by Larry Niven
“Only when I heard the racket.” Her head buzzed hollowly. Somebody tranked me . . .
“Damn. Listen—you haven’t had a full night’s sleep for three days, and I want you to get one. You’ve been running on adrenaline.”
His hand slipped from her chest to her belly, the warm, gentle swell there, and she suddenly realized the truth in his words. Both of her needed rest. And food. Now that the adrenaline rush had slowed, she could hear the dull roar of hunger and fatigue. The tension had masked it. The tension of waiting, of helplessly watching the search for Carlos and Bobbi. Of watching Cadmann and the others descend into the earth to do battle with the unknown. Of standing at Marnie’s shoulder, waging a losing battle for Bobbi’s life. Of waiting to convey the terrible news to Carlos . . . if Carlos survived.
There had been, could have been, no rest.
But now . . . Terry was right.
“Carlos and Stu just needed to get it out. They’ll probably cover each other’s backs tomorrow. There’s nothing anyone can do for it.” He ran his hands lovingly through her hair, scratching her scalp with the tips of his nails. “And anyway, I’m here to make sure that you don’t go running off. Junior needs you to be reasonable.”
For an instant, she thought of arguing, then fatigue completed what tranquilizers and low blood sugar began, and she slipped back into a light and fitful sleep.
When Sylvia finally emerged from the caverns of narcosis some ten hours later, the camp was on full alert. The minefields beyond the perimeter fence were activated. Current pulsed through the wire. Sylvia’s skin hummed if she approached it too closely.
She wrapped her sweater around her more tightly and headed through the thin morning fog toward the communal dining hall.
In the midst of total alert, she felt a curious security: the Colony was not pitted against human enemies. It’s only an animal. Intelligent as a gorilla. Maybe as intelligent as a primitive human. Doesn’t matter. It can’t use tools! It’s only an animal. We—Cadmann hunted it down, went into its den, and it wasn’t a dragon at all. Only an animal, with a brain smaller than a man’s, and no tools.
A tiger in the dark room is a monster. Turn on the light, and it is just an animal. Cadmann turned on the lights for us.
Zack held the door for her as she entered the dining hall. She asked him, “How’s Carlos?”
“Sleeping it off. Stu has a busted lip. Well earned, if you ask me.”
Virtually every adult male, and half the women, were clustered in the hall. The walls and ceiling of the hall were illuminated with views of the Colony and points south. Cadmann stood in the front of the room. Near him, but separated, were ten colonists, his kill team.
He stands there—does he know just how arrogantly he’s standing there? But the rest of them, they’re taking it seriously. They accept it. I never saw him like this before. In his element. The bad time is over for Colonel Cadmann Weyland.
One of the wall videos wavered, and Cadmann’s face loomed into focus. “We’ll be using a portable holosystem,” he continued. “Rachel will carry it into the first assault—and I want her to stay back. The idea here is to perfect a system. If we make any mistakes, we want the camp to know it fast. If we do it right, we can be sure that the National Geographic people will be interested. This will head back to Earth along with the rest of the data on grendels. George, Jill, you’ll bracket the pool here, and here—”
Sylvia looked at the maps. One was a digitalized thermal breakdown representing fresh water, hot springs and vegetation.
On the other wall was a contour map, and on a third a wildlife vector. Greatest concentrations of samlon had been detailed. Four of the water holes had been identified as likely hidey-holes. These had large populations of samlon, and no hot springs nearby. Grendels would want cold water to dump heat into. Distance from the other holes was an important factor. Any creature as voracious as a grendel had to be extremely territorial, requiring substantial hunting ground.
Sylvia found her eyes drawn time and again to the center maps. The Colony.
A small area, really. Terribly small when examined in contrast to the entire island. Barely two square kilometers.
The view from the Geographic made hollow their assertions of mastery. From that perspective, how very little change they had wrought.
So presumptuous had been the children of Earth. When all was said and done, might not this new world, this terribly old world, swallow them and their folly, leaving nothing behind but bones? Bones, and some films beamed back to an Earth that might or might not send others this way again. Earth was rich, and jaded.
She touched her belly, trying to sense the slumbering life within. It shifted, kicking, and suddenly she felt awesomely small and vulnerable. What was she doing here? What were any of them doing here? All she could think of was the image of that hideous beast twisting through the searchlights, sprinting forward like a windup toy with a broken spring. Bathed in flame, skin coated in jellied gasoline. By all sanity dead, but living still.
God in heaven.
Then there were the Knights of Avalon, men and women descending into the caves beneath the northern ravine. There, in the abysmal darkness, confronting a larger, more powerful version of the first beast. Armed with better weapons, more certain knowledge, and something else: the kind of foolhardy courage that had lured men beyond the edge of shadow since time immemorial.
Now, forty grim determined men and women waited, armed and ready. Waited to follow the camp’s only true warrior into hell if need be, to stand between Sylvia’s unborn child and the hideous grasp of a grendel.
Suddenly, her eyes blurred with tears, and an unbidden, heartfelt prayer echoed in her mind.
God be with you, Cadmann.
Because the Devil has already dealt himself in.
♦ChaptEr 21♦
killing ground
Chance favors the trained mind.
—Louis Pasteur
Carlos wiped his forehead with the back of a gritty hand and adjusted his throat mike. “Martinez here. In place.”
The water hole was situated eighty miles north of the Colony, an hour’s flight by Skeeter. Just a wet spot hidden by bushes, forty feet long by half that wide, one he would never have believed could be sixty feet deep. Some ancient seismic activity had torn the rocks apart and the Miskatonic had filled the hole. That was long ago. A monster lurked there now. Probably, Carlos reminded himself; but in his heart he knew. You’re there, and I have come to kill you.
The clearing was roughly horseshoe-shaped, narrowing into an eastern bottleneck where the stream trickled in from the main river. The overflow bubbled up over a western rise of crumbled stone and disappeared into a marsh.
Probability seventy-eight percent. Those words had sounded encouraging back at the camp, but here at the killing ground, with twenty hunters surrounding the hole, that twenty-two-percent uncertainty looked as big as Mucking Great Mountain.
In just a few minutes they would know. Carlos stared at the chill depths. Grendel, Grendel, are you there? Grendel, we have come to kill you, he thought. But all that Carlos had seen so far were samlon flashing like silver shadows.
Be here. Be here and die. Die slowly, die and taste death—
“You okay, amigo?” Hendrick Sills asked.
Carlos flashed a quick smile at his companion. “Sí, compadre.” He let Bobbi’s image fade, forgot the still, pale face and the memory of a last desperate kiss shared beneath a shelf of rock.
No mistakes this time. Twenty men and women surrounded this hole. We have enough weapons to kill a tyrannosaurus rex. More than enough to take down one of these bizcuernos.
The satchel team stood by. On signal, three men would run forward to throw eight kilograms of explosives into the hole, then run away as the charge sank until either the depth fuse or the timer detonated it. The hydrostatic shock would either kill or drive it out of the hole. Hendrick Sills, their chief engineer, had verified that there was no other exit.
“Can you believe this?” Hendrick demanded. “Ten light-years from home. When my grandparents took the solar system we didn’t have anything like this to fight. Just physics, just our own ignorance. Another goddam star and we’re standing here like a Stone Age tribe facing a tiger.”
“They are strong, these grendels,” Carlos agreed. “But—”
Hendrick grinned like a wolf. “But. Damn straight, ‘but.’ No brains.”
Carlos felt unreasonable resentment. “They have brains. They—”
“Hey,” Hendrick said. “It’s okay, I’m on your side, remember?”
Carlos grinned. “I remember. My apologies. More, you are correct. The grendels must use instincts. What they know is in their genes. Not so with humans. Once we had conquered all the animals on Earth we began on each other. We have ten thousand years of war experience.”
“And well enough,” Hendrick said.
“And well enough. The objective is to kill them. And that we will do.”
His comcard spoke. “Carlos, this is Cadmann. You ready?”
“As I’ll ever be, amigo.”
“Let’s do it, then. All units, general alert. Stand by.”
The semicircle of armed men and women looked to their weapons, then waited.
“Alpha team, go!”
Three men ran forward, one of them George Merriot, still limping from his burn wounds. Ten feet from the sinkhole they paused. One stood with flame thrower ready as the other two swung the heavy satchel they held between them.
“One, two, three, go!”
The dark brown box arced out toward the swampy hole. “That’s it!” the team leader called. “Run away!” They were laughing as they rejoined their comrades in the line facing the hole.
The bomb splashed into the dark water and vanished.
One. Two . . . Carlos counted half-consciously . . . ten, eleven . . .
WHAM!
It came as a surprise, as it always did, no matter how hard Carlos tried to be ready for it. Water shot skyward, water and samlon and tiny crustaceans and mud.
Now wait . . .
For about four seconds.
The water exploded a second time as a quarter-ton of scale and muscle burst from the surface of the water. The grendel came at an impossible speed over the lip of the sinkhole. It dashed over the flopping samlon that lay at the water’s edge. Once it had a firm footing it paused, black bullet body glistening in the afternoon light. Its enormous saucer eyes glared at them—
Then fixed on Carlos. Directly upon him, and he froze in fear and impotent horror. We can’t do it. We can’t kill this thing . . .
“Shoot!” Cadmann ordered.
Someone fired automatically. Then someone else.
Carlos screamed wordlessly. He forced himself to center the grendel in the sights of his weapon.
It was out of the hole, out and charging, moving at speeds that no animal could possibly reach, moving so fast that although time had slowed for Carlos, the creature had become faster, so fast that everything happened at once—and he squeezed the trigger.
Carlos’s bolt exploded in the bushes behind the creature. Three other hits. The grendel screamed, then screamed again as it tried to come forward but tripped over its own severed foreleg.
Even then it did not die. It pulled itself up onto the rocks and took off like a good racing car, away from the pain, away from the foaming, smoking water and lancing spears, running east through the shallow stream, toward the safety of the Miskatonic—
As Cadmann had said it would.
“Down!” Cadmann’s voice was calm and reassuring in the earphones, and Carlos was down. One second later, there was an awesome roar, and after that he was showered by dirt and falling rock. Two big mud drops struck his cheek.
“All clear.” Cadmann sounded cheerful. “Chalk up one more.”
One more.
“Like I said, no brains,” Hendrick said. “They’ll always go for the river. Plant some mines and wait—”
“Would you have thought of that?”
“Aw, I don’t know.”
“Nor would I,” Carlos said. “Or, let us say it another way. You or I, perhaps we would have thought of the mines, and perhaps we might have thought of whatever it is that we will need when those no longer work. Would you be willing to bet that either of us will think of that before Cadmann does? Or know that it is right?”
Hendrick stood and shook off the dirt from his coveralls. “Lighten up. Let’s go see what we got.”
“Yes.” Carlos stood. “Let us look at our grendel.” His forefinger picked a speck of wet red flesh from his cheek. Not a raindrop.
There wasn’t much. Craters in the dirt, splashes of bright crimson, torn alien flesh and bone, a flailing severed tail, ropy red strands splashed against the rocks. Carlos felt a grin pulling his face toward his ears.
Twenty hunters stood up from their positions around the clearing.
All twenty of them. They hadn’t lost a single man, and the grendel was as dead as anything had ever been.
“Let’s be sure,” Cadmann ordered. “All units, stand by. Alpha team, move out.”
Once again three men moved forward. One stood with flame thrower ready as the others tossed the satchel charge into the pothole.
WHAM!
Mud, water and samlon showered the area. Carlos stood tensely—
And nothing happened.
“All clear,” Cadmann said at last. He left his command post and came over to Carlos. “And that’s what I call ballin’ the jack.”
“Damn straight, amigo.” Carlos raised his weapon. “Damn straight!” The victory cry built deep inside him, rolling slowly up through his chest and out of his throat like the cry of a more primitive, more basic animal. The others joined in. Twenty hunters, screaming to the cloud-muddied sky, the glory and perfection of the moment connecting them with a simpler time.
They were alive, and the enemy was dead, its limbs and guts spread before them. Still the timeless scene seemed somehow incomplete. This was the time when the shamans, the ancient men and women of the village, should scramble out from behind the rocks, should examine lengths of twisted gut, stare into the scarred and lifeless eyes of a foe and speak of the signs within. Eat handfuls of jellied brain and sing of dark portents and bloody dreams.
Then again, he realized that he didn’t need diviners to tell him the future.
Here, on Avalon, mankind was the future.
The howls from twenty throats rose to the sky . . .
Jerry sighed in disappointment as he examined the gutted corpse.
There was samlon meat in its belly. Jerry identified parts of three samlon, two nearly dissolved, one nearly fresh.
“Now we know. Nothing protects samlon,” Jerry said. “No great secrets here at all.”
“So why are they still around?” Sylvia wondered.
“They probably breed faster than hell, and there aren’t enough grendels to wipe them out. That’s good news. I guess. There is a limited number.” Something attracted Jerry’s attention, above the creature’s staring eyes. He moved his tweezers under something, and lifted
Half a meter of limp tubing rose from a cleft in the forehead.
“I’ll be damned. Will you look at that? It’s got a snorkel for breathing underwater. Here, you can see where the blood vessels fill to lift it. Just like a penis. Sorry.”
Sylvia said, “We’re out to kill them. You’re starting to admire them.”
“Know your enemy.”
Once the technique was devised, the killings themselves became almost routine. The adrenaline was there, the sense of satisfaction, but experience had dampened the true danger, replacing it with caution and structure.
&
nbsp; Because, after all was said and done, the grendels were mortal. Heirs to the same failings as any other creature of protoplasm. Vulnerable to the same techniques of killing that had worked on Earth, evolved through countless big-game hunts and wars since the beginning of recorded time.
Flush the beast.
Channel its retreat.
Bottleneck, and the killing ground.
The second killing team utilized an additional refinement. There was a chance, no matter how small, that a grendel might be hiding outside the water hole, or might find an auxiliary exit and attack them from the rear. Transverse observers were posted, one for every two hunters facing the killing ground. Two hovering Skeeters watched from above, scanning for grendels.
There were only twelve sites on the entire island with a probability above thirty percent.
Twelve holes. One a day, with the Colony kept under full battle alarm the entire time.
They would not lose another human being.
It was good to have a system: Skeeter above, and a first pinning team moved into place while the engineering corps designed the minefield, worked with Cadmann to determine the field of fire that would best funnel the creature to its death.
Where natural walls of rock were insufficient, walls of flame were utilized, flame throwers backed by men and women with rifles and spear guns.
And always, always, a conspicuous bolt-hole. Someplace where a pain-maddened creature could run to safety, to freedom . . .
To certain death.
So died the fourth grendel, blown in half and then roasted by jellied flame, dead even as it crawled for the depths of the Miskatonic, pitifully torn claws outstretched, eyes open and fixed. Yearning, perhaps, for one last taste of the samlon flashing within.
And the fifth, dead before it ever reached the minefield, Carlos’s explosive spear in its brain. He took limited pride: he had been aiming at the heart.
And always, always, there was Cadmann, driving them on and on, past exhaustion with his boundlessly murderous energy.