Look to Windward

cyclone-struck clippers; puffs of gas made brief, dispersing vapour clouds in the air as the colossal creature’s outer ballonets and gas sacs were ruptured; the torn bodies of falficores, smerines and phuelerids tumbled in bloody cart-wheeling spirals into the abyss, their screams fright-eningly close in the compacted depth of air yet nearly drowned out in the vast noise of frenzied feeding going on all about.

The raptor scouts, cloud attackers, envelopian defenders and other creatures which were part of Sansemin’s dispersed self and that would normally easily have kept such aggressors at bay were nowhere to be seen. The remains of a few had been discovered where they had fallen and been picked clean by others. The most telling pair of skeletons had been found with their jaws clamped around the other’s neck.

Uagen Zlepe stood on the seemingly solid surface of the dirigible behemothaur’s vast back, looking out over a landscape of tattered, withered skin foliage being torn apart by falficore flocks. He stood beside the seven-metre- wide bulk of the signalling pod. It was anchored to the envelope’s surface by a dozen small hooks made from falficore talons and tended to by a handful of Deciders nearly identical to 974 Praf.

Spread in a circle about them were a hundred of Yoleus’ raptor scouts, forming a living defensive barrier which was patrolled from above by another fifty or sixty of the creatures, flying slow circuits. So far they had repelled all attacks and had not lost any of their number; even one of the ogrine disseisors, obviously intrigued by the activity round the signalling pod, had turned tail when confronted by twenty of the raptor scouts in attack formation and returned instead to the easier pickings on offer all over the dying behemothaur’s surface.

Two hundred metres away across Sansemin’s back, near the knobbled ridge of a longeron spine, a smerine swooped down, scattering the smaller creatures in a blizzard of piercing cries; it thudded into a giant wound in the behemothaur’s skin; Uagen saw the flesh around the tear ripple under impact. The predator flapped its twenty- metre wings and dipped its long head, flaying the exposed tissue.

A gas sac, severed from its supporting structure, wobbled out of the spreading wound and into the air. It began to climb. The smerine looked up but let it go; the falficore flock above attacked it, screeching, until it punctured and jetted slowly off, deflating in a long exhaling scream of gas and scattering enraged falficores behind it.

There was a thud at his feet. Uagen jumped. “Oh, Praf,” he said as the Interpreter stowed its wings. It had gone with a dozen of the raptor scouts to investigate the interior of the behemothaur. “Find anything?” he asked.

974 Praf watched the distant gas sac as it finally fell deflated into the foliage forest near Sansemin’s upper fore-fins. “We have found something. Come and look.”

“Inside?” Uagen asked nervously.

“Yes.”

“Is it safe? Umm, in there?”

974 Praf looked up at him.

“Umm. I mean, umm. The central gas bladders. The hydrogen core. I thought there was a possibility those might, that is, it might. Umm.”

“An explosion is possible,” 974 Praf said in a matter-of-fact manner. “This would be of a catastrophic nature.”

Uagen felt himself gulp. “Catastrophic?”

“Yes. The dirigible behemothaur Sansemin would be destroyed.”

“Yes. And. Umm. Us?”

“Too.”

“Too?”

“We too would be destroyed.”

“Yes. Well, then.”

“This outcome will grow more likely with delay. Therefore delay is not wise. Expedition is advisable.” 974 Praf shuffled its feet. “Extremely advisable.”

“Praf,” Uagen said, “do we have to do this?”

The creature rocked back on its heel talons and squinted up at him. “Of course. It is duty to the Yoleus.”

“And if I say no?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if I refuse to go inside and look at whatever it is you’ve found?”

“Then our investigations will take longer.”

Uagen stared at the Interpreter. “Longer.”

“Of course.”

“What have you found?”

“We do not know.”

“Then—”

“It is a creature.”

“A creature?”

“Many creatures. All dead but one. Of an unknown type.”

“What sort of unknown type?”

“That is what is unknown.”

“Well, what does it look like?”

“It looks a little like you.”

The creature looked like an alien child’s doll, thrown against a barbed wall and left hanging there. It was long, with a tail that was half its body length. The head was broad, furred and—he thought—striped, though in the darkness, using only his IR sense, he couldn’t tell what colours its pelt might be. The creature’s big, forward-facing eyes were closed. It had a thick neck, broad shoulders, two arms about the size of a large human’s but with very wide, heavy hands which looked more like paws. Only a dirigible behemothaur or one of its acolytes would have imagined it looked much like Uagen Zlepe.

It was one of twenty similar forms strung out along one wall of the chamber. All the others were dead and rotting.

Below the creature’s arms, supported by a second, still wider set of shoulders, rested what at first appeared to be a giant flap of furred skin. Looking closer, Uagen realised this was a limb. A dark pad of toughened skin extended across its end in an 8 shape, and stubby hints of toes or claws dotted the perimeter of the pad. Below the torso, two powerful-looking legs hung from a broad set of hips. A furred mound probably concealed genitals of some sort. The tail was striped. One of the root-cables Uagen had seen attached to the raptor scout in the similar chamber in Yoleus led from the back of the creature’s head and into the ribbed wall behind.

The smell in here was even worse than it had been in Yoleus. The journey had been horrific. Dirigible behemothaurs were riddled with fissures, chambers, cavities and tunnels disposed so that their collection of tributary fauna could carry out their various tasks. Many of these were large enough to admit raptor scouts and it was down one of these that they had journeyed from an entrance behind the behemothaur’s rear dorsal fin complex. The effects of the creature’s own attendant entities turning against it were everywhere. Great gouges and tears had been slashed through the tunnel’s walls, making the curved floor slick with liquid in some places and cloyingly sticky in others; flaps of decaying tissue hung from the ceiling like obscene banners, and rents in the floor could swallow a leg, a wing, or even—certainly in Uagen’s case—a whole body.

Here and there smaller creatures still feasted upon the body of the being they had served; other corpses littered the floor of the winding tunnel, and where the two raptor scouts accompanying 974 Praf and Uagen Zlepe down into the body of the behemothaur could do so without delaying their progress, they swiped out at the parasites and tore them to pieces, leaving them twitching on the floor behind.

Finally they had arrived at the chamber where the behemothaur sought knowledge from its self-kin and guests. A great tremor ran through the cavern just as they entered, making the walls shake and dislodging some of the half-rotted bodies.

Two of the specialist raptor scouts had clawed their way up the wall beside the creature which still appeared to be alive. They were intent on an examination of its head where the cable root disappeared into it. One of the raptor scouts held something small and glittering.

“Do you know the nature of this being?” 974 Praf asked. Uagen stared up at the creature. “No,” he said.