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Arkk couldn’t see the Urd and his vortna tracker, but he knew they were out there. Gau squeezed his upper arm again, and Arkk fought down the rising flood of panic.
“I won’t let them catch you,” the Osk said, “but you must do exactly as I say. Can you do that for me, Arkk?”
Arkk nodded.
“Good.” The Osk flexed a muscle in its upper arm, and a blade of bone slid from what Arkk realized was a sheath along the Osk’s forearm.
Arkk was too astonished to be afraid as Gau inserted the blade under the cables binding Arkk to the tree. It sawed at the cables and they fell around Arkk’s feet.
“Give me your arm.” Arkk hesitated. Gau’s tone sharpened. “What did I say? Quickly!”
Arkk extended his arm. Gau grabbed it and rested the point of its blade at the seam where two scales met. “Breathe deep. This will hurt.”
He’d just finished drawing breath when Gau wedged the bone blade under his scale and levered upward. There was a flash of red pain as the scale tore off. He snatched back his throbbing arm.
Gau slipped the scale into its cloak pocket and pointed toward the trees. “Lead them away from the campsite, not too far. I want you back here in ten minutes.” Gau pointed to the boulder. “Then get inside. There’s a button for the hatch, near the flower. I’ll follow you.”
Arkk didn’t need to be told twice. He leaped up into the tree and swung away from the camp. A snort and the scrabbling of claws on dead leaves told him the vortna was in pursuit.
#
Foliage shook and outraged jungle fauna chittered and screamed along Arkk’s route through the canopy. Half out of its mind with fear, the Arashal still understood its role and made noise to draw the Urd away.
Gau waited for the Arashal to gain a few meters of distance from the camp before turning to the “boulder”. The mossy side facing him did indeed have a single flower growing from its surface, intentionally out of place. Gau reached for the flower and his fingers ghosted right through it and touched the rectangular hatch lever underneath. He pulled it down.
A rectangle of boulder slid away, and Gau entered the airlock the hologram had hidden. The acrid stench of scorched metal and polymers swept over him as soon as the airlock cycled. Gau closed his nostrils reflexively, breathing through his mouth. The fresh, slightly earthy air outside made the interior reek that much worse by contrast.
Twin panniers made of woven fibers sat on a motorized pallet next to the open wall-niche of the Carnivore’s biosynthesis station. One was empty, the other three-quarters full of jungle fauna Gau had harvested for the ship to process into proteins he could eat. Gau pushed the full pannier to the floor and placed the scale he’d taken from Arkk’s arm into the empty wall-niche.
An opaque shield slid down over the niche, hiding it from view as the wall-embedded screen beside it lit up, awaiting instructions. Gau selected its replication function and, after tapping his lip in thought, entered in a yield based on his rough estimate of Arkk’s size.
While the console cogitated and analyzed the sample proteins, Gau maneuvered the pallet with its empty pannier under the synthesizer’s output station and opened the hatch on the chute. The seconds seemed to stretch before the synthesizer chimed; in a few seconds more, gobbets of reddish-yellow Arashal meat were sliding down the output chute and plopping wetly into the pannier.
The chime signaling the end of the process was still sounding when Gau snatched the pallet’s handles and pushed it into the airlock.