by Brian Daley
The attacker dropped the mutilated foreleg and chased its opponent for a dozen lengths, then skidded to a halt, gurgling in a way that Floyt could only characterize as self-satisfied. It quickly returned to the abandoned kill and began sniffing at it.
"Scare-flare," Paloma Sudan identified it tightly, with out taking her eyes from it. The creature noticed the humans for the first time, gurgling, opening its warning ruff at them wide, snout antennules waving for their scent. After a few moments it lay down by the dead prey and began feeding with noisy enthusiasm.
"If it leaves scraps that draw scavengers, that could be bad for us," Alacrity said.
Paloma had her target pistols out but she was shaking her head. "I might be able to drive it away with a little lightshow, but on the other hand I might just get it mad. And anyway, as I recall, there're no scavengers in this area that would be very dangerous to us. The scare-flares are our main worry; they're really called Morgan's scorpions."
Floyt gave a sudden yell, slapping his neck, startling the other two. He was pulling an insect-size thing off his neck as blood ran from the spot where it had opened an exploratory well. The pest was about half the length of his thumb, a hydra with wings like mayapple leaves. "What is it?"
"Drillbug," Paloma supplied. "I didn't know they infested this area."
"Poisonous?" Floyt was pale. Alacrity scanned the air for more.
Paloma was shaking her head. "No, but they can be nasty. They inject an anticoagulent, so that bite's going to bleed for a while, I'm afraid."
She, too, looked around for more. "Lads, this isn't good—even worse than scare-flares. The atmospheric pressure on Lebensraum's lower than Standard, so our bodies put out a lot of odors, and that's liable to get them swarming. I don't think they can get through our clothes, but unless we can cover up our hands and faces with mud or something, or find better shelter, I guess the fire's our best bet.
The feeding scare-flare disinclined them to search around in the gathering gloom for a cave or other refuge.
"That is," she went on, "unless one of you has repellent or a keepaway field generator."
They didn't, but Alacrity opened his big Viceroy Imperial umbrella. As Paloma watched, he began freeing up its drop-netting.
"Well, aren't you the well-equipped travelers, though?" As she helped Alacrity clear a spot where they could all take cover, Floyt prepared a pile of firewood and kept an eye on the scare-flare.
Unbothered by the drillbugs, the creature finished its meal with incredible speed and glared up at the humans again. Their inaccessibility, the fire and its recent meal combined to discourage it. The scare-flare ambled over to a sausage-boled tree, its bark a delicate, lacey white. The creature sniffed at it, looking it over carefully. On the bole there was a series of deep, parallel gouges in the wood.
The thing reared up, raking at the bole to leave new clawmarks, deeper and higher off the ground than its former rival's. Then it dropped back to all six and wandered off.
Alacrity and Paloma had selected a spot in the middle of the redoubt, about the only place where they'd all be able to fit comfortably under the brolly. They paused long enough for Alacrity to swat a drillbug that had landed on his hand. Floyt batted at another that was circling him as Paloma lowered herself to the rock surface.
"Quick, they're swarming!" she called. They sat with their backs together, feet extended in different directions, the umbrella propped up between them; it wasn't the first time Alacrity had taken a night's refuge under an umbrella, and he'd bought the Viceroy with that, among other things, in mind. Freed up, the tough netting was diaphanous and plentiful; they tucked it under their legs and tried to make sure there were no openings. Paloma had her evening shawl around her for added protection, and had closed a flap of her costume's sheer insert to cover her risky cleavage.
Drillbugs began orbiting in squadrons, bouncing against the netting, attracted by body heat, blood, sweat, and other aromas. The trio squirmed to get as comfortable as possible. "Will we have to spend the whole night like this?" Floyt asked with dread. His behind was already getting numb; his back felt like it was planning to kink up in the near future.
"It looks that way," Paloma said tiredly. "Do either of you two buckos know any good, lo-oong jokes?"
Chapter 10
Shall We Compare Thee To A Summer's Cold?
It turned out that they all knew a fair number, from the quite funny to groaners, though after months together Alacrity and Floyt were familiar with one another's repertoires. Paloma had good delivery, but Alacrity noticed that she stayed away from anything overtly sexual.
Still, for the most part the conversation revolved around how they were going to get back to Horselaugh—or if they stood any chance of it—as drillbugs bounced off the netting. The things preferred flying to scuttling, so it wasn't much problem keeping them out. Down below, the gawklegs had begun a peculiar droning, like two-ton Buddhist monks inside an echo chamber, and the infrasonics had gotten intense, an impossibly deep pipe-organ concert.
The three shifted and resettled a lot at first, trying for more comfortable resting positions, backs sliding and rear ends squirming, but each time one moved, it disarranged the other two. Accusations were exchanged. In time, with a certain amount of bickering, they achieved a compromise that all three could endure, at least for a while.
Every so often Floyt would snake his hand out into the open long enough to toss another piece of wood at the fire, then snatch it back before the slow-witted drillbugs could pounce on it. He wasn't as particular about his aim as he was about avoiding more bites, so the fire became rather haphazard. It popped and hissed as confused drillbugs blundered into it.
Floyt and Paloma were sitting with legs off to either side of the blaze. Alacrity, facing away from it, was comfortable enough in his shipsuit for the time being but knew it would get colder fast, and wished he'd had time to pull on his suit insert. He was also worried about the prowling noises he heard from time to time in the darkness. He held a short cudgel of the spongy firewood in his lap. His best weapon, the brolly, was their only drill-bug defense.
Floyt kept the survival tool ready, blade open, and was trying to whittle a stabbing stick for Alacrity without poking a hole in the netting or jarring open any gaps in their flimsy palisade. Paloma had her flashlight pistols and a few throwing-size rocks. The wood supply wasn't adequate for the night; they didn't talk about what might happen when the fire burned itself out.
Resigning himself to being uncomfortable, Alacrity began examining Paloma's planetological info file again, fast-forwarding through it as the little holoprojection lit his face and Paloma and Floyt twisted their heads in an effort to see. "Jeez, Paloma, you got everything in here."
"I wanted to know all there was to know. Planetography, flora and fauna, climate and the rest—how else was I going to sound like someone who'd spent a long time in the wilds?" She removed her fillet with its big gemstone.
"Well, you knew what you were saying; hell's entropy, this'll be a rough trip even with those big derricks helping. Without 'em … "
"I doubt we could make it very far before we became too weak to go on," she gauged coolly, "aside from predators, mountains, rivers and the rest."
"Perhaps we ought to rethink signaling?" Floyt ventured. "With a big fire if not with proteuses. If someone lands, we jump them and take their craft."
"First of all," Paloma told him crisply, "this whole area's very lightly inhabited. I doubt anyone flies within visual range of here once in several years. But if we did attract attention, it'd most probably be from a boatload of company police. Still, what you're talking about is the kind of thing we might have to think about, further down the line."
"I wonder what the Precursors were doing here," Floyt mulled.
Alacrity had been thinking the same thing and couldn't come up with much. He hadn't had much time to ponder it through, but at least one thing was definite: of all the Precursor manifestations he knew of, the two that ha
d yielded the most amazing connections to Precursor knowledge were the only two located on or under a planetary surface. He also tried to envision where Hecate and the site had rabbit-holed to.
"You've got high desert, where we can travel and survive if the gawks help," Paloma said, "because they're good at finding water and can carry it for us, besides which they cover ground a lot faster." She was trying to see the map Alacrity was studying. "That's our first big barrier, if we can't win their help."
"What's this here?" Alacrity held the projection up so she could see it, pointing out a map feature. A half meter or so away, drillbugs bounced against the netting like pixie vampires. "Beyond the mountains, I mean. Savannah?"
He caught her nod, and moved the map around so Floyt could get a look at it.
"You read it right," she confirmed. "A gruesome place for humans afoot, but no great shakes for a herd of gawks. And beyond that is Lake Fret, which is a problem I haven't quite worked out yet. The gawks are supposed to be able to swim a little, but I don't think they can make it across a stretch of water that big. And besides, there's a good deal of surface shipping there, and some meat eaters in the water."
"Yeah, that's what—thirty, thirty-five kilometers across at the narrowest point, there?" Alacrity said. "Of course, it's a couple hundred extra to go around in either direction, but if we have to—"
"Uh-uh." Paloma was shaking her head. "At that end, beyond the company operations sites, there're mires and bogs pretty much the whole way to the sea, impassable to gawks. At the opposite end, it's open country, barren, with lots of company activity. We might be able to go around, but we'd end up in some very cold country. I don't know if the gawks could take it—or if we could."
Floyt, already chilly despite the fire, shivered at the thought of a snow trek, even on gawkback. Especially on gawkback. "What about rafts, for the lake?" he proposed hesitantly, picturing a fifty-klick row with something the size of a gawk trying to keep its balance. "Or could we leave them behind at that point?"
"Not a chance," Paloma said, "because the selling point of the trip, as far as the gawks are concerned, will be that they can go on from the opposite shore of Lake Fret to link up with another gawk herd down in those plains there a few hundred kilometers south. I'll explain the whole thing to you, but for now that lake's our big problem.
"And we can't let the gawks be seen anywhere close to company operations, or everything the company could get flying in the air or moving on the ground would be out blasting away at them."
"But then what does that leave?" Floyt "wondered.
"I'm working on that, Hobie," she told him. Floyt started. Hobie?
"Well, keep us updated," Alacrity said. Then he added, "Whoa!" as something the length of his forearm whipped down into the firelight in a quick swoop and was gone again. "What-all in perdition's plenum was that?"
"Ringwing," Paloma said. "I didn't know there were any in this area. But then again, I didn't know the drill-bugs lived on this side of the mountains, either."
Another ringwing dove through the light and into the dark again, and another, eel shapes with multiple wing-sets that seemed to meet and form circles at the top and bottom of each stroke, oaring the air. Then more shot through the firelight as drillbugs began disappearing.
"Makes sense, though," Paloma said. "The drillbugs probably came along when the gawks did; they lay eggs in the dung. And the ringwings eventually blundered into a huge drillbug population and prospered."
Floyt could see that the fast-moving ringwings were proficient feeders, getting a drillbug or two on every dive, like bats grabbing insects. He gulped. "And do ringwings have a taste for human blood, too?"
She considered it dispassionately. "Mmm, I wouldn't think so. They're pretty specialized predators, and we're too big for them."
"Fast, too," Floyt commented. The air was cleared of drillbugs—not because the prey was very good at avoiding predators; the drillbugs seemed to be singleminded blood seekers, like leeches—in just a few minutes of ringwing feeding.
It was like being in the middle of some bizarre dogfight. Except for the flutter of wings, the hiss of air as the ringwings passed, and the occasional bump of a drillbug, it was played out in silence. The fire sounded quite loud in the middle of it all. The ringwings' guidance sense was uncanny; as close as they swept to the brolly, not one so much as brushed it. The humans watched spellbound for a total of seven minutes or so.
Then the air was clear of bugs and 'wings alike. Alacrity cautiously poked his head from under the netting. "Well, I'll be."
"Great, isn't it?" Paloma said cheerfully. "Let's all hear it for ringwings."
Floyt emerged from the netting, grabbing for more wood. With a sudden dread of the dark and a determination that the flames would not die out, he fed the fire. The gawks' droning still rose and fell in the distance. Other nightfliers were venturing out, bioluminescent mites and fluttering, transparent things like ghostly, airborne hairpieces. Decaying matter and plant parasites gave off eerie phosphorescence, making the woods look menacing and haunted.
"Look, Paloma," Alacrity said, carefully laying aside the brolly but leaving it open just in case. "This stuff about wiping out the gawks and driving them out here—how long does the company think it can get away with a thing like that?"
She raised her shoulders and let them fall, making dismissing gestures with her hands. "People have better things to do than go nosing around the Lebensraum Outback. And most of the very few who know the real truth have a vested interest in keeping the secret. Besides, nobody's counting on it lasting forever.
"What I'm getting at is, you have this company exec, and how much do you think he cares if the truth comes out thirty or fifty or a hundred years down the line? By then he's long since retired somewhere with his money, or dead. But they all make sure nothing gets out while they're on the scene, and that's the way it's been all along."
"Some secrets have been maintained for a long, long while in more or less that fashion," Floyt said, the fire set up to his liking again. Alacrity could just about read his thoughts: the Camarilla had lasted two hundred years.
Floyt took the mated proteuses and began flashing forward and back through gawkleg data, looking over some very old company zoological studies. Alacrity tossed more wood on the fire so that it was disarranged; Floyt took a moment to square it away to his own satisfaction once more, with a proprietary air. The brolly and the data and wilderness savvy might be someone else's, but the campfire was Floyt's.
"I think it'll be all right," Paloma said, meaning the fire. "If we run low on wood we can take torches and get more; there's enough nearby. I don't think even a scare-flare would bother three of us with burning brands."
"Now, while we've got a minute," Alacrity brought up some old business, "just why is it again that you think the gawks'll go along with your invitation to convoy us cross-country?"
"In a way, the gawks need us just as much as we need them," she said.
Floyt, the professional Earthservice accessor, had found what he was looking for. He looked to Paloma. "Only to convince them of that might require a little nature study of our own, am I correct?"
She gave him a congratulatory nod and a smile Alacrity found himself coveting. "You're a fast man with a file, Hobie."
"All right, all right; I'm lost," Alacrity confessed. "Now will somebody please tell me?"
She gave him a surprised look. "Why, we're going to take a headcount on the gawklegs, of course."
* * * *
"Day shift coming on." Floyt yawned, looking down at some little rodent-thing scampering from cover and back again. "I hope the scare-flares are late sleepers." He rolled in his mouth the pebbles he was using to try to keep his mind off thirst. He rubbed his side to get the blood circulating after a torturous night of trying to sleep on cold solid rock. As a mercy, though, the drillbugs hadn't returned. As he watched, an enormous flock of avian-things took to the wing, blotting out Invictus and darkening the sky.
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Alacrity looked up from where he was hardening his spearpoint in the coals and wondering if he was doing it right; he'd only heard about that sort of thing. At the very least, Floyt's multitool was a promethean blessing, a hip-pocket machine shop of sorts.
Alacrity squinted at the dawn. Gawklegs were on the move in the distance, their infrasonics apparently silent. "Time to go house hunting, what d'you say?"
Paloma stood and stretched, hands against the small of her back, groaning as she arched. Alacrity watched admiringly. "First, how 'bout some food hunting?" she proposed.
"That sounds wonderful," Floyt enthused. "My stomach's rumbling so loud, the scare-flares must be cowering in their dens. Or nests, or whatever."
"Usually in a burrow down on the flatlands," Paloma clarified. "And today's the day we start convincing them they better stay the hell down there and away from us."
"What've you got, landmines hidden in your girdle?" Alacrity blinked. He was scattering the fire, grinding embers and covering them with ash; the area was dry and he had no desire to find out what a local wildfire was like.
"Trust me; I'm the legendery Siren of the Wilderness, remember?" Paloma followed Floyt down from the redoubt, both of them alert against attack, holding their sharpened walking staffs as spears.
Alacrity moaned tiredly, gathering up his own spear and meticulously brushing off and refolding the brolly. He thought a moment, then left the cap off its sharpened tip.
"A drink of water's first on the list as far as I'm concerned," Floyt announced. "And, er, another brief stop."
"No argument here," Paloma assured him. "Only first let's see what's left of the scare-flare."
They went with Paloma leading because she knew more than either of the men. Floyt held the center and backed her up while Alacrity brought up the rear. They moved in close order; it wasn't a combat patrol wherein one round might get them all. It was instead a survival march in unfamiliar wilds without firearms; grouped defense, grasslands-baboon style, was their best bet.
