“No, no. I doubt there are too many around, we would have discovered them before. Fortunately, we captured the creature alive. Now all we need to do is coerce a food-creature into communicating with it.”
“So the food-creatures are telepathic?”
“The capability is latent in certain individuals.”
“If they are telepaths, then I believe the presence of a Tulk in their brain-encasements could greatly enhance this capacity. Perhaps we could actually interrogate a Tulk, not just their slaves.”
“A rare event indeed. Worthy, perhaps, of great rewards?” commented the nife. Nonchalantly, he eased nearer to her throne. For once the Parent tolerated his brash, overconfident manner. She even allowed him to caress her tentacle-tips.
“We will interrogate the food-creatures as you suggest,” she said. “I will grow an appropriate organ, it will only take a few moments to construct the genes. We have a new set of food-creatures in the dish now. We shall interrogate and devour them presently.”
* * *
“I don’t understand it,” said Rodney, his voice worried. “They always begin feasting by now. Why else would they have brought us here?”
Sarah shared his concern. If the aliens were deviating from their normal behavior on this occasion, what other deviations might occur? “Should we try to jump out of the pit?”
Rodney snorted softly. “It’s been tried, believe me. One of my own bodyguards, the last to survive, tried it the first time I was in this pit. I decided—I mean he decided to do it, over my objections, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Anyway, he made it to the lip, about ten feet up. I heard him move around up there for about three seconds, then he dropped back down.”
“Was he all right?”
“He was headless.”
Sarah half expected Bili to say ‘neato’, but for once he didn’t.
They waited there in the dark for a considerable length of time. Then, to everyone’s surprise, a voice began to speak in the chamber above them.
“The food will answer the questions,” it announced in a distorted warble. The phlegmatic voice rasped unevenly, like the voice of an old man with a cold.
None of them moved or spoke.
“Respond.”
“What do you want?” asked Sarah. Rodney gripped her shoulder, pulling her back, but she shrugged him off.
“The food will answer the questions, or the food will be devoured immediately.”
“Okay, I’ll answer anything you want,” said Sarah. She stepped out into the center of the pit, looking up into nothingness. Behind her, Rodney hissed in exasperation.
“Identify the specimen above the pit.”
“I can’t see anything.”
There was a period of silence. Soon, the chamber was lit by a wan glow.
“Identify the specimen above the pit or a killbeast will damage you.”
Sarah and the others were too busy gaping to even look at the specimen above the pit. All around them were hideous aliens. Pacing around the circumference of the pit was a creature with long stalks that appeared to contain his optical organs. The deadly soldier-types ringed the pit a pace or two back from the edge. Sarah immediately assumed that they were the killbeasts that the voice had been referring to. Further back, almost out of their sight, were huge dark shapes. Some of them had a single massive horn in the center of their heads while others appeared to be the digging types like the one she had first encountered. More grotesque than any was the bloated thing that perched on a chair or throne of some kind near the pit. The throne was built up of crude brown resins lumped together into an organic shape. Several more thrones were in the room, but they were empty.
Directly above them was suspended a transparent globe containing what resembled a small dollop of grayish jelly.
“Identify the specimen above the pit,” the voice repeated. Sarah could locate it now. It came from a one of a cluster of tick-like things growing out of the roof of the nest. One of them had a mouth on it like a fleshy conch shell.
“Will you let us go if we can tell you what it is?” asked Sarah.
Rodney made a wordless hiss of warning. Sarah thought she saw the one with the eyestalks make a signal of some kind, but if there were any communications, they were silent. With amazing speed one of the killbeast guards leapt into the pit. Before the humans could do more than cower, the killbeast kicked at Sarah’s head in a sweeping arc. The alien turned the blade flat at the last instant, knocking her to the floor rather than decapitating her. With easy grace it bounded back out of the pit.
“Food is not permitted to question the Parent or her offspring,” warbled the translating conch shell.
Sarah climbed back to her feet, rubbing the back of her head and trying to moan softly. Bili came to her and embraced her.
Sarah waved the others forward. Rodney only huddled closer to the wall in his alcove while the skald merely ignored them. Odd tremors coursed through his body at random intervals. Daddy remained flat on his back in delirium.
“Help me look at this thing!” Sarah whispered to Rodney. “They might eat us if we don’t identify it. It looks like some kind of sea creature.”
Finally, Rodney shuffled forward. He held his hands curled to his chest and peered up into the gloom. “Some kind of jellyfish.”
“We think it’s some kind of jellyfish. A sea creature,” answered Sarah loudly. “But we aren’t sure.”
There was a moment of silence while the leader aliens seemed to digest and discuss this.
“Food doesn’t recognize the Tulk? They don’t ride in your brain-encasements?”
For some reason the skald chose that moment to jerk spasmodically and topple to the floor of the pit. It seemed as if he was having some kind of fit.
Sarah looked at Rodney, baffled by the questions and the skald’s behavior.
“It means our heads, we carry our brains in our skulls,” he hissed back. He eyed his alcove longingly and rubbed his fingers together.
“No, they don’t ride in our heads,” Sarah said. “We don’t know what a Tulk is.”
This seemed to set off a debate, during which the smaller alien with the eyestalks marched up and down before the throne of the bigger one. There were many gestures, but few audible sounds other than occasional blatting noises, reminiscent of the calls of air-swimmers during mating season.
Finally, a decision was obviously reached. The smaller alien marched off out of sight, seemingly agitated. Then two killbeasts jumped down into the pit and tried to haul Daddy out of it. They had to get help from two trachs and another killbeast before they had him out.
Then began a most horrid feasting. Sarah held her hands over Bili’s ears and turned his face to the wall of the pit, but that only left her ears open to the ghastly sounds. The Parent, which had to be the monstrous thing on the throne, ate Daddy by tearing him into little strips with her fast-working crab-like mandibles and sucking them up with a tube-like orifice. The ripping of flesh and the sucking noises filled the air.
Daddy regained consciousness briefly during the process. The other aliens easily constrained his thrashing. His desperate hoarse screams echoed through the nest. It seemed to Sarah that the Parent quivered a bit more excitedly as her food fought her.
When there was little left but exposed bone, the Parent sent more killbeasts into the pit. Rodney shoved Garth toward them and tried to wedge himself between Sarah and the wall of the pit. This did no good however, as he was taken next.
“How can it still be hungry?” asked Bili. He buried his face in her side, not expecting an answer.
“Stop them!” Rodney shouted down to Sarah as he was carried like a babe in the arms of a killbeast. “Stop them or your chances of survival are nil!”
“Tell me where the ship is! I can stop them!” Sarah shouted back.
The killbeasts ignored his ripping and biting at their tough bodies and pinned him in front of the towering mass of flesh on the throne. Sarah opened her mouth, deciding to try to save Rodney despite of his crimes and his deviousness, but before she could speak he was crying out the location of the secreted flitter.
“It’s in the boatyard on Lake Axalp, on the south shore—” he broke off, shrieking as a pair of pincers sliced into his legs. “Do something!”
“I lied!” shouted Sarah, cupping her hands to direct the sound to the translating conch shell on the roof of the chamber. “I know what the specimen is. I’ve see the Tulk before.”
There was no response for several seconds. Rodney continued screaming as a strip of his flesh was sucked down the Parent’s foodtube.
Suddenly, the feast halted.
Sarah looked up expectantly, but the conch shell didn’t speak. Instead, the majority of the killbeasts stiffened, as though they were receiving silent instructions, then raced off into the tunnels. The larger, horned shapes to the rear of the chamber stirred and trundled forward to surround the Parent in a protective ring of flesh. Rodney was rolled back into the pit where he lay in a heap, moaning.
“What’s going on, Mom?” asked Bili.
Then she felt it. A tremor in the nest, then another. Soon, she heard it, and a few crumbling scraps of earth fell from the distant ceiling to dribble down on their heads.
Suddenly, the roof shook and sprayed them with loose earth. Several of the tick-like things fell into the pit with them, including the one with the conch shell mouth. They broke open and splattered them all with soupy flesh.
“Looks like brains, Mom,” commented Bili as they scrambled for the alcove.
Sarah was only mildly surprised to find both Rodney and the skald had beaten her into the alcove. The four of them squeezed together; it was a tight fit.
“The nest is under attack,” said Rodney fearfully.
Sarah nodded. “It’s probably Stormbringers out of Fort Rodney. I hope they blow these aliens apart.”
Then the light went out and there was no point in talking as the ear-splitting explosions began in earnest.
* * *
“This graphic clearly shows the location of the nest,” said Mai Lee, pointing to the colorful mass of moving points of light that hovered over the holo-plate. “I’ve instructed the battle computers to display enemy movements by locating their radio emissions. You can see here that the central globe of the nest is buried between two peaks, in effect straddling the pass between Grunstein and the Slipape Counties. The larger of the two peaks is where you will land and set up your artillery, Zimmerman.”
“How much resistance will we face?” asked Zimmerman, studying the graphic intently and rubbing his jowls.
“You can see for yourself that there are relatively few contacts up there, it’s only a small outpost at most. You will land there, destroy any resistance, and begin firing on the nest immediately,” boomed Mai Lee. The imposing head of her battlesuit swung to regard him.
“And what will you be doing?” asked young Zeel Zimmerman, his face pinched in suspicion.
“While you bombard the nest, we will broadcast noise on the preferred alien communications frequencies. They will be under a heavy surprise attack with their communications jammed. Their command control will break down. We will wait for the nest to be breached. When the breach is wide enough, you will stop the bombardment while I will lead my troops into the nest and exterminate the queen.”
Zimmerman’s face took on an expression of great surprise. Even Zeel looked impressed. “You mean you personally will fight the aliens in their own nest?”
The battlesuit seemed to stand a bit more erect. “Correct.”
The Zimmerman command walked out of the dome, muttering among themselves. They didn’t like the plan, if only because Mai Lee had suggested it, but they couldn’t come up with a better one.
After they had left and mounted their lifters to lead the assault on the peak, Mai Lee returned to the graphic she had just displayed. She pressed a key and the battlecomputer instantly displayed an altered image. A tight mass of tiny lights appeared, buried beneath the peak she had sent the Zimmermans to. A long conduit of lights led from the mass beneath the peak back to the central mass of the nest.
Inside her encasement of steel and collapsium, she chuckled.
The battle began exactly as planned. Smoothly, the blue-clad Zimmerman knights swooped down on the peak and brushed away the few killbeasts that were stationed there, tossing their blasted corpses from the cliffs. The weaponeers unlimbered their heaviest equipment and sighted on the innocent-looking patch of forest that covered the nest site. The first barrage ripped through the still air, sang for a moment, then broke apart into a hundred thunderclaps. Horkwoods a thousand years old split apart and disintegrated.
Simultaneously, the parabolic radio dishes mounted on her lifters focused on the nest and began broadcasting. She imagined the turmoil inside the fortress of her enemies and wriggled a bit in pleasure.
The bombardment and the jamming continued for several minutes when the nest was finally breached. The upper galleries vanished; the aliens caught near the surface were vaporized. Mai Lee ground her teeth, considering using the one or two tactical nukes she had hoarded and hidden from Nexus inspections for so long. In the end she forbear, they were too much like her own children—in fact, she considered them even more useful and dear. Spending them in this battle when more conventional weaponry could do the job seemed frivolous.