was precisely what they did not want us to do. It must have been frustrating for Tholan: the both of us in one tent that could have been cut from its moorings — two witnesses lost in the unfortunate accident-but sting-shooting molluscs preventing him from committing the dirty deed. I reached round with my free claw and tightly gripped Anders’s belt, swung my foot claws in, and gripped the rock-face with them.
“Get the frame off.”
She stared at me in confusion, then looked up the slope, and I think all the facts clicked into place. Quickly, while I supported her, she undid her frame’s straps, leaving the chest straps until last. It dropped into the mist: a large chrome harvestman spider… a dead one.
“Okay, round onto my back and cling on tightly.”
She swung round quickly. Keeping to third-assist-for any higher assistance and the frame might move too fast for her to hang on — I began climbing down the cliff to the mist. The first Optek bullet ricocheted off stone by my face. The second ricochet, by my hand, was immediately followed by an animal grunt from Anders. Something warm began trickling down my neck and her grip loosened.
Under the mist, a river thrashed its way between tilted slabs. I managed to reach one such half-seen slab just before Anders released her hold completely as she fainted. I laid her down and inspected her wound. The ricochet had hit her cheekbone and left a groove running up to her temple. It being a head wound, there was a lot of blood, but it didn’t look fatal if I could get her medical attention. But doing anything now with the medical kits we both carried seemed suicidal. I could hear the mutter of Tameera and Tholan’s voices from above — distorted by the mist. Then, closer, and lower down by the river, another voice:
“Shabra tabul. Nud lockock ocker,” something said.
It was like hiding in the closet from an intruder, only to have something growl right next to you. Stirred by the constant motion of the river, the mist slid through the air in banners, revealing and concealing. On the slab, we were five meters above the graveled riverbank upon which the creature squatted. Its head was level with me. Anders chose that moment to groan and I quickly slapped my hand over her mouth. The creature was pyramidal, all but one of its three pairs of arms folded complacently over the jut of its lower torso. In one huge black claw it held the remains of a sheq. With the fore-talon of another claw, it was levering a trapped bone from the white holly- thorn lining of its duck bill. The tiara of green eyes below its domed skull glittered.
“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
