“So … how are we doing, Corporal? You two have about enough fun here?” She resisted the urge to glance longingly towards the shelter of the aircar. Then she remembered—wings. But surely there was no way … “Those things can’t actually fly, can they? Even a little?”
The look Vasquez gave her wasn’t quite pitying. “Of course not, ma’am. The wings are for mating and dominance displays. Nothing that size could possibly fly with those wings.”
Of course not. The whole idea was absurd. Cube-square law, muscular efficiency, basic aerodynamics … No wonder Vasquez had looked at her like a not-too-bright child.
“Right. So, ah …” She’d just noticed Leidecker was recording everything with his xel. “You still want to look for that Veriform thing, right?”
“The Veriform Gloriosa? Yes, certainly.” Taking the hint, she got the doctor’s attention. “Might be good to move on, Doctor? Before it gets much later?”
“Oh.” Leidecker, absorbed in his observation, recovered himself. “Quite right. Quite right.” And at that moment, the rock beneath them did shake.
“What the …” Kris’s voice trailed off. The male probostelli must’ve felt it too. As one, they lifted their heads again and called; a different note altogether, more urgent, ending in a shrill discordant wail. Then they all turned and thundered away to the south at a lumbering run.
The rock shivered again and there was a commotion in the trees to right and below, in the dead ground beyond the edge of the clearing.
“You don’t think …” Vasquez murmured, quiet and amazed.
“I could scarily credit it,” replied Leidecker in a like tone.
“What the hell are you two talking about?” Kris asked, more worried than ever.
As if in answer, a head rose into view, and kept rising, on a long serpentine neck. The treetops swayed as they were pushed aside and the ground shook with a monstrous, irresistible tread. Before anyone could speak, the body hove into view: leviathan on four legs, the foot of any one of which could have crushed a male probostellus with ease.
“What—is … that … thing?” Kris barely got the words out in a dry husking voice.
“It’s a female.” The corporal’s face was radiant with wonder—beatific, even rapturous.
“A female probostellus?”
There was a superficial similarity to the heads, though where the males’ were ungainly with the narrow cranium and long drooping snout, the female’s had a reptilian elegance with great, glittering slit-pupiled dark eyes. In place of the drab gray hide of the males, the female’s was sleek cobalt green and blue, shading to reddish gold at the underside. Over the back were folded a pair of enormous wings, bright turquoise, lightening to a silvery shade at the outer edge. These wings did not mold as tightly to her back as they did the males’, projecting their pointed tips well beyond the hindquarters. A long whip-like tail, ending a massy barbell, balanced the curving neck, and the slimmer body mocked the males’ stumpiness.
“That thing’s the size of a frigate,” Kris whispered.
“Not quite, ma’am.” Vasquez gave her an indulgent smile. “Not above three-quarters the size.”
“Ah, people?” Hardestan spoke from behind them, low and urgent. Vasquez and Leidecker turned as if they’d quite forgotten his existence—which they probably had. “Y’think we oughta get airborne?”
“I cannot recommend that just now,” Leidecker answered, speaking with great care. “I shouldn’t like to attract her attention at this particular moment.”
Hardestan, his already pallid face now whey colored, retreated inside the aircar and sat back down at the controls. “Just lemme know then.”
“Assuredly.”
Leidecker sounded far too insouciant for Kris’s liking. These rocks offered little if any shelter against a creature that big, but she thought the doctor had a point. The barbell on the end of that tail was almost the size of the aircar, and the way the beast was lashing it around, attempting take off did seem like a poor choice right now. Still …
“Is it aggressive?” Kris whispered in Vasquez’s averted ear.
“Oh no, ma’am,” the corporal whispered. “She’s most unlikely to do anything”—with a mild insistence on the feminine pronoun. “Unless she’s provoked, that is.”
Oh great. Just stellar.
And they all returned their attention to the female probostellus, which was approaching one of the conifers in the clearing. She seemed intent on the bunches of fruit high above, but they were out of reach of even her neck. Could she rear up? Kris wondered. Unless that body could be lifted much closer to the vertical that Kris thought possible, it still wouldn’t be enough. Then the female reared, and bracing her forelimbs on the mighty trunk, appeared to be snuffling the fruit, now just out of reach. Waggling her head to and fro—whether in satisfaction or negation was impossible to say—she pushed away from the tree to land on all fours with a jarring thump that shook pebbles loose from their rock.
“What—” Kris began to whisper but the corporal motioned her to silence with a forefinger against her lips. The beast backed and turned and Kris heard the whistle as it whipped that long tail up and around. With a powerful writhe of the hindquarters, the female slammed the barbell into the tree’s trunk with a reverberating crash. With another whistling windup, she assaulted the tree again, sending out a shower of live splinters as Kris scrunched further down into the cleft of rock. Three more of these incredible, echoing blows and the beast stopped and resumed her swaying contemplation of the now half-shattered trunk.
“Watch now, ma’am,” Vasquez urged, as Kris showed every sign of wanting to make herself absolutely as insignificant as possible. “You won’t want to miss this.”
Like hell. Just show me the fuckin’ video.
But pride and curiosity and the mesmerizing joy in the corporal’s voice pried Kris loose from her crouch, and she peered cautiously into the clearing. The female probostellus was up on her hind legs again, braced once more against the tree, but this time she was leaning on it with all her weight, pushing in a slow, deliberate rhythm. The tree began to sway and then they heard a deep solemn rending note as it bent, bent further, and then a great earsplitting crash as it snapped off and toppled, riffling their hair with the wind of its falling.
Vasquez and Leidecker were practically beside themselves as the creature sauntered up the crown and Kris turned to ask another question, only to receive another silent shushing gesture, as it began to take deep huffing breaths. They could plainly see the massive thorax expand, great ribs spreading to an remarkable degree, then the head shot forward, jaws gaping and gout of blue flame erupted, scorching the fruit.
Another deep inhalation, another gargantuan flaming breath; then twice more, until the much of the crown was blackened and smoldering, and Kris was wide-eyed and dumbfounded. Then female probostellus tucked in to eating the steaming fruit with a delighted appetite.
“What the fuck was that?” Kris breathed, when she could finally breath at all.
“Methane,” Vasquez answered peacefully. “The females store it in a series of bladders just under the ribs. They exhale and ignite it with an enzyme secreted behind the back teeth.” Vasquez explained this as if that was perfectly commonplace. Kris began to entertain doubts as to what Antigua must be like.
“It’s okay, ma’am.” Vasquez had noted her look. “She’s eating now. It’s quite safe. You’ll see.”
“See what?”—not liking the glint in the corporal’s eye. Besides, Vasquez was speaking far too soothingly for comfort.
Instead of answering—or maybe it was her answer—the corporal slipped down the rock and began to walk out into the field. Instinctively opening her mouth, Kris snapped it shut as Leidecker clutched her elbow. “It would not do to make any abrupt motions, just now.” He spoke low, recording all the while.
Abrupt? What did Leidecker think of Vasquez, even now advancing on a beast who could inhale her without noticing? They could hear the great jaws
at work, a long, purple-stained, prehensile tongue manipulating the clusters into its maw. Observing the unconcern with which the probostellus crunched the spines along with the fruit, Kris twitched. Vasquez was already in well within range—that tongue must be ten meters long.
“Why’d it torch that tree?” The question was absurd, in keeping with the whole affair, but Kris could not help it. Those spines, so formidable looking, offered not even a token defense, so what use could the flame have been?
“Poison,” Leidecker answered, speaking in voice closer to normal now. “The skin of that fruit are coated in a virulent poison, although the flesh itself is quite wholesome. The flame denatures it. I’m told it quite tasty—heavily restricted, though. But something like blackberry, although more potent. Potentially fatal, if overindulged in.” His voice wandered off as he continued to record, and yes, the aroma was reaching them now: a blackly sweet, heavy scent, condensed, syrupy and cloying, overlaid with a sharpness, like raw alcohol.
It made Kris’s eyes seem to burn; she rubbed them and Vasquez whistled. Instantly, both her eyes and beast’s fixed on the tiny figure. Vasquez had arms spread wide and was now singing to the creature: a pure, light, carrying soprano that wafted back to them—something in her native tongue.
Leidecker was murmuring under his breath, Kris was practically choking on wild thump in her chest and the corporal was sidling up to the probostellus like a maid at a faire. The probostellus laid its titanic head in the tall grass, regarding the corporal with a cold reptilian stare, its vertical pupils narrowed to mere slits. Vasquez came up one side, up to the eye itself—an eye that must have a half-meter taller than she was—and stretching on tiptoe, began to scratch the scaly ridge above it. Incredibly, the beast closed its eyes and huffed.
Leidecker put down his xel and Kris felt dizzy.
“Uh, people—” Hardestan said from behind them.
“Quiet,” they cut him off in unison. Their tone must have carried conviction because Hardestan spoke no further. Vasquez gave the probostellus an affectionate pat on the snout and started to back away, recommencing her song. At length, the probostellus returned to its feeding, but more lazily now, selecting individual morsels rather daintily. Vasquez, seeing this, turned and came back with a swift step that was almost jaunty, giving Kris the impression—another absurdity—that the corporal would have been skipping had it been safe do to so.
“Vasquez,” she began in thick voice when the corporal rejoined them, but Vasquez’s face was so radiant, her smile so broad and beautiful, the dark eyes aglow with a delight so palpable Kris could not finish.
“Ma’am, I trust—”
“Astounded, I am” Leidecker interrupted. “Most extraordinarily astounded and amazed. Would never have believed it.” He gestured with his xel, now furled. “Can hardly believe it now. Even with this. It is very like a dream, I say. Paradisiacal.”
“C’mon, people. I have to insist—”
A great shattering brass bellow ripped the air.
“What the fuck?” For Vasquez and Leidecker’s faces had changed instantly from rapture to deep alarm. Below, the probostellus had lifted her head and seemed to be scenting the breeze.
“Best get inside,” Vasquez was saying, taking Kris by the arm, as Leidecker urged them along from behind. As they climbed into the aircar and sealed the doors, Kris looked over her shoulder at the pair.
“What now?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Do you think it possible?” Leidecker asked, staring out the window. Crouched low, the probostellus was breathing like a bellows, its wings half extended and beating powerfully, flattening the grass all around. Beneath the pumping wings, its flanks rippled strangely. “I had thought it a mere tall tale, as they say. A mythic fabrication—the invention of fabulists . . .”
No one was listening, especially Hardestan, who seized the thruster controls. “We’re outta—”
“No!” The exclamation shocked him, coming from both mouths at once and looking back, there could be no doubt that that Vasquez would physically restrain him if necessary.
“We must delay,” Leidecker added, much more gently. “To be airborne now—most imprudent. But a moment longer.”
As he finished speaking, the female probostellus made a galvanic spring as the partly folded wings beat downwards. The leap lifted her no great distance into the air, but as the wings swept up, torrents of blue-tongued flame erupted all along the beast’s lower flanks, igniting the grass in an explosion of dense white smoke, shot through with burning embers, that entirely hid the creature as it billowed skyward in a towering cloud. From out of the center, as the three occupants of the aircar sat shocked to utter stillness, the probostellus rose—up and up—on the roaring jets whose ground-blast rocked them.
At fifty meters altitude or more, the wings unfurled to their full shocking extent, and with a single beat, the jets died. The massive shadow passed over them as the probostellus glided off south, gaining speed down the far slope, and soaring away above the treetops.
“Now can we go?” Hardestan asked when the probostellus was lost from sight. The man was visibly shaking. Nor was he the only one.
“Oh, yes,” Leidecker found his voice to reply a moment later. “Yes, indeed. Surely.”
~ ~ ~
Day 192 (PM)
Darnen’s Fell, Traumerei Mountains
Southern Continent, Iona, Cygnus Mariner
They flew on to their original destination (a map coordinate someone in the cartography department had seen fit to label “Darnen’s Fell”) wrapped in a gauzy sense of anticlimax. Leidecker spoke rather at random and at odd intervals, to be answered by Vasquez, who voice had something (though not much) of the same distracted quality. Neither Kris nor Hardestan spoke at all. Hardestan was slow to recover his color and his lips remained pale while his knuckles showed yellowish from being clamped on the controls. His eyes flicked from the instruments to the forward view screen from time to time, but otherwise hardly a muscle moved in his expressionless face.
Kris could simply could think of nothing to say, and not being called on to say anything, indulged herself by closing her eyes and retreating into a private reverie. Pulled from it by a comment from Leidecker to Hardestan on reaching their objective, she opened her eyes to find them entering a steep-sided gorge with a river at bottom and impenetrable-looking vegetation climbing half way up the sheer walls. Flying along at little more than treetop level, Hardestan eventually set the aircar down in glade where gorge opened out into broad plain where the river lost its vigor in a maze of smaller channels meandering through carpet of lowland jungle, a shocking contrast to the towering coniferous forest they had so recently left behind.
As the aircar’s doors opened, humid air, so heavily scented with a light sweetness over a dense, earthy umami tang that it felt almost sticky, hit them in waves as if the jungle itself was breathing. On exiting and walking to the edge of the glade, a demarcation so sharp as to seem unnatural, Kris discovered that her fanciful notion the jungle was breathing was not so fanciful after all.
It was flowers: large trumpet-shaped flowers, clearly allied to those they seen in the probostellus’ meadow and full of the same clear, viscous nectar, but these were a rich salmon or coral color, with redder throats and furled inner petals, and unlike their upcountry cousins, those long throats pulsed, sending pungent wafts into the humid air. They grew at intervals from broad, smooth mahogany-hued trunks that grew along the ground and were shot through with veins of rich burgundy and laced with a tracery of gold, so that the bark appeared to shimmer. Between the trunks, grew tall stands of bamboo-like stalks, many as big around as a Kris’s waist, with outer skins that shown like gold-leaf. Far above, the dark green canopy roofed the jungle, the huge leaves nodding to each other and letting in a dazzling fractured light.
Hypnotic, alluring, enticing as a vision from a spectacular dream that might so easily shift into the darker realm of nightmare, the ever-present rustling o
f the breeze in the canopy took on the quality of a sigh, even at times a soft panting, that made Kris’s skin tighten between the shoulder blades.
They exchanged a round of glances and Leidecker smiled. “Fabulous, isn’t it?” Hardestan, standing next to Kris, muttered something she barely caught that sounded like “God’s own whorehouse” and secretly agreeing with him, she followed Vasquez and Leidecker across the boundary, Hardestan bring up the rear with a reluctant step.
Walking on the damp, spongy leaf-littered ground quickly proved to be impossible. The trunks, some a meter and more in diameter, provided the only highway and they crept along these at first, and then moved more boldly as they acquired greater confidence. The trick was to not slow down and ponder the next step. Mastering this, Kris found they were covering a surprising amount of ground.
Covering it to where was much less clear. The serpentine wind of the trunks led them on, through this hallucinogenic tropical maze, ever deeper into the treacherously perfumed heart of the unknown in pursuit of the unimaginable. Vasquez was out front, gliding along in the dappled light with no more concern than if she strolling down a broad and civilized thoroughfare. Leidecker came next, remarkably spry for a man of his age and build, while behind Kris, Hardestan was audibly puffing and, from the curses trailing intermittently in his wake, deeply regretting his decision to accept this assignment.
As much faith as Kris had in Vasquez, the jaunt was taking on dimensions that reached the outer limits of weird—or even fuckin’ weird—and were fast approaching truly disturbing. Just when she felt she needed to say something, Vasquez suddenly froze and raised a fist. For the next few seconds, graven images showed more life than did Kris and her companions. Then, keeping the rest of her body utterly still, Vasquez slowly raised one finger and pointed slightly up and left.
Alerted by the corporal’s stock-still posture, Kris swiveled her eyes alone in the direction indicated. There, inserted to the hindquarters in the depths of a vibrant pink blossom on a nearby branch, was a dull ocher beast with mammalian haunches and long tail tipped with a brush of fur. Based on what she could see, Kris estimated it to be about a meter long.
Loralynn Kennakris 4: Apollyon's Gambit Page 34