As usual, she stood tall and alert on watch. She did not feel unusually exposed on the crag. There was a ‘scape hatch and slide tunnel one step away on her left. A sensor atop the tunnel’s marker pole kept constant watch on her. She carried a gushburner and lasgun, but even more important, she knew her own reflexes. Conditioned by the harsh requirements of Pandora, she could match anything except a massed attack by the planet’s predators.

And the Nerve Runner invasion had been turned back.

Waela crouched then and stared down across the southern plain to the rim of hills. Without conscious volition, her gaze darted left, right; she stood and turned, repeated this procedure. It was all random, constant movement.

“Try to look everywhere at once.” That was the watchword.

Her yellow flaresuit was damp with perspiration. She was tall and slim and she knew this gave her an advantage here. On patrol, she walked tall. Other times, she pulled in her shoulders and tried to appear shorter. Men did not like taller women, a continually bothersome fact which amplified her constant concern over her unavoidable peculiarity: her skin changed color through a broad spectrum from blue to orange in response to her moods, a system not under conscious control. Right now, her exposed skin betrayed the pale pink of repressed fear. Her hair was black and cropped at the neck. Her eyes were brown and shaded in epicanthic folds, but she felt that she had a slender and attractive nose which complemented her broad chin and full lips.

“Waela, you’re some kind of chameleon throwback,” one of her friends had said. But he was dead now, drowned under the kelp.

She sighed.

“Rrrrrssss!”

She turned to the sound and, by reflex, gunned out two Flatwings, thin and multilegged ground racers about ten centimeters long. Poisonous things!

Alki was four diameters above the southern horizon now, sending long shadows northward and painting a red-purple glow across the distant sea to the west.

Waela liked this particular watch station for its view of the sea. It was the highest vantage connected to Colony. They called it simply “Peak.”

A line of hylighters drifted through the sky along the distant shoreline. Judging by their apparent size from this distance, they were giants. As with others among the Shipmen/Colonists, she had studied the native life carefully, making the usual comparisons against Shiprecords. The hylighters were, indeed, like giant airborne Portuguese men-of-war, great orange creatures born in the sea. Steadied by its long black tendrils, a hylighter could adjust the great membrane atop its buoyant bag and tack into the wind. They moved with a strange precision, usually in groups of twenty or more, and Waela found herself on the side of those who argued for some intelligence in these gentle creatures.

Hylighters were a nuisance, yes. They were buoyed by hydrogen and that, coupled with Pandora’s frequent electrical storms, made the creatures into lethal firebombs. In common with the ’lectrokelp, they were useless as food. Even to touch them produced weird mental effects—hysteria and even, sometimes, convulsions. Standing orders were to explode them at a distance when they approached Colony.