Blade's temper nearly snapped. «Why didn't you tell me?» he said, an edge in his voice.
«You never asked me,» said Fudan.
Blade let out his breath in a long whoooossssh and began to laugh. Fudan was quite right. It had never occurred to him that the Hauri might have seen the Menel without thinking them worth mentioning. It had seemed wise to keep the Menel as much a secret from the Hauri as he'd kept them from the Kargoi.
So much for what had seemed wise.
«I understand,» said Blade. «But I must tell you that Sky People, the Menel, are indeed using the creatures of the sea and the birds of the air against us. They are enemies to the Kargoi. They may become enemies to the Hauri as well. Now that their machine has fallen, we have a good chance to learn more about them. We must dive down to that machine and look at it and everything in it. This will be more dangerous than letting the Menel fly over your canoes and look at you, but-«
«Do you think the Hauri become afraid so easily?» said Fudan. He did not sound angry, merely implying that Blade was being rather silly to even raise the point.
«No. I have fought the Hauri and know they are a brave people. But the Menel have weapons against which the courage of the Hauri and the Kargoi together may be nothing. There may be such weapons in this machine, and some of the Menel may still be alive to use them. So let us not treat them like stranded sea turtles, to be knocked on the head with a stick.»
«Certainly, that would not be wise,» said Fudan. He put the helm over, and the canoe turned toward the position of the crash. «Blade, look to our weapons. The weapons of the Hauri have slain green sharks and death eels, so perhaps they will make even the Menel know that the Hauri are not easy prey.»
If the Menel beamers didn't work under water, Fudan might very well be right. The Hauri's underwater weapons would not have been turned down by a Home Dimension skin diver. They had tridents and thrusting spears, hooked bars for prying shellfish loose from rocks, crossbows with elastic bands of fish skin that propelled heavy barbed darts, and curved knives that could slit the throat of a man or the gills of an eight-foot green shark with equal ease. The Hauri never killed or took more than they needed from the sea, but they made sure they could always take that much.
Fudan started the canoe zig-zagging as they approached the crash position, to make a difficult target for anyone who might be waiting. Blade hoped the wreck would be no more than eighty feet down. He was a good enough skin diver to reach that depth easily, but he was no more than an amateur by the standards of the Hauri. Their best divers could bring up shells and coral from a hundred and seventy feet down.
As they drew closer to the position Blade scanned the water, looking for floating wreckage. Fudan lowered the sail and broke out the paddles. The water was now so transparent that they could see down to the bottom a hundred feet below, every fish and every coral boulder clearly visible. Both men loaded crossbows and put them in the bottom of the canoe within easy reach.
They were entering the area of the crash when Blade saw a gray-white cloud of shrieking sea birds whirling over something floating in the water. Without a word Fudan steered for it. A few more strokes, and Blade could make out the floating object as one of the Menel. A few more, and they were alongside the body.
There was no doubt the Menel was dead. No living creature could survive with its head crushed into featureless pulp, two arms torn out of their sockets, and half its body split open so that strange internal organs trailed out into the water. Small fish were already nibbling at those organs while the sea birds swooped on them from above.
Blade looked at the Menel, and couldn't help feeling slightly sorry for it. It reminded him of the body of an RAF pilot he'd seen, washed ashore after a high-speed plane crash into the sea. It had suffered a wretched death he wouldn't wish on any intelligent creature, human or not, friendly or not.
Blade saw no other bodies floating. If there'd been any other Menel aboard the machine, they were probably trapped in the wreckage. Fudan said nothing, although this must have been his first sight of one of the Sky People. Perhaps to a man used to the strange creatures of the sea, even a being from outer space would not look strange.
Another hundred yards, and Blade saw a dark shape on the bottom below. Its outlines were distorted by the water and by crash damage, but it was unmistakably what they were looking for. Fudan threw the anchor overboard and counted the knots on the line as it ran out. Finally the stone touched bottom and the canoe swung gently to and fro.
«Nine dzor,» said Fudan, as he laid his paddle in the bottom of the canoe. The dzor was a measure of depth equal to about seven feet. So the wreck lay about sixty feet down, easy diving depth.
Blade pulled off his sandals and began strapping on the fish-skin fins. Then he tied the weight belt with its pouches of gravel around his waist and picked up a sack and his crossbow.
«With your permission, Fudan?» he said. The first dive on a fishing expedition had a certain ritual quality. Normally Blade would have let Fudan go first, but he didn't know how much time they would have. If the crashed machine had been able to get off any sort of a distress signal ….
Fudan nodded. He was silently pulling on his own diving gear, watching both sky and water as he did so. There was no need to tell him to keep alert. The Hauri knew the basic safety rule for diving: one man in the water, the other in the boat, alert and ready to help if needed.
Blade clung to the side of the canoe, breathing deeply to fill his system with oxygen. At last he let go of the canoe, flipped upside down, and plunged toward the wreck below.
He seemed to drift down through the greenness, although he was kicking as hard as he could. The wreck of the Menel machine seemed to hang suspended before his eyes in a distant limbo for a long time, without getting any closer. A school of foot-long silver fish with dark stripes swam up past him. Then suddenly the coral branches on the bottom seemed to be reaching up toward him like clutching hands. He leveled out and swam toward the machine.
It lay with its nose crushed against a cluster of boulders and its tail standing up like a tombstone. The canopy was gone, both hatches blown off, and the metal skin amidships torn open like a paper bag. Blade swam up to the gaping opening left by the missing canopy and looked down into the cockpit.
Two of the Menel lay there in the wreckage, their bodies mangled almost beyond recognition. Among the smashed controls and what must have been seats, Blade could see the twisted shape of one of the beamers. Farther back in the fuselage he could make out a third Menel, crushed under several items of heavy equipment torn loose from the walls and floor by the impact of the crash.
That was all he could make out before his chest began to tighten up from lack of air. He backed out of the machine and thrust himself steadily back to the surface, the sunlight, and the air.
For the next two hours, Blade and Fudan alternated diving and keeping watch. Dive after dive, Blade explored the machine. Dive after dive, Fudan brought up pearl oysters and piled them in the bow. He paid no attention to the machine.