The tentacles began to tighten on his body, pulling in opposite directions. He could not breathe. His lower back felt as if it were breaking. He was stretched, pulled apart by terrible forces. He knew what was going to happen. In another second he would be torn in two. He could do nothing to prevent it.
In his agony Nenda could not see clearly. When something black flashed past him, flying through the air toward the Zardalu, he did not know what it was. He made a great effort and turned his head.
As he did so, the tearing forces on him slackened for a moment. He realized that the flying object he had seen was Kallik.
The Hymenopt had leapt straight out of a crouched position with all the power of her wiry legs. Her spring carried her high in the air, to the top of the head of one of Zardalu holding Nenda. Kallik’s clawed paws dug into the Zardalu’s tough hide and held there. She clutched the rounded head above the blinded eyes and the wicked beak.
The Zardalu was reaching up with two of its tentacles, but Kallik did not flinch. The yellow sting appeared from its sheath at the bottom of her stubby abdomen. The furred Hymenopt body moved sideways an inch or two, seeking an exact position. The abdomen tilted. The sting sank with surgical precision into the Zardalu’s head, at a point exactly between the great lidded eyes. The abdomen pulsed with a full poison discharge. The sting withdrew. A moment later Kallik dropped free and scuttled back, away from the forest of threshing arms.
The stung Zardalu made no noise, but the killing pressure around Nenda’s legs slackened at once. The uplifted tentacles wilted. the great body shuddered, then froze into position. A moment later, the paralyzed Zardalu convulsed and toppled forward. It narrowly missed J’merlia and Julius Graves and lay motionless, poised on the very brink of the steep tunnel that led to the vortex.
And crawling above it, clinging upside down to the ceiling of the tunnel, came the great winged form of Atvar H’sial.
The Cecropian remained hanging on the ceiling until she was past the recumbent body of the Zardalu. Then she dropped down, clear of the still-motionless tentacles, and pushed with all her strength at the hulking body. The Zardalu hung poised for a moment at the edge, then started away down the slope. Nenda heard it rolling and slithering toward the vortex at the bottom. It made no sound.
He was glad to see it go, but that did not solve his own problem. Although he was no longer being pulled apart, Holder’s tentacle still crushed his midsection and he was being drawn steadily toward the gaping sharp-edged beak.
He lacked the breath to cry out for help. Kallik, her sting sac temporarily emptied, had leapt at the second Zardalu, but she found herself gripped by a pair of tentacles. Then she and Nenda were being pulled together toward Holder’s beak.
Atvar H’sial had turned from the vanished Zardalu and was watching the wild confusion in the tunnel. The yellow trumpet horns on each side of her head pointed toward Louis Nenda and Kallik as the two were pulled closer and closer to the Zardalu beak.
Atvar H’sial crouched silent, apparently inactive.
Only at the last moment, when Nenda was close enough to reach out and touch Holder’s blinded eyes and opening maw, did the Cecropian act.
She took a glassy ovoid from within her wing cases. As Nenda was moved into position and the Zardalu’s maw gaped at its widest, Atvar H’sial jumped.
Two hind limbs stabbed at Holder’s blinded eyes. That was merely a distraction, while a forelimb thrust the oval object deep into Holder’s ingestion slit. A split second after the Cecropian withdrew her arm, the maw snapped shut.
The Zardalu emitted a strange, quivering scream. The great body jerked full upright. The tentacles holding Nenda and Kallik went limp. And as he dropped to the tunnel floor, Louis Nenda saw what no sighted organism in the universe had ever seen before: a Zardalu interior, as it must appear to a Cecropian’s ultrasonic imaging.
The Starburst had triggered deep inside Holder. The light it provided was so intense that the body of the Zardalu became translucent, lit from within to reveal the interior organs. A diffuse blue glow shone from the maw, from the beak, from the eyes, even from the lower part of the canopy of tentacles. Nenda could see the dark ellipsoid of the brain, nestled in the center above the long cord of the central nerve conduit. Above that he could make out the shape of the eight-chambered heart, pumping its copper-based blood through the massive body. The Starburst itself was at the back of the maw, a dazzling point of blue.
As Nenda watched, that point of light vanished. Holder became again a tall cylinder of midnight blue, supported on powerful tentacles.
Except that those tentacles would no longer support the body. They splayed wider and wider, to spread across the whole width of the corridor. The torso slumped down at their center, lower and lower, until Holder stretched full-length along the floor, head toward her companions.
Louis Nenda moved out of reach. Atvar H’sial had insisted that the Starburst was not really a weapon. It would not explode inside a Zardalu, and it would not kill one. But even without that, the strength of the internal illumination was enough to put the Zardalu out of action, at least in the short term.
Nenda intended to handle the longer term himself. He had promised to take care of Holder personally, at the moment when the Zardalu had pulled Kallik’s leg off.
He drew the long knife from its holder on his calf. Maybe he could not stab the Zardalu’s heart, because it sat too deep; but he could sure as hell carve a way down to it. And now he knew exactly where it lay in the body.
Nenda started forward. And then he hesitated.
Twelve Zardalu were still active. The burns that Hans Rebka, Darya Lang, and E. C. Tally had inflicted from behind were having the desired effect, spinning the Zardalu round and round, driving the pain-maddened aliens steadily forward toward the steep ramp that led down to the transportation vortex.
But that created a new problem. Birdie Kelly lay immobile in his narrow niche by the tunnel wall. Either he knew that his only hope was in remaining still, or he had fainted. But Nenda, Kallik, Graves, J’merlia and Atvar H’sial were all in front of the Zardalu. And even though their adversaries were blinded, those tentacles and beaks had undiminished killing power. There was no way to drive them down the ramp, without the whole group being forced along with them.
And the Zardalu were adapting to their blindness. Even as Nenda watched, E. C. Tally came within inches of being swept up by a thrashing, powerful arm.
The embodied computer was in awful physical shape, and he should not have been in the battle at all. He was weaving and staggering, one leg dragging useless as he moved. He stepped close to one of the Zardalu, giving it a maximum intensity burn and forcing it to move, then tottering backwards. But a sweeping arm missed him by only a split-second.
Nenda swore and put away his knife.
Pleasure deferred, not pleasure denied. He’d get Holder later.
It was not safe to speak, but he stood up, braving the forest of waving tentacles. He gestured to Hans Rebka. When the other finally noticed him, he pointed at Graves and the others in his group, and then to the tunnel behind them.
Rebka nodded. He understood the problem. Nenda and the rest were penned in by the Zardalu. He patted the flashburn unit he was holding. Should they stop driving the Zardalu forward?
But they might begin to recover their sight at any time. Rebka and the others had to keep harassing them, to drive them over the brink before they knew of the danger.
Nenda shook his head. He made the gesture of firing a flashburn unit, and shrugged. Keep on burning them. We’ll have to find the solution here for ourselves.