“Don’t know. But it’s all over the pilings and the bottom of the Pod. I thought I’d get Vik to take a look at it under the scope. See if she can figure out what this stuff is. Probably some sort of Donovanian algae or the like.”

“Good thinking.” She started for the hatch, lost in thought. Stopped as she opened the pressure door. “Yosh, you and I are thinking along the same lines. Aguila won’t forget this. We really are on our own. If you think of anything, and I mean anything, that I might need to know to keep us alive out here, you will tell me, won’t you?”

He gave her a smile, nodded. “I can’t be Shin. He was a one of a kind. But yeah. We’ve been though too much to lose it all now.”

36

The tooth flower, in all of its glorious colors, hung low over the trail as Dek slowed, cocked his head, and studied the predator. In the twilight, he backed a step, feeling the roots under his foot squirm. Better to go around. With a bunching of his legs, he leapt the two meters to the top of a thick tangle of chabacho roots, ran the five meters along the top root, and dropped with a thump onto the trail beyond the tooth flower. Not that it was a trail in the Earthly sense, just an opening in the forest floor that allowed passage between the massed snarls of intertwined roots.

As he lowered his body parallel to the ground, mouth open, and sprinted down the winding way, he was aware of the sidewinder that jetted back out of sight. The bem he passed didn’t so much as shift its camouflage, despite the intensifying of its odor. A sure indication of fear.

Better yet, Dek’s vision gave him added confidence as he shot through the mazework of vines, root bundles, and occasional dips and rises. Nothing had prepared him to see the world with such clarity. Human stereoscopic vision was so limited. With three widely spaced eyes, his depth perception was perfect, even at the speed he ran. Never had he been so surefooted, able to run so fast without a bobble or a misstep. His body might have been one with the terrain, each step perfectly placed.

Dek paused at the base of a vertical tumble of black rock, the stone cloaked in a fine tracery of roots. A leap took him to the top of a fallen boulder, and dodging vines, he scampered his way up to the flat meadow above. There, on the black bedrock, he stopped short, scenting for danger, and used the air funneling into his lungs to expel excess body heat from the vents beside his tail. The sensation of air sucking through his mouth, compressing for oxygen, and jetting out behind him, filled him with exultation.