They had landed on top of Predator Number Two.

"We're still going down," Chippawa grunted. "These things must really be delicate. We're not that heavy, especially with one of the floats deployed."

"I guess we're heavy enough," Faraday said, rubbing the side of his neck as he gazed out the window.

His first impression, just before they'd hit, had been that the predator's skin was lumpy. Only now, as he had time to study it, did he realize just how incredibly lumpy it actually was.

The skin was covered with dozens of ridges and protrusions of various sizes and shapes, like a snowfield that had been whipped by the wind into odd drifts. Some of the lumps were low and flat, others long and narrow, sticking as far as eight or nine meters out from the surface. Like tree trunks, perhaps, whose branches had been stripped off.

No, he decided. Not like tree trunks. More like torpedoes or rockets pointed the wrong way on their launching pads.

Abruptly, he caught his breath. Like torpedoes? "Scotto..."

"What?" Chippawa asked.

"That lump out there," Faraday said slowly. "The tall one, dead center. What does it look like to you?"

"Like a lump," Chippawa said, a hint of impatience in his voice. "Give me a hint."

"Remember the fellow with the big eye?" Faraday said. "Wasn't he shaped like that?"

"Yes, but—" Chippawa broke off, leaning closer to the window. "But that's the same skin that's on everything else," he said. "The predator's skin. Isn't it?"

"Sure looks like it," Faraday agreed, his throat feeling raw. "As if the skin just grew up around one of them..."

For a long second he and Chippawa stared at each other. Then, in unison, they both turned back to their boards.

"Underside cameras have gone dark," Faraday announced tightly, his eyes flicking across those displays. "Forward ones... maybe the connections were knocked loose in the crash."