One of the Llobbans had quit. Jajaqin hadn’t bothered to learn their name. They had observed their partner staked to the ground like a tent and Human Gina bouncing toward the horizon with another captured weapon, and simply quit. They had shrugged out of their hunting gear, sworn fluently into the camera, dropped all the equipment on the ground and shuffled away.
The other Llobban, once they had wrestled themselves free of the net, watched them go dispassionately. They made no effort to call their partner back. Jajaqin wondered about that; he had assumed that the duo were at least friends, but this bloodless acceptance of their partner’s abandonment suggested something else. He wasn’t familiar with Llobban culture, and didn’t know any of them socially. It hadn’t seemed important until now.
“Don’t go,” he said as the remaining hunter began to gather up the quitter’s gear. “I have a suggestion.” The Llobban listened as he laid out his idea.
“We won’t make as much on a winning hunt if we have to split the winnings with everyone.”
“I understand that. But Human Gina had me neutralized in just a couple of breaths! And she surprised me, and you know my people aren’t easy to sneak up on.”
“Actually, we didn’t know that.” Evidently the Llobban needed to expand their social circles too.
“Well, we are. Let’s get the others to meet up with us. This is a completely different hunt from anything else any of us have ever done, and we’re going to have to do it differently if we’re going to succeed.”
It was nearly an eighth-turn before everyone had gathered in a location they’d agreed upon via their trackers. Firstly they had all had to sleep – only Jajaqin could stay awake all night without suffering neurological injury and he was unwilling; it had been a stressful postmeridian. He guessed by its small eyes that the human wasn’t very adept at night, and might naturally take an extended break.
In the morning, they discovered they had been mistaken. Sometime during the night, half their weapons had simply disappeared. When they took stock of what was left to them they realized that all their ranged weapons, projectile throwers and the like, had been stolen away. They were left only with direct-contact devices like the Llobban’s spears.
The Aranndan triad screeched. Jajaqin’s translator uttered a stream of very bad words, and a couple of blank spaces where the translator either lacked a word or else encountered a decorum threshold. It wasn’t common, but it happened. The Aranndan leader rasped, “It got our guns!”
Jajaqin chuckled quietly to himself. The group had been highly skeptical of everything he’d told them the previous evening as the sun went down. The night hadn’t been dark since the primary was in opposition so even as the sun went down, the dimmer but far larger planet covered nearly half the sky, providing a softer light that nevertheless left no shadows. Under such conditions and despite them leaving sentinels awake in shifts during the night, Human Gina had stolen in, collected the guns, and escaped again. The Aranndan added, “The creature is a demon.” Jajaqin wasn’t sure of that last word, but never mind that for now.
“Do you believe me now? I only had a brief encounter with it – with her – and she had neutralized me almost before I realized she was there. She is small, strong, very fast. I don’t know much about her species but she’s easily physically the equal of any of us. She doesn’t give off any scent markers that I detect, and she’s even quiet.”
The remaining Llobban grumbled, “Probably because they’re so small. Slip under stuff. Between stuff.” Jajaqin had talked them around to staying, but in the face of these further developments they clearly were having second thoughts. “They called us something when we dropped out of the tree on them, though. What was that about? They called us Erb.”
“Does she know any other Llobbans? Maybe she mistook you for someone else.”
“We don’t all know each other, you know.” They flapped tentacles irritably.
“What do you call yourself, anyway?”
“We’re Dollo.”
The Aranndans refused to provide names. “If you need us, just call us Aranndan.” Jajaqin remembered that Aranndans guarded identities jealously, generally only opening up to intimates. That was fine by him.
The big blue individual across from the low table where they had compiled their remaining equipment was of the same species as Human Gina’s companion, Booj: a Qualan from the outermost jovian’s innermost secondary. He was affable and, compared to the taciturn Llobban, downright talkative. He boomed his formal name, a rich, thrumming chord that Jajaqin appreciated for its qualities even if he couldn’t pronounce it, “but just call me Arn.”
The Aranndans looked vaguely annoyed but said nothing, ruffling feathers and settling again. The Qualan noticed it anyway. “What?” he asked.
“It’s because of you that we’re faced with this…this creature.”
“Because of me?”
“Because of your species!”
“Like Dollo said: we don’t all know each other.”
“You Qualans are forever blundering into wild business ventures of every sort! Let’s go mine asteroids! Let’s sell Aran blankets! Let’s go introduce a completely wild human to the entire system!” All three Aranndans looked cranky as their spokesperson groused. “You are reckless. Yes, all of you.” He stomped to his feet but couldn’t seem to decide where to go, and threw himself back down. “I am stuck in an untenable hunt with a undecipherable.” Jajaqin knew that the translator knew all the epithets, and so guessed that this was probably a cultural idiom that seldom got off the Aranndan world.
Silently, Jajaqin tapped the camera on his thorax. “Maybe you would like to choose your words more carefully?”
The spokesperson fumed. “Why should I?”
“So you won’t have to explain the precise meaning of what you just said to all of us here and our paying viewers."
The spokesperson said nothing further, but his companion stood up. “I will do the talking from now on. Please call me Aranndan.” This one’s demeanor was far different and Jajaqin guessed, based on no evidence at all, that a status game had just been won among the Aranndans, but he couldn’t say who the winner was.
Arn rumbled, “No explanation is necessary.” He hummed low in his throat, making small pebbles near his feet vibrate. “I know that word.”
As one, the Aranndans got up and left the table. Jajaqin sighed. Ganging up on Human Gina was going to be far more difficult than he had thought.
"All right, everyone. Let's come up with a plan."
