Traders Risk | Page 5

not stand for long against the sort of brute the owls had shown him, and there was no sort of weapon at hand. They couldn't even run.
"There's something outside," Jennifer said in a small voice.
Her voice seemed to trigger the attack.
* * * * *
The Zid lunged against the door with a force that cracked the wooden hurricane bolt across and opened a three-inch slit between leading edge and lintel. Jeff had a glimpse of slanted red eyes and white-fanged snout before reflex sent him headlong to shoulder the door shut again.
"The bunk," he panted at Jennifer. "Shove it over."
Between them, they wedged the bunk against the door and held it in place. Then they stood looking palely at each other and waiting for the next attack.
It came from a different quarter--the wide double windows that overlooked the bay. The Zid, rearing upright, smashed away the flimsy rattan blinds with a taloned seizing-hand and looked redly in at them.
Like a man in a dream, Jeff caught up his communicator from the table and hurled it. The Zid caught it deftly, sank glistening teeth into the unit and demolished it with a single snap.
Crushed, the rig's powerful little battery discharged with a muffled sputtering and flashing of sparks. The Zid howled piercingly and dropped away from the window.
That gave Jeff time enough to reach the storm shutters and secure them--only to rush again with Jennifer to their bunk barricade as the Zid promptly renewed its ferocious attack on the door.
He flinched when Jennifer, to be heard above the Zid's ragings, shouted in his ear: "My Scoop should have the Queen afloat by now. Can we reach her?"
"Scoop?" The Zid's avid cries discouraged curiosity before it was well born. "We'd never make it. We couldn't possibly outrun that beast."
The Zid crashed against the door and drove it inches ajar, driving back their barricade. One taloned paw slid in and slashed viciously at random. Jeff ducked and strained his weight against the bunk, momentarily pinning the Zid's threshing forelimb.
Chafi Three chose that moment to reappear, nearly causing Jeff to let go the bunk and admit the Zid.
"Your female's suggestion is right," the Ciriimian croaked. "The Zid does not swim. Four and I are arranging escape on that premise."
The Zid's talons ripped through the door, leaving parallel rows of splintered breaks. Both slanted red eyes glared in briefly.
"Then you'd damn well better hurry," Jeff panted. The door, he estimated, might--or might not--hold for two minutes more.
The Ciriimian vanished. There was a slithering sound in the distance that sounded like a mountain in motion, and with it a stertorous grunting that all but drowned out the Zid's cries. Something nudged the cottage with a force that all but knocked it flat.
"My Scoop!" Jennifer exclaimed. She let go the barricade and ran to the window to throw open the storm shutters. "Never mind the door. This way, quick!"
* * * * *
She scrambled to the window sill and jumped. Numbly, Jeff saw her suspended there, feet only inches below the sill, apparently on empty air. Then the door sagged again under the Zid's lungings and he left the bunk to follow Jennifer.
He landed on something tough and warm and slippery, a monstrous tail fluke that stretched down the beach to merge into a flat purplish acreage of back, forested with endless rows of fins and spines and enigmatic tendrils. The Scoop, he saw, and only half believed it, had wallowed into the shallows alongside his dock. It had reversed its unbelievable length to keep the head submerged, and at the same time had backed out of the water until its leviathan tail spanned the hundred-odd yards of sloping beach from surf to cabin.
Just ahead of him, Jennifer caught an erect fin-spine and clung with both arms. "Hang on! We're going--"
The Scoop contracted itself with a suddenness that yanked them yards from the cottage and all but dislodged Jeff. Beyond the surf, the shallows boiled whitely where the Scoop fought for traction to draw its grounded bulk into the water.
Jeff looked back once to see the Zid close the distance between and spring upward to the tail fluke behind him. He had an instant conviction that the brute's second spring would see him torn to bits, but the Scoop at the moment found water deep enough to move in earnest. The Zid could only sink in all six taloned limbs and hold fast.
The hundred-odd yards from cabin to beach passed in a blur of speed. The Scoop reached deeper water and submerged, throwing a mountainous billow that sent the Island Queen reeling and all but foundered her.
Jeff was dislodged instantly and sank like a stone.
He came up, spouting water and fighting for breath, to find himself a perilous twenty feet from the Zid. The Zid, utterly out