Mech

Nineteen

The weird, table-like creatures carried Sarah and the others down into the tunnels. Sarah was wrapped in womb-like blackness. For seemingly an endless time she rode on the warm, undulating back of her beast.

Dazed by her recent experiences she stared upward, watching nothing but the colorful after-images that played on her retinas. The darkness didn’t seem to bother the aliens; they apparently needed no help to guide themselves through their own tunnels.

Sarah began to feel a deep hopelessness, a pitiful despair that wasn’t familiar to her. She tried to get herself out of this defeatist malaise, to tell herself there was always hope, but somehow the blackness and the odd stinks and sounds drove the hope out of her. It was as if grotesque minions of evil were carting her into the depths of hell.

An unwelcome addition to her discomfort was the terrible headache she had from having been drowned. Oxygen deprivation had sent a herd of galloping horses through her head, pounding down the gray matter with sharp hooves. She wondered vaguely if she had sustained any brain damage-and whether or not it would be possible for her to tell if she had.

Slipping in and out of consciousness, she slept.

Mom?

Mom, are you there?

Sarah reached up and touched her itching nose. The itch didn’t go away however, as it was an alien stink, not really an itch.

“Mom?” asked a tiny voice from somewhere.

With a sudden intake of breath she came awake and sat up halfway. She only made it halfway because her head hit the roof of the tunnel that they still traveled within. “Bili?” she cried, ignoring the jolt of pain in her head. “Bili, where are you?”

“Here, Mom,” said Bili, not so far away. From the sound of it, he was on the next animal up. She noticed something in her eyes, something that stung briefly. It was blood from her forehead.

Something came out of the darkness and touched her. It was an alien appendage of some kind, a hard horny thing like the claw of a crab. It touched her and pushed her firmly back down. She realized, swallowing a great scream, that it was only the beast she was riding on, pushing her flat for easy transport. Feeling like livestock on the way to the slaughterhouse, she let herself lie flat again.

“Bili, what’s been going on? Are you okay?”

“You’re alive,” said Bili with intense relief in his voice. “The aliens haven’t hurt me yet, but something’s wrong with Daddy, he’s breathing like a walker on a mountainside and won’t talk to me. He just moans every once in awhile. I hope he dies, the fat bastard.”

Sarah felt a sudden added weight on her shoulders. She had been so concerned about Bili that she had blanked out all the recent events with Mudface and Daddy. She shivered, although the air in the tunnel was surprisingly warm, even hot. She noticed that her clothes were still wet from the pool, which meant that she couldn’t have slept too long. Now that she was more fully awake, she realized just how much pain she was in. Being murdered and then brought back to life played hell with your body. She felt like a bruised lump of overripe fruit.

“Daddy’s here? What about Mudface?”

“They offed him,” said Bili, sounding positively cheerful. “It was enough to make me cheer for their side. Almost.”

Sarah was again taken by a wave of guilt. This whole situation was her fault. She had gone for the money by dealing with Mudface and Daddy in the first place. She had even given the aliens her ticket for a ride down to the planet when they needed it. Worst of all, she had dragged Bili into all this with her, her own son.

“Oh, Bili,” she said, her voice weak in the darkness. “I’m so sorry for getting you into this.”

“It’s okay, Mom. Besides, I’m the one you did it for. I guess I’ll never get that regrow for my arm now.”

In the blackness, Sarah let tears run down her face, but she didn’t make a sound. It would only upset Bili.

After an unknowable length of time, during which Daddy made fitful mewling noises and breathed like a smithy’s bellows, they reached an opening. Sarah could feel the wash of moving air, the different reflection of sound.

“We must be in some kind of big chamber,” she said.

“You think this is where they’re going to eat us?” asked Bili.

Sarah blinked rapidly in the darkness. “What are you talking about?”

“Well, why else would they drag us down here?” asked Bili reasonably. “These things are just like the bone-cutter ants down in the jungles around Bauru. They dig tunnels, attack everything that moves, carry food back to the nest on their backs.”

Sarah could think of nothing to say. The boy was probably right.

After crossing the great chamber, which took long enough to convince Sarah that it was truly huge, they reentered a smaller side tunnel again. Soon they became aware of a growing glow of light from down the tunnel. Sarah raised her head and saw the dim outline of her son, crouching on the next animal up ahead.

The column stopped, and they were unceremoniously tossed into a shaft that branched off from the tunnel. Inside was a small, low chamber, perhaps thirty feet deep, six feet wide and three feet high. The room contained several people, in the midst of whom sat a tiny, portable glow-lamp, which was the source of the illumination.

They turned to look back at the beast of burden and were just in time to scramble out of the way as the massive form of Daddy rolled into the cramped chamber. At the entrance, one of the carrying types levered a heavy thickness of some kind of transparent material into the opening. Another type that they hadn’t seen before, a small spidery creature with many eyes and appendages, squirted a substance around the border of the transparent material, sealing them in.

“Let me introduce myself,” said a resonant, half-familiar voice behind her. “I’m-. ”

Sarah and Bili had turned around to face the speaker. They all three froze.

It was ex-Governor Rodney Zimmerman.

Before she knew what she was doing, Sarah had punched him in the face. His head jerked up, striking the roof of the low chamber. She followed up with a kick to the belly that probably hurt her sore body as much as it did Rodney, but the effect was gratifying. He rolled on the tunnel floor, groaning and trying to get away from her.

“Restrain her!” he shouted to the others, his nose bubbling blood. “She’s a murderess, she and the brat. Killed a whole farming family and-Ow!”

Bili had produced a rock from somewhere and bounced it off the ex-Governor’s tender nose. “The aliens got that family, you bastard!” shouted Bili. “The same way they got us now.”

Muttering something about treason, Rodney withdrew to the rear of the chamber and squatted there.

Sarah and Bili pulled back from the rest of them, which was almost impossible in the cramped chamber. She did her best to avoid both Daddy and the ex-Governor. The other miserable-looking people in the chamber made no threatening moves against them.

Sarah, head still pounding, curled herself protectively around Bili, as she hadn’t done since the accident when he had lost his arm. She watched the others closely. There were eight people in the chamber, including themselves, Daddy, Rodney Zimmerman and four others. She turned her attention to the ones she didn’t know. There were two women, a little girl and a tall thin man with a pallid face and long limp hair that was so blond it was almost white. She noted the red streak across his face and knew him to be a skald, a member of a peculiar religious sect of Garmish origin.

The skald looked particularly distressed by his captivity. His body was frequently racked with spasms of twisting motion, seemingly without purpose. His eyes were haunting holes of blackness. The others were doing their best to avoid him.

“I’m Sarah and this is my son, Bili,” Sarah said experimentally, addressing the women. The women and the little girl huddled together, making no attempt to reply. They did turn their eyes on her, however, and the darkness she saw in them made her wonder what horrors they might have witnessed.

Sarah assumed they were related to one another. They were squat and strong-bodied New Manchurians, with the look of the land about them. Sarah was reminded of the farmer’s wife, Sasha. A cloud passed over her face and she shivered in the sweaty cell, thinking about the bloody mess the aliens had left behind after attacking the farm. Could Sasha and Timmy still be alive down here somewhere? The thought cheered her a bit, although she didn’t know why, given the grim situation.

Bili soon had had enough of her mothering and pulled away from her embrace, moving to the entrance. He circumnavigated Daddy and inspected the seal the aliens had made.

“It’s like safety-glass,” he said over his shoulder to Sarah. “Like inches-thick safety-glass.”

Sarah joined him. “It’s some kind of transparent resin. A polymer, I would imagine. It’s quite amazing that they can secrete it from their bodies.”

“It was only that special little one that could do it. The big table-like types just put the door into place.”

Sarah pressed against the surface experimentally. It was as hard as rock, as unforgiving as iron.

“Well, I hope they don’t let us suffocate down here.”

Bili then raised his fist and pulled it back to pound on the surface.

“NO!” screeched someone behind them.

They turned to see the skald racing toward them on all fours, his thin arms and legs pumping like a scuttling crab running from the surf. Sarah almost screamed herself as she caught sight of his face. It was an image of extreme insanity. The mouth hung lax; spittle flew from the quivering lower lip. Odd croaking noises bubbled up from his throat. The eyes were the worst: two wild staring glints of blue inside a stripe of livid red skin.

Sarah pulled Bili back, away from the sealed entrance. She put her hand out to stop the skald in case he attacked them.

Seeing them move away from the entrance, his charge faltered, slowed, stopped. Aimlessly, he wandered to the nearest section of wall and propped himself against it. He slumped forward, resuming the same posture he taken before.

“Jeez,” said Bili, frowning fiercely at the skald. “He’s nutso.”

Sarah only nodded, moving to a new spot from which she could watch everyone in the chamber and the entrance, too. It was clear to her now that these people had been stressed to their limits. They had stepped past the thin veneer of civilization and become barbarians. In the case of the skald, it seemed to have gone as far as insanity.

Time passed. She had almost dozed off when she realized that Bili had left her side to go exploring again. He was leaning over the prone bloated figure of Daddy and the sight of him, so near to those deadly hands that had strangled her just hours before, brought her instantly awake. She stiffened, but didn’t want to just start screaming at him, in case the man was really asleep and not just laying for him, for her baby. She rose up into a cat-like crouch.

Bili noticed she was awake and crawled back to her. With intense relief, she gripped his shoulders. “Don’t ever go near that man again, Bili,” she whispered fiercely.

“Awe, come on, Mom. He’s out cold. I think he’s poisoned, too. One of those killer things cut off his some of his fingers, you know. I think they must have venom on their blades or something. He’s sweating real bad and he stinks.”

Sarah looked Bili over briefly, then looked toward Daddy’s dark bulk. “Stay right here.”

With infinite caution, she crept to where she could see his face. He did indeed resemble a victim of poisoning. He breathed in shallow gasps, his body was bathed in sweat and his arm was red and swollen. The stumps of his fingers had stopped bleeding, but were discolored and raw-looking.

“I think you’re right. Still, you must promise me that you’ll go no closer to him.”

Bili nodded and promised.

A few more minutes passed during which the Asian women began to weep for some reason, speaking quietly among themselves.

“What have you all seen? Why have these monsters imprisoned us?” Sarah finally asked the group aloud, tired of moping in this dark hole. She was feeling better now and thoughts of escape were running through her mind.

It was Rodney Zimmerman who came forward to answer. He approached them warily, but smiled insipidly the entire time. Sarah was reminded strongly of a reptile. The stench of his clothes-she thought that he must have befouled himself-added to the image.

“You haven’t been to the throne room then?” he asked, his eyes shifting from her to Bili and then back to her. He gazed frankly at her breasts, which were only partially covered due to her struggles with Mudface and Daddy.

Self-consciously, she shifted her clothing, but it did no good. Bili came to the rescue by placing his head back against her chest. She was grateful. Together they glared at the Governor of Garm. “We just got here, Zimmerman.”

“Ah, please, call me Rodney,” he said with a leer. “Then you haven’t witnessed one of their feasts, yet?”

“No.”

“They’re quite a spectacle,” he said, a shadow passing over him. He was silent for a few seconds, then coughed wetly. “They, the aliens, that is, have a big queen-mother alien. A whole group of them, actually. They seem to be the ones who lay the eggs, or whatever.”

“Go on,” said Sarah, intrigued despite her disgust with the source of information. She felt a desperate need to know what was going to happen to them.

“The trick to survival is to go unnoticed. I have been to the feasts three times, and still I return to my cell, unnoticed. Our fat smuggling friend over there,” he nodded toward Daddy’s limp form, “is currently my greatest hope. They seem to have an affinity for the fat ones, you see.”

They followed his gaze. Sarah tried to find pity in her heart for Daddy, but couldn’t. “So that’s why all these people are cracking up. They’ve all been to a-feast?”

“Correct.”

“Is that all they like, the fat ones?” asked Bili with hope in his dark eyes.

“No, they seem to like the young as well,” he said with a wicked smile, “and the females.”

Bili seemed to shrink. “You’re second in the fatso contest, you know,” he said defiantly. Then he turned up to Sarah. “We got to get out of here, Mom.”

“You really are a prick,” Sarah told Rodney. “First you hand us over to killers, then you work hard to scare a little boy.”

“Ah, please excuse me. My trips to the feasts have been very stressful. And as to the presumption of your guilt, all I can say is that I made a mistake. I thought you were murderers, you see. So when those wretched smugglers threatened to kill a lot of good people to capture you, well… I guess I made the wrong assumption,” he gave her a winning smile that didn’t quite cut through his greasy stench. She didn’t believe him, but somehow just the possibility that it was all a mistake made her feel more trusting. After all, why would he lie now?

“So, how do we get out of here?”

As if he had been waiting for those exact words, Rodney came alive. “Now we are thinking along the same lines. I have a flitter, out in the forest not far from here.”

Sarah narrowed her eyes. “How do you know where we are?”

“It has taken me some time to piece together our position from various sources, but after interviewing a lot of cellmates, I feel confident I know what part of the Polar Range we are under. What helped is that I keep a hunting lodge not far from here. That’s where the flitter is stored.”

“But where, exactly?”

A calculating expression came over his face. “Can you pilot a flitter?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Of course,” he echoed, smiling, wrapping his thin white arms around his knees and rocking back. “I’ve waited what seems like an eternity to hear those words. You are the first qualified pilot I’ve come across in three trips to the feasting room! I suspected it, of course, as you are a smuggler.”

“So your plan is to break out somehow and get to the flitter and escape, right? Can you tell me where it is? How far it might be? I know these mountains well, I’ve flown over them a hundred times.”

Rodney looked back at her with a crafty glint in his eye. “Ah, but why would you take your worst enemy along with you on a jaunt into the wild blue? No, no, the location must remain a secret for now.”

Try as she might, she could get no more out of him. She quickly began to see what kind of man he was and began to despise him even more deeply, now that he was familiar to her, than she had before when he had only been a cruel stranger.

Inside the dark, unknowable workings of Garth and Fryx’s joint mind things had taken a turn for the worst. The stress of actually being captured by the Imperium and, horror of horrors, held prisoner inside an enemy nest, was simply too much for Fryx. His great age and natural reclusiveness didn’t provide the mental structure he needed to face his worst nightmare.

Garth was caught in the middle. An insane thing was locked in his mind, threats no longer coerced it, and reasoning was pointless. It was all he could do to keep from attacking the other captives around him.

When the scuttling sound began again in the tunnels above them, only the faintest vibration came through to Garth’s back and buttocks. He had placed himself completely against the resonant surface of the nest for precisely that reason, to be forewarned. His body rose up, twisting sinuously of its own accord, writhing like a headless snake in flames.

Fryx was frenzied, the enemy were returning, another feast had begun. Forcing his body to move in an organized fashion through sheer force of will, Garth crept toward the others.

Sarah shrank back from the bizarre skald’s approach. He seemed to be forming a single word with his lips, straining mightily to get it out.

“Feast-” he slurred.

Sarah’s blood went cold. Everyone in the cell fell quiet, even Daddy’s gasps and warblings seemed to subside.

Then they could all hear it, feel it-the approach of churning feet on the nest floor.

“We must form a plan!” hissed Sarah to the others. “We must fight.”

Rodney shook his head and snorted.

“We must do something!”

Rodney’s shook his head more vigorously. “No. You must listen to me, you must trust me on this one point for I need you alive. You must not attract their attention in any way. To do so is usually fatal.”

“Well at least it would be a clean death,” retorted Sarah. She felt helpless and scared.

“What would your boy do then, eh? Do you want him to die alone down here? In the dark?”

“Bastard,” she spat out.

The aliens had reached the opening by then and they removed the seal by squirting some kind of solvent around the edges, dissolving the earlier secretions. The humans, huddling, moaning, were dragged out and placed on the backs of the waiting transport creatures. Daddy was grabbed up first, and it seemed to Sarah there was some eagerness in the aliens that handled him. The thin skald fought them spastically, but was easily overpowered. The three Asians were spared for some reason, left behind on their own.

Soon they were moving through the black tunnels again to be dropped into a black pit in the midst of what felt like a very large chamber.

“It’s always the same,” Rodney hissed in her ear. She jumped, not having realized he was there. “We sit here in the dark, listen to them grunt and smack themselves, then finally they choose their first course and tentacles come down out of the blackness. Then comes the worst: listening to them feed.”

“How have you survived three times?” she demanded, trying not to move, not to be noticed.

“Come with me, I have discovered an alcove that conceals most of my body from view. However their senses work, they seem to find me unpalatable in that position.”

He took her hand and she almost jerked it back before controlling herself. She felt like she had been bitten.

Suddenly, new ghastly alien sounds erupted from above them. Wet slappings, blatting noises, sudden warbling gasps. Sarah and Bili clutched at one another, trembling.

“A Tulk discovered amongst the food creatures?” gasped the Parent. “Do you have any idea how serious this is?” Her tentacles curled protectively around her foodtube in a gesture of fright.

“Well, I would suggest that we interrogate one of the food creatures,” said the nife.

“Interrogate? How?”

“The bio-computers now have a thorough understanding of their sonic vibration-based speech patterns. If you could be troubled to grow a sound-producing organ for one of them, we could easily communicate,” suggested the nife. The Parent noted that his orbs were riding very high indeed today. She suspected that he was after something special, perhaps he would even attempt to excite her enough to allow a second melding.

“A Tulk amongst our food-creatures,” she repeated, still stunned by this monstrous concept. “The most hated enemy of the Imperium. How could we be so unfortunate? Are the food-creatures in league with them? Could it be that all of them are so infested? It’s enough to make one retch.”

“No, no. I doubt there are too many around, we would have discovered them before. Fortunately, we captured the creature alive. Now all we need to do is coerce a food-creature into communicating with it.”

“So the food-creatures are telepathic?”

“The capability is latent in certain individuals.”

“If they are telepaths, then I believe the presence of a Tulk in their brain-encasements could greatly enhance this capacity. Perhaps we could actually interrogate a Tulk, not just their slaves.”

“A rare event indeed. Worthy, perhaps, of great rewards?” commented the nife. Nonchalantly, he eased nearer to her throne. For once the Parent tolerated his brash, overconfident manner. She even allowed him to caress her tentacle-tips.

“We will interrogate the food-creatures as you suggest,” she said. “I will grow an appropriate organ, it will only take a few moments to construct the genes. We have a new set of food-creatures in the dish now. We shall interrogate and devour them presently.”

“I don’t understand it,” said Rodney, his voice worried. “They always begin feasting by now. Why else would they have brought us here?”

Sarah shared his concern. If the aliens were deviating from their normal behavior on this occasion, what other deviations might occur? “Should we try to jump out of the pit?”

Rodney snorted softly. “It’s been tried, believe me. One of my own bodyguards, the last to survive, tried it the first time I was in this pit. I decided-I mean he decided to do it, over my objections, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Anyway, he made it to the lip, about ten feet up. I heard him move around up there for about three seconds, then he dropped back down.”

“Was he all right?”

“He was headless.”

Sarah half expected Bili to say ‘neato’, but for once he didn’t.

They waited there in the dark for a considerable length of time. Then, to everyone’s surprise, a voice began to speak in the chamber above them.

“The food will answer the questions,” it announced in a distorted warble. The phlegmatic voice rasped unevenly, like the voice of an old man with a cold.

None of them moved or spoke.

“Respond.”

“What do you want?” asked Sarah. Rodney gripped her shoulder, pulling her back, but she shrugged him off.

“The food will answer the questions, or the food will be devoured immediately.”

“Okay, I’ll answer anything you want,” said Sarah. She stepped out into the center of the pit, looking up into nothingness. Behind her, Rodney hissed in exasperation.

“Identify the specimen above the pit.”

“I can’t see anything.”

There was a period of silence. Soon, the chamber was lit by a wan glow.

“Identify the specimen above the pit or a killbeast will damage you.”

Sarah and the others were too busy gaping to even look at the specimen above the pit. All around them were hideous aliens. Pacing around the circumference of the pit was a creature with long stalks that appeared to contain his optical organs. The deadly soldier-types ringed the pit a pace or two back from the edge. Sarah immediately assumed that they were the killbeasts that the voice had been referring to. Further back, almost out of their sight, were huge dark shapes. Some of them had a single massive horn in the center of their heads while others appeared to be the digging types like the one she had first encountered. More grotesque than any was the bloated thing that perched on a chair or throne of some kind near the pit. The throne was built up of crude brown resins lumped together into an organic shape. Several more thrones were in the room, but they were empty.

Directly above them was suspended a transparent globe containing what resembled a small dollop of grayish jelly.

“Identify the specimen above the pit,” the voice repeated. Sarah could locate it now. It came from a one of a cluster of tick-like things growing out of the roof of the nest. One of them had a mouth on it like a fleshy conch shell.

“Will you let us go if we can tell you what it is?” asked Sarah.

Rodney made a wordless hiss of warning. Sarah thought she saw the one with the eyestalks make a signal of some kind, but if there were any communications, they were silent. With amazing speed one of the killbeast guards leapt into the pit. Before the humans could do more than cower, the killbeast kicked at Sarah’s head in a sweeping arc. The alien turned the blade flat at the last instant, knocking her to the floor rather than decapitating her. With easy grace it bounded back out of the pit.

“Food is not permitted to question the Parent or her offspring,” warbled the translating conch shell.

Sarah climbed back to her feet, rubbing the back of her head and trying to moan softly. Bili came to her and embraced her.

Sarah waved the others forward. Rodney only huddled closer to the wall in his alcove while the skald merely ignored them. Odd tremors coursed through his body at random intervals. Daddy remained flat on his back in delirium.

“Help me look at this thing!” Sarah whispered to Rodney. “They might eat us if we don’t identify it. It looks like some kind of sea creature.”

Finally, Rodney shuffled forward. He held his hands curled to his chest and peered up into the gloom. “Some kind of jellyfish.”

“We think it’s some kind of jellyfish. A sea creature,” answered Sarah loudly. “But we aren’t sure.”

There was a moment of silence while the leader aliens seemed to digest and discuss this.

“Food doesn’t recognize the Tulk? They don’t ride in your brain-encasements?”

For some reason the skald chose that moment to jerk spasmodically and topple to the floor of the pit. It seemed as if he was having some kind of fit.

Sarah looked at Rodney, baffled by the questions and the skald’s behavior.

“It means our heads, we carry our brains in our skulls,” he hissed back. He eyed his alcove longingly and rubbed his fingers together.

“No, they don’t ride in our heads,” Sarah said. “We don’t know what a Tulk is.”

This seemed to set off a debate, during which the smaller alien with the eyestalks marched up and down before the throne of the bigger one. There were many gestures, but few audible sounds other than occasional blatting noises, reminiscent of the calls of air-swimmers during mating season.

Finally, a decision was obviously reached. The smaller alien marched off out of sight, seemingly agitated. Then two killbeasts jumped down into the pit and tried to haul Daddy out of it. They had to get help from two trachs and another killbeast before they had him out.

Then began a most horrid feasting. Sarah held her hands over Bili’s ears and turned his face to the wall of the pit, but that only left her ears open to the ghastly sounds. The Parent, which had to be the monstrous thing on the throne, ate Daddy by tearing him into little strips with her fast-working crab-like mandibles and sucking them up with a tube-like orifice. The ripping of flesh and the sucking noises filled the air.

Daddy regained consciousness briefly during the process. The other aliens easily constrained his thrashing. His desperate hoarse screams echoed through the nest. It seemed to Sarah that the Parent quivered a bit more excitedly as her food fought her.

When there was little left but exposed bone, the Parent sent more killbeasts into the pit. Rodney shoved Garth toward them and tried to wedge himself between Sarah and the wall of the pit. This did no good however, as he was taken next.

“How can it still be hungry?” asked Bili. He buried his face in her side, not expecting an answer.

“Stop them!” Rodney shouted down to Sarah as he was carried like a babe in the arms of a killbeast. “Stop them or your chances of survival are nil!”

“Tell me where the ship is! I can stop them!” Sarah shouted back.

The killbeasts ignored his ripping and biting at their tough bodies and pinned him in front of the towering mass of flesh on the throne. Sarah opened her mouth, deciding to try to save Rodney despite of his crimes and his deviousness, but before she could speak he was crying out the location of the secreted flitter.

“It’s in the boatyard on Lake Axalp, on the south shore-” he broke off, shrieking as a pair of pincers sliced into his legs. “Do something!”

“I lied!” shouted Sarah, cupping her hands to direct the sound to the translating conch shell on the roof of the chamber. “I know what the specimen is. I’ve see the Tulk before.”

There was no response for several seconds. Rodney continued screaming as a strip of his flesh was sucked down the Parent’s foodtube.

Suddenly, the feast halted.

Sarah looked up expectantly, but the conch shell didn’t speak. Instead, the majority of the killbeasts stiffened, as though they were receiving silent instructions, then raced off into the tunnels. The larger, horned shapes to the rear of the chamber stirred and trundled forward to surround the Parent in a protective ring of flesh. Rodney was rolled back into the pit where he lay in a heap, moaning.

“What’s going on, Mom?” asked Bili.

Then she felt it. A tremor in the nest, then another. Soon, she heard it, and a few crumbling scraps of earth fell from the distant ceiling to dribble down on their heads.

Suddenly, the roof shook and sprayed them with loose earth. Several of the tick-like things fell into the pit with them, including the one with the conch shell mouth. They broke open and splattered them all with soupy flesh.

“Looks like brains, Mom,” commented Bili as they scrambled for the alcove.

Sarah was only mildly surprised to find both Rodney and the skald had beaten her into the alcove. The four of them squeezed together; it was a tight fit.

“The nest is under attack,” said Rodney fearfully.

Sarah nodded. “It’s probably Stormbringers out of Fort Rodney. I hope they blow these aliens apart.”

Then the light went out and there was no point in talking as the ear-splitting explosions began in earnest.

“This graphic clearly shows the location of the nest,” said Mai Lee, pointing to the colorful mass of moving points of light that hovered over the holo-plate. “I’ve instructed the battle computers to display enemy movements by locating their radio emissions. You can see here that the central globe of the nest is buried between two peaks, in effect straddling the pass between Grunstein and the Slipape Counties. The larger of the two peaks is where you will land and set up your artillery, Zimmerman.”

“How much resistance will we face?” asked Zimmerman, studying the graphic intently and rubbing his jowls.

“You can see for yourself that there are relatively few contacts up there, it’s only a small outpost at most. You will land there, destroy any resistance, and begin firing on the nest immediately,” boomed Mai Lee. The imposing head of her battlesuit swung to regard him.

“And what will you be doing?” asked young Zeel Zimmerman, his face pinched in suspicion.

“While you bombard the nest, we will broadcast noise on the preferred alien communications frequencies. They will be under a heavy surprise attack with their communications jammed. Their command control will break down. We will wait for the nest to be breached. When the breach is wide enough, you will stop the bombardment while I will lead my troops into the nest and exterminate the queen.”

Zimmerman’s face took on an expression of great surprise. Even Zeel looked impressed. “You mean you personally will fight the aliens in their own nest?”

The battlesuit seemed to stand a bit more erect. “Correct.”

The Zimmerman command walked out of the dome, muttering among themselves. They didn’t like the plan, if only because Mai Lee had suggested it, but they couldn’t come up with a better one.

After they had left and mounted their lifters to lead the assault on the peak, Mai Lee returned to the graphic she had just displayed. She pressed a key and the battlecomputer instantly displayed an altered image. A tight mass of tiny lights appeared, buried beneath the peak she had sent the Zimmermans to. A long conduit of lights led from the mass beneath the peak back to the central mass of the nest.

Inside her encasement of steel and collapsium, she chuckled.

The battle began exactly as planned. Smoothly, the blue-clad Zimmerman knights swooped down on the peak and brushed away the few killbeasts that were stationed there, tossing their blasted corpses from the cliffs. The weaponeers unlimbered their heaviest equipment and sighted on the innocent-looking patch of forest that covered the nest site. The first barrage ripped through the still air, sang for a moment, then broke apart into a hundred thunderclaps. Horkwoods a thousand years old split apart and disintegrated.

Simultaneously, the parabolic radio dishes mounted on her lifters focused on the nest and began broadcasting. She imagined the turmoil inside the fortress of her enemies and wriggled a bit in pleasure.

The bombardment and the jamming continued for several minutes when the nest was finally breached. The upper galleries vanished; the aliens caught near the surface were vaporized. Mai Lee ground her teeth, considering using the one or two tactical nukes she had hoarded and hidden from Nexus inspections for so long. In the end she forbear, they were too much like her own children-in fact, she considered them even more useful and dear. Spending them in this battle when more conventional weaponry could do the job seemed frivolous.

A twisting cloud of culus squadrons rose up from the blasted nest like a swarm of enraged bees. With alarming speed they flew to attack the source of the jamming, directly at Mai Lee’s lifters. Gouts of plasma and long lines of tracer slugs leapt out to meet them. She ordered her lifter to beat a spiraling retreat. She didn’t withdraw, but rather lengthened the time the enemy must suffer under her guns before closing.

Even while the culus horde approached, there was a slowdown in the bombardment. The firing slowed, became sporadic. Zimmerman called in a state of great distress.

“We must pull out!” he shouted at her, red-faced and sweating profusely. “There is a tunnel network beneath this peak. Aliens are sprouting out of the ground like fungus.”

“You will hold your position at all costs,” snapped Mai Lee, cutting off the connection abruptly. She wheeled the battlesuit and strode out onto the deck of her command lifter. The time for action had come.

With intense personal satisfaction, she called the commander of her helicopter gunships and ordered them to destroy the Zimmerman lifters.

She watched the graphics over the holo-plate tensely as the helicopters roared to the attack. Caught completely by surprise from behind, the Zimmerman lifters were blasted to fragments before they could get airborne. Only a few of the weaponeers even managed to return fire.

Mai Lee had been concerned that a few of the Zimmerman weaponeers would turn their artillery on her lifters, but she realized now that her fears had been groundless. Realizing that they were now trapped on the mountain peak, the Zimmermans fought a desperate struggle against the seemingly infinite number of aliens that now boiled from beneath the trees and boulders. They had no concern but for their survival. The fighting was hand to hand and to the death.

Before she could really savor the sweetness of having finally ridded herself of an ancient enemy, the culus squadrons were among her lifters. Although greatly reduced in numbers, they still managed to wreak havoc, dropping shrades among the troops, slashing open weaker human flesh and crushing men inside their own armor. The pilot of one of the lifters was stricken by a shrade and the lifter sagged down into the forests. A great explosion shook the deck beneath Mai Lee’s feet.

Soon, however, the attackers had been destroyed and with triumph Mai Lee’s forces moved to assault the nest. Lifters set down in the cratered forestland, disgorging hundreds of heavy troopers in full battlegear. Mai Lee marched with them, but had the caution to hold back, entering the smoking hole only after the bulk of her forces had cleared the way. Her heavy metal claws sank into piles of blasted alien corpses.

The throne-chamber, located at the deepest point of the nest, was built to last. The upper galleries and tunnel networks were forced open like cracked mollusk-shells under the bombardment, but the roof of the throne-chamber held. Sixteen layers of complex polymers (incredibly long molecules built from chains of simple molecules) buckled and sagged downward, but didn’t break. Thousands of pounds of explosives were spent in a few minutes. The hests had done their work well.

“Mom?” croaked Bili, his voice a gasp. He coughed up grit and inhaled more.

Sarah was lying on his chest, but at first she didn’t hear him, and she didn’t know he was there. The explosions had stopped, but in her head they rang on and on, with a sickening repetitiveness.

She simply rested her head on her son’s hitching chest, aware only of the pressure and the texture of his dirty shirt. He put his arms around her neck awkwardly and hugged her.

She tried to raise her head, but a great weight pressed her back down. Shooting pains ran down her side. She stopped moving. Better.

Her movement elicited a reaction from Bili. He stopped hugging her and leaned forward, shouting something in her ear. “I thought you were dead, Mom.”

They rested for a time, their senses slowly returning.

Pain returned with her senses. Sarah found her voice after several minutes. “Bili, what’s on top of me?”

There was a pause while she felt Bili’s hand reaching above her, probing in the blackness. “An alien. A dead killbeast, I think. I’ll try to get it off.”

There was a pause, then a wrenching pain from her back. A great weight shifted, rolled away. “I got lucky,” Bili shouted into her ear. “The damned thing shifted easy.”

Sarah found she could move now, although movement wasn’t without its cost in pain. She reached down and felt around with her right hand. Bruised, tender flesh met her probing fingers. She reached out with her left hand and bones grated in her wrist. She loosed a rasping scream. Fire ran up her arm. Clearly, her wrist was broken.

“What’s wrong, Mom?”

“Bili, help me up,” Sarah said, reaching for her son. Together, they managed to get her into a sitting position without causing more damage to her wrist. Bili rubbed blood back into his legs, which had been under her body and that of the killbeast’s.

Suddenly, something came up and softly touched them both. A delicate hand brushed her cheek.

“Who is it?” whispered Bili.

Sarah reached out blind with her good hand and caught a handful of long fine hair. “The skald.”

“The nutso?”

The skald moved away from them, then returned. He touched each of their cheeks in turn and moved away again.

“He wants us to follow him,” said Sarah.

“Jeez, Mom. I don’t know about this guy.”

For some reason, she felt she could trust the skald to help them get out. He certainly didn’t want to stay here, of that she was convinced. “Maybe he can help us get out. I may not be able to go far without help, Bili.”

Grabbing hold of the skald’s fluttering hand with her good one, she was quickly hauled erect and together they began climbing a shifting pile of rubble and bodies. The side of the pit had collapsed, allowing them to escape. She was surprised at the strength in the skald’s wiry limbs. She leaned on him heavily.

Just as they reached the lip of the pit, they stumbled over Zimmerman. He was crawling on his belly, making his way out of the pit by inching along. His voice was bubbly, as though he spoke through a mouthful of blood. “Take me with you, or you’ll never find the flitter.”

“I know exactly where Lake Axalp is,” Sarah told him coldly. It felt wonderful to be free of the man’s controlling hand for once. “You have no hold over us.”

“Wrong.” he bubbled. He stopped, breaking off into a coughing fit.

“Come on, Mom. Let’s get out of here before the aliens notice us,” urged Bili.

Sarah hesitated. She nudged Zimmerman with her foot. “What do you mean, wrong?”

“I… I lied,” he said, “only I know where the flitter really is.”