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A good bureaucracy is the best tool of oppression ever invented

- Jesus Lewis, The Oakes Diaries

WHEN REGA had set behind the western hills, Waela TaoLini turned atop her craggy vantage to watch the red-orange ball of Alki cross the southern horizon in its first passage of the diurn She had only been forced to kill three demons in the past hour and there seemed little more to do on this watch except mark the distant line of powdery red to the south where they had burned out a Nerve Runner boil just two diurns past But it looked as though they had sterilized the area, although she could still detect an occasional whiff of burned acid from that direction But Swift Grazers were already into the red, gorging on the dead Runners The bulbous little multipeds would not venture anywhere near a live boil of Runners

As usual, she stood tall and alert on watch She did not feel unusually exposed on the crag There was a ’scape hatch and slide tunnel one step away on her left A sensor atop the tunnel’s ushburner and lasgun, but even more important, she knew her own reflexes Conditioned by the harsh require except a massed attack by the planet’s predators

And the Nerve Runner invasion had been turned back

Waela crouched then and stared down across the southern plain to the riaze darted left, right; she stood and turned, repeated this procedure It was all random, constant movement

"Try to look everywhere at once" That was the ord

Her yellow flaresuit was damp with perspiration She was tall and slie here On patrol, she walked tall Other times, she pulled in her shoulders and tried to appear shorter Men did not like taller women, a continually bothersome fact which amplified her constant concern over her unavoidable peculiarity; her skin changed color through a broad spectrue in response to her ht now, her exposed skin betrayed the pale pink of repressed fear Her hair was black and cropped at the neck Her eyes were brown and shaded in epicanthic folds, but she felt that she had a slender and attractive nose which complemented her broad chin and full lips

"Waela, you’re some kind of chameleon throwback," one of her friends had said But he was dead now, drowned under the kelp

She sighed

"Rrrrrssss!"

She turned to the sound and, by reflex, gunned out two Flatwings, thin and , Poisonous things!

Alki was four dia shadows northward and painting a red-purple glow across the distant sea to the west

Waela liked this particular watch station for its view of the sea It was the highest vantage connected to Colony They called it sih the sky along the distant shoreline Judging by their apparent size fro the Shipmen/Colonists, she had studied the native life carefully, hters were, indeed, like giant airborne Portuguese e creatures born in the sea Steadied by its long black tendrils, a hylighter could adjust the greatand tack into the wind They roups of twenty or ued for sohters were a nuisance, yes They were buoyed by hydrogen and that, coupled with Pandora’s frequent electrical storms, made the creatures into lethal firebombs In common with the ’lectrokelp, they were useless as food Even to touch them produced weird mental effects - hysteria and even, so orders were to explode them at a distance when they approached Colony

Al up the Peak on her left It was a big one She guessed it would equal the five kilos of the largest ever taken Because the high-density, molelike creature was Pandora’s only slowEvery opportunity to study Pandora’s predators had to be used It was as gray-black as the rocks and she guessed its length at about thirty centi the spinner tail The first Colonists to encounter Spinnerets had been trapped in the sticky fog the things released through that tail appendage

Waela chewed her lower lip, watching the Spinneret’s purposeful approach It had seen her; no doubt of that The stickyproduced a peculiar paralysis It rendered everything it touched ihted Spinneret, having trapped a victi pace

"Close enough," she whispered as the thing paused fewer than fiveits lethal spinner into play A quick red wash of the gushburner incinerated the Spinneret She watched the reht diameters above the horizon and she knew her watch was alerous activity a predators They all knew the reason for watching outside Colony’s barriers The visible human in a yellow flaresuit would attract predators "We’re bait out there," one of her friends had said Waela resented the assignment, but in a place of coer That was Colony’s social glue Even though she would get extra food chits for this, she could not help resenting it

There were other dangers ne in Colony priorities Her place was out studying the kelp As the sole survivor of the original study tea a new tea out our research?

There were ruy could not be spared for construction of strong-enough subhter-Than-Air was still theoutposts, and, because they had been built to sihters, they attracted hters appeared to be immune to the predators

She could see the rationale of the arguments Kelp interfered with the aquaculture project and food was short The argunorance

We need unned out a Hooded Dasher, noting that it was the first one seen anywhere near the Peak in twenty diurns