Chapter 37
Tantalus Crater
31 October, 2:00 p.m.
T he solitary wasp flew in slowly, a paralyzed caterpillar dangling between her legs. She began to fly back and forth in zigzags over her nest, then settled lower, searching for the mud chimney of her burrow.
Within moments she had registered that her chimney had been smashed. Her nest had been damaged and invaded. There was an intruder.
Danny Minot wrapped himself around the rock, hiding under the plant, trying to make himself as rocklike or plantlike as possible. “You idiot!” he whispered to Karen. He’d been left alone in the micro-world.
The mother landed, carrying the caterpillar. Vibrating her wings, she advanced to the entrance. At that moment she caught the scent of her baby’s death leaking out of the hole. She began beating her wings furiously. The air filled with the thunder of her wings. She dropped the caterpillar, then charged into the hole headfirst.
Karen King heard a rumbling sound in the earth above—a buzz of wasp wings, a clatter and clash of a wasp’s exoskeleton.
“Danny!” she called. “What’s happening?”
There was no answer.
“Talk to me, Danny!”
The mother surged down into her nest, a toxic, armored bundle of maternal rage.
Karen listened to the wasp coming. She crouched in the chamber at the foot of the vertical shaft, with Rick lying on the floor behind her. The sounds were frightening—and informative. A sharp smell wafted into the room—an advance wave of the mother’s fury.
Karen got out her diamond sharpener and began to frantically hone her machete, zing, swish, zing. “Hang on, Rick,” she muttered. She worked the sharpener over the steel, bringing the blade to an extreme edge. It would have to slice through massive bioplastic armor. Then she poised herself by the opening with the blade raised over her head. “Come on, come on,” she muttered.
The mother reached the bottom of the shaft. There was a pause.
And then the wasp’s head, huge, black-and-yellow, appeared in the opening.
Upside down.
She swung the machete at the wasp’s face with every ounce of her strength.
The blade bounced off the wasp’s eye, leaving a mark. The lady had armored eyes.
The wasp thrust her head—still upside down—into the room, snapped her jaws around the machete, and tore the blade out of Karen’s hands, dragging it back into the hole. Karen heard crunching metallic sounds: the wasp was cutting up her last weapon.
The room shook: the wasp was pounding her wings against the tunnel walls. Getting ready to charge. She heard the wasp gasping.
She glanced over her shoulder, and her headlamp beam passed over Rick. He looked dead—
In swinging her head around, she became aware of the little knife dangling from her neck. She’d sworn never to carry it in her pocket again. My knife. She thumbed the blade open and yanked the cord off her neck.
The wasp’s head was in the room now—still upside down—and the jaws snapped at her. Karen dove down to the floor, and slid her body underneath the wasp’s upside-down head. The head was covered with bristles. She gripped the bristles. The head jerked up and down, battering her against the floor. The wasp could see her: a trio of little eyes stared at her from the top of the head.
Karen clung to the head as it rotated and beat her against the tunnel, the jaws crossing and snapping. She was getting a terrible thrashing. Even so, in searching for a grip, she reached behind the wasp’s head and managed to get her fingertips wedged in the occipital suture, the crack between the head capsule and the pleuron, the first armored plate of the thorax. This was the back of the wasp’s neck. There was a joint in the armor at that spot. Her fingertips felt soft tissue in the crack.
The neck was so narrow that she was able to wrap her fingers entirely around the wasp’s neck. She had gotten a stranglehold. Maybe she could choke the wasp.
At that moment, the wasp jerked backward into the tunnel, dragging Karen along. Now she was jammed in the tunnel, being crushed by the wasp’s head, which continued to hammer against her body. The wasp curled its body, and Karen realized it was trying to bring its abdomen forward and sting her. The wasp pushed her back into the room again, and began twisting, trying to throw her off its neck. But she held her grip. Having located the neck joint, she let go of the neck with one hand, grabbed her knife, then slipped the tip of her knife into the crack. Then she quickly ran the knife blade around the neck, following the crack and sawing as she went. All the way around.
The wasp’s head fell off.
It rolled on top of her, and she scrambled back into the room, followed by a spurt of blood.
The mandibles snapped twice and froze. The body exsanguinated fast, blood spewing out of the severed neck all over Karen. The wings of the headless body thumped against the walls in the tunnel, the wing-beats weakening and slowing down, until the corpse quieted and lay still.
Karen pulled herself away and knelt by Rick and took his hand. She was shaking badly. “I did it.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Rick saw movement behind her. He blinked his eyes and shouted in his mind: Look out!
The master brain inside the severed head had lost contact with the eight minor brains in the wasp’s body, but those minor brains were still sending out messages to the rest of the body. The wasp’s legs went into action, dragging the headless body into the room. The abdomen curled and thrust forward, and the stinger came out.
A noise at her back made Karen whirl around. Just in time she saw the stinger coming, and jumped aside as the abdomen slammed her into the wall. She struggled, trapped, as the sting waved past her face. She saw the twin blades working against each other, inches from her eyes. The sting palps popped out and tapped her cheek, and entered her mouth. But finally the stinger went still, lightly resting on Karen’s collarbone, the blades bared. A dewdrop of poison swelled from the blades and hung there. She could see her face reflected in the droplet of wasp venom.
She delicately extricated herself from under the sting, avoiding contact with the liquid and blades. Then she got down on her knees and wiped the dirt from Rick’s face. “How’re you doing, soldier?”
He seemed completely paralyzed. Rick’s face looked like a mask. Eyes moving, blinking, but no expression. The muscles in his face had gone AWOL and he had peed his pants. At least he was breathing, and his heart was beating. The wasp venom was tricky stuff, she realized. It had disabled some of his nervous system but not all of it. Was he trying to talk? She couldn’t be sure.
“Can you blink?” she asked. “If you blink your eyes, it means yes. If you don’t blink, it means no. Can you understand me?”
He blinked once. Yes. Then something trembled in his face.
“Rick! Is that a smile?”
Yes. Trying to.
“That’s a start. Does anything hurt?”
Yes.
“What hurts? …Never mind. I’m going to carry you. Will that hurt?”
He didn’t blink. No.
She lifted Rick under the arms and dragged him around the dead wasp, keeping their bodies away from the big droplet of venom that still hung from the wasp’s stinger. As she dragged Rick, though, she could see how dire his condition was. He would never survive unless he could move his muscles. His nervous system needed help. That fucking venom—the droplet of poison gleamed in her headlamp, suspended from the stinger—that venom had acted like a smart bomb, taking out only parts of his nervous system. Horrible poison, but sophisticated, too. Nature could do magic with chemistry that no human drug could accomplish.
Rick needed help or he would die.
Staring at that clear drop of poison, Karen got an idea. The venom that had paralyzed Rick might also help save him.
She needed to collect it. She groped at her waist, and found a water bottle suspended on a cord from her machete belt. She poured out the water, then held the open mouth of the bottle to the venom droplet, and watched as t
he liquid dripped into the bottle. She screwed on the top. Okay.
“I’ve got a plan, Rick. It’s crazy but it might work.”
He just stared at her.
Jamming her knees against the walls of the shaft, Karen pushed him up the shaft ahead of her as she climbed. She felt like Superwoman; she never could have done this in the big world. It was a long climb, accomplished in stages with rests in between, and she was glad she was as strong as an ant. Finally she arrived at the mouth of the nest.
Danny Minot had given up hope. He couldn’t believe his eyes when Rick Hutter popped out of the hole, followed by a battered-looking Karen King. “I got him,” she said fiercely, and hoisted him across her shoulders. She carried him across the sand and dropped him in the shade of the plant beside Danny.
She knelt by Rick and studied him. Danny huddled nearby, crouching to keep out of the wind.
“Can you stand up?” she asked Rick.
He blinked once.
“Yes? You want to try?” She helped him stand up. He swayed, tottering, and dropped to his knees, then sank and fell over.
She showed him the canteen of wasp venom. “This might save you, Rick. No guarantees. What we need to do now—” she looked at the line of towering bamboo across the open ground—“is get ourselves back into the forest.”
She was thinking of the death of that sniper, how the man had gone into a grand mal seizure from the spider venom. The man’s death carried information that might save Rick.
Chapter 38
Tantalus Base
31 October, 2:30 p.m.
T he wind blew across the ridgeline of Tantalus Crater. Karen King and Danny Minot walked along slowly, carrying Rick in a stretcher made from a space blanket. Karen wore the backpack, and the blowgun was slung across her back. They moved step by step, making their way painstakingly toward the wall of bamboo trees and the Great Boulder. Rick’s breathing came hoarsely from the stretcher.
“Put him down,” Karen said to Danny. She examined Rick. His face was pale and drawn, and his lips were turning blue. He wasn’t getting enough oxygen. What especially worried her was his breathing: ragged, irregular, insufficient. The wasp venom might have affected the breathing center in his brain stem. If his breathing shut down, he was finished.
She opened his shirt and found a bruise on his chest. What was that? The bends coming on? Or just the result of being thrown around by the wasp? They had to get out of this open area. They were morsels for birds, food for another wasp.
“How are you doing, Rick?”
He moved his head slowly from side to side.
“Not so good? Just don’t fall asleep. Okay? Please.”
Karen studied the bamboo forest ahead. “We just need to get under those plants, Rick. It’s not far, now.” She hoped, prayed, she’d find what she needed there. In the leaves.
She heard a sigh. “How are you doing, Rick?”
Silence. Rick had lost consciousness. She shook him. “Rick! Wake up! It’s me, Karen!” His eyes opened and closed. He was becoming unresponsive.
All right. Maybe she could make him angry. She had always been good at that. She slapped him in the face. “Hey Rick!”
His eyes flew open. That had worked.
“I nearly got myself killed dragging your sorry ass out of that hellhole. Don’t you dare die on me now.”
“We might have to leave him,” Danny said softly.
She turned on Danny in fury. “Do not say that again.”
Finally they got beneath the plants, and put Rick down in the cool shade. Karen gave him a droplet of water to drink, holding the water in her cupped hands and pouring it into his mouth. She looked up at the leaves. She wasn’t sure of the species of plant. That didn’t matter, what mattered was whether any spiders lived on the leaves.
There was a particular spider she wanted to find.
She knelt by Rick, and talked to him. “Rick,” she said. “You need a swift kick in the pants.”
He smiled faintly.
“What are you going to do?” Danny asked her.
She didn’t answer. She rooted around in the pack and removed a clean, empty plastic lab bottle. Then she started pacing around, looking up into the leaves. She grabbed the blowgun and the dart kit, and she ran into the deeper parts of the vegetation.
“Where are you going?” Danny shouted.
“You watch him, Danny. If you let anything happen to Rick, I’ll—”
“Karen!”
She ran off. She had spotted a flash of color under a leaf. Day-Glo green, red, yellow. It might be what she was looking for.
It was.
She wanted to find a spider that wasn’t very poisonous. All spiders used venom to kill their prey, generally insects, but spider venom varied a lot in its toxicity to humans and mammals generally. Black-widow venom was among the worst. The bite of a black widow spider could make a horse drop dead. Yet other spiders seemed less toxic to humans.
She stood under the spider now, looking up at it. It was small, with legs as transparent as glass, and a body splashed with colorful markings. The markings formed a pattern that looked like a human face, grinning with laughter—it looked like the face of a smiling clown.
It was a happy-face spider. Theridion grallator. One of the most common spiders in Hawaii, much studied by scientists. Known to have essentially no effect when it bites a human.
The happy-face spider rested in a little cobweb, a tangle of threads strung randomly under the leaf.
These spiders were very shy. They tended to flee at the first sign of trouble. “Don’t run away on me,” she whispered.
She began to climb the stem of the plant. She shinnied up it a distance, and then, getting herself seated on a leaf, she took out a dart from the kit, and opened her canteen. The wasp venom had filled it almost to the neck. She dipped a dart in the venom, loaded the gun, and took aim.
The spider backed away, staring at her. It appeared to be frightened. Yes, it was scared: it scrunched itself down inside its little web.
She knew the spider could hear her, and was forming a sonic image of her with the “ears” in its legs. It had probably never encountered a human and had no idea what Karen was.
She blew.
The dart lodged in the patterned back of the spider.
The spider backed up, its legs flipping around, and it tried to run, but the venom acted swiftly, and within moments the spider stopped moving. Karen heard air whistling faintly in and out of the spider’s lungs, and she saw its back rising and falling. Good. It was still breathing and its heart was beating. That was important. The animal needed to have blood pressure in order to pump out venom.
She climbed up to the web. She took a strand and shook it. “Yah!”
The spider didn’t move. Karen swung herself into the web and crawled across the threads, right up to the spider, reached out to one of the legs and flicked at a sensory hair. Nothing happened.
Lying on the web, she unscrewed the top of the empty lab jar and positioned it under the fangs. Using two fingers, she lifted a fang from its base, unfolding the fang from its sheath as she stared into the spider’s eyes.
How to get the venom flowing? The venom glands were located in the spider’s forehead, behind its eyes. She made a fist and rapped on the spider’s forehead. The spider stirred, and a few drops of liquid dribbled out of the fangs. She screwed the cap on. She hoped the spider would wake up no worse for its experience. She cut the web below her and fell to the ground.
She bent over Rick. “This spider venom—” she held up the jar so that he could see it—“might give your nerves a jolt. It has excitotoxins in it. You understand?”
He looked at her. Blinked once. Yes, I understand.
“Excitotoxins. They’ll make your nerves fire. But there’s a real danger. I don’t know anything about this venom. I can’t control the dose. This stuff could kill cells in your body. It could start digesting you.” In her mind’s eye, she saw the sniper’s body going
through that digestive meltdown.
She took his hand in hers, and squeezed it. “I’m afraid, Rick.”
He squeezed her hand back.
She said, “You want it?”
He blinked. Yes.
She removed a blow dart from the case. A clean one, no curare on it. She dipped the tip of the dart into the spider venom. The tip came up wet, barely covered with a minuscule amount of the liquid. She held it in front of him where he could see it. “Are you sure?”
Yes.
She laid the point across his forearm. She caught the point in his skin, over a vein, and pushed it in. Not too deep. Then she gripped his hand, and leaned over him. “Rick…”
For a few moments, nothing happened. She was beginning to wonder if she had given him enough—but then he gasped. His breathing sped up. She touched his neck, and felt his pulse racing. The venom was hitting him hard.
There was an explosive sound: Rick gasped, and dragged air into his lungs. Then he went into a seizure. His gaze flew around wildly and he strained upward against her, eyes staring, body trembling. She lay across him, holding his arms down, but afraid to press on him too hard. He gasped, taking huge lungfuls, hyperventilating as his spine arched. She threw her weight on him, trying to pin him down, fearful that he would hurt himself.
He groaned. And then his hand whipped out and fastened around her neck. He gripped her throat, his fingers squeezing, closing her throat off.
He was trying to strangle her. He hated her that much.
But then his fingers relaxed, his grip softened. He released her throat. He ran his hand over her shoulder. The touch became a caress. His hand worked up the side of her neck and under her ear, passed lightly over her skin, and his fingers opened and ran through her hair. Now she was kissing him and the great thing was that he was kissing her back.
She broke off, finally. “Does it hurt, Rick?”
“Hurts…like…hell…” he croaked. “I…could…get to like it.”
She helped him sit up. He was dizzy, and almost toppled over, but she held him, keeping her arms around him, talking softly to him, telling him everything would be all right. “You saved my life, Rick. You saved my life.”