In the now-covered skimmer, Holloway pretended he wasn’t on the verge of panic and knelt next to the small storage area by his seat. He opened it and fished out his shotgun. It was a small, blunt thing with a short barrel; it’d be useless at anything other than a very short distance. Holloway suspected at the moment it’d be perfect for his situation. He’d purchased it when he arrived on Zara XXIII but had never had to use it. It looked like there was a first time for everything.
He opened the barrel to load in shells and looked into the storage area for the box of ammunition that always lay nestled next to the shotgun.
It wasn’t there. Holloway felt a chill.
There was a metallic rattle outside the skimmer. Holloway looked up at the noise. The zararaptors were at the fence, pulling at it.
The fence.
Holloway suddenly had a crazy and desperate idea, because crazy and desperate ideas were the only things left to him at the moment. He grabbed for his infopanel as one of the zararaptors separated the fence material from the stake posts.
In most ways Holloway’s skimmer was basic. He’d purchased it from another surveyor who had gone bust and was looking to make any sort of money he could before dragging his ass back to planet Earth. The skimmer was built for purpose rather than for beauty, with a large cargo area and a spartan interior covered by a standard retractable roof/window combination. Four large rotors, cowled so as not to julienne unwary flying creatures or surveyors, were stationed at the corners of the vehicle, providing lift and maneuvering capability.
Holloway had done almost nothing to improve the skimmer after he purchased it. He liked a flashy conveyance as much as the next guy—he had been a lawyer, after all—but part of the point of a flashy conveyance was showing it off, and on Zara XXIII, there was no one to show off to. People there were obsessed with the getting of money, not the exhibition of it. So there was nothing to prove in the direction of ostentation. In a way it was freeing.
Nevertheless, Holloway had splurged on one thing. The skimmer’s previous owner had equipped it with a single utilitarian speaker, for likewise utilitarian use—announcements from the skimmer and the infopanel, communication with his contractor rep, and so on. Holloway had blanched at this. If he was going to be spending most of his time in the skimmer, he was going to want to listen to music and audiobooks and other things that would keep his brain entertained while his eyes and hands and everything else were busy. Holloway wanted a sound system.
The sound system he got was ridiculously expensive, not because he wanted that particular system, but because it was the only one the ZaraCorp general store carried. Most surveyors, he was told, listened to their music on earbuds and went for the utilitarian speakers for their skimmers. The shopkeep offered Holloway what he assured him was a nice deal on a pair of formfitting earbuds. Holloway, who disliked the idea of sticking anything smaller than an elbow into his ear, bit the bullet and paid for the ridiculously expensive sound system.
The zararaptors had torn down the emergency fence and were now circling the skimmer, trying to make some sort of sense of it, and determining how to get past its hard outer shell to the soft chewy treat inside. Holloway focused on not wetting himself and on calling up his sound system’s diagnostic software.
One of the things that made the sound system so expensive, or so the general store shopkeep explained to Holloway, was that the system put out sounds above and below the human range of hearing—the range of the system was in fact 2 kilohertz to 44.1 kilohertz. The point of this range was that even if humans couldn’t hear in those ranges, there were psychoacoustic effects that propagated above and beyond human hearing range, effects that were lost in conventional sound systems whose speakers reproduced less than the human hearing range. This sound system reproduced everything, the shopkeep said, allowing for the best sound performance short of real life.
At the time, Holloway told the shopkeep that he suspected that was all just a bunch of sales bullshit. The shopkeep agreed that it probably was, but that Holloway was paying for it anyway, so he might as well know the excuse for it.
The zararaptors began pounding on the skimmer windows with their hands, first in open palm smacks and then with fists. The windows rattled but held; they were composite windows built to survive bird impacts at nearly 200 kilometers per hour. They could handle an animal fist.
One of the zararaptors broke away from the skimmer. Holloway, despite himself, watched the thing go. Its gaze was fixed on the ground, as if looking for something. Suddenly it paused and bent down and came up with an impressively large rock. It looked back at the skimmer and then swung its arm back in a frighteningly accurate simulation of a cricket bowler.
Huh, tool user, some part of Holloway’s brain said. I’ll have to tell Isabel about that. Then Holloway ducked involuntarily as the very large rock sailed through the air at a viciously flat trajectory. It smacked full into the front side window, leaving a small but distinct crack. The zararaptor rushed toward the skimmer to try again.
Holloway tore his attention away, back to his infopanel, and to the sound system’s diagnostic software, which had now loaded.
When Holloway purchased his sound system, he had looked at the horribly complex sound system software for half an hour, with its various frequency tests and acoustical settings and options. Then he decided that life was too short to geek out on speakers, went back to the front screen of the software, and checked the box for AUTOMATIC MAINTENANCE. This meant the software would take care of itself, and Holloway could just listen to his music and books. Holloway was on that screen now, jabbing the button for MANUAL MAINTENANCE instead.
The zararaptor was now directly outside the window. It was reaching down to pick up the rock.
The infopanel screen changed, and a page of menu items displayed, in no apparent particular order. Goddamn lousy user interface, Holloway thought, and found the FREQUENCY TESTING option just as the zararaptor rammed the rock into the window with force, expanding the crack about a millimeter.
Holloway pressed the FREQUENCY TESTING option on the screen and was then treated to a soothing splash page graphic while a man’s voice explained, in warm, rich tones, how calibrating the Newton-Barndom XGK sound system across all frequency ranges would assure the listeners of total sonic enjoyment.
Holloway screamed in frustration and fear and searched desperately for the SKIP INTRO option. He found it at the same time the second zararaptor had picked up its own rock and started beating it against the same window as the first raptor. They were taking turns breaking the window. The window shattered as Holloway loaded up what he was looking for.
Holloway launched himself away from the window and reached over to the one manual control on the dash associated with the sound system: the volume knob. He gripped the knob as the first zararaptor punched the glass in the window, popping it out in a single sheet, and then drew its head into the skimmer cabin, hissing. It was clearly planning to jam its way into the skimmer. The other zararaptor stayed outside, waiting for Holloway to be flushed out.
Holloway managed not to crap himself while he waited for the zararaptor to get about halfway into the skimmer. When it had, he jabbed a button in the infoscreen. The sound system kicked on as it ran the frequency test for the 22.5-to 28.0-kilohertz range. Holloway cranked the volume knob, turning it over hard and fast.
The zararaptor in the window screamed and thrashed and beat its toothy head against the side of the skimmer in a frantic attempt to pull its head out of the vehicle. After several terrifying seconds, the creature managed to reverse out of the skimmer, scrambling away from the broken window. The other raptor was retreating with it. Holloway was so relieved he almost cried.