Saturn Rukh (21 page)

Petro, having missed out on the food because of his position as an outgatherer, now switched positions in the hunting cone with one of those that had captured their fill. As the flock dove, the outgatherers sent out loud, forward-directed pulses and the whole cone listened for the returns. Soon they could hear something far away and down below. From the purity of tone and the amplitude variation of the returns, it had to be a cloud of roundfloaters, rising up on a thermal. Since the round-floaters had no rapidly moving portions on their bodies, the return tones were not shifted in frequency, while the elongated, variable-amplitude shape of the return, in contrast to the sharpness of the ping that had been sent out, indicated that the return signal had bounced off a large round object. It was a good-sized cloud of good-sized roundfloaters and Petro could feel hisses and rumbles in Petru’s gizzard as the giant winged body prepared its digestive tract for some input.

This hunting interval would last longer than the previous one and the tactics would be different. Although the roundfloaters were of low intelligence and had no eyes to see with, they were exceptionally good at detecting sound. They made little sound themselves when they were floating upward on a thermal, and the extremely large sound detection area provided by their flotation balloon meant that they could hear things at greater distances than even a ruus could. Not only could the roundfloaters detect the search pulses of the outgatherers before the outgatherers could detect the returns, but they could even hear the muffled roar of the jets shooting out from the rear of each of the gigantic flying-wing bodies. Since the roundfloaters could not fly, high-speed chase was not needed; stealth was more effective. The flock stopped their jet-driven highspeed dive and went into a silent gliding formation, where the only noise they made was due to the air rushing over their wings. Each gigantic flying-wing body fluffed up its leading-edge feathers, softening even that noise. The silent deadly hunting cone increased in diameter as the dive continued.

The cloud of roundfloaters soon came into view of Petro’s giant eye. This area was full of thermals, each containing a cloud of spheres, slowly rising upward in the circling heated air column. The hunting cone converged on the nearest food cloud. As they drew nearer, Petro could begin to see the spicy-tasting fringe that hung from the globular flotation bladder of the roundfloater. Inside that was the meaty portion of the roundfloater, the foodgatherer and the gizzard. The trick in swallowing a roundfloater was to make sure the heavy meaty portion at the base of the balloon passed over the lower lip of your maw. That way you swallowed the roundfloater whole. If you missed, then the heavy portion would drag some of the balloon shreds back out of your gizzard and you would be left with nothing but a mouthful of hot air and a few shreds of flotation bladder.

The hunting cone dove silently on the columnar cloud of blind roundfloaters. The wing noise of the outgatherers on the hunting cone was finally detected by the roundfloaters nearest them. The roundfloaters shrieked a warning to their cloudfellows and took evasive action. Those roundfloaters that were above an outgatherer dropped their ballast load of waste and water they had been saving for just such an occasion and shot rapidly upward, while those roundfloaters that were below a detected outgatherer deflated their flotation bladders and dropped downward. Although this saved those already outside the cylinder of death that the hunting cone bored out of the sky, it did little to save those in its path. The ruus had made the size of the hunting cone large enough that neither maneuver allowed the roundfloater to escape the double-mouthed maws of the ruus in the base of the cone. One by one, the giant balloons were swallowed by the much-larger maws.

After the first cloud had been passed through, the hunting cone shifted in direction toward the next thermal and its drifting cloud of food. Petro, who had filled both gizzards during the last encounter, left the tail of the cone and took over the upper outgatherer position while Petru digested its meal. Since they were still far from the next thermal, and silence was not necessary, the flock broke into song again.

~ * ~

“My sonar receivers are detecting strong infrasound signals from the west,” Jeeves reported to Chastity and Sandra on the control deck.

Sandra took down the biviewer and looked out the science console viewport.

“Oh my God ...” she whispered.

“What
is
it!” shouted Rod, coming up from below as rapidly as he could. He banged his head on the grating again and swore.

“It’s a flock of the largest birds I have ever seen,” said Sandra. “They look like a winghunter with two air intakes, but they’re much larger. They could swallow a winghunter in a single bite. But unlike the winghunters, they aren’t flapping their wings—I guess they’re too large for that. They must be jet powered! They’re in a conical formation. Probably optimum for hunting.”

“Hunting?” said Rod, grabbing the viewer.

“There are four of them ahead of the others, on the outside of the formation, like beaters, while those trailing behind are arranged in a conical shape.”

They watched in awe as the hunting cone dove on a distant columnar cloud of bubblefloaters.

“The cone of birds has become silent,” said Jeeves. “I cannot even hear their wing noise.”

“Stealth hunters!” said Rod in admiration, as he watched the hunters approach their prey through the biviewers.

“The floaters are fleeing in panic,” reported Rod. “Some are deflating and dropping as fast as they can, while some are expelling their gas and jetting upward.”

“And I bet the flock formation is just big enough from top to bottom to capture them no matter what tactic the bubblefloaters use,” Sandra observed.

“The birds in the base of the cone only move away from their nominal positions to capture an incoming bubblefloater, then they move back again,” reported Rod. “There is no way for a floater to escape that trap.”

“How big are those birds, anyway?” asked Chastity from the pilot console.

“Hard to tell,” said Rod, still hogging the biviewer. “They are so far away it’s impossible to estimate the distance.”

“My radar returns indicate that the wingspan is four kilometers,” reported Jeeves.

“Four kilometers!”
shouted Chastity. “That’s as big as Central Park!”

“An accurate analogy,” confirmed Jeeves calmly.

“Those aren’t birds,” said Rod. “They’re rocs! Like the one in ‘Sinbad the Sailor.’ “

“Rukh, “
interrupted Sandra, annoyed because Rod was hogging the biviewer. “The proper name for that mythical giant bird is spelled with a
u
and ends in the Arabic consonant
kh.
It’s pronounced with one-and-a-half syllables—
Roo,
like in
kangaroo,
and a guttural
kh,
like in Genghis
Khan.
It’s
Roo-kh,
not
Rock
—the arrogant Englishman that first did the translation of the name got it wrong.”

“Whatever it’s named, they’re
big!”
Rod raised the biviewer again. “And they’re coming this way. We ought to get a good look at them as they pass by. I’ll go get the high-res IR camera.” He gave Sandra back the biviewer and headed down the ladder to the equipment storage locker.

Chastity tapped some commands onto her pilot screen. When Jeeves’s reply came back, she gave a concerned frown.

“Rod?” she called. “I think you had better forget the camera and come up here.”

“What’s the matter?” Rod called from down below, over the sound of an equipment drawer being shut.

“Jeeves says that the rukh formation isn’t going to go
by
us, it’s going to go right
through
us, and the altitude of the center of the formation is right at the altitude of our balloon.”

Soon Rod was back up the ladder. All the previous excitement over finding a new species on Saturn had evaporated from his face. In its place was the serious, veiled-eyed look of a test pilot in trouble. He looked at Chastity’s screen and grunted as his eyes took in the details of Jeeves’s presentation. He turned to look at Sandra.

“Any chance they’ll avoid the balloon instead of eating it?” he asked.

“With the nuclear reactor inside, the balloon is probably hotter than most bubblefloaters,” replied Sandra. “But its size is well within the typical sizes of floaters. They would avoid eating our capsule—their sonar would tell them it’s too dense for them to handle, but the balloon is going to look like a nice big fat juicy bubblefloater to them.”

Rod didn’t reply. The random flickering motion of his eyes showed that his test pilot brain was trying to find a way out of their predicament. Sandra noticed that Chastity was in the same trance. Leaving the two pilots with the problem of extricating them from their problem, Sandra turned to the science console and quietly fingered in commands to Jeeves to warn Pete down in the meta plant and wake Dan and Seichi in their habitats. When she turned back from the console, Rod and Chastity were each busy at one of the other two consoles. She pulled over the biviewer and took another look at the oncoming formation of giant birds.

The formation now completely filled the greenly glowing screen of the biviewer. Each rukh looked like a flying island. At this distance she couldn’t see any evidence of eyes, but then, you can’t see the eyes of a whale until you are up close either. The mouths, however, were easily visible. There were two of them, like two large oval intakes built into the wings of a flying-wing type of jet bomber. The mouths were two hundred meters high and nearly twice as wide. As she watched, the rukh at the “feeding point” apex of the conical formation pulled out and its place was taken by another one. The satiated bird increased its speed and assumed one of the four “beater” positions ahead of the feeding cone. The rukh did not beat its wings during the maneuver that took it ahead of the flock. The thick balloon-like wing structures were obviously only for flotation and gliding, although the tips did warp during turns to assist the long tailfeather rudder. She could see pulsations going down the sides of the body behind the intake regions. After separating out the food from the incoming air, the creature probably compressed the air and jetted it out the rear like the water jet on an octopus or squid.

Sandra was having Jeeves feed her earphones frequency-shifted versions of the tones that the sonar picked up. The shifting of positions within the formation involved a great deal of “talk” among the giant birds. The rukhs were obviously social animals with enough intelligence to communicate with each other and plan hunting strategies. Sandra wished that she could have met them under better circumstances than that of hunter and prey.

“They’re at sixty kilometers and closing,” reported Chastity.

“What’s the ETA?”

“Fifteen minutes.”

“Sixty kilometers in a quarter hour! Those things
can’t
be moving at two hundred forty klours!”

“They’re hunting, they’re diving, and they’re jet powered,” interjected Sandra.

“Then there’s no time left for trying to
think
our way out of this predicament,” said Rod firmly. “I’m going to see if I can
fly
us out of here!” He punched an icon on his screen and suddenly his breathing could be heard loudly throughout the ship and in each habitat. “Pulling gees in thirty seconds. Buckle in!”

“I have the meta production line going through emergency shutdown,” reported Pete from inside the meta plant. “Should be completed in ten.”

“These habitats weren’t designed to take gees,” objected Doc, his voice echoing inside his cocoon.

“I’ll be right out” came Seichi’s voice from the habitat beneath Rod’s console.

“No time for that, Seichi!” replied Rod. “Chass! Take over the scottyboard!”

“I sure hope in
hell
you know what you’re doing!” growled Chastity as she pulled up the shoulder harnesses from the seat back and clicked them onto her seat belt. “With the meta plant attached, we mass eighty-five tons dry, but we’ve only got ninety tons of fuel in our tanks. That’ll only get us halfway to Titan. After that, we drop back and burn up!” She paused as she tried to figure out what Rod was thinking of. “Unless, of course, you’re planning on dropping the meta plant…” Having voiced her objections, her trained left hand obediently flickered over the icons on the scottyboard screen and two bright red flickering icons appeared.

BALLOON JETTISON SWITCH

PLANT JETTISON SWITCH. WARNING! PERSONNEL STILL IN PLANT.

“Let me know when you want the balloon cut,” she said grimly, glad now that she didn’t have the decision-making responsibility that went with the job of commander. “But you’ll have to push the meta-plant jettison switch yourself.”

“Hey!”
yelled Pete over the comm link. There was a long pause, followed by a resigned “I don’t like it... but I’ll understand if you have to do it.”

“Cancel the icons,” Rod replied. “We’re taking the balloon and meta plant with us.” He took one last look at the formation of birds plotted on his screen. Jeeves had plotted an escape corridor for him to follow. He stuck his right hand into the throttle cavity below his console and nestled his wrist into the restraint while his fingers closed on the joyball.

Rod didn’t bother with a verbal countdown of the last seconds. He lifted the joyball and the rockets roared into life. With plenty of fuel but very little time, he ran the engines at maximum thrust. That thrust level would normally have pushed
Sexdent
at greater than ten gees, but with the drag of the balloon and the mass of the meta plant, the
Sexdent
seemed to be merely crawling. Rod knew that he couldn’t follow Jeeves’s escape corridor since it went almost straight up. As soon as they gained any altitude and the shrouds started to hang down below them, the exhaust would melt the shrouds and disconnect them from the balloon. He was forced to improvise by flying in an arc that kept the exhaust away from the tough but temperature-sensitive polymer strands that were their lifeline. There was a violent twist at the nose of the ship as it rose up above the balloon and the tether tightened again. Chastity was ready for it and expertly controlled the tether reel so they were actually hauling in tether line at the same time they were pulling on the balloon at the maximum tension the tether could take. There was jerk after jerk as the weaker portions of the main strands parted—their places taken by the four secondary strands, two on each side, which bridged the broken strand and “healed” it, making that section stronger than it was before the main strand broke. The jerks tapered off in number as the weaker strand segments were eliminated.