“Brong da bulla,” it stated, having freed the bone and flung it away.
It was no consolation to realize that the sheq corpses had attracted the gabbleduck here.
Almost without volition, I crouched lower, hoping it did not see me, hoping that if it did, I could make myself appear less appetizing. My hands shaking, I reached down and began taking line off the winder at Anders’s belt. The damned machine seemed so noisy and the line far too bright an orange. I got enough to tie around my waist as a precaution. I then undid the straps to her pack, and eased her free of that encumbrance. Now, I could slide her down toward the back of the slab, taking us out of the creature’s line of sight, but that would put me in the foliage down there and it would be sure to hear me. I decided to heave her up, throw her over my shoulder, and just get out of there as fast as I could. But just then, a bullet smacked into the column of my claw frame and knocked me down flat, the breath driven out of me.
I rolled over, looking toward the gabbleduck as I did so. I felt my flesh creep. It was gone.
Something that huge had no right to be able to move so quickly and stealthily. Once on my back, I gazed up at Tholan and his sister as they came down the cliff. My claw frame was heavy and dead, and so too would I be, but whether by bullet or chewed up in that nightmare bill was debatable.
The two halted a few meters above, and, with their claw frames gripping backward against the rock, freed their arms so they could leisurely take aim with their Opteks. Then something sailed out of the mist and slammed into the cliff just above Tameera, and dropped down. She started screaming, intestines and bleeding flesh caught between her and the cliff-the half-chewed corpse of a sheq. The gabbleduck loomed out of the mist on the opposite side of the slab from where it had disappeared, stretched up and up, and extended an arm that had to be three meters long. One scything claw knocked Tameera’s Optek spinning away and made a sound like a knife across porcelain as it scraped stone. On full automatic, Tholan fired his weapon into the body of the gabbleduck, the bullets thwacking away with seemingly no effect. I grabbed Anders and rolled with her to the side of the slab, not caring where we dropped.
We fell through foliage and tangled growth, down into a crevasse where we jammed until I undid my frame straps and shed my pack ahead of us.
“Shabber grubber shabber!” the gabbleduck bellowed accusingly.
“Oh god oh god oh god!” Tameera.
More firing from Tholan.
“Gurble,” tauntingly.
“I’ll be back for you, fucker!”
I don’t know if he was shouting at the gabbleduck or me.
There was water in the lower part of the crevasse — more than enough to fill my purifying bottle and to clean the blood from Anders’s wound before dressing it. I used a small medkit diagnosticer on her and injected the drugs it manufactured in response to her injuries.
Immediately, her breathing eased and her color returned. But we were not in a good position.
The gabbleduck was moving about above us, occasionally making introspective and nonsensical comments on the situation. A little later, when I was trying to find some way to set up the blister tent, a dark shape occluded the sky above.
“Urbock shabber goh?” the gabbleduck enquired, then, not being satisfied with my lack of response, groped down into the crevasse. It could reach only as far as the ridge where my claw frame was jammed. With a kind of thoughtful impatience, it tapped a fore-talon against the stone, then withdrew its arm.
“Gurble,” it decided, and moved away.
Apparently, linguists who have loaded a thousand languages into their minds despair trying to understand gabbleducks. What they say is nonsensical, but frustratingly close to meaning. There’s no reason for them to have such complex voice boxes, especially to communicate with each other, as on the whole they are solitary creatures and speak to themselves. When they meet it is usually only to mate or fight, or both. There’s also no reason for them to carry structures in their skulls capable of handling vastly complex languages.
Two-thirds of their large brains they seem to use hardly at all. Science, in their case, often supports myth.
Driving screw pitons into either side of the crevasse, I was eventually able to moor the tent across. Like a hammock, the tough material of the groundsheet easily supported our weight, even with all the contortions I had to go through to get Anders into the sleeping bag. Once she was safely ensconced, I found that evening blue had arrived. Using a torch, I explored the crevasse, finding how it rose to the surface at either end. Then the danger from octupals, stirring in the sump at the crevasse bottom, forced me back to the tent. The following night was not good. A veritable swarm of octupals swamping the tent had me worrying that their extra weight would bring it down. It was also very very dark, down there under the mist. Morning took forever to arrive, but when it eventually did, Anders regained consciousness.
“They tried to kill us,” she said, after lubricating her mouth with purified water.
“They certainly did.”
“Where are we now?”
“In a hole.” She stared at me and I went on to explain the situation.
“So how do we get out of this?” she eventually asked.
“We’ve both lost our claw frames, but at least we’ve retained our oxygen bottles and catalyzers. I wish I’d told Tholan to screw his untraceable com bullshit.” I thought for a moment.
“What about your palm com? Could we use it to signal?”
“It’s his, just like the claw frame I was using. He’ll have shut it down by now. Should we be able to get to it.” She looked up. Her backpack was up there on the slab, up there with the gabbleduck.
“Ah.”
She peered at me. “You’re saying you really have no way of communicating with the citadel?”
“Not even on my blimp. You saw my contract with Tholan. I didn’t risk carrying anything, as he seems the type to refuse payment for any infringements.”
“So what now?” she asked.
“That rather depends on Tholan and Tameera… and on you.”
“Me?”
“I’m supposing that, as a valued employee, you too have one of these implants?”
Abruptly she got a sick expression. I went on, “My guess is that those two shits have gone for my blimp to bring it back here. If we stay in one place, they’ll zero in on your implant. If we move they’ll still be able to track us. We’ll have to stay down low under the mist and hope they don’t get any lucky shots in. The trouble is that to our friend down here we would be little more than an entree.”
“You could leave me — make your own way back. Once out of this area they’d have trouble finding you.”
“It had to be said,” I agreed. “Now let’s get back to how we’re going to get out of here.”