Dawn would find them still hull-down out of sight of the launch tower but not out of range of the kid and the girl.
Did I do the right thing? Twisp asked himself.
It was a question he had repeated many times, aloud to Bushka and silently to himself. At the moment of decision, it had felt right. But here in the night ...
Momentous changes gathered force on their world. And who were they, pitted against the evils he could sense in that change? One overage fisherman with arms too long for anything but hauling nets. One whining intellectual ashamed of his Islander ancestry, maybe capable of wholesale murder. One kid out to make himself a man, a kid who could see in the dark. And a Merman girl who was heir to the entire food monopoly of Pandora. The consequences of Ryan Wang's death had a bad feel.
The squawks began to stir in their cage near Twisp's feet. Faintly at first, then louder, somewhere off to the right in the thicker kelp, Twisp heard a dasher purring. Putting a finger on the stunshield switch, he waited, straining to see something, anything, in the blackness where that ominous purr stroked the still air.
A purring dasher could mean many things: it might be asleep, or well-fed, or responding to the smell of rich food ... or just generally contented with its life.
Twisp slipped a leg over the tiller, prepared to start the motor and steer away from that perilous noise. With his free hand he groped for and found the lasgun in its hiding place behind his seat.
Bushka began to snore.
The dasher's purr stopped, then began once more on a lower note. Had it heard?
Bushka snorted, rolled over and resumed his snoring. The dasher continued to purr, but the sound began to fade, moving farther to the right and behind the drifting coracles.
Asleep, Twisp hoped. Trust my squawks. The birds had not stirred again.
The dasher's contentment faded away in the distance. Twisp listened for movement there, straining to hear over the sound of Bushka's fatigue. Slowly, Twisp forced himself to relax, realizing that he had been holding his breath. He exhaled, then inhaled a deep breath of the sweet night air. A dry swallow rasped the back of his throat.
Although he could not hear the dasher, tension still rode him. Abruptly, the squawks came full awake and began living up to their name. Twisp flipped the stunshield switch. There came the unmistakable splash of something stiffening in the water close behind, then the frenzied whines and chuckles of dashers feeding.
Filthy cannibals, he thought.
"Whuzzat?" Bushka demanded.
The coracle shifted as Bushka sat up.
"Dashers," Twisp said. He aimed the lasgun toward the feeding sounds and fired six quick bursts. The buzzing vibration of the weapon was hard against his sweaty hand. The thin purple beams lanced into the night. At the second shot, the dashers erupted in a frantic cacophony of yelps and screeches. The sounds receded rapidly. Dashers had learned to turn tail at the buzzing, purple shaft of a lasgun.
Twisp turned off the stunshield and reached for his handlight as another sound far off to his left caught his attention: the hiss-hiss-hiss of paddles cutting through wet kelp. He aimed the handlight toward the sound but the night sucked it dry without sending anything back but the sea's pulse in dark strands of kelp.
A voice called from the distance: "Coracle! Do you have a load?"
Twisp felt his heart triple-time against his rib cage. That was Brett's voice!
"Riding too high!" he shouted, waving the handlight as a locator. "Careful, there's dashers about!"
"We saw your lasgun."
Twisp could make them out then, an amoebalike blot undulating toward him on the low seas. Two paddles flashed bits of his light back at him.
Bushka leaned against the thwart, tipping it precariously near the water.
"Trim the boat!" Twisp called. "You, Bushka!"
Bushka jerked back but kept his attention on the approaching shape. The paddles struck the water with splashes that burst like blossoms against the black hull of an inflatable raft.
"It's them," Bushka said. "They've blown it, just like I warned you."
"Shut up," Twisp growled. "At least they're alive." He took a deep breath of thanksgiving. The kid had become family and the family was whole again.
"Mother, I'm home!" the kid called, as though reading his thoughts.
So, Brett was sufficiently lighthearted that he could joke. Things could not be too bad, then. Twisp listened for dashers.
Bushka laughed at the quip, a laugh with a dry, cracked edge that set Twisp's anger near the boiling point. The raft was in easy talking distance now. Twisp kept the handlight pointed toward the approaching figures and away from his own face, where tears of fatigue and relief wet his cheeks. At a low word from Brett, both he and Scudi stopped paddling. Brett threw a line to the coracle. Twisp caught it and hauled in the raft like a net of muree, snugging it against the coracle. One long arm snaked out and grabbed Brett. The kid's dive suit was soaked and inflated.
The squawks took that moment to set up a warning commotion, but it subsided immediately. Dashers patrolled just out of sight, wary of the lasgun. A sizable hunt of them, Twisp thought. Hunger drove them in and fear kept them away.
Scudi said, "Should we come aboard?"
"Yes," Twisp said, and heaved Brett aboard, then helped Scudi gently over the gunwale and onto the seat-slat in front of him. He secured the line to keep the raft tight against the boat, then stowed the handlight under his seat. Twisp put a hand on Brett's arm, keeping it there, unwilling to break off the reassuring touch.
"They wouldn't listen to you, would they?" Bushka demanded. "You had to run for it again. What happened to your foil?"
"Do we run for Vashon?" Twisp asked.
Brett held both hands up to slow them down. "I think we'd better discuss it," he said. He recounted the story of Gallow and Nakano as briefly as he could. It was a bare-bones account, which Twisp heard with a growing admiration for Brett.
A good head there, he thought.
When Brett had finished, Bushka said, "Let's get away from here! Those are devils, not men. They probably followed you and when they come -"
"Oh, shut up!" Twisp snapped. "If you don't, I'll shut you up." He turned to Brett and asked, in a calmer voice, "What do you think? They have two foils now and could hunt us down with -"
"They're not going to hunt for us, not yet," Brett said. "They have other fish to fry."
"You're a fool!" Bushka blurted.
"Hear him out," Scudi said. Her voice was as flat and solid as plasteel.
"They said they were waiting to capture a doctor," Brett continued, "probably true, from the way they acted. It looked like they tried something and failed. They were shook up and trying to hide it from us. A lot of bragging."
"That's Gallow," Bushka muttered.
"So what were they doing besides waiting to get a doctor?" Twisp asked.
"They were near the Launch Base," Brett said. "With Gallow, I suspect nothing is coincidence. My guess is they want those hyb tanks."
"Of course they do," Bushka said. "I told you that."
"He wants them real bad," Brett said. He nodded to himself. The hyb tanks circling up there in space were the single most speculative subject on Pandora. Guessing the manifests of the hyb tanks ranked right up there with the weather as a conversational staple.