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another enemy.
"Remember, the drugs are Flattery's doing, not yours."
Her tears, the way she looked at Ben seemed like the genuine article.
But look at what happened to Ben, he cautioned himself.
"Get your suit on," Rico said. "We don't have much time."
Crista had to slip out of her dress to don the dive suit. Rico knelt beside
Ben, a hand on his forehead. He moved a little, and Rico took it for a good
sign. His breathing was much stronger.
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Crista did not seem modest at all, nor did she look like a monster.
Probably spent so much time as a lab animal she didn't have a chance to get
shy.
Rico, like Ben, had been raised among Islanders, a generally shy lot. Rico
admitted to himself that Crista had the best-looking legs he'd ever seen.
Again, he thought of Snej back at
Operations, and sighed. He planned to send a message to her, too, along with
whatever he'd think of to say to Operations. He turned back to Crista Galli.
A little pale, he thought.
She seemed very weak, and struggled just to pull her suit on and fasten the
seals. Her breathing was rapid and shallow. Her forehead beaded sweat and
she was still more pale than when Rico had first seen her in the village. Her
eyes were doing their dilation trick and he noticed an uncontrollable tremor
in her legs.
"Can you get back into your harness?" he asked.
She shook her head.
"No," she said, her voice weaker now. "It's starting . . ."
She was drifting out again. She lay down on her couch, eyes still open.
"Are you still with us?" he asked. "Can you hear me?"
"Yes," she said. "Yes."
Rico still didn't want to touch her. Whatever it was, it had nearly killed
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Ben and he wasn't about to let the same thing happen to himself. He reached
around her carefully and snicked the harness into place, then snugged it up
with a jerk. He pushed the head of the couch back so that she lay flat. By
then Crista was unconscious again.
Rico hurried into his own suit and noted that the seas had calmed somewhat.
He could hear the thump and scrape of Elvira at the hull ports, and hoped that
the kelp wouldn't set her hallucinating as it did some people. She seemed to
have been all right before.
"It'd be just our luck," he muttered to himself. "Best damned pilot in the
whole damned world thinking her gauges are grapefruits."
There was a very loud scrape, more of a long, slithering rasp across the top
of the foil. Then another. It was the same serpentine sound that the kelp
had made when it grabbed them. Rico jumped for the cabin, but it was too
late.
The whole foil tipped on its side and he was thrown against the port bulkhead
so hard it knocked the wind out of him. He saw, through the swarm of black
amoebas across his vision, that they were airborne. He was jostled again, not
so much this time, and as the bow of the foil tilted upward he saw them being
pulled up into a mass of hylighter tentacles.
"Shit!"
He struggled to his knees and crawled the upended bulkhead to the command
couch under the plaz.
He could flip open a port and get a shot at it with his lasgun . . .
That was when he saw how big this hylighter really was. He guessed it at a
hundred meters across, with its two lead tentacles, which gripped the foil, at
nearly that length. Even the smallest tentacle was thicker than Rico.
They were already a hundred meters or so in the air, and rising.
That pitch back there, he thought, it must've dumped a helluva ballast to be
able to pick us up.
It was then that he thought of Elvira, and scrambled for a view of the seas
below. She was there,
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She must have seen him, but she didn't wave.
"Damn!"
He couldn't drop her a flare, he couldn't try the engines. Either of these
might touch off the hundreds of cubic meters of hydrogen in the monster
hylighter. It tucked the Flying Fish upside-
down against its great orange belly. Rico had never been this close to a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]