THE PREACHERS DAUGHTER

ry 19, 9570

n the corner of my eye," Eliana whispered back. "So fast!" "What shape?" Eliana sighed. "Indistinct." "Huh?" "I'm not sure it had clear edges. It was very hard to tell." "No edges? How can that be?" Basel frowned. "Well, what about color?" "Assume fantastic camouflage, chromatophors beyond anything ever imagined, even for an octopus. I think I saw it flow over a dark rock surrounded by snow, and it moved a dark image of the rock across its body as it came towards us. Unbelievably good camouflage Basel, the brain processing power needed for such a feat is staggering. It was orienting its camouflage to my line of perspective, a fantastic feat to do in real time!" Basel sounded unconvinced. "And you say it flowed?" "Yes." "Could it have been a real liquid? Somehow a reservoir of melted snow bursting?" "What?! No, of course not! Basel, this thing was alive, acting with intelligence. It darted from behind one tree to behind another!" "But you say it's a liquid?" "No, just that it flowed like one! Basel, it was flowing out of the gully on your left to attack us! It was flowing uphill!" "Ah..." The sun set as expected at 7:12 AM Universal Capital Time. They spent the next hour scanning in silence. They saw nothing in the deepening twilight, except for the occasional flicker of the Northern Lights. "An hour after sunset Commander," Basel said quietly. Eliana sighed as she continued her scan. "I'd like to keep this up for another hour before we turn the job over to the automatic scanners. I'm expecting to see something very soon. Focus where our tracks enter the clearing." She was referring to a point about 300 meters away. Five minutes later... "Mark! Twenty meters north of the tracks! Did you see it Basel?!" "That flicker Commander? Yes. It wasn't much." "Replay the sequence and focus on the UV spectrum." Basel complied and said a moment later, "Yes, much brighter in the UV. Very fast." Eliana. "Oh yeah. When it hit the clearing, it realized it was about to make a big mistake. Very quick response time. I'm estimating it covered 59 kilometers in 105 minutes." "Thirty-two kilometers per hour," commented Basel, "on par with the world's fastest human." Eliana gave a mirthless laugh. "Well,