The following night, they encountered life again, but this time the dot on the cyber’s scanners was pink, also unidentified, and a lot smaller. Sabre went to investigate, and found a strange, cylindrical beast crawling across the sand. Tassin tried to hold him back when he neared it, and he urged her closer, sure that the slow-moving, worm-like creature was harmless.
“I think it’s what the dragons eat. Don’t be scared,” he said.
“I am not scared,” she retorted, releasing him to approach the beast, as he had known she would.
The worm creature moved on six stumpy legs, dragging a fat, boneless body. Its blue internal organs were visible through its pale, translucent skin, and its eyeless head searched the sand with long whiskers, ingesting certain rocks and sand, which it ground to a paste. Sabre squatted beside it and watched it for a while, fascinated. The cyber’s scanners showed that it also contained a lot of copper, which meant that this was a closed system. The worms ate sand and the dragons ate the worms, but what, if anything, ate the dragons?
The alien creature seemed oblivious to their presence, and he did not wish to alarm it, not knowing what sort of defensive mechanisms it might possess. Despite his assurances to the Queen, he was aware that many apparently harmless prey animals were sometimes armed with dangerous defences. Strangely, this creature was nocturnal while the dragons were diurnal. Perhaps this was not their original food source, but one they had been forced to adopt when all the other indigenous animals had been wiped out.
“What is it?” Tassin whispered.
He glanced at her. “Well, it’s not a reptile. This one seems to be more like a worm. It eats certain types of rock and sand, feeding at night and probably living in a burrow during the day. Its skin is far too fragile to withstand the sun. You’ll probably find that they have water in their burrows. Since this is a man-made desert, there could be plenty of water underground. This is definitely what the dragons feed on, quite harmless.”
She pulled a face. “It is ugly.”
Sabre stood up, his curiosity satisfied, and scanned the flat expanse that surrounded them. They had encountered no sign of burrows on their journey, so it was likely that the worm creature fabricated a lid for its hole. If he could find one, it might be possible to climb down it and fill the water skins from the worm’s supply, but the scanners could not detect anything deep down. They had been fortunate to stumble across the well, which had seeped water into the surrounding soil, probably cracked during the conflict. The scanners had detected the water because it was only ten metres down, but a worm’s twisting tunnel was probably far deeper and plugged with a thick lid.
They left the worm to its sandy meal and walked on, almost mechanically now. Despite his efforts to conserve water by travelling at night, Sabre’s tongue rustled dryly between cracked, parched lips, and an amber warning light flashed in the cyber’s host status data, indicating his dehydrated state. According to the data, his bio-status was only fifty-two percent, dangerously low. He had drunk no water since the previous night, and that had only been a few sips. Tassin had consumed most of it, and was in far better condition. The chestnut still stumbled along, but he did not think it would live much longer.
Sabre watched its staggering gait for a while, then, as dawn broke and they stopped to rest for the day, he decided to end its suffering. The chestnut, unlike the bay, was not giving up. After sharpening the knife to a razor edge, he made a nick in the horse’s jugular. The animal did not appear to feel it, and stood with a hanging head. He collected the blood in one of the empty water skins, saddened by the noble beast’s death. As its blood pressure dropped, the gelding lay down and closed its eyes. It stretched out on the soft sand, heaved a great sigh, and died.
Tassin sat and watched with dull eyes, clearly too tired to care. The horse’s death meant one last infusion of life for them, and it would not have survived the journey anyway. Sabre drank the blood in small amounts, so it did not sicken him. Tassin accepted some this time, pulling a face at its taste. He butchered the animal and ate the soft organs again, but she drew the line at raw meat. They drank all the blood before it spoiled, then Sabre cut strips of meat. When he had as much as he could safely dry, they left the corpse and walked on for a distance, not wishing to sleep beside it.
The Cyber Chronicles - Book I: Queen of Arlin Page 59