Unfortunately, the soil under the cone tree was too sparse and too dry to stick. The protuberant roots gave the strider surfaces against which it could squash a few tormentors, but the main infestations were not concentrated where the rolling routinely crushed them. Some did fall off, though—
Caine leaped closer to the water-strider and smashed a handful of the pirhannows into mush with the back of the axe head. The sight, and the smell, was not unlike stamping on corpse-bloated maggots.
The water-strider started, stopped its rolling, focused all four eyes on Caine, snuffled lightly — then seemed to catch the whiff of its dead tormentors. It stopped, stared at Caine again, and then began rubbing its broad flat face along the roots that radiated out from the trunk of the cone tree. A dozen of the worm-fish were scraped off, still squirming. The strider leaned back its head — and out of pure instinct, Caine pulped them with the back of the axe. Savagely. He didn’t know if it was for Mizuki, or out of gratitude for being twice-saved by water-striders, or something more primal. Or possibly, he wondered, standing back, this is an example of the Slaasriithi process of Affining one species to another. But despite the chilling implications of that possibility, Caine Riordan realized that there was simply no arguing that he had become, well, fond, of this powerful yet gentle creature.
Riordan resumed his strange partnership with the water-strider, lethally grooming the pirhannows from its pelt for another fifteen minutes. By then, the remaining wormlike tormentors were located in anatomical regions that the creature could not reach, and which Caine had no way of approaching without seeming like a new threat. The water-strider looked at him — it recalled the patient, steady stare of a grateful horse or dog — and rolled its mass a bit further away, the margins of its mouth not only caked with its own blood, but dry and cracked.
Caine rocked back upon his buttocks, sat, reflected on the surreal circumstances in which he found himself — and, for the first time, heard his collarcom paging steadily. Clearly, Gaspard had used his command-level authority to unlock the devices. Riordan tapped it. “Riordan.”
“Captain Riordan! We had given you up for — never mind. We are delighted that you have answered. But where are you?”
“I believe I’m directly across the river from you, Ambassador. Can you see a large cone tree on the opposite bank, the only one for hundreds of meters in either direction?” As they spoke, dusk was making its final surrender to night.
“I do not see—” Eager exclamations behind him suggested that others had better awareness of their surroundings. “Ah — yes, yes. Your position is known. But—”
“Ambassador, first things first: is everyone all right?”
“Happily, and improbably, yes. Ms. Veriden and Ms. Betul covered our retreat up the rocky outcropping by greeting our pursuers with a flurry of bullets. One was killed, two were wounded. That was enough to convince them to flee. But you have found shelter? Even though we saw you pursued? And you are safe?”
Caine stared at the water-strider; it may have been sleeping fitfully. That, or it was an awfully noisy breather. “Frankly, Ambassador, I doubt I’ve been safer since I stepped foot on this planet.”
“I am confused, Captain: how could you be—?”
“Ambassador, it would take far too long to explain. For now, let’s concentrate on arranging the safest way for me to rejoin you tomorrow. Have Mr. Xue and Ms. Veriden make their way over here to escort me back one hour after dawn. They should both be armed with rifles. After last night, if those predators are still in the area, they will hightail it the other direction if they take more fire. Other than that, I think we should save the batteries of our collarcoms.”
“Very well, Captain. You seem to lead a charmed existence.”
Caine looked at the strider. “A very unusual one, at least. Good night, Ambassador. Signal me when Xue and Veriden leave tomorrow.”
“Very well. Bon nuit, Captain.”
“Likewise.” Riordan turned off the collarcom.
* * *
The water-strider fell into a restless slumber, judging from its phlegmy susurrations, but its bleeding increased steadily. Riordan wondered if — following the apparent intent of the water-strider — he might have more success at making mud to cake its wounds. But the pirhannows had pulped the large animal’s hide in so many places that it was difficult to discern the worst sources of the bleeding.
The other problem — beyond Riordan’s innate reluctance to touch the large creature without its express toleration for such contact — was the lack of mud or suitable soil. Caine searched around the sub-biome that existed beneath the cone tree’s canopy, but the ground cover was thick and the dirt somewhat sandy: it crumbled when he tried to pick it up.
So maybe the answer was to make one’s own mud, or, better yet, to bring it in from the shore that crept right up to the margins of the tree. Armed with one of the tree’s large, spatulate leaves, Riordan moved through the arch the strider had used to enter under the canopy—
And recoiled: the riverside shallows were choked with orange lily pads. Well, that answered why the gargantua had not returned to its natural environment after confronting the predators. It had probably been run ashore by this immense colony of lily pads and its attendant swarms of pirhannows. Which also made it impossible to get enough river water to make mud. Walking back into the microecology under the canopy, and into what seemed like a growing mélange of sickly-sweet scents, Riordan looked for other sources of water.
The search was made easier by the bioluminescent clusters that were nestled in the high reaches of the undercanopy. One of the clusters, a helix of puffballs interlaced by tubules filled with a lighter-than-air gas, had detached from its bud and was descending in a slow spiral. As the glowing lavender and violet lei rotated and the play of light changed, Riordan noticed a glistening, sloped root that ran in under the canopy from outside.
As Caine guessed, the root emanated from the cone tree’s invariable botanical partner, an adjacent bumbershoot. Early evening condensation was accumulating on its bole, which sent the runoff trickling down microgrooves that ran onto this angled root. It’s a tiny natural aqueduct, Caine realized, tracing how the runoff spread slowly throughout the microecology huddled beneath the cone tree and was further distributed by the capillary actions of ground mosses and day-glo lichens. Along with a thick, mown-grass smell, the flow increased as he watched. With any luck, there would be enough water to make a mud plaster for the water-strider. But even if he was able to create a serviceable mass of the slop, he was still confronted by the initial, troublesome questions: where should he apply it? And was that really what the water-strider had been trying to accomplish? All of which begged the question: would the water-strider allow him to do so? One way to find out.
Riordan approached the behemoth carefully. After two complete orbits of its side-slumped form, he remained uncertain about where to treat it. Almost a quarter of the its body and legs were covered in bloody bore-holes, and no spot seemed any worse or better than another. Ultimately, Caine’s attempt at veterinary assessment yielded only one useful result: a better understanding of the water-strider’s physiology.
In addition to the four eyes that bracketed its wide mouth like corner-points on a rectangle, the creature was dotted with a vast array of light sensors that had no eyelids, no irises, no protective bone ridges. They were simple, possibly expendable, and probably essential to the animal’s safety. Whereas terrestrial herbivores tended toward opposed ocular arrangements — one eye on each side of the head, often furnished with fish-eyed lenses — to increase the total field of vision and hence watchfulness, this creature had evolved a different solution to the same challenge: more eyes. The quality of vision was probably vastly inferior, but the increased awareness was likely to be a good trade; the long-legged quadruped had a lot of potential blind spots. Audial sensing seemed to be more rudimentary, probably because the water-strider spent much of its time submerged: two small bony tufts at the front of its membranous backsails answered for ears.