[Witches' Horses] Chevalier de Grammont
Title: Weather forecast: heavy snow
'Verse/characters: le Chevalier de Grammont; Grammont, Sinclair
Prompt: 49D "preservatives"
Word Count: 3342
Notes: *squints at index* *scowls* fuck it. After she gets a set of guns, well before they make the area too hot to hold them. (Yes, that's why they're building up a reputation at the beginning of Witches' Horses. And bitching about it the entire time.)
---------
There were times she resented not having hands. Not enough to risk becoming like the human-rider. But she resented not being able to follow her human to meetings like that afternoon's. She could squirm her way into every system big enough to register in her nets, listen with all her might for the sounds of a fight, for a militia mustering a raid on the local freetraders, for someone to say 'Where in God's name did he go?', but she couldn't follow his trail.
Not without risking a curious militia herself, asking why she'd left the stable she'd told them she was in, not declared her path, and was looming meaningfully over what should have been an abandoned building, anyway.
She grumbled a tiny crackle of lightning out of her nose, unable to roll herself over in discontent while stuck at the bottom of a planet's gravity well. Salty ice vaporised where the lightning hit, and she flicked the cloud towards an external intake before it could drift back down again as snow. She ate it, automatically examining the salts within the ice, but her mind was still on other things. Not least the thickening blanket of snow on her back, and the rapidly descending light levels.
She'd set down in the lee of an old breakwater, sheltered from prying eyes by the tumbled-down building on top of the breakwater. Her human had guessed it a lighthouse, once, from the map and the shipping lanes boats would have taken on the water. She would never had suspected; the idea of traveling across the surface of liquid ice was alien enough she hadn't even managed to mock him for taking a metal detector with him. With her so close, he hadn't needed it, but he'd taken one nonetheless, used it to confirm that there was enough twisted into the remains of the building to distort her shape on anyone's long-distance mirror.
He'd put up a few eyes for her within the ruins after that initial confirmation of the location's suitability. She'd tucked the list of alternates into long-term retrieval after they confirmed he could climb the breakwater as easily as they'd guessed from the map. No point in a good hiding spot if he couldn't get to her fast, or climb the breakwater at all.
He could; even bundled up in the same gear he wore to work on her in the black to protect him from the air's bite, he could scramble up the breakwater in less than two minutes, and be beyond her sensor net's immediate range within fifteen. She hadn't spotted him again until she'd heard his voice through the militia's gate-check systems, in the town. Three minutes of lies about his business, including who he planned to meet and where he'd come from, and half-mimed discomfort at having the eyepatch exposed while he spoke to the guard, and he'd been gone again.
She spat another curl of lightning, tasted calcium carbonate in the vapour that time, and focused a little more attention at what she'd hit. Her human was late returning from his meeting, she hadn't heard him anywhere since he'd disappeared into the town, and she was refusing to calculate her own actions if he was dead. Examining the small life forms clinging gamely to the breakwater would occupy a few cycles of her thoughts; ignoring the complaints from the temperature sensors in her outermost skin was not occupying more than a thread of her attention.
The species of barnacle she identified from records led her to reading about their feeding habits, from there to the tides, from there to the animals that she might have seen if they'd hidden here in a different season, and their feeding habits.
"Interesting," she muttered, by habit out loud, and startled when the vibration sent a trickle of loose snow down her sides. She snorted, considered cycling the gravity in her skin to properly shake herself free of the snow. The temperature sensors took the opportunity to complain again. After due consideration--the cold taste of snow at the back of her intakes among them--she decided against the idea and tamped down her sensors again. Her human would complain at length if he had to scramble over and past a moat of avalanched ice in order to reach her.
Which was funny up until he refused to get up in the middle of his night cycle to scratch an itch. He'd phrase it as if she couldn't be bothered to work to his convenience, he wouldn't be bothered to work to hers.
She wanted to roll, to circle the space and go seeking her tiny herd. There was a too-long gap between the gate-system and her nets, made longer by the weather. She'd lost four of the more distant systems as the daylight faded, including the university library. Fortunately she'd largely finished researching oceanic lifecycles by that point.
The gate-system buzzed, tickled at her internal sensors enough that she shivered, shaking loose more snow from her back. She poked at the machine, curious but a little idle. Her human would hardly send her a message via a human and a human-designed sensor net; if he was intelligent he'd found a place to rest for the night, and he'd be back with the daylight.
"--in this weather?" the gate-system caught, distorted by the weather and the distance, and her attention spiked.
"--dacha--friend," the system gave out briefly in a crackle of static that sounded like a colt crying for attention, and she kept listening mostly for the noise's sake. The other human's voice had been a stranger's, not hers.
"--directions. Don't worry, sir: we've got plenty of gear," the stranger added, thumping at something that made her pause, cycle the sound through internal playback three or four times, and then spit a bigger crackle of lightning at the snow-covered barnacles on the rocks. That noise was a hand meeting an insulated box, one big enough to contain a human, and there'd been no echoing metallic noise from within to confirm the human's claim of 'gear'.
"--if you insist," the gate-guard's doubtful voice replied, and she almost broke in. That inept human was allowing other humans to leave, in weather he was strongly concerned about, and he couldn't even be bothered to visually check over the 'gear' they claimed to be bringing with them? She ate an angry mouthful of snow, fed it into her internal heaters.
Engine noises echoed down the crackly connection, fading with distance. There would be a delay of at least twenty minutes before the machine hit the outer reaches of her personal sensor-net. Her human had covered the distance in more, but he'd been on foot and in good light, and far less snow. Even with the vehicle's advantage, the other humans could not know precisely where they were going, and she would not be neighing worriedly for her human to guide them in.
It was fifty minutes before her sensor net picked up a distant engine noise among the muffling snow, and faraway bouncing lights. She'd begun assigning probabilities that the humans had, in fact, been telling the truth, or that their destination was something not-her, or that they'd met trouble in the dark.
The alternate-destination probability dropped to miniscule as the lights came closer. The trajectory the vehicle drew on the map inside her was unmistakable, altered only by obstacles and quickly corrected. Quietly beginning to shift standby power into her lightnings' heart, she waited for the vehicle to come close enough to resolve into more than light and a moving shadow behind it.
She wanted to know who she was hitting, after all.
More minutes passed--she wished her human had put eyes on a few of the trees he'd passed on his way--before she could snap a clear image to enlarge. Vehicle, mound of as-yet unidentified equipment and organic-appearing coverings, single driver, no other passengers. Re-examining the recording of the gate-system's crackly exchange, she tentatively decided that the guard had exchanged words with two different men. Which gave her at least one missing human in the vehicle coming closer; the sound of the engine was audible through her skin's ears.
She quickly weighed another few probabilities, then overloaded a part of the sensor net until it burst in a flash of blue-white light. Snapping a succession of images to examine with another part of the net as the vehicle jerked aside in reaction, then corrected itself more slowly, the driver probably at least partially light-blinded from the flash and the reflection off the snow, she looked over her footage.
The coat, hood, and underlying protective gear were unfamiliar, too-big for the man wearing them, but the way he threw one arm up to block the light--and the telltale reflective flash of an eye covering--were much more familiar. The mound of organics behind the driver resolved into three bodies with the additional light from her net-piece, once she'd corrected the images for the reflection from the surrounding snow. One of the bodies was missing a coat and protective gear.
She did not like snow, she decided as she shrugged out of the mound of powdered ice covering her to the hocks, rolling herself partially sideways as she lifted to present her largest belly-hatch to the level of the ruined lighthouse. It dampened sensors, reduced system ranges, was heavy, and it was much more reflective than she'd anticipated.
The vehicle paused briefly, acceleration slowing as her human emerged onto the surface of the breakwater and found her waiting. Then he sped up again, bridging the half-meter gap between the rocks and the edge of her open belly with no more than a jar. She caught the vehicle with the coils in her belly, slewing it over to rest neatly in the center of her belly as she closed and locked the hatch.
"You're late," she said. He'd stopped pressing the accelerator as soon as her coils grabbed him, let her arrest all the momentum and put him where she pleased. Something like amusement curled through her as she kicked the heat up a notch to compensate for that lost while the hatch was open. He hadn't bothered slowing, either, trusting her to have him well in hand.
"Being locked in a cooler for five hours will have that effect," he agreed, hopping out of the vehicle without bothering with the door. "Especially once someone's taken half my cold-weather gear."
"You were in that 'gear'-box, then?" she asked as he dragged two men's bodies clear of the back seat and cargo compartment by their hoods.
"How did you--oh. Broke into the town's wall-patrol system? Of course you did. I was, yes. One of these days I'll be in real trouble if someone actually thinks to strip me of my clothes, not just my coat." He paused to heave the third, coatless body off the box, then ripped the lid off and extracted a fourth body, that one in much messier shape than the other three. "Or just my coat and my boots," he amended. "Someone thought of that one, once. Didn't help him, but he was more thorough about it than these idiots were."
Dropping the fourth body unceremoniously on top of one of the others, he jumped back out of the vehicle and knelt down beside one. Shoving his borrowed hood back off his head, he pulled off the sections covering his face and head, and yanked open the ties on the coat. He didn't bother to remove the gloves, and she lowered the heat in the space a little in response.
"They claimed they were going to trade me for a ride somewhere," he said conversationally as he put his hands in the dead man's clothes, searching through pockets. "Our contact list is out of date--the father had died of an illness, both his older sons went down in suspicious crashes within a week, and two distant cousins are battling it out for the remains of the household. These idiots," the inflection he poured over the word was more meaningful than half the Russian curses she'd overheard, "had backed one of the cousins that were closer to the center, and were trying to cut their losses and run. From the sound of things, us asking for a meeting was just an opportunity. Cooler didn't even have much of a lock on it--I just had to wait for them to be distracted long enough."
Which explained why he'd waited until the hole between the town and her sensor net, she thought, rapidly updating the list they'd used for the area. The news reports hadn't mentioned more than one of the events he'd just described--the locals must have been at pains to keep things quiet.
She whickered, pleased, as he began throwing the electronics he stripped from the bodies towards the wall, catching them carefully with altered gravity and nibbling at the machines. After a moment, she remembered to ask "Should I save these for you?"
"I'll have a look once I've slept," he replied, and she inched the electronics away from her mouths. No spare metals for her. Not yet, anyway. "I want to get the bodies taken care of before they begin to smell."
"I have an idea for that," she said, discarding the immediate desire for the treat awaiting her and supplanting it with a chance to fulfill curiousity.
"I think people would notice if you trampled them under your hooves," he told her dryly. "Even with the snow cover, lightning isn't very subtle."
"Crabs are much more subtle," she sniped, allowing her tone to shift to stung. She'd known not everything could be solved with lightning a long time ago.
"Crabs," he repeated flatly. "You want to make crabs eat them."
"The bodies have to go somewhere," she pointed out.
"You could eat them," he replied, humming the near-mechanical noise Martin had claimed humans called a growl. She'd asked.
"I don't want to," she said. "They look stringy."
" . . . 'stringy'," he echoed after a moment, staring at nothing, then sat back on his heels as he focused on the nearest of her eyes. "You're objecting on the grounds that they wouldn't be tasty?"
"I thought that would be a valid concern to a human," she replied tartly, projecting an arms-crossed woman onto the mirror in his line of sight. "Or do you not care about the quality of your caloric intake?"
He turned his head slightly to put the mirror in better view, but kept his eyes directed towards hers. "I don't hide the aftermath of a fight in a smørrebrød!"
"What's a smørrebrød?" she asked, playing back the word with the timbre shifted upwards to better match hers. The mirror-image tilted its head, miming curiousity.
"At fancy gatherings, a kind of zakushi. Why do you want to throw them in the water? Bodies float, nag."
"Not if you weigh them down, human," she shot back. "Go fetch some of the smaller stones from the lighthouse while I build nets."
"Why should I do that when you can just eat them?"
She thought of seven responses, but they all tangled in the speaker and emerged as a long buzz of coltish static until she shut it down entirely. Shut the mirror down too, the woman's face twisted into a scowl echoing as a faint afterimage. " . . Because I asked you to," she said eventually. He might respond to 'I was worried about you', but there was nothing either of them could do to change the circumstances that would leave her worrying. Useless to voice the words.
After a long, tense moment, he rose slowly to his feet, biting off a pained groan. "Give me a sledge, nag. I'm not carrying a stone at a time until you tell me there's enough."
The mid-sized sledge he used to shift cargo around on better days silently fell out of its storage slot on the wall, clicking on with a hum of internal gravity coils and swishing forward to nose at his hand. He groped for a moment for the lead, then dragged the obedient sledge to the smaller hatch, where it sat waiting while he reassembled his protective coverings.
She left the hatch on manual control, most of her concentration shifted into producing a polymer net that would serve her purposes. It had to be strong enough to hold, but not so strong it wouldn't allow her crustaceans to work beyond it. The hatch cycled open, then closed as she considered, eventually deciding that a coating that was activated by contact with seawater but would thin over a period of time would work. Especially if she added a component that would increase the rate of decomposition dramatically on contact with air.
By the time the hatch cycled again, she'd spat the first of the nets onto the floor, and was trying to work it over the coatless body without letting go of the vehicle.
A sound that it took her several seconds to identify as a laugh--long enough he'd stopped by the time she was sure it was a variation on the theme--echoed through the room. "That will go faster with hands."
"An annoying large number of things do," she muttered, surrendering the net to his waiting hand. "The loops are a pull-and-twist, like the cargo nets--" done deliberately so he wouldn't have to tie many knots to satisfy her whim "--for the weights, and the long ties are to close the net."
He tugged experimentally on one of the longer ties as he flipped the bundle over, tied the net closed, and began putting the rocks he'd gathered into the loops. "What?"
"I'll put the chemistry up on the big mirror after you've slept," she interrupted. "It's kind of interesting."
"Coats on or coat off?" he asked instead as he attached the last rock and stepped back so she could levitate the body onto one end of the sledge.
"Coats off--they won't degrade in the water," she replied. "Might as well be made of preservatives. And I might be able to cut them up to make you a better spare set."
"Worth trying," he agreed, and went to work on the second body. She, in her turn, eased herself away from the breakwater and out over the surface of the bay. Staying low meant the sensors on her belly were protesting about the nearness of the liquid ice, but it also meant she'd be difficult to pick up on a mirror. They'd come in that way, and there was no indication they'd been spotted then, and every indication that the still-falling snow would blur mirror-resolution further.
On the fourth net--the one for the messiest body--she attached a spare eye in one of the sets of loops for weights. It wouldn't degrade, and she'd never get it back, but she really wanted to see the process. She'd read the descriptions of the consumption of dead marine mammals; it stood to reason a human would be similar.
Her human gave her nearest eye a look when he noticed the spare, but didn't comment. He staggered a little as he rose for that one, and she hurried the process of getting the body onto the sledge, dislodging one of the spare rocks in the process.
Glancing down to identify the clunk of stone meeting metal, he obviously considered and then discarded the idea of kneeling down to fetch it back. "We over the water?" he asked instead, and she opened the big hatch for answer.
An unceremonious five minutes got the bodies into the water with splashes, and the sledge back where it belonged. Her human looked at the vehicle, then shook his head. "After I've slept," he muttered.
"Sleep well," she replied, opening the door closest to his sleeping quarters. "I'll get us back to the stable."
"Waste of a day," he said.
"Not entirely--I researched oceanic life cycles," she said, and recorded the sound of his exhausted laughter all the way up the hall.
'Verse/characters: le Chevalier de Grammont; Grammont, Sinclair
Prompt: 49D "preservatives"
Word Count: 3342
Notes: *squints at index* *scowls* fuck it. After she gets a set of guns, well before they make the area too hot to hold them. (Yes, that's why they're building up a reputation at the beginning of Witches' Horses. And bitching about it the entire time.)
---------
There were times she resented not having hands. Not enough to risk becoming like the human-rider. But she resented not being able to follow her human to meetings like that afternoon's. She could squirm her way into every system big enough to register in her nets, listen with all her might for the sounds of a fight, for a militia mustering a raid on the local freetraders, for someone to say 'Where in God's name did he go?', but she couldn't follow his trail.
Not without risking a curious militia herself, asking why she'd left the stable she'd told them she was in, not declared her path, and was looming meaningfully over what should have been an abandoned building, anyway.
She grumbled a tiny crackle of lightning out of her nose, unable to roll herself over in discontent while stuck at the bottom of a planet's gravity well. Salty ice vaporised where the lightning hit, and she flicked the cloud towards an external intake before it could drift back down again as snow. She ate it, automatically examining the salts within the ice, but her mind was still on other things. Not least the thickening blanket of snow on her back, and the rapidly descending light levels.
She'd set down in the lee of an old breakwater, sheltered from prying eyes by the tumbled-down building on top of the breakwater. Her human had guessed it a lighthouse, once, from the map and the shipping lanes boats would have taken on the water. She would never had suspected; the idea of traveling across the surface of liquid ice was alien enough she hadn't even managed to mock him for taking a metal detector with him. With her so close, he hadn't needed it, but he'd taken one nonetheless, used it to confirm that there was enough twisted into the remains of the building to distort her shape on anyone's long-distance mirror.
He'd put up a few eyes for her within the ruins after that initial confirmation of the location's suitability. She'd tucked the list of alternates into long-term retrieval after they confirmed he could climb the breakwater as easily as they'd guessed from the map. No point in a good hiding spot if he couldn't get to her fast, or climb the breakwater at all.
He could; even bundled up in the same gear he wore to work on her in the black to protect him from the air's bite, he could scramble up the breakwater in less than two minutes, and be beyond her sensor net's immediate range within fifteen. She hadn't spotted him again until she'd heard his voice through the militia's gate-check systems, in the town. Three minutes of lies about his business, including who he planned to meet and where he'd come from, and half-mimed discomfort at having the eyepatch exposed while he spoke to the guard, and he'd been gone again.
She spat another curl of lightning, tasted calcium carbonate in the vapour that time, and focused a little more attention at what she'd hit. Her human was late returning from his meeting, she hadn't heard him anywhere since he'd disappeared into the town, and she was refusing to calculate her own actions if he was dead. Examining the small life forms clinging gamely to the breakwater would occupy a few cycles of her thoughts; ignoring the complaints from the temperature sensors in her outermost skin was not occupying more than a thread of her attention.
The species of barnacle she identified from records led her to reading about their feeding habits, from there to the tides, from there to the animals that she might have seen if they'd hidden here in a different season, and their feeding habits.
"Interesting," she muttered, by habit out loud, and startled when the vibration sent a trickle of loose snow down her sides. She snorted, considered cycling the gravity in her skin to properly shake herself free of the snow. The temperature sensors took the opportunity to complain again. After due consideration--the cold taste of snow at the back of her intakes among them--she decided against the idea and tamped down her sensors again. Her human would complain at length if he had to scramble over and past a moat of avalanched ice in order to reach her.
Which was funny up until he refused to get up in the middle of his night cycle to scratch an itch. He'd phrase it as if she couldn't be bothered to work to his convenience, he wouldn't be bothered to work to hers.
She wanted to roll, to circle the space and go seeking her tiny herd. There was a too-long gap between the gate-system and her nets, made longer by the weather. She'd lost four of the more distant systems as the daylight faded, including the university library. Fortunately she'd largely finished researching oceanic lifecycles by that point.
The gate-system buzzed, tickled at her internal sensors enough that she shivered, shaking loose more snow from her back. She poked at the machine, curious but a little idle. Her human would hardly send her a message via a human and a human-designed sensor net; if he was intelligent he'd found a place to rest for the night, and he'd be back with the daylight.
"--in this weather?" the gate-system caught, distorted by the weather and the distance, and her attention spiked.
"--dacha--friend," the system gave out briefly in a crackle of static that sounded like a colt crying for attention, and she kept listening mostly for the noise's sake. The other human's voice had been a stranger's, not hers.
"--directions. Don't worry, sir: we've got plenty of gear," the stranger added, thumping at something that made her pause, cycle the sound through internal playback three or four times, and then spit a bigger crackle of lightning at the snow-covered barnacles on the rocks. That noise was a hand meeting an insulated box, one big enough to contain a human, and there'd been no echoing metallic noise from within to confirm the human's claim of 'gear'.
"--if you insist," the gate-guard's doubtful voice replied, and she almost broke in. That inept human was allowing other humans to leave, in weather he was strongly concerned about, and he couldn't even be bothered to visually check over the 'gear' they claimed to be bringing with them? She ate an angry mouthful of snow, fed it into her internal heaters.
Engine noises echoed down the crackly connection, fading with distance. There would be a delay of at least twenty minutes before the machine hit the outer reaches of her personal sensor-net. Her human had covered the distance in more, but he'd been on foot and in good light, and far less snow. Even with the vehicle's advantage, the other humans could not know precisely where they were going, and she would not be neighing worriedly for her human to guide them in.
It was fifty minutes before her sensor net picked up a distant engine noise among the muffling snow, and faraway bouncing lights. She'd begun assigning probabilities that the humans had, in fact, been telling the truth, or that their destination was something not-her, or that they'd met trouble in the dark.
The alternate-destination probability dropped to miniscule as the lights came closer. The trajectory the vehicle drew on the map inside her was unmistakable, altered only by obstacles and quickly corrected. Quietly beginning to shift standby power into her lightnings' heart, she waited for the vehicle to come close enough to resolve into more than light and a moving shadow behind it.
She wanted to know who she was hitting, after all.
More minutes passed--she wished her human had put eyes on a few of the trees he'd passed on his way--before she could snap a clear image to enlarge. Vehicle, mound of as-yet unidentified equipment and organic-appearing coverings, single driver, no other passengers. Re-examining the recording of the gate-system's crackly exchange, she tentatively decided that the guard had exchanged words with two different men. Which gave her at least one missing human in the vehicle coming closer; the sound of the engine was audible through her skin's ears.
She quickly weighed another few probabilities, then overloaded a part of the sensor net until it burst in a flash of blue-white light. Snapping a succession of images to examine with another part of the net as the vehicle jerked aside in reaction, then corrected itself more slowly, the driver probably at least partially light-blinded from the flash and the reflection off the snow, she looked over her footage.
The coat, hood, and underlying protective gear were unfamiliar, too-big for the man wearing them, but the way he threw one arm up to block the light--and the telltale reflective flash of an eye covering--were much more familiar. The mound of organics behind the driver resolved into three bodies with the additional light from her net-piece, once she'd corrected the images for the reflection from the surrounding snow. One of the bodies was missing a coat and protective gear.
She did not like snow, she decided as she shrugged out of the mound of powdered ice covering her to the hocks, rolling herself partially sideways as she lifted to present her largest belly-hatch to the level of the ruined lighthouse. It dampened sensors, reduced system ranges, was heavy, and it was much more reflective than she'd anticipated.
The vehicle paused briefly, acceleration slowing as her human emerged onto the surface of the breakwater and found her waiting. Then he sped up again, bridging the half-meter gap between the rocks and the edge of her open belly with no more than a jar. She caught the vehicle with the coils in her belly, slewing it over to rest neatly in the center of her belly as she closed and locked the hatch.
"You're late," she said. He'd stopped pressing the accelerator as soon as her coils grabbed him, let her arrest all the momentum and put him where she pleased. Something like amusement curled through her as she kicked the heat up a notch to compensate for that lost while the hatch was open. He hadn't bothered slowing, either, trusting her to have him well in hand.
"Being locked in a cooler for five hours will have that effect," he agreed, hopping out of the vehicle without bothering with the door. "Especially once someone's taken half my cold-weather gear."
"You were in that 'gear'-box, then?" she asked as he dragged two men's bodies clear of the back seat and cargo compartment by their hoods.
"How did you--oh. Broke into the town's wall-patrol system? Of course you did. I was, yes. One of these days I'll be in real trouble if someone actually thinks to strip me of my clothes, not just my coat." He paused to heave the third, coatless body off the box, then ripped the lid off and extracted a fourth body, that one in much messier shape than the other three. "Or just my coat and my boots," he amended. "Someone thought of that one, once. Didn't help him, but he was more thorough about it than these idiots were."
Dropping the fourth body unceremoniously on top of one of the others, he jumped back out of the vehicle and knelt down beside one. Shoving his borrowed hood back off his head, he pulled off the sections covering his face and head, and yanked open the ties on the coat. He didn't bother to remove the gloves, and she lowered the heat in the space a little in response.
"They claimed they were going to trade me for a ride somewhere," he said conversationally as he put his hands in the dead man's clothes, searching through pockets. "Our contact list is out of date--the father had died of an illness, both his older sons went down in suspicious crashes within a week, and two distant cousins are battling it out for the remains of the household. These idiots," the inflection he poured over the word was more meaningful than half the Russian curses she'd overheard, "had backed one of the cousins that were closer to the center, and were trying to cut their losses and run. From the sound of things, us asking for a meeting was just an opportunity. Cooler didn't even have much of a lock on it--I just had to wait for them to be distracted long enough."
Which explained why he'd waited until the hole between the town and her sensor net, she thought, rapidly updating the list they'd used for the area. The news reports hadn't mentioned more than one of the events he'd just described--the locals must have been at pains to keep things quiet.
She whickered, pleased, as he began throwing the electronics he stripped from the bodies towards the wall, catching them carefully with altered gravity and nibbling at the machines. After a moment, she remembered to ask "Should I save these for you?"
"I'll have a look once I've slept," he replied, and she inched the electronics away from her mouths. No spare metals for her. Not yet, anyway. "I want to get the bodies taken care of before they begin to smell."
"I have an idea for that," she said, discarding the immediate desire for the treat awaiting her and supplanting it with a chance to fulfill curiousity.
"I think people would notice if you trampled them under your hooves," he told her dryly. "Even with the snow cover, lightning isn't very subtle."
"Crabs are much more subtle," she sniped, allowing her tone to shift to stung. She'd known not everything could be solved with lightning a long time ago.
"Crabs," he repeated flatly. "You want to make crabs eat them."
"The bodies have to go somewhere," she pointed out.
"You could eat them," he replied, humming the near-mechanical noise Martin had claimed humans called a growl. She'd asked.
"I don't want to," she said. "They look stringy."
" . . . 'stringy'," he echoed after a moment, staring at nothing, then sat back on his heels as he focused on the nearest of her eyes. "You're objecting on the grounds that they wouldn't be tasty?"
"I thought that would be a valid concern to a human," she replied tartly, projecting an arms-crossed woman onto the mirror in his line of sight. "Or do you not care about the quality of your caloric intake?"
He turned his head slightly to put the mirror in better view, but kept his eyes directed towards hers. "I don't hide the aftermath of a fight in a smørrebrød!"
"What's a smørrebrød?" she asked, playing back the word with the timbre shifted upwards to better match hers. The mirror-image tilted its head, miming curiousity.
"At fancy gatherings, a kind of zakushi. Why do you want to throw them in the water? Bodies float, nag."
"Not if you weigh them down, human," she shot back. "Go fetch some of the smaller stones from the lighthouse while I build nets."
"Why should I do that when you can just eat them?"
She thought of seven responses, but they all tangled in the speaker and emerged as a long buzz of coltish static until she shut it down entirely. Shut the mirror down too, the woman's face twisted into a scowl echoing as a faint afterimage. " . . Because I asked you to," she said eventually. He might respond to 'I was worried about you', but there was nothing either of them could do to change the circumstances that would leave her worrying. Useless to voice the words.
After a long, tense moment, he rose slowly to his feet, biting off a pained groan. "Give me a sledge, nag. I'm not carrying a stone at a time until you tell me there's enough."
The mid-sized sledge he used to shift cargo around on better days silently fell out of its storage slot on the wall, clicking on with a hum of internal gravity coils and swishing forward to nose at his hand. He groped for a moment for the lead, then dragged the obedient sledge to the smaller hatch, where it sat waiting while he reassembled his protective coverings.
She left the hatch on manual control, most of her concentration shifted into producing a polymer net that would serve her purposes. It had to be strong enough to hold, but not so strong it wouldn't allow her crustaceans to work beyond it. The hatch cycled open, then closed as she considered, eventually deciding that a coating that was activated by contact with seawater but would thin over a period of time would work. Especially if she added a component that would increase the rate of decomposition dramatically on contact with air.
By the time the hatch cycled again, she'd spat the first of the nets onto the floor, and was trying to work it over the coatless body without letting go of the vehicle.
A sound that it took her several seconds to identify as a laugh--long enough he'd stopped by the time she was sure it was a variation on the theme--echoed through the room. "That will go faster with hands."
"An annoying large number of things do," she muttered, surrendering the net to his waiting hand. "The loops are a pull-and-twist, like the cargo nets--" done deliberately so he wouldn't have to tie many knots to satisfy her whim "--for the weights, and the long ties are to close the net."
He tugged experimentally on one of the longer ties as he flipped the bundle over, tied the net closed, and began putting the rocks he'd gathered into the loops. "What?"
"I'll put the chemistry up on the big mirror after you've slept," she interrupted. "It's kind of interesting."
"Coats on or coat off?" he asked instead as he attached the last rock and stepped back so she could levitate the body onto one end of the sledge.
"Coats off--they won't degrade in the water," she replied. "Might as well be made of preservatives. And I might be able to cut them up to make you a better spare set."
"Worth trying," he agreed, and went to work on the second body. She, in her turn, eased herself away from the breakwater and out over the surface of the bay. Staying low meant the sensors on her belly were protesting about the nearness of the liquid ice, but it also meant she'd be difficult to pick up on a mirror. They'd come in that way, and there was no indication they'd been spotted then, and every indication that the still-falling snow would blur mirror-resolution further.
On the fourth net--the one for the messiest body--she attached a spare eye in one of the sets of loops for weights. It wouldn't degrade, and she'd never get it back, but she really wanted to see the process. She'd read the descriptions of the consumption of dead marine mammals; it stood to reason a human would be similar.
Her human gave her nearest eye a look when he noticed the spare, but didn't comment. He staggered a little as he rose for that one, and she hurried the process of getting the body onto the sledge, dislodging one of the spare rocks in the process.
Glancing down to identify the clunk of stone meeting metal, he obviously considered and then discarded the idea of kneeling down to fetch it back. "We over the water?" he asked instead, and she opened the big hatch for answer.
An unceremonious five minutes got the bodies into the water with splashes, and the sledge back where it belonged. Her human looked at the vehicle, then shook his head. "After I've slept," he muttered.
"Sleep well," she replied, opening the door closest to his sleeping quarters. "I'll get us back to the stable."
"Waste of a day," he said.
"Not entirely--I researched oceanic life cycles," she said, and recorded the sound of his exhausted laughter all the way up the hall.