“I am so very terribly sorry to have let you down like this.” Drenched and hunched over in his colorfast wraps, he looked thoroughly miserable. His speaking trunk drooped down over his face, blocking one of his eyes—the physical equivalent of a whisper.
“We don’t know it at all your fault.” Without quite knowing why, Jemunu-jah found himself inclined to be forgiving. “Maybe something fail seriously within skimmer’s controllers.”
“Certainly it did.” His speaking trunk rising as his eating trunk sucked up a casual drink from a small puddle in a hollow on the branch, Masurathoo eyed his indigenous companion. “But I am puzzled and concerned as to how and why it should have done so just as we made contact with the one we were sent to find.”
“Speaking of that contact,” Jemunu-jah added as he turned his attention back to the falling rain and the wild, wet Viisiiviisii in which they now found themselves stranded, “I wonder if anyone survive here for us to rescue?”
His answer came in the form of a solid blow to the lower portion of his back, just above the tail. As he fell forward and reached out to grab something to keep himself from plunging through to the water below, he caught a glimpse of the solid, fast-moving shape that had struck from above. Masurathoo’s lack of a scream was instructive—as was Jemunu-jah’s first sight of the creature that had surprised him.
Landing lithely on both feet, the human kept the majority of his attention focused on the more dangerous Sakuntala while not neglecting to monitor the movements of the startled Deyzara. As Jemunu-jah rolled over, back aching, he found himself gazing down the barrel of a surprisingly large handgun. Occasionally the muzzle would shift to cover the motionless Masurathoo. Most of the time, however, it was aimed in the Sakuntala’s direction. The human’s stance was tense, Jemunu-jah noted, and beneath the hood of the rain cape he wore his small but efficient eyes were in constant motion. The big, muscular male was clearly very unhappy with something.