by Neal Asher
The two halted a few metres above and, with their clawframes gripping backwards 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 metres 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 crevice 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 crevice – 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 colour 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 crevice. It could reach only as far as the ridge where my clawframe 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 crevice, 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 crevice, finding how it rose to the surface at either end. Then the danger from octupals, stirring in the sump at the crevice bottom, forced me back to the tent. The following night was not good. A veritable swarm of octupal 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 for ever 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 clawframes, but at least we’ve retained our oxygen bottles and catalysers. 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 clawframe 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 entrée.’
‘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.’
After we had repacked the blister tent and sleeping bag, we moved to the end of the crevice which, though narrow, gave easier access to the surface. Slanting down one way, to the gravelled banks of the river, was another slab, bare and slippery. Above us was the edge of the slab we had rolled from, and behind that, disappearing into mist, rose the wall of stone I had earlier descended. Seeing this brought home to me just how deep was the shit trap we occupied. The citadel was just over two hundred kilometres away. I estimated our travel rate at not much more than a few kilometres a day. The journey was survivable. The Almanac loadings I’d had told me what we could eat, and there would never be any shortage of water. Just so long as our catalysers held out and neither of us fell…
‘We’ll run that line of yours between us, about four metres to give us room to manoeuvre. I’ll take point.’
‘You think it’s safe to come out?’ Anders asked.
‘Not really, but it’s not safe to stay here either.’
Anders ran the line out from her winder and locked it, and I attached its end ring to a loop on the back of my belt before working my way up to the edge of the slab. Once I hauled myself up I was glad to see her pack still where I had abandoned it. I was also glad that Anders did not require my help to climb up – if I had to help her all the way the prospective journey time would double. Anders shrugged on her pack, cinched the stomach strap. We then made our way to where vegetation grew like a vertical forest up the face of the cliff. Before we attempted to enter this I took out my palm com and worked out the best route – one taking us back towards the citadel but keeping us under the mist, but for the occasional ridge. Then, climbing through the tangled vegetation, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching us, something huge and dangerous, and that now it was following us.
The first day was bad. It wasn’t just the sheer physical exertion, it was the constant gloom underneath the mist sapping will and blackening mood. I knew Tameera and Tholan would not reach us that day, but I also knew that they could be back overhead in the blimp by the following morning blue if they travelled all night. But they would stop to rest. Certainly they knew they had all the time they wanted to take, to find and kill us.
As the sun went down, Anders erected one blister tent on a forty-degree slab – there was no room for the other tent. I set about gathering some of the many rock conches surrounding us. We still had rations, but I thought we should use such abundance, as the opportunity might not present later on. I also collected female spider vine flowers, and the sticky buds in the crotch branches of walker trees. I half expected Anders
to object when I began broiling the molluscs, but she did not. The conches were like chewy fish, the flowers were limp and slightly sweet lettuce. The buds have no comparison in Earthly food because none is so awful. Apparently it was a balanced diet. I packed away the stove and followed Anders into the blister tent just as it seemed the branches surrounding us were beginning to move. Numerous large warty octupals were dragging themselves through the foliage. They were a kind unknown to me, therefore not commonly encountered, else I would have received something on them in the Almanac’s general load.
In the morning, I was chafed from the straps in our conjoined sleeping bags (they stopped us ending up in the bottom of the bag on that slope) and irritable. Anders was not exactly a bright light either. Maybe certain sugars were lacking in the food we had eaten, because after munching down ration bars while we packed away our equipment we quickly started to feel a lot better. Or maybe it was some mist-born equivalent of SAD.
An hour after we set out, travel became a lot easier and a lot more dangerous. Before, the masses of vegetation on the steep slopes, though greatly slowing our progress, had offered a safety net if either of us fell. Now we were quickly negotiating slopes not much steeper than the slab on which Anders had moored the tent the previous night, and sparse of vegetation. If we fell here, we would just accelerate down to a steeper slope or sheer drop, and a final impact in some dank rocky sump. We were higher, I think, than the day before – the mist thinner. The voice of the gabbleduck was mournful and distant there.
‘Urecoblank … scudder,’ it called, perhaps trying to lure its next meal.
‘Shit, shit,’ I said as I instinctively tried to increase my pace and slipped over, luckily catching hold before I slid down.
‘Easy,’ said Anders.
I just hoped the terrain would put the damned thing off, but somehow I doubted that. There seemed to me something almost supernatural about the creature. Until actually seeing the damned thing, I had never believed there was one out here. I’d thought Myral’s gabbleduck as mythical as mermaids and centaurs on Earth.
‘What the hell is that thing doing here anyway?’ I asked.
‘Probably escaped from a private collection,’ Anders replied. ‘Perhaps someone bought it as a pet and got rid of it when it stopped being cute.’
‘Like that thing was ever cute?’ I asked.
Midday. The first Optek shots began wanging off the stone around us, and the shadow of my blimp drew above. A kind of lightness infected me then. I knew, one way or another, we were going to die, and that knowledge just freed me of all responsibility to myself and to the future.
‘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 a course that angled lower down into the mist. The firing tracked us, but I reckoned the chances of 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 kilometres. 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 kilometres. 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 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 metres 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 monofibre 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 in to 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 dropped into sight on its rope.
‘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 metres 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 towards 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. Ta
meera 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 afterwards. 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 as 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-millimetre-thick cable. At the last moment I accelerated, and leapt: three metres 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 towards 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.
