Symphony for Skyfall

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Shark!

Ensign stretched his timpani even tighter and listened again. The clouds swirled around his body, obscuring his own wingtips in the mist of opaque orange and pink. Wind-driven ice crystals stung against his taut membranes. The air pressed in on him thick and oppressive. He wished he were above the clouds and out in the clean sunlight with the rest of his pod. Reflexively his body twitched toward a more aerodynamic shape that would let him rise faster. But he forced himself to relax into a listening posture. Trying to out-climb a shark was a fool’s game and a fool would not survive this day.

Dum-Doom.

The shark’s hunting pulse swept over him again as the predator sought him through the clouds. Close, but not too close. With the disturbance caused by the nearby thermocline the hunter would have trouble finding him. Ensign listened so hard his muscles ached from the strain of holding his hearing membranes taut. He knew that if he used his jet the shark could home in on the sound instantly—so he used the slower, quieter, and more drawn-out method of relaxing his buoyancy chambers, letting them inflate silently to float him upward, continuing his painfully slow rise to sunlight and safety.

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