"No!" she said, slashing at the Sivra again. "Not without you."

Raimey twisted again, harder this time. But the predator's grip didn't loosen. He came to a jerking halt, twisted back the other direction—

And then, through the pain, he suddenly felt something give. The Sivra wasn't letting go, exactly, but something about its grip felt different. Pausing in his thrashing, Raimey peered down along the edge of his fin.

The Sivra was still there. But at the point where it had grabbed Raimey's fin, its drab brownish body had taken on a new color scheme: blue, with edges of a dark red.

The same color scheme, in fact, as Raimey's own skin.

Raimey stared, so fascinated that for a moment he forgot the pain, the danger he was in, and even Drusni. He'd seen Qanskan skin growing up around attacking predators before; in fact, he'd seen it happen his very first day on this planet. But he'd never seen it happen with his own body.

It was the strangest thing to watch, and an even stranger thing to feel. Rather like a scab starting to itch, he decided, but with a strange sort of stretching sensation added to it as well. The skin had crept nearly halfway up the Sivra's length now, and the creature had stopped struggling. Dead, Raimey decided, though still managing to maintain a death-grip on his fin.

Of course, snugged into Raimey's self-growing cocoon, the Sivra's teeth didn't really have any choice but to stay where they were. No wonder older Qanska were so lumpy.

A slap on his other fin jolted him out of his fascinated reverie. "Manta, come on," Drusni panted.

"We've got to get out of here."

Raimey twisted over and looked behind him, suddenly remembering the deadly danger they were both in. If the other Sivra were still on the hunt—

But no. This particular pack of Sivra weren't going to be bothering him and Drusni. At least, not any time soon. They already had their meal well in hand.

He looked away from the predators' feast, sickened to his core. "Yes," he told Drusni quietly as he started swimming upward. "Let's go."

"What's happening?" Hesse demanded, hovering behind Beach with all the nervous anxiety of a mother hen watching her latest batch of eggs being readied for Sunday brunch. From the speaker, the gasps and panting and clipped instructions continued to flow, all of it overlaid with a thick layer of static. "Damn it all, what's happening?"

"I'm working on it, I'm working on it," Beach said, his fingers bouncing across his keyboard like twin kittens on a serious catnip high as he tried yet another sound-scrubbing program. "The relay probe's on its way down, but until it clears the cloud-layer turbulence I can't risk deploying the antennas. We're looking at ten more minutes, tops."

"He could be dead in ten minutes," Hesse shot back. "Damn it all. What did he think he was doing down there, anyway?"

"Avoiding the rest of the herd, probably," Sprenkle said. "If you think about it, he's been doing a lot of that since his mother's death."

"What are you talking about?" McCollum asked. "He and his friends have been practically joined at the fin for the past eight months."

"Agreed," Sprenkle said. "And all three have been pushing outward from the herd, with Raimey as the driving force. He's still running away; he's just taking a little company along with him."

"But isn't that normal?" McCollum argued. "They're nearly adults, preparing to go off on their own.

In a lot of Earth species, they'd have been kicked out of the herd already."

"And don't forget that Raimey's been an adult stuck in a kid's body ever since Day One," Milligan added. Like Beach, he was typing busily at his console, working the controls of the relay probe.

"He's going to be straining at the leash even harder."

"Pig drippings," Hesse said sourly. "If he was so anxious to be officially declared an adult, he'd be in the front row right now at that Song of Change ceremony. He's hotdogging, that's all. Seeing how deep he can go, and to hell with the consequences. The same idiot stunt he was pulling when he broke his stupid neck in the first place."

McCollum turned halfway around in her seat. "You're being very quiet, Colonel," she commented.

"Am I?" Faraday asked, gazing at the thrashing snow on the displays. "I was just thinking about Mirasni. Wondering if Raimey has ever really understood what she gave up so that he could be born in her son's body."

"I doubt it," Sprenkle murmured. "It's not the sort of question that's likely to even cross his mind.

Raimey's a fairly shallow character, when you come right down to it. His number-one focus in life has always been himself."

"Well, he sure picks odd ways to demonstrate it," Hesse said with a snort. "He goes charging off maverick from the herd, and thereby runs square into whatever the hell is going on down there.

Doesn't sound like self-preservation to me."

"True," Sprenkle agreed. "But self-absorption and self-preservation don't always go together."

Hesse frowned at him. "Are you suggesting he's become suicidal?"

"Not necessarily," Sprenkle said. "But that doesn't mean he might not give up without a fight if death came staring him in the face."

"Hell," Hesse muttered, looking back at the displays.

"Here we go," Milligan announced suddenly. "Probe's in range."

Faraday's eyes flicked across the displays. But there were only Raimey and Drusni, swimming hard, with no predators anywhere in sight. Whatever had happened, it looked like it was all over, and they'd made it through all right.

And then, a sudden cold thought squeezed at his throat, and he took a second look at the displays.

Raimey and Drusni were there. But Tigrallo was nowhere to be seen.

"Looks like they're heading up," Beach said.

"Is he all right?" Hesse demanded anxiously. "Ms. McCollum?"

"He's swimming smoothly, and I don't see any blood," McCollum reported, gazing at the images.

"Looks like there's something hanging off his fin now, but it seems to be covered with his own skin.

Probably a Sivra."

"They're still heading up," Milligan reported. "Looks like they're going all the way to Level One."

"I've got him on emscan now," Milligan added. "Heading for the herd, all right. Score one for the good guys."

"Better make that score two-thirds," Faraday corrected quietly. "Tigrallo's not with them."

There was a long, dark silence. "Oh, no," McCollum murmured.

"Maybe he's hanging back as rear guard," Beach suggested hesitantly.

"No," Milligan said. "I've got him on emscan from the probe. Or at least, what's left of him."

"Sivra," Beach muttered. "Damn little bastards."

"Any of them pursuing?" Hesse asked. Even he, Faraday noted, sounded subdued.

"No," Milligan said. "Everything looks clear."

"For now," McCollum said under her breath.

Milligan's lip twisted. "Yeah."

Hesse looked at Faraday. "That was close," he muttered. "Too close. We nearly lost everything."

"That was always the risk we took," Faraday reminded him, a small back corner of his mind noticing the irony in that statement. The risk they took? "The Five Hundred know that."

"Maybe they did once," Hesse said tightly. "I'm not so sure they do anymore."

Faraday frowned at him. The younger man's face had an expression of pinched intensity on it, a look Faraday had never seen there before. "What do you know that you're not telling us?" he asked.

Hesse threw him a sideways look, as if suddenly realizing what he was giving away. "I don't know anything," he said, the intensity smoothing out like someone was going over his face with a cement trowel. "I just know how to read politicians. Do you know offhand when the next Qanskan sleep cycle is?"

Faraday glanced at the clock, did a quick calculation. "About three hours. Why?"