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But not Abby Bullitt. She'd dismounted and stood in front of their animal now, hands clasped. "He's beautiful. He's beautiful," she repeated over and over, looking up at his great head towering above her.
Colin looked away from the light in her eyes. She looked hypnotized.
And now Colin felt his animal move. The biding eyes were looking down at Abby Bullitt, and slowly, magnificently, the great wings spread. Spread in a movement Colin had never seen before. Spread upward and outward until they seemed to blot out the whole of the morning's sun.
"Oh," the woman gasped. "Oh, I must ride him."
"No," Colin said. Something was going on here that he didn't understand and his feeling of uneasiness was deep. ' 'No, he's never been ridden before. Never even mounted."
But Abby Bullitt had her hand on the bridle. "Let go," she said. "I must ride him."
"No," Colin said and then his hand was bloody where she'd cut it with her riding crop and snatched away the bridle.
She flung herself onto the animal's shoulders, into the hollow between the high-carried wings, her sharp spurs gouging.
It screamed and it ran. On its hind legs as Colin had so often seen it do, its grafted front ones tucked in, birdtike, and then it was in flight. Again it screamed and now Abby Bullitt's voice was blended in the sound. Was it delight… or terror? Colin could not tell. The mount and ils rider climbed higher. The screams were fainter now, but the terror in Abby Bullitt's was plain.
Toward the nver and the tall cliffs beyond it the animal flew.
And then it and the screaming were gone. But, airborne, it had been seen and heard, and now the crowd was gathering.
On the rim of Colin's consciousness the voice of Ed was shouting.
"Now don't worry. We know exactly where they are. The transmitters, the police can home in on the data transmitters…"
But Colin wasn't really hearing him. Colin was staring at his jerry-rigged monitoring screen. The pattern of light darting and swirling across its face was a strange one for this particular animal, but one not strange at all to Colin. He'd seen it before, many times, constantly almost, with Ato's Pride, and he recognized it now with a growing horror.
Somewhere, greedily, slaveringly, the Bullitt beast was at long last feeding.
Hunched, wrapped in blankets, holding steaming mugs, Colin and Ed, in the cockpit of the patrol boat that had pulled them out of the river. Ed still shaking his head.
"It went for us. Did you see how it went for us?"
Colin didn't answer him, knowing that Ed wasn't looking for him to. Remembering the two of them in the police copter, with the pilot and the man with the heavy carbine.
Tracking their animal, homing in on the emitting signals of its data transmitters until, on the rocky face of the cliffs, halfway up, they caught the glint of the sun on its gold-green skin.
"There!" Ed shouted, pointing, and the copter hovered close.
Crouched it was, on the jutting shelf. The great wings half unfurled, opening, closing, twitching,
"Do you think she's still alive?" the man with the carbine said, then, "Forget it."
It rose to meet them. Hurling itself at them with a ferocity that brought to Colin's mind the vivid image of its dog-sized predecessor.
"Move!" the man with the carbine was shouting at the copter pilot. "Swing this thing around! Give me a clear shot!"
But the pilot had already swung his craft. Hanging on its screw, he'd fumed it like a pendant bubble and the man was firing.
Again and again Colin saw him jerk with the recoil of his heavy weapon, but the great flying animal was still airborne.
Upon them now it was. Circling around them, great wings flailing. Lips drawn back from its bloodied teeth.
Claws. It looks like it's got claws on those feet and not hooves.
And then it struck. Like the huge beast of prey that it was.
It struck, swooping down upon them from above and behind with a speed impossible to evade; with a whistling and a shrieking that Colin was sure he heard even above the clatter of their own copter blades.
And into those blades it plunged, and the impact was tremendous.
They hung there in the clear sky for a heart-stopping moment; the screaming animal and the maimed machine.
Then they fell. Fell the few hundred feel to the river and into its chilling waters.
Beside Colin the copter pilot shivering in his blankets called out to the man at the patrol boat's wheel. "See it yet?"
"No," someone called back to him, and the man who had lost his carbine pulled his blankets closer and said. "Forget it. He's not floating with all the lead I put into him."
They were waiting for them on the jutting dock when the patrol boat swept close. On the dock and coming oat to meet them in their hovering craft. The vidcasters, the reporters, the curious.
And after them the TriV coverage of the inquest, the investigations, the public's blatant, and their colleagues' more discreet, inquiries into how they produced their miracle, until at last even Ed turned to Colin in their office one morning and said in genuine dismay, "I know I wanted publicity to put us over the top, but enough is enough." Colin smiled and waved the pale blue vac-tube message his secretary had just handed him.
"The Commodore says thank you but he doesn't think he ought to accept Ato's Pride from us, not as a gift anyway."
"Why not?" Ed said. "It's the least we can do to show him our appreciation for the contracts he's wangled for us."
Colin laughed. "Those he says he doesn't need to defend, not any more. But he doesn't want to get fouled up with any committee investigating expensive presents to government people."
"Tell him to take the horse and stop worrying," Ed said, and from his expression Colin could not tell if he was kidding or not. "If they fire him, a growing organization like ours can always use a good man who knows his way around Procurement."