The swarm came down on both of them-on Reilly too. It must have been the blood and confusion in the air. The cloud of hungry tenants buzzed around the worm as well. In their suits, maybe they had a chance, but these were the little red kites that we called shredders. They were aerial piranhas, the worst ones of all. For a moment, it looked like Locke and Willig might actually make it. They struggled forward through the angry biters, but the mass of bodies around them kept growing and growing. The things clustered on their hoods and body suits, on their backs and arms and heads-until they disappeared inside an evil churning mass. The sheer weight of numbers pulled them both down into the pink. Maybe they thrashed wildly against their myriad little attackers, and maybe it was just the furious frenzy of the feeding swarm that jerked them wildly about, but it was obvious that their body suits had given way before the onslaught. A great black stain spread outward through the pale dust. The worm was recovering now. It moved unsteadily forward to investigate.
We had maybe a minute before they came after the rest of us. I was already shouting: "Go! Go! Goddammit! Goddammit! Dammit! Dammit! Dammit! Go!" I was waving my arms and urging the rest of the team madly toward the pod. I scrambled after them in a blind panic, charging futilely through the unyielding muck, crunching through the crust, skidding, slipping, sliding, tumbling, flailing toward the yellow-gleaming doorway in the distance, my vision blurred, unseeing, raging hoarsely, screaming, not knowing if those things were coming after me, expecting any second to be hit by the roaring worm or surrounded by all those crimson horrors fluttering up behind, enveloping all of us in an agony of shredding little bites, hideously scratching and clawing and pulling us down into the drifts, disintegrating into screaming oblivion, the terrible pictures in my head, the maw, the teeth, concentric circles descending into hell, Reilly's spattering blood and Willig's flailing arms, Locke's futile struggles, the exploding swarm, the furious insects, all the churning little mouths-and the screams! My God, the screams! The wild thrashing-and the other noises too, the wet slobbering ones-my blood was pounding in my head.
The worm had reached them now and-
Lopez was the first to reach the pod. It was the size of a small bus, only with landing skids instead of wheels. She punched the red panel next to the door, popping it open-she flipped up the activation switch, and the pod's door fell outward. The dust crackled and puffed. Lopez threw her cases in, then turned and helped pull Valada into the module. Siegel came slipping and skidding through the slushy pink mess; it churned like syrup; he pushed Lopez up the ramp, turned, and waited for me-I shoved him in, using the autolog as a ram, and tumbled in on top of him, not looking back. The door came slamming shut behind me. I was tangled in a mass of limbs and metal boxes. Somebody was swearing-someone else was screaming. I heard sobbing too. I tried to scramble to my feet, tried to make my orders heard. "Goddammit! Somebody punch the launch button!"
Somebody did. I felt the module jerk sharply. The first of the lift bags was inflating. Another two thumps and the second and third bags began filling with helium. When all three silvery balloons were bulging like ripe melons, the pod would lift aloft and be carried high above the roiling roof of pink. If need be, the lifters would pull us all the way up into the stratosphere.
"Anchor those cases and strap yourselves in-is anybody hurt?" I pulled myself erect, hanging from a wall brace. "Lopez, see to Valada. Anesthetize her if you have to. Everybody keep your 0-masks on." I slipped and skidded, but still managed to position myself in front of the door. "Forget it, Siegel. You're not going back-"
"Just one shot, Captain-
"Let it go! If you miss, or if you only wound it, it'll attack the module-"
"Let me shoot it from the air!"
"I said, let it go!"
"You heartless bastard!"
"Thank you for sharing that-"
Siegel's expression was so filled with hate and rage that for an instant I thought he was going to attack me. He started to turn away, but I caught his shoulder, pulled him back to me, put both my hands on his face and held him close. "Listen to me! She was my friend too-I almost went back for her. She knew what she was doing! So did Reilly. And Locke. They paid for your ticket on this bus. Don't you waste it by doing something stupid."
He knew I was right, but he still didn't like hearing it. The module shuddered and jerked. We both looked up
"First bag is full," said Lopez. "Two and three-" The pod shuddered again, slipped sideways, and tilted uneasily; the sludge beneath us squelched as the vehicle tried to pull free. "-two and three are filling fast."
"Anchor that." I pointed to the autolog module. Siegel grabbed it with a surly efficiency and clipped it to a couple of rungs set in the floor. I glanced around; everybody else was already strapped in; there were seats all the way around the interior of the cabin. I pushed Siegel into an empty one and plunked myself down opposite him. Valada handed me one side of my seat harness, I had to fumble around for the other. I was still fumbling when the pod finally squelched free of the damned muck and we lifted up into the air.
For a moment, everything was silent. We looked at each other's faces. We were dirty and stunned and still shocked by the rapid pace of everything that had happened. We drifted upward unbelievingly. "Altitude?" I asked.
Lopez glanced to the display at the front. "Seventy-five meters. And rising."
"That's high enough," I said. I unclipped myself so I could turn around and look out the window. Nope-wrong direction. I lurched for the opposite side of the pod and peered out past Siegel's shoulder. "Turn around and watch this," I said.
Below, we could see the dull gray lump of the tank frozen in a pastry landscape. Nearby, a frosty worm was doing something horrible in the meringue. In the center of a flattened patch of crust, an angry churning cloud swarming around it, the worm was feeding. Even in my revulsion, the detached part of my mind was realizing that this explained the strange bite patterns we'd seen on the dead feral worm. First, the three socialized worms killed it, then the tenants came in and gorged until the blood stopped flowing. Another hideous partnership. I unclipped the remote trigger from my belt, armed it, and pressed the red button.
The tank disappeared in a flash. A beautiful bright globe of orange light flared into existence, spreading out rapidly, expanding to envelop the two dead worms, the third one that was now gorging itself on the bodies of our friends, the grove of clutching shambler trees, the nest beneath it, and all the goddamned things still fluttering in the air. All of them were instantly incinerated. And still the flash expanded.
The shock wave rose to meet us. For a brief uncomfortable moment, the module buffeted nastily, then it was over, and we rose up again in silence.
Below, the world burned. The pink crust ignited and flamed. Black smoke rose up around us. We could feel the heat like an oven. For all I cared, the inferno could rage from here to Chihuahua, leaving half of Mexico scorched and blackened. The hell with it. The hell with everything.
The stingfly lays its eggs in the fleshy edible lobes of the purple wormberry plant. The eggs remain dormant until the wormberries are eaten by an acceptable host organism. When the stingfly egg reaches the organ that serves as a stomach, it hatches into a tiny voracious grub.
To keep itself from being flushed out of the stomach into the lower digestive tract, the stingfly grub attaches itself to the stomach lining with numerous strong pincers. Then it begins to feed on any organic matter in the stomach with a high cellulose content.