Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (22 page)

Mary
crawled up through the opening in slow motion. Her limbs were stiff, and she
felt old and beaten. It was a common aftermath of having your body utterly
exploited. The sound, the din of groaning voices, persisted this time. It was
like a macabre song stuck in her head; and try as she might, she couldn’t shake
it. When she saw Bailey curled up and sleeping in the nest, a note of brief joy
drifted like a white wisp up out of the bedlam, then died as the dark groans
overtook it from below.

The dead
man lying on the clothes had been particularly depressing. He’d been so
handsome and there had been a sensitivity behind his dark eyes that shone
through even in death. He obviously couldn’t take the shock of capture and
being processed. She’d seen it before.

She
wanted to lie down next to Bailey and forget what she’d been through. She
wanted something to somehow make it vanish, disappear completely from her
memory. If she could have anything, it would be that single, simple thing.

She lay
down and felt herself draw slowly up into a knot. It was an automatic response
and unstoppable once it started. Her knees came up and her arms wrapped around
them and tightened. With the strength of her will, she forced out the sounds of
pain and the wrenching, twisting feel of grubs deep in her loins. She erased
the alien’s hideous countenance and thin, nimble fingers. She obliterated the
biotic tools and their clever, cruel shapes. Slowly, surely, she erased the
chamber’s black ceiling from her mind in broad sweeps.

Before
she drifted into the sanctuary of sleep, she felt Bailey’s comforting hand
rest easily on her shoulder. She sensed a hesitation; but a moment later, she
felt the warmth of Bailey’s legs against her own as Bailey drew up around her,
returning the solace Mary had given Bailey after her first cycle.

She slept and dreamt of nothing at all.

*
 
*
 
*

The
virulent sound of wasp wings crashed through the walls of sleep and set off
alarms of panic in Mary and Bailey. They jerked awake, squealing and rolling
under the power of the now all-too-familiar sound.

“Where is it!”
Bailey screamed, slapping at her
hair.

The sound
in the chamber was nearly omnidirectional and Mary tried to locate it by sight,
looking frantically everywhere at once.

“There!”
she yelled, finding it and pointing it out.

They
moved as far from it as possible, to a point against the curved wall of the
chamber. Looking for a weapon, Mary darted back up to the nest, grabbed one of
her athletic shoes and scooted back.

“What
happens if it stings us? Stings us now. Here” Bailey asked.

Mary’s
mind filled with the thoughts of being stung and impregnated by the wasp
without benefit of the alien’s surgical skill to remove its progeny. All she
could manage was, “Quiet!”

It would
have to sting and paralyze them both before it could get on with the business
of laying eggs in them. But the goddamned things were so fast and they seemed
to know exactly what you were going to do next and dodged your every move. Mary
knew it was possible for it to get them both. She raised the shoe up to the
ready and waited and tried to think of what to do. Their only chance was to get
the others down here and hope that one of them could kill it before it stung
everybody in the tube. There was strength in numbers. Maybe they could
overwhelm its uncanny dodging with enough hands and shoes aimed at it.

The wasp
sniffed the air with its antennae and almost all the scent was the same. But it
detected a few molecules of just-right scent and turned and swooped back and
forth to gain its direction.

Mary had
seen many wasps in that pre-attack mode.
“Scream!”
she yelled. “Scream your head off!”

Before
they could get the screams out, the wasp had taken a dozen samples of the air
around it and locked onto the right scent as surely as a fighter pilot could
lock onto a target with radar. It changed the angle of those buzzing wings and
flashed out the chamber’s opening.

Bailey
turned her scream into a breathy, “It’s gone!”

Mary just
let her breath out with a long sigh.

Bailey
pulled the husk of the pupa’s casing out by the nylon cord and looked at it.

“Oh, my
god . . .” she said.

“What the
hell is that?!”

“Phil
gave it to me . . . he said it was dead!”

The wasp
dove into the strong stream of just-right scent in the tube and veered one way
and felt the scent weaken. It turned then and flashed along in another
direction. Swooping back and forth in wide sweeps to stay on track, it waited
for the weakening in the scent that would signal a change in direction. The
signal came as it flew past the opening of the chamber of Pui Tamguma and his brother
James. The wasp veered and turned back and feeling the strongest scent closest
to the chamber opening, it darted through it.

Once
inside, the wasp stopped and hovered in a uniform cloud of prey-scent. Sight
now pointed out the target.

It had found
its prey in still air, from chamber to chamber, in about six seconds.

“What
now?” Bailey asked.

“We have
to warn the others.”

Mary
moved cautiously to the chamber opening and looked right, left, up and down.
She stepped into the tube, shoe raised and ready. She looked down the tube and
saw nothing, heard nothing.

“I think
it’s gone into one of the holes,” she said.

All we
can do
, she thought,
is to
wait for the scream.

Pui
Tamguma was sitting and praying for the safe return of his brother from the torture
chambers of the aliens when he heard the wasp fly in. He saw it instantly and
tried to uncross his legs to get away. The wasp dashed down and struck him in
the neck before he could move his head and Pui felt the familiar numbness from
the sting spread to his voice, silencing it. He tried to get up and the wasp
hit him again in the chest and it felt like he’d been hit with a rock. He tried
to make it to the opening, but fell face-first just a step or two from where he
started. The last thing he felt was the wasp crawling up the back of his bare
leg before that, too, lost all feeling.

“Phil!”
Mary called. Phil was out of his chamber before Mary got there and met her in
the tube.

“There’s
a wasp loose in the tube! It’s in one of the holes!”

Phil
quickly put two and two together.

 
“The pupa?”

“It must
have hatched out,” Mary said.

“Christ!”
he said.

“It flew
out of our hole and that’s when I lost it. It’s in here somewhere.”

Phil
looked around and thought. “Everybody out!” he bellowed. “Get out! There’s a
wasp in the tube! Everybody out!”

He had to
get them out of the chambers and into one area, one cluster. Isolated, any of
them were targets. He moved rapidly, yelling at the top of his lungs. People
scrabbled out like panicky rodents, looking everywhere. Some covered their
heads and bodies with their bedclothes for protection. Ned bunched them all up
in the middle of the tube.

“Is that
everyone?” Phil called out to Ned.

Ned
looked back over the covered heads at Phil and threw up his arms.

“I think
so!”

“Check
the holes at your end!” he shouted, then turned to Mary. “You check this end.”

Ned
walked down the tube peering cautiously into the chambers like a cop looking in
parked cars. The third one he came to was Pui Tamguma’s. He was lying face down
with his head turned toward the opening. The open eyes and blank stare told the
whole story. As he watched, Ned could see a small shape moving along Pui’s
back, under his blue and white striped t-shirt.

“It’s in
here!” he called.

Phil
worked his way through the knot of people. They’d grouped together out of
instinct and were some distance from Pui’s chamber, but they began to creep
even further from it, like sheep drifting away from a herding dog.

“It’s in
there all right. I saw it under his shirt,” Ned said to Phil.

Phil
moved up close and looked in. The wasp, its abdomen pointed straight down, was
visible on Pui’s neck.

“That’s
it for him,” Phil said.

“While
its got its stinger in him, I think I could get in there and kill it,” Ned
said.

Phil
considered it. The wasp was preoccupied, distracted in fact, but there was no
way to tell for sure. It might have them in its sights right now.

“I’ll do
it,” Phil said. “I need something to whack it with.”

When Mary
came up, Phil reached over and took the shoe out of her hand. Mary looked
puzzled.

“You’re
going in there? Are you nuts?”

“We have
to kill it.”

“Why
don’t we just seal off the opening with a sheet— keep it contained.”

“To hell
with that. I don’t want to worry about the goddamned thing getting out somehow.
Besides, they might find it. We can’t risk that.”

Mary
thought about it.

“So?” she
asked.

“We don’t
want them to know we know how to move around. They might tighten security, or
just kill us,” Ned added.

There was
no telling what they might use them for if they thought they were a threat or a
danger. Phil was right.

“Go kill it,” she said. “But what are we going to do about Pui?”

“I’m not
sure yet. We’ll have to figure that out later,” Phil said and moved up closer to
the hole. “Why don’t you two step back? Give yourselves some distance.”

Mary and
Ned moved away. Phil moved cautiously to the opening and put one foot up into
the hole. The wasp was off Pui’s neck and was now on the back of his leg, its
butt pointed down. Phil moved slowly to within striking distance and raised the
shoe. In a blink, the wasp drew its ovipositor out of Pui’s leg and launched
itself into the air. It flew up into Phil’s face and began to swoop back and
forth just inches away. Phil froze and could feel the breeze from its buzzing
wings against his skin. The angles weren’t right. It was too close to him to
get any force with a downward hit without changing position first.
No way.

Without
warning, the wasp dashed back to Pui’s bare leg, turned in a quick circle,
raised its ovipositor and sunk it deep. Phil didn’t bother to question why the
wasp didn’t attack him. He brought the running shoe down on it with such
ferocity that its juice splashed out in all directions as if he’d hit an
overripe plum. There was no telling what he’d driven into Pui’s body down
through the hollow needle of the wasp’s ovipositor, but that particular
injection was the least of Pui’s problems. The whack had been so fierce it left
a clear print of the shoe’s tread pattern on the leg.

“Did you
get it?” Ned asked from the opening.

Phil
looked at the remains of the wasp stuck to the bottom of the shoe. “Yeah. I got
it.”

Phil
stepped out of the hole and handed the shoe back to Mary. Mary held the shoe up
close to her face and examined the remains, then picked at its parts with the
nail of her index finger. “I’ve never seen a dead one,” she said. “These must
be the eggs. They must be self-fertilizing. The damn things are probably born
pregnant.”

Phil and
Ned leaned over and looked. Mary had substituted her index finger for the
precision of her little finger and had pointed its nail at a gooey mass of what
looked like pinhead-sized yellow eggs down in the shoe’s tread.

“It’s an
alien species,” Phil said. “Anything’s possible— just look around you.”

As if on
cue, Gilbert walked up, Bible in hand.

He pushed
his glasses up on his nose then wiped the corners of his mouth with his thumb
and middle finger. He looked at Mary who ignored him.

“Did you
bring it in?” he asked Phil as he indicated the mashed insect on the shoe with
a nod. “That wasp?”

“That’s
right.”

“And
there are more of them somewhere?”

“Right.
Millions,” Phil said.

“Are they
yours to steal?”

The
question rankled and Phil felt his anger rise up like an old and vicious dog.
It wasn’t the way he said it, but the fact that he said it at all that angered.

Phil
grabbed the dog’s collar and held on tight.

It was a
completely twisted kind of question. Phil searched for any value in it and
found not a farthing. It was devoid of meaning. He felt the dog pull hard. It
was a pointless question, filled with lame morality. The more Phil thought
about it, the less firm his grip on the dog’s collar became. A deep growl resonated
noiselessly in the air.