had brought Angelo Ponti into the conspiracy. It rapidly became apparent to Rob that some of the plotters were much better at suggesting cool pranks than at actually doing them. Simeon in particular was a fount of ideas but claimed to be too busy to execute any.
The four of them who actually did stuff had very different styles. Rob personally leaned toward high-tech pranks: the stain in Tizhos’s bag was his doing, and he followed it up by disconnecting the light switch in the aliens’ room. Josef’s ideas all had an appealingly direct vulgarity, based on body fluids. Angelo, in Rob’s opinion, was the one most likely to get caught. He’d been the one who stole the cushions from the aliens’ room, which meant that he’d gone through half the station carrying them.
But it was Dickie Graves who really worried Rob. The ideas he suggested when the plotters were brainstorming were all very rough; some of them might have been recycled from the old “killing Henri” game. The glue on the chairs scheme was the mildest thing he proposed, and even then Rob had to insist that Graves use a dilute glue instead of the pure stuff, which would have taken the aliens’ skin off.
Dickie’s second prank was equally harsh. He got some of the trypsin used to break up proteins and “accidentally” spilled a whole bottle on Tizhos’s smart environment suit. The suit’s adaptive surface and self-repair mechanisms did their best, but the damage was simply too great. Everything but the backpack and the helmet turned to goo.About half an hour after Tizhos discovered the damage, Dr. Sen posted a general announcement to the station network.