"They're coming in!" Derik screamed. His sleeping bag was next to Justin's, and now he was standing just to Justin's left. "Here they come!"
The snow spumed up in crisscrossing lines. Grendel flash. At least six. Justin sighted, locked, fired—a clean miss. He blinked and the grendel was a hundred meters closer, nearly atop him. Lock! He fired again, and Derik fired also. One of the darts struck the grendel dead into its throat. It ran on toward them. Physics supersedes biology—
Justin rolled one way and Derik the other. The grendel plowed through the center, right where he had lain. Its legs scrabbled in the air as it made a terrible pierced-boiler squawking sound.
A skeeter flashed down from above. Aaron was belted into the doorway, and had mounted a gun there. Armor-piercing rounds stitched across the snow, then along a grendel from tail to head. Blood sprayed the snow. Everyone expected a second grendel to attack the wounded one. They had seen that in recordings made in the Grendel Wars. A grendel was wounded and the others turned on it, sometimes generating a frenzy. It didn't happen here. The other grendels charged onward.
Hungry, Justin thought. Hungry, and wary, and they cooperate! The snow keeps them cooled off, and they cooperate.
Christ.
Skeeter VI. Katya's voice. "Grendel flash south-southwest."
"Targeting?"
"Negative."
"Jessica? Can you engage?"
"I've got it."
Justin had never been happier to hear her voice. She was to the south. He and Derik had the east, Chaka the north. Who was to the west? He didn't know. Nothing I can do anyway. Hold my sector, and hope the others hold theirs. This is what Dad meant about the First. They had to trust each other—
Skeeter II buzzed close overhead. Katya's voice: "We've lost visual. We've got Cassandra reconstructing our infrared images. The storm is interfering with transmissions. I'm not sure our onboards—"
There was a moment in which the sound rose to a crackle, and then it died out. Dammit. Justin heard it overhead, coming in too low. The snow increased, another flurry driving itself against him, and he cursed. He couldn't see anything.
The earphones crackled again. "Trying to see—"
And then—
Stu leaned out the door of Skeeter II. Too much was happening too quickly to let him keep the whole camp under observation. He wasn't worried. They had grendel guns far better than the ones the Earth Born used to win the Grendel Wars, and the Star Born were better trained, had better reflexes than the First. They'd rehearsed this in simulation, skeeters and Cassandra and the gunners operating together to bring maximum firepower to bear.
That was in simulation, but this was different. Here the weather kept Cassandra blind, and he was nearly so, and his heart pounded and he sometimes forgot to breathe. He peered into the snow, but he couldn't see clearly.
"Stu, where the hell are they?" Justin's voice yammered in his earpiece.
"Bring it down a little closer," he told Katya. "Justin needs help."
"Right," she said. "Uh—I can't—"
"Yes?" he shouted.
"Nothing. I'll get in closer."
The meat milled right in front of Cold One, but the stink of death was in the air, and an alien chemical reek. There was much that she didn't understand here.
She bucked and snapped at a sister next to her, receiving a warning snap in return. It might have turned into a death match then and there, but for the meat—so much!--and for another thing. Others of her kind, others of her own brood had died here, and the stench of speed and grendel blood filled the air.
The air was filled with smoke and thunder as her sister burst open, spewing blood and bone and shredded flesh and speed. Something like blind panic hit her. She couldn't begin to comprehend what had just happened, but she had once seen the sky flash with light, rainfire, and that light climb down from the clouds to strike a tree. The tree had burst into flame.
And this was something close to that. The meat! The meat! So much of it. Yet the world was turning upside down, and she smelled death in every wind. The world was changing. Hell was coming, and any strange thing might be worth her life.
Like this: looming abruptly out of the sky was a burring thing that Cold One had only glimpsed between flurries, a birdie big enough to eat grendels, its wings invisible on speed. It swung down, then drew back as if suddenly aware that it had come too close to earth. A threat! A challenge!
Speed flooded through her body. A grendel would attack what it feared.
Justin saw Katya's skeeter come in low, circle, come back even lower. The sound and pressure of its rotors bore down on them and swelled until they filled the entire world. Suddenly it was only a few feet over his head. "Sleet!" he yelled, reflexively flinging his hands up in a doomed attempt to ward off disaster.
Katya was already trying to correct. The skeeter headed out into grendel territory, and began to rise.
"God," Derik said. "They're going to make it—"
The skeeter struggled to gain altitude against the wind and snow. The low power light winked on as she threw full power to the engines, but the skeeter tipped downward and fell. "Stu—we're going in," she had time to say.
Snow exploded, a white cloud against the windshield. The skeeter didn't want to respond to the controls, and a pale shape was coming at her eyes. She screamed and crossed her arms in front of her face as jaws came across the ship's nose. The grendel smashed through the front viewscreen. The skeeter banked violently to the left, and she lost all control. The skeeter fell into the snowbank. She had time to hope that the fall would crush the grendel, but then the rotor caught and threw up a shower of snow and dirt, and they cartwheeled forward and over, crashing down nose first. Her harness straps dug into her flesh but they held.
"Stu—" she shouted. "Stu, it's not dead!"
Stu wiped blood from his eyes. He'd lost his grendel gun in the crash. Up forward the slim torpedo head and much of its body were halfway through the shattered left-hand windscreen. The Jaws opened and closed. Snow heated by the internal heat of its speed steamed up from its snout and jaws. Those jaws snapped closed no more than a meter from Katya's face.
The grendel had been stunned by the fall but now it was coming awake. It was like a scene from one of their recorded Halloween movies, a serpentine ogre coming back from the dead. A long strip of the windshield's frame had torn loose and partly eviscerated the grendel. It left a trail of hot blood and steaming intestines as it inched toward Stu. The stench of its dragon breath was nearly overpowering.
Katya screamed. The thing whipped its head around and stared at her as if affronted by her noise, her motion, her very mortal fear. Stu saw the grendel, impaled, dying, work its way in through the window, saw its jaws close on her head. He closed his eyes, and wished that he could have closed his ears as well, the terrible cracking-ice wet crunching sound, the sudden explosive stench of blood and brains...
He blinked, hard. Katya was still alive, the grendel hadn't reached her yet. He threw off the quick-release buckles and dived forward. He screamed "Hey!" and swung his fist, connecting solidly on the side of its head. He felt his knuckle break against its armor, cursed and swung again, at its eye.
It roared, deafening in the confined space, and turned to snap at him.
Stu screamed, suddenly registering the insanity of what he had done, and jerked his safety webbing loose. He rolled out of the skeeter, spilling into the snow, and kicked the door shut behind him. The enraged grendel was coming through the Plexiglas windscreen. Ignoring the hysterical Katya, it pounded its way through the Plexiglas of the door and flowed after Stu like a shark through water.
How could the dying beast move at all? Stu staggered flailing through the snow. He'd left his gun... he never would have had time to reach it, but how could it still move? It flashed into speed and was on him. He'd gone no more than a dozen meters.
Justin was moving even before the skeeter struck the ground. The snow was driving now, a sudden flurry that blinded, but it would confuse the grendels as well.
"Justin!" Derik yelled behind him. He didn't care. Katya was in mortal danger, and there was no way that he could leave her to die.
He pitched forward into the snow and peered out through his goggles.
Feasting, near the skeeter. He recognized Stu's jacket.
Justin clamped his mind down on nausea and fear and grief. Business now. Mourn later. Think.
That grendel was busy. It looked to be dying, ripped open, for that matter. It might even warn others away: its natural territoriality would protect Katya for a few moments.
He heard Katya whimper, and almost lost his resolve. Almost. There was a plea, a cry of "Justin! Help me!" He felt it reach right under his logic, and twist.
He remembered what Carlos said about his bride, up on the cliff. That he had never forgiven himself. That he had learned something about himself at that moment.
Justin could pull back to the safety of his encampment, and let whatever happened happen. Wait for the storm to abate, or for the grendel to finish its meal, and decide what to do about the whimpering woman.
And find out whether or not he could live with it, later.
Closer.
"Justin—" Katya screamed.
And—
Grendel flash.
Memory: the Learning Center, the domed building in the very center of the colony. Cadmann sets four-year-old Justin in a bucket seat in the hollow of something that looks like a big half-eggshell. Cadmann sits down next to him, touches a button.
Now they're next to a river. It's a cartoon, not real at all, and everything is moving slowly.
Suddenly, something ugly pokes its head out of the water. Not real ugly: comic book ugly, exaggeration ugly, with pop-eyes and blacked-out broken teeth and an idiot expression. If a grendel had been in Dumbo's circus, this would be it.
Cadmann pushes a button, and a green ray shoots the ugly thing. It rolls over, thrashes, and kicks its legs. It holds a daffodil between its stubby paws.
Justin claps, delighted.
"Now your turn," Cadmann says. And he's laughing, but little Justin wonders at a queerness in the sound. Daddy wants something out of this.
The thought passes. Little Justin takes the control. This is fun.
At twelve, the virtual game is a regular thing. Every week Cadmann takes him. Every boy and girl in Camelot competes in the Game. It is simple. There are hunting simulations. Climbing scenarios, mining expeditions. Simulations all. They form teams or play alone.
And at some point in the Game (and there might be a dozen other objectives within a game) there will be a grendel flash.
Every week for years, a different component of skill has been nurtured. Instant response. Aim. Relax under pressure. Multiple targets. Automatic scanning for a second, third, fourth predator. On and on.
The intent is to groove one neurological response pattern. Cadmann has told him:
The grendel depends upon its speed. But unless you have been foolish indeed, you will have a second or two before it is on you. We will train you to respond in less than two-fifths of a second. We will train you to bring your weapon to bear, to evaluate risk, to fire twice in precisely the correct pattern, it will be a reflex, completely unconscious. We can give you this gift.
You will survive.
Pale death came at him in a whorl of snowspray. Justin's hands moved faster than his brain could follow, lining up with perfect coordination. The thing accelerated to over 120 klicks an hour in the time it would have taken him to blink. If he had blinked. But that was training too. Calm breath. Don't blink. Fire twice.
The first bullet tore into the grendel's throat, carrying enough shock to drive it sideways, off line, so that he wouldn't be bowled over by its charge. The second was an incendiary round, heat for the heated, to jolt the beast across an invisible metabolic line.
It reeled back, torn, bleeding, dying. Its eyes locked with his, its feet splayed, bright red blood staining the snow which whirled and pelted between them.
Grendel flash, left! He shot it again, between its eyes, and tore off the top of its head. He spun left—
The grendel above Stu was gone. Not gone: he caught its madly whipping tail following it into a snowbank.
Someone fired from behind him, twice. Derik. Justin said, "Hold off."
"Why?"
"All the other grendels are hamburger." Justin was still taking it in.
A mistake in judgment here could be terribly embarrassing.
Stu's ravaged corpse lay in a pit in the snow. The grendel had been terribly injured; he'd seen its intestines hanging in coils. Its spraying blood, nearly boiling, had melted cubic meters of snow. Three or four more dark pits led to the snowbank: more splashed blood. The grendel had disappeared into snow there, and Stu's two exploding bullets were interlocked pocks right in the middle of that; but Justin had seen snow shift to the right, and now he saw it shift again. The grendel wasn't moving now—huddling, he thought—but the heaped snow was melting.
Justin said, "I'd like to give Chaka an intact corpse."
"It's still dangerous."
"Sure, we have to kill it, not study it. Do I hear the voice of Zack Moskowitz? Cover me."
Rifle at the ready, he ran to the skeeter as Derik covered him. Katya was cowering in the back, somehow wedged behind the seat. Her arms were wrapped around her chest, and a rictus of terror distorted her face.
She looked at him without seeing. He put his hand across hers. "Come on," he said. "You're safe."
She clutched at his hand. He bent to the floor of the wrecked skeeter, picked up Stu's grendel gun, and wrapped her hands around it.