“So your plan is to break out somehow and get to the flitter and escape, right? Can you tell me where it is? How far it might be? I know these mountains well, I’ve flown over them a hundred times.”
Rodney looked back at her with a crafty glint in his eye. “Ah, but why would you take your worst enemy along with you on a jaunt into the wild blue? No, no, the location must remain a secret for now.”
Try as she might, she could get no more out of him. She quickly began to see what kind of man he was and began to despise him even more deeply, now that he was familiar to her, than she had before when he had only been a cruel stranger.
Inside the dark, unknowable workings of Garth and Fryx’s joint mind things had taken a turn for the worst. The stress of actually being captured by the Imperium and, horror of horrors, held prisoner inside an enemy nest, was simply too much for Fryx. His great age and natural reclusiveness didn’t provide the mental structure he needed to face his worst nightmare.
Garth was caught in the middle. An insane thing was locked in his mind, threats no longer coerced it, and reasoning was pointless. It was all he could do to keep from attacking the other captives around him.
When the scuttling sound began again in the tunnels above them, only the faintest vibration came through to Garth’s back and buttocks. He had placed himself completely against the resonant surface of the nest for precisely that reason, to be forewarned. His body rose up, twisting sinuously of its own accord, writhing like a headless snake in flames.
Fryx was frenzied, the enemy were returning, another feast had begun. Forcing his body to move in an organized fashion through sheer force of will, Garth crept toward the others.
Sarah shrank back from the bizarre skald’s approach. He seemed to be forming a single word with his lips, straining mightily to get it out.
“Feast-” he slurred.
Sarah’s blood went cold. Everyone in the cell fell quiet, even Daddy’s gasps and warblings seemed to subside.
Then they could all hear it, feel it-the approach of churning feet on the nest floor.
“We must form a plan!” hissed Sarah to the others. “We must fight.”
Rodney shook his head and snorted.
“We must do something!”
Rodney’s shook his head more vigorously. “No. You must listen to me, you must trust me on this one point for I need you alive. You must not attract their attention in any way. To do so is usually fatal.”
“Well at least it would be a clean death,” retorted Sarah. She felt helpless and scared.
“What would your boy do then, eh? Do you want him to die alone down here? In the dark?”
“Bastard,” she spat out.
The aliens had reached the opening by then and they removed the seal by squirting some kind of solvent around the edges, dissolving the earlier secretions. The humans, huddling, moaning, were dragged out and placed on the backs of the waiting transport creatures. Daddy was grabbed up first, and it seemed to Sarah there was some eagerness in the aliens that handled him. The thin skald fought them spastically, but was easily overpowered. The three Asians were spared for some reason, left behind on their own.
Soon they were moving through the black tunnels again to be dropped into a black pit in the midst of what felt like a very large chamber.
“It’s always the same,” Rodney hissed in her ear. She jumped, not having realized he was there. “We sit here in the dark, listen to them grunt and smack themselves, then finally they choose their first course and tentacles come down out of the blackness. Then comes the worst: listening to them feed.”
“How have you survived three times?” she demanded, trying not to move, not to be noticed.
“Come with me, I have discovered an alcove that conceals most of my body from view. However their senses work, they seem to find me unpalatable in that position.”
He took her hand and she almost jerked it back before controlling herself. She felt like she had been bitten.
Suddenly, new ghastly alien sounds erupted from above them. Wet slappings, blatting noises, sudden warbling gasps. Sarah and Bili clutched at one another, trembling.
“A Tulk discovered amongst the food creatures?” gasped the Parent. “Do you have any idea how serious this is?” Her tentacles curled protectively around her foodtube in a gesture of fright.
“Well, I would suggest that we interrogate one of the food creatures,” said the nife.
“Interrogate? How?”
“The bio-computers now have a thorough understanding of their sonic vibration-based speech patterns. If you could be troubled to grow a sound-producing organ for one of them, we could easily communicate,” suggested the nife. The Parent noted that his orbs were riding very high indeed today. She suspected that he was after something special, perhaps he would even attempt to excite her enough to allow a second melding.
“A Tulk amongst our food-creatures,” she repeated, still stunned by this monstrous concept. “The most hated enemy of the Imperium. How could we be so unfortunate? Are the food-creatures in league with them? Could it be that all of them are so infested? It’s enough to make one retch.”
“No, no. I doubt there are too many around, we would have discovered them before. Fortunately, we captured the creature alive. Now all we need to do is coerce a food-creature into communicating with it.”
“So the food-creatures are telepathic?”
“The capability is latent in certain individuals.”
“If they are telepaths, then I believe the presence of a Tulk in their brain-encasements could greatly enhance this capacity. Perhaps we could actually interrogate a Tulk, not just their slaves.”
“A rare event indeed. Worthy, perhaps, of great rewards?” commented the nife. Nonchalantly, he eased nearer to her throne. For once the Parent tolerated his brash, overconfident manner. She even allowed him to caress her tentacle-tips.
“We will interrogate the food-creatures as you suggest,” she said. “I will grow an appropriate organ, it will only take a few moments to construct the genes. We have a new set of food-creatures in the dish now. We shall interrogate and devour them presently.”
“I don’t understand it,” said Rodney, his voice worried. “They always begin feasting by now. Why else would they have brought us here?”
Sarah shared his concern. If the aliens were deviating from their normal behavior on this occasion, what other deviations might occur? “Should we try to jump out of the pit?”
Rodney snorted softly. “It’s been tried, believe me. One of my own bodyguards, the last to survive, tried it the first time I was in this pit. I decided-I mean he decided to do it, over my objections, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Anyway, he made it to the lip, about ten feet up. I heard him move around up there for about three seconds, then he dropped back down.”
“Was he all right?”
“He was headless.”
Sarah half expected Bili to say ‘neato’, but for once he didn’t.
They waited there in the dark for a considerable length of time. Then, to everyone’s surprise, a voice began to speak in the chamber above them.
“The food will answer the questions,” it announced in a distorted warble. The phlegmatic voice rasped unevenly, like the voice of an old man with a cold.
None of them moved or spoke.
“Respond.”
“What do you want?” asked Sarah. Rodney gripped her shoulder, pulling her back, but she shrugged him off.
“The food will answer the questions, or the food will be devoured immediately.”
“Okay, I’ll answer anything you want,” said Sarah. She stepped out into the center of the pit, looking up into nothingness. Behind her, Rodney hissed in exasperation.
“Identify the specimen above the pit.”