Then they drowned her out, Dalehouse first and loudest. “She’s going to do it! But she promised—”
“Shit, Dalehouse, she couldn’t keep that promise! The Greasies would think it was a bluff. She’s going to take out their arms and food just like we planned, and then we’ll move in and wipe them up.”
“What insanity!” cried Ana. “There’ll be nothing there! The fallout will kill us if we go into the camp.”
“Maybe. I’ve got a counter; we’ll check everything out. The important thing’s the planes. If we get them we can get to their base on Farside.” She hesitated. She had been carefully rehearsed in all this and had carried the secret with her for more than a day. But she had dreaded this moment. If it had not been for her burns, she would have been in the warrens with the colonel and the major, and a lot happier there than she was here. “Anyway,” she finished, “there’s nothing we can do about it now. She’ll blow the bomb in the next ten minutes. Get your faces down!”
And then, at last, hope was dead.
For the Brood Mother, too, all hope was gone. Blind and alone she moved slowly down through the tunnels to the only place left for her to be.
The thirty-meter level was for pups and outcasts. It was a place to play growing-up games or, at the end of all games, a place to die. Mother dr’Shee had never been there before. She had been a biddable pup, trained early to responsibility. As a tiny thing she had found it tingly-thrilling to listen to the stories of the half-growns, shivering in delight as she groped for the teat in her nurse’s sheltering silk. But she had never explored the adventurous levels for herself. Not once. She had known that the time would come soon enough when, at the end of her life, she would drag herself down to see those old, unvisited levels and die.
In that she had been partly wrong. It was time to die, and she was there. But she could not see.
With dignity the Brood Mother raised her forebody to its fullest stretch and called, “Is anyone near?”
There was no reply. No sound. No scent except the stale, spoiled smell of elders long dead. She tried again, not because she had any hope of being answered, but for the sake of being methodical. “Person or pup, can anyone hear my voice?”
Nothing. If there had been an answer, it could only have been one of the wild young males who roamed the upper corridors, seeking only to kill. But there was not even that.
So another of her senses had become useless to her. Hearing meant nothing when there was nothing to hear.
It was a pity she was blind, but she bore no malice toward the Two-Legs who had burned out her eyes with their stroboscopic lights. She had in any case revenged herself upon a number of them in advance — for poisoning her tunnels, for abducting her young, for perverting the brood into new and vile practices. Most of all for coming to disturb her life in the first place. She had fought against it all, against the Two-Legs and sometimes against members of her own brood turned against her by the new ways of the Two-Legs. And now the tunnels were empty, and she was blind. Tssheee! It would have been less — less final to be here and alone if she could have seen at least an occasional phosphorescent glimmer of fungus or decay. What was left of her senses? Taste no longer mattered. There was little to eat. Smell was unrewarding, with neither males nor pups to nuzzle. She could still feel the powdery dust floor beneath her, the curving wall at her side. Dr’Shee took comfort from being tightly enclosed, as she had been through all the happiest parts of her life…
Which was now over.
She stretched and sighed a feline, purring sound of despair. She was beginning to be very hungry. The Two-Legs had ruined most of the food stores when they poisoned the tunnels to get at her and her few surviving allies. But the tunnels stretched ten kilometers in all directions. Somewhere there would be something, in this immense engineered warren that had been her world. She did not seriously think of seeking it. A Brood Mother did not debase herself to prolong a life that was over.
Woomf -
The tunnel around her moved. It was not a shake or a tremor, but a deliberate and almost peristaltic movement. Mother di’Shee had never before experienced such a thing. Burrows sometimes crumbled, Krinpit invaded them, the rains might wash through a roof. But for all the earth to move? Such a thing could not happen! For the Brood Mother such an event was exactly as disquieting as it would have been for a fish to scull its tail and yet not move, or for a human being to feel the air about him turn glassy and shatter.
And then, from thirty meters above and more than a kilometer away, she heard the sound that followed. It was more than a sound; it was a pressure in the air that stung her ears and left them filled with a distant, discordant chatter, like the peeping of a hungry litter. But there were no pups to cry for her, ever again.
For some reason Margie’s right knee was only scraped and sore, while the left one was bloodily gouged, the leg of the coverall worn through, the skin itself long since rubbed away. It was harder and harder for her to keep up with the two ahead of her. God had not intended her to crawl through tunnels ninety centimeters high for hours on end… Which God she meant was not quite clear. To spare her knee she tried for awhile a three-legged gait, putting a little weight on her left toes, the rest on right leg and hands. That was a bummer. She wound up with the worst cramp she had ever had in the calf of her leg. She had to stop and press it out while Vandemeer behind her almost caught up and the two ahead kept on going. So then she speeded her pace and ripped the knee still more.
She paused and glanced at her watch. Still more than a quarter of an hour before the device would go off. Before that the two grenades they had left at bends in the tunnels would bring down enough dirt to tamp the explosion; and they were a good kilometer away by now. Probably far enough for survival, if not comfort. “Take ten,” she shouted. She rolled over and rested her limbs, breathing hard of the stale and tainted air. Funnily, it was not really dark in the tunnels. That she had not expected. Once her eyes had adjusted, she could see little will-o’-the-wisp lights, so faint and pale that they hardly had color at all. Swamp gas, foxfire, Wilis — whatever they were, they were welcome.
She heard a quick, quiet scuffle down the tunnel behind her, then a thwuck.
Then silence again.
“Van?” she called. “Major Vandemeer?”
The dirt walls swallowed her words, and there was no reply. Painfully she rolled herself over, turned herself around, and crawled back.
The mouse-droppings odor was very strong. She touched the switch of her little helmet light and saw that the major was dead. One of the burrowers had been here, and the dart that protruded from Vandemeer’s face proved it.
“Shit,” whispered Margie, and then belatedly lifted her head and drew her pistol. The light showed nothing for sure down the crooked, uneven tunnel — was that a glint of something? a reflection from an eye? She fired twice.
When she looked again there was nothing there. But every few meters there were little side passages and bays, and a dozen Creepies could be waiting there for her to turn her head.