Strata by Terry Pratchett Page B

rupture, organ rupture, brain damage – when they got back to a human world it would be six months in a resurrection vat for Jalo.
    ‘A coronary?’ suggested Silver.
    ‘Massive,’ said Kin. ‘He’s lucky.’
    There was silence, and when Kin turned the shand was looking at her in astonishment.
    ‘Coronary is easy,’ she explained. ‘We can repair that. Simple job. If Marco had got to work on him there wouldn’t have been anything left to put in a vat. He threatened Marco.’
    Silver nodded. ‘Kung are paranoid. But he also acts like a human.’
    ‘You watch him enter a room. That walk of his is a fighting stance. Kung don’t know the meaning of the word fear.’
    ‘Fine,’ said Silver pleasantly. ‘Half kung, halfhuman. Well, I know the meaning of the word fear, and right now I’m scared.’
    ‘Yeah, I can see—’
    (a few seconds of vertigo, an eternity of despair)
    The first thing Kin registered when her sight came back was the cabin window and the view outside. The ship appeared to be surrounded by a fog full of icebergs.
    She was dimly aware of an alarm, which cut off abruptly.
    She was aware of hazy stars, and of drifting across the cabin because there was no gravity. Silver was floating near what had been the ceiling, out cold.
    Let’s see. The ship had been floating on a lake. Now it was floating in space. Outside was frozen air and quite a bit of the lake, so down on Kung storms must be raging since a few cubic hectares of air and water had suddenly been dragged into space inside the ship’s Elsewhere field …
    In free fall Kin’s natural genius felt somewhat cramped. She swam and bounced her way to the control room, where Marco was hunched over the main consol like a spider, and screamed in his ear.
    He grabbed her out of the air and turned her to face the big screen at the far side of the cabin.
    She stared, open mouthed.
    After a while she fetched Silver, who was treating a slight headwound in the medical roomand cursing in several languages, and made her watch.
    When the film was finished they ran it through again.
    ‘I put Jalo’s reel in the navigator,’ said Marco finally. ‘It included this.’
    ‘Run it again,’ said Kin. ‘I want to have another look at one or two bits.’
    ‘The picture quality is exceptionally good,’ said Marco.
    ‘It had to be. They were meant to be transmitted over tens of parsecs—’
    ‘If I may interrupt for a few seconds,’ said Silver. She reached up to her tusks, and began to twist them. Kin watched in fascinated horror as the fangs unscrewed and were stowed away in a small leather case. She had seen fangless shandi on Shand itself, but they were children or condemned criminals.
    ‘In order to be a good linguist one must be prepared to make sacrifices,’ said Silver in faultless allspeak. ‘Do you think I submitted to the operation without much secret shame and soul-searching? However, I have something to say. Do I strike you, Marco Farfarer, as a character of ill-humour and short temper?’
    ‘No. Why?’
    ‘If you try a stunt like you just did once more, I will kill you.’
    ‘I thought it was impossible anyway,’ said Kin, with hasty diplomacy.
    Marco looked from one to the other.
    ‘It’s not impossible, simply tricky and highly illegal,’ he said carefully. ‘Do it wrong, and you end up in the middle of the nearest sun. As for your, uh, statement, Silver – I have noted it.’
    They both nodded gravely.
    ‘Right,’ said Kin brightly. ‘Fine. Now show the film again.’
    Either the film was genuine or Jalo was an unsung special-effects genius.
    It might have been the polar regions of New Earth, or anywhere on Serendipity. Not Njal and Milkgaard, because those worlds had no birds and one picture showed a flock of birds in the distance – until Silver turned up the magnification. Whatever they were, they were not birds. Not with those horse heads, black scales and bat-black wings. But there was a word for them in human history,