air and returned a few meters closer to Keepiru, grinning.
“I guessssed the truth some time ago, I am one of the prized experiments of our beloved human-patron Ignacio Metz. That-t fool did one great thing, for all of his ssstupidity. Some of the others he snuck into berths on Streaker did revert or go mad. But I am a successs.…”
“You are a calamity!” Keepiru spluttered, prevented by the breather from using words more to the point.
K’tha-Jon drifted closer still, causing Keepiru to back away involuntarily. The giant stopped again; a satisfied clicking emanated from his brow. “Am I, Pilot? Can you, a simple fish-eater, understand your betters? Are you worthy to judge one whose forebears were at the top of the ocean food-chain? And dealt as judges of the sssea with all your kind?”
Keepiru was hardly listening, uncomfortably aware of the vanishing distance between himself and the monster.
“You arrogate t-too much. You have only a few gene splices from …”
“I am ORCA!” K’tha-Jon screamed. The cry echoed like a high paean of bugles. “The superficial body is nothing! It is the brain and blood that matter. Listen to me, and dare deny what I am!”
K’tha-Jon’s jaw-clap was like a gunshot. The hunt cry pealed forth and Keepiru, under its direct focus, felt a deep instinct well up, a desire to tuck himself inward, to hide or die.
Keepiru resisted. He forced himself to assume an assertive body stance and bite out words of defiance.
“You are devolved, K’tha-Jon! Worse, you are a mutant thing, with no heritage at all. Metz’s grafts went bad. Do you think-k a true Orca would do what you’ve done? They do hunt fallow dolphins on Earth, but never when sssated! The true killer whale does not kill out of spite!”
Keepiru defecated and flicked it in the giant’s direction with his flukes.
“You are a failed experiment, K’tha-Jon! You say you’re still logical, but now you have no home. And when my report gets back to Earth your gene-plasm will be poured into the sewers! Your line will end the way monsters end.”
K’tha-Jon’s eyes gleamed. He swept Keepiru with sonar, as if to memorize every curve of an intended prey.
“What gave you the idea you were ever going to report-t-t?” he hissed.
Keepiru grinned open-mouthed. “Why, the simple fact that you are a crippled, insane monster whose blunt snout couldn’t stave in cardboard, whose maleness satisfies only pool-gratings, bringing forth nothing but stale water.…”
The giant screamed again, this time in rage. As K’tha-Jon charged, Keepiru whirled and darted into a side channel, fleeing just ahead of powerful jaws.
Tearing through a thick hedge of dangle-weed, Keepiru congratulated himself. By taunting K’tha-Jon into a personal vendetta he had made the creature forget entirely about his harness … and the laser rifle. Now K’tha-Jon obviously intended to kill Keepiru the way he had finished off Akki.
Keepiru fled a bare body length ahead of the mutant.
So far so good, he thought as the sparkling metal hillsides rushed past.
But it proved hard to shake his pursuer. And the menacing jaws made Keepiru wonder if his strategy had been so wise, after all. The chase went on and on, while the afternoon waned. As the sun set they were at it, still.
In the darkness, it became purely a battle of wits and of sound.
The nocturnal denizens of the archipelago fled in dismay as two swift foreign monsters streaked in and out of the interisland channels, swerving and darting in streaming clouds of bubbles. As they swept by, they sprayed the depths and shallows with complex and confusing patterns of sound—compounded images and vivid illusions of echoes. Local fishes, even giants, fled the area, leaving it to the battling aliens.
It was an eerie game of image and shadow, of deception and sudden ambush.
Keepiru slid out of a narrow, silted channel and listened. It had been an hour since he last heard the hunt-scream, but that didn’t mean K’tha-Jon was being silent. Keepiru built a mental map of the surrounding area from the reflections that came to him, and knew that some of those images were subtly crafted constructs. The giant was nearby, using his immensely talented sonic organs to place an overlay of untruth over the echoes of this place.
Keepiru wished he could see. But the midnight clouds cast everything into darkness. Only faintly phosphorescent plants illuminated the seascape.
He rose to the surface for breath, and looked at the faint, silvery underlining of the clouds. In a dismal, gloomy drizzle, the vegetation on the hulking metal-mounds swished