Book 4: Chapter 21: Getting Involved
Bob
July 2334
Arcadia River System
I sat up, water running off my fur and puddling around my butt. It was raining. I had a momentary surge of irritation, the kind of thing you get when you’ve been caught outside without an umbrella. This was followed by irritation that the AMI hadn’t alerted me to the issue. It had been raining for some time, judging from the level of wetness of, well, everything.
But the irritation was swept away as I remembered my current form. There was no chill, no feeling of shivering dampness. The Quinlan fur, with its waterproofing, kept me nice and toasty.
I gazed up at the sky. The rain clouds resembled rain clouds everywhere—gray, ugly, and wet. The striations might have been a little weird, because of the megastructure’s rotation, but then again maybe not. I wasn’t a weather expert, and my interest in cloud formations had always been limited to staying out from under the wet ones.
I examined the horizon in several directions. I thought it might be lighter to the west, but generally speaking, we were socked in in all directions. So, large weather systems—check. I frowned. I could have done without this particular reproduction of a planetary environment.
“Look at this,” Bridget said. I turned. I hadn’t realized she’d activated yet. She was pointing at some underbrush that had been crushed flat. “I think we were visited overnight. Something big. Maybe a loroush.”
“Uh …” I searched my memory. A loroush was kind of a big wolf, but with claws like a grizzly bear. It grasped its prey and held it while it tore off chunks. Not a fun date, for sure. “Why didn’t our AMIs alert us?”