Plant and mantis simply headed off into the dark. Their way was lit by a home-made electric light bulb on a stick, held aloft by the ever-busy mantis. There might have been Screamers waiting for them right there in the dark. Snapper cocked her carbine and headed off after them, dragging Captain Beau along in her wake.
“Where the hell did they find that mantis?”
“Oh – somewhere south! She was heading for Spark Town, apparently.”
“On her own? Walking?”
“So I’m told!” The fox-pheasant was being towed forward at a speed that did not please him. “Someone mentioned an explosion?”
“Oh – stuff and nonsense! All that fuss over a little bang!” The mantis woman’s voice came drifting from the darkness ahead. Her light bulb bobbed along as she flitted up ahead. “Any program of experimentation is certain to have its teething problems. There was no need for the town council to be quite so unreasonable.” The creature set quite a pace. “Spark Town is the place for me! A more adventurous outlook completely. A chance for some real discoveries to be made!”
They moved through a tangle of bushes. The fox-pheasant tried to hold back. “Look – clearly an organised plan is needed! Perhaps I should provide protection for the rear…?”
“Stay close and watch the rear! You! Mantis… Kitt… Thingy! Wait up!” The shark gave a curse. “Oh for fuck’s sake!”
They ran to overtake the mantis before the creature could get herself eaten. The plant and the mantis were standing beside a picket fire – still undoused, but smoking and almost dead from want of fuel. The mantis’s silhouette was almost demonic in the gloom. Snapper came racing up and stamped out the last of the fire.
“Get that light off!” Snapper put a hand on the mantis girl’s plated shoulder and made her bob down. “Don’t make a silhouette.”
“Oh – yes, I see!” The mantis hefted her gun. “Are these Screamers close, do you think?”
“Who the God-fish knows?” Snapper moved forward quickly, scanning the dark for the slightest sign of movement. “Stay there and stop talking.”
“Righto!”
This was clearly a job for wiser heads. Snapper nudged Captain Beau into action, and moved swiftly forward for a few dozen metres. She knelt down, signalling the fox-pheasant to halt, and began sniffing carefully at the darkness.
Beau crouched nervously beside her, his ears pricking high. Snapper nudged him and moved on, crossing along the perimeter of the campsite.
Captain Beau trotted after her. He suddenly leapt sideways, showing unexpected agility. Fur and feathers stuck outward in alarm.
“Oh! There’s a… um…” He waved his hands at the ground. “Madam! I think he’s here!”
Snapper came swiftly over. She found a great, reeking mass on the grass near the alarmed Beau’s feet. A rifle lay nearby, along with a few parts of the missing man. The caravan guard was clearly dead.
Snapper fished in her belt pouch for a fire lighter and struck a light. In the little yellow flame, she saw a body splayed out in the dust. The body was missing its head, but also seemed to be horrible deflated. Snapper winced and pulled free the man’s ammunition pouch and belt knife, then retrieved the fallen rifle. Crouching low, she kept her voice in the barest whisper.
“Alright – keep together.” She tossed the rifle to the fox-bird. “Here! There’s a round up the spout.”
“Ah!” The bird had been holding a pair of pistols. He looked as if he’d never seen a breech loading rifle in his life. He juggled the rifle, then awkwardly caught the ammunition pouch. “Yes, right… err, fine!”
“OK, let’s get back!”
A soft flapping noise drifted in from overhead. Throckmorton had escorted the mantis over to the body, and the woman immediately switched on her infernal light bulb. She produced a collapsible metal rod – clearly a scavenged antennae from an ancient vehicle – and approached the dead man with enormous professional curiosity.
“Wait! Wait! A moment please.”
Throckmorton held the light, and the mantis carefully examined the corpse. Snapper’s stomach jerked. The body seemed deflated – almost flattened. It had clearly burst open. Bones jutted up from a ribcage that had been emptied of its organs. Keeping clear of the mess, the mantis used her probe to lift up skin and bloody clothes. Her hands moved with skill and delicacy. Behind her, Captain Beau jittered, trying to watch every threatening shadow all at once.
“Madam!” The fox-pheasant shifted from one talon to the other, urgent to be gone. “Madam! I think the gentleman is beyond our help!”
“Hmmm?” The mantis scarcely noticed. She was intent upon the corpse. “Well obviously. But the post mortem trauma is extremely grisly. Extremely!” The mantis examined the empty body cavity, then waved one hand at Snapper beside her. “Did I hear right, my friend? You saw an entire herd of animals consumed like this?”
“All busted open? Yep. Yes indeed.” Snapper kept one eye on the darkness, and another on the mantis. “You figure they’re laying larvae inside their prey?”
“I believe so…” The mantis prodded at a discarded larval skin that hung half out of the corpse. A second lay on the ground half a metre away. “Impressive. Extremely impressive! The entire process is damnably swift. The guards were changed only an hour ago. This poor man can only have been dead for less than an hour.” She squatted by the victim and looked out at the grass. “Two creatures came out of the corpse. Overall mass of the newborn must be – what – twenty kilos at best? Thirty? There may be an intermediate stage – a juvenile. They must burst free and run off to feed.”
Captain Beau blinked, keeping anxiously back from the corpse. He looked rather unhappy.
“Is that important?”
“Well it’s jolly interesting. It means we may not be in absolute immanent danger. The juveniles would be greatly undersized, and interested in smaller prey.” The mantis sat back and folded up her probe. “One wonders at the mechanism? No egg could hatch so swiftly. The adults might possibly be carrying a larva already inside them, ready for insertion into a suitable victim.”
Snapper winced. “Oh hell. So we can’t just take the adults down. We have to make sure we kill the larvae!”
“Well – it might all be good news!” The mantis arose and waved her hands to encompass the dread, dark wilderness. “We can posit a scenario where the creatures have performed their yearly breeding, and will now retire back to their usual haunts.”
Somewhere far off in the darkness, a distant scream shivered through the air. The noise hung in the night, frozen like a crack through ancient glass. Snapper slowly guided the others backwards towards the camp.
“What if we posit a scenario where they just discovered a whole new mass of prey and feel like getting randy?”
“Ah – that might not be so good.” The mantis stiffened as another far-off scream echoed in the night. “Expeditious retreat?”
“Expeditious retreat!” Snapper smacked Captain Beau on the backside. “Bird guy! Go!”
Beau led the charge to the rear, talons flashing as he sprinted back to the camp. The mantis and Snapper came next, both covering the dark. Throckmorton the plant hovered overhead, long leaf wings flapping. He made certain the others were safely away before following them back amongst the wagons.
Wagons were soon lurching away from the campsite, forming themselves into a rough and ready line. The dray beasts – huge rumbling creatures with agile snouts – growled as they caught the agitation of their drivers. Pans rattled – wheels creaked and groaned. The riding beasts used by the caravan guards still milled about the camp in panic. Snapper found Onan and vaulted up into the saddle while Throckmorton and the mantis raced for the last wagon. The shark girl saw three other riders mounting up, and waved them over.
“All right, we’re heading west!” She saw Captain Beau clambering atop a nervous riding budgerigar. The bird was only barely under control. “Beau – you come with me! You there – who are you?”
A human had just mounted onto a beetle-horse. He was a tall man, aquiline and self-possessed, with green skin that showed definite plant admixture somewhere in his genetic past. He was armed with an expensive, silver-chased sword and an excellent rifle. The man flicked a cool glance at the shark woman, then gave a terse nod.
“Kenda. Outrider.”
“Kenda.” Snapper pushed back her helmet brim. “How many riders have you got?”
“Four in total.”
“Fan out in a flank and rear guard. Watch towards those hills. We need plenty of warning if those things head after the convoy.”
Snapper spurred away, slapping Beau’s mount on the tail.
“This way – come on!”
The fox-bird’s budgerigar squawked and skittered forward, then followed after Onan. Beau held on tight, his long tail plumes jouncing. He looked utterly uncomfortable. Snapper led him racing up past the wagons and out into the dark, plunging under a dense stand of trees. They came out upon a scree of small rocks and dirt, all criss-crossed with little water courses. It was the bed of a seasonal creek – now merely trickles linking deeper waterholes. Snapper signalled the wagons with a flash from her lighter and drove on up the shallow banks, picking a line the wagons could easily follow.
The moon arose, showing its great yellow face, trickling stark bands of light across the plains. The land ahead seemed flat and parched, covered over with waist-high scrub. Grass trees dotted the land – many of them sporting tall central stalks tipped with eyes. They swivelled to watch intruders as they passed, rippling their fronds: the creatures could fling rocks with considerable force, but might make excellent sentinels to warm of any approaching Screamers. Snapper forged the way forward, picking a path that threaded between colonies of grass trees. She kept standing in her stirrups to look about the plains, watching for any telltale movements in the brush.
Captain Beau came lurching and surging up beside her, trying to get his bird under proper control. He was aware of Snapper’s baleful glance, and tried to make the best of his arrival, waving a disparaging talon towards his budgerigar.
“Forgive me! I am unused to riding birds! They possibly resent something about my ancestry.”
“Uh-huh.” The shark managed to put all manner of inflections into the simple cock of her eye. “So why are you riding one?”
“Ah – well, needs must as the devil drives. All that was available and all that.” The man settled a long, slim sword at his side. “I usually prefer a far more mettlesome beast – something more mammalian.”
Beau’s hands and forearms were bird like – scaled and extremely well cared for. His coat was in an elegant style far at odds with normal weird-lands life – although slightly frayed at the edges. Snapper rode beside him up onto a slight rise in the ground, then turned to look back towards the dark shapes of the wagons. They were five hundred metres behind and moving steadily. Snapper took a moment to polish her glasses, then flipped a considering glance towards the fox-bird beside her.
He was a creature of poise and elegance, with a handsome fox face, and the cascading plumes of a golden pheasant. With pleasant manner and a rogue’s smiling eye he was decidedly a creature of grace and derring-do. Snapper ripped a bite from a stick of bacon-fruit jerky and chewed it in her razor teeth as she looked the captain over.
“So what’s your story then, old son? Village militia? Some kind of guard for hire…?”
The man cleared his throat and essayed an easy salute. His warm voice spoke of wine and laughter.
“Oh, wandering adventurer. Knight errant – sword for hire!”
Snapper raised one brow. “Really?”
“Indeed!” The man tried to get his budgerigar to leap over a fallen branch, but the creature balked. He tried to drive it on. “Going wherever called. Fighting the good fight, that sort of thing.”
Snapper considered the man over the rim of her spectacles. She felt only a limited twinging of kindred spirit.
“And you just decided to come north because….”
“New fields! New experiences! Travel expands the mind.”
“Yeah…” Snapper settled her spectacles, then made certain that her pelisse hung properly from her shoulder. “Well good luck with that. You have a sword there as well as those pistols?”
“Oh! Indeed, indeed!” The man did indeed have a sword: a long, slim thing that looked as though it might make someone an excellent curtain rod. “But marksmanship’s the thing! A well pointed pistol – that’s the ticket.”
“And you point them often?”
“Oh! Well one tries to be a man of peace! A beacon of rationality. Sometimes a word or a sympathetic ear is far better than force…”
“Well you might want to try more than strong language on those Screamers…” Snapper stood in her stirrups and patted Onan on the neck. “Have you ever come across monsters before?”
“Not really. A few odd creatures here and there. But nothing too dire. Travel has been wonderfully rewarding. Always a new surprise at every corner!” The man preened long foxy whiskers. He cast an eye over Snapper’s curves and the sinuous sweep of her tail. “Now
you
, madam! You are certainly a woman well worth suffering the wilds for!” The man bowed with a flourish. “I was unaware that the world of the north held such astonishing beauty.”
Snapper sucked on a great saw-edged tooth. She eyed the man thoughtfully, then clucked Onan forward into the dark.