74 ::: Keepiru

Keepiru raced to the northeast, toward the battle sounds he had heard during the night. He swam hard and fast at the surface, arching and thrusting to drive through the water. He cursed at the drag of his harness, but to drop it was unthinkable.

Once again he cursed the damnable luck. Both his and Moki's sleds were used up, worthless, and had to be left behind.

As he entered the maze of tiny islands, he heard the hunt-scream clearly for the first time.

Until now he could tell himself he was imagining things that distance or some strange refraction in the water had tricked him into hearing what could not be.

The screeching cry pealed out, reflecting from the metal-mounds. Keepiru whirled, and it momentarily seemed a pack of hunters was all around him.

Then came another sound, a brave and very faint skirr of distant Trinary. Keepiru swung his jaw about, chose a direction, and swam for all he was worth.

His muscles flexed powerfully as he streaked through the maze. When a rasping buzz told him his breather was near empty, he cursed as he popped the thing loose, and continued his dash along the surface, puffing and blowing with each driving arch.

He came to a narrow meeting of channels and swung about in confusion.

Which way! He swiveled about until the hunt cry echoed once more. Then there was a terrible crashing sound. He heard a squeal of outrage and pain, and the soft whine of a harness in operation. Another faint Trinary challenge was answered by a shivering scream and another crash.

Keepiru sprinted. It couldn't be far! He dashed, sparing none of his reserves, just as there came a final call of exhausted defiance.

* For the honor

Of Calafia… *

The voice disappeared under a scream of savage triumph. Then there was silence.

It took him another five minutes, frantically casting about the narrow passages, to find the battleground. The taste of the water, when Keepiru sped into the quiet strait, told him he was too late.

He caught up short and stopped just short of entering a small vale between three metal-mounds. Coppery strands of dangle-weed floated overhead.

Pink froth spread from the center of the tiny valley, with streamers of red in the direction of the prevailing currents. At the center, enmeshed in a tangle of wrecked harness parts, the body of a young amicus neo-fin, already partly dismembered, drifted belly up, teased and tugged at by the red jaws of a giant dolphin.

A giant dolphin? How, in all the time since they had left Earth, had he not noticed this before? He desperately reattached a fresh breather from his harness, and took gasping breaths while he watched and listened to the killer.

Look at the deep countershading, he told himself. Look at the short jaw, the great teeth, the short, sharp dorsal fin.

Listen to him!

K'tha-Jon grunted contentedly as he ripped a piece from Akki's side. The giant didn't even appear to notice the long burn along his left flank, or the bruise slowly spreading from the point where Akki's last desperate ramming had come home.

Keepiru knew the monster was aware of him. K'tha-Jon lazily swallowed, then rose to the surface for air. When he descended he looked right at Keepiru.

"Well, Pilot?" he murmured happily.

Keepiru used Anglic, though the breather muffled the words.

"I've just dealt with one monster, K'tha-Jon, but your devolution fouls our entire race."

K'tha-Jon's derision was a series of high snorts.

"You think I have reverted, like that pathetic Stenosss Moki, don't you, Pilot?"

Keepiru could only shake his head, unable to bring himself to say what he thought the bosun had become.

"Can a devolved dolphin speak Anglic as well as I?" K'tha-Jon sneered. ".Or use logic thisss way? Would a reverted Tursiops, or even a pure Stenosss, have pursued an air breathing prey with such determination… and satisssfaction?

"True, the crisis of the last few weeks allowed something deep within me to burssst free. But can you truly listen to me and then call me a devolved dolphin?"

Keepiru looked at the pink froth around the giant's stubby, powerful jaws. Akki's corpse drifted away slowly with the tide.

"I know what you are, K'tha-Jon." Keepiru switched to Trinary.

* Cold water boils

When you scream

* Red jawed hunger

Fills your dream.

* Harpoons slew

The whales,

* The nets of Iki

Caught us,

* Yet you, alone

We feared at night

* You alone -

… Orca.

K'tha-Jon's jaw gaped in satisfaction, as if he were accepting an accolade. He rose for air and returned a few meters closer to Keepiru, grinning.

"I guessssed the truth some time ago. I am one of the prized experiments of our beloved human-patron Ignacio Metz. That-t fool did one great thing, for all of his ssstupidity. Some of the others he snuck into berths on Streaker did revert or go mad. But I am a successs…"

"You are a calamity!" Keepiru spluttered, prevented by the breather from using other words more to the point.

K'tha-Jon drifted a few meters closer, causing Keepiru to back away involuntarily. The giant stopped again; a satisfied clicking emanated from his brow.

"Am I, Pilot? Can you, a simple fish-eater, understand your betters? Are you worthy to judge one whose forebears were at the top-p of the ocean food-chain? And dealt as judges of the sssea with all your kind?"

Keepiru was hardly listening, uncomfortably aware of the vanishing distance between himself and the monster.

"You arrogate t-too much. You have only a few gene splices from…"

"I am ORCA!" K'tha-Jon screamed. The cry echoed like a high paean of bugles. "The superficial body is nothing! It is the brain and blood that matter. Listen to me, and dare deny what I am!"

K'tha-Jon's jaw-clap was like a gunshot. The hunt cry pealed forth and Keepiru, under its direct focus, felt a deep instinct well up, a desire to tuck himself inward, to hide or die.

Keepiru resisted. He forced himself to assume an assertive body stance and bite out words of defiance.

"You are devolved, K'tha-Jon! Worse, you are a mutant thing, with no heritage at all. Metz's grafts went bad. Do you think-k a true Orca would do what you've done? They do hunt fallow dolphins on Earth, but never when sssated! The true killer whale does not kill out of spite!"

Keepiru defecated and flicked it in the giant's direction with his flukes.

"You are a failed experiment, K'tha-Jon! You say you're still logical, but now you have no home. And when my report gets back to Earth your gene-plasm will be poured into the sewers! Your line will end the way monsters end."

K'tha-Jon's eyes gleamed. He swept Keepiru with sonar, as if to memorize every curve of an intended prey.

"What gave you the idea you were ever going to reportt-t?" he hissed.

Keepiru grinned open-mouthed. "Why, the simple fact that you are a crippled, insane monster whose blunt snout couldn't stave in cardboard, whose maleness satisfies only pool-gratings, bringing forth nothing but stale water… "

The giant screamed again, this time in rage. As K'tha-Jon charged Keepiru whirled and darted into a side channel, fleeing just ahead of the powerful jaws.

Tearing through a thick hedge of dangle-weed, Keepiru congratulated himself. By taunting K'tha-Jon into a personal vendetta he had made the creature forget entirely about his harness… and the laser rifle. K'tha-Jon obviously intended to kill Keepiru the way he had finished off Akki.

Keepiru fled a bare body length ahead of the mutant.

So far so good, he thought as the sparkling metal hillsides rushed past.