Saturn Rukh (20 page)

Petra didn’t notice it at first. She was too engrossed in singing with the rest of the flock. It was at times like this she felt herself greater than herself alone, part of a community of spirits that had gone on long before she was born and would go on long after she had died. Now she was part of it and enjoying it. Finally, the sensory input from the giant body under her control became too noticeable to ignore. The air Petru was swallowing had no taste! She knew what that meant and quickly stopped singing. She used the giant wingspan of Petru to send a single chirp of sound out and up. After a long wait, a faint echo returned and was picked up by Petru’s wing, acting as a giant ear. The return was fuzzy in tone, depth, and width. She had been right, there was a flock of slimswimmers ahead of her, who were also climbing during the night. As they flew, they left a trail of empty, tasteless air behind them. All Petra needed to do was follow the path of tastelessness and it would lead her to a middark meal. Petra would be the hunter for a change instead of Petro. She quickly informed the others in the flock and they went into their slimswimmer formation. In the daytime, when the males were diving from high altitude, the jet-powered winged bodies of the ruus could outfly anything in the skies. During the nighttime climb upward, however, the slimswimmers could fly fast enough to easily evade the maws of a single ruus. The slimswimmers had poor sonar. They depended upon their eyes to detect predators at a distance. At night, however, when there was little light, they could be taken by surprise if the attacker remained silent during the attack.

“You all heard the return from my chirp, so you know where the slimswimmers are,” said Petra, directing Petru’s voice downward so the slimswimmers above would not hear. The gigantic area of the wing of each ruus made a supersensitive sonar detector, and the return from her single pulse had been quite strong, so she knew everyone in the flock, even the children still on wing, not only knew the location of the flock of slimswimmers, but had already used their giant eye to pick them out against the Arc-lit orange highclouds. “We six highest will set a silent trap. The rest of you know what to do.”

Petra looked around. Hakra and Conra were above her. Hakra was highest and would take the top dive position. Conra would duck under the prey and attack from the front, while Petra and the others below would attack from the sides, rear, and bottom. Silently, using their excellent eyesight to keep each other and the prey in sight, they closed the trap on the slimswimmers, while the remainder of the flock noisily talked amongst each other as they flew off in the opposite direction, always climbing as they went.

The females didn’t often get a chance to hunt. Despite that, tonight they were very effective at coordinating their attack even without talking to each other. As each one moved into position, far distant from the unsuspecting flock of slimswimmers, but keeping pace with them, their tailfeathers would twitch up and down, indicating to the others they were ready. All waited until Hakra had Hakru in the top position. Hakra waved Hakru’s tail once, then dove straight down at full jet power, screaming and roaring and yelling from every interbladder orifice, while the other five closed in from all the other directions, as silent as their pulsating jets allowed, maws wide open. The flock of slimswimmers, attacked by a screaming monster from above, scattered in panic in all directions. Each ruus in the attack party had at least one gullet full of slimswimmer before the attack was over, while some more-fortunate ones had both maws full. Grinding their gizzards contentedly, they rejoined the rest of the flock and continued the long climb upward, singing as they climbed.

~ * ~

Back on
Sexdent,
Jeeves heard a multitoned sound through the ship’s sonar. It was obviously very far away because it faded and drifted in direction as though it had passed through many different density strata and had been blown about by the winds. It was a long, variable, complex sound, unlike any other Jeeves had detected since their arrival on Saturn. The recording of the strange sound was filed away in Jeeves’s still nearly empty memory, and Jeeves turned its attention to the tasks that started each morning on Saturn: preparing breakfast, lunch, or supper for each member of the crew, depending upon which shift they were on; cycling Pete Stewart through two airlocks and assisting him in his daily checkout of the meta plant; and a myriad of other chores.

~ * ~

Bright was illuminating the eastern horizon as Petra and the rest of the flock finished the climbing song and brought their bodies to a halt at a common altitude. All of the ruus in the flock were hungry from the exertion of the long climb during the night, but Petra and some of the others had some of the hunger pangs dulled by the middark snack. This was the time for socialization and grooming, while the males woke up and took over control prior to the daily hunting dive. With Petru flying at constant altitude at low speed, the wind across the wing top was slow enough that Petra could leave her perch on the top of the keel and start her morning grooming of Petru’s topside.

Down below, snuggled in his niche in the bottom of Petru’s keel, Petro awoke. He stayed in himself, letting Petra retain control of their giant body. Even though he was not operating Petru, he could still groom his side. Since gravity was constantly attempting to pull him off, he had to be more careful with his clawholds on the feathers than Petra did. So while the female head and neck groomed one side of their joint body, the male head did the other side. Occasionally, when they were both putting things into the same maw, they would look at each other, eye to eye.

“I can sense something tasty in Petru’s left gizzard,” said Petro to Petra through their thinklink. “You must have had good luck during the darkclimb.”

“A slimswimmer school,” replied Petra. “Six of us ate, while the others acted to deceive the slimswimmers into thinking we had left.”

“Well done,” said Petro. “I will take the outer position in the hunting cone when we start the dive, so the others of the flock can be fed.” They parted and returned to their grooming tasks.

Extending her neck, Petra used her multitude of neck claws to crawl along the wing top, combing out feathers, collecting small prey that had impacted on the giant body, and using her large eye to find the tiny vermin that burrowed into feather roots. The vermin were laboriously extracted, pierced if not too tough, then taken to the wing edge and dropped into the maw below, where eater became eaten. The attack on the slimswimmers had resulted in some bits of slimswimmer flesh being caught between feathers. This, too, was scraped from the feathers and dropped over the wing edge, where it impacted the mouthfeathers and fell into the all-devouring maw. By pumping up the inflation sacs in her neck, Petra extended her reach all the way to Petru’s wingtip, then down the wing to the tail. Only the tips of the tailfeathers were out of reach of the long flexible neck, but that was what flockmates were for. Toward the end of the grooming session, the flock formed a lazily flying circle, while each one tended the colorful tailfeathers of the one ahead of it. Over the tops of the circle, the female heads gossiped about the night’s rare hunting interval and the progress of the children of the flock, while down below, the male heads bragged about yesterday’s hunt and what they intended to accomplish in the upcoming hunt.

One by one, the female heads relinquished control over the gigantic winged body they had directed during the long climb to hunting altitude and allowed the male heads to assume command. The females contracted their necks, lay them in the crevasse along the top of the inflated keel that ran the length of the giant body, held their neck in place by grasping the roots of the feathers on either side of the crevasse with the claws extending from each neck segment, closed their large single eye, and went to sleep for the day. Those that had children on wing made sure their babies were snuggled under their necks, while the older children were tucked well under the upper wing feathers of their parents. During the hunting dive the airspeed across the top of the gigantic flying wing bodies would sweep off anything that wasn’t securely shielded from the gale. Some of the older children settled down under the feathers right at the leading edge of the wing. The wind was much stronger there, but from that position their male heads could look out over the wing and pretend they were the ones controlling the gigantic body that supported them. After enough hunting dives as passengers, they would gain enough experience from watching their parent operating in coordination with the rest of the hunters in the flock that they would be able to participate in future hunts, as a free-flying “wingmate” to their parent, keeping up with the flock by gliding on the air blast from the parent’s leading edge. ,

As the male heads took over each body, they broke from the grooming circle and checked out their control of the twin jet-powered body by zooming upward at high speed. They then rejoined the rest of the group as they chased each other in mock prey-predator aerial combat. Soon all the winged bodies were controlled by the males. At the command of Conro, the eldest of the flock, the cloud of circling bodies formed themselves into a hunting cone and dived. At first they fell mostly by the pull of gravity, but as their speed through the air grew and the air friction rose, they gulped larger and larger mouthfuls of frigid high-altitude air into their twin maws on each side of their keel. Their wings rigidized, grew thinner, and began to sweep back, as internal pressure changes moved air from one wing-bladder to another. The sides of their bodies pulsed faster as the inward-gulped air was passed rapidly through the long body and spurted out in twin jets from the rear. Slight changes in jet strength from one jet to the other, combined with slight adjustments of the angle of the wingtips, and flicks of their long steering tail, directed the large bodies closer and closer together until the whole flock became one gigantic flying maw. The combination of gravity and jet power gave the formation of flying hunters a speed that was greater than that of any of its prey.

Since Petru had been one of those in the flock that had eaten during last night’s meeting with the slimswimmers, Petro joined the hunting cone as one of the outer-edge “gatherers.” His job, along with the others at the leading open edge of the cone, was to drive the prey toward the center of the cone, where it would become fodder for those in the eating positions near the tip of the conical formation. The long shallow dive took them into warmer, moister air. There had been sunlight passing through this portion of the air for some time now, and the air had a rich taste. There was nothing that Petro’s eye could see or Petru’s sonar could detect, but the mouthfeathers in Petru’s maw, which screened the air before passing it back to the air passages, were now dripping rich-tasting drops into the gizzard at the base of the maw. With the air this rich in food, there should be a flock of slimswimmers in the region. Petro increased the intensity of the sound pulses generated by Petru, scanning the beam in a spiral in the forward direction. A faint return came from far ahead and below; Petro tightened the spiral scan and concentrated it in the direction of the faint return. Soon there were enough returns that all in the flock could hear that there was worthwhile prey in that direction. Slowly, the hunting cone shifted in direction and headed for the source of the distant return. The jets from each body increased in strength as the flock added speed. Sonar searches were stopped and even conversation ceased as the silent swift hunting cone closed in on its victims.

Soon the prey was in sight. Petro’s large eye could now make out the individuals in the flock of slimswimmers. They had not moved significantly from the position at which Petru’s sonar had detected them. Usually, when a flock of prey animals heard the distant ping of a searching ruus, they headed in the opposite direction as fast as they could go. These slim-swimmers had not done so. The reason was obvious. They were under attack by a small flock of wingflyers, who were keeping the main school herded together while consuming the outer victims one by one. Neither the wingflyers nor the slimswimmers had eyesight as good as a ruus, so the silent hunting cone would sweep down on them unnoticed, until it was too late.

“This time we will have a variety of tastes in a kill,” thought Petro to himself. He and the others in outgatherer positions passed the cluster of slimswimmers and wingflyers and began to circle inward, closing the way in the forward direction. Suddenly the prey and their small predators became aware of the onrushing cone of death. Together in panic they fled in all directions, but it was too late. The high-speed divers in their close-packed cone scooped shrieking bodies into their gigantic double maws, maws with orifices ten times bigger than their prey. The bodies collided with the sharp edges of the stiff mouthfeathers inside the maws, where they were sliced into strips of bleeding flesh that slid down the feathers into the gizzard below, to be sucked dry and ground to pulp by pulsating minibladders covered with hard, viciously sharp toothfeathers. One of the older children was lucky this hunt. Its parent, at a good point in the hunting cone, was the recipient of many of the slimswimmers, so when a less-tasty wingflyer came along, it adjusted its trajectory with a flip of its tail and directed the incoming wingflyer into the maw of the child. The wingflyer was a good-sized bite for the child, but it had no problem in swallowing the wingflyer whole.

The hunting formation did such a good job of capturing most of the slimswimmers and wingflyers in the first pass that there was little to go back for. Leaving the remnants of the prey to re-form and build up into worthwhile targets for the future, the hunting cone regrouped and headed downward again. As they headed downward, the flock broke into the diving song.