“Disguised as Rodriguez?”
Cahuella nodded. “He did say he was going to get me.”
“Yes . . . but my guess is he’s with the main party. That’s what Orcagna told us. The imposter might even have planned to lie low with us, not compromising his cover until the rest of the party came through.”
“It could have been him, though.”
“I don’t think so; not unless the Ultras are even cleverer than we thought. Reivich and Rodriguez were nowhere near the same size. I can believe they altered his face, but I can’t see them having the time to change his entire skeleton and musculature—not in a few days. Then they’d still have to adjust his body-image so he didn’t keep bumping into ceilings. No; their assassin must have been a man of similar build to Rodriguez.”
“It’s possible he got a warning through to Reivich, though?”
“Possible, yes—but if he did, Reivich isn’t acting on it. The weapons traces are still moving at the normal rate towards us.”
“Then—essentially—nothing’s changed, right?”
“Essentially nothing,” I said, but we both knew that neither of us felt it.
Shortly afterwards his men made the turbine sing again and we were on our way. I had always taken the security of the expedition seriously, but now I had redoubled my efforts and rethought all my arrangements. No one was leaving camp unless they were armed, and no one was to leave alone—except, of course, for Cahuella himself, who would still insist on his nocturnal prowls.
The camp we set tonight would form the basis of our ambush, so I was determined to spend more than the usual amount of time searching for the best place to pitch the bubbletents. The camp had to be nearly invisible from the road, but close enough that we could mount an attack on Reivich’s group. I did not want us to become too separated from our munitions stores, which meant placing the tents no more than fifty or sixty metres into the trees. Before nightfall, we could scythe out strategic lines of fire through the wood and arrange fall-back routes for ourselves in case Reivich’s men laid down a heavy suppressing fire. If time allowed we would set deadfalls or mines along other, more obvious paths.
I was drawing a map in my mind, crisscrossing it with intersecting lines of death, when the snake began to cross our path.
My attention had wandered slightly from the route ahead, so it was Cahuella shouting “Stop!” which first alerted me that something was happening.
Turbines cut; our vehicles bellied down.
Two or three hundred metres down the trail, just where the trail began to curve out of sight, the hamadryad had poked its head out of the curtain of greenery which marked the edge of the jungle. The head was a pale, sickly green, under the olive folds of its photosensitive cowl, retracted like a cobra’s hood. It was crossing from right to left; towards the sea.
“Near-adult,” Dieterling said, as if what we were looking at was a bug stuck to the windshield.
The head was nearly as big as one of our vehicles. Behind it came the first few metres of the creature’s snakelike body. The patterning was the same as I had seen on the helical structure wrapped around the hamadryad tree, very snakelike.
“How big do you think it is?” I asked.
“Thirty, thirty-five metres. Not the biggest I’ve ever seen—that has to be a sixty-metre snake I saw back in ’71—but this isn’t any juvenile. If it can find a tree which reaches the canopy and isn’t much higher than its length, it’ll probably begin fusion.”
The head had reached the other side of the road. It moved slowly, creeping past us.
“Take us closer,” Cahuella said.
“Wait,” I said. “Are you sure? We’re safe here. It’ll pass soon. I know they don’t have any deeply wired defensive instincts, but it might still decide we look like something worth eating. Are you sure you want to risk that?”
“Take us closer.”
I fired up the turbine, gunning it to the minimum number of revs sufficient to give us lift, and crept the vehicle forward. Hamadryads were thought to have no sense of sound, but seismic vibrations were another thing entirely. I wondered whether the air-cushion of our car, drumming against the ground, sounded exactly like part of the snake’s diet coming closer.
The snake had arced itself so that the length of two-metre-thick body spanning the road was always elevated. It continued to move slowly and smoothly, betraying absolutely no sign that it had even registered our presence. Perhaps Dieterling was right. Perhaps all the snake was interested in was finding a nice tall tree to curl itself around, so that it could give up this tedious business of having a brain and having to move around.
We were fifty metres from it now.
“Stop,” Cahuella said again.
This time I obeyed unquestioningly. I turned to look at him, but he was already hopping out of the car. We could hear the snake now: a constant low rumble as it pushed itself through foliage. It was not an animal sound at all. What it sounded like was the continuous crunching progress of a tank.
Cahuella reappeared at the side of the vehicle. He had gone round the back to where the weapons were stored and had drawn out his crossbow.
“Oh, no . . .” I started to say, but it was too late.
He was already racking a tranquilliser dart into the bow, coded for use against a thirty-metre adult. The weapon, on the face of it, seemed like an affectation, but it made a kind of sense. A huge quantity of tranquilliser would have to be delivered to an adult to dope it as we had the juvenile. Our normal hunting rifles were just not up to the job. A crossbow, on the other hand, could fire a much larger dart—and the apparent drawbacks of limited range and accuracy were hardly relevant when one was dealing with a deaf and blind thirty-metre snake which took a minute to move its body length.
“Shut up, Tanner,” Cahuella said. “I didn’t come out here to see one of these bastards and turn away from it.”
“Vicuna’s dead. That means we have no one to implant those control electrodes.”
It was as if I had not spoken. He set off down the trail, the crossbow in one hand, the muscles in his muscular back defined against the sweat-sodden shirt he wore under his bandolier.
“Tanner,” Gitta said. “Stop him, before he gets hurt.”
“He’s not in any real danger . . .” I started to say.
But it was a lie, and I knew it. He might have been safer than if he had been this close to a juvenile, but the behaviour of near-adults was only poorly understood. Swearing, I opened the door on my side, jogged round to the back of the vehicle and unracked a laser-rifle for myself. I checked the ammo-cell’s charge, then loped after him. Hearing my footfalls against the dirt, Cahuella looked back irritatedly.
“Mirabel! Get the hell back into the car! I don’t want anyone ruining this kill for me!”
“I’ll keep my distance,” I called.
The hamadryad’s head had vanished into the other side of the forest, leaving an arc of body spanning the road with the elegant bowstring curve of a bridge. The sound, now that I came closer, was immense. I could hear branches snapping along the snake’s length, and a relentless susurration of dry skin against bark.
And another noise—identical in timbre, but coming from another direction completely. For a moment my brain sluggishly refused to reach the obvious conclusion, trying to work out how the acoustic properties of the jungle could echo the hamadryad’s progress so effectively. I was still wondering about it when the second snake burst through the treeline to my right. It moved as slowly as the first, but it was very much closer, which made the thing’s half-metre per second progress seem a lot swifter. It was smaller than the first one we had seen, but still monstrous by any standards. And I remembered an uncomfortable fact about hamadryad biology. The smaller they were, the faster they were capable of moving . . .
But the snake brought its hooded, deltoid head to a stop, metres from me and metres above my own. Eyeless, it seemed to float against the sky like a malign, thick-tailed kite.
&
nbsp; In all my years of soldiering, I had never been paralysed by fear. I knew that it happened to some people, but I wondered how it was possible and what kind of people they had really been. Now, belatedly, I was coming to an intimate understanding of just how it could happen. The flight reflex was not completely decoupled from volition: part of me knew that to run could be just as hazardous as to remain fixed to the spot, motionless. Snakes were blind until they located a target, but their infra-red and olfactory sensitivity was acute. There was no doubt that it knew I was standing beneath it, or else it would not have stopped.
I had no idea what to do.
Shoot it, I thought . . . but the laser-rifle was, in hindsight, not the best weapon I could have selected. A few pencil-thin holes right through its body were not going to massively impede this creature. No point aiming for specific areas of brain function, either: it hardly had a brain to begin with, even before giving birth to the young that would eat that tiny knot of neurones. The laser was a pulse-weapon, the beam too transient to be used as a blade. I would have been better off with the scythe I had used against the imposter . . .
“Tanner. Stay still. It has a lock on you.”
Out of the corner of my eye—I didn’t dare move my head—I saw Cahuella, approaching in a near-crouch. He had the crossbow against his shoulder, squinting along the weapon’s long haft.
“That won’t do much more than piss it off,” I said, in not much more than a hiss.
Cahuella answered in a stage whisper, “Yeah. Big time. The dose was for the first one. This one’s no more than fifteen metres . . . that’s twelve per cent of the body volume, which means the dose’ll be eight times too strong . . .” He paused and halted. “Or thereabouts.”
He was within range now.
Above me, the head swayed from side to side, tasting the wind. Perhaps, following the other, larger, adult, it was impatient to be moving on. But it could not let this possibility of prey pass without investigation. Perhaps it had not eaten in months. Dieterling had said that they always had one last meal before fusion. Maybe this one was too small to be ready to bind with a tree, but there was no reason to assume it was not hungry.
Moving my hands as slowly and smoothly as I dared, I slipped off the rifle’s safety-catch, feeling the subliminal shiver as the discharge cells powered up, accompanied by a faint rising whine.
The head bowed toward me, drawn by the rifle.
“This weapon is now ready for use,” the rifle said brightly.
The snake lunged, its wide mouth opening, the two attack-phase eyes gleaming at me from the mouth’s red roof, triangu lating.
I fired, straight into the mouth.
The head smashed into the dirt next to me, its lunge confused by the laser pulses. Angered, the snake reared up, its mouth wide, emitting a terrible roar and a smell like a field of butchered corpses. I had squeezed off ten rapid pulses, a stroboscopic volley which had punched ten black craters into the roof of the mouth. I could see the exit wounds peppering the back of the head, each finger-wide. I’d blinded it.
But it had enough memory to remember roughly where I was. I stumbled back as the head daggered down again—and then there was a glint of bright metal cleaving the air, and the thunk of Cahuella’s crossbow.
His dart had buried itself in the neck of the snake, instantly discharging its payload of tranquilliser.
“Tanner! Get the fuck away!”
He reached into his bandolier and extracted another dart, then cranked back the bow and slipped the second dart into place. A moment later it joined the other in the snake’s neck. That was, if he had done his sums correctly, and the darts were both coded for large adults, something like sixteen times the dose necessary to put this specimen to sleep.
I was out of harm’s way now, but I kept firing. And now I realised that we had another problem . . .
“Cahuella . . .” I said.
He must have seen that I was looking beyond rather than at him, for he stopped and looked over his shoulder, frozen in the action of reaching for another dart.
The other snake had curved round in a loop, and now its head was emerging from the left side of the trail, only twenty metres from Cahuella.
“The distress call . . .” he said.
Until now we had not even known they had any calls. But he was right: my wounding the smaller snake had drawn the interest of the first, and now Cahuella was trapped between two hamadryads.
But then the smaller snake began to die.
There was nothing sudden about it. It was more like an airship going down, as the head sunk towards the ground, no longer capable of being carried by the neck, which was itself sagging inexorably lower.
Something touched me on the shoulder.
“Stand aside, bro,” said Dieterling.
It seemed like an age since I had left the car, but it could only have been half a minute. Dieterling could never have been far behind me, yet for most of that time Cahuella and I felt completely alone.
I looked at what Dieterling was carrying, comparing it to the weapon I had imagined suitable for the task at hand.
“Nice one,” I said.
“The right tools for the job, that’s all.”
He brushed past me, shouldering the matte-black bazooka he had retrieved from the weapons rack. There was a bas-relief Scorpion down the side of it and a huge semi-circular magazine jutting asymmetrically from one side. A targeting screen whirred into place in front of his eyes, churning with scrolling data and bullseye overlays. Dieterling brushed it aside, glanced behind to make sure I was out of range of the recoil blast, and squeezed the trigger.
The first thing he did was blow a hole through the first snake, like a tunnel. Through this he walked, his boots squelching through the unspeakable red carpet.
Cahuella pumped the last dart into the larger snake, but by then he was limited to doses calibrated for much smaller animals. It appeared not to notice that it had even been shot. They had, I knew, few pain receptors anywhere along their bodies.
Dieterling reached him, his boots red to the knee. The adult was coming closer, its head no more than ten metres from both of them.
The two men shook hands and exchanged weapons.
Dieterling turned his back on Cahuella and began to walk calmly back towards me. He carried the crossbow in the crook of his arm, for it was useless now.
Cahuella hefted the bazooka and began to inflict grievous harm on the snake.
It was not pretty. He had the bazooka set to rapid fire, mini-rockets streaking from its muzzle twice a second. What he did to the snake was more akin to pruning back a plant snip by snip. First he took the head off, so that the truncated neck hung in the air, red-rimmed. But the creature kept on moving. Losing its brain was obviously not really much of a handicap to it. The slithering roar of its progress had not abated at all.
So Cahuella kept shooting.
He stood his ground, feet apart, squeezing rocket after rocket into the wound, blood and gore plastering the trees on either side of him. Still the snake kept coming, but now there was less and less of it to come, the body tapering towards the tail. When only ten metres were left, the body finally flopped to the ground, twitching. Cahuella put a last rocket in it for good measure and then turned round and walked back towards me with the same laconic stroll Dieterling had used.
When he got close to me I saw that his shirt was filmed in red now, his face slick with a fine film of rouge. He handed me the bazooka. I safed it, but it was hardly necessary: the last shot he had fired, I saw, had been the last in the magazine.
Back at the vehicle, I opened the case which held replacement magazines and slotted a fresh one onto the bazooka, then racked it with the other weapons. Cahuella was looking at me, as if expecting me to say something to him. But what could I say? I could hardly compliment him on his hunting expertise. Apart from the nerve it took, and the physical strength to hold the bazooka, a child could have killed the snake in exactly the same manner.
> Instead, I looked to the two brutally butchered animals which lay across our path, practically unrecognisable for what they had been.
“I don’t think Vicuna could have helped us very much,” I said.
He looked at me, then shook his head, as much in disgust at my own mistake—that I had forced him to save my own life and lose his chance to capture his prey—as acknowledging the truth of what I said.
“Just drive, Tanner,” he said.
That night we established the ambush camp.
Orcagna’s trace showed that Reivich’s party was thirty kilometres north of our position and moving south at the same steady rate he had maintained for days. They did not appear to be resting overnight as we did, but as their average rate was somewhat slower than what we were managing, they were not covering much more ground in a day. Between us and them was a river that would need to be forded, but if Reivich made no serious mistakes—or decided against pattern to stop for the night—he would still be five kilometres up the road by dawn.
We set up the bubbletents, this time shrouding each in an outer skin of chameleoflage fabric. We were deep in hamadryad country now, so I took care to sweep the area with deep-look thermal and acoustic sensors. They would pick up the crunching movement of any moderately large adults. Juveniles were another thing entirely, but at least juveniles would not crush our entire camp. Dieterling examined the trees in the area and confirmed that none of them had released juveniles any time recently.
“So worry about the dozen other local predators,” he said, meeting Cahuella and I outside one of the bubbletents.
“Maybe it’s seasonal,” Cahuella said. “The time when they give birth, I mean. That could influence our next hunting trip. We should plan it properly.”
I looked at him with a jaundiced eye. “You still want to use Vicuna’s toys?”
“It’d be a tribute to the good doctor, wouldn’t it? It’s what he would have wanted.”
“Maybe.” I thought back to the two snakes which had crossed our path. “I also know we almost got ourselves killed back there.”