“What else? Well, you can see for yourself what the legs are like. Four pairs, each one seven-jointed. A hit where a leg attaches to the cephalothorax might do some damage, otherwise forget them. The breathing spiracles and lung slits are on the abdomen, on the second and third segments. There are two pairs of lungs, but you may as well ignore them. Even if you got a hit, the spider can breathe for a while through its tracheal tubes, more than long enough to finish you off. “The heart is in the abdomen here. See the four spinnerets, back on the fourth and fifth segments? Keep an eye on those, too. You’ll never break free of the silk if once you’ve been wrapped in it, and it dries instantly as soon as it’s in contact with air. The spider can squirt silk at you, too, so you’re not safe unless you stay at least your body length away from her.”
MacDougal turned to look at the audience. “That’s all I have to say about the spider. Any questions before we go into Adestis mode and head down there to look at the trap? Better ask now. We won’t have time for it once we’ve started.”
“I’ve got one.” A skinny man two seats in front of Brachis nodded at the screen. “Those eyes look as though they ought to be vulnerable. Should we be shooting at them?”
“Good question.” MacDougal aimed the pointer at one of the eyes. “See their locations? They’re all up on the carapace. That’s like a thick shield, protecting the top of the cephalothorax. And that raises another point: the carapace is tough. Your weapons won’t penetrate it. The eyes look like a weak point, but it won’t be easy to get a good shot at more than one eye at a time, and if you miss you’ll waste your ammunition on the carapace. So my recommendation is that you save your shots for the underside, or for the maw and joints.
“There’s another reason why I don’t think it’s worth making the eyes your target. This sort of spider doesn’t rely much on eyesight. It goes largely by touch. Even if you got all the eyes, you wouldn’t put it out of action. And that has another implication: Don’t assume it doesn’t know where you are, just because you are out of sight. The legs are terrifically sensitive to vibration patterns. If you get into trouble but you’ve not actually been seized, lie perfectly still. The spider will sometimes ignore anything that doesn’t move. You may get lucky. Anything else?”
“Yes.” A woman near the front stood up abruptly. “You can count me out, Dougal. I’m leaving. I’m not going to fight that thing.”
“The Adestis group won’t refund your payment.”
“That’s the least of my worries.” The woman turned to the others. “You’re all crazy if you stay. That’s nothing but a goddamned bug in there, and anyone in his right mind would be happy to swat it.”
She left rapidly. Dougal MacDougal watched her go with a fixed smile on his face. “No nerve,” he said as soon as the door had closed. “Good riddance — she’d have been nothing but trouble. Now, any more questions? Otherwise, let’s get on with it.”
The audience stared uneasily at each other. There was a slow shaking of heads, but at last one man rose and followed the woman out of the room. He would not meet anyone’s eye. Finally, at a signal from MacDougal, those remaining picked up their Monitor sets and placed them over their heads.
Luther Brachis waited for the correlator field transients to settle, and the disturbing moments of double sensory inputs to fade. The briefings had told him what was happening. Telemetry couplers in the headset translated sensory inputs from his own tiny simulacrum to electrical impulses within his brain. At the same time his brain’s intention signals, the ones that normally cause activity in his body’s motor control system, were intercepted and translated into cyber-signals in the body of his Adestis simulacrum.
As MacDougal had explained it, “Your actual brain never sees anything, anyway. It’s blind. It can’t see, just as it can’t hear, smell, taste, or touch. All it gets from your senses are streams of electrical inputs, and it interprets them as sensations. Well, now those electrical inputs will be coming from your simulacrum. You’ll see, hear — and feel — what it sends.”
The sensory hold was tightening. Brachis grunted in surprise; or rather, his simulacrum did. He had expected the simulations to be plausible, since although the makers of Adestis admitted that they had imitators, they denied that they had real competitors. Still he was staggered by the uncanny quality of the sensory inputs. They were like life itself. He had no other body. The simulacrum was his body.
He looked down, and saw that he was standing on a damp, pebble-strewn plain. Tiny wormlike animals wriggled away from him as he moved his feet. Fifty paces away a gigantic fly skimmed past on iridescent wings. Brachis stared all around him. Two dozen others stood in a rough circle, all experimentally raising arms, moving feet, and watching each other. The exception was Dougal MacDougal, recognizable by his ease of movement and confident manner.
“As soon as you’re ready,” he said. “Get the feel of the environment, get to know who you all are — your suits are color-coded, just the way they were in the war-room. You ought to learn to recognize each other as quickly as you can. Then you want to practice the feel of your weapon. After that we can get on with it. “Look over there.” He pointed away to the left, through air that seemed dusty, thick, and smoke-filled. “It’s hard to spot from here, but there’s the trap. The spider will be sitting at the bottom of the pit. She already knows that we are here, because she feels the vibrations through the ground. Don’t bother to try to walk lightly. You’ll do that anyway. Remember, you’re only half a centimeter tall and you now weigh only about one five-hundredth of a gram. At this size and mass, gravity isn’t too important. We can all tolerate a fall of many times our height, with no injury. On the other hand, we’re attacking something that’s more than twice as tall as we are, with legs six times as long and a mass that outweighs the lot of us put together. Don’t get over-confident.’
There was a gasp from a green-bodied simulacrum next to Brachis. He has to be joking!”
Brachis shook his head experimentally. It felt perfectly natural. “He’s not joking. He’s just giving what he thinks is good advice. Maybe he’s right, and some people come into Adestis believing that the trapdoor spider is just another bug you could stand up and step on.”
“Not me.” Green tried a shake of his head, too. “If that’s just a bug, the Hyperion Vault is just a hole in the ground. I’m telling you, if I didn’t work in his office, and if he hadn’t put the pressure on me to come along on this …”
The party was slowly becoming more organized. Four of the members had taken part in Adestis on other occasions and they assumed lead roles. Everyone was permitted two practice shots from the projectile weapons, aiming at head-high moss growths fifty paces off to the left. Brachis noted that even with recoil compensation the gun he was holding delivered quite a jolt to his arm. That was a good sign. He had been wondering if the organizers of Adestis expected them to knock off the spider with weapons like peashooters. He also noticed that his gun pulled a little to the left. He took careful aim, made the adjustment, and put his second shot exactly through the fluffy pink ball of a head of moss-flower.