The shore patrol had arrived. The five packs were already working with ropes to slide the biggest parts of the raft away from the grinding rocks.

Out on the wreckage, dozens of Tines were perched on piles of junk. These were the first Tropicals Johanna had ever seen. They were every bit as strange as the locals claimed. The foreigners didn’t cluster into packs. They were like a mob of singletons, doing whatever they pleased. Some of them cooperated to pull on the ropes thrown to them; others cowered in terror. She looked across the misty water. Here and there, she saw a head, or a single Tine lying across a bit of broken timber. Dozens of the creatures had been swept overboard.

Johanna reached out to the nearest of Pilgrim. It was Scarbutt, still the largest of the pack. “Look there! Those ones in the water are going to drown! We should go after them first.”

Pilgrim gave a general nod of agreement. “Not sure that can be helped.”

“Hei, it sure as hell can be helped!” Johanna pointed at the coils of rescue rope that the shore patrol packs had brought. “Grab those ropes! Get the shore patrol to do the important stuff first!”

Pilgrim was normally a very forward fellow. Now he hung back for a second, then ran along behind the shore patrol packs, gobbling loudly. Even after three years of listening to Interpack, Johanna found the language mostly unintelligible. The words got stacked up in chords, some them too high pitched to hear. By the time you got the sounds separated out, you were trying to make sense of the next chord. Just now, Pilgrim was shouting some kind of demand. The sounds of “Woodcarver” popped up several times. Okay, so he was invoking higher authority.

Two of the shore patrol packs left their posts and helped Pilgrim drag unused loops of rope away from the rocks. More packs were running toward them from Cliffside harbor. These didn’t look like shore patrol. Most of them avoided Johanna and Pilgrim.