Such wishful thinking was useless, however, and he put it aside. There was the question of behavior to consider. In some species, the male was the main defender of the herd; in bees and some other social insects, however, the females were. He wondered what the case was with these brutes.
He tossed another stone.
The creatures all went on high alert again, but it was the male who spread his wings and flew up to investigate, gliding over and circling the area where the stone had fallen, looking around with its compound eyes. Pendergast made himself as invisible as possible behind the edge of the lava cone. The male, satisfied nothing was amiss, returned to the nest.
Now Pendergast understood: to have any hope of targeting the female, he would have to kill the male first.
The next question was where to place the shot. If the thing even had a heart, guessing its location would be too risky, given its size and alien physiology — and besides, if it was truly like a mosquito, it might have three hearts, as mosquitoes did.
That left a head shot as the preferred method of attack. A great pity the head was so small in relation to the body: the alignment would have to be perfect.
Pendergast tossed another rock, carefully calculating its distance and location, then braced himself, Les Baer at the ready. With a rattle, the rock hit the ground not far from the base of the cone.
At this, the male’s head jerked up again, then the thing took off with a screech, more alert than before. It swooped over the area where the rock had fallen, eyes swiveling on short eyestalks, peering everywhere. Its return route, Pendergast hoped, would take it close to the cone.
The beast circled a few times, finally satisfying itself there was no threat. As it turned to fly back to the nest, Pendergast waited — gauging the perfect moment — then stood up and cried out, waving his arms.
The thing swerved in midair, locked eyes, and flew straight at him — aligning itself exactly as Pendergast had hoped. He raised his weapon, waited a beat. As it closed in on him, he saw the beast was even more brutally ugly than he’d believed: puckered skin like a rhinoceros, covered with greasy bristles and webbed with bulging veins like pipes.
He squeezed the trigger twice, a double tap into the head, the Les Baer bucking fiercely. As the beast gave a roar of fury, Pendergast threw himself down and it came careening past the cone, talons rasping the lava above his head. To his dismay it flapped back around, flying lopsided, one of its eyes hanging from a torn stalk. Its syringe-like proboscis was quivering, shooting in and out, and Pendergast was so close that he could make out rows of needlelike teeth within it.
He fired two more shots as the creature came back at him, both directly into the good eye. The eye exploded like a watermelon hit by a sledgehammer. He threw himself down, but this time he couldn’t escape the raking talons, one of which tore into his left shoulder, ripping it open and tumbling him partway down the steep slope.
With a gasp of pain, Pendergast reached out with his other arm, grasping a handhold in the rough lava and arresting his slide, while the huge creature thrashed about, tearing at the air with its claws in a blind fury before crashing to the ground in a shower of gore.
All six of the other creatures had now left the queen and taken off, coming for him. There was no way he could fight all six at once. As the blood bubbled from the wound in his shoulder, Pendergast grasped the Les Baer in both hands and — carefully, deliberately — aimed at the flabby, pulsating abdomen of the queen, and squeezed off a round. The creature was two hundred yards away but presented a big target — and the round hit home.
A squeal like that of a stuck pig burst from its mouth; it arched its back and threw its tiny head up, whipping it back and forth with a high-pitched keening and squealing. The effect was as Pendergast had hoped: the six beasts broke off their flight and whirled back to protect their queen. He glanced back at the male: it was sprawled at the base of the lava cone, gasping and clawing, blood and thick fluid pouring from its exploded eyes.
That monstrous brute, at least, no longer presented a threat.
Meanwhile, the wounded queen continued to squeak and squeal. To Pendergast, listening, it sounded less and less like animalistic cries of pain and rage, and more like — language.
Abruptly, the six creatures broke off their flight to the queen and turned back toward him. They separated as they flew and approached more quickly than before, creating difficult targets. Suddenly, as if on cue, they turned and converged on him from six directions at once, in a spiraling pattern that made a fatal shot exponentially more difficult.
Pendergast realized that he had underestimated their intelligence and ability to strategize — perhaps fatally so.
As they closed in, talons extended, he realized there just might be a way out. A moment before they converged, he swung down the inner wall of the cone, into the lava pipe, and then clambered down the chimney, bracing his feet on either side of the walls, doing his best not to fall into the abyss below. Once he was wedged between the walls of the tube, he grasped the Les Baer with his good hand and aimed straight over his head.
The first creature landed and immediately jammed its head into the hole, the glittering spear of its mouthpiece stabbing down like a striking snake and grazing his shoulder. It made a sucking sound even as he fired straight up into its head. It fell back and a second beast jammed its head in, proboscis thrusting, and then a third, spraying grease and fluid on him even as he fired point blank into their nightmare faces, the tubes slashing around him, sucking and stabbing, sticking him when he wasn’t quick enough. He soon emptied the first mag and slammed home the second, firing whenever a creature appeared.
And then all went silent.
Had he killed them all? He checked his magazine and found he had three rounds left. He felt the warm blood running down his arm and dripping from his fingertips. He was running out of time in more ways than one.
Bracing himself, legs on either side of the lava tube, he tried to pull himself up, only to be seized by a wave of dizziness. Judging from the amount of blood on his shirt and arm, he guessed the claw of the male must have damaged or even severed his subclavian artery. In addition, his upper body had suffered a number of shallow stab wounds. He was rapidly becoming hypotensive; the bleeding had to be stopped immediately.
Still straddling the yawning chasm, feeling his strength ebb away, he holstered the gun and worked his jacket off, doing his best to ignore the pain. He bit down on the cuff of his shirt and tore off the sleeve, then used it to tie a crude tourniquet under and around his arm, knotting it above his clavicle to provide pressure. He would lose consciousness soon, and if he did so in this lava chimney, he would fall to his death. He had to get out — now.
With the last of his strength, he struggled up and out, then lay back on the steep cone, digging in his heels to keep from sliding down the slope. At the base of the cone, he counted five dying creatures in addition to the big male, heads blasted open by his gunfire, one or two still twitching and keening.
Where was the sixth?
The question was answered by a scream as the last of the brood — he could see the scarred cross on its wing, along with a fresh tear — came for him like a meteor, straight out of the sun. Still on his back, Pendergast yanked out the Les Baer and, with hardly the strength to raise his arm, fired the last three rounds into it even as it came down on him, talons grating the lava with a rasping noise. It slumped to one side, then collapsed, lying athwart Pendergast’s body. He could feel the noisome heat, the wings and dugs throbbing and twitching. He tried to push the thing off, but it was too heavy, and he was too weak.