Didn’t mean they wouldn’t eat one another when the occasion offered.
Inric sat up and leaned over the readout again. The platform’s underside bristled with the latest in remote analysis gear, including two prototypes he’d obtained in return for initial field tests and favors to come. And that wasn’t all they used to search this world. “Check the imagers again, will you, Bob? They should be close to finishing the latest flyover.”
“They’re coming,” Bob answered, gazing at the horizon. Better vision was only one of the adaptations that made Ehztif useful companions. “Wait. What’s that following them?
Ssshhhhssahhsss!
” the Instella dissolved into a hiss.
Inric lunged to his feet and ran to the rail. “What’s wrong?” He stared where Bob pointed, expecting the worst—an IU inspector, come to push them offworld. They had clearances. Just not real ones.
The worlds scoured by the Dhryn were restricted, even ones like this, where there hadn’t been a sentient species to leave its accomplishments behind. In the present state of near panic, Inric doubted they’d be fined and sent on their way. There’d been rumors of entrepreneurs simply disappearing, lately. “Can’t be an inspection,” he concluded. The ship they’d left in orbit was to send warning of any approach, as well as being nimble enough to elude almost anything transect-capable given that warning was received in time to retrieve her absent crew of two.
“It’s gone. But for an instant, I could see—” Bob appeared to hesitate, cheeks puffing in and out. “Below the incoming bots,” she said finally. “In the water. There was
sshssah
.”
“Meaning?”
“The heat of life.”
An Ehztif’s ability to detect and react to infrared was the source of a thriving Sethillak industry in camouflage gear, but in this case? The Human exhaled his relief in a low whistle. “Impossible. We’ve been scanning this world for weeks. The Dhryn weren’t interrupted here—they took every scrap of living matter.” But Inric’s eyes didn’t leave the patch of unremarkable ocean.
The water was the only thing that moved on Riden IV. Water, he corrected, wind, and themselves.
“The Dhryn.” Bob’s head shrank into her shoulders. Her anxious shudders rattled the gleaming armor plates growing across her juvenile skin. When those met and fused, she’d be less flexible and thoroughly deadly to anything her instincts viewed as edible, basically that which generated body heat and wasn’t Ehztif. It gave her species a unique perspective on the Dhryn, whose appetite seemed without limit.
They were terrified.
“We are not safe here,” Bob continued, backing away from the rail.
Inric could see the incoming bots for himself now. There were a dozen; nothing fancy here, just the same off-the-alien-shelf design Earth had adopted for visual surveillance. They’d recorded mind-numbing images of rock, sand, and water. High ground on Riden IV consisted of chains of weathered islands, few of cloud height, their lee sides dressed in curls of unappealing brown sand. The poles had never, according to IU records, supported life.
The oceans had swarmed with it, fluorescing at the surface by starlight, submerging by day. The slow whirling currents of the tropics had spawned immense mats of jelly, themselves supporting landscapes of towering growth to rival the forests of the equatorial islands. It was said once you heard Riden’s singing flowers, released to drift from mat to mat, you could never again enjoy the music of your own species, so intensely beautiful and complex was the sound of their petals on the wind.
The wind only howled now, when it didn’t rattle their shelter or
skitter . . . scurry
like invisible mice around the consoles. Inric gave his companion a sour look and went back to his scanner. The Consortium wanted assurance the world was lifeless before releasing development funds. Their research group had cataloged sufficient mineral wealth to justify investment long ago, but had concluded against proceeding. Ore was common; singing flowers, unique.
The Dhryn had forever changed the equation, and the Trisulian hunger for expansion had made it economical for their competitors to take certain liberties with due process.
In other words, if Sencor delayed exercising its mining rights on Riden IV, it might find Trisulian colonists pretending to farm the barren islands and fish the empty seas.
Bringing them to the present situation, and his twitchy partner. “The Dhryn are gone, Bob,” Inric stated. “They died in Sol System. Human space, my friend. Human space.”
Scurry . . .
“Humans did nothing but cower in their ships. Everyone knows,” the Ehztif countered. “And who said all the Dhryn were there?”
Before Inric could answer, there was a sudden
crack,
as if a whip had snapped across the cloudless sky. Human and Ehztif looked up in time to see the closest bot drop into the sea well short of the platform. The rest kept approaching.
“What the hell—”
CRACK!
Eleven bots arrived at their coordinates.
Obedient to their programming, they bobbed in the air precisely where the platform should have been.
Above where the empty sea boiled.