"Right," Keff said, starting toward the setup. He put one knee on the hanging sling. Suddenly, the computer emitted a loud beep, then a siren wail.
"Oh, no!" he exclaimed, leaping backward. "It's got a proximity alarm. Do they hear me? Are they coming this way?" He stared at the doorway.
"Don't panic," Carialle said, her voice changing to a deep baritone to be heard over the shrill alarms. "I don't hear any high frequencies from motion detectors. It might be a timer."
"It has attracted attention. I hear something." Keff's audio pickups detected a faint shuffling sound. "They're coming this way!"
He put one eye around the edge of the door and flung himself backward when he saw a huge shadow looming toward him. "I'm trapped. TE, keep out! I'll get free if I can."
"I hear," the Ozranian's voice said, sounding worried.
"Right you are, Sir Knight," Carialle said, suddenly. "All four bodies are moving toward your location. We've got a visitor coming from space, too."
"What?"
"Looks like Ship Three," she said. "It's alone. I'm tracking… updates as available. You hide, now!"
The shuffling sounds grew louder. Keff cast about frantically for a place to hide. He threw himself behind stacks of storage containers just as the feet reached the doorway. Stifling groans of pain from the ribs he bruised in his headlong dive, he flattened himself against the wall and hoped the barrier between him and the aliens was stable.
"They're big ones, all right," Carialle's voice said very quietly in his aural canal. "Two hundred fifty, a hundred seventy, and two hundred ten kilos respectively. The fourth one has gone through to the domes. Probably to watch Ship Three land."
"No way out," Keff said.
"Not yet. Your respiration and blood pressure are up. Take a few deep breaths. Take a drink of water. How is your oxygen supply?"
"Okay," Keff muttered sublingually. He heard a slight sound coming toward him and held his breath. He cursed both CW Exploration and Diplomatic for not allowing their ships to carry even defensive weapons. A stun gun would be useful right now in extricating him from this place. The brutes would kill him with the same lack of pity they showed the crew of the DSC-902. The sound continued past him. The next thing he heard was dragging-one of the aliens hauling in a sling from the atrium. They planned to stay in this room, probably until Ship Three landed. It took a mental effort to restart his breathing. He dragged in a gasp of air, then held his breath again.
"They can't hear you," Carialle reminded him, calmly. "Your helmet muffles sound effectively."
"I know," he whispered, "but because I can hear me I think they can. I'll relax."
Keff turned up the gain on his audio pickups. The aliens were talking. Their voices were surprisingly musicaclass="underline" deep, resonant, like the call of brass horns. He tried to separate the sounds into words and decided he didn't yet have enough data to go on. The hail from the approaching ship came in over the speakers faintly. Apparently Tall Eyebrow's improvised missiles had done some damage to the ship, because the transmission kept cutting in and out. He sensed concern in the voices of the ground crew.
Minutes dragged past. His muscles cramped because of the awkward position in which he lay, but he didn't dare shift to ease them. Sweat began to trickle out of his hairline, over his face and neck, and down between his shoulder blades. It itched infuriatingly. He blinked his eyes to clear drops off his lashes. The chatter of voices, both within the room and on the distant ship, reached a crescendo of agitation. Keff thought he heard the words "Central Worlds," in passing, but decided he was trying to read too much into the meaningless multisyllabic babble. Suddenly there was a hush in the room, and he felt the ground shake. The dome made a grand echo chamber for the boom! the ship made when it landed.
"Three point five on the Richter scale at the epicenter," Carialle said. "That ship has no boosters left to soften touchdown. TE did good work. It probably won't be able to to take off again."
"We ought to disable it entirely before we leave here," Keff whispered, "just to make sure."
Hissing and groaning from the airlock compressors heralded the arrival of Ship Three's crew. The ground staff greeted them with unmistakable relief. A couple of them hunched past the gap in the boxes behind which Keff was hiding. He heard the hubbub of vocal greeting, and the shifting of feet as they went through their handshake-equivalent ritual, whatever it was. The brawn maneuvered himself so he could peer through, and got his first glimpse of the aliens. He realized with a shock that their faces were just slightly farther from the floor than his. They did walk on all fours! He willed the new arrivals to stay where they were, and as if they could hear him, they did. At first he saw only partially-opaqued helmets and vast protective suits. One by one, the aliens sat back on invisible haunches, took off the helmets and shed gauntlets. Keff vibrated with impatience until one of them moved in front of the gap again.
"Big flat faces," he told Carialle in staccato bursts of narration, "weird eyes. Sleek head, widens to neck. Sandy pelts, slightly fuzzy, like the garden cushions. Claw hands."
One of them moved too close to the cartons and shut off his view with a slick, oversuited shoulder. Keff withdrew his head very slightly, and waited. The body moved away, and the fabric of the coverall slid downward to reveal the creature's back.
"Cari, they have wings!"
Carialle's voice was a businesslike hum in his ear. "Vestigial wings? That says a lot about the devolution of this planet's bios…"
"No," he hissed, excitedly. "Full-sized wings. Like bat's wings, but with longer fur."
"Do you know what that means?" Carialle asked, astonished, adding up the facts in a microsecond. "This planet isn't hollow. There's no air mass to support flight. Its surface gravity is huge! That means there are no underground passageways, no millions of separately evolved sentients living cheek by jowl with the Cridi. That's why the difference in the air quality between outside and inside. They're strangers. This is an outpost, too! Where do they come from?"
"I don't know!" Keff whispered.
He shifted to get a better view, feeling the boxes with his gloved hands to make sure they wouldn't slip. He found another gap, closer to the computer setup, and applied his eye to it.
"I keep seeing flashes of claws and talons. I think there's a pair of vestigial fingers on the wings, where, er, where primary feathers would be, beside that pair of hands on the forelimbs that is used for manipulative as well as locomotive purposes. I'm getting a glimpse of heavy haunches."
"That would explain the slings," Carialle's voice said. "Four hands! Fascinating."
Keff heard the ticking of claws on the smooth floor. One of the aliens paused just on the other side of the containers, giving Keff a good look at it. The brawn peered at the set of the narrow head; the placement of the wings on the broad, golden back; the noble, handsome face. "You know, they look rather like griffins."
Carialle immediately accessed the Myths and Legends handbook, found the cross-reference for Griffins, subhead: Gryphons, then cross-referenced it to encyclopediae and classical works from the European subcontinent of Old Earth. "Those griffins had eagles' beaks and lion's tails."
"These have no nose, but those mouths… if they are mouths…"
The "griffin," answering a query from one of its unseen fellows, spread the halves of its upper lip, and Keff blanched at the sharp white fangs behind it. "That's a mouth, all right," he said. "We need to file a report with the CenCom, but first I have to get out of here."