“Where?” Colene asked.
On the path ahead.
“Uh-oh. We’ll have to scare it out of there, because we need that path,”
“I will send the shear,” Nona said. The shear launched from her shoulder and flew in its winding way down the path.
Then, abruptly, there was a thought of alarm. It was followed almost immediately by a flare of pain. Then nothing.
“Something killed my familiar!” Nona cried, falling back against a tree. Darius, connected to the shear’s mind through her mind and Seqiro’s, was already aware of that. Death had come with stunning suddenness.
This was serious. The shear, though tamed, remained a vicious customer when encountering others, and was more than competent to avoid what it couldn’t handle. What could have happened?
“I don’t like this,” Colene said. “You have any idea, airfoot?”
Airfoot? But Burgess, like Seqiro, seemed to like her nicknames. However, he had no idea what the shear could have encountered.
“We shall have to go look ourselves,” Nona said.
Darius was already marching ahead, down the path toward the escarpments. He carried a spear and had the axe strapped to his back. He knew that if he had to fight, Seqiro would enable him to do so with devastating efficiency.
As he rounded a turn to where he could see between the escarpments, he spied something odd. It seemed to be a mass of legs and tentacles, unlike anything he had seen on this world before. He tried to form enough of a mental picture so that the others could make sense of it, but there was a patch of vapor in the vicinity that interfered with vision.
Something struck Darius on an armored leg. Before he could react, his leg was yanked out from under him. He was dragged rapidly toward the thing on the path, sliding along his back. The axe was ripped away, and his spear caught against a tree and was yanked from his hand.
Then he was on his back amidst the mass of tentacles, and they were clamping on his armor. He was several feet above the ground. The monster had gotten him!
He struggled, but the tentacles held him down. He couldn’t turn his head to see exactly what it was that held him. But it had to be what had killed the shear.
There was a hissing near his feet. Darius strained to peer down, and saw a tube there. Vapor was issuing from it. As it spread out to envelop him, he started coughing; it was putrid stuff which stung his eyes and nose.
“Hallucigen!” Colene exclaimed. “So that’s how it feeds!”
“Never mind how it feeds!” Darius cried. “Don’t let it catch you!”
“Fire!” Colene exclaimed. “Fire will stop it! Nona—”
There was a burst of flame nearby, and smoke billowed out. Nona had magically ignited the brush near the monster.
The tentacles quivered. Then the monster moved. It backed away from the fire, carrying Darius above it.
“Hit it again, Nona!”
There was another burst of flame, so close that Darius winced from the heat. This time the tentacles convulsed, letting him go. Darius rolled to the ground, landing among flames. He scrambled up and charged away. His armor had protected him from actually getting burned, but he knew that wouldn’t last.
When he was clear, he turned and looked back. Now he saw the monster clearly. It had seven pairs of stiff rodlike legs, and seven tentacles above its long body. Each tentacle had small pincers at the end. Those were what had held him so firmly. But it was the head that appalled him. It had one corrugated snout with hefty toothed pincers at the end that were almost jaws, small eyes circling the snout’s base, and a cruel mouth orifice facing back toward the tentacles.
Suddenly the snout lengthened, the pincers shooting outward. They clamped on Colene’s pole and jerked it out of her hands.
Now he realized what had happened. Those pincers had shot out and caught his leg. Then that snout-tentacle had contracted and hauled him in, dumping him on the monster’s back—where the tentacles had caught him. But why the noxious vapor, and how did the thing eat?
More fire flared. The Hallucigen dropped the pole and backed away again. Then it turned and scrambled fourteen-footedly away.
Colene ran up. “You okay, manface?”
He embraced her as well as he could, considering his armor. “Bruised, singed, battered, choked, humiliated, but otherwise satisfactory, girlface,” he said, kissing her.
“Then let’s get moving before the Hallucigen decides to come back,” she said, turning businesslike.
They resumed their march. As they moved, they pooled their information, with Nona putting a hand on one of Burgess’ contact points so that he could participate. Soon enough they worked out the nature of the thing they had just driven off.
The monster was a long-descended variant of the Cambrian Hallucigen, the creature Colene had thought might be an appendage of a larger creature. It had evolved to come on land, breathe air—Colene had noticed a set of air gills projecting down from the head—and had grown enormously in size. So now it was a monstrous land-predator, as they had discovered. That pincer-snout had snapped the shear from the air and brought it in for swift destruction. Darius, considerably larger, and boxed in by his armor, had been more of a chore, so the monster hadn’t been able to dispatch him before the counterattack commenced.
The Hallucigen’s mouth orifice was in no position to snap at anything in front of the head. But it didn’t need to. Instead the snout whipped the prey onto the back, where it was held, then shoved forward into the orifice. “Like a pencil sharpener,” Colene remarked, clarifying her mystifying reference for them so that her analogy made sense. “You would have been jammed in headfirst, Darius, ground up like hamburger. So maybe it would have taken some time to reach your feet; that was all right, because Hallucigen had you secured. It might simply have eaten another segment each day, until you were gone. Nice system.”
“Very nice,” he agreed wryly. “But why the vapor?”
She had an answer for that too. “It’s digestive, I think. Probably sort of pacifies the prey and softens it up, so the mouth can grind it in better. I mean, why make the meat grinder work harder than it needs to?” She had to clarify her analogy again, but again it was apt.
“It must also drive away other predators,” Nona offered. “So that none will try to take away the meat.”
“Yeah, like a skunk,” Colene agreed. “With the prey held right there, it probably just puts the tenderizer right on it, neat as you please. I’m sure glad I found out how the head works; it was a real mystery. The thing must have stood in a current, so nobody would smell it, and hauled in any creatures drifting in that current. It didn’t need to move fast, because the current would bring prey down to it. It just had to be sure it was secure on its feet. It’s a pretty neat design, really.”
“Neat,” Darius agreed, echoing her colloquialism. “I am just glad that Nona knew how to make fire.”
“I never thought of it,” Nona protested. “Until Colene told me.”
“Actually we might have put a block in its pincers and then beaten it off,” Colene said. “It doesn’t have other offensive weapons. It’s just snatch and hold and eat. But I’m glad it didn’t eat you,” she said to Darius.
He was glad too.
They continued along the path, making good progress. At this rate they would indeed complete their trip in one day. If they didn’t encounter any other ugly surprises.
CHAPTER 6—MODES
BURGESS rode on the wagon, not comfortable but satisfied to be transported in the way that was feasible. Without this arrangement, he would not have been able to travel through the wilderness or to remain with his adopted alien hive.