Justin brought up a chair and dogged it down. "How many candidates do you think we have?"
"For a chicken run?"
He nodded.
"Six are old enough."
"Think we can find a grendel for them?"
Nasty chuckle. "Not one for each, but we can sure run a lottery."
"Extra safety, okay? Lay an extra rifle on," Aaron said thoughtfully. Jessica examined him. Aaron Tragon was not usually the man who spoke for caution.
"Why?"
"Nothing goes wrong. Not now. We're about to get everything that we want." Unspoken: a permanent base on the mainland, manned by the Second. The beginning of a new colony.
Even more unspoken: the real colony. If Aaron had his way, he would lead that colony. He would set the artificial wombs aboard Geographic pumping out a hundred children a month, and found a nation before he died. He would make the original landing little more than a footnote in the history of Avalon.
And why not? They were here to conquer a world.
The clouds were shot through with gold and silver now, and the mist was beginning to burn away. On the horizon, perhaps twenty miles distant, was the mainland. The pilots had timed it beautifully. The Scouts began to applaud and hoot and stamp their feet.
The mainland was green and lush. The mist seemed almost to change color there ahead of them, coiling and snaking around the bay that opened before them. They watched the water—dark gray foaming to blue, waves rolling in toward a rocky coastline broken by irregular reefs. The mist was heavy, oily, oozed from the ground like smoke and hovered close to it.
Jessica's heartbeat sped up, and a light sour sensation of pleasure begin to boil in her stomach. This was only her sixth trip to the mainland.
The observation deck was getting crowded now. Carey Lou had drawn breakfast lots the night before. He served her a tray of scrambled eggs and sliced fruit. Jessica sipped and chewed and sighed, and felt that all was right with the world.
One of the first things that anyone noticed about the mainland was that it was more lush by far than Camelot Island... as if all the grendels had disappeared, but of course they hadn't. Still, farther north on the vast prairie they called the Scribeveldt, Geographic had seen beasts large enough to give a grendel pause. Geographic's cameras showed tracks tens of kilometers long, pale lines scrawled across the vast green-brown prairie. They crossed and curved elegantly, as if some entity were trying to write messages for the stars. It was natural to call the entities Scribes, though seen from orbit they were only squarish blobs at the track endpoints, prairie-colored and nearly featureless. Scribes had to be herbivorous, but everything beyond that was speculation.
There was a forest at the edge of the Scribeveldt, and sometimes Cassandra saw, or thought she saw, fairly large animals in herds. No one had ever seen a herd of grendels, and the only thing that ate grendels was other grendels. Robor rose to cross a ridge of splintered rock crested with dense green and green-blue foliage. The ridge looked like the bottom row of a skull's teeth. Just beyond it the rock dropped away into a dense green carpet of valley. An old river fed by snows on mountains far to the north snaked lazily along the valley floor until it cut through the ridge to the ocean.
"Grendel hunting grounds," Aaron said. The candidate Scouts stared down at the swamps and forests. "We stay out of there."
At the side of a pond beneath, a herd of something vaguely resembling a cross between a horse and a pig drank nervously. Robor was only about sixty feet up now, barely ten feet higher than the tree line, so that the Scouts could see more clearly.
With a sudden, violent splash, something exploded from the water, so fast that their eyes could hardly follow what happened next. One of the beasts at the edge of the water was bowled backward, smashed flat by the awesome velocity. Probably dead that instant. The other animals fled in all directions, in a sort of galloping waddle.
But that wasn't what captured their interest. That wasn't what caught every eye in the lounge. No one seemed to breathe. Heartbeats may have frozen still.
There, perched above the torn and bloodied body of the pig-creature...
Was a grendel.
A voice came over the speaker in the lounge. "Grendel kill," Linda said from the control room. "We have just seen a grendel kill." The clear curving outer wall clouded, and a video window opened up on its right side. The death scene was replayed for them in slow motion.
The camera brought them in close. The herd of pig-beasts drank slowly and carefully. Three stood guard above the bank while the herd went down to the water, just a few at a time, in a clumsy, laughable waddle. Then, in slow motion now, the pond's surface bulged, broke, and four meters of black death exploded from the depths.
Jessica whispered, "Oh God," just as stunned as anyone else in the room. It was impossible not to be impressed by this creature, the most savage predator that mankind had ever faced.
Blunt snout. Crocodile armor. Blunt, spiked tail. It emerged at rocket speed, and the pig-thing died snorting water and blood. Its body deformed as the grendel struck it. It tumbled back, plowing up dust and grass. The computer, enhancing some kind of wide-angle holo view, kept right with it. Another, wider-screen angle, still in slow motion, showed that the other animals broke and headed for cover almost instantly, running fast but at normal animal pace. No animals save grendels had ever been observed moving on speed.
Grendel teeth had torn its victim's belly and rib cage open. Blood spurted, covering the grendel's snout. It burrowed its teeth into the wound, head deep. It ripped out a mouthful of viscera before looking around, and then up, directly at Robor.
It opened its mouth, and closed it in that disorienting holographic slow motion. Blood and saliva drooled away from the dagger-like teeth, droplets running down as it screamed challenge at them.
Was it the sound of the skeeter engines? Their aerial bulk? The grendel's eyes locked with them, as if uncertain of Robor's distance. As if it thought they might challenge it for the meat.
It screamed a scream that they couldn't hear. Then it turned, and hooked its spiked tail into the carcass. Its tail differed from pictures of the Avalon grendels, with one big, gaudy hook almost underneath, and the shattered scar where a matching hook had been.
The pig's, bleeding had slowed to a trickle. Its feet still trembled a bit. Just a twitch, now. The grendel dragged it back, down into the water.
And the moment after it sank, the recording played again at normal speed. The pig-things approached the shore; one darted in to drink; death smashed into it and tore it apart. Jessica flinched violently.
"Jesus," Aaron said. "I love those damned things."
She looked at him, and for a moment, felt something akin to jealousy. Love hadn't been too strong a word. His eyes burned. The grendels represented something... raw power, absolute single-mindedness... naked ferocity?
Some quality or gestalt that Aaron Tragon respected.
Admired.
Loved.
She had never been certain that he loved her. But she could never doubt that he loved grendels. Loved hunting and killing them, likely enough. But loved them. More, probably, than he loved anything else in the world.
How very odd to feel jealous of a monster. But Aaron can't really love grendels! I couldn't love a man who—
There was more to see: plains that sloped away from the mountains. Get a kilometer or so from running water and you saw lush vegetation and more animal life. There were creatures that looked reptilian—nothing too large, but several packs of animals that momentarily darkened the plain, then broke and ran at tile first touch of Robor's shadow.
Here, the brush thickened to jungle density. Her heart leapt. There had been virtually no exploration of the mainland forests. Almost no categorization of flora or fauna. Little mapping, save by satellite. Except for territory immediately surrounding the mining concerns, there had been precious little of anything.