“Okay. That’s as good a name as any.” She wondered how Soichiro Yoshimura—their marine biologist and evolutionary theorist—would react to naming an entire order of flying creatures as “polka dots.”

“Did you see?” Felix asked soberly. “It ate something from the water.”

“I did. That’s called predation. You’ve always lived off ration. But way back in human history, we lived off prey. That means that humans hunted and killed and ate other creatures. Back in Solar System, meat is grown in factories, so we don’t have to kill things. But, when they first started Port Authority, they brought animals to kill and eat because it was easier than a factory. There were cows, chickens, and pigs.”

Felix made a face. “Yuk! That’s sick.”

“Yeah, well, Donovan made short work of the livestock.” She turned her attention to the course, keeping to ninety degrees.

The launch—a thirty-meter V hull—was powered by a five-hundred-horsepower electrical engine, and Kevina pushed the throttle up a notch. The launch leapt ahead, planing across the swells.

Felix grasped onto the grab bar, wide-eyed, as he was thrown back. Then his face burst into a wide grin and he began to whoop with joy. “Faster, Mama. Faster!”

“That’s thirty-five knots. That’s fast enough for now.”

Her attention being fixed as it was on the far horizon, she first caught movement at the edge of her vision. Focusing just ahead of the bow, she saw them. Darting images beneath the surface, like arrows that sped away at perpendicular angles from her course. Not that Kevina was the world’s best judge of speed, but if she was doing thirty-five knots, the things zipping away just below the surface had to be twice to three times as fast.

Her PhD had been in oceans system theory with a specialization in the Arctic, so she’d had considerable training in marine biology. On Earth, a sailfish might hit an incredible seventy miles an hour in a short burst of speed but couldn’t maintain it. Try as she might, she could think of no terrestrial fish or mollusk that could move as fast and far as these. Nor did this creature leave a gas trail like a hyper-cavitating torpedo would. She couldn’t wait to catch one, see for herself what magical traits it possessed.

Just over the horizon, perhaps six kilometers off the port side, Kevina could make out the triangular sails of seaskimmers. She was contemplating their nature when something erupted from the ocean’s surface not more than fifty meters to her left.