The professor led the way, shuffling through the fissures, Dev close behind. Every so often he paused to consult his tracking device, then carried on.
“Trundle?”
“Trundell.”
“If you love scroaches so much, how come you’re all togged up in ceramide fibre and tungsten mesh? Don’t you trust them?”
“I may admire the scroach, but I’m not crazy. They’re temperamental and sometimes unpredictable. Only a fool would get as close to them as I do and not take precautions.”
“Ever been attacked?”
“Couple of times. A female tried to sting me once, but her aculeus failed to pierce my clothing. Just. It felt like being rammed hard in the chest with the end of a steel rod. I was bruised for days. I blame myself, though.”
“You would.”
“No, really. I didn’t respect her. She was carrying her infant brood on her back, and I plucked one off to take a closer look. I was going to return it, of course, but she couldn’t have known that. Another scroach nearly took a couple of my fingers off with its pincer. Again, mea culpa. Dromopoda alighieriensis is a proud beast and doesn’t take kindly to insults.”
“You were rude to it?”
“By its own lights, yes,” said Trundell. “I mimicked the brandishing of its pedipalps incorrectly.”
“For shame. It waved its arms at you and you didn’t have the courtesy to wave back?”
“I did, but in order to indicate submission you not only have to copy what the other scroach does precisely but you must do so at a marginally slower rate to denote your inferior status. I freely admit I got it wrong. Also, and this is the real issue, I don’t have chelicerae.”
“Those being...”
“Moveable mouth parts. Scroaches use them to signal to one another in addition to their pedipalps. They exhale through special spiracles set just inside their jaws and modify the sound with the chelicerae. I can hiss too, of course, but not with nearly the same range of modulations and frequencies.”
Dev recalled the extensive rattly hissing he had heard from the scroaches. “You’re saying they can talk to one another?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
“Ugh.”
“Why ‘ugh’?”
“Because that’s freaky. Insects talking.”
“No more so than birds chirping or dogs barking, and scroaches are no less intelligent then either of those species. Personally I find it extraordinary and rather beautiful.”
“Of course you do.”
“In fact I’m thinking of making it my field of specialism – quasi-verbal communication among alien invertebrates. How they manage to convey aggression, announce the desire to mate, familiarise themselves with their young, share warning messages and so forth, by means of a complex system of principally auditory cues.”
Dev did not seem to have endeared himself to Trundell by bullying him earlier, but the xeno-entomologist’s passion for his subject, however, was overcoming his nerdy resentment. He just couldn’t help enthusing about his beloved scroaches to anyone who would listen, and in Dev he had a more or less captive audience.
“We’re familiar with Terran insects who use sound to communicate,” he went on. “The stridulation of cicadas and grasshoppers, for instance, or the sharp air expulsions of the Fijian long-horned beetle and the Madagascan hissing cockroach. But they operate at a relatively low level of sophistication compared with the scroach. They’re either calling to mates, demarcating territory, or trying to repel rivals or predators. That’s about all.”
“Who needs more than that? I know I don’t.”
“Dromopoda alighieriensis,” said Trundell patiently, “has such a variety of hisses, so many intonations and patterns to suit different circumstances, that I can’t help but think of it as a language. I haven’t found another insect quite so intricately expressive, apart from the so-called singspiders on Auriga B with their web harps.”
“Still freaky, though.”
“It might because they’re a wholly subterranean species. Their environment lends itself to auditory communication. Tunnels and caves act as natural amplifiers, carrying sounds over long distances. Scroaches see adequately enough, but their tympanal and chordotonal organs – their, for want of a better word, ears – are acutely well developed.”
Trundell stopped, holding up a finger.
“Case in point. Hear that?”
Dev listened as a faint whispery rustle drifted through the air. It was coming from some distance away, and it wavered and skittered like wind-blown autumn leaves.
“That’s them?”
“That’s scroaches,” Trundell confirmed. “Lots of them, spread out far and wide. Communing remotely.”
“Can’t be good. What are they saying?”
“I’ve been recording their different hisses and attempting to correlate them with mood and context in order to decode the syntax, but I still haven’t fully mastered it. It’s a work-in-progress. That noise could mean a massed spat, or it could be a mating-frenzy summons, or maybe...”
Now there came a soft tremor, like the noise of one heavy stone scraping against another.
“Or maybe,” said Trundell, “it’s that.”
The scroach hissing rose in pitch and volume, becoming sharper and shriller.
“Earthquake?” said Dev.
“No, but we’d better hurry all the same. A couple more geodes and we’ll be out in the tunnels. Then we can get some proper speed up.”
“What is it?” said Dev as they scurried on all fours through one fissure, then the next. “I could be wrong, but those scroaches sound... frightened.”
“That’s because they are. You must know why.”
“I’m not from round these parts.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Appearances to the contrary, no.”
“Well, neither am I, but even I know what a moleworm is. And does. Apex predator. Top of the food chain. Favourite meal: scroaches. But it’s not choosy, and if we’re unlucky it’s just as apt to snack on us!”
12
OUT OF THE geode maze, Dev and Trundell crouched and scuttled along the tunnels. Trundell’s tracking device was giving out loud beeps at two-second intervals.
“Ooh, judging by the ping-back strength, it’s a big one,” the xeno-entomologist said. “Probably a female. They outweigh the males by a ratio of one-point-five to one, on average.”
“Less talking, more moving?” Dev suggested.
“It’s all right. We’re heading away from her.”
“Are we? Because those beeps sound to me like they’re getting closer together rather than further apart.”
“No. No.” Trundell squinted at the tracking device’s tiny floatscreen, which hovered just above the back of his wrist. “Well, maybe. But if we keep going this way, we should...”
Dead end.
“Oh. That isn’t... I must have got turned around. In all the confusion...”
“Spelunking down here for three months, he said. Tunnel rat, he said.”
“We should backtrack.”
“Really? You think?”
They returned to the junction where they had last made a turn. Trundell increased the gain on the tracking device’s scanner. A cross-section of branching tunnel architecture swept across the screen, routes indicated by dotted lines.
The beeps were now less than one second apart.
“It’s coming,” said Dev. He could feel a vibration underfoot, as though some heavy road vehicle were approaching. “Which way do we go?”
“I’m trying to work out the optimal course.”
“Then try a bit harder.”
“Don’t harass me! I’m flustered enough as it is.”
“Stop clucking. Focus.”
Trundell pointed a decisive finger. “Down there.”
“Okay.”
They set off, but hadn’t gone more than ten steps when a scroach came hurtling along the tunnel towards them. Both men pressed
themselves against the wall to let it pass.
“That one was certainly shifting,” Dev said.
“They can manage forty kph at full tilt. Faster than most people can sprint.”
“But I mean, why is it going that fast in the opposite direction if we’re supposed to be running away from the moleworm?”
“That is a good point.”
More scroaches charged towards them, hissing wildly, pincers waving. Dev thought of a shoal of fish fleeing a hungry dolphin.
“Yeah, I vote we follow them,” he said. “I trust their instinct for self-preservation over your machine.”
“Yes,” said Trundell, “I’m thinking that too.”
They about-faced and charged after the scroaches, Trundell in front. The beeps from the tracking device were at half-second intervals and getting faster. The whole tunnel was shaking.
“Aargh! This is killing my thighs,” the scientist panted, slowing down. “And my back.”
Dev himself was not enjoying having to run bent over. “Would you rather get caught by the moleworm?”
Trundell somehow found the energy to increase his pace again. That was just as well, because otherwise Dev might have shoved him aside, barged past and left him for dust.
They still weren’t going fast enough. The beeps were issuing from the tracking device as quickly as darts from a kinetic energy repeater gun, urgently insisting that the creature Dev and Trundell were trying to escape from was right on their very heels.
The ground behind Dev erupted.
Two sets of shovel-like claws broke through solid rock as though it was peanut brittle.
They swiftly dug out a hole large enough to admit a fleshy, many-tentacled thing that Dev mistook at first for some kind of large sea anemone. He realised almost immediately that it was in fact a nose, its tip bristling with prehensile feelers.
The feelers writhed as more and more of the beast emerged. Now a skinny, glistening snout. Now a circular, sphincter-like mouth, fringed with needle-thin teeth. Now two small primordial eyes, white as blisters.
With astonishing speed, the claws widened the hole, until the moleworm was able to slither its whole self through. It squirmed out into the open – long-bodied, hairless, loathsome.
It had four legs, all at the front, just behind the head. The two rear legs were a little longer than the two stumpy forelegs, meaning the clawed extremities at the ends – footlike hands, handlike feet – were all positioned next to one another.
The rest of the creature was tapering and serpentine, a cable of sinewy muscle that started as thick as a cow’s girth and narrowed to the diameter of a man’s arm. A combination of abdomen and tail, this section of the moleworm coiled and thrashed with an eagerness that spoke of soon-to-be-sated hunger. Predator had located prey.
Trundell was rooted to the spot, eyes bulging in terror.
Dev was only slightly less appalled, but he had the presence of mind to grab the xeno-entomologist by the scruff of the neck and bundle him along the tunnel, away from the moleworm.
The creature lolloped after them in pursuit, its puckered mouth opening and shutting, emitting ropey drool.
Dev noted that the moleworm seemed clumsy and hamstrung as it ran. Its limbs were not well co-ordinated and its tail added drag to its progress. The impression he had got from the tracking device was that it was much fleeter of foot than this. He and Trundell were managing to put distance between them and it.
It was, he deduced, a born burrower. Its physiology was designed for carving a passage through rock and earth. Out in the open, even in the relatively tight squeeze of this tunnel, it wasn’t anywhere near as efficient at propelling itself along.
Dev thought for a moment that he and Trundell were going to be able to outrun the moleworm after all.
The moleworm seemed to come to the same conclusion, for it dived headlong into the tunnel floor. Within moments it had excavated a deep hole for itself and was gone from sight.
Not from earshot, though. It rumbled along underneath them, at home in its natural milieu, easily keeping up.
“She can sense us,” Trundell gasped. “Those feelers on her nose are phenomenally sensitive organs. She can detect our footfalls with them, our breathing, the fear pheromones we’re giving off; our heartbeats, even.”
The ground beneath them cracked and split. Dev yanked Trundell backwards by the collar just as the moleworm launched itself up through the floor. Its clacking needle-teeth missed Trundell’s leg by millimetres.
“Sensitive, huh?” Dev said.
Before the creature could wriggle all the way up into the tunnel, he stamped on its nose. The ring of feelers squashed rubberily under his boot heel. A couple of them split open, jetting blood.
The moleworm screeched and shrank back into the hole.
Dev thrust Trundell across the gap, over the recoiling moleworm, then leapt too. They charged down the tunnel. Dev briefly entertained the hope that he had hurt the moleworm so badly that it would think twice about giving chase again.
But no, all he had done was piss it off and make it all the more determined to get them.
Once again it dived underground and burrowed along, matching the course of the tunnel with a brand new tunnel of its own.
Trundell was beginning to flag, wheezing hard for breath. One of his image intensification lenses had popped out, leaving him half-blind in the gloom.
Dev knew he would be better off without the scientist. He could go faster. He was more effective when he didn’t have to consider anyone’s welfare but his own.
He was sorely tempted to abandon Trundell, but he couldn’t do it. Blame his military background. You did not leave anyone behind, not if you could help it. That mantra had been drilled into him during basic training. Even the wounded, even the dying – you took them with you. Because one day the wounded or the dying might be you, and would you like it if your comrades just discarded you like so much waste?
Still, Trundell was becoming a lame duck, and lame ducks had a tendency to become sitting ducks.
If Dev and Trundell hadn’t stumbled across a stray scroach, it was debatable whether they would have got away from the moleworm unscathed.
The scroach was missing one of its pedipalps and several of its legs, no doubt the legacy of battles for mates or food that it had lost. It was limping along far behind the general exodus of scroaches, a straggler.
As the moleworm yet again ripped up through the tunnel floor ahead, Dev seized hold of the slowcoach scroach by the tip of its tail. He slung it forward, straight at the moleworm’s maw.
The scroach’s little legs flailed as it flew through the air, hissing in distress, and the moleworm caught it neatly with its snout feelers. It manipulated the insect round so that its sting was pointing downwards. Then it bit off the top segment of the tail and spat it aside.
The snout feelers enfolded the scroach tightly. The insect struggled in vain as the moleworm flipped it the other way up and chomped off its head.
Dev stood motionless, and made Trundell do the same, while the moleworm chewed the scroach’s head with evident satisfaction. Its teeth mashed ganglia and crunched chitin. The rest of the scroach twitched and spasmed, its nervous system still firing even after decapitation. Its truncated tail stabbed bluntly, uselessly, against the moleworm’s head.
“Will she – ?” Trundell began.
Dev put a finger to his lips.
The moleworm finished masticating and swallowed. Dev could see it weighing up the situation. One scroach in its clutches, two humans nearby. The proverbial bird in the hand versus two in the bush. Should it go after further prey or stick with the tasty morsel that had been so obligingly presented to it?
In the end it decided to cut its losses. The humans were elusive. One of them had caused it great pain. It had a scroach. That would do.
The moleworm withdrew into the hole with the scroach, which had by this stage figured out it was dead and had curled up into a ball. Dev heard and felt
the huge mammal drill down into the rock, taking its meal somewhere where it could eat in peace, unmolested.
“I’m beginning,” he said, “to really not like this planet.”
13
THE BAR WAS busy, but not packed. On a small stage, a three-piece guitar band shambled through ironic punky cover versions of Ante-Enlightenment church hymns.
Irreligiosity was still a big deal out on the fringe worlds. Back on Earth, people were over Enlightenment. The yoke of faith had been shucked; they’d had a hundred years to get used to the idea. It wasn’t something they much thought about any more. Old hat.
On planets like Alighieri, however, the party celebrating the final, absolute death of God was carrying on.
Dev carried two beers over to the booth where he and Trundell were sitting.
The xeno-entomologist picked up his bottle with an unsteady hand. He took a tentative sip, as though unable to recall what you were supposed to do with a beer. Then he upended the bottle and half emptied it in one go.
He looked across the table at Dev. “I guess I owe you my life. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be moleworm food right now.”
“It’s nothing. Buy the next round and we’re even.”
“I like to think my life has a higher exchange value than the price of a bottle of beer.”
“You go on thinking that.”
Trundell looked puzzled, until it slowly dawned on him that Dev was teasing. “The trouble is you’re too deadpan for me. I have difficulty telling when people are being funny or not. At school, other kids would make cruel remarks and I couldn’t work out if they were bullying or just doing that thing that friends do.”
“Banter.”
“Yeah. It was a confusing time. That’s why I like insects. Insects are logical. They have rules. Occasionally they break them, but mostly they abide by them and, if they don’t, they get killed and eaten. Insects make sense. People don’t.”
Dev performed a quick scan of Trundell’s face, concentrating on the eyes. It was more a reflex response than anything. He doubted very much that the xeno-entomologist was a Polis+ agent, but a statement about people not making sense was just the sort of thing an AI sentience might let slip in an unguarded moment.
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