“No bleeding wonder the dragonets were scared.” He smashed impotent fists into the water, sending ripples out. Sorka’s Duke appeared instantly, hovering just outside and peering in. He waited just long enough to squeak a reassurance, and then literally disappeared. “Well, now,” Sean said. “If I were Pol Nietro, I’d call that instantaneous flit of theirs the best defense mechanism a species could develop.” A long thread slithered from the ledge and hung a moment in front of their horrified eyes before a flame charred it.
Revolted, Sean splashed water on the remains, whisking the floating motes away from Sorka and himself. Behind them the horses breathing showed signs of real distress.
“How long?” Sean said, gliding over to Cricket’s head and soothing the horse with his hands. “How long?”
It is not mating activity,” Bay told Sabra when she called, “and it is a totally irrational pattern of behavior.” Her mind riding through all she knew and had observed about the dragonets, Bay continued to peer out her window. As she watched, a sled lifted from a parking spot near the met tower, and it headed at full speed toward the storm. “Let me check my behavioral files and have a word with Pol. I’ll call you back. It really is most unusual.”
Pol was working on the vegetable patch behind their home. He saw her coming and waved cheerfully, tipping back his visored cap and mopping his brow. The garden soil had been carefully enriched and enhanced by a variety of Terran beetles and worms that were as happy to aerate the soil of Pern as of Earth and augmented the local, lazier kinds. Bay saw Pol stop, his hand in midwipe, and stare about him; she guessed he had only then noticed the absence of the dragonets.
“Where’ve they all gone?” He glanced toward other residential squares and Betty’s empty roof. “That was sudden, wasn’t it?”
“Sabra’s just been on to me. She said their Fancy appeared to attack little Shuvin. For no reason, although her claws did not pierce the skin. Fancy then attempted to enter the house with them. Sabra said she sounded frightened.”
Pol raised his eyebrows in surprise and continued to wipe his brow and then the hat band before recovering his head. Leaning on his hoe, he glanced all around. It was then that he saw the gray cloud.
“Don’t like the look of that, m’luv,” he said. “I’ll take a bit of a break until it blows over.” He smiled at her. “While we access your notes on the menta-breed. Fancy’s a menta, not a native.”
Suddenly the air was full of shrieking, screaming, bugling, and very frightened dragonets.
“Where have they been, the little pests?” Pol demanded, snatching off his cap to wave it furiously in front of his face. “Faugh! They stink!”
Bay pinched her nostrils, hurrying toward the refuge of the house. “They do, indeed. Positively sulfurous.”
Six dragonets detached themselves from the swirling hundreds and dove for Bay and Pol, battering at their backs and screeching to hurry them forward.
“I do believe they’re driving us into the house, Pol,” Bay said. When she stopped to study the eccentric behavior, her queen grabbed a lock of her hair, and the two bronzes secured holds on the front of her tunic, pulling her forward. Their cries grew more frantic. “I believe you’re correct. And they’re doing it to others, too.”
“I’ve never seen so many dragonets. We don’t normally have such a concentration here,” Bay went on, cooperating to the point of a lumbering jog trot. “Most of them are wilds! Look how much smaller some queens are. A preponderance of greens as well. Fascinating.”
“Extremely,” Pol remarked, mildly amused that the dragonets who were their particular friends had entered the house and were cooperating in a joint effort to close the door behind the humans. “Most remarkable.”
Bay was already sitting down at the terminal. “Patently, it’s something harmful to them as well as to us.”
“I’d prefer them to settle,” Pol said. Their dragonets were flitting about the lounge and into the bedroom, the bathroom, and even the addition to the house that had been made into a small but well equipped home laboratory for the two scientists. “This is a bit much. Bay, tell your queen to settle, and the others will follow suit.”
“Tell her yourself, Pol, while I access the behavioral program. She’ll obey you as well as me.”
Pol attempted to coax Mariah to land on his arm. But the moment she touched down she was off again, and the others after her. A tidbit of her favorite fish was ignored. Pol was no longer amused. He looked out the window to see if others were experiencing the same mass hysteria and noticed that the squares had been cleared of people. He could see clouds of dust over by the veterinary barns, and the dark dashes of dragonets attempting to herd the animals. He could also hear the distant discord of frightened beasts.
“There had better be an explanation for this,” he murmured, pausing behind Bay to read the screen. “My word, look at Betty’s house!” He pointed over the screen and out the window toward a structure fully clothed in dragonets. “My God, should I call them to see if they need help?”
When he put his hand out to reach for the door pull, Mariah, screaming with anger, dove at his hand and pushed it away, scratching him.
“Don’t go, Pol. Don’t go out, Pol! Look!”
Bay had half risen from her chair and remained frozen in the semicrouch, a look of utter horror on her face. As Pol threw a protective arm about her shoulders, they both heard the hiss of the terrible rain that fell on Landing. They could see the individual elongated raindrops” strike the surface, sometimes meeting only dust, other times writhing about the shrubs and grasses, which disappeared, leaving behind engorged sluglike forms that rapidly attacked anything green in their way. Pol’s nicely sprouting garden became a waste of squirming grayish “things,” bloating larger within seconds on each new feast.
Mariah let out a raucous call and disappeared from the house. The other five dragonets followed instantly.
“I don’t believe what I saw,” Pol said in an amazed whisper. “They’re teleporting in droves, almost formations. So the telekinesis was developed as a survival technique first. Hmm.”
The hideous rain had advanced, spreading its mindless burden behind and inexorably falling across Pol’s neatly patterned stone-work patio toward the house.
“They can’t devour stone,” Pol remarked with clinical detachment. “I trust our silicon plastic roof provides a similar deterrent.”
“The dragonets have more than one unexplored skill, Pol, my dear,” Bay said proudly and pointed.
Outside, their dragonets were swooping and soaring, breathing flame to incinerate the attacking life-form before it could reach the house.
“I would be happier if I knew the things could not penetrate plastic,” Pol repeated with a slight tremor in his voice, looking up at the opaque roof. He winced and hunched in self-protection as he heard a slithering impact, then another, then saw the flame spurt briefly in gouts across the dark roof material.
“Well, that’s a relief,” he said, straightening his shoulders.
“They did strike the roof, however, until the dragonets, bless their little hearts, set them ablaze.” Bay peered out the window facing Betty Musgrave-Blake’s house. “My word! Look at that!”
The house seemed to be ringed by fiery whirls and gouts as an umbrella of dragonets frantically made certain that not a single piece of the grotesque rain reached the home of a woman in labor.
Pol had the presence of mind to collect his binoculars from the clutter on a shelf. He turned them on the fields and the veterinary sheds. “I wonder if they’ll protect our livestock. There’re too many animals to get all safely under shelter. But dragonets do seem to be massing in that area.”