Stardogs (41 page)

The view from the top is inevitably of a higher place. The view from the bottom is inevitably of whoever is on top, which is all right if you happen to like them.

The Indigo Kama Sutra.

Several hundred yards from the up-ramp in a small clearing dotted with tiny ice-flowers they stopped, more from exhaustion than for any other reason. “Do you think,” pant, pant, “we’re safe here?” Johannes was not the only one of the party stumbling with exhaustion and hunger, but he was one of the worst off. His laziness, and the unfitness that had resulted from this, were destroying him.

Lila was still too breathless to speak at this stage. She shook her head, and pointed down. The trail they’d run down through the thickets of praspruce trees was plainly a snake’s one.

“We’re doomed!” Kadar lamented.

“Oh shut up, you fuckin’ streak of misery,” said Sam. “Look Capo. The only safe place is up.”

“How do you know, Yak?” snapped Martin Brettan.

“It’s obvious, you idiot,” Tanzo replied for him, her steel showing. “Why else do you think the creatures were trying to stop us going up there?”

Caro shivered and leaned against the bodyguard. The bodyguard’s stolid brain ticked over as he put an arm around her. “You mean,” he said slowly, “the environment up there might be something that the snakes can’t deal with?”

“Probably too hot. Or if they’re like any other snakes, too cold.”

“If it is going to be colder I could use a fire. My feet are freezing,” said Caro snuggling closer.

Juan snapped his fingers. He still had Una’s arm round his shoulders. He’d staggered, and nearly fallen in one of their closer encounters. She’d rushed in and lifted him. She’d hung on to him. She was used to being scared, but somehow the Prala V environment disturbed her deeply. “That’s it! Fire! Um… In a vid I watched… The Revenge of the Mutant Kandrags… the hero fought the monsters off these with burning sticks.”

“This isn’t exactly a vid-nasty… but it is worth trying. Anything’s worth trying at this stage,” said Shari grimly. “Come on everybody. Gather some dry stuff. It’s no use just standing and waiting for the snakes.”

The under branches of Praspruce are sheltered by the conical layers above them. There was an abundant supply of dry twigs and needle-leaves there. Praspruce has a high resin content. It burns easily, with hot and smoky eagerness. Martin wasn’t able to light the bonfire pile however, as his lighter was conspicuous by its absence. A search of Mark Albeer’s pack revealed that the pipe-soldering torch was missing. It was fairly obvious who had taken them, if too late to do anything more than wish stomach aches on the Neanderthals who ate Jarian. Fortunately, Deo was able to light the pile of twigs when Shari asked him. It apparently had not occurred to him to offer.

The heat-sensors cells in the frill detected the fire from a quarter of a mile off. Excitement as well as predatory hunger flared in the small mind of the hydra. The head-arm didn’t pause, or attack with the degree of caution it had previously displayed. Instead it struck with all the eagerness that the super-attractor called for. The fire was gone in a gulp, leaving Mark Albeer immensely relieved that the bunch of twigs he’d been trying to make a torch from had gone out.

The snake-creature did not appear at all distressed by having eaten the fire. It didn’t appear damaged either. In fact there was considerable damage, but the lining of the pseudo-mouth had no nerve endings. Instead the frill-snake head calmly slithered back, to go and deposit a pile of burnt sticks in the ground-floor maw of the hydra body-pod.

The party stood stunned, looking at where their fire had been. Tanzo’s quick mind was the first to assimilate what had happened and see in it a way to get past the blockade of snakes at the up-ramp. “We’ll draw them out with fires. They’d rather attack fires than us. There are about thirty of them… so far. If we make a whole lot of little fires we can make for the ramp.”

They’d done it. And it had worked. But if only the Denaari had been less efficient in organizing fire-prevention. They were all soaked to the skin. The other thing, thought Shari, as she shivered, that she could use besides dry clothes, a good meal and a safely anonymous existence on a distant planet, was some ear plugs. The body-pod of the frill-snake hydra was expressing its anger at being fed piles of charred sticks, and its frustration at being unable to reach its prey in terrible howls and bellows. The ramp was blocked solidly with snake-heads, opening and closing mouths full of wicked teeth. There seemed to be some that were burned quite badly. But there were still forty of them. At least they came no further.

Compared to the immense ground floor the top level of the pyramid was tiny, a mere forty thousand square yards. The envirocages here were still intact, and populated with creatures from various Denaari-colonized worlds. The transparent walls were obviously some kind of one-way glasslike substance. The animals appeared ignorant of being observed by non-Denaari invaders. As yet they’d found no way into any of the cages. The food they could see contained within was as unreachable as if it had been on the moon.

They eventually found an access to the outside, a huge sliding panel where the flying Denaari must have entered the Bio-zoo. Below them they could see the forest-choked valley, tiny fields, the towering mountains and the distant desert all trailed with the long shadows of evening. Looking up at the distant mountains, Shari saw how the last of the sunlight briefly caught a thin razor-slash line from the red-trimmed mountains up into the purple darkness.

Central had settled on using three cargo transports. The animals were rather dim for the job. One was loaded with such medical repair beasts as Central’s cold vaults still had in store. The other two had missiles and energy projectors hastily fitted. All had direct-link auxiliary biocomp units roughly cobbled onto the huge cargo-lifters’ thought-centers. It had been two hours since Central had finally become aware of the castaways. The transmissions from Rat had come from some distance away from the bio-zoo then. Now they appeared to be right inside it.

While the cargo-transports were in their laboriously slow flight across the mountains Central accessed the file-records from the Bio-zoo. Central was not competent to understand why the records made it uncomfortable. It didn’t really understand guilt. It determined that when this mess was sorted out the stupid little Bio-zoo could have at least some of the resources it asked for. If the Bio-zoo still existed then: Central was seriously weighing up the proposal from Ground-Control for dropping a nuclear device onto the whole structure.

Nucleonics were one of the things that contact with the Sil had taught the Denaari. But they’d never actually used the devices they’d built. Considering the degree of misunderstanding about the engineering process, that was just as well. But Central didn’t know that. Central had decided that if it proved to be alien saboteurs, and the weapons dispatched proved inadequate… well, at the first sign of problems Ground-control had the missiles ready. The bio-zoo was only 48.3 seconds away from nuclear destruction.

Central attempted for the 326th time to establish communication with the Bio-zoo’s brain. And was rewarded for its patience. It rapidly began wishing it hadn’t been. The points in favour of Ground-control’s proposal increased.

Firstly, there was the reality of the situation at the bio-zoo: Only 1.72% of the total environmental display area was still intact and functional. A massive earthquake had sheared off the one corner of the bio-zoo unit and damaged or destroyed 17.9% of the envirocages. If that wasn’t bad enough, one of the specimens had subsequently destroyed the most of the cages and consumed most of the rest of the specimens. And the stupid Bio-zoo’s brain had been too apathetic to do
anything
about it.

Secondly, if Central followed Ground-control’s recommendation, it would stop the Bio-zoo’s interminable whining about it all being Central’s fault. On top of it all, although the Bio-zoo could give Central internal vision on all the envirocages, there were no eyes in the service and observation corridors. That must be where the transmitter signal was coming from, because the Bio-zoo’s cage-eyes showed Central nothing but devastation, an incandescently angry hydra and a few well-kept envirocages on the top level. There’d been a fire on the penultimate level, which the Bio-zoo had successfully dealt with by altering the precipitation regime. Fires sounded like saboteurs, not survivors.

“We might as well eat what we have. There must be a way of getting at the food inside those chambers.” said Shilo Kadar.

“Eat and sleep,” said Martin Brettan with a cracking yawn. “It’s been a hellish day. But at least we have found a sanctuary at last. The snakes don’t seem to be able to get up here, and those stone-age monkey types can’t get past the snakes.”

Shari looked at the fast-gathering darkness outside. Already it was dim in the high-roofed corridor. “Let’s eat then. But we must still ration what we have. Do you mind organizing that, Martin? I just want to have a look at this arm.”

The Dagger of the Goddess was passive as she gently undid the sling. She was not to know that his confused mind was still pondering the symbolism of the breaking of the holy blade. Or that he felt he ought to recognize her. Not as the Dewa… but as someone human, and close to him. Someone beloved and someone he would have to kill.

The arm was straight. Within it the slave-units of the nanomech surgeon had been busy with prodigious engineering feats. Their host did not know this. It astounded Shari. “It was bent…”

“You ought to splint it,” said Mark Albeer. “Here, Princess. I’ve still got a few pieces of straightish stick. It looks as if you’ve got it nicely in position.” So the arm, already plated from within, was splinted and strapped on the outside too.

They ate by the glow of a lumitube. The moons were not yet up, and Shari had vetoed a fire. She hadn’t forgotten the sudden wetting that their fires had brought them earlier. Then they were in the dark, with only the stars. There was a squalling howl from below. “Snakes sounding miserable again,” said Sam, feeling uneasy.

Then the roof light-strips came on. As Central had intended, when it had told Bio-zoo to do this, the castaways where blinded by the sudden intensity of it. The Bio-zoo opened the sliding portal as the cargo-transporter slid level with it. Two heavy-duty stevedore beasts controlled by brain-auxiliary units disembarked, carrying energy projectors. Central was worried about those energy projectors. The energy projector beasts were old and distinctly cantankerous.

The other cargo-vessel had entered the lower door of the Bio-zoo. It had met a questing head-arm. The hydra, angry with the proceedings of the day had attempted to attack the craft for moving, even if the silicon and metallo-chitin lifeforms on it were unsuitable prey. It had received a sound chastisement… from the Bio-zoo, via the roof of the chamber in which the body-pod reposed. Now two more of the stevedore beasts were approaching from the other end of the corridor. The humans were caught like rats in a trap.