“No, don’t dismount,” Sorka said. “Faranth says there’s something prowling in there. The dragonets will have a look. Whoops!”
The air was suddenly full of the chitterings and chatterings of angry dragonets. Bay’s Mariah shrieked in her ear.
“Now, now, it’s all right. Faranth won’t let anyone harm you.” Bay held up her arm for her gold, but Mariah joined the investigating fairs. Bay was astounded to realize that the dragon was growling, a sensation she could also feel through her body contacts. Faranth turned her impressive head toward the compound, the many facets of her eyes gleaming with edges of red and orange.
A piercing yowl was clearly audible and then there was silence. The excited fairs swirled back over the two dragonriders’ heads, chittering and clattering with their news. Faranth looked up, her eyes wheeling as she absorbed the dragonets’ images.
“There’s some kind of very large spotted beast out there,” Sorka told Sean. “And something else that is even larger but silent.”
“We’ll need trank guns, then,” he said. “Sorka, have Faranth call up some reinforcements. Marco and Duluth, if possible; Dave, Kathy – we may need a medic. Peter’s Gilgath is sturdy, Nyassa won’t panic, and ask for Paul or Jerry. I think we should evacuate Mary and the two children until the beasts can be captured.”
Her ordeal ended, Mary Tubberman wept copiously on Bay’s shoulder. Her son, Peter usually a cheerful seven-year-old, watched poker-faced and taut with anxiety. His two little sisters clung together on a lounger and would not respond to Pol’s efforts to comfort them, though he was generally very deft with children. Mary did not resist the suggestion that she move to a safer location.
“Dad’s dead, isn’t he?” Petey asked, stepping right up to Sean.
“He could be out trying to recapture the beasts,” kindhearted Bay suggested. The boy gave her a scornful look and went off down the corridor to his room.
The dragon reinforcements arrived with the trank guns. Sean was pleased to see them landing in the order they had been drilled in. Sean gave Paul, Jerry, and Nyassa the trankers and sent them off on their dragons to see if they could find and disable the escaped animals.
Leaving Sorka to help the Tubbermans assemble their gear, Sean and the others, armed with the pistols, cautiously approached the wrecked compound. Inside the building, the reek of animal was heavy and mounds of recent dung littered the place. They found Ted Tubberman’s mauled and gnawed body pitifully sprawled outside his small laboratory.
“Fardles, nothing we have kills like that!” David Catarel exclaimed backing out of the corridor.
Kathy knelt by the corpse, her face expressionless. “Whatever it was had fangs and sharp claws,” she remarked, slowly getting to her feet. “His back was broken.”
Marco grabbed up an old lab coat and some toweling from a rail and covered the corpse. Then he picked up the remains of a chair made of one of the local pressed vegetable fibers that were used for interior furnishings. “This’ll burn. Let’s see if we can find enough to cremate him here. Save a lot of awkwardness.” He waved in the direction of the main house. Then he shuddered, clearly unwilling to move the mangled body.
“The man was insane,” Sean said, poking a rod into the dung pats in one enclosure. “Developing big predators. We’ve enough trouble with wherries and snakes!”
“I’ll go tell Mary,” Kathy murmured.
Sean caught her arm as she went by. “Tell her he died quickly.” She nodded and left.
“Hey!” Peter Semling picked up a covered clipboard from the littered floor of the laboratory. “Looks like notes,” he exclaimed, examining the thin sheets of film covered with notations in a cramped hand. “This is botanical stuff.” He shrugged, held it out to Kathy, and picked up another. “This is . . . biological? Humph.”
“Let’s collect any notes,” Sean said. “Anything that would tell us what kind of creature killed him.”
“Hey!” Peter said again. He flipped the cover back on a portable bio-scan, complete with monitor and keyboard. “This looks like the one that went missing from the vet lab a while back, along with some AI samples.”
Meticulously they gathered up every scrap of material, even taking an engraved plate with the cryptic message Eureka, Mycorrhiza! which had been nailed to the splashboard of the sink unit. Dave carried several sacks to be brought back to Landing. Then Sean and Peter collected enough flammable materials to make a pyre that could be lit once Mary and the children had gone.
“Sean!” David Catarel called. He was hunkered down by a wide green swath that was the only living thing in the raddled and ash littered plot, though its color was dimmed by the pervasive black ash. “How many Falls has this area had?” he asked, glancing about. He ran his hand over the grass, a tough hybrid that agro had developed for residence landscaping before thread had fallen.
“Enough to clear this ! “ Sean knelt beside him and pulled up a hefty tuft. The dirt around the roots contained a variety of soil denizens, including several furry-looking grubs.
“Never seen that sort before,” David remarked, catching three deftly as they dropped. He felt in his jacket pocket, extracted a wad of fabric, and carefully wrapped the grubs. “Ned Tubberman was yaking about a new kind of grass surviving Fall down here. I’ll just take these back to the agro lab.”
Just then Sorka, Pol, Bay, and Peter, each loaded with bundles came out of the main house. Sean and Dave began to load the eight dragons.
“We can make another run for you, Mary,” Sorka suggested tactfully when the woman joined them with two stuffed bedsacks.
“I don’t have much besides clothes,” Mary said, her glance flicking to the compound. “Kathy said it was quick?” Her anxious eyes begged confirmation.
“Kathy’s the medic,” Sean assured her smoothly. “Up you go now. David and Polenth will take you. Mount up. You kids ever ride on a dragon before?”
Sean made a game of it for them and passed quickly over the awkwardness of the moment. He saw them all off before he and Pol ignited the funeral pyre. Then they took off in yet another shower of the volcanic dust which would eventually bury Landing.
“I can’t break Ted’s personal code! “ Pol exclaimed in exasperation, throwing the stylus down to a worktop littered with clipboards and piles of flimsies. “Wretched, foolish man!”
“Ezra loves codes, Pol,” Bay suggested.
“Judging by the DNA/RNA, he was experimenting with felines, but I cannot imagine why. There’re already enough running wild here at Landing. Unless – ” Pol broke off and pinched his lower lip nervously, grimacing as his thoughts followed uneasy paths. “We know – ” He paused to bang the table in emphasis. “ – that felines do not take mentasynth well. He knew that, too. Why would he repeat mistakes?”
“What about that other batch of notes?” Bay asked, gesturing to the clipboard lying precariously on the edge.
“Unfortunately, all I can read of them are quotations from Kitti’s dragon program.”
“Oh!” Bay cocked her jaw sideways for a moment. “He had to play creator as well as anarchist?”
“Why else would he refer to the Eridani genetic equations?” Pol slapped the worktop with his hand, frustrated and anxious, his expression rebellious. “And what did he hope to achieve?”
“I think we can be grateful that he hadn’t tried to manipulate fire-dragonets, though I suspect he was practicing on the ova he appropriated from the vet frozen storage.”
Pol rubbed the heels of his hands into his tired eyes. “We can be grateful for small mercies there. Especially when you consider what Blossom has done. I shouldn’t have said that, my dear. Forget it.”
Bay permitted herself a scornful sniff. “At least Blossom has the good sense to keep those wretched photophobes of hers chained. I cannot think why she persists with them. She’s the only one they like. Bay gave a shudder of revulsion. “They positively fawn on her.”