She had.
“Why, Claire, why?” Arthur sighed, taking another long pull from the bottle of rye whiskey in his hand.
Half the morning was gone. He had raged. He had cried. He had screamed and kicked things, quite possibly breaking a toe in the process. A combination of pain from his foot and the despair chewing at his heart had made him haul out the bottle and take that first drink. The ones that followed had just sort of happened. At about the fourth he’d half-decided to go looking for her, and even gotten as far as putting on an envirosuit, but in the end he had gone back to the fifth instead.
His bothersome beautiful beloved Claire grinned back at him from the screen in formerly living color, frozen in the act of blowing him a kiss in her final moments before the leviathan had gotten her. Her face wore that crazed look he knew—and secretly loved—so well, her dark eyes glowing with reckless pleasure. She’d known he would see this, and had waved good-bye before—
He took a shuddering glug and hugged the bottle to his chest, the hooded yellow Teflon fabric envirosuit and his tragic expression face making him look like a bereft banana on a bender. Every Canadian boy grew up knowing American women were trouble, and she was clearly and inarguably more trouble than any ten normal daughters of Uncle Sam. Why had he ever let himself get involved?
A sound that was half a sob and half a laugh escaped him. Like he could have stopped himself! Not two minutes after they had first met and begun working together she had begun driving him crazy. Before the month was out he’d known he was going to have to either kill her or admit that he loved her. That some deep, unsuspected, probably masochistic part of him liked it. Craved it. That when he was with her he was alive in a way he’d never been before. Life since then had been an adventure, and himself a reluctant adventurer.
He knew himself to be a dull man.
Cautious. A plodding i dotter and t crosser par excellence. He wasn’t a rule-breaker or risk-taker; in their partnership his role was to be the boron moderator of her fissioning impulse, and in a strange way her protector.
His rules and checklists were meaningless now, and in spite of all the times he had threatened divorce, he now knew that he was utterly, abysmally, and irrecoverably lost without her.
“Wha’ should I do now, darlin’?” he asked her image slurrily. She beamed back at him with the face of a peyote-eating Mona Lisa.
One part of him wanted to get drunker than he’d ever been in his whole life, drunk enough to die from. Another part wanted to go hunt down that miserable rubber-lipped wife-eating alien sonofabitch and make it pay.
One of the fundamental guiding principles of Expeditions was that no major life-forms were to be harmed, and on that point the Whuggs were figuratively and literally immovable. The monster that ate his Claire had to be classified as a major life form just on size alone. Killing one on purpose would be effectively killing his career as a part of Why Not U at the same time.
“Big deal,” he sniffed, wiping away a tear and taking another numb swallow of whiskey. Going back to being a plain vanilla administrator mired in the hidebound life he’d led before she came along would be like dying anyway.
“T’ hell with it,” he growled, struggling to sit more or less upright. Enough maudlin muddling, mister!
“System. Exscrap—eggrap—uh, figure out th’ track of th’ leviathan on th’ screen. Use, uh, any an’ all ’vailable data from them orbiting whatchamacallits to locate it so I c’n—”
His longest drink of whiskey yet, tears running down his eyes and excess liquor dribbling down his chin.
“So I c’n shoot th’ bloody thing!”
There. He’d said it. Breaking the rules still horrified him, but dam it, a man had to do what a man had to do! Speaking of which…
After three tries he managed to escape the chair’s clutches. He turned, oriented himself in the general direction of the bathroom, swung one leg out for that critical first step, missed the floor completely and proceeded to fall flat on his face, out cold even before his head hit the carpet.
What finally roused him was the bellowing.
The sfhere sheathing the blindship was completely soundproof, but the sensors monitoring the area were still active and keyed to respond to significant changes in ambient noise.
Bellowing was a rather pallid description of the unearthly sound which blew him from his stupor and set him to thrashing wildly around on the cheap shag carpet. It was a vast mournful baying Barrrrrrooooooooooooo that made an air raid siren sound like a squashed kazoo blown by an emphysemic.
Arthur floundered around in blind panic, banging his head twice on the bottom of the chair before getting past that barrier, lurched to his feet, and when he slapped a hand onto the board to catch his balance he hit the mute button by sheer beneficent accident.
His ears still ringing, his head pounding, and his brain mired in that muddy no man’s land between roaring drunk and rawly hungover, he tried to flog his mind into action.
A dim recollection of instructing the system to track down the monster that had eaten Claire trickled back into his consciousness like a mixture of glue and broken glass. He squinted at the reads. The damned thing had been found, and it was presently located—
—Right outside!
On the third try he got the system shifted over to displaying a real-time view of the clearing out front.
There it was, but strangely enough the gargantuan creature seemed to be in almost as much distress as Arthur himself. It was crouched on the hard-pan outside in a posture that rang corroded bells in his aching brain, its broad blunt head twisted to one side and its mouth open in a soundless howl of obvious anguish.
“Suffer, you bastard,” he growled thickly. “But stay where you are! I’m coming to put you out of your misery!”
The leviathan shook itself like a wet dog and swung its big body around as if trying to dislodge something clinging to its hindquarters, its fuzzy tail curled into quivering rigidity over its leathery back.
Arthur stared slackjawed as its rear end hove into view, his eyes nearly popping out of his head when he saw that sticking out from under the leviathan’s tail was a pair of legs.
Legs he knew quite well from being married to their owner.
And they were kicking.
The leviathan’s small, muddy brown eyes seemed to follow Arthur hopefully as he half ran, half edged around its heaving flanks. Claire’s stun-rifle banged into his spine with every step. He’d brought it along in case the colossus tried to eat him as well, but the thing seemed to be acting almost tame. When it had seen him coming it ceased its mournful baying, squatted down and lapsed into a shallow stentorian panting, like a monster mother in labor.
Arthur was not by nature a man to rush into things. He was the sort who, if he found his shoes on fire, would give considerable deliberation to whether water would be best poured over or into them.
But for once in his life he didn’t waste time debating methodology, pondering the merits of a modified Lamaze technique versus some other carefully researched approach. Instead he simply took a running leap up into the air, and with an atheist’s prayer for efficacy on his lips, seized hold of his wife’s ankles with both hands and let his full weight drop.
His technique, although crude, unconsidered and not particularly scientific, was sufficient unto the task. Claire came free like a cork from a champagne bottle, accompanied by a loud pwop! and followed by a glittering ten-bushel burst of leviathan dung.