CHAPTER 19
The snow was drifting down, turning even the nearby mountain wall into a gray haze. The bitter chill bit Keilin's exposed face. The clear-cut path that the surgeon had described might be easy enough to follow when the weather was good. But now! And the surgeon had said this was late summer!
They edged their way forward. Keilin knew real fear. In this they could be lost in minutes. He was about to suggest each holding on to the other's belt when one of the overall muffled figures handed him a cord. One of the Gene-spliced obviously carried a number of spare bow strings. He struggled with the knot, and noticed a digital readout set on to his sleeve. It read -11O C. The wind behind the snowflakes would make it even colder.
They walked on, keeping a gloved hand on the guide rail set into the mountain. And then Keilin stumbled over something half-buried in a snowdrift. It was a chitinous Morkth body. A few yards later there was another. Then it actually became difficult to follow the path, so frequent were the sprawled insect corpses. Looking off into the snow Keilin realized they weren't black rocks, half covered in snow. Rather it was thousands of Morkth bodies. In the last pile one of the creatures was newly dead . . . Its jaws still opened and closed weakly. And, before they had time to prepare, coming up the path out of the snow haze, loomed the reason.
She was a hundred and fifty feet long, swollen with several tons of fresh ideal protein. Frozen ichor and fragments of black chitin still smeared her scythe jaws, and indeed most of her face. But she was sated now. Prey had no more attraction. Now she had to find a mate. But the Alpha neoteny had taken her far back in her species' evolutionary history, to when the drones were free-living. Now she hunted for one that smelled right. With increasing desperation, as the bitter cold began to affect even such a huge bulk, she stomped on, paying them no more attention than the rock itself. They smelled wrong. She had to find a mate.
But it was with the greatest physical effort that Keilin stopped himself from ripping the garments off the hive girl just behind him, and raping her on the spot.
He pulled his bow off his shoulder, and with clumsy gloved hands fitted an arrow instead. He launched a tiny toxin-tipped barb into her only soft spot, the reproductively open egg vent. She simply blundered on . . . and they hastily went the other way. Suddenly a burst of ruby incandescence glared through the snow. An explosive report. Then another. A retort in purple. A terrific explosion that rattled the mountainside.
"Holy shit. Looks like we're soft targets in the middle of a firefight," Johann muttered.
* * *
The speaker next to the console bleeped. Cap, dressed in a new crisp white uniform, bespattered with gold braid, stood up from his dinner and walked over to it. "Compcontrol, Report." He scanned the screen. "Destroy all craft. Even those grounded." As he spoke Shael watched Leyla calmly rifle the belt pouch Cap had taken from the Morkth commander. She took out the core sections and replaced them with something. It was lying innocuously back where it had been, when he finished looking at the screen.
He turned back to his steak. "The Morkth are trying to run, in their small craft. Give it ten minutes, and I'll order an infrared search-and-destroy operation on the remnants."
He pushed the steak around the plate with his knife. "Robot cooking's not as good as Beywulf's, is it?"
"Why did you kill him then?" Leyla could not hide the sadness in her voice.
"Don't get emotional with me. He stood in my way. Disobeyed my orders. I was planning to bring him along. But he thought he knew better. Look where it got him. Just remember that before you get any ideas."
Leyla stood up. "Well, thank you for the meal. Now I need to visit the loo. I found that flushing mechanism so . . . beautiful. What about you, Shael?" Something in the voice told Shael to go along. She got up.
Cap snorted. "Hmph. You women can never go to the heads alone. And you always take so bloody long in there. To think a flush toilet could be the most fascinating thing you've seen. Off you go then. It'll give me a chance to institute the infrared search in peace."
* * *
They stood before the great double doors set into the mountain. The doors weren't moving. The obdurate steel didn't budge or respond in any way to their pounding, shouting knocking or pleading. It was hardly surprising after those ear-ringing explosions.
Unaware that Cap was busy setting up a command sequence for an antipersonnel infrared search they stood in the fire zone having a council of war. It was difficult enough to stand still in temperatures suited only to castrato brass monkeys. "We need a ram," counselled the military expertise of the Gene-spliced.
"Well . . . can we make it out of snow?" asked Keilin bitterly. "Or bits of rock? I don't think there's enough left of the Morkth ships to make a toy dagger with."