But the animal could still kill anything within reach. The multiple legs were grasping madly in all directions, while the constricting rings in a reflex of violence were dilating and snapping tight every couple of seconds.
Then the upper part of the leathery legs was no longer visible. The dome of the carapace showed less high above the surface. The current had carried the soundbug downstream to one of the deep pools.
Once the thick shield of the exoskeleton had vanished completely beneath the surface, Carp tightened the cable to prevent the sunken body from moving to shallower parts. Then he stood and waited.
Waves on the surface revealed the desperate activity beneath. Four times the soundbug reared up, and the edge of the carapace became visible. Before the head could appear, Carp pulled the body off-balance. The fourth time, the soundbug flipped over onto its back before it disappeared again. There was one last burst of furious splashing, which gradually subsided. Finally not a ripple showed on the surface of the pool.
Carp waited for another minute or two, before finally wading to the bank and hauling himself out. He sat for a while, hunched over and with his legs in the stream. He was still holding the cable that had trapped the soundbug in its noose.
He looked exhausted. It was not surprising. He had fought a creature that Drake had judged invulnerable; he had fought in a place that was not of his own choosing; and he had fought without weapons.
That was when Drake realized the most astonishing thing of all. He and Milton had watched the fight with the aid of microwave and high-frequency imaging sensors. They could see everything. The soundbug, until the stream drowned its sense organs, had also seen perfectly; but Carp could have seen nothing. It was too dark.
He had fought the soundbug totally blind. And still he had won. It was tempting to ask, what were the limits of Carp’s abilities as a fighter? How far could he be pushed, before he lost?
That was an immoral question. Drake had made his decision earlier, before the fight began. He would not change it now.
“It’s over.” He spoke to Milton, who was staring at the display where Carp had at last roused himself and was hauling the dead body of the soundbug onto the bank of the stream. “We wait for dawn. Then first thing in the morning, we go and get the flier.”
“And Carp?”
“He goes free. Don’t you think he’s earned it?”
“More than earned it. But what about the Shiva?”
“We’ll have to find another way.” Drake took a last look at Carp, who now had the soundbug on its back and was prying open the lower shell casing. There was every sign that the soundbug’s final meal would be as a course and not as a diner. What senses was Carp using to guide him? It could only be touch and smell. If it was anything else, some sense undreamed of by humans, Drake would never find out what it was. Just as he would never know what thoughts
were carried inside that long-haired skull.
“First thing in the morning,” he repeated. “Then it’s good-bye to Carp. Some means can never be justified, no matter what the ends.”
It seemed natural that Drake would feel a form of bond with Carp, given the latter’s genetic roots. What was more surprising was that Milton had similar feelings.
And yet, why not? Milton had done the genetic design work, plus the tricky splicing of human and Snark nucleotide coding. Milton had also grown Carp’s body and downloaded into his brain a body of data that went beyond basic survival instincts. If Drake was the father and one of the Snarks was Carp’s mother, then the Servitor could certainly claim to be the midwife.
Milton discussed none of this with Drake. The Servitor merely, and uncharacteristically, volunteered to go back to the clearing and collect the flier. Milton had confirmed that the car would no longer work by remote control, and suggested that it might be informative to learn what had been done to it.
“You can go, with two conditions.” Drake was busy with his own work. He had vowed that Carp would have a group of his own kind as companions, as soon as possible. With Carp’s template to work from, the task would be short and routine. The seed of the necessary lab had been dropped from orbit, the lab itself had been grown, and the lab’s manufacturing line was already up and running.
“First,” Drake continued, “you must handle everything with a heavy lift vehicle that stays continuously airborne. You hoist the flier with that, and you don’t land anything at all on the surface — including you. Second, you make sure that Carp is nowhere around when you do it. Scan the flier, inside and out. If you see a sign of Carp, abandon the pickup operation at once and return to base.”
“Which is precisely what I would have done, without instructions.” The Servitor was touchy on only a few subjects, but reliability and sound judgment were two of them. Milton rolled away, leaving Drake to continue the development of the Carp duplicates. The original cells were in a continuous-flow nutrient bath and had a constant doubling time of 820 seconds. Growth from primal cell to full-sized organism, ready to step out onto the surface of Graybill, was a twelve-hour operation. There were fewer than four hours to go.
Drake divided his attention three ways while the growth process proceeded. His main focus was on the development of the Carp clones, but at the same time he was making plans to wrap up operations on Graybill. The orbiting mother craft had already received instructions. It was prepared to send Drake and Milton back to headquarters by S-wave link, as soon as they were uploaded to it.
Every few minutes Drake made a spot check of Milton’s progress. Like the downed flier, the heavy-lift air vehicle had been grown on Graybill. Both craft would be left behind on the planet after Drake and Milton were uploaded to orbit. The vehicles would not last long. With a planned decay time of less than a month, they would crumble to dust as intermolecular forces weakened.
The vehicles had also been built with an eye to rugged simplicity, rather than the ultimate in performance. That became clear during operations. The heavy-lift cargo car could hover, but it had a slight tendency to drift forward. Drake watched until, on the second sweep, the lifter’s magnetic grapples secured the flier and hoisted it clear of the surface; then Drake returned to his other tasks. He had seen no signs of Carp on the ground, and he confirmed that Milton’s observations had discovered no trace of him. The body of the soundbug had been opened and partly eaten. Without landing for a close inspection, it was hard to say how much of a hand Carp had had in that operation. Plenty of other native life-forms had probably been willing to enjoy breakfast at the soundbug’s expense.
Drake checked the status of each biotank. By design, each copy of Carp had been given a slightly different development plan, and the results would all be a little different from each other. Drake spent the next hour monitoring and approving the progress of each variation.
Finally, he looked up and wondered what was delaying the heavy lifter. The vehicle had not been designed for speed, but the three-hundred-kilometer return trip should take no more than an hour. It must be slowed by the presence of the flier beneath it, and by the resistance of Graybill’s dense atmosphere. There could be no major problem, otherwise the lifter’s emergency beacon would have gone into operation.
Drake turned back to the biotank displays. Almost immediately he was interrupted. The heavy lift vehicle had finally arrived. It lowered the crippled aircar and released it onto the station pad, then made its own landing. Drake, watching at the window, saw the door of the heavy lifter open. Milton rolled out and headed for the aircar. The whisk-broom head turned toward the station. Drake waved and was answered by a nod of tangled wires.