“I’m sorry to treat you so, but ain’t a thing known about a hair on your head. Except that you sent those kids out there on some mischief, and I ain’t entirely sure you’re sane.” The ringmaster tapped his large forehead. He closed the door behind him and, this time, he locked it.
Descending the lift rig, Herb marched through the backstage area and out into the ring. The HawkEye and the Scuttlers joined him. Behind the calliope balcony, Nim remained aglow.
“Okay, so let’s see if you kids understand the way of it?” Herb pointed to the huge boiler, located beneath the calliope. Thick ropes of ornate brass looped around and back on themselves, decorating the boiler’s base. “Whaddya do with that lot?”
“Drag it, drag it,” the boy offered.
“Where’d you drag it to?”
One of the girls said, “To the black water where we slip it in.”
“Good,” said Herb, and the girl looked pleased. She danced her great limbs, clattering dreadfully.
“Sssh! You gotta keep it down.” Herb brushed a hand over his forehead which was shiny with sweat. “Whaddya do next?”
“Come back here and say ‘start it pumping!’” said the second girl.
“Start it pumping!” parroted her siblings.
“Good kids. And then you reel them hoses in again once the boiler’s full and we can scat.” Herb glanced at Hellequin. “They’ll have to go out the main flap. Hose won’t reach otherwise.”
The HawkEye nodded. “I’ll let them out. Keep an eye on them too.”
Herb bustled off to the brass staircase and climbed up and out onto the balcony alongside Nim. He squinted against the blaze of her, laid a hand on one of the girl’s which gripped the rail tightly, and felt her jump.
“Time to turn your light off now, gal,” he told her softly. “We’re about to open the floodgates.”
EIGHTEEN
The circus was silent but for slight eddies of air through the pipes of the calliope. Drawing the heavy material of the tent flap aside a crack, Hellequin waved the Scuttlers out. The children rattled away into the weird twilight, pulling the hose like the body of a giant worm.
Hellequin kept the flap open a small degree and peered out. His steel eye piece ticked in small revolutions, the red lens burning out. The cavern teemed with locusts; they crawled over one another, forming ant hills of squirming brittle bodies. Others crisscrossed the roof of the cavern, wings reverberating with a low, woody whisper, or clung to the walls, mandibles dripping luminescent bile.
He tried to dismiss the swarm as no more significant than a savannah full of clothhods and concentrated instead on the lake and the Scuttlers, just another breed of insect drawn to the water’s edge. Hellequin half expected enormous arms to solidify out of the black fluid, grasp each child and pull them under. Certainly the lake struck him as an entity that attracted worship and demanded sacrifice.
“Hush little children,” he said under his breath. The hose unravelled off the framework of hooks beneath the calliope, dragging out of the tent with a small ‘slush’ of sound. Hellequin mapped the quadrants of the cavern in his mind, the whirring insects overhead and those milking bile on the honeycombed walls. Nothing reacted. The children were mites to be tolerated.
What couldn’t be relied on was the randomness of the insects’ movements. One of those in flight came in to land nearby, clamping down on top of the hose and forcing the Scuttlers to come to an abrupt stop a couple of metres short of the lake. The children rolled in their shells, instinctually defensive.
Hellequin collated the movements of the swarm, his circuitry working to make sense of the options. They had to get the hose to the water as soon as possible. Sooner or later, the flesh-eating locusts would nose their way into the crevices of the circus tent and, with just one kill, bring their brethren swarming.
The soldier drew his bowie knife. It would be nonsensical to openly kill the beast since spilling its inner fluid would attract the interests of the swarm. But it went against his programming to leave the circus in danger. Rifle hanging off his shoulder, a fistful of ammunition in a top pocket of his combats, he slowed his breathing and slipped out of the tent. His steps were hushed by the dust underfoot. The further he got from the circus tent, the more he was engulfed by the illumined gloom. Locusts hauled their bodies over the rocks in all directions. The humid air was punctuated by weird sounds: creaking long limbs, p’ffing exoskeletons that lifted and sucked around soft meat, and the cack-cack of mauling jaws. Hellequin walked softly, but the children spotted him and called out him.
“Hi! Hi!”
Hellequin cursed their stupidity. He put a finger to his lips and motioned to the three to take hold of the hose again, which they did. Now it was his turn to act.
The colossal locust nestled on top of the hose, churning its mandibles like a clothhod chewing the cud. Hellequin crept closer. The Scuttlers waited.
Kneeling slowly, the solider fed his hands around the ribbed brass hose. It was lukewarm and surprisingly soft to the touch. He attempted to lift it, encouraging the bug to take flight of its own accord. The creature stayed rooted, rubbing its hind legs off one another and producing a long, sonorous note.
Dulled panic set in beneath Hellequin’s ribs; he was programmed to use the emotional stimulus as a fresh shot of adrenaline. Muscles tightened and pulsed. His only option was to kill the creature swiftly, silently, and without spilling its inner fluids.
He ran at the thing with swift strides, pulling up last second to stare into its roaming eyes. See me now? The locust answered with a toss of its head, spraying acidic matter. Its voice was a soft cack-cack. For an instant, Hellequin feared the insect might zone in on his hardware and dismiss him as fleshless. But then the great back limbs powered down and the locust sprung forward, displacing dust.
Hellequin had seen the response a precious millisecond in advance. His eyepiece gridded and calculated the trajectory of the creature’s spring. He leapt up, rolling and going into a crouch an instant before one of the locust’s vast wings swept above his head, unsettling his hair. Hellequin grabbed for the wing, propelling himself up and onto it. The sinew and fibre mass rippled as the creature tried to shake him off. Hellequin kept low, desperate to stay incognito to the rest of the hive. When he was assured of his balance, he ran along the wing and leapt onto the beast’s back. The lethal head feathers washed dangerously close; he registered their stretch and concluded that he was safe.
Snatching a glance backwards, he saw that the hose had been freed and the Scuttlers were dragging it the last few metres to the lake. Positioning his bowie knife at the base of the locust’s neck collar, Hellequin drove it in. He gave the blade a sharp twist. While unsure of the exact biology of the species, he’d enough desert experience to know he could kill a hand-sized spindleweb with that same method.
The locust collapsed under him, exciting a small dust storm. Hellequin glanced up and around him. Had the swarm been alerted to his presence by the tussle?
Nothing altered in the atmosphere. The trills and reedy notes of the insects still coloured the air. Their shadows continued to crisscross overhead.
The bowie knife was abandoned in the meat of the carcass; Hellequin knew he couldn’t pull it free since the slightest trace of death in the air would attract the creatures. Instead he jumped down, readjusted the rock rifle strap on his shoulder and stared out to the lake’s edge. Having fed the hose into the water, one of the three siblings was in the process of toddling back to the tent. Hellequin followed after.
When it came, the shot rebounded off the cavern walls with the sound of a tremendous whip crack. Rock ammo pierced Hellequin’s shoulder blade near his newly stitched stab wound. Feeling pain flash-fire inside him, Hellequin wheeled around. His HawkEye took in many different angles to form a cohesive panorama – the two Scuttlers by the shore of the lake, balling up inside their hard shells and rolling back towards the circus, the new twitchy awareness of the locusts, the barrel of a rock pistol in D’Angelus’s hand as he stood in the open cockpit of the burrower, and men pouring out the backend of that surfaced conveyance like a second swarm.