“Everyone, dig in with your claws!” Fraaf’kur growled as he pressed close to the deck. “The only way to get at it is to let it chomp down on the boat and then spear it between the eyes! Are you ready?”
“What?” Schro clutched the harpoon gun tightly. It was all he could do not to wet himself.
“Can the ship take a hit like that?”
“This is a kzin craft, monkey! The Nautical Devastation is built for war!”
A gigantic flipper rose into the air and slapped the water with such thunderous force that the catamaran rocked and spun like so much flotsam in the sea. To his credit, Schro tried to aim his harpoon at the creature, but Dan grabbed him and hunkered down close to the bucking bow. “We can do this, kit! This is why we’re here,” he whispered through gritted teeth. “But we have to do it right.”
With one paw, Fraaf’kur got control of the flapping sail while desperately working the tiller with the other, and, after a long, queasy while, the Nautical Devastation straightened out. Just ahead, a range of olive-colored scutes rose from the water like a sudden rock formation; two of the outcroppings were large, yellow eyes and two were flaring nostrils, each an eruption of mist. Dan and Schro both knew that the ketosaurus now perceived them as a slow and stupid longneck.
“It looks like a crocodile-humpback-whale hybrid,” Dan said, and instantly regretted not having better researched their prey-now their predator-before leaving Shrawl’ta.
Schro got up and tried to target the leviathan again.
Then a voice, like that of the Maned God himself, boomed within Dan’s skull. Daneel Guthlac, you are a strange and interesting creature.
Schro stopped and looked down at him, astonished, “The sea monster can talk! It’s telepathic!”
“You heard that?” For a moment, and despite the clarity of the words-no, not words, but complete thoughts forming in his mind like ice crystals-Dan wondered if he imagined it.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Fraaf’kur snarled from his post. “These beasts are not telepathic! I’ve waged war on them before; they’re worthy and dangerous opponents, but that is all.”
Confused-terrified-Dan scanned the ketosaurus with his weak telepathy. He knew the cetaceans of Earth were intelligent, but this…the creature was unremarkable. The warrior was right; there was nothing there except simple, primal urges.
I am both attracted and repulsed by you. I don’t know how to proceed, the great voice proclaimed-or was it a second, distinct voice? — and the monster slid its gargantuan bulk beneath the waves.
There was an obvious disconnect between the dumb marine animal and the alien intellect speaking through and around them. “Schro, quickly link with me and sweep the area with your ziirgrah! I don’t think that was the ketosaurus.”
“A full-blown kzin telepath?” the Hero screamed, traumatic memories of the murderous telepath aboard his old spacecraft seizing him.
“Steady yourself, Fraaf’kur. That didn’t feel like a kzin mind or a human one.”
All of a sudden, the monster crashed into the catamaran with an explosive breach that launched the whole rig meters into the air. Without claws to maintain his hold, Dan was thrown off the boat. The acute agony of hitting the freezing Kcheemic Ocean was like going for a spacewalk in your underwear. Incandescent white blinded him. He was dying; he knew, he had almost died once before when the drug-crazed telepath aboard the Righteous Manslaughter had viciously mangled his mind. Hell, psychologically-spiritually-he had died. It was a miracle he had hung on long enough to fire a single laser beam and fry the telepath’s deadly, preternatural brain.
We wish to learn from you, Daneel Guthlac. Your patchwork psyche is fascinating to us, but you are an uncontrollable variable. Your own thoughts reveal you to be dangerous.
Fear and urgency cleared his mind, and in one perfect zen moment, he knew the alien minds were coming from the island. The ketosaurus was only a weapon. Then, encroaching hypothermia forced him back to his immediate situation, and he tried to swim back to the boat in an achingly slow and desperate doggie-paddle.
After what felt like an eternity, something sharp, like knives, sank into his left arm and hauled him out of the water, where the wind-chill made him shake wildly. Dan was distantly aware of Schro licking his face and the same knives slapping a thermal patch on his back. Warmth slowly crept into his bones, and with it came rational thought.
“What happened?” Dan asked feebly. He realized he was draped over the side of the starboard hull on his belly and facing the sail, which lay in the water.
“The heavily reinforced port hull held, but the Nautical Devastation still capsized dishonorably,” was all Dan understood of Fraaf’kur’s howling. The rest was cursing in the bloodcurdling dialect of Shasht.
“The boat’s on its side…Schro, are you okay?” He could sense his son’s terror and fury; the kit’s dormant telepathic power had sharpened like a spike by the unexpected attack.
“Yes, I still have my harpoon!” He had held onto it with his prehensile tail. “Are you all right, father? I thought you were dead!”
“I’m just cold-and surprised the thing didn’t go for me when I was in the water.”
“You’re nothing to it. The ketosaurus is treating us like a wounded longneck. Soon it’s going to strike the mast.”
As if on cue, the leviathan slammed its jaws shut on the mast and thrashed violently, testing the boat’s tolerances to the brink. Dan held on with all his might, and through the ferocious quake, Schro’s piercing cry got his attention. The kit had climbed down the now vertical trampoline and impaled the ketosaurus with two harpoons; one psychic, which bewildered its rudimentary mind, and the other, the steel projectile embedded within the creature’s left eye and driven through his brain. The jerking crescendoed into death throes, and then everything stilled.
Long moments passed. The three worn sailors just watched their monstrous kill bob in the water as if waiting for it to spring to life and pummel them once more.
An hour passed. It was clear that the sea monster was never going to move again, so Fraaf’kur carefully pried back a large scale on the ketosaurus’ side and tore off chunks of its flesh. He ceremoniously offered the first bite to the proud and still-shaky Schro, and they ate their terrible sashimi perched on the starboard hull as it jutted out of the water. The stony island loomed large in the horizon. It was close, about a kilometer away.
Dan had tried contacting his gravcar, but his wristcomp was damaged from the salt water. “We need to get to the island somehow. The telepathic voices are coming from there.”
“I can swim it, but then what? Without protective fur, you’ll freeze to death in minutes, and Schro here can’t swim. We need to right the ship. You’re an engineer, human, got any ideas?”
“I have an idea,” Schro volunteered to their surprise. “The industrial gravbelt, we can use it to lift the ship out of the water, enough to get it straight.”
That would work. “What about the trophy? We brought that to tow the ketosaurus back. What about your crèche mates?”
The kit-no, he was no longer a kit, he was an adolescent kzin now, a kzinchao-radiated confidence. “I don’t need to prove I killed the top predator on the planet. It’s enough that I know I killed it.”
Fraaf’kur slapped Schro’s back. “Not a bad idea, runt! We stowed it in the port hull. I can dive down and retrieve it.” Without another word the Hero plunged into the ocean, and, with expansive paw strokes and a rhythmic swish of his powerful tail, Fraaf’kur disappeared beneath the surface. Dan was instantly reminded of how cold the water really was.