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, and 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, that 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 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
