The WalkingStone had stopped, pointing a finger at the pack. SilverSide, in motion, saw the fingertip become round and a dark opening appear at its apex.
Weapon!The word screamed in SilverSide’s head.
“KeenEye!” she shouted. “Scatter!”
She hurled herself at the WalkingStone’s extended arm.
Metal clashed against metal. A line of searing, intense light cut a crazy swath harmlessly through foliage as SilverSide’s rush knocked the WalkingStone’s arm aside. The kin yelped and retreated again.
Gears whirred menacingly inside the WalkingStone. The smell of it made SilverSide snarl. The featureless, impassive face turned toward SilverSide, who faced it defiantly. Deliberately, the WalkingStone pointed its deadly, laser-tipped finger at her. The aiming beam tracked brilliant red across her body; the skin glowed white just behind. The ferocious heat translated as pain to SilverSide’s positronic brain; the “human” responses overlaid there made her yelp in response though the tough metal alloy was only scorched, not yet melted. Still, the attack disrupted circuitry to that side of her body.
She went down.
The WalkingStone turned its attention back to the pack, now huddled in a knot around the youngling “SilverSide?” LifeCrier called, her fear-scent strong. “What do we do?”
SilverSide tried to answer. Nothing happened. Her vocal circuits were temporarily gone as well.
KeenEye and LifeCrier tried to rally the kin.
The pack had its own peculiar method of fighting, as SilverSide had seen before on their way from her Egg to PackHome. She knew what KeenEye’s command barks said.
“Circle. Keep moving. Keep the WalkingStone busy, but don’t let it touch you.” A SharpFang would have been dealt with in much the same way, the pack whirling around it like a clawing, biting tornado, dashing in behind to nip at ankles and then leaping back, harrying the creature until-exhausted and frustrated-it gave them a fatal opening. Then they would swarm in as one and bear it down.
Such tactics gave the kin the ability to deal with carnivores far larger and stronger than themselves.
Such tactics were horribly ill-suited for their current foe.
It required no effort for SilverSide to picture what would happen if the WalkingStone used its laser on any of the kin. The urgent First Law need to respond drove everything else from SilverSide’s mind.
With the left side of her body still shut down, there was only one possibility. With anything fashioned to resemble a living creature, the joints-neck, elbows, knees-are the most fragile area. SilverSide knew that: as a shapechanger herself, structural dynamics were part of her core knowledge. Her malleable body shifted, altered. The mostly immobile left side she rounded as best she could; everything else she metamorphosed into a massive, coiled muscle.
She gathered herself. Aimed.
Leapt.
Metal boomed against metal like a thunderclap.
The WalkingStone’s neck was stabilized with supports, but none were designed to withstand the tremendous hammer blow SilverSide represented. There was a screech and a wail of stressed steel. Welds popped as the head was suddenly canted at an acute angle. The glowing eyes dimmed. The thing staggered, the laser fired wildly and high. Its knees buckled, it seemed to wheeze mechanically.
It fell.
As it fell, SilverSide heard its voice in her head. Oddly, SilverSide understood it, for the thing spoke in the language she’d been born with. Central, under attack, badly damaged and shutting down……The voice trailed off. None of the kin looked as if they’d heard it.
SilverSide had fallen herself, resuming her wolf shape. As her body cooled, control returned. She managed to limp slowly to her feet, and stood on her hind legs over the fallen WalkingStone. It twitched spasmodically, but seemed no threat. Its mental voice was silent. As SilverSide watched, a plume of thin, acrid smoke came from the broken neck, and all movement stopped.
SilverSide lifted her muzzle and gave a BeastTalk howl of triumph as she’d seen the other kin do after a kill. The others howled with her.
LifeCrier and KeenEye padded over. Both groveled in front of SilverSide, baring their necks in ritual submission. “You are the Bane of WalkingStones,” LifeCrier declared. “You saved our lives and the lives of all the kin here.”
“Yes,” SilverSide answered. It was not immodesty; it was simply truth.
KeenEye rose, her eyes unreadable. “I was wrong,” she said. “What LifeCrier said of you is true. You are the wisest of us. You are the OldMother’s gift.” She paused “You are now the leader of kin.”
“Yes,” SilverSide said.
The decision echoed in all her judgment circuits. “Yes, I am,” she repeated.
Chapter 8. A Hurried Departure
The hard thing under his cheek seemed to be a foot. It was attached to a very smooth and shapely leg, and at the top of the leg…
“Derec,” a woman’s sleepy contralto said warningly from farther down the bed. A warm breath tickled his shin. “I’m very, very cross when rudely awakened.”
“You don’t like it?”
Ariel wriggled under his attention. “It’s not…0” she breathed, then sighed. “I’m just tired.”
“Too tired?”
She gasped. “Oh, you…” In a flurry of bedcovers, she whirled around. Her mouth touched his. She rolled him on his back.
Much later, they snuggled together. Derec reached out from the cover to touch the contact that caused the wall of the bedroom to become one-way transparent. Though in the middle of Aurora’s largest city, there was nothing to be seen but green, open expanse. They looked out over an expanse of a lush rolling meadow, crowned with a stand of magnificent trees. The orange-red sun of Aurora slashed through the branches, wedges of light outlined in a miasma of morning fog.
A native whose whole life had been spent on the planet might have shrugged-beautiful Auroran sunrises were commonplace enough to have become the norm-but in the year since Derec and Ariel had been on the planet, they hadn’t yet become blast. They gazed at the display as if the awakening world had arranged it strictly for their benefit.
“It’s very lovely,” Ariel whispered.
“Like you.”
“Flatterer.”
“Will it get me anywhere?”
“We’ll see. Maybe. A little later, anyway.”
“There’s no reason to wait.”
“Greedy this morning, aren’t we? Well, you’ll just have to cultivate a little patience.”
Ariel kissed him again and rolled from the bed. With a lithe grace, she moved across the room. She’d recovered entirely from her ordeal in Robot City, or at least it seemed that way. The disease that had warped her personality had been cured, her injuries healed. She had left Robot City and returned to normal.