The Gabble

“Total malfunction. Safe mode-power down,” my helmet display informed me. I pulled the trigger anyway, then gazed down in bewilderment at the slagged hole through the weapon.

“Mine,I think,” said Jael, stooping in one to pick up her weapon and fire. Same explosive shell she’d used against the Prador. It thumped into my chest, hurling me back, then detonated as it ricocheted away. The blast flung me up, trailing flame and smoke, then I crashed down feeling as if I’d been stepped on by some irate giant. My chainglass visor was gone and something was sizzling ominously inside my suit. Armored plates were peeled up from my arm, which I could see stretched out ahead of me, and my gauntlet was missing.

“What the fuck are you doing here with him?” Jael enquired angrily.

“He turned up on Arena before I left,” Gene replied. “Just to be on the safe side I was keeping to the Pens until Penny Royal’s golem left.”

“And you consider that an adequate explanation?”

“I put Arena Security onto him, but he somehow escaped them and ambushed me outside.” Gene sounded somewhat chagrined. “I let him persuade me to give him the U-signal code from the gabbleduck.”

I turned my head slightly but only got a view of tangled metal and a few silver golem bones. “Ulriss,” I whispered, but received only a slight buzzing in response.

“So much for your wonderful ECS training.”

“It was enough to convince him that I still worked for them.”

So, no ECS action here, no Polity dreadnought on the way. I thought about that encounter I’d seen between the Prador cruiser and the dreadnought. I’d told Gene about it and she’d used the information against me, convincing me that the Polity was involved. Of course, what I’d seen was the kind of saber-rattling confrontation between Prador and Polity that had been going on in the Graveyard for years.

“What’s the situation here?” Gene asked.

“Fucked,” Jael replied. “Something’s intervened. We have to get out of here now.”

I heard the sounds of movement. They were going away, so I might survive this. Then the sounds ceased too abruptly.

“You used an explosive shell,” Gene noted from close by.

“What?”

“He’s still alive.”

“Well,” said Jael, “that’s a problem soon solved.”

Her boots crunched on the floor as she approached, and gave me her location. I reached out with my bare hand and slid it into slick silvery metal. Finger controls there. I clamped down on them and saw something shimmering deep into twisted metal.

“Collar!” I said, more in hope than expectation, before heaving myself upright.

Jael stood over me, and beyond her I saw Gene reach up toward her neck, then abruptly drop to the floor. I swung my arm across as Jael began to bring her multigun up to her shoulder.

A slight tug-that was all. She stood there a moment longer, still aiming at me, then her head lifted and fell back, attached still at the back of her neck by skin only, and a red stream shot upward. Air hissing from her severed trachea, she toppled.

I carefully lifted my fingers from the controls of the golem weapon, then caught my breath, only now feeling as if someone had worked me over from head to foot with a baseball bat. Slowly climbing to my feet I expected to feel the pain of a broken bone somewhere, but there was nothing like that. No need to check on Jael’s condition, so I walked over to Gene. She was unconscious and would be for some time. I stooped over her and unplugged the power cable and control optics of her weapon from her suit, then plugged them into mine. No response and of course no visor read-out. I set the weapon to manual and turned away. I decided that once I’d retrieved the memstore-if that was possible-I would come back in here and take her suit, because mine certainly would not get me to Ulriss Fire.

The hum of power and the feeling of distorted perception associated with U-jumping greeted me. I don’t know what that thing was poised over the gabbleduck, nor did I know what kind of force-field surrounded it and that other entity that seemed the bastard offspring of a sea urchin and an octopus. But the poised thing was fading, and as it finally disappeared, the field winked out and numerous objects crashed to the floor.

I moved forward, used the snout of my weapon to lift one tentacle, and then watched it flop back. Penny Royal, I guessed. It was slumped across the floor beams and other machinery here. The gabbleduck turned its head as if noticing me for the first time, but it showed no particular signs of hostility, nor did it seem to show any signs of its containing some formidable alien intelligence. I felt sure the experiment here had failed, or rather, had been curtailed in some way. Something’s intervened, Jael had said. Nevertheless, I kept my attention focused on the creature as I searched for and finally found the memstore. It was fried but I pocketed it anyway, for it was my find, not something ECS had put in the path of my sifting machine.

Returning to the other chamber, I there stripped Gene of her spacesuit and donned it myself.

“Ulriss, we can talk now.”

“Ah, you are still alive,” the AI replied. “I was already composing your obituary.”

“You’re just a bundle of laughs. You know that?”

“I am bursting with curiosity and try to hide that in levity.”

I explained the situation, to which Ulriss replied, “I have put out a call to the Polity dreadnought we sighted and given it this location.”

“Should we hang around?”

“There will be questions ECS will want to ask, but I don’t see why we should put ourselves at their disposal. Let their agents find us.”

“Quite right,” I replied.

I bagged up a few items, like that golem weapon, and was about to head back to my ship when I glanced back and saw the gabbleduck crouching in the tunnel behind.

“Sherber grodge,” it informed me.

Heading back the way I’d come into this hell-hole, I kept checking back on the thing.

Gabbleducks don’t eat people, apparently-they just chew them up and spit them out. This one followed me like a lost puppy and every time I stopped it stopped too and sat on its hindquarters, occasionally issuing some nonsensical statement. I got the real weird feeling, which went against all my training and experience, that this creature was harmless to me. I shook my head.

Ridiculous. Anyway, I’d lose it at the airlock.

When I did finally reach the airlock and began closing that inner door, one big black claw closed around the edge and pulled it open again. I raised my gun, crosshairs targeting that array of eyes, but I just could not pull the trigger. The gabbleduck entered the airlock and sat there, close enough to touch and close enough for me to fry if it went for me. What now? If I opened the outer airlock door the creature would die. Before I could think of what to do, a multi-jointed arm reached back and heaved the inner door closed, whilst the other arm hauled up the manual handle of the outer door, and the lock air pressure blew us staggering into the pipe beyond.

I discovered that gabbleducks can survive in vacuum … or at least this one can.

Later, when I ordered Ulriss to open the door to the small hold of my ship, the gabbleduck waddled meekly inside. I thought then that perhaps something from the memstore had stuck. I wasn’t sure-certainly this gabbleduck was not behaving like its kind on Masada.

I also discovered that gabbleducks will eat raw recon bacon.

I hold the fried memstore and think about what it might have contained, and what the fact of its existence means. A memstore for an Atheter mind goes contrary to the supposed nihilism of that race. A race so nihilistic could never have created a space-faring civilization, so that darkness must have spread amidst them in their last days. The Atheter recorded in the memstore could not have been one of the kind that wanted to destroy itself, surely?

I’m taking the gabbleduck back to Masada-I feel utterly certain now that it wants me to do this. I also feel certain that to do otherwise might not be a good idea.