The Gabble and Other Stories (4 page)

“You fucking missed!” I bellowed.

“That’ll soon change!” came Tholan’s distant shout.

“There’s no need to aggravate him,” Anders hissed.

“Why? Might he try to kill us?” I spat back.

Even so, I now led us on a course taking us lower down into the mist. The firing tracked us, but I reckoned the chances of us being hit were remote. Tholan must have thought the same, because the firing soon ceased. When we stopped to rest under cover of thicker vegetation, I checked my palm com and nearly sobbed on seeing that in one and half days we had covered less than three kilometers. It was about right, but still disheartening. Then, even worse, I saw that ahead, between two mounts, there was a ridge we must climb over to stay on course. To take another route involved a detour of tens of kilometers. Undoubtedly, the ridge rose out of the mist. Undoubtedly, Tholan had detected it on his palm com too.

“What do we do?” Anders asked.

“We have to look. Maybe there’ll be some sort of cover.”

“Seeble grubber,” muttered the gabbleduck in the deeper mist below us.

“It’s fucking following us,” I whispered.

Anders just nodded.

Then even more bad news came out of the mist.

I couldn’t figure out quite what I was seeing out there in the canyon beside us, momentarily visible through the mist. Then, all of a sudden, the shape, on the end of its thin but hugely tough line, became recognizable. I was looking at a four-pronged blimp anchor, with disposable cams taped to each of the prongs. We got moving again, heading for that ridge. I equated getting to the other side with safety. Ridiculous, really.

“He’s got… infrared… on them,” I said, between gasps.

A fusillade sounding like the full fifty-round clip of an Optek slammed into the slope just ahead of us.

“Of course… he’s no way… of knowing which camera… is pointing… where,” I added.

Then a flare dropped, bouncing from limb to limb down through the vertical jungle, and the firing came again, strangely, in the same area. I glimpsed the anchor again, further out and higher. Tholan and his sister had no real experience of piloting a blimp —it wasn’t some gravcar they could set on autopilot. Soon we saw the remains of what they had been targeting: an old sheq too decrepit to keep up with its seven, probably replaced by a new hatching. It was hanging over the curved fibrous bough of a walker tree, great holes ripped through its body by Optek bullets.

We climbed higher as the slope became steeper, came to the abrupt top edge of this forest of walker trees, made quick progress stepping from horizontal trunk to trunk with the wall of stone beside us. After a hundred meters of this, we had to do some real climbing up through a crack to a slope we could more easily negotiate. My feet were sore and my legs ached horribly.

Constantly walking along slopes like this put pressure on feet and ankles they were certainly not accustomed to. I wondered just how long my boots and gloves would last in this terrain. They were tough—made with monofiber materials used by the military—but nothing is proof against constant abrasion on stone. Maybe a hundred days of this? Who was I kidding?

By midday, we were on the slope that curved round below one of the mounts, then blended into the slope leading up to the ridge. Checking the map on my palm com, I saw that there was likely a gutter between the ridge and the mount. I showed this to Anders.

“There may be cover there,” I said.

She stared at me, dark rings under her eyes —too exhausted to care. We both turned then, and peered down into the mist and canted forests. There came the sound of huge movement, the cracking of walker trunks, broken vegetation showering down through the trees below us.

“Come on.” I had no devil-may-care left in me. I was just as weary as Anders. We reached the gutter, which was abundant with hand and footholds, but slippery with rock-slime. We climbed slowly and carefully up through thinning mist. Then the blimp anchor rappeled down behind and above us like an iron chandelier.

“Surprise!” Tameera called down to us.

The mist was now breaking, and I glimpsed the lumpy peak of the mount looming to our left. Higher up, its propellers turning lazily to hold it against a breeze up from the ridge, floated my blimp. Tholan and Tameera stood out on the catwalk. Both of them armed, and I was sure I could see them grinning even from that distance. I swore and rested my forehead against slimy stone. We had about ten meters of clear air to the top of the ridge, then probably the same over the other side. No way could we move fast enough —not faster than a speeding bullet. I looked up again. Fuck them. I wasn’t going to beg, I wasn’t going to try to make any last-minute deals. I turned to Anders.

“We’ll just keep climbing,” I said.

She nodded woodenly, and I led the way. A shot slammed into the rock just above me, then went whining down the gutter. They were playing, for the moment. I glanced up, saw that the blimp was drifting sideways toward the mount. Then I saw it.

The arm folded out and out. The wrongness I felt about it, I guess, stemmed from the fact that it possessed too many joints. A three-fingered hand, with claws like black scythes, closed on the blimp anchor and pulled. Seated on the peak, the gabbleduck looked like some monstrous child holding the string of a toy balloon.

“Brong da lockock,” it said.

Leaning over the catwalk rail, Tholan tried pumping shots into the monster. Tameera shrank back against the cabin’s outer wall, making a high keening sound. The gabbleduck gave the blimp anchor a sharp tug, and Tholan went over the edge, one long scream as he fell, turned to an oomph as the monster caught him in one of its many hands. It took his rifle and tossed it away like the stick from a cocktail sausage, then it stuffed him into its bill.

“Keep going!” Anders shoved me in the back.

“It used us as bait to get them,” I said.

“And now it doesn’t need us.”

I continued to climb, mindful of my handholds, aware that the gabbleduck was now coming down off its mount. We reached the ridge. I glanced down the other side into more mist, more slopes. I looked aside as the gabbleduck slid down into mist, towing the blimp behind it, Tameera still keening. It had its head tilted back and with one hand was shoving Tholan deeper into its bill. After a moment, it seemed to get irritated, and tore his kicking legs away while it swallowed the rest of him. Then the mist engulfed the monster, the blimp shortly afterward.

Tameera’s keening abruptly turned to a long agonized scream, then came a crunching sound.

“It’ll come for us next,” said Anders, eyeing the stirring mist, then shoving me again.

We didn’t stand a chance out here —I knew that.

“What the hell are you doing?”

I passed back the ring of the line’that joined us together. “Wind it in.”

She set the little motor running, orange line-cladding falling around her feet. I glanced at her and saw dull acceptance that I was abandoning her at last. The large shape came up out of the mist, shuddering. I began to run along the ridge. It was a guess, a hope, a chance —on such things might your life depend.

The anchor was snagging in the outer foliage of walker trees and the blimp, now free of two man weights and released by the gabbleduck, was rising again. I was going for the line first, though I’m damned if I know how I would have climbed the four millimeter-thick cable. At the last moment, I accelerated, and leapt: three meters out and dropping about the same distance down.

My right leg snapped underneath me on the roof of the cabin, but I gave it no time to hurt. I dragged myself to the edge, swung down on the blimp cables, and was quickly in through the airtight door. First, I hit the controls to fold the anchor and reel in the cable, then I was in the pilot’s seat making the blimp vent gas and turning it toward where Anders waited. Within minutes, she was on the catwalk and inside and I was pumping gas back into the blimp again.

But we weren’t going anywhere.

“Oh no… no!” Anders’s feeling of the unfairness of it all was in that protest. I stared out at the array of green eyes, and at the long single claw it had hooked over the catwalk rail. I guessed that it would winkle us out of the cabin like the meat of a rock conch from its shell. I didn’t suppose the bubble metal alloys would be much hindrance to it.

“Gurble,” said the gabbleduck, then suddenly its claw was away from the rail and we were rising again. Was it playing with us? We moved closer to the windows and looked down, said nothing until we were certainly out of its reach, said nothing for some time after that. At the last, and I don’t care how certain the scientists are that they are just animals, I’m damned sure that the gabbleduck waved to us.

<>

* * * *

Three moons chased each other across the umber sky and ferris flies spun in swarms above the goss thorns. On the white sand of the shore, where weed had collected in decaying banks like spills of tar, footprints were clearly visible. Prints from deck boots, Ansel reckoned. He squatted by one of them and stirred the sand with the barrel of his thin-gun, then stood and shrugged his rucksack more evenly on his shoulders. Glancing back at the shuttle resting on neutral grav out at sea, its lights reflecting off the foamy water, he saw that the pilot was now in the cargo bay, securing the AG sled with which he had brought Ansel ashore. The same sled the man had used to bring Kelly to this beach seven Fores days ago. The pilot said he would return here in another fifty days to pick Ansel up. Kelly would only be leaving this place in a body bag.

Ansel watched the shuttle rise silently from the sea. When it was a hundred metres up its thrusters spat twin blue flames and it fled into the sky. Afterwards he studied the moons.

In the Almanac the three moons were only numbered, though it was probable the colonists had named them. He felt certain one of them had to be called cheese or some such, so closely did it resemble a wedge of Cheddar. As another moon, shaped like a lemon, and the smallest of the three, tumbled down behind the horizon, he moved off. The larger moon moved slowly across the sky and it was in the ruby light of this that Ansel followed the trail. He reckoned on gaining a good three hours on Kelly before sunrise. What he hadn’t reckoned on was the sudden weakness and sickness that hit him almost as soon as he set out.

At Terran Holdings Company headquarters they’d said this might happen. It was his body’s reaction to the symbiont - the creature inside him that enabled him to survive on the food here. But he had not expected it to be so bad. Fifty metres down the beach and he fell shuddering to his knees. Abruptly he vomited, and when he saw what he had brought up, he vomited again. On the sand before him was a slimy grey sheet of matter that moved slightly as he watched it. He pulled the bottle of aldetox provided for just this circumstance and swilled down a mouthful. In a minute, his symbiont quietened and he was able to stagger to his feet, then into the shade of a goss thorn sprouting from the shell debris farther up the beach. There he took off his rucksack and pulled out his thermal sleeping bag. It took him all his effort to climb inside and there he lay shivering till dawn.

* * * *

Before the sun rose, the sky changed from umber to a delicate flesh-pink, then broke up into bars that were every pastel shade between that pink and a dark orange. When it finally breached the horizon, the sun itself was an intense topaz that spilled shadows before it like blue oil on the ground. Wearily Ansel pulled himself from his thermal bag then staggered down to the sea. With a small glassite saucepan he scooped clear water and gulped it down. It tasted vaguely of a fizzy stomach remedy, but of nothing else. He had been told it was safe. When he had drunk his fill, he washed his face and returned to his belongings. Now he felt hungry, and must forage for his food. There was supposed to be no problem with this. He looked up at the branches of the goss thorn where ferris flies hung like strange Christmas decorations. The long fruits that grew parallel to the inner branches of the tree were haired with fly spines. The direct download from the Almanac had provided him with more than enough knowledge to easily survive here. He knew it was inadvisable to eat fruits like this and so, packing away his bag and hoisting his rucksack, he moved off. Only a few minutes later he found his first cornul bush.

The cornul bush possessed a star-sectioned green stem and ferny leaves. In its branches were hundreds of fruits small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. They were yellow and red, green and white, and in as many different shapes as there were fruits on the bush. The Almanac had provided him with no explanation for this. He just knew that all of the fruits were edible for someone with the symbiont. Ansel plucked a white fruit, shaped like a banana, and studied it.

This innocuous object would have killed him five days ago, after protracted painful convulsions, just as similar fruit had killed the Director and ten members of the board two months ago. He bit down and relished the taste explosion in his mouth. Even to people without the symbiont the fruits tasted like this, hence the way they had been so well received at the banquet in the Strine Station. No one had suspected a thing. No one would have believed that someone could smuggle highly toxic fruits aboard the station, then into a high-level Company banquet. After he had eaten his fill, Ansel moved on. He decided he should ask Kelly, before he killed him, just how he had managed that. Certainly, Kelly must have contacts on the station, and a shuttle secreted somewhere.

The footprints in the sand turned inland and soon became difficult to follow, but Ansel did not worry too much about this. The village of Troos lay a couple of kilometres from here. Kelly’s family lived there, and that was where Ansel would doubtless find him.

Inland the fauna and flora changed markedly. The goss thorns were more dispersed now and here grew into solid trees with trunks like barrels, short and viciously thorned limbs, and blue-green spines hazing their bark. Occasionally things that looked vaguely like butterflies went winging past. Ansel knew these to be flying flowers - the ultimate pollen-carriers. Botanists and entomologists had concluded, after many years of discussion, that these flowers had once been nectar-feeding insects, and that this mutualism had been carried to its ultimate extreme. It was after he watched one of these objects fall on the still-attached flower of another plant, for mating, that the wind changed, and Ansel got his first hint of putrefactor.