He was met by blank looks.
“Kwango, come to the point,” said Conrad wearily. “We have no time for bumper fun book stuff.”
“Then you should make time, Commander, sir. The brain needs to be exercised as well as the body. A Chinese football team has twenty-two yellow legs and two wings. See? Something you wouldn’t think of.”
“Oh, my God!” said Liz James.
Kwango was enjoying himself. “Now, I solve your mystery. The noise we made coming down out of the sky and then setting up this so-called security perimeter drove away all the big intelligent creatures. Except the ones that couldn’t afford to migrate because they had built themselves a nice air-conditioned home which, for the sake of convenience, I now call Mount Conrad.
“Your hill, Commander, is the nest of a colony of nocturnal, omnivorous snake-like creatures. The computer and me both agree that, fully grown, they are some three metres in diameter at the widest point, that they are about ninety metres long, that they have a capability of moving rapidly—say fifty kilometres an hour flat out, that they each weigh approximately three hundred tons Earth norm, and that they are not very nice people. Message ends.”
There was silence. Everyone looked at Kurt Kwango.
Lou Andreas said: “Kwango, you are full of crap.”
Liz James said carefully: “It is just possible. But it is one hell of a leap into the dark.”
Chantana Le Gros smiled. “Mr. Kwango has had his fun. Quite entertaining. Personally, I enjoyed the performance.”
“It fits,” said Conrad heavily. “By Jesus, it fits… It’s a tall one but—has anyone else got a more sensible offer?”
No one had.
“Then let’s hit the sack. It has been a long day. Tomorrow, we will try to find out whether Kurt’s twenty-two yellow legs and two wings really belong to a Chinese football team.”
Conrad slept badly. He had nightmares. Oddly, they were not about a hill full of super-colossal snakes.
They were about a doomed ship falling into the sun. About the men who had lost their lives, trying to take off her crew. About a smashed and withered arm. About an eye that had virtually melted in its socket when the phototropic visor of Conrad’s space-suit had packed up. About the intolerable torrent of radiation that poured out from that vast globe of an atomic furnace that was trying to suck two space ships into its fiery heart.
In the middle of the night, there were other nightmares. But these were for real. Because they happened when Matthew hit the general alarm button on the nav deck. Conrad didn’t wait for verbal explanation on the intercom. He shook the sleep out of his one normal eye and the other nightmare out of his head, and rushed— half naked—up to the nav deck.
Lieutenant Smith had beaten him to it. She, too, was half-naked, her prosthetic legs looking like chiselled marble beneath her short night-tunic.
The party was almost over. Two of the searchlights had already been knocked out. The great roars and thuds that came over the audio were sickening, awe-inspiring, terrifying—as were the great indistinct shapes that threshed about on the perimeter, shaking the ground and even the Santa Maria herself.
Conrad stared, fascinated, at the screens. Matthew was giving an appreciation in his cold, logical way, of the events as they occurred. But, somehow, the words did not register. It didn’t matter. Conrad could get the playback—verbatim—later. All that mattered now was what was happening on the screens.
He saw monstrous serpentine shapes, threshing about on the perimeter. A beam of light caught one as it reared, showing the glistening, fantastic and segmented body. Another shattering roar, then the third searchlight died. The remaining one swept to and fro crazily as if it was being held by a drunkard. Its beam showed briefly a dreadful head, decapitated by the wires and nylon ropes of the defence system.
The face—if you could call it that—was fully two metres hi diameter. The mouth, wide open, was a black chasm—large enough to take in four men side by side. The seven eyes—if they were eyes—were spaced at regular intervals in a half-moon shape close over the thick, top, obscene lip of the cavernous mouth. They reflected the searchlight beam, shining briefly like grotesque stars.
There was yet another great roar, and the last searchlight was smashed.
Lieutenant Smith sank on her haunches, retching. By then the rest of the team had arrived on the nav deck. Kwango, the rapist, the brilliant ecologist, knelt by Lieutenant Smith, stroked her back, held her gently as she vomited.
Conrad wiped the sweat from his forehead.
“Ladies and gents,” he said, as calmly as he could, “we have now discovered the nature of the opposition. It is a great step forward.”
Chantana Le Gros laughed. “It seems more like a great step backwards. Why didn’t we pull out while the going is good and declare the planet unfit for colonisation?”
“Because we are Expendables,” said Conrad with sudden ferocity. “Because it is our job to prove this planet one way or the other, not to get the shit scared out of us by things that go bump in the night. Because it cost a billion solars to put us here. That money—as Lieutenant Smith will be the first to tell you—could have been’ spent on land reclamation projects, on schools, hospitals, hydroponics farms for a worn-out planet that has too many people. But U.N. chose to gamble on us and on the possibility of a new world. There are Indian, Chinese, South American children now dying of starvation because of the billion solars it took to get us to Kratos. You want them to die for no reason? I don’t… We are all social trash, one way or another. So it doesn’t really matter a damn whether we live or die. Except that on the other side of the sky there are people who backed us, gave us what we needed, and are now waiting patiently for results. We are going to give them the results—at least, the survivors are. O.K.?”
“O.K. Commander.” It was Lou Andreas who spoke. He gave a faint smile. “It was a great commercial. I’m sold on the packaging. Personally, I think we are now going to have to concentrate on the exo-training.”
“Great minds think alike,” said Conrad drily.
“Commander, I appeal on de grounds of racial discrimination,” said Kwango in his best Uncle Tom voice. “It appears I’m still carrying de white man’s burden.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Kurt grinned. “You white trash only got to face de prospect of dying once. For dis pore, ignorant black man, it’s de second time around.”
Suddenly, the tension broke. And everyone was laughing.
Stage Two The Secrets of Kratos
PHASE ONE Investigation: Death’s Head
Conrad went out at first light. He took Andreas and Batista with him. They wore heavy, armoured jackets. They carried laser rifles. Among other things, they were looking for the robot John, who had been patrolling the perimeter, also armed with a laser rifle, during the attack.
Throughout the rest of the night, no one had slept. Batista had spent some of the time arming half a dozen of his favourite toys—cold nitro bombs. They were vacuum insulated steel spheres containing solid nitro-glycerine. The arming device was his own invention. Set the electronic fuse timing, throw the bomb; and, after the required interval, instant heat would be applied to the nitro-glycerine. Bang!
Batista’s speciality was not needed. The attackers had gone. But they had left behind them trails of devastation, one certain casualty, and one robot literally flattened into the ground.
John’s duralumin-clad control centre had been crushed as if it were silver paper. His steel limbs were distorted. He lay in a rut that was fully two metres deep.
“Where the hell is his laser?” said Conrad. It could not be found; maybe it was under him.
“These creatures play real rough,” said Andreas. “They can make one hell of a mess of expensive equipment.”
Batista fingered one of his cold nitro bombs lovingly. “I wish one would show its ugly head just now. I’d like to see how it reacts to a half-litre of nitro.”
“A head, we already have,” observed Conrad, pointing to the grotesque and horrifying thing that lay tangled in the wreckage of the perimeter wire. “I wonder what happened to the rest of the body? Did its friends somehow drag it away, or did they eat it? It’s a pity the searchlights were put out so soon… Well, thank goodness we haven’t had any breakfast yet. Let’s go take a close look, gentlemen. I’m not surprised Lieutenant Smith threw up. Even from here, it looks god-awful.”
From close up, the head was worse than horrific. It was obscene, repulsive in a way that could not be defined.
The mouth, frozen in the rictus of death, had thick grey lips that looked as if they were made of foamed latex. They were covered in a very regular fashion with pustules—or were they suckers? Suckers that might clamp on to prey struggling to escape. The lips, more than thirty centimetres thick, seemed fixed in a wide and horrible grin, as if the creature had died laughing. There were no teeth in the mouth. Evidently, the creature did not need to masticate. But there were four tight coils of muscular tissue. One at each side of the orifice, one centred on the top jaw and one centred on the bottom. Tongues or some kind of tentacles? Conrad surmised that they might have a function similar to the tentacles of an octopus or squid. Perhaps they could flash out, snatch the prey and draw it to the suckers on the lips, where the unfortunate creature would be stuck prior to being swallowed whole.
“This bloody thing is segmented!” exclaimed Batista.
Conrad, who had been concentrating on the “face”, took a look at the tissue behind the head, where the wires had cut into it, and where something had pulled the rest of the body away.
“It’s like a worm,” Conrad managed to say. Bile rose into his mouth. He tried very hard not to be sick. He succeeded, temporarily. “Apart from the face, it’s like a king-size earthworm.”
“Commander,” said Andreas, “those things over the top lip are definitely eyes, Goddamit, this critter has got to be the most shit-awful thing that ever existed.”
Also it stank. And the gaping wound where the head had been torn from the body oozed. Gobbets of brown semi-solid body matter, covered with a mass of slime and mucus, still tumbled out from the already rotting head.
Conrad forced himself to step over the tangle of perimeter wire and go behind the dreadful thing. And look.
He was utterly appalled at what he saw. The four metres of head section was almost hollow. The mass on the ground was only a small portion of the flesh that should have been there. The rest had been gouged out, presumably devoured.
“The problem of the missing body has been solved,” he said unsteadily. “They didn’t drag it away. They ate it.”
Then he lost the battle with his stomach and began to vomit. Andreas and Batista were wise enough to leave him alone, to look the other way.
After he had stopped retching, Andreas said gently: “Look, skipper. This damn thing is getting me. I don’t feel too good. Why don’t we go back to the Santa Maria and get ourselves some strong black coffee? Batista ain’t too happy, either—are you, Fidel?”
Fidel Batista laughed grimly. “That, my friend, is some understatement. I, personally, would like to scream somewhat. I am prevented only by the fact that I represent the people of Cuba in this terrible place.”
When he had finished being sick, Conrad said: “O.K. I take the point. You are being kind, and I appreciate it. Now, come over here and see what I have seen.”
Batista was sick first. He beat Andreas by all of two seconds.
“Now, you know,” said Conrad tranquilly. “Now, we’ll go get that coffee.”
Aboard the Santa Maria, their spirits recovered somewhat. But when one of the robots brought Andreas his favourite breakfast of ham and eggs he had to rush from the saloon. Conrad and Batista were wiser. Their breakfast consisted entirely of black coffee.
The others joined them in the saloon. Surprisingly, Lieutenant Smith ate well. So did Kwango. But Chantana Le Gros and Liz James stuck with coffee and toast.
After breakfast, Conrad held a brief council of war.. All the Expendables were present, as was Matthew.
Conrad wasted no time. “Kurt was right about the nature of the opposition. Give the man a cigar. But as of now, we must stop thinking of these creatures in Earth-terms. Snake-like, wormlike—it doesn’t bloody matter. They are simply big, fast moving creatures that appear to have great strength and every repulsive characteristic in the book. There are two major questions to be answered. The first is: are they a common species or a rare one? Were we just plain unlucky touching down near one of their nests, or would we have encountered them if we had touched down anywhere on Continent B? If they are as rare as the elephants—or whales —of Terra, we have a chance of licking them. If they are as common as rabbits in Australia, we might as well wrap it up with a negative report on colonisation potential.”
“Unless,” said Kwango, “we can combat them with a kind of myxomatosis, as with the Australian rabbits.”
“A possibility,” agreed Conrad, “but a long-range one. We don’t have the resources or the time to develop synthetic diseases. Though that need not stop us trying. The value of such a project will have to be determined by the experts, Le Gros and James. Anyway, a priority task is to determine how abundant these creatures are.”
“I can tell you now that they are not very abundant,” said Kurt Kwango authoritatively. “To support a mass of three hundred tons, those bastards need a hell of a lot of food—proteins, carbohydrates, fats.”
“You said they are omnivorous.”
Kwango shrugged. “Also, it seems, cannibalistic— which proves that they need a lot of food.”
Conrad cleared his throat. “We can answer the first question by simple survey. I will take the chopper, Lieutenant Smith will take the hovercar. And we will both survey a block of one million square kilometres. The incidence of nests—or hives or whatever—should give the computer enough data to provide extrapolations. That’s fairly easy, routine. To answer the second question is going to be more difficult. I want to know if these creatures are intelligent. There are two ways to find out; by observing the living and analysing the dead. We don’t have any living specimens just now— thank God—but there’s a fragment of dead horror down in our own backyard. James and Le Gros, find out as much as you can from it.” He gave a thin smile. “I ought to warn you. It won’t be nice. I recommend you use the sealed clothing and bottled air we have for inspection of the hot deck. I recommend also that you follow decontamination procedure afterwards.”
“Don’t worry, Commander,” said Liz James. “We won’t be sick—provided we can use a couple of robots.”
“I see… I have only four robots left—which is one hell of a wastage, considering how long we have been here. I was planning to use all four to help build a new defence system. How long would you need the robots for?”
“Two hours, maybe three.”
“You can have one robot for three hours. Matthew assign one of your brethren to assist Miss James and Miss Le Gros.”
“Query term brethren, sir?”
“Cancel bloody term,” snapped Conrad. “Execute!”
“Decision noted, sir. Execution proceeds. Mark assigned. Unless orders are countermanded, he will now prepare two suits, sealed clothing, two bottles oxygen-nitrogen standard Earth ratio.”
Conrad ignored him. “How do you feel, Kwango?”
Kwango grinned. “Bloody O.K. Commander, sir. / ate a good breakfast. Want me to tell you about it?”
“Spare me the details, funny man. You have work to do.” He turned to Lou Andreas. “Think you can train this black genius to use an exo-skeleton in a couple of hours?”
Andreas scratched his head. “Don’t rightly know, Boss. I met these genius types before.” He grinned. “Shit-hot when it comes to the big think, but on the practical matters of life, they are just like babies.”
Conrad was in no mood for further banter. “Do it,” he said. “Because you and her and the robots have a p
articularly important assignment. You are going to build a stockade where the perimeter fence used to be. You are going to make it impregnable, so that if we get another visitation from those bastard things, they will do themselves considerable injury trying—and failing —to get through. They are big enough and tough enough to wreck the torus of the Santa Maria. If they are allowed to do that, we’ve had it.”
“Where do we get the materials?”
“About two kilometres south of here, there is a large patch of tall trees with straight, slender trunks. From the air, they look almost like Terrain pine trees. Anyway, that is your source of materials. Using the exo-skeletons, you should be able to pluck them like daisies. You will give the trunks sharp points and drive them into the ground at an outward angle of, say, sixty degrees. If you make the stockade about three metres high, and those worms or snakes or whatever try to slither over it, their own weight will cause them to impale themselves. Right?”
“Right,” agreed Andreas. He sighed. “But that is going to be one hell of a job.”
“You didn’t come to Kratos for a rest cure,” said Conrad. “You came because you volunteered for hazardous duty, and you were chosen because you are socially expendable… O.K. We all have our assignments. Let’s move.”
Conrad’s aerial survey revealed the existence of six more dome-shaped hills in the block of one million square kilometres. They all had the same characteristics as the first he had found, and they were almost identical in size. The survey took two and a half days. Lieutenant Smith confirmed his findings and also made another interesting discovery. She found one of the creatures whole and dead. There was no mark upon it, no apparent reason for its death. She measured it, took photographs and samples from each segment of its fantastic body. These, together with the investigations carried out by James and Le Gros, yielded much-needed information about what the Expendables came to call the death worms.
The Deathworms of Kratos [The Expendables 1] Page 8