The room was dead silent.
Aaron was the first to speak. "Freeze me alive! You've hit it!
Fossilized bees in the coal? The speed might act like flecks of dynamite under circumstances like that—"
Suddenly the entire room was vibrant with discussion. Aaron stood in the middle of it. "I think that this is cause for celebration," he said.
"Why is that? These bees—"
"Don't you see? I think that we are entitled to an apology. For months, one ugly question has hovered over the entire colony: Who sabotaged the mines?
"And there was a second question: Who or what killed Linda and Joe? Now we've answered both questions. The bees came through the pass—Cassandra, what were the weather conditions at Deadwood Pass when Joe and Linda were killed?"
"A hot dry sirocco wind blowing from the western high desert."
"Sure," Aaron said. "And that's what did it. The wind picked up a swarm, blew them across the desert and over the pass. Linda and Joe had the bad fortune to be in the way. They were stripped to the bone in minutes by starving, disoriented necrophage bees."
Sylvia looked devastated. "We were so careful."
"Careful to avoid the Avalon ecology rather than understand it," Cadmann said. "And that one falls right into my lap. I thought we could do it. I thought Deadwood Pass was safe. Oh, Lord!"
"What?"
"Eden Oasis. Just luck the wind didn't blow that way while it was full of Grendel Scouts! The worst of it is, I knew all along the only real safety was in understanding what we faced, and I didn't do anything about it."
"I didn't want you killed by the dragon," Sylvia whispered.
"We all thought the same thing, amigo," Carlos said. "We did." He gestured toward Aaron and the others. "They had a different view."
"But you do see the danger?" Big Chaka said carefully.
Aaron nodded. "It's a real danger, but being eaten by bees is no worse than being stung to death by a colony of them back on Earth. Individually, they are probably pretty harmless, and anyway they generally stay in the lowlands where we don't go. In some circumstance that we don't completely understand, they swarm and can reach highlands like Deadwood Pass. Fine. We will study them, and become aware of them. We can build shelters. And now, more than anything else we need to find out—why did Cadzie Weyland survive?"
There rose a buzz of speculation. Big Chaka cleared his throat. "We need to learn more about bees."
"So let's go on a bee hunt!" Carlos cried. "Katya and I know where to start in the morning."
"Not alone, though," Aaron said.
"We will not leave the safe area—"
"I'm afraid there is no safe area," Aaron said. "Not since we saw the grendel this afternoon. Chaka, just how could a grendel be there?"
Little Chaka shook his head. "I have no idea. I would have taken a mighty oath that there was, there could be, no grendel there."
"Avalon Surprise," Sylvia said.
Chapter 36
BEE HUNT
Linnaeus, Carolus, 1707-78, Swedish botanist and taxonomist, considered the founder of the binomial system of nomenclature and the originator of modern scientific classification of plants and animals. In Systema naturae (1735) and Genera plantarum (1737) he presented his classification system, which remains the basis for modern taxonomy. His more than 180 works also include Species plantarum (1753), books on the flora of Lapland and Sweden, and the Genera morborum (1763), a classification of diseases.
The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia
Cadmann watched the skeeters take off, then returned to the dining hall to rejoin Sylvia. "Bees," he said. "I can't get over it. We were so bloody careful! Divert the streams, build grendel-proof shelters. Satellite observations. Nothing could get to Deadwood Pass—how could we know a swarm of Avalon bees would blow over that pass?"
She reached across the table to take his hand. "It wasn't your fault, you know."
"The hell it wasn't. We had all the clues, explosions in the mines, and instead of coming over here to look for the real cause we wondered how the Pranksters could have done it."
"More my fault than yours, then," Sylvia said. "I'm the biologist. And I never guessed. Cadmann, stop blaming yourself."
"Sure."
The comm card chirped.
"Cadmann here."
"Amigo, we have it."
"The nest?"
"A nest, certainly."
"How big is it? How close are you?"
"I'm looking into a long valley," Carlos said. "I'd see more from a peak—Cassandra, that peak—Cad, the valley runs northeast from here, with a meadow down the center. The peak, call that Spyglass Hill for reference, is at the southeast end, forty-three kilometers distance bearing two-sixty-five degrees from Shangri-La. It's a long flat valley nestled in between ridges. There's a shallow stream. No indication of grendels. Let me say that again, no indication of grendels."
"There wasn't any indication of grendels at the lake up there either," Cadmann muttered.
"I have not forgotten that. The nest is below the peak. It's the size of a hill, a lumpy hill with no sharp edges to it, ten meters at the tallest. It's big, I make it ninety meters by a hundred and eighty. I'll make my way to the top of Spyglass and get a better measure, but it's big. Cad, it might not be the only nest. We've all converged on this valley, six search parties following bees, and we all ended here."
"Compadre, that implies a lot of bees."
"You know it. Colonel."
"Okay, we'll come look." He glanced at Aaron... but Aaron didn't try to interrupt, and this wouldn't be Cadmann Weyland's first siege. "We need poison gas... wouldn't it be nice if they had a ton of cyanide sitting in a warehouse?"
"No cyanide, but we do have some good insecticides," Aaron said. "You insisted. Remember? Do you think we will need them?"
"Probably not. Carlos, don't get too damn close to that nest. Bees protect their hives, and Avalon bees have a similar lifestyle."
"It's very likely they will," Sylvia said. "There would be strong evolutionary pressure to do that. Carlos, he's right, be careful."
"You know it."
"Here," Carlos called. "Follow the coffee smell."
Carlos had a full campfire going, with long sticks poking out of it, and a coffeepot braced on the sticks. Pouring, he said, "I thought I might want a torch right handy. Those bees are like little flying firecrackers, don't you think? Your people used to celebrate the Fourth of July that way, before the Green laws got so anal retentive."
Cadmann sipped, looking down through war specs.
The bees were big enough to see as individuals, even from here, from a hundred and twenty meters away and uphill. There were thousands. The nest... hard to tell where it ended; the edges faded out into low bushes and tall swamp grass.
Magnify. "There are several varieties," Cadmann said. "Most are under ten centimeters across, but there are larger ones too."
"Possibly soldiers," Sylvia said. "Terrestrial ants and termites develop lots of different forms. I never heard of bees doing that, but I don't suppose there's any reason they couldn't." She moved up beside him and adjusted her war specs. Then she shuddered. "They don't look dangerous."
"Even so, I would not care to go down there and dig up the nest," Carlos said.