“Not really.” Archimedes glanced at Diana and smiled ruefully. “But my, uh, stock is down. I think that’s how you say it.”
“Don’t worry about it, Archimedes. You’re still the best damned weapon-maker in, well, anywhere. If you need to distance yourself from me for a while, that’s fine. But either way, Marvin and I will continue to look for the hippogriffs.”
Archimedes nodded. His cub toddled up and dropped into his lap. Head-first.
*
“Well, that explains it,” Marvin said. “I stopped at the shoreline and I shouldn’t have. The things seem to be centered on a rookery out on this island…” Marvin pointed to a large island a kilometer or two offshore. Obviously volcanic in origin, it was steep, deeply folded, and very probably had a lot of lava tubes that would make perfect homes for large flying things.
“How many of them are there?”
“Can’t tell for sure.” Marvin shrugged. “They’re always coming and going during the day, but unless I start tagging them, I don’t know how many nests or dens or whatever are in those caves. But certainly scores of adults, at minimum.”
I frowned. “That’s a significant population of predators. So what do they eat when they can’t get Deltan?”
Marvin waved up a picture. “Seals. Well, seal-equivalents. Or maybe closer to walruses. They seem to fill the same niche. They spend most of their down-time basking on the beach, and they hunt in the water. They’re a little more mobile than seals or sealions, but still basically sitting ducks on land. Although I’d imagine they could do some damage with those tusks.”
I stared at the picture for a few milliseconds, rubbing my chin. I turned to the globe and expanded it until it showed just the island and the Deltans’ past and current range. “So the hippogriffs discovered the Deltans, who were probably easier prey, chased them out of their original territory…”
Marvin continued the thought. “Then eventually caught up with them after they moved into gorilloid territory. The Deltans could handle the gorilloids, with flint weapons to help, but they couldn’t handle both predators. They retreated over the mountain range…”
“…which put them out of range of the hippogriffs, but lost them the flint resource. Without that, they couldn’t quite hold their own against the gorilloids,” I finished.
“And then we, and by we I mean you, led them back to the flint site. Where they are, once again, on the menu.” Marvin gazed at me with one eyebrow raised. “So what now?”
I sat down, called up coffee, and leaned back in thought. “I think we can agree that just doing nothing is off the table?” Marvin nodded and I continued, “Likewise, asking the Deltans to move again is probably a non-starter. I doubt they’d do it even if I had a good, safe destination in mind.”
“Plus, the flint site really is their best long-term bet, generally speaking.”
[Approaching predator detected]
We both looked up at Guppy’s announcement. We’d used all available drones to set up a tighter perimeter around Camelot, and set them to looking specifically for anything large and airborne. It appeared we had a bite.
I pulled up the video that Guppy offered. The hippogriff was hard to make out. On a clear day, it would have been almost impossible to see, the blue of its hide matched the sky so well. But today there were too many scattered clouds for the animal to camouflage itself from all angles. It was heading directly for Camelot. There was no doubt in my mind of its intentions. And this was almost certainly the one that had taken the Deltan two weeks ago.
“Right, let’s busterize it.” I called up a buster and set it to full acceleration. It shot towards the hippogriff.
At the very last moment, though, the hippogriff dodged the bullet. Literally. The thing’s speed and aerial agility was unbelievable.
We both stared for a few milliseconds, then I called up more busters.
“Don’t overdo it,” Marvin cautioned. “Let’s find out what the animal is capable of. We know we can get it if we throw enough busters at it. Let’s find out what ‘enough’ means.”
I nodded at him, and ordered most of my second wave to stand down. Instead, I sent in two busters in the fore/aft formation that Riker had used so successfully in the Battle of Sol.
Again, the hippogriff dodged the first buster. The speed of the animal was really impressive. But it was unable to correct for the second one. The splat created a cloud of fine red mist, which settled slowly to the forest below.
“I didn’t like that,” Marvin said. “We got it with the second one, but it was close. I think if we want to take them out dependably, we should go with an encirclement using three or more busters.”
“The question is whether this was a one-off or whether they fly some kind of patrol pattern. Maybe there won’t be any more coming this way.”
Marvin didn’t look convinced. “Predators almost always have a patrol pattern of some kind, if only to protect their territory from competitors. I doubt we’ve seen the last of them.”
*
It took less than a day to prove Marvin right.
[Multiple incoming detected]
Oh, God, this just keeps getting worse. I pulled up the window and leaned forward. It was hard to tell from the returns, but it looked like about a dozen hippogriffs, give or take a few, were bearing down on Camelot.
“What the hell?” Marvin said, popping in. “What’s attracting them?”
“Just a guess, but I’d say the blood in the air yesterday from the busterized hippogriff. I’m sure a predator would be able to smell the spoor for miles. Maybe it draws them like sharks.”
“Oh for— okay, a dozen of them will require thirty-six busters. We don’t have that available.”
“We’re going to have to wing it, Marv. They’re in a fairly tight group. Maybe we can thin them out some of the first pass.”
Marvin nodded, and we called up the twenty busters that we had available. I ordered Guppy to fly in reinforcements from orbit, and we set the ones we had on a direct line of attack with maximum acceleration. By the time they neared the flock of hippogriffs, they were doing about Mach 1.5.
The first pass took about five hippogriffs, and allowed us to see that there had been fourteen total. Now, we had fifteen busters left for nine attackers. There was a good possibility one or two might reach Camelot.
While the busters were coming around for another pass, I activated one of the drones in Camelot. I flew towards the first recognizable face I saw, which was Arnold.
Everyone was looking in the direction of the sonic booms, staring at the red clouds that had appeared. I shouted at Arnold, “Hippogriffs coming. Get everyone under cover!”