Taking all of this into consideration, plus the “friendliness” that made them tourist attractions (many visitors pay good money to experience the thrill of swimming with these titans—while wearing ultraprotective suits, of course; the “frolicsome” creatures never attack anything too big to swallow, and we humans are a little large for them, but you might as well guard against a chance swipe of the tail that could almost send you into orbit, right?), not to mention their status as the planet’s unique and iconic species, the human colonizers finally decided to let the tsunamis continue happily scarfing down most of the seafood on their planet.
I imagine they also came to understand that any cure would be worse than the illness. As is so often the case in ecology.
That’s what I call taking lemons and making lemonade.
Though many people still get a shock every time one of these “harmless little worms” pokes its enormous cylindro-conical head through the water’s surface.
I can perfectly picture Mrs. Tarkon, leaning sensually against the rail of the high-speed ferry on which local political bosses transport her powerful husband from one island to another, playing with the limpid water… when suddenly one of those gigantic maws emerges beside her, the innocent tsunami version of a kid jumping out from behind a column and shouting, “Boo!”
Or rather, in this case, “BOOOOOO!”
Maybe I misjudged her; you can’t blame her for dropping the bracelet. It’s a miracle she kept the hair on her head…
“How go todo, Boss Sangan?” Narbuk asks, worried by my silence. “Be problemas? Malos intestinal parasites? It be jewel o no?”
My assistant isn’t kidding about the parasites. The “illegal aliens” these super-extra-grande creatures may harbor often constitute the greatest danger to those who venture inside them.
Once when I was working inside a juggernaut, removing an in situ pulmonary neoplasm, half a dozen freeloading nematodes almost half a meter long decided I was a competitor and, more than willing to get rid of their bothersome rival, attacked me with their suckers.
Their circular mouths produced a powerful acid. Good thing I was wearing my ultraprotective suit, which they weren’t able to pierce. But it was an experience I’m not anxious to go through again. Not one bit.
Fortunately I haven’t found any unexpected guests inside the tsunami. If juggernauts—mollusks from the planet Colossa that are “only” six hundred meters across—can host acid-spewing worms like those, this giant could be infested with parasites twice the size of a rhinoceros on Earth.
“No. If there had been alguna, the laxative must have gotten rid de ella. As for the sludge—todavía I can’t say,” I grumble, disappointed. “It’s resisting, por ahora. Must be a very old cyst. Dáme more time.”
Indeed, the mass adhering to the mucous membrane of the anesthetized giant’s intestine won’t budge, unmoved by the suction hose.
I turn up the power and keep going, absorbed in thought.
Such a fuss over a simple bracelet. If it had been a wristband terminal belonging to any citizen of Nerea, it would have been tough luck, adiós, fuggedaboutit. After all, it’s so cheap to make them, so easy to buy a new one.
But this was the governor’s respectable wife’s very own priceless, irreplaceable platinum wedding band, inlaid with Aldebaran topaz, so of course it was a disaster.
Tarkon’s security detail reacted swiftly. One of the muscular bodyguards grabbed a harpoon gun (there’s one on board every ship on Nerea) and tagged the monster with a radio transmitter dart—showing off his excellent aim in the process, since it’s never a bad idea to angle for a personal recommendation for your next job from an influential governor.
Then they dumped hundreds of gallons of fish blood (the best possible bait) into the water to draw the tagged giant into a shallow naval repair dock nearby. Shallow for a tsunami, that is; it’s more than two hundred meters deep. They penned it in there by lowering the sluices and brought me in as quickly as possible.
Good thing the lovely little beastie didn’t start wagging its tail before I got here. No matter how strong the monomolecular steel a sluice gate is made from, it could not withstand more than a few blows from an armored tail half a kilometer long and weighing dozens of tons.
Setting a new galactic speed record, I was here just four hours after the worm swallowed the bracelet uninvited. Since the metal detector found no trace of the jewel at the bottom of the dry dock, I deduced that it must still be inside the worm’s guts.
Wasting no time, Narbuk and I anesthetized it by filling the dock with morpheorol. Using a couple of cranes, we lifted its head above the waterline, and just when it looked like the whole operation was going to be easy as pie—localize the bracelet, give the worm a little jab, and extract it…
Things started getting complicated.
Tsunamis are blind as bats. Their most important sense organ for detecting prey in the oceans of Nerea is electromagnetic.
If anybody plans to press a metal detector against the skin of an animal that can sense electromagnetic fluctuations of a few microvolts or a tenth of a gauss ever again, he’d better warn me first—so that I can get as far away as possible.
Half a galaxy away would be nice.
For the record, it wasn’t my idea. A certain irresponsible Laggoru came up with it… But in any case, the immediate result of the attempt was a reflexive flick of the tsunami’s tail that sent a couple dozen tons of water sailing into the air. The water fell more or less uniformly onto Mr. Tarkon, his wife, their bodyguards, the local political honchos and their guards, the Amphorians… and me.
Most ironic of all, the only person that the downpour missed was Narbuk himself. Thanks to his animal allergy, he was standing a good hundred meters back.
Since the “find and recover” tack was obviously not going to work, I went to plan B: force the worm to let go of it. The massive dose of laxatives that we administered orally worked great. In less than five minutes, the stuff filling the dock wasn’t exactly water anymore… and the smell forced us all to put on gas masks.
You could tell right away, our tsunami lives on a fish-based diet.
And its stomach is so big that a good part of the menu must have time to rot inside before it even starts getting digested.
A lovely scent for aiding digestion, to be sure.
Everyone whose appetite is piqued by scatology, raise your hands… Sorry if I didn’t raise mine. I had one hand busy pinching my nose and the other covering my mouth to keep me from retching.
Without much luck, I admit.
Good thing we didn’t give it the laxative before trying the metal detector, otherwise we would have gotten splashed with… Better not even think about it.
But the damn bracelet still refused to appear.
When my stomach was more or less back to normal, it occurred to me that the priceless jewel might have gotten caught in one of the creature’s stomach pleats, or lodged in one of its intestinal folds, and I decided to go after it the old-fashioned way.
In situ.
Even if we had something that could overcome the minor obstacle of its exoskeletal plates, it would have been insane to try drilling through the epidermis of a creature with a nervous system so rudimentary that even while deeply sedated it was capable of reflexive movements such as the unforgettable crowd-bathing swipe of the tail. Nobody wanted to risk a second shower, especially since this time the water falling on us wouldn’t precisely be crystalline.
So with a vacuum hose in my hand, and wearing a proper anti-magnetic, everything-proof suit that an aide to Mr. Tarkon had quickly commandeered from one of the planetary system’s solar patrol ships (I’d have been crazy to go in without one, after the incident with the little worms and their acid suckers inside the juggernaut), I marched smugly, a new and voluntary Jonah, straight up to the monster’s jaws.