"You mean Arbiter Liadof?" Faraday shrugged. "Certainly an interesting choice of gifts."

Hesse snorted under his breath. "She's a barracuda with legs," he declared.

"It's not considered polite to talk about your boss that way," Faraday warned, glancing around the mostly empty room. This was not the way one talked about a member of the Five Hundred.

Particularly not in public.

But Hesse merely gave another snort. "What do I care?" he countered. "She won't be my boss much longer."

He took a sip from his drink. "If you're lucky, she won't be your boss much longer, either," he added.

"You telling me you're quitting the project?" Faraday asked.

"No need," Hesse said. "Give her a few weeks, and the whole project will die out from under me on its own."

"Oh, come on," Faraday said, trying to ignore his own misgivings about Liadof. "She can't be that bad."

"She can, and she is," Hesse insisted. "She and the people she's fronting for are worse than you could ever imagine."

He shook his head. "I had such high hopes for Changeling, Colonel," he said quietly. "But she and her group are absolutely going to kill it."

"How many drinks have you had, anyway?" Faraday asked, peering closely at him.

"Just this one." Hesse smiled wanly. "Don't worry, Colonel, I'm not drunk. Unless you want to count self-pity and frustration. Those I might be drunk on."

Faraday sighed. "Look. If this is about being replaced—"

"This isn't about me at all," Hesse cut him off angrily. "Don't you understand?"

"No, I don't understand," Faraday said. "I can see how the Five Hundred might be getting impatient about our lack of progress. But they've also invested huge sums of money in Changeling. No one's going to cancel it simply out of pique or spite. Not Liadof or anyone else."

"I never said she was going to cancel it," Hesse said tartly. "I said she was going to kill it.

Unintentionally, maybe, but it'll be just as dead." He pressed his lips tightly together. "And in the process, there's a fair chance they'll kill Raimey along with it."

Faraday stared at him. "I think," he said quietly, "that you'd better tell me what's going on. Starting with what exactly happened back on Earth."

Raimey was startled awake by a thin, wailing cry of fear and pain. He snapped himself to full alertness, twisting around to see what the trouble was.

That instinctive move probably saved his life. Even as he spun around, a sharp stab of pain scraped across his left fin; and suddenly he was face to face with a pair of unblinking black eyes.

Vuuka!

He rolled over in midtwist, angling away from the wide mouth already opening for another try.

Again the chomping teeth snapped together, this time catching the very tip of his right tail and biting it off.

He spun around again as a second jolt of pain shot through him, turning a tight circle as he tried to assess the situation. It was still mostly dark, with the sunlight glow just starting to appear in the east.

But it was bright enough for him to see that three more Vuuka were dodging in among the suddenly awakened Qanska, snapping at them like wolves in a sheep pen.

But even as he completed his circle, all three of the other Vuuka suddenly abandoned their pursuit of the fleeing Counselors and turned toward him.

And as he twisted around to point himself upward, he caught a glimpse of his now ragged tailtip, and the trail of yellow blood droplets dribbling away into the wind.

And he was now officially in big trouble.

He drove upward toward Level Three, twisting like a leaf in a hurricane as he swam. These Vuuka were as big as he was, and in a straight head-to-head race he knew they would eventually run him down.

But while their torpedo-shaped bodies might be faster in a straightaway, his was a lot more maneuverable. As long as he kept twisting and turning, he could hope to keep out of their reach.

Unfortunately, at this point that looked to be a very temporary hope. The Qanskan healing process was quick but not instantaneous; and until his tail healed over, the trail of leaking blood was going to draw them like magnets.

And at four-to-one odds, sooner or later he was going to run out of maneuvering space.

He spun around some more, still heading upward as fast as he could. Vuuka of this size, he knew, were most comfortable on Level Four or even Level Five. The higher he got, the harder it would be for them to keep up with him, let alone match his maneuvering. If he could keep them off him until his tail healed, they might give up and go after easier prey.

Easier prey. Like maybe one of the bigger but slower Counselors back behind him.

Like maybe even Beltrenini.

And somewhere deep inside him, a part of him that he'd thought was dead suddenly surged back to life.

Evasion and playing herd odds were the standard Qanskan approach to survival. They were the techniques he'd been taught when he was just a Baby, and the ones he'd employed countless times in the hundreds of ninedays since then.

But suddenly it wasn't good enough to just outdistance these predators and hope they picked on someone else. Inside this multicolored carcass, he was still a human being. That made him a predator, too.

More than that, he was a tool-using creature, even if no one this side of the Great Yellow Storm even knew what a tool was. There was a way to defeat a Vuuka; and he was sure as the Deep going to figure out what it was.

Sharp teeth slashed across the back of his right fin, again just missing a solid hold. Raimey cut around in a three-quarter circle, shooting beneath the Vuuka's belly and heading off at right angles to him. The other three predators were coming up hard on the leader's flukes, one of them close enough to take a snap at Raimey as he passed practically in front of their snouts. Close; but now it would take a few seconds of frantic braking and turning for them to change direction after him.

He had that long to come up with a plan.

All right, he thought, forcing his mind back into the half-forgotten patterns of all those business logic classes he'd taken a lifetime ago. Profit, loss; inflow, outflow; pluses, minuses. What were a Vuuka's pluses? Sharp teeth, mainly, plus speed, strength, and stamina. What were its minuses? Lack of maneuverability and a densely packed body type that gave it less vertical range through the Jovian atmosphere than Raimey had. In his mind he laid out a spreadsheet of credits and debits, adding in everything he and that biologist McCollum up on Prime had been able to figure out about Vuukan physiology since his arrival here.

Behind him, he heard a bull-like snort as the four Vuuka got themselves lined up on him again.

Another ninepulse, and they would be up to speed and gaining.

Speed, and stamina...

Raimey smiled tightly to himself. Okay. He had a plan.

Now to see if it worked.

He kept going, wiggling and ducking to keep the Vuuka off-balance, until he felt the hot breath of the leader on his tailtips. Then, with a drop-and-flip maneuver he had to basically invent as he performed it, he did a half circle that brought him head-up beneath the Vuuka's lean body.

And ducking his snout, he slammed his bony forehead squarely into the Vuuka's lungs.

The predator's whole mouth seemed to explode outward with an agonized cough as the impact knocked all the wind out of him. A pulse later the other three shot past, snapping angrily at Raimey but going too fast for a quick stop. With lungs and buoyancy sacs both temporarily paralyzed, the winded Vuuka dropped like a rock; twisting around out of his way, Raimey continued his climb.

His tail, he noticed as he rose upward, had stopped bleeding. Theoretically, the loss of the braindeadening blood trail should now allow the remaining Vuuka to think straight again and possibly reevaluate their chances of actually snagging this particular meal.