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Dennis Stock, 1967, via Magnum.
Parric wheeled away as the moironteau spilled out of the gap. There were too many to outrun to the next gap--not with two wings struggling to keep the voilently fighting Flavius wrapped up and safe. He'd have to wait them out inside a dimensional pocket.
Quickly he Crafted a pocket ahead, a small one, unobtrusive and all but impossible to detect. The narrow opening flickered, a faint warping of light. An instant later, Parric was inside, curling tight and wrapping the pocket in on itself to close it off from the pursuers.
Parric breathed heavily, listening for sounds of pursuit even though he knew such things were impossible. He'd wrapped the dimensional pocket too tightly--not even stray photons were finding their way in to the hiding place. Parric grumbled to himself. He'd been more thoughtful with his earlier pocket, keeping it loose enough to afford easy observation of the external world. But he hadn't been pursued by a swarm of moironteau then, either, had he?
Flavius kicked then, a nasty jab right in Parric's recently-healed ribs. Parric squeezed roughly, as much to express his displeasure as to hamper Flavius' efforts to retrieve the dirk he always wore in his belt. A muffled stream of invective answered Parric's efforts.
The dimensional pocket abruptly lurched. Parric snapped alert, his antennae splayed wide. The pocket shuddered, sluffed sickeningly to one side, them snapped open.
Three moironteau stood at opposite angles, half their combined footheads gripping the edges of the dimensional pocket with row upon row of dagger-like teeth, pulling the haven apart. The fourth waited for the flushed quarry.
Parric sprang forward in an instant, throwing a hastily-Crafted prismatic distortion ahead of him. It wasn't well-Crafted, but it was enought to force the fourth moironteau to strike wildly as Parric shot past. The three released the edges of the dimensional pocket to pursue, and almost as an afterthought Parric reached back and nudged it forward. The pocket snapped closed over the fourth, it's massive footheads vanishing into a shimmering ripple of nothing.
It would take at least for the few moments for the moironteau to fight its way free of the pocket. But there were still three other monsters in pursuit. Parric located the next-closest gap and made for it.
Before he'd covered half the distance, a new moironteau emerged from the gap. And another. Parric veered away only to find more moironteau popping up all across the battlefield.
"Is every gap being guarded?" Parric sputtered in exasperation.
Nearly thirty monstrous moironteau churned across the battlefield, all converging on Parric. The strangling smoke thinned as the measured, disciplined gunfire faltered and dwindled to a the occasional random shot. The charging highlanders had long since broken and scattered in the face of these new, hellish scourges of war. The orderly English lines had collapsed into a chaotic mass panic. The powerful artillery batteries sat silent, abandoned. Cavalry horses spooked and fled, carrying their hapless riders along. The moironteau crushed and stomped their way through the overmatched soldiers, the toothy footheads flinging blood and body parts this way and that.
A handful of the moironteau clambered into the sky, angling to cut Parric off from above. Others moved to intercept his flight path, to block his escape even as others closed on him from behind and the sides.
Flavius began thrashing again, forcing Parric to dip dangerously close the ground before recovering a moment later. An English footman reacted too slowly, suffering a snapped neck as Parric's breast grazed him. Furious, Parric took advantage of the next several downsweeps of his wings to thump Flavius sharply.
"Do you rather I letting them killing you again? Do you?" Parric shouted. "They're wanting to killing both of us just as muchly right now."
Flavius bucked and cursed.
"Shutting you up is an impossibling," Parric said. "I'm not knowing which is worse fighting, you or them. Uh oh!"
He hadn't expected the moironteau to move so quickly, but it'd managed to block Parric's way. Parric banked away from it only to find another dangerously close. The noose had closed around him in an instant--Parric was surrounded. He wheeled in ever-tightening circles, searching in vain for a clear path through the slashing, flailing footheads. The moironteau climbing above him loomed ominously, ready to drop upon him at any moment. There were simply too many of them.
He'd sprung the trap, and it'd proven to be a good one. One lacking in finesse, perhaps, but effective nonetheless.
Parric retreated to the center of the circle, beginning a Crafting. He settled to the ground, ruffling his featherscales to give himself a swollen, bloated appearance.
The moironteau stopped abruptly, startled by the unexpected move. After a moment, when Parric made no further movement--save for the odd kick or twist from the still-captive Flavius--one of the moironteau took a tentative step foward. Then others followed, slowly, cautiously.
"You are owing me so big," Parric whispered to Flavius. Then he ripped out a beakful of featherscales and flung them into the sky.
Thirty Parrics abruptly scattered in the air, flying straight at the oncoming moironteau.
Cassini Spacecraft Finds Ocean May Exist Beneath Titan's Crust
PASADENA, Calif. - NASA's Cassini spacecraft has discovered evidence that points to the existence of an underground ocean of water and ammonia on Saturn's moon Titan. The findings made using radar measurements of Titan's rotation will appear in the March 21 issue of the journal Science.
"With its organic dunes, lakes, channels and mountains, Titan has one of the most varied, active and Earth-like surfaces in the solar system," said Ralph Lorenz, lead author of the paper and Cassini radar scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., "Now we see changes in the way Titan rotates, giving us a window into Titan's interior beneath the surface."
Members of the mission's science team used Cassini's Synthetic Aperture Radar to collect imaging data during 19 separate passes over Titan between October 2005 and May 2007. The radar can see through Titan's dense, methane-rich atmospheric haze, detailing never-before-seen surface features and establishing their locations on the moon's surface.
Using data from the radar's early observations, the scientists and radar engineers established the locations of 50 unique landmarks on Titan's surface. They then searched for these same lakes, canyons and mountains in the reams of data returned by Cassini in its later flybys of Titan. They found prominent surface features had shifted from their expected positions by up to 19 miles. A systematic displacement of surface features would be difficult to explain unless the moon's icy crust was decoupled from its core by an internal ocean, making it easier for the crust to move.
"We believe that about 62 miles beneath the ice and organic-rich surface is an internal ocean of liquid water mixed with ammonia," said Bryan Stiles of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in, Pasadena, Calif. Stiles also is a contributing author to the paper.
"The combination of an organic-rich environment and liquid water is very appealing to astrobiologists," Lorenz said. "Further study of Titan's rotation will let us understand the watery interior better, and because the spin of the crust and the winds in the atmosphere are linked, we might see seasonal variation in the spin in the next few years."
English cannon fire ripped the air. The choking smoke roiled across the marshy field. The icy, stinging rain came down in fits and starts. A hundred highlanders--maybe more--lay dead on the sodden ground, their ranks naked and exposed to the withering fire of the English guns. The erratic fire from the handful of Scottish cannon offered little cover for their own, and little threat to the English. And still they stood their ground, neither charging nor retreating.
Parric watched, dumbfounded. He'd heard tales of the battle over and over again, but until this moment, he hadn't realized that this "Bonnie Prince Charlie" Flavius went on about had intentionally lost. But that was the only explanation for the carnage he was witnessing, unless... The possibility that these highlanders were afflicted with a type of mass insanity had never occurred to him before, either, but it did explain a great many things about Flavius.
Parric hovered high above the battlefield, hidden inside a dimensional pocket. Watching. Waiting. Already he'd located seventeen Nexial gaps within a five mile radius. Granted, six of those were deep within the crust of the planet below him, but when it came right down to it, a gap was a gap.
Parric scanned the massed highlanders again, trying to spot Flavius. Parric had arrived earlier this time, hopefully early enough to avoid the moironteau entirely. The downside was that he didn't actually know where Flavius would be at this point. Past experience had demonstrated that a mortally wounded, near-death Flavius invariably proved more docile and far less likely to engage in any chopping off of wings, not to mention other, more negative, behaviors.
Parric perked up. Some signal had gone out--the massed highlanders seemed to tense, them let out a thunderous roar as one. The din was deafening. In fits and starts, they began their charge.
Parric knew what happened next. Knew where Flavius was going, where he'd be. Cautiously, Parric extended his antennae.
No sign of the moironteau.
That didn't mean it wasn't out there, lying in wait like some interdimensional trap door spider, ready to spring its trap.
There was no time like the present. Besides, if he got Flavius now, he wouldn't have to bother Crafting his wounds back together.
Parric uncoiled, slipping out of his shelter. Immediately gravity noticed him, asserting its hold. Deliberately, almost casually, Parric spread his double pair of wings. They vanished in a blur of motion. A moment before he struck the ground, Parric leveled off and shot toward the charging highlanders.
He reached them in an instant, plunging through banks of smoke and darting this way and that to avoid collision with any number of wildly screaming men. Ahead, Parric spotted Flavius.
Flavius MacDuff was unmistakable in his mud-splattered kilt, his red-brown hair and beard bedraggled and forlorn. In one hand he waved his old, notched sword and in the other he held his shield. He charged with the rest of the Scots, fighting to keep his footing as those on his left crowded into his rank to avoid a bog of standing water.
Parric was on him in an instant. Flavius turned a split second before Parric reached him, his eyes going wide before he was plucked from the ground like the day's berry harvest.
Parric snatched Flavius with his hindmost wings, wrapping him up and holding him immobile. Flavius spewed forth a flood of unintelligible curses, muffled by the constraining wings. Flavius' sword, fortunately, was also immobilized by Parric's grip.
"Stop fighting me, you idiot," Parric muttered as Flavius' thrashing made his flightpath weave drunkenly. "You're not liking falling, I guarantee!"
Parric banked right, making for the nearest Nexial gap. He began to Craft a Wedging, then abandoned the effort. The gap was already blocked. Quickly he pulled up, breaking away from the gap just as the moironteau appeared from out of nowhere. The moironteau's teeth slashed the air where Parric had been a moment earlier.
The moironteau lunged after Parric, crushing the charging highlanders underfoot. The monstrous apparition proved too much for the haggard Scots--the left flank faltered, then scattered. The moironteau took no notice of the humans. Instead, it flung itself after Parric, four of its footheads straining forward, mouths gaping.
Unlike their first encounter, Parric was ready. A subtle flick of his antennae Crafted prismatic distortions over the moironteau's multitude of eyes.
The results were as instantaneous as they were spectacular. Suddenly faced with visual dissonance as each eye processed light forty, ninety or one hundred and eighty degrees off its normal focal plane, the legs caromed wildly trying to reconcile what it saw with reality. It tripped, tumbled and crashed violently into the bog.
Parric allowed himself a private smile. Knowicent's background on the moironteau had proven accurate, after all. With that many simple eyes, it didn't take much Crafting at all to upset the creature's complex visual processing.
"Taking that back to your master," Parric shouted.
Parric made for the next closest gap, in the heart of the English line. The foot soldiers stared dumbfounded as Parric shot past overhead, the officers anchored in place, open mouthed. Quickly Parric began Crafting a Wedging for the looming gap, when unexpectedly the gap opened on its own.
A moironteau launched itself through the opening. Then another. And another.