by Diane Carey
But there was nowhere to stampede to, and they couldn’t gain much speed. They crowded up, bunching and bolting, then bunching again.
The two slick-skinned aliens had a job on their hands. Though momentarily confused, like true predators they soon bagan to focus on individual animals. They lashed out, as if in planned unison, one seizing a large ewe, the other getting a grip on a young camel. They lifted the kicking animals up off the ground, as if dancing with them.
The camel blared a terrible protest and kicked violently. Its long hind legs cracked into the alien’s ribcage. The sound of snapping bones was like paper ripping. The alien hissed, dropped the camel, then drove its tail spear through the poor beast’s throat.
The sheep had it worse. With a good grip provided by the ewe’s thick wool, the alien held the sheep with one strong arm and pulled the animal’s hind leg back with the other. It parted the primary jaws and took a holding bite on the sheep’s leg. From where Ned stood, with the alien in profile, he thought he saw the secondary jaws strike forward, then twist.
He heard the sheep’s leg bone snap, and the animal blared in pain. But the alien did not kill it next—which was what Ned expected. The alien now had a crippled animal in its grip, and coiled its body around the sheep, then turned and moved away from its partner with what apparently was some kind of trophy.
At Ned’s side, Adam said, “They’re taking some of them alive!”
Ned almost hit the ceiling, having forgotten that anyone was here with him at all. His mind was so crowded with the sight in the bay that he could almost not think at all.
“Cocooning!” Dylan said from below, peeking out between Ned’s knees and the hatch. “They’re gonna stick ’em to a wall, like the captain said!”
He spoke out loud, but that didn’t matter. Over the blaring, baying, neighing, and roaring, there was just no reason to keep quiet. They couldn’t attract any more attention to themselves than the animals were already doing.
“We’d better scat!” Ned said with a gulp. “Leigh! Come on!”
He turned back to her, inside the compartment.
She was pressed back against cabinet, pathetic in her terror, sobbing like a child.
Perhaps she was a child. Perhaps they all were.
“She’s all done,” Adam evaluated.
With a glance at him, Ned made a decision. He stepped back through the chamber and locked the other hatch, then came back to the girl. He looked down at her in appreciation, for this was no ordinary teenager. Leigh could see the whole celestial sphere of visible intrinsic stars and galaxies in her head, which was a wonder in itself, but this particular girl was more than the sum of her own mind. She knew how to use what she knew, and that, from the mundane to the amazing, was remarkable in itself.
“Stay here. Don’t come out until someone comes for you. Understand? You must stay right here and not venture at all. You must promise, or I daren’t leave you.”
Her tear-flooded eyes shifted to him. With a little squeak that might’ve been “M-hm,” she folded herself into the space between the cabinet and a desk, wrapped her arms around her knees, and settled in.
He took her hand and held it between both of his. “A spaceship is the perfect lost city… you can’t get out of it. Someone will come for you.”
Indeed she seemed relieved. She had hit her limit. He didn’t blame her a bit and wished he too could hunker here.
“I’ll lock you in,” he added, and nudged Adam and Dylan through the hatch, then slammed it shut and spun the handle.
The clang rang through the hold, briefly startling the herds of animals, almost as if they had heard a signal bell.
And it alerted the alien. Its huge elongated head rolled upward, searching for the noise. But it couldn’t tell the humans from the sheep. To it, they were all just warm bodies.
The three boys held suddenly still, grasping each other.
“Dylan…” Ned began.
“Closer… I… have… to… get… closer…”
How wild it seemed! Closer to that thing?
The alien scanned the shifting herd. Behind it, the horses found a way out through another entryway and disappeared. Two muscular bull elk, with antlers splayed wide, decided maybe they were horses too and trotted after them.
Overhead, the factory-like appendages of loading mechanisms and disk cranes dangled in repose, creating a contrary industrial sky for the pastoral scene below.
“Follow,” Ned quickly said, and moved into the herd of sheep, aiming toward the alien. “Down!” He hunched over, so he was more the size of the sheep, which was all right since they were bulky with wool and fairly large, large enough to provide cover for the humans. He hoped the other two boys imitated his posture, for there was no chance to look back.
In the midst of the bloody slaughtering field, the one alien postured and shrieked a ghastly high-pitched cry.
All at once, they heard barking. Barking! A dog!
Ned craned about, looking for the sound. The huge bay provided a strange echo, and he couldn’t—
Suddenly a quick black-and-white form lashed out from between two rows of stacked containers. As if given a divine gift, Ned stood bolt upright. A dog! Not just any average dog—a border collie! The blasted sheep must’ve come with their own herding dog!
Ned made a single clap of victory with his hands. “Kite!”
No, of course, it wasn’t his dog from home, but larger and colored differently, large for the breed, maybe sixty-five pounds, with a long rough coat of coal black and a white tail and chest, white legs freckled with brown, and two brown ears over its black face. The brown streak from the right ear went partway down the dog’s handsome pointed face and over a set of wily brown eyes. It hunched down, chin almost to the ground, freckled front paws out, flag-like tail down with the point curled up, in the famous arrowhead attitude of a border collie at work. It would make a poor pet, because it wanted to herd its people more than play with them, but there was never a breed of dog on Earth that knew and loved its job like a Scottish border collie. The smartest dogs in the world.
On any world, apparently.
The dog had its eye on the alien and was actually trying to nip and drive the sheep away from the god-awful danger! Good champ!
He made the bet of his life and shouted, “Kite! Come bye!”
The dog never even looked at him, but instantly broke clockwise around its herd. It moved too fast, though, not understanding the shape of the bay, so Ned shouted, “Kite! Steady!”
Instantly the dog slowed its pace, crossing its paws over each other to keep moving sideways, and continued to drive the sheep, doing better at keeping them away from the dragon. The dog had stopped barking, now that it had a master to give it direction, for it knew they were working together against the destroyer before it.
The unearthly beast snarled at the dog, cradling the body of the camel it had killed.
“Away!” Ned called. “Kite! Away!”
The dog, empowered by Ned’s directions, did a little victory jump and circled the sheep now to the right, anti-clockwise, which caused the sheep to bolt directly at the alien. In that short moment of training, the dog had learned that “Kite” had something to do with him. That was brilliant—Ned needed the dog to respond only to certain commands, not jump every time he yelled at somebody, because he had the idea he was going to do a lot of yelling.
Kite continued nipping counter-clockwise, driving the herd, but was unable to change the herd’s direction because of the stack of containers keeping them tightly together. The sheep, bunched tight, ran square into the alien and knocked it sideways.
It ran its tail into one of the rams, hoisting it high and casting the sad animal’s mutilated body on top of one of the containers. But the rest of the sheep ran on through, and the alien was left standing in an empty spot, ankle deep in entrails.
“Kite, lie down!” Ned called.
The dog hit its emergency brakes and dropped flat to the deck, still as a rug. The alien t
urned away from the boys, looking now at the dog, which in its ultimate bravery did not flinch even a hair, though its upper lips curled in a snarl and showed its teeth.
“Dylan, now!”
With the alien distracted by the dog, its back to them now, Dylan shimmied forward through the sheep. His short stature and compact form made him the perfect bulldozer to get through the sheep without tripping. He came out of the herd just as the alien got the idea something was up.
“Take this, bitch-kitty!” he shouted, and opened fire with the metallic sprayer.
An arch of lovely shimmering liquefied metal spewed from the nozzle, making a perfect cone. It struck the alien right in the face and body, coating the dragon and the camel’s corpse with what seemed like silver paint.
But it wasn’t paint—it had a substance about it, a thickness and a gluey texture that drew out in strings as the alien parted its primary jaws and screamed at Dylan. The boy didn’t stop spraying, but pressed even harder, until the gun exhausted itself and the alien dripped with glaze.
Dylan dropped the gun, found the utility remote he’d tucked into his belt, and started pushing buttons.
“It’s not working!” Adam choked at Ned’s side.
The alien shook itself, glowing like a polished jewel in the bay lights. It was enraged now, and didn’t seem to care that it was coated head to foot.
“Listen!” Ned held Adam back, hearing a humming sound of electrical activity.
Overhead, one of the crane derricks began to quiver with energy. Hanging from it, the huge magnetic disk used to move containers began also to hum, louder and louder.
The alien arched its bony shoulders and dropped the camel, but the camel didn’t go down. It went up.
Sucked upward as if into a wind tunnel, the camel’s body slammed into the magnetized disk and flattened out, even its tongue pasted upward into the disk. The alien looked up, splayed its hands in fury, and screamed again.
Dylan thumbed the controls. The disk began to hum and whine with power. Two containers nearby, stacked high on other containers, shuddered and actually began to lean toward the disk.
Then the alien’s feet left the ground and it was drawn upward like a shot, slamming head-first into the magnetic disk. Its spine and tail hit the disk next, then its hind legs, and it was pinned, shrieking and writhing, clawing at the magnet.
Ned and Adam raced to Dylan’s side as the boy thumbed the controls again.
“Stay back!” Dylan warned. “This’ll be icky!”
Ned looked at the dog. “Kite! Come bye!”
Delighted, the border collie jumped up from its lie-down position and bolted after the sheep on the clockwise again, which cleared both the sheep and the dog away from under the disk.
With his tongue poking from one side of his mouth, Dylan aimed the remote and cranked.
The humming sound intensified. The containers shuddered. The stuck monster screamed—and the metal on its body pulled all the way through to the magnet, flattening the alien as if it were a bug between two pieces of glass.
The creature’s bones and tissue were crushed flat. Acid splattered out in an arch, then struck the deck and began to eat through the sheep corpses and the entrails and the deck itself.
“Brilliant!” Ned slapped Dylan on the back.
“‘Bitch-kitty,’” Adam quoted. He looked at Ned. “How did you get the dog to… ?”
“Animals know their jobs!” Ned told him quickly. “Border collies are workaholics, by God!”
“Lucky for us—look out!” Adam shoved them both out of the way without warning, knocking them to the deck, just in time to avoid being trampled by a woolly mammoth lumbering out from the canyon between two stacks of containers—with an alien corpse skewered to its tusk!
The mammoth trundled by, shaking its great head, sending ripples down its heavy coat and the underlayer of muscle along its flank. It missed the boys by nothing more than a good arm’s reach.
“Say so!” Ned shouted in amazement at the ancient animal that had so efficiently conquered an animal of the future. “Bonny thing, what a champion!”
“Watch out—there’s—there are—just get up!” Adam pulled him to his feet and they sidestepped a stream of acid burning its way toward them.
“How many is that?” Dylan asked. “How many of them are dead?”
“At least five we’re sure of,” Ned said. “The smugglers killed two. The day’s with us so far—”
“I thought it was only one.”
“No, two, wasn’t it? Dylan, didn’t you see the smugglers take… Dylan?”
But Dylan’s expression had changed as he stared over Ned and Adam’s shoulders.
“Ah—ah—” he stammered, raising the remote in his hands, and began to push buttons, as if that would help.
A sizzling sound crawled up their backs. Feeling his midsection contract, Ned stopped breathing. Beside him, Adam began to turn to look over his shoulder.
Shock broke in Adam’s eyes. He lost that steadyness he had always displayed, and began to shrink sideways.
But it was too late.
A pair of clawed hands drifted down from the top of a container to flank his face on either side.
Dylan fell back, away.
Though he tried to turn, Ned knew they were helpless, without even the spent metal sprayer to throw.
A speared tail twisted down from above and punted him in the chest, knocking him to the deck.
Then the hands closed on Adam’s head and lifted him clear off the deck. He hooked his own hands over the alien’s arms to keep from having his head torn off and, silent but for a tiny whimper, he was floated away.
20
“Adam—no!”
Ned’s throaty cry had more guff in it than gasp, but he was helpless. Over his head, Adam and the alien disappeared to the top of the container, leaving only the sheer boxy wall looming over Ned and Dylan.
“Oh… oh, jeez… oh, God, jeez…” Dylan began to hyperventilate at Ned’s side, choking on the air he was trying to breathe.
“Stop it!” Ned shouted and pushed to his feet. He grasped the other boy and shook him. “Get back to Leigh! Stay with her and don’t venture out!”
“But—but—”
“You’ve done a hero’s work! You’ve killed one single-handed, by God, and scarce that is! Go back, now, and get into cover and don’t move! And don’t let Leigh move! I need everybody safe!”
“You—you—have a plan?”
“Every animal knows its job and I know mine. Get cracking!”
“Okay!” Dylan slapped him on the shoulder and took off, back the way they had come.
With a silent prayer to any saint that might be listening, Ned steeled himself and began to climb the metal ladder on the side of the container. What he would do when he got up there, he had no idea. But a lie of the plan was better than dust, and he’d spit on the beasts if he had to. Pure anger drove him on. The idea that these innocent people could be so compromised, and for no good reason but the captain’s greed and the rancor of cancerous brutes—why, it just wasn’t fair in this world or any. There was wickedness afoot and it had to be faced.
“Dan, still there?” he spoke into the tiny com at his throat.
“Ned, I can’t track ’em so well now! There’s interference! I’m losing touch with some of ’em!”
“That’s because they’re being killed. The aliens and the animals and maybe more smugglers—they’re fighting with each other! Can you replicate that noise they make? Can you make the same noise in a section of the ship if I tell you?”
“It’ll be the devil’s own guess what I’ll be saying to ’em—”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you when I’m ready. Then blare it through the starboard freight bay, got it?”
“You mean to corner ’em?”
“I mean to drive them.”
“Zat so…”
“Stand by!”
He reached the top of the container, but it was not
hing but a bare field of that same metal-sprayed stuff Dylan had used to kill the magnetized one. Seeing that the top was clear, Ned ran across to another ladder, this one bolted to the actual bay wall, leading upward to other levels and other scaffolds and other passageways. It took a leap, but he made it.
Only one level up from the deck… he turned to his right and traveled the only way open to him, along a scaffold walkway over one of the beautiful aquarium containers. He paused and looked down.
The container was open, probably by the same protocol that had opened the food containers, but this one wasn’t opened from the end, with a ramp. Instead, the top had retracted, leaving the turquoise water without a roof. He peered down into the colorful sprawl of a coral reef, with a thousand fish and anemones flitting and winking at him, like an inviting tropical lagoon. Indeed, that’s just what it was. A piece of a lagoon cut from the Earth’s shallows and venturing out into space to make someplace else beautiful. He wished more than anything to dive in for a swim. He could, right from here, as simple as that. How good that would feel against his clammy, sweat-pasted skin! To forget all this and dive in—to let himself drown passively instead of being ripped to shreds…
No. Keep on!
He hoped Leigh and Dylan were all right. He hoped the wonderful collie kept driving the sheep out of the bay. The dog would stay with the herd, he knew, and wait for a command.
Forcing himself to be as dutiful as new Kite, he stepped onward over the beautiful pool, and thought it was the last beauty he would ever see.
* * *
“Hurry up. Keep up with me!”
Captain Pangborn led three of the kids through the underside of the Umiak. He chose this route purposefully, and they had climbed down four levels of utility ladders to get here. That Australian kid and the Mank’s sister had stayed behind with Spiderlegs, and that was fine with Pangborn. He could control these three. He didn’t need an audience.
They reached the lowest level and dropped into a maintenance tunnel that followed the outer skin of the ship and allowed for spot-maintenance of the hull and the inner integrity of the flank bay overhead. The flank bays were almost independent ships, stuck to the sides of Umiak. They could actually be taken off and tugged independently, with their own atmosphere and entirely separate systems. He remembered the segment of the educational program when Dana had explained that to the kids, but doubted they had the brain development to really understand the bigger concept. They were following him now, and that was all that mattered. The Mank and that one smartass who thought he was second-mate material were off someplace getting themselves killed, and Pangborn knew things had turned now in his direction.