As Erlin walked from behind the boulders, she noticed the group had closed up, with Anne on her knees and the others standing over her. Erlin approached and stood before them waiting for some reprimand. Frisk just stared at her for a long while, then slowly drew the laser from her belt. Erlin noted a look exchanged by the two mercenaries.
‘You’re Hooper,’ Frisk said, ‘you have the virus.’
Erlin nodded.
Frisk went on: ‘I’ve decided I need only one hostage now. What I’m going to do next is laser you from the feet up. It’ll take a couple of hours, but I’ll enjoy every minute.’
Just then, everything happened at once. Anne shot to her feet, crashing right into Frisk, knocking the laser from her hand but throwing them both off balance. A huge shadow fell across Erlin and the two mercenaries stepped back — Svan looking wary but prepared, Shib with blank horror on his mutilated face. Something nearby let out a hissing snarl, in a vast exhalation.
Recovering her own balance Frisk tripped Anne, then kicked her hard in the side of the head when she tried to rise again. Then Frisk looked up.
‘Jay, darling,’ she cooed.
Erlin wondered just how hollow had been her sense of ennui with life. Here she was with her hands tied behind her back; the people in front of her wanted to kill her — and she had a damned good idea of what was standing behind her. She had never before felt so vulnerable and so mortal. Then she heard a friendly, familiar voice.
‘Erlin, get down!’ Ambel bellowed at her.
Erlin flew face-down on the earth just as Ambel’s blunderbuss boomed.
19
The tonne of fresh heirodont flesh had contained sufficient protein to initiate certain changes in the leech’s body, for its huge size was such that prey from which it could extract such massive plugs were now rare. An organ that had been growing inside it for some time, now ruptured the membrane connecting it to the creature’s stomach, and began producing a different bile. Thus, this leech began to transform into one that could feed upon whole animals rather than parts thereof. Now cruising along the surface it felt the urge to take on an entire prey. Unfortunately it came upon a suitable candidate — the molly carp gorged on turbul-inflated glister — before the transformation inside itself was complete. Its mouthparts opened out wider and wider as it instinctively swallowed its victim whole. The carp, suddenly finding itself inside a creature it often preyed on, though reluctantly, began to gnaw its way out — the leech’s bile not yet having developed sufficient sprine to kill.
Janer saved the charge in his laser carbine for more opportune shots. Ambel’s barrel full of stones and rusty nails sent the Skinner stumbling, and Ron’s measured shots were burning the skin from its face. But the weapon the Batian was using on the monster was the most effective of all. The screaming man kept backing away from it in terror, the explosive shells he fired repeatedly taking lumps out of the Skinner’s diseased-looking body.
‘Back it up. Back it up,’ yelled Keech, the snout of his APW flicking from the Skinner to Frisk, then back again. Janer knew that with the setting randomized, as Keech had explained earlier, the monitor could not risk taking a shot with Erlin and Anne so close to his targets.
Abruptly the male mercenary turned and ran. The other one, the woman, stayed by Frisk’s side, abruptly opening up on the slab behind which Ambel and Ron were crouching. Shells exploded against the rock, flaking off large chunks of it and showering them both with hot splinters.
Janer drew a bead on the Batian woman and let the autosight pick her up. He pulled the trigger and saw her flung back, her crabskin armour flaming and smoking. She rolled away and, still clutching her weapon, scrabbled for cover.
Frisk snatched up the laser she had dropped earlier, pointed it straight at Anne’s head, and pulled the trigger, then pulled it again and again, raging as nothing happened. Janer swung his carbine towards her, but the auto-sight kept tracking back to the fallen mercenary. So he fired on manual and set a tree behind Frisk to smoking. Frisk threw her useless weapon on the ground, then turned and ran. Janer let the sight slip back to the female mercenary, but she had now made it to cover.
‘Clear shot,’ said Keech distinctly.
Janer assumed he meant on Frisk. He did not.
A purple flash lit the air as the Skinner was knocked flat. It howled in fury.
Just then, Ron leapt from behind the rock slab with his machete raised.
‘We’ll finish it!’ he bawled, charging towards the fallen monster. Janer tried another shot at Frisk as she dodged through the trees, missed, then swore and looked around. Boris and Roach had vanished, though he hadn’t seen them go. Keech suddenly rose and leapt out of hiding. The monitor fired once into the woods and a muted purple flash showered burning leaves some distance behind the escaping Frisk. Then he turned and looked over towards the Skinner. Ambel came running to stand at his side.
‘You’ll kill it,’ he said flatly. As Ambel nodded, Keech went on, ‘Then Frisk is mine.’
The monitor set off at a trot down the slope taken by Frisk.
Ambel went after Ron, who had nearly reached the fallen Skinner. Janer followed.
It had all become just too much. The work offered by Svan had seemed attractive enough at the time: a month at most spent on a low-tech world where apparently Sable Keech had arrived, without backup. It had been described to him as a job combining protection of the client, who would meet them there, with the burning of a few natives, and which would culminate with the hit on Keech, for which they would receive a bonus on top of their usual daily rate. However, from that first moment of incredible luck, stepping out in the shuttle and seeing Keech right before them, it had all started to go terribly wrong.
First Nolan being blown away by a dead man, then a rhinoworm trying to bite their dinghy in half and deposit them in a leech-infested sea, then that screwup on Tay’s island, then the journey in the Prador spacecraft with those monstrous stinking creatures all around, then — after finding a suitable ship — the swim through the sea with leeches grating at his armour and other things trying to drag him down. He hadn’t believed the stories about Hoopers, until he’d seen how hard they really were to kill, until he’d seen what happened to the hardest and most professional of his comrades, until he’d seen Dime the… There had been no relief after that. He’d relaxed his guard for just a moment and lost two fingers to a thing out of an ancient cartoon. Then the prill… Tors screaming…
Shib ran blindly. He didn’t know where he was going. He just wanted to be anywhere that thing back there wasn’t. The sails, the prill and the frog whelks were bad, and the leeches worse still. His insides folded with shame at how he’d reacted, but there had been nothing else. He’d just been unable to move. Even the pain of that leech grinding into his face hadn’t unlocked his paralysis of fear. Now… now that thing…
When it had stepped out of the trees behind the black woman, Shib had questioned his own sanity. There were horrible things on many worlds, and he had seen several of them, but this thing was beyond all that. It was something out of fairy tales and hell. It was evil. He had felt that instantly. With this thing there could only be pain and horror. Yet it had once been a man. He’d waited desperately for the order to fire on it, waited for Svan herself to open up on it, longed to see it obliterated.
‘Jay, darling.’
That had been enough and Shib had cracked. No way. Just no way. I’m gonna kill the bogeyman. Only it didn’t die. The shells he fired made holes in its diseased-looking body, but it just howled and looked even more pissed off. He felt shame again that he was running. But at least that thing was behind him now.