The damn silly Snoops almost missed it, zipping about among the crashing waves like a cloud of demented fireflies. Ash could swear they liked playing in the surf sometimes; other times, he suspected they were simply responding to some kind of unvoiced urging of his own.
"Back on track, boys," he murmured, and closed his eyes, concentrating on the visuals.
A wild blur of white spray black shiny rock heaving black water – Ash swallowed a surge of nausea. "Slow down! And let's have a little more light. We've got to find it quickly." The Snoops would execute his commands without him speaking out loud, of course, but Ash had long ago stopped worrying about talking to himself or to the objects around him. Speech was a necessary comfort in a place that nobody visited.
Almost nobody, Ash corrected himself grimly, and applied himself to chivvying the glowing Snoops into a smooth curve formation that he could send in a controlled sweep across the semi-submerged rock shelf. Even with the Snoops' illumination pushed to the maximum, it was an eye-confusing nightmare. How was he supposed to find anything in this? Irritation flared. What was the stupid creature doing on the shelf anyway? Why hadn't it just stayed where it was put, safe? Wasn't that what it was supposed to do?
"Last confirmed location," he said, and pulled back to glance at the tilted amber screen overhead as the Snoops bunched together, fidgeting. He flicked through several time-marked image captures: the black-clad figure walking away from the bleached ruins of the city; wading across the Torrent where it carved into the beach before the rocks; stripped to the waist spreadeagled on the shelf, gazing intently into a rock pool; the last two, late in the afternoon and then near dark, showed the creature hunched against the base of the cliff nearby, asleep. When he sent the Snoops spiralling across the shelf to the spot, it was already underwater, waves smacking high against the rock wall. Ash sent a single Snoop looping down into the water, just to check that it hadn't got snagged on a rock down there, but there was nothing, and he sent the tiny thing racing back to join the rest with a splash and a puff of superheated steam.
"Where did you go...?" Again he withdrew from the Snoops and frowned at the screen. Think, think... it must have woken in the dark to find the tide coming in. It doesn't behave like someone familiar with the sea, so what would it do? There's nowhere to go from there, the currents and the deep-water channel cut by the Torrent mean the water comes in too quickly to cut back across, but it wasn't to know that, was it? It waded across at low water, maybe it thought it could do the same on the way back...
"Oh, no no no- Please don't have done that..." He launched himself back into the Snoops with the clumsiness of horror, hurled the whole glowing mass of them south over the last of the rock shelf, wincing at the brute force of the waves as they crashed seething over the broken rock teeth at the base of the cliff. Nothing was going to be alive if it had got caught in that. He brought the Snoops to a wavering halt over the last spine of rock sticking up before the raging waves were lost in the oily surge of the Torrent. They darted jerkily back and forth, semaphoring his anxiety, and he set them sternly to searching above and below water under that last jagged outcrop, because he very much did not want to have to consider what would have happened if the creature had gone into the Torrent unprotected. He squeezed the fear down and focused grimly on the visual feeds. Worse than before on the surface, white spray black shiny rock heaving black water. He twitched away and sought out the Snoops searching below the surface. Visibility crap to zero down here, he'd hoped it would be better but the silt stirred up by the wave action hung in the water like fog. The Snoops' stabbing beams of light from above and below illuminated nothing but a crazy slopping lattice of empty water. He began to gather them back together, shock settling a hollow feeling in his belly. It must have gone into the Torrent, and if it had there was no way he'd find what remained, which was probably just as well.
The last few Snoops eluded him for a second, darting excitedly around something dark they had found snagged under a protruding ledge. The idiotic things were getting in each others' way, the combined visual feed a mess of bubbly black water and beams of dazzling gold light, and he took a long exasperated second to recognise that what he was seeing through five hyperactive Snoops was the black leather of the creature's coat. He stared at it dumbly, almost not believing he'd found it.
"Back up!" He yanked the excitable drones back a couple of feet, and brought the rest zipping down to spread a steadier light.
It looked dead. That was all he could think, over and over. The long skirts of its coat had tangled in the broken teeth of the ledge, and the pounding wave action had swung its body into the scooped-out trench beneath. White hair drifted across the pale face like a shroud.
It's going to be dead if I don't do something. Ash hesitated. The Snoops and Fetchers would be no use for this, they lacked the finesse that would be needed to prevent the body getting thrown against the rocks as they extracted it. Even as he dithered, a fierce backwash of current dragged the thing halfway out into the gully before the swell slammed it back in again.
"This is going to make me so sick." He could taste bile at the back of his throat just thinking about it, but he clambered shakily down from the chair and stretched out on the floor in roughly the required position. He wouldn't have more than an instant, not at this distance. He reached out one last time with the Snoops to make sure he had the location right, and held his breath.
There. The shock of cold water all round him almost made him gasp. He hadn't been prepared for how dark it would be without the Snoops. He grabbed wildly in front of him and banged his knuckles on rock. Flailed again and tangled his arm in flapping wet leather. A gout of air escaped him in a blinding burst of bubbles, and he dragged his body closer to the creature's, clawing desperately to pull it against him.
Back. Air. Air, and the soft directionless light of the eyrie. Ash rolled off the creature's inert body and flopped on to the floor, retching and trembling. That never gets any better. God, I hate sea-water.
He sat up as soon as the spasms subsided, and got his first good look at what he had rescued. Large, at least two metres tall at a guess. Humanoid, rangily built. It still looked dead, skin somewhere between white and blue-green, marbled with the grey ghosts of blood vessels, tangled white hair plastered flat. Some kind of black tattoo marking on its face. The mouth hung slightly open on sharp teeth that put him uneasily in mind of some marine predator, a translucent saw edge. It didn't seem to be breathing.
He called for Fetchers, and watched while they manipulated the creature so it lay face down. Its right leg looked wrong - broken, he guessed - and as the Fetchers turned its head to the side, he saw blood matted into the hair at the back of the skull.
First things first. The Fetchers swivelled expectantly in his direction, and he crawled over to plant his knee in the small of the creature's back. His knee encountered bone, and he put out a tentative hand; was it wearing some kind of exoskeletal armour?
"Remove its clothing." The Fetchers swarmed over the creature, snipping, unpicking, folding, so fast that it looked like an optical illusion. A small troop of them pattered off carrying the pieces, the last two in line carefully balancing a boot each, and Ash was free to run one finger doubtfully up a shallow dorsal crest, the rounded nub of each spinal process articulated with the next. Well, this is new.
He stuck his knee in the thing's back, avoiding the crest, and shoved down hard. Water gushed from the creature's mouth and nostrils. He switched sides and repeated the action, putting all his weight into it. More water, but it still wasn't breathing. He struggled to push it over on to its back, hindering the Fetchers, who would probably have done the job quicker without him, and pressed his fingers into the cold flesh of its neck. Stupid, really; I don't even know if its kind has a pulse there.His own heart jumped when he felt the tiny movement under his fingertips.
Well, she'd said it was tough.
He really didn't want to get any closer to those sharp predator's teeth, but he placed the thought aside, tilting the creature's head back to clear the airway and pulling the lower jaw down with a cautious finger to check the mouth was clear. The slanted furrows below each cheekbone gave him pause, but he elected to go for the obvious, pinched the creature's nostrils shut and covered its lax mouth with his own, breathing out until he saw the chest lift. He sat back on his heels, counting one, two, three, four, five, as the chest gradually fell. Another breath, and he checked the pulse again; it seemed stronger, if he wasn't imagining it. Four, five. Another breath, and he thought he saw an extra lift of the chest. Come. On. Three, four, five. He was half expecting it, but it still made him jump when the thing jerked a sudden choking breath as he was leaning down, and he all but fell scrambling away from it as it convulsed, heart banging in his ears. Shit. The room seemed suddenly very small.
The creature jacknifed helplessly sideways in a series of wrenching spasms that made Ash's own stomach clench in sympathy. God, but it must have swallowed a lot of water. Eventually, the puking dwindled to dry retching, and then it just lay there panting and shuddering.
Ash started to stand, but at the first scuff of his bare foot on the floor, the creature's head twitched towards him so fast he froze, his spine making a creditable attempt to dig its way out through the rock wall behind him. Predator. Glaring yellow eyes fixed on him, vertical pupils blossoming into black pits, and the lips peeled back to expose the needle teeth in a breathy snarl that abruptly became a fresh bout of retching. Ash took the opportunity to call Fetchers, and was scrubbing at his own wet hair with a dry towel when the creature spoke. Its voice was rough and very faint.
"Who are you?" Ash supposed it was an improvement on the snarling, but the subtly disturbing harmonics of the alien vocal cords set his teeth on edge nonetheless. He took a quiet step backwards and saw the amber eyes flick towards the movement.
"What, not 'where am I?'"
The creature gave a coughing hiss that he took for laughter. "I very much doubt... you would tell me that even were I... to ask."
"You're right." Ash moved again, casually, and again the yellow eyes scanned for the movement. "You're safe."
It laughed again, a humourless rasp. "Now that... that I do doubt."
"I won't harm you." Ash went to his knees beside the creature as it struggled to sit, pushing it back down. "Please, you're injured, you mustn't try to move-"
The thing grabbed his arm with shocking strength, yanking him off-balance. For a heart-stopping second he was face to face with it, feeling its heartbeat pound against his own, then it slammed its open right hand into his chest so hard it knocked all the breath out of him. In vignettes of discrete horror, he felt razor-sharp barbs hook into his flesh, pulling the creature's burning palm flush against his skin, and a hissed breath at his ear. "My apologies. But I must feed."