Thirteen
Lobster, my ass. Muddy water flooded over my faceplate and closed out the daylight as a monster dragged me under and toward the channel’s center.
Desperation concentrates the mind, and now the brief about the scorpions flooded back over my drugged brain.
Barrens scorpions weren’t, biologically speaking, scorpions. But they weren’t restaurant lobsters, either. They were Tressel’s version of pterygotid eurypterids, giant nightmares that had evolved, then died off, on Earth and Yavet during those planets’ respective Paleozoic eras. Pterygotid eurypterids filled the brackish-water estuary-predator niche until they went extinct. Then crocodiles moved in and replaced them.
The scorpions hunted by lying in opaque water that hid their ton-plus bulk, navigating with dinner-plate–sized compound eyes. They lured prey with wormlike stalks that periscoped above their manhole-cover–sized flat heads. Apparently some animals were dumb enough to buy the worm trick. I now knew of at least one.
The scorpion clamped me with its two pincers. One vised my left thigh, the other my waist. The scorpion dragged me backward toward the channel’s deep center, thrashing a horizontal fluke flexed by tail muscles four yards long and a yard wide.
The scorpion’s mouth, on the underside of its flat head, was too small and mandibular to bite chunks off prey. So the scorpion battle plan was to crush and drown prey, then store the carcass under a rock for leisurely nibbling, after rot softened the meal.
The beast shifted its pincers to better grip this hard-shelled, unfamiliar fish.
I broke free and slogged, gasping, into the shallows. There I drew my puny bush knife while I screamed at the idiot who decided not to bring a gun.
The bug shot after me into the shallows, then rose up on eight legs. Water streamed off its armored back and off its two snapping pincers, upraised like a boxer’s gloves. It punched one pincer at me, and I slashed with my knife. The blade exploded water but slid off the bug like a toothpick off a lobster claw.
Meanwhile the scorpion’s other claw thrust beneath the water, clamped my ankle, and dragged me down again.
I hacked every appendage I could reach with the bush knife, but this time I couldn’t break the monster’s grip. The good news was that the Eternad’s strain gauges stayed in the green. This monster wasn’t strong enough to crush up-to-date plasteel.
The bad news was that, according to the suit’s sensors, the water in the deep center of the channel was saltier, and therefore heavier. It lay beneath the layer of fresh water that was flowing seaward. The salty undercurrent was drifting the bug and me inland. That was fine with the bug, who preferred brackish water to the saltier open sea, and disastrous for me.
One reason that the scorpion liked inland waters was that Tressel’s Paleozoic ocean was chock-full of fish big enough and mean enough to eat it.
I wasn’t strong enough to break free of this beast, but, with the help of the suit’s buoyancy, I could force the pair of us to the surface. I blew the floatation to max, and the two of us popped up like a buoy.
The surface current was still running out to sea. After only moments on the surface and above the undercurrent, the scorpion and I reversed direction and floated seaward as we struggled, whether the beast liked it or not.
For the next ten minutes we drifted down the cycad-roofed bayou like it was fight night in the tunnel of love, pummeling one another without result.
Then the leafy cycad roof vanished. The estuary spilled its fresh water out into the sea, where it would blend with the salty ocean.
Heh, heh. As soon as the scorpion sensed the change of salinity, it would drop me like a hot amphibian and swim back to the shelter of its swamp.
I looked skyward. Still daylight. Once freed, I would swim ashore and set up the heliograph tripod.
I punched the air with my injured fist, grimaced, but hooted at the scorpion anyway. “End of the line, dumb ass!”
Ten minutes later, the dumb ass and I continued to drift out to sea locked together, only one of us really fighting anymore. He may have been uncomfortable in salt water. He may have feared open-water predators bigger than himself. But he was too dumb to let go of a meal once he had clamped onto it. No wonder his kind were headed for extinction.
I pushed myself up against the bug’s claws and stretched my neck. The waves were only a couple of feet high, but that was enough to obscure my vision. I couldn’t see any friendlies. If they had hung around the landing zone, if they had ever been at the landing zone, they probably couldn’t see me.
If night fell and the friendlies gave me up for dead, I might as well be. The distance between me and my objectives would be as unbridgeable as the light-years I was from home. I might as well have hit the mud at terminal velocity, or become bug food back in the swamp.
I was down to one option. I hated to use up my one and only signal pyrotechnic. If a bomb explodes in the ocean and no one hears it, does it make a sound?
I eyed the sinking glow of the sun beyond the overcast. Time was running out.
Digging into my suit’s thigh pocket, I tugged out the pyro signal canister and hefted it. It felt heavier than the Mark II I was used to. I read the stenciled instructions.
MARK IV ENHANCED SEARCH AND RESCUE PYROTECHNIC DEVICE
PULL PIN AND THROW
Well, that part remained idiot-proof. There was more.
CAUTION: DO NOT DEPLOY WITHIN THIRTY YARDS OF PERSONNEL OR CONCUSSION-SENSITIVE EQUIPMENT
Seriously? It was a glorified firecracker, for God’s sake. I reduced the gain on my helmet audio and pulled the pin. Then I chucked the canister into the water, where it splashed down four yards away.
Foom!
Even muted, the sound knifed my ears. Blue sea spouted against the gray sky, and threw me and the bug twenty feet.
We splashed back into the water, sank, then surfaced in a froth. I said, “Wow.”
A pall of purple marker smoke blotted out the daylight as it drifted across me.
Not us. Me.
The bug was gone. Maybe dead. Maybe scared. I didn’t care which.
I was free at last. I floated on my back and paddled my unencumbered feet. “Woo hoo!”
The purple smoke dissipated.
I stopped woo-hooing and listened to the waves as they metronomed against my helmet. There was no other sound, such as a friendly voice.
I trod water and thrust my uninjured arm above the wave crests so I could periscope the vicinity with my finger cam. I didn’t see land. The estuary outflow had carried us farther than I had realized.
I was free. But I was alone. And it was getting dark. I said to nobody, “Oboy.”
At least it couldn’t get worse.
My foot felt cold. And wet. The pyro’s concussion had ruptured a suit seal. I was sinking slowly, but I was sinking.
Blup.
I turned my head as a dead fish bobbed to the surface alongside me. They had been serious about the thirty-yard safe radius.
Blup. Blup. Blup.
Two minutes later I stopped counting the concussed, belly-up Paleozoic fish that surrounded me.
I periscoped another brief snapshot. Silver in the distance, a fin that appeared to be attached to something bigger than the scorpion cut the water. It was inbound toward me and my fish fry.
The brief about open-water fauna I had paid attention to. Tressen sea rhizodonts reached lengths of up to twenty-five feet, had four hundred needle teeth per jaw, foul dispositions, and insatiable appetites. They ate pterygotid eurypterids, if any ventured beyond the swamps, for breakfast.
I trod water and reached for my bush knife as the cold of inflowing water in my suit reached my knee.
I had been wrong. It could get worse.