He rolled out of his tent into chaos.
The attack had come from the tree line to the east, a black silhouette against the dawn. Keck, Sullivan, Diggs, and Tom Compton had set up a sort of skirmish line behind the heaped bodies of three dead fur snakes. They were firing into the woods sporadically, starved for targets. The remaining fur snakes shrieked and yanked at their tethers in futile panic. One of the animals fell as Guilford watched.
The rest of the expeditionaries were tumbling out of their tents in terrified confusion. Ed Betts lay dead beside the campfire, his shirt scarlet with blood. Chuck Hemphill and Ray Burke were on their hands and knees, shouting, “Get down! Keep your heads down!”
Guilford crawled through the circle of tattered canvas to join Sullivan and company. They didn’t acknowledge his presence until he had ducked up and fired a pistol shot into the dark of the woods. Tom Compton put a hand on his arm. “You can’t shoot what you can’t see. And we’re outnumbered.”
“How can you tell?”
“See the muzzle flash.”
A fresh volley of bullets answered Guilford’s single shot. The snake carcasses shook with thudding impacts.
“Christ!” Diggs said. “What do we do?”
Guilford glanced back at the tents. Preston Finch had just emerged, hatless and bootless, adjusting his bottle-glass lenses and firing his ivoried pistol into the air.
“We run,” Tom Compton said.
“Our food,” Sullivan said, “the specimens, the samples—”
The close whine of a bullet interrupted him.
“Fuck all that!” Diggs said.
“Get the attention of the others,” Tom said. “Follow me.”
The Partisans — if they were Partisans — had encircled the camp, but they were sparse on the unwooded western slope of the hill and easier to shoot. Guilford counted at least two enemy dead, though Chuck Hemphill and Emil Swensen were killed and Sullivan winged, a bloody puncture in the meat of his arm. The rest followed Tom Compton into the mist of the ravine where the sunlight had not begun to penetrate. It was a slow and agonizing route, with only the frontiersman’s shouted commands to keep the expeditionaries in any sort of order. Guilford could not seem to draw breath enough to satisfy his body; the air burned in his lungs. Shadows and fog made uneasy cover, and he heard, or imagined he heard, the sound of pursuit only paces behind him. And where was there to run? A glacial creek bisected this valley; the ridge wall beyond it was rocky and steep.
“This way,” Tom insisted. South, parallel to the water. The soil underfoot grew marshy and perilous. Guilford could see Keck ahead of him in the swirling cloud, but nothing farther. Keep up, he told himself.
Then Keck stopped short, peering down at his feet. “God help us,” he whispered. The texture of the ground had changed. Guilford closed in on the surveyor. Something crackled under his boots.
Twigs. Hundreds of dried twigs.
No: bones.
An insect midden.
Keck shouted at the frontiersman ahead of him. “You brought us here deliberately!”
“Shut up.” Tom Compton was a bulky shade in the mist, someone else beside him, maybe Sullivan. “Keep quiet. Step where I step. Everybody follow the man in front of him, single file.”
Guilford felt Diggs push him from behind. “They’re still coming, get a fuckin’ move on!”
Never mind what might be ahead. Follow Keck, follow Tom. Diggs was right. A bullet screamed out of the fog.
More small bones crunched underfoot. Tom was following the midden-line, Guilford guessed, circling the insect nest, one step away from oblivion.
Keck had brought one of these bugs to the campfire a few days ago. Body about the size of a big man’s thumb, ten long and powerful legs, mandibles like steel surgical tools. Best not think about that.
Diggs cried out as his foot slipped of fan unseen skull, sending him reeling toward the soft turf of the insect nest. Guilford grabbed one flailing arm and pulled him back.
The sky was lighter when they reached the opposite side of the midden. Not to our advantage, Guilford thought. The Partisans might see the nest for what it was. Even then, they would be forced to follow the narrow defile of the midden-edge, either along the ravine wall as the expeditionaries had or close to the creek — either way, they might make easier targets.
“Form a line just past these trees,” the frontiersman said. “Reload or hoard your ammunition. Shoot anyone who tries to circle around, but wait for a clean shot.”
But the Partisans were too intent on their quarry to watch the ground. Guilford looked carefully at these men as they stepped out of the low mist and into what they must have mistaken for a rocky ledge or patch of moss. He counted seven of them, armed with military rifles but without uniforms save for high boots and slouch hats. They were grinning, sure of themselves.
And their boots protected them — at least briefly. The lead man was perhaps three-quarters of the distance across the soft open ground before he looked down and saw the insects swarming his legs. His tight smile disappeared; his eyes widened with comprehension. He turned but couldn’t flee; the insects clung tenaciously to one another, making strands of faintly furry rope to bind his legs and drag him down.
He lost his balance and fell screaming. The bugs were over him instantly, a roiling shroud, and on the several men behind him, whose screams shortly drowned out his own.
“Shoot the stragglers,” Tom said. “Now.”
Guilford fired as often as the rest, but it was the frontiersman’s rifle that found a mark most often. Three more Partisans fell; others fled the sound of screams.
The screaming didn’t last long, mercifully. The lead man’s body, rigid with poison, angled up like the prow of a sinking ship. A glint of bone gleamed through the black swarm. Then the whole man disappeared beneath the churning moist soil.
Guilford was transfixed. The Partisans would become part of the midden, he thought. How long until their skulls and ribs were cast up like broken coral on a beach? Hours, days? He felt ill.
“Guilford,” Keck whispered urgently.
Keck was bleeding vigorously from the thigh. Best bind that, Guilford thought. Staunch the blood. Where is the medical kit?
But that wasn’t what Keck wanted to say.
“Guilford!” Eyes wide, grimacing. “Your leg!”
Something crawling on it.
Maybe the insect had been thrown out of the nest by the Partisan’s thrashing. It scuttled up Guilford’s boot before he could react and drove its mandibles through the cloth of Guilford’s trousers.
He gasped and staggered. Keck caught him under the arms. Sullivan brushed the insect away with his pistol butt, and Keck crushed it under his heel.
“Well, damn,” Guilford said calmly. Then the venom reached an artery, a dose of hypodermic flame, and he closed his eyes and fainted.
Interlude
This happened near the End of Time, as the galaxy collapsed into its own singularity — a time when the stars were few and barren, a time when the galaxies themselves had grown so far apart that even distortions in the Higgs field did not propagate instantly.
Elsewhere in the universe the voices of galactic noospheres grew faint, as they resigned themselves to dissolution or furiously constructed vast epigalactic redoubts, fortresses that would withstand both the siren song of the black holes and the thermal cooling of the universe. In time, as white dwarfs and even neutron stars dissipated and died, the only coherent matter remaining would be these strongholds of sentience.