Skye Object 3270a (9 page)

S
kye's mood cooled after that. She started thinking more and more about how they might get rid of the warden without getting Buyu in trouble, but the only idea that seemed at all promising was her original notion of using the warden as bait for the acid dragon. She was about to suggest it again, when Devi suddenly stopped. He'd been out in front. Now he dropped into a crouch behind a waist-high boulder, peering over the top at something Skye could not see, while waving at the rest of them to
keep down
. He took one more look, then he crept back to meet them. “There's a litter of viperlion pups in the next pool,” he whispered.

Viperlions?

Skye frowned. “Isn't that some kind of a—”

“A predator,” Zia whispered. “I've heard of them.”

Devi nodded. He kept his voice low as he added, “It's pretty common to find the pups along stream banks. They can slip into the water to avoid danger. They're able to stay under for several minutes . . . assuming there aren't any hungry rocks in the pool.” He looked at Skye with a self-satisfied smile. “They're more common at higher elevations. I thought we might have to hike a long way to find some.”

“I'm not hearing this,” Buyu muttered. He backed several steps away. Then he gazed across the stream, as if he were alone in the wilderness and they were not plotting treason behind his back.

Skye looked at Devi. His cheeks were a rosy brown, flush with the equatorial heat. His eyes seemed to be asking her,
Are you in it?

She thought she could guess his plan. Quickly she scanned the thickets, but she saw no sign of the warden. “Viperlions are pretty aggressive?” she whispered.

Zia had just caught on too. She looked suddenly frantic. Her head whipped around as she searched for the warden. “You two are crazy.”

“What else are we going to do?” Devi whispered.

“I don't know.”

“Will the parent be close by?” Skye asked.

“I hope so.”

Zia said, “How are we going to make sure it gets the warden and not us?”

Devi's smile was apologetic. “I don't know. Any ideas?”

Skye hefted Ord onto her shoulder. “Let you know in a minute. First I'm going to take a look.” She glanced at Buyu, but he was still staring off into the bushes, pretending he didn't know what was going on.

They had come to a place where the stream ran fast and narrow. Skye waded into the water until it reached her waist. Then she made her way upstream, holding onto plants that grew along the bank to keep her balance. The streambed wound to the left, around a polished gray rock twice her height. She edged past it, to find a broad, shallow pool on the other side, formed behind a natural dam of melon-sized rocks. Seven little creatures, each no bigger than a dokey, chased and wrestled one another on the margin of the pool, where the water was only a few inches deep. Each one moved on six ribbon-like legs—legs that were much wider from front to back than from side to side—tapering to small, clawed feet, so that it looked as if each viperlion was walking on three pairs of oversized tweezers.

Most of the animal life of Earth was built on a lateral plan – in a line – so that mouth/brain/eyes were at one end, digestive and reproductive organs were in the middle, and waste was eliminated at the other end. In contrast, much of the animal life of Deception Well was built on a radial plan – in a circle – around central digestive organs . . . like a sea star from Earth . . . except the basic radial layout had undergone a lot of change. Evolution had led it to imitate the lateral plan, so that the viperlions had head and tail at opposite ends of a long, sinuous body. In fact they had two heads each, and two . . .
maws
. That was the proper word, Skye recalled. Not mouths, because viperlions did not swallow food through their long necks. Their “necks” were really just modified legs from the ancient circle of legs that was the basic plan of this clade of life. Each head had two eyes, and one set of grasping and tearing “jaws,” though the jaws might as well be called toothy pincers.

As Skye watched, one of the pups jumped thirty centimeters in the air. One of its heads darted out, its maw dropped open, and it snapped up a passing insect. It crunched hard. Then its snake-like neck swung under its belly, tucking the insect into its central stomach before its litter-mates could grab a share. Its tail waved proudly, looking like a thick noodle with a pom-pom on the end. Another viperlion pup leaped on its back. The four-heads dueled, before both pups went rolling through the water.

Skye grinned. These pups were the cutest things she had seen since dokeys.

A twitch of motion drew her gaze to the thickets beyond the stream's gravel bank. She expected to see the warden there, watching, making sure all the rules were being followed, but if it was there, it was too well-camouflaged for her to see it.

Ord shifted restlessly. Skye looked around, to find that Devi had slipped up beside her. He was submerged to his neck, so she sank down beside him. “Have you seen the warden?” she whispered.

“No.”

“It might be over there”—She nodded toward the thickets across the stream— “but I'm not—”

She left her whispered sentence unfinished as a blue-winged bat dropped out of the sky. Or maybe it wasn't a bat. It had wings that were bat-like – made of thin skin stretched between long bones – but its eyes were in its belly, and there were pincer-limbs attached to the front and back of its disc-like body, each midway between the glistening wings. It fell toward a pup that had wandered alone to one end of the gravel bank. It held its blue wings high as it reached with its pincer-limbs to grab the baby.

But just as it was about to strike, a snake-like head with glittering black eyes reared-up from the thickets where Skye had thought the warden might be hidden. The head looked like a quarter-sized model of a transit car. The neck that carried it was thicker than the posts that held up the footbridge at Vibrant Harmony. As the head darted out over the gravel bank—looking like the head of a giant, floating snake, unaffected by gravity—its jaw gaped open, exposing a bright red maw more than large enough to crunch Skye's skull. It snapped up the blue flyer, crushing it instantly and smearing its wings into odd angles.

The parent viperlion.

Skye eased back into the shadow of the rock while Ord patted her cheeks. “Go home now, Skye?” it whispered.

As the viperlion's head withdrew into the bushes with its prey, a second head emerged, sweeping protectively over the pups with the same dreamy floating motion.

Skye felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned to find Devi crooking a finger at her. He wanted her to slide back down the stream and behind the rocks. She shook her head. Instead, she started angling across the current, making for the far bank. “
Skye!
” Devi hissed.

She turned around and laid a finger over her mouth in a plea for silence. Then she held her palm up, urging him to
stay
. Quickly, she crossed the stream and climbed the far bank. She could see Buyu and Zia, watching her with puzzled faces. Devi was still standing in the stream, the water up to his waist, looking undecided. She reached up to touch Ord's smooth side. “Hold on tight,” she warned, in a barely audible whisper.

“No good, Skye,” Ord whispered back. “Time to go home now, yes? Yes, it is. Go home. Go home now, good Skye.”

Skye patted it again. Then she ducked into the bushes and began creeping up the stream bank. A splash warned her that someone was following.
Zeme dust!
She wanted to yell at them to stay back, but when she turned to look, she found that everyone remained exactly where she had left them. Well good.

She crept through the bushes, trying to reach a point above the stream exactly opposite the half-hidden viperlion.

Suddenly, the warden appeared in front of her only half a meter away, blocking her path. It had been so well hidden, it seemed to materialize out of nowhere. At first its face was blank, with only a suggestion of eyes, nose, and mouth. Then its features shifted and deepened. She found herself looking at a petite copy of Buyu's face. “Skye,” he growled, “don't make me tell you again. Get back here now, or your right to visit the planet will be suspended for five years. You know it's illegal to approach a predator like the viperlion.”

Skye grinned. She'd come up the stream bank hoping to make the warden nervous, so it would show itself, but this was more than perfect. Buyu had figured out how to control it, and he had written a script that would keep him looking like an honest and responsible guide.

Buyu, you are slick!

“Get back now,” the warden commanded, in stern imitation of Buyu's voice.

“Sure!” Skye said, as loudly as she could manage. She stood up abruptly, rattling bushes. “I just wanted to get a closer look at those pups!”

Several things happened at once:

The adult viperlion's two heads rose together above the thickets, both of them staring across the stream, straight at Skye.

A soft grunting arose from the brush and the pups responded, disappearing immediately among the swaying plants.

The warden slipped down to the water, its path marked by rustling bushes.

And Ord clung a little more tightly to Skye's neck. “Bad, bad, bad,” it whispered. “See it? No good. Go home, Skye. Be silent. Be safe. Please good Skye?”

The viperlion glided out of the thicket. There was no other way Skye could think to describe it. Its snake-like heads floated out first, then its arched body followed, narrow and sinuous and mottled green, so that it might easily slip between trees or slide under logs and still match the background color of the forest. Its six ribbon legs balanced on tiny feet that hardly seemed to touch the ground. Its tail followed behind: a two meter whip with a tassel at the end.

Skye started backing away up the steep slope.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Devi and Zia floundering across the stream. Buyu remained on the far bank. The tall gray rocks still kept them all hidden from the viperlion's gaze.

Buyu was using his suit radio to talk to someone. Skye was startled, and for a moment she was overcome with doubt. Maybe Buyu wasn't the one in control of the warden? Maybe city authority had only used his voice, thinking she would be more likely to listen? How dangerous were viperlions, anyway?

Zia and Devi reached the stream bank. They scrambled toward Skye, crushing bushes, snapping branches, sending pebbles rolling toward the water. The noise angered the staring viperlion. Both its maws opened, flashing a red warning. Then it charged.

Ord shrieked. It was the loudest sound Skye had ever heard the robot make, but she didn't need any encouragement to run. She turned and scrambled up the gully wall, pulling on stems and tree trunks to haul herself higher.

The viperlion required only two bounds to cross the natural rock dam that had created the pool. Water fountained beneath its tiny feet, and then it reached the gravel bank. It was met by the warden, which appeared as if from nowhere. The startled viperlion skidded to a stop. Skye hesitated too, turning to watch the confrontation.

The warden had given up its camouflage colors. Instead of blending in with the foliage, its color had changed to bright red, and as she watched, its body stretched into an absurdly tall, absurdly thin figure, like a paper cut-out.

The viperlion wasn't fooled though—or else it just didn't care how big its prey appeared to be. It dropped into a crouch, and its two heads darted forward, attacking the warden from opposite sides. The maws snapped. One closed on the warden's shoulder. The other grabbed it by the hip. When the heads jerked back, the warden flew apart in a great splash of red gelatinous goo. The remains of the warden trailed from the maws as they swung back, tucking their prizes into the viperlion's underbelly stomach.

“Run!” Devi shouted. “Skye! Get over the ridge and out of sight!”

Skye was just about to take his advice when the branch she'd been holding snapped. She lost her footing on the steep slope and went down
,
sliding on her rear through the broken bushes. The viperlion heard the noise, and gave up on retrieving the scattered remains of the warden. It called out in a hooting growl. Then it charged again, rushing up the slope on its six ribbon legs, moving with a terrifying, mechanical smoothness.

Skye grabbed at the brush to stop her slide. She got her feet back under her. Giving up on climbing out of the gully, she turned, scrambling upstream, shattering bushes in her path. Behind her, Devi was whooping, trying to distract the viperlion . . . but it had already chosen its prey.

She burst out of the bushes, only to find herself facing a wall of rough, gray stone. The stream was now several meters below her, dropping down a series of steep rapids. It was too wide to jump, and too shallow to hide in. She would have to climb the wall.

She leaped, grabbing for a knob of rock half a meter above her head. She got her hand on it, but the knob snapped off. She tumbled to the ground, landing on her back, hard. The air was knocked out of her lungs. She lay there a second, staring at the bright blue sky and listening to the crackle of the viperlion's approach. “Up, Skye, up,” Ord pleaded, patting her neck. “Go home now. Be safe.”

A gust of cold air flowed over her cheek. She turned her head and saw a dark hole, barely half a meter wide and only twenty centimeters high, in the bottom of the gray stone wall. It was half-hidden behind shrubs, with moss growing around the entrance and some kind of white scat on the ground in front of it. Another gust of cold air flowed out of the hole . . . which meant it had another entrance somewhere!

She flopped over just as the viperlion bounded out of the thicket. It hesitated, confused, perhaps, by her position on the ground, for after all, it had been expecting a tall, slender lunch. Skye used the moment to scramble on her elbows, wriggling headfirst into the narrow opening, willing it to be deep enough to shelter her whole body. As she jammed her shoulders in, dirt scraped off the walls. Roots slapped her face. The viperlion huffed and growled. It sounded as if it were right behind her.

She scrambled faster. She got her shoulders in, her waist, her hips and then her legs. She still had not come to the end of the dark tunnel; a frigid breeze whispered past her face, coaxing her onward.

She surged forward. She was going to make it! The viperlion was way too big to follow her into this little hole.

Then a horrible pressure closed over her right foot. The viperlion had bit her with its maw! The scales of her skin suit responded instantly, locking into place around her leg, freezing into a diamond-hard protective armor that prevented her foot from being crushed. The warden's soft biogel body had been shredded by the viperlion. Her suit was tougher than that, but it could not make the viperlion let go. The creature hauled back on her foot, trying to drag her out of the burrow. Skye fought it. She dug her gloved fingers into the sparse soil. She clung to knobs of rock, and wedged her elbows against the tunnel walls, but it was a losing battle. Slowly, slowly, the viperlion was dragging her out.