"I am ready, Festina."
She swung her silver axe to her shoulder. I couldn't tell if the gesture was meaningful, or if she was simply getting ready to move out. Did she understand that her axe could be a weapon, or did she only see it as a tool for clearing trees?
I shivered. Spears. Axes. Weapons.
Feeling the weight of the stunner in my hand, I headed off at Oar's side.
Night on the Plains
The footprints of the spearmen had come from the southwest; therefore I headed southeast, setting a brisk pace until the depths of dusk. We camped for the night in a stand of a dozen trees — large enough to conceal us from prying eyes, but small enough that we still had a clear view in all directions.
Before we went to sleep, I tuned the Bumbler's intruder scan to cover the maximum possible area. With so much ground to cover, the Bumbler wouldn't be as sensitive — it would probably overlook snakes, for example, especially ones moving slowly — but it would detect glass spearmen at almost a klick away.
Frankly I didn't give a damn about snakes that night… even rattlers.
When sleep finally came, my dreams were ugly: Yarrun as a Skin-Face, tattered flesh hanging from his disfigured jaw. He tried to kill me with a spear, or maybe it was Oar's axe; I couldn't keep my attention on the weapon with that ravaged face in front of me. As sometimes happens in dreams, it kept repeating itself ineffectually — Yarrun would lunge and I would dodge, much too slowly. The weapon came in, but nothing happened, as if my mind didn't care whether the blow actually landed. The moment passed, then the whole thing started again: Yarrun attacking again and again, with both of us sluggish, as if slowed by water.
It was a tiring dream… like doing hard work hour after hour. Eventually I woke, still in darkness. I lay on my back and stared at the stars for a long time. Maybe the dream really happened then: when I assembled the random nonsense floating through my mind and interpreted it as Yarrun attacking. Some psychologists claim that's the way dreams work — invented after the fact, when you try to impose order on the mental chaos. Perhaps I owed it to Yarrun to dream about him. Who knows?
If I thought about Yarrun, I would cry. If I thought about Chee, I would probably cry too. If I thought about Jelca… I wouldn't cry, but it wouldn't help my mood.
In the end, I passed the time devising ways to fight people made of glass. How to punch them without breaking my hand. Where to kick for maximum effect. Whether their greater density made them harder or easier to take down with a leg sweep. And the perennial question of any martial artist raised under League of Peoples's law: how to batter opponents into unconsciousness without the risk of killing them.
No one has ever answered that question to my satisfaction. That made it a good topic for thought in the restless night… letting my mind swirl around the possibilities until finally, sleep took mercy on me.
Dragons
There was frost the next morning — a white feathered coating across the broad green of the prairie. Oar considered it an aesthetic improvement; she also enjoyed the way her breath turned to steam when she huffed out.
"I have become a dragon," she told me. "Haahhhhh! I am breathing fire."
"How do you know about dragons?" I asked.
"My sister told me."
"Before or after she met the other Explorers?"
"I cannot remember."
Idly, I wondered if her sister heard about dragons from Jelca and Ullis, or if the dragon myth was so old, these people remembered it from long-ago days on Earth.
Less idly, I wondered if dragons weren't a myth on Melaquin: if there really were fire-breathing creatures, created by bored bioengineers. Exposed out here with open space in all directions, would we suddenly see a flying giant in the sky?
Sometimes I hate the way an Explorer's mind works.
The River
We reached the great river shortly after noon, having seen no further sign of glass-people. Although the day had started clear, gray clouds stole in throughout the morning, making the sky morosely overcast. The river was none too cheerful either: half a klick wide, muddy, and festooned with deadfalls. Every dozen meters or so, bare branches protruded from the water, remnants of trees that had fallen upstream, floated a while, then run aground in shallows. Here and there, larger logs lurked under the surface, their slime-coated wood a jaundiced yellow.
"I do not like this river," Oar said.
"Because it came close to drowning you?"
"It is also mean and spiky."
The spiky bits — the deadfalls — worried me too. Before seeing the river, I had planned to cross using some suitably floatable log: Oar would cling to the log, while I dog-paddled to push it from one bank to the other. Now I realized that was easier said than done. Finding a log wasn't the problem; we could chop down a tree from the many stands dotting the shore. However, threading the log through the erratic palisade of deadwood, without running afoul of sunken obstacles… that would take luck.
I hated relying on luck. When it worked, it made me feel so damned eerie.
To give myself time to think, I led Oar east for a while, tracking the shoreline to see if we'd find somewhere better to cross. Three bends of the river later, nothing had changed: deadfalls in the shallows and sunken trees farther out. Worse, I hadn't any new ideas and the longer we dithered on shore, the more chance we might be spotted by people we wanted to avoid. The clincher was the sky darkening minute by minute. Rain was coming: rain that would fill the river with fast-running mud.
"Here's a good place," I said, trying to sound chipper. "A good straight stretch of open water." It was only half a lie: the river did run straight for a klick, but it was just as congested as everywhere else.
It took fifteen minutes to find a fallen tree, trim its branches with the axe, then drag the trunk to the river. Oar's glass muscles did most of the work. Soon we were in the water, positioned on the upstream side of our "boat" — if we did run into a sunken log, I didn't want us squeezed between the log and our tree trunk. For final preparations, I held the stunner in one hand and slung the recharged scuba device around my neck. Oar wasn't happy I kept the rebreather for myself, but it was the rational thing to do. She couldn't die by drowning; I could. The re-breather would also give me a chance to pull us both out of trouble if something went wrong.
The water was not as cold as the stream we'd hidden in the day before, or maybe it just seemed warmer because the air had turned cool. Clearing the shore proved easy enough — we only snagged once on a deadfall, and Oar chopped us free within seconds.
Good axe.
The current was slow but strong, moving about a meter per second. As I flutter-kicked us forward, the far shore slid dreamily sideways. Oar kept up a steady chatter of encouragement. "We are doing very well, Festina. We are going to miss that log there… yes, see? And if we go a little faster… yes, we have cleared that one too. We are doing very well. Very, very…" She stopped. "What is making that beeping sound?"
"The Bumbler," I panted. "Proximity alarm."
"Is this where we say Oh shit, Festina?"
"Let me get back to you on that."
Scanning for Trouble
The alarm scan was still set on its longest range — at least we had ample advance notice for whatever the Bumbler had detected. There were no Skin-Faces on shore, no hypothetical dragons soaring through the sky. That suggested the danger might be in the water with us… and a scary suggestion it was. On this setting, the Bumbler wouldn't notice anything as trifling as a lamprey, piranha, or water moccasin; it had to be something bigger.
If we were lucky, it might be a freshwater dolphin. If we weren't… I told myself the river was too cold for alligators, and snapping turtles seldom bit anything larger than pickerel.