Yoshimura swallowed hard as the video showed the three-bladed predator launch itself out of a curling breaker. “Nothing hunts like this. Except maybe the crocodile, and it doesn’t race inland this far, let alone this fast.”

Kalico froze the frame just shy of the scimitar-like blades slicing together around Shinwua. “Nothing, Dr. Yoshimura? This thing does. People, we have to rethink predation. It’s not in our mental framework to be hunted from the water. And this sure as hell is not a crocodile. More to the point, it figured out that the UUV wasn’t edible, backed off, and watched us. This is a guess on my part, but I’m willing to bet that it knew the seatruck wasn’t alive. Curious, it waited until we got out. Having never seen a human, it still recognized us as prey. It bided its time until Dr. Shinwua was far enough from safety to make it’s charge.”

Thinking of the kids, she skipped the actual attack, stopped the recording where the beast was sideways, Shinwua’s body mostly hidden from view. “Here’s what the creature looks like. A riot of color, which is pretty normal for Donovan. Trilateral symmetry. What you would call the dorsal fins are flattened on the top of the body, and the two rows of ventral fins—if that term still applies—are perfectly adapted for terrestrial locomotion.”

“And notice the musculature at the mandibles.” Yoshimura forced dispassion into his voice, walking over to point at the scimitar’s head. “These bulges lateral from the mandibular articulation pivot to provide the kind of biomechanical advantage that could cut through the UUVs plastic.”

He glanced at Kalico. “Supervisor, is there any land-based form analogous to this?”

“Not that we’ve seen so far. But Donovan is a big world. We’ve barely scratched the surface when it comes to biology. There are whole continents where we’ve barely set foot. Entire ecosystems that are unexplored. When it comes to the seas, we only knew about the jellyfish because one of the survey ships way back in the beginning scooped one up in a water sample. Even then, as today shows, we’ve completely misinterpreted how the organism lived based on a terrestrial bias.”

“What if there are more of these things?” Michaela asked, pointing at the scimitar. “Maybe even bigger ones?”

Kalico hitched her butt up onto the table. “Count on it, Director. The notion that we encountered the craftiest, largest, and only one of these things swimming around in the sea is statistically inconsistent with reality.”

“But you shot it,” Lara Sanz’s voice was almost a protest. “Why didn’t it die?”