Free Undercurrents by Robert Buettner Page B

Something grabbed me around the waist and squeezed.

Thirteen
    Lobster, my ass. Muddy water flooded over my faceplate and closed out the daylight as a monster dragged me under and toward the channel’s center.
    Desperation concentrates the mind, and now the brief about the scorpions flooded back over my drugged brain.
    Barrens scorpions weren’t, biologically speaking, scorpions. But they weren’t restaurant lobsters, either. They were Tressel’s version of pterygotid eurypterids, giant nightmares that had evolved, then died off, on Earth and Yavet during those planets’ respective Paleozoic eras. Pterygotid eurypterids filled the brackish-water estuary-predator niche until they went extinct. Then crocodiles moved in and replaced them.
    The scorpions hunted by lying in opaque water that hid their ton-plus bulk, navigating with dinner-plate–sized compound eyes. They lured prey with wormlike stalks that periscoped above their manhole-cover–sized flat heads. Apparently some animals were dumb enough to buy the worm trick. I now knew of at least one.
    The scorpion clamped me with its two pincers. One vised my left thigh, the other my waist. The scorpion dragged me backward toward the channel’s deep center, thrashing a horizontal fluke flexed by tail muscles four yards long and a yard wide.
    The scorpion’s mouth, on the underside of its flat head, was too small and mandibular to bite chunks off prey. So the scorpion battle plan was to crush and drown prey, then store the carcass under a rock for leisurely nibbling, after rot softened the meal.
    The beast shifted its pincers to better grip this hard-shelled, unfamiliar fish.
    I broke free and slogged, gasping, into the shallows. There I drew my puny bush knife while I screamed at the idiot who decided not to bring a gun.
    The bug shot after me into the shallows, then rose up on eight legs. Water streamed off its armored back and off its two snapping pincers, upraised like a boxer’s gloves. It punched one pincer at me, and I slashed with my knife. The blade exploded water but slid off the bug like a toothpick off a lobster claw.
    Meanwhile the scorpion’s other claw thrust beneath the water, clamped my ankle, and dragged me down again.
    I hacked every appendage I could reach with the bush knife, but this time I couldn’t break the monster’s grip. The good news was that the Eternad’s strain gauges stayed in the green. This monster wasn’t strong enough to crush up-to-date plasteel.
    The bad news was that, according to the suit’s sensors, the water in the deep center of the channel was saltier, and therefore heavier. It lay beneath the layer of fresh water that was flowing seaward. The salty undercurrent was drifting the bug and me inland. That was fine with the bug, who preferred brackish water to the saltier open sea, and disastrous for me.
    One reason that the scorpion liked inland waters was that Tressel’s Paleozoic ocean was chock-full of fish big enough and mean enough to eat it.
    I wasn’t strong enough to break free of this beast, but, with the help of the suit’s buoyancy, I could force the pair of us to the surface. I blew the floatation to max, and the two of us popped up like a buoy.
    The surface current was still running out to sea. After only moments on the surface and above the undercurrent, the scorpion and I reversed direction and floated seaward as we struggled, whether the beast liked it or not.
    For the next ten minutes we drifted down the cycad-roofed bayou like it was fight night in the tunnel of love, pummeling one another without result.
    Then the leafy cycad roof vanished. The estuary spilled its fresh water out into the sea, where it would blend with the salty ocean.
    Heh, heh. As soon as the scorpion sensed the change of salinity, it would drop me like a hot amphibian and swim back to the shelter of its swamp.
    I looked skyward. Still daylight. Once freed, I would swim ashore and set up the heliograph tripod.
    I punched the air with