Dinosaurus Planet Survivors
- Автор: Маккефри Энн
- Серия: Dinosaur Planet #2
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Dinosaurus Planet Survivors». Краткое содержание книги:
“He’s back. He’s back,” she cried as she ran to the vines anchored to the shuttle and began shinnying up. She was just pulling herself onto the cliff when the blunt snout of the two-man vehicle emerged from the obscuring haze and wobbled erratically in her direction.
Krims! Was the thing damaged. “Lunzie! Triv! Get up here!”
What was Kai attempting? The sled angled down, not as if he was attempting to circle and land in the cave. The flight angle was wrong. What was he doing? Reminding the giffs of the first peaceful visit they’d had from humans? No, not with the sled swinging like that. Glare kept her from making out the pilot behind the canopy. The giffs were alarmed, too, taking to the air in flocks. Some began to circle to investigate. The bow of the sled dipped again and, as Varian watched from the cliff edge, her heart in her throat, its forward motion was braked so fast that the vehicle fell rather than descended, bumping along the vines until she was afraid that momentum would carry it over the cliff. She even put out her hand in an unconscious gesture. With a final grind, the nose of the sled caught on the vines and it slowed to a halt. Then she could see that Kai was slumped over the console.
Forgetting any caution for the circling giffs, she clambered over the edge and reached the sled just as the first of the giffs landed. She eyed the creature over the stained and scratched canopy. The giff reared back, its wings half extended, the wing talons spread but, as she caught her breath and braced herself for an assault, a long warbling note restrained the giff. The creature’s talons closed and its wings relaxed slightly.
She had time, then, Varian thought, to get to Kai. She pressed the canopy release and, once the plasglas had cracked open, she pushed to speed the retraction.
“Kai! Kai!”
“Kaaaiiiii! Kaaaaiiiii!” The giffs mimicked her as more landed and ranged themselves on either side of the first one.
At that moment, Kai moaned. Ignoring the giffs, Varian bent into the sled to tend to his body slumped over the console. A putrid stench now rose from the opened cockpit. Shuddering in revulsion, she hauled Kai upright. And shuddered again, mastering the wave of nausea that swept her. Kai’s face was a mass of blood. What was left of his overall was matted against his bloodied flesh. The whole front of him was a bloody mess.
“LUNZIE! TRIV! HELP!” She screeched over her shoulder.
“UNNNNZZZZI IVVVVELLLLL.” The giffs picked up the sounds.
“Shut up! I don’t need a chorus!” Varian yelled at them to relieve the horror that she experienced looking down at her co-leader. He moaned again.
Her fingers hunted for the pulse against the carotid artery. Slow, strong and regular. Strange. No, he’d been exerting Discipline. How else could he have returned to the cliffs in his condition.
Had Lunzie heard her? She glanced warily up at the giffs and was astonished to see that every head was turned away and the bodies seemed to be withdrawing from the sled. They looked, for all the world, as if they were avoiding an unpleasant smell. And so they were, for the stench still rose from the sled, and mostly from Kai. Could she risk leaving him and going to the cliff edge to hurry help.
“We’re coming!” Triv’s shout finally encouraged her.
She bent to look more closely at Kai’s wounds. He appeared to have been attacked by something or something’s that sucked blood for as she eased a shred of his coverall from his chest, she saw the pattern of pin point marks on his skin, each with its own jewel like tear drop of blood. And that awful stink! Worse than anything that Ireta had inflicted on her before except, she realized now, that she remembered that frightful odor. It was not easy to forget: oily, marine, and utterly disgusting!
“Is it safe to approach?” Triv asked, poking his head over the cliff edge.
“It hardly matters, does it?” Lunzie replied, heaving herself onto the vine-covered surface.
“They’re not aggressive now,” Varian said in a well-projected voice, keeping her tone sweet. “I’d just move slowly.”
“My intention, I assure you. How bad is Kai?”
“He’s unconscious now. Must have Disciplined himself to get back.
He seems to have run into a bloodsucker.”
“Faugh!” Lunzie’s face wrinkled in distaste and she pinched her nostrils. “What’s that smell?”
“Kai.”
“Your fliers don’t seem to like the smell any more than we do,”
Triv remarked.
“Let’s get him out of the sled while they’re snooting the wind,” Lunzie said. “I really can’t see enough through the blood.
Triv and Varian slipped into the sled to hoist out the unconscious geologist. Triv grimaced at muscles slow to respond to his commands as they guided the limp body out to Lunzie.
“That stink would suffocate a man,” Triv remarked, taking deep gulps of fresher air. “Oh ho, what’s wrong here?” He bent back inside the sled. “Did he drop this thing? Every malfunction light on the control panel is lit.”
“Krims! I was hoping we could fly him down to the cave in the sled,” Varian said.
“I wouldn’t advise it until I can get behind the control panel.”
Triv flicked off the power and closed the canopy.
Lunzie deftly peeled away the tatters of the coverall to disclose the hundreds of tiny punctures that had pierced Kai’s skin, each one filled with blood. Varian removed the trouser legs.
“Even his boots are perforated,” she told Lunzie. “I don’t remember telltagging anything that could do this.”
“You think he’d smell it coming,” was Lunzie’s dour comment.
“Watch it, girls, we’ve got company. Hey…”
At Triv’s warning, Lunzie and Varian looked up and received a giff-borne shower in the face as a flight of giffs skimmed over them and each emptied its filled throat pouch on the little group. Most of the unexpected drenching fell on Kai’s exposed body, leaving it clean of blood momentarily.
“Well, what d’you make of that?” demanded Triv. “Ah there’s more coming! No, they’ve got leaves!”
As deftly as the shower had been delivered, the thick green leaves dropped about Kai.
“What are they trying to tell us, Varian?” Lunzie wanted to know.
“They know that stink, Lunzie. They could know what attacked him.
They must be trying to help us.”
“They’d attack with claw and wing,” Triv said thoughtfully, “not water and leaves.”
“But they did attack you and Kai…” Lunzie began.
“This time they saw us all come from the cave.” Varian seized one of the leaves and held it up to the giffs remaining beyond the sled. “What do I do with it?”
Lunzie picked up a leaf, crushing the pulpy tip in her fingers, sniffing and sneezing at the odor of the sap.
“One thing sure, it smells a lot better than he does. A neutralizer?”
“Varian! That big one…” Triv pointed and they looked at the largest of the giffs, who could have been the Middle Giff of the cave inspection, crushing a leaf in its talon and smearing it on its chest fur.
“What might work on giffs, might not work on us, but I’ve nothing else…” Lunzie muttered and tentatively squeezed sap over the oozing punctures on Kai’s shoulder. “Well, what d’you know? It’s a styptic! Quick, both of you, get to work. Even if the leaves only stop the bleeding, it’s something!” She tasted the sap then. “Oooo. Bitter, bitter. Alum like. Good. Now if it could also neutralize-whatever bit Kai is toxic as all… Hell!”