and dragged me by my backpack loop onto the bank. Then he waded back out, grabbed the dead scorpion’s tail fluke, and wrestled it until the beast’s eight rear limbs lay anchored on the mud bank.
I sat, arms on my knees, in the mud, popped my faceplate and sucked air in ripping sobs. Aud staggered up next to me, sat and gasped, too.
Five minutes later, I croaked. “Thanks.”
“S’nothing.”
“Nothing?” I ran my eyes from the flat tail fluke down the segmented tail. Out in the shallows, the scorpion’s pincers poked above the water like giant broken-toothed combs. Aud shrugged. “Just a sixth-molt female. No reason for you to know that the yellow wiggler means ‘run away.’ But every Tressen child knows it from the time his parents start telling bedtime stories.”
“Why did you drag the body back up here?”
Aud waded out alongside the carcass, knee deep. Grunting, he heaved the tail section up like a rolled carpet, hacked at the beast with his trench knife, then stood and smiled. In one hand he raised what looked like a sack of translucent ping pong balls. “Egg roast tonight!”
Rain pattered the sodden vegetation again.
“Aud, we can’t make a fire.”
He pointed at his brush pile. “We can. Oilwood will burn even in a full rain barrel.”
Especially on Tressen. Like on late-Paleozoic Earth, Tressen’s swamp plants cranked out so much oxygen that the atmosphere was fire-friendly. I pointed back in the direction from which we had come. “I mean Iridians will spot a fire. I’d rather be a cold fugitive than a dead POW.”
“Jason, Iridians are our least worry.” Aud pointed at the carcass. “You saw the enormous eyes on that beast. Scorpions hunt submerged during daylight. At night, they hunt onshore.” He fingered his ammunition pouch. “I can wound perhaps two more. Without a fire’s light to discourage them, we’ll attract a dozen before the sun’s two hours down. How many can you wrestle?”
I rubbed the new row of dents in my chestplate, and swallowed.
Then I scooped an armload of brush onto Aud’s pile. “I’ll take my eggs over easy.”
An hour later I sat elbows-on-knees in the dark, with my back to our fire. Oilwood cracked and sizzled like bacon, while warmth soaked through my armor’s backplates.
Facing away from the fire, I chinned my optize=inned mcs to night passive and zoomed on the object on the bank, twenty yards away. The Barrens linked to the sea, and the outgoing tide had now completely exposed the scorpion that had nearly killed me. It slumped in the mud like a flattened lobster fifteen feet long. Longer if someone tugged its forelimbs out in front of it, like Superman holding pliers. I shuddered inside my armor. That someone wasn’t going to be me.
Aud tossed a pebble at the scorpion carcass. “Do you have these in your home?”
I wiggled my index finger. “Our biggest scorpions are this long.”
He poked me in my side, grinning. “And sergeants serve privates breakfast in bed.”
“No, really.” I tapped my earpiece. “I think there’s a translation problem. Our big scorpions are extinct. Actually, barely relatives of our little modern scorpions. Closer related to what we call horseshoe crabs.”
My earpiece ticked as the translator program hunted, then continued. Tressen had a word for “shoe,” of course, but not for “horse,” because horses were millions of years down Tressel’s evolution trail.
“We’d call scorpions like yours pterygotid eurypterids. Ours were big, but not that big.” This time, my translator didn’t tick. Most of the time, the translator worked so fast that you just talked and listened. I said, “Today, reptiles—animals like tetras, but bigger—have replaced eurypterids in the swamp predator niche.”
“Tiny scorpions. Ferocious tetras!” He shook his head and chuckled. “I needed a laugh.”
“We call them crocodiles. I can show you pictures. I wouldn’t lie to you, Aud.”
He turned his head to