A Day for Damnation

ELEVEN

WE STARTED seeing dome clusters almost immediately. And many of them were second-stage nests.

The pattern was standard: one central dome, six more the same size placed hexagonally around it. We'd seen that in the Rocky Mountain District too, but we still didn't have a sense yet how many Chtorrans a dome cluster would house. A single dome never held more than four; this was obviously an expansion-but for how many? These were the first clusters I'd seen where construction looked complete.

We tagged the first few, then gave it up. There were too many. "Save your markers," Lizard said. "There's a lot more to see."

"Jim!" said Duke, "Directly below us."

I leaned as far forward in the bubble as I could. There were at least a dozen bright red worms streaming across the ground below us, more than I'd ever seen in one place before-and they were huge! That one, chasing the chopper's shadow, had to be at least as big as a Greyhound Land Cruiser.

I had a horrifying realization. Every time the scale of the infestation expanded, so did the size of the worms. Was there no limit to their growth?

It gave me a queasy feeling to realize how puny we really were in comparison. How big were they going to get? And-how did they perceive us? The worms were turning to look up at us, often raising a third or more of their length off the ground. They waved their arms agitatedly, but I couldn't hear if they were screeching.

The scattered dome clusters were becoming frequent now. I had the sense of a village or a small town. There were domes and corrals and funny-looking spires. I remembered the totem pole I'd seen in front of the very first dome I'd ever burned. Were these the same thing? I wished I could have gone down to look at them firsthand. I wondered what a Chtorran town might look like when it was complete. Most of these structures were still in varying stages of construction. There were half-finished domes everywhere-and they were laid out in serpentine courses as often as they were circular. There was a hint of pattern in the layout-but it wasn't clear yet. I needed to see more.

But as we flew on, the sense of pattern became less, not more, obvious. As the density of clusters increased, so did the number of domes in each cluster-but the careful geometric spacing of the domes seemed to be disintegrating as if under pressure. It was as if some instinctual blueprint had broken down. There were extra domes jammed tightly around every core now, sometimes as many as nine or ten. They were squashed so tightly together, the individual domes were built misshapen, as if pushed out of round by the pressure. I could feel the wrongness.

Behind us, I could hear the first of the explosions. The Scorpions were going to work. They were dropping smart bombs to take out the large clusters. I could see the worms moving frantically beneath us. Was that a Chtorran panic? They streamed out of the domes. From the air, they looked like fuzzy pink caterpillars humping and flowing madly after us. I imagined I could hear their warbling cries over the noise of the jets.

"Chtorrrr! Chtorrrrrr!"

The ship rocked as the blast waves passed us. Lizard hollered something and we bounced up higher. I looked back and saw an ugly yellow cloud spreading across the horizon behind us. A wave of twenty-four Scorpions was spreading a swath of death in our wake. The idea was to sterilize the ground, make it uninhabitable to worms-or anyone else, for that matter.

The truth was, we had no idea how effective any of our measures really were. The Chtorran ecology recovered too fast. Once the short-life radioactives expired and the biodegradables broke down, the Chtorran plants and insect-things were back in force in a matter of weeks. They established themselves faster than any Earth species could. This area would have to be sprayed regularly-until we could find something more permanent. Denver was talking longer short-lives.

Lizard was hollering something at me. "McCarthy! Coming up at two o'clock. What's that?"

It was on my side of the ship-the largest dome cluster yet! A cluster of clusters-the pattern was expanded again! The original hexagon of domes was the core of a larger wheel of hexagons-a Chtorran mandala! A third-stage nest! The sense of pattern was very clear here-there wasn't the same pressured feeling as we had seen elsewhere. It was as if this huge wheel of domes were some kind of model Chtorran village-and the other villages were pushing their growth in an effort to catch up and doing it wrong! The pressure was expressed as cancerous-looking domes.

As we came over the mandala, I could see that it was still growing. The central cluster of domes was being expanded into one huge dome-and other clusters were being laid out neatly around the perimeter. The mandala was adding yet another circle.

I hollered back to Lizard, "Bingo! We just found the Chtorran City Hall!" I fired a marker into it, and then another just to be certain. I leaned out into the bubble to watch behind. I wanted to see it explode. I could see the worms streaming out of it as it went up in flames.

The ground was erupting Chtorrans now-it looked like it was bleeding. There were too many of them. All sizes. Larger than I'd ever seen. Smaller than I'd ever seen. And all colors too, from bright purple to flaming orange. I saw everything from baby pink Chtorrans to huge scarlet worms. It was a riot of red! I couldn't see them as individual creatures any more. They were merely crimson streaks on a flesh-toned nightmare landscape. They flowed like oil. They looked like particles of fire. There were so many of them all flowing together that I could see the pattern of their panic as a vermilion river streaking horribly beneath us. It was insanity! Unreal

The whole camp was on the move-they were a furious stampede. New worms kept joining all the time. In their blind fear, the larger ones tumbled the smaller ones aside, or flowed over them, leaving them writhing and injured in the dirt; the injured creatures disappeared beneath the maddened onrushing bodies of their fellows. I could hear them screaming. All of them. The sound was a high-pitched screech like metal being sheared. I could hear it even over the whuffling of the chopper's blades and the noise of its jets.

Now, as we came over them-and as the sound of the Scorpions behind us grew louder-the crimson river swirled in confusion, as if it were caught in the churning turbulence of the chopper blades. The shrieking worms turned this way and that in a bedlam of terrified disorder-until they were enveloped by the sulfurous yellow clouds from the Scorpions. The great black beasts came roaring on behind us like the avenging angels of death.

Suddenly the ground below was rockier. The clusters of huts vanished like a dream-as abruptly as if the worms themselves had drawn a border. No more of those crimson horrors poured out of the ground. No more paced the chopper's shadow. The last of them fell behind us and disappeared beneath the Scorpions' wrath.

A few miles farther and the festering red landscape vanished too. The hills gave way to green and brown again. There were pine trees here-and redwoods and sequoias.

For a moment, there was silence in the plane. Only the steady chuff and screech of chopper blades and the muted whine of jets filled the cabin, and that wasn't a sound any more; it was merely a presence, constant and unpleasant.

Lizard made a sound then-something like a growl, something like a shriek. It started low and quickly rose. It was a release of tension, a controlled scream like the whistle of a steam engine. Her face was tight

And then she stopped and took a breath. And took us higher.