Parallax View by Eric Brown, Keith Brooke

settlement: they had a supply of the dopefruit, didn’t they? They didn’t have it just for us.”
    “But they guarded it,” Tanya said.
    “They guarded the orchard area where they harvested the stuff,” Corrie said. “But it was easy enough to get in and out of the caves once we’d been outcast, wasn’t it? It was as if we no longer existed. Maybe they’ll have some supplies in these caves.”
    “So we just walk right in...?”
    “Not quite,” Corrie said, grinning. “Not quite.”

    Just as Corrie had suspected when she first saw the settlement, the sequence of artificial caverns all faced out across the river’s flood basin. There were signs here of violent water-flow – the outpourings of melting glaciers, Corrie supposed. It had carved the rills through the sandstone embankment which the Gargoyles had roofed over, and it had scooped out the great river basin that, at present, was only graced with the slightest of turbid trickles at its core.
    Rachel and Sue had needed little persuasion to wait in the jungle while Tanya and Corrie reconnoitred. About fifty metres from where the sandstone embankment tumbled down towards the river basin, the jungle proper opened out and thinned. A few meagre tongues of scrubby growth lapped the open ground and the two women worked their way along one of these.
    About ten metres from the edge of the embankment, they reached bare ground. Side by side, they crawled across on hands and knees until they could lie belly down and stare out across the settlement.
    It was a scene quite unlike the previous settlement. Small groups of Gargoyles were frozen in their now-familiar half-observant, half-stupefied postures, but elsewhere some of the beings lay basking in the afternoon sun with almost cat-like ease. And there were what appeared to be young Gargoyles, too: smaller aliens, flitting about the open space like gnats over a stagnant pool. In short, there was a domestic atmosphere to this settlement that had been altogether absent from the first settlement.
    “It’s the season,” Tanya said, answering Corrie’s unspoken question. “This colony is further through the cycle, just as you said they would be as we move north. They’ve bred, it’s a more mature settlement, getting through the seasonal cycle before the winter zone moves south again.”
    “Come on,” Corrie said. “We’re not field scientists now: we’re looking for food.” She backed away from the embankment.
    Back in the undergrowth, they worked their way along to the first roofed over section of gully, as far back from the river basin as possible. They weren’t, as Tanya had suggested, just going to walk into the caverns: they were going in through the roof.
    The roof material had been sliced from the fleshy limbs of some kind of tree. The stuff was tough and rubbery and, Corrie suspected, would put up pretty good resistance to even a laser cutter if they’d had one to hand. But it was flexible and elastic, and she found it quite easy to twist away a flap of the material and peer down into the gloomy interior of the cavern. The musty faecal smell was quite overpowering and, hanging with her head suspended into the opening, she had to fight not to gag.
    It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust, and in that time she expected at any moment to feel cold, twiggy fingers closing around her head, hauling her down into the cave. But it didn’t happen. Instead, she found that she could make out bulky shapes in the gloom.
    She was looking into a cavity, hollowed out from a natural cleft in the rock. There was a bulbous shape at the far end and, for a chilling instant, she thought that somehow they had completed a full circle and come back to the original settlement and this was Rube or Jake or Imran wallowing in their own self-centred filth.
    But no. She knew that wasn’t true. And, in any case, the smell was not a human one. It was animal, something like the fetid mustiness of a fruit bat colony she had once