Stardogs (40 page)

They ran, Shari carrying Otto. Spears and rocks flailed at them. And then they were in the open, running desperately for the broken corner. The Neanderthals ran too. Not after them but towards the forest margin, to cut them off. It never occurred to the locals that any creature would voluntarily run into the Pyramid. When they saw where the party was headed, they were astounded. The snake was still resident in Eden. No animal, no matter how alien, could be stupid enough to run in there, surely? The average Neanderthal outcast would not have hesitated to choose the desert, before venturing into that place. The Neanderthals were the most dangerous creatures outside… but inside, trapped inside by its bulk, was something worse. Far worse.

Panting and exhausted, bleeding and bruised, the little band of castaways reached the huge golden structure with profound relief.

“They’ve stopped chasing us at least.” Tanzo pointed back. “They’re all standing back there at the trees.”

“They probably regard this place as a holy temple or something.” Johannes panted, looking about. This part didn’t look very temple-like. Debris outside had plainly blown in and fragments of the shattered pyramid-stuff and pieces of twisted pylon also lay about.

Sam shook his head, trying to clear it. A rock had hit his ear back there. This place didn’t feel good.

“Stop shaking your head like that, Sam. You’re splattering blood on me.” Tanzo held his head still and examined the cut. “You’ll live, lover. Here, press this against it.” She handed him a folded strip torn from her petticoat.

From outside they heard ululation. “It sounds like they’re getting their courage up. We’d better move further in and find a defendable spot.”

Cautiously, through shattered chambers between twisted girders, they made their way deeper and deeper into the vast structure. Golden light streamed in and vegetation grew wildly, a mixture of types from various empire worlds. Yet there were no signs of animal life. It was not difficult going though. There were huge, wide smooth trails, twisting and turning but easy to follow through the various chambers. Now, further in, they found that they were on the bottom storey of the vast pyramid. Obviously there were many layers above this. They moved through an impact-shattered piece of wall into yet another chamber.

This was dryland. Scattered inkberry bushes, fruit laden, and tufts of turpentiny grass. Even the light changed. It was squinting bright in here. The trail in the sand was full of tiny ripples. Lila looked suspiciously at it. This place was agonizingly like home, but she’d never seen a track like that. Could it be that of some kind of alien vehicle? Her grip on the .22 pistol tightened.

They moved into yet another chamber. Now the light was distinctly green and muted. The plants that flourished here were purple-black of foliage. Martin Brettan peered at the odd-shaped frilly leaves, the coiled and twisted fronds. “I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this. This is no empire world’s vegetation, I’ll swear.”

“I must admit I have never seen anything like it either,” said Shari.

Juan’s Denaari knowledge drifted upward in a flood of images. “There were other places. Worlds explored but not on Stardog routes… maybe this was from one of those?”

“What gets me is that there aren’t any animals. The bushes back there were full of inkberry. Normally the jeroos strip them, even before most of the berries are ripe,” said Lila warily. “And what is this track?”

“What strikes me is that this Denaari installation is still functioning. Yes, it is damaged, but it is still functioning. Some of those trees outside must be hundreds of years old. Yet this place still has functioning light and water and nutrient control. The track, I suppose, is for some kind of maintenance vehicle,” said Tanzo peering at it.

“But it is so quiet in here. It worries me. Out there you could hear, well, birds and things. This place makes me uncomfortable.” Caro looked nervously around.

“Yeah. I don’t like this place,” said Sam. “What’s that noise now?”

It was a clicking, slithering sound, coming from where they’d been. “It must be those damn ape-men getting their courage up and coming after us. Quick. Let’s move on.”

There is a world orbiting a small reddish sun near Pleides. It is a rich, verdant world. Life is abundant here, and predation is fierce. The dominant predator is the frill-snake hydra. They get quite large, with an arm-length of, say, ninety feet or so. They don’t have determinate growth, so, if it was not for a seasonal infestation of blood-parasites they could go on growing forever. The parasites, by clogging arteries, slow blood-flow to the brain of the Hydra. That is not serious in the smaller, shorter-armed beasts. But the bigger ones are seriously slowed down by anoxia. The smaller ones never give anoxia a chance to kill the really big ones. Instead, as soon as the big ones slow down, the littler ones eat them.

Then, as winter comes, the parasites in the poikilothermic hydras become gonad-sacs, then burst and fill the frill-snake hydra’s blood with gametes. Fertilization in the sea of gametes is inevitable and the zo-oolites are excreted by the beasts, often onto the low frond-grass favoured by the polykapi, the grazer which are the favored food of the hydras. The parasites have their winter life-stage in the liver-kidney of the polykapi. The polykapi in turn return the parasites to the predators to complete the life cycle.

In summer polykapi don’t have parasites. In winter frill-snake Hydras don’t. The Denaari collectors had of course stocked the Bio-zoo with both Polykapi and Frill-snake hydra. Only they hadn’t collected them in the same hemisphere. The parasite never made it to the Denaari Eden, unfortunately. And the largest of the hydras, having eaten all its smaller compatriots, had just kept right on growing. The Bio-zoo provided living things with essential nutrients. But the hydra preferred live food. It had eaten everything animal in its domain, even the smallest, and most indigestible alien creature.

The barrel body-pod of the hydra was huge now. So big it was effectively jammed between the floor and the ceiling. The body-pod also now occupied most of the controlled environment cage. The hydra could never move from here. Only its forty-eight arm-heads could search the corridors and punch into cages in the Hydra’s unending quest for live food. The arm-heads were only seven hundred yards long. As yet there were a few controlled environment cages at the top of the Pyramid which it couldn’t get to, but the rest of the pyramid was within reach.

The paths they had followed were the squirm-tracks of the arm-heads as they slithered endlessly through the ruined bio-zoo, their sense-organ frills spread wide to detect even the faintest prey-sign. The arm-head slithered through what was left of the New Texas environment cage from which the Condor-harpies, diamondbacks and jeroos had escaped to help populate the outside world. It raised itself briefly, twitching the frill. Fourteen lifeforms. It could smell-taste even the rat in Juan’s pocket. A nerve-message went back to the body-pod. Other head-arms were pushed out, slithering along different routes to the chamber where the castaways were now.

Otto gave the alarm, making them turn in time to stop somebody being eaten.

“It’s a snake! The biggest snake in the world! That’s what these tracks are. Hell!” The hydra arm-head that had picked up the scent of their passage in the semi-desert of the New Oz room slithered slowly forward. Herding the prey, toward the other hastening arm-heads which were slithering at top speed toward the green-lit chamber.

The Dagger of the Goddess stared at the eyeless head. At the mouth full of three-pronged teeth. At the enormous flapping frill around it. The mouth must have been fully fifteen feet wide in its gape. What demon thing was this? Mark Albeer stood beside him and fired, straight into the gaping maw.

He might as well have patted the creature, for all the difference it made. The mouth was not a true mouth leading to a gastro-intestinal tract. That was back at the body-pod. The pseudo-mouth merely held prey and crushed them. Many of the hydra’s natural prey animals had been armoured with spikes and spines. The pseudo mouth was surrounded with a thick, tough gristle-layer. In a hydra this large that was nearly three feet thick, and there was nothing vital behind that anyway.

Lila’s hands shook hopelessly. Her shot hit the frill. And the arm-head writhed and pulled back. Even the body-pod reacted. It had not felt such pain for a thousand years. It sent another three arms slithering along to the body of the injured one to back it up. When the questing head began to come forward again, it was cautiously.

“That frill,” shouted Shari. “That must be its eyes.” Actually the frill was a great deal more, but it wasn’t a bad guess.

The Dagger of the Goddess ran and sprang, as the great maw shot forward. Somehow he managed to get onto the snake-neck, behind the frill. He clung with his legs and stabbed with a long wavy-bladed knife in each hand. The scales were diamond hard, so he slashed at the frill. The arm-head went wild as its senses were slashed away, rearing up and twisting and tossing itself into a furious and desperate arc, trying to reach its attacker. No rodeo rider could have hoped to stay on for more than a few seconds. The man in grey somehow managed to cling for yet another desperate slash, before he was flung away like a piece of spume in a storm-wind. Had he hit anything hard Deo would have died, broken. Instead he landed in masses of dark-purple coils of sponge-fronds. Damage was still enough to drive the nano-surgeon within nearly frantic.

The pseudo-mouth could not scream in agony. But the enraged bellow that erupted from body-pod was so loud that even the ululating Neanderthals, nearly a mile and half away, were stilled. The now sensorially stripped arm-head backed away hastily, the mouth threatening vaguely in the wrong direction.

“Deo!” Shari scrambled through the thick undergrowth, to where he lay. The holy assassin sat up, looking dazed. He put the one knife he still held away, without ceremony, and looked for the other, swaying. Shari saw it. Knowing how sharp it was she carefully picked it up by the hilt and gave it to him. A coin-sized piece was sheared out of the finest folded Damascus steel. The man was horrified. His right forearm was also obviously broken but, by comparison, he seemed unconcerned by this. He allowed Shari to put the arm into a crude sling. She winced, seeing the odd angle of the arm and the limpness of the fingers.

Several of the others had also run to help, and between Shari and Mark Albeer they got Deo back on his feet and back to the wide trail.

“Oh God! There are three more of them!” shouted Kadar, who had been staring down the trail of the retreating head-arm. He was right. Three more ‘snakes’ were nosing their way forward, one on the trail, and the others cracking their way through the underbrush.

“Come on! The other way!”

They fled. “Up!” shouted Sam. “We must go up!” They hurried through another hydra-punched hole and into a dry savannah landscape, complete with Erzulie’s famous porcupine trees. And another ‘snake’. Martin Brettan wrenched off one of the long, straight spine-branches, and ran at the open mouthed monster. He didn’t try to spear it with the razor tip of the porcupine-tree branch. Instead he belaboured the frill with it.

It reared away and struck at him. He dodged back. Several of the others had grabbed branches by this time, and they joined him beating at the frill. The hydra roared again and pulled back. But they had scant time to celebrate their victory. The three arm-heads from the previous chamber were catching up. They tried assaulting the frills of these ones too, but the three defended each other.

“Hurry!” shouted Caro. “That one that Martin hit is coming back with some others.” They fled again, deeper into the pyramid. Dodging the questing frill-snake arms they found a spiral ramp. Up they went, panting, hitting out at the frills of the snaky heads pursuing them, pausing briefly to try to defend a level, beating at the heads of the fifteen arm-heads now after them. Then another ‘snake’ appeared, already on that level. They were forced upward again.

Frill-Snake Hydras are not very intelligent. But even the stupidest predator could have understood that the prey was heading for the one part of the pyramid it could not quite reach. Arm-heads were sent squiggling up through smashed ceilings to block the cargo-ramp access to the uppermost level. Nineteen of them waited at the up-ramp mouth when the castaways struggled up onto the platform of the second to highest level. They fled into the Prala V equatorial Taiga. The Hydra didn’t like this level much. This level was cold-worlds. Thermo-control still worked partially and the cold slowed the arm-heads. But at least here it could hunt down the prey at its leisure.