Need…
‘Shaddup! Buggering shaddup!’
The stalk of the sea-cane Peck sliced up with single panga blows so each fragrant section fell into the second barrel. The ribbed red-and-green skin of the cane stalk was only a thin sheath covering a gooey yellow honeycomb that smelt strongly of aniseed. Peck scooped up the tangled top and tossed it back over the side, before quickly snatching up the grappling hook and casting it out into the water again. It’s a coward, he thought, as he yanked in another cane. It’s only this bad when the Captain ain’t aboard. But today the whispering was particularly strong. He’d never known it as persistent as this before. But this time he would resist. It was only when he had dealt with the second sea-cane, which had nicely filled both barrels, that he remembered that Ambel kept the salt-yeast in his cabin. Then the whisper became even more intense, even more eager. With elaborate care, Peck returned the rope and grappling hook to the locker before clinging tight to the rail again. He clung there for as long as he could, but a horrible fascination eventually turned him round to stare towards the Captain’s cabin. After a moment he walked to the door and — out of Pland’s view — he ducked inside.
The pain. The pain had been transcendent. It had taken Peck somewhere he had never before been. There had been a terrible understanding in it, too. It had been given to him so he might understand, yet he had failed. Peck stood over the sea-chest with his sweat dripping on to the ornately carved wood. Here, concealed in this box, was something that all Hoopers — with their ambivalent relationship with pain — could not but fear and worship at the same time.
I mustn’t…
It was so hungry, and if he fed it, the whispering would stop. Peck abruptly turned from the cabin and ran out on to the deck. For a moment he stood there gasping, hoping it would just cease. That subtle voice suggested untold pleasure and pain so intermingled they were indistinguishable. He had to silence it, so if food would do the trick, then food it must be. He reached into the barrel where they kept the sail’s feed and pulled out the last, rather putrid rhinoworm steak. He headed back into the Captain’s cabin and opened the chest.
It was there in the box; moving about in the box. Peck studied the secured lock and felt a strange relief.
I tried…
Then the lock clicked.
Oh bugger.
Gliding on thermals rising from banks of sun-heated coral, Windcheater observed the motorized dinghy as it hurtled for the shore, the wake of a chasing rhino-worm close behind it. Steam and explosions of water blew from around that wake as the figure crouched in the back of the dinghy tried to hit the pursuing worm with a high-intensity laser. Windcheater recognized this because only recently he had been scanning, with wonder and no little dismay, a weapon-dealer’s site.
‘They’re bounty hunters. Batian killers. I already know about them,’ said the Warden, as the sail tried to describe what he was seeing — he hadn’t yet quite mastered transferring images across from his visual cortex.
Windcheater banked, riding out of the thermal and away from the island. Hadn’t there been something about Batians on that weapons site? The sail resisted the impulse to go back to the place as he had more than enough to chew on concerning humankind. As he flew on, he auged through to any easily accessible information about his own kind, and was surprised to find how much and how little was known.
Polity experts knew that sails fed from the surface of the sea, taking rhinoworms, glisters, prill from the back of leeches — and sometimes leeches themselves. The speculation that they took to the ships for an easier food supply and a less hazardous existence was, of course, entirely wrong. Strange how the humans tried to classify the behaviour of any other species as relating only to ‘animal’ traits. Windcheater was completely certain that he and his kin had taken to the ships out of curiosity. It was much more difficult working as a ship sail for just a few steaks than snatching a whole worm from the sea and devouring it on the wing. Silly, arrogant humans.
The information section concerning sail mating was of huge interest to Windcheater. He had known for a long time that humans were divided into two sexes, and how all that operated — he had often been aboard a ship during one of the frequent Hooper meets, though why it was necessary to consume prodigious quantities of sea-cane rum and boiled hammer whelks before the sexual act, he had never been able to fathom. What he had not been aware of was that his own kind had four sexes. Anyway, during the mating season, he had never really had much chance to think about the mechanisms that drove him to such exhausting madness. Three males required to fertilize one female egg, and that egg then encysted and stuck, in its cocoon, on the side of the Big Flint. Hence, what a human far in the past had described as ‘that rock-top orgy’.
Windcheater flew on, heading for the horizon of Spatterjay, and all the new horizons he was now discovering. He was but a speck by the time the Batians beached their dinghy in a spray of sand and opened fire en masse on the rhinoworm that reared out of the sea behind them.
The worm dropped, flaming, back into the sea, writhed there for a moment as if still intent on coming on to the beach after them, and then grew still. Shib let out a shuddering breath, then quickly wiped at the sweat that was stinging his eyes.
‘Great idea using an inflatable dinghy to get out here. Real classic, that one,’ he snarled.
‘Shut up, Shib,’ said Svan, as she watched the leeches surfacing to take apart the laser-cooked rhinoworm. ‘You know what would happen if we used AG here. The Warden would be up our asses with a thermite grenade about two seconds later.’
‘Yeah, but—’
Svan made a chopping motion with her hand. ‘Enough. You either handle it or you don’t.’
Shib shut up. He knew Svan wasn’t suggesting he could pay back the deposit and go home. Employment contracts with first-rankers like her either ended with a large payout or in a rather terminal manner. He nodded when she gestured towards the boat, then slung his carbine from his shoulder and headed over to the vessel. Upon reaching it, he immediately clicked on the little rotary pump. Joining him, Dime hauled out their packs and tossed them on to the pebbled beach. Shib detached and collapsed the telescopic outboard, and then he and Dime stood back as the dinghy quickly collapsed and shrivelled. The rolled-up dinghy was no wider than a man’s wrist, and with its motor locked beside it, formed a pack that could be tucked under an arm. Dime carried this to the head of the beach and slid it under a spread of sheetlike leaves growing there. Soon all four of them had loaded up their packs and were heading along the beach.
‘Why here?’ Tors asked after a moment.
‘A location easy to find — and our client has business here,’ Svan replied.
Half listening to the conversation, Shib kept his eyes on the dingle. A hideous bird-thing observed him from the branches of a tree with a hugely globular trunk. He had thought the creature dead and decaying until it had moved to follow their progress with its glistening eye-pits. He suppressed his immediate inclination to burn it from its branch. No doubt Svan would take that as one push too many.
‘Do you have any further information on this client?’ Tors asked.
‘Same one as has had the bounty up on Sable Keech for the last three centuries. No way of tracing the transaction without collecting, and no one has managed that yet.’
‘I don’t get how he’s lasted so long,’ said Dime, with an apologetic glance to Shib.