Jerry's eyes narrowed. "It's not slowing down—"
He loaded another tranquilizer dart, and then another. They lanced into the grendel's sides with dull phutts. It shrieked and twisted more frantically, clawing furrows in the rocky soil, snapping and glaring balefully through the tangled netting.
Jerry jumped back and shook his head. "Each of those carried enough somazine to knock over a rhino. I'm afraid I just don't understand how it's wired—" The thing snarled and lunged at them, sending fragments of rock spinning through the air. Another stake popped from the ground. Heat rose from its body in palpable waves, but it no longer seemed a threat to anyone but itself.
"It's dying," Jerry said softly.
Its labors were pitiful. It tried to head back toward the river, but the last six stakes held, and it just struggled at the end of the lines.
And struggled. And struggled.
"Isn't there anything that we can do?" Cadmann said.
"We could let it go."
"No, thank you."
The large body movements were growing spastic now, replaced with a kind of overall tremble, a desperate, dying convulsion.
It exploded back into motion, moving so quickly that it scarcely seemed to be anything made of flesh, seemed more an engine with a shattered governor, a dark whirlwind. Its screech spiraled up and up and up the scale, clawing toward a terrifying crescendo. It bounced and thrashed at the end of the cables. The incredible effort went on and on, as if the creature were draining everything left in its body in one last all-out effort, nothing held back, nothing in reserve for the functioning of any organ, just the now, now, now of a creature with no way to tell its cortex that there is no threat.
Then it was still. Only its tail tremored. The hunting crew moved back in and re-anchored the loose cables. Jerry, his face glum, poked at the thing's tail with a long stick. It twitched reflexively.
"Asleep?"
"Dead." Jerry waved the Skeeters down.
The netting was refastened, the cable hoists reattached. Cadmann watched the Skeeters hoist the body, so hot it was almost sizzling, from the ground and into the air.
Cadmann was one of the last back to the camp. He supervised the final disarming and removal of all unexploded mines, and accounted for all weaponry. Then he commandeered a Skeeter and spun it up toward the eternally gray bed of clouds pillowing the sky. The campfires had been quenched, the tents packed and folded away. In days or weeks the underbrush would grow in to obscure the scars, to conceal the fact that this effort had ever taken place. That a group of determined, prepared human beings had journeyed together into the darkness, to meet and destroy the greatest natural predator the children of Earth had ever faced.
He breathed deeply as the Skeeter rose and headed north toward the mist-shrouded bulk of Mucking Great Mountain. The light of a setting Tau Ceti diffused redly through the clouds.
At first the landing pad was an indistinguishable part of the sprawling camp, then a postage stamp, and then cracker-sized, and finally the familiar square studded with radio beacons and lights.
Mary Ann stood there, looking a little rounder than when last he'd seen her. A little warmer, more vulnerable. She shielded her face from the wind and dust. The smile beneath her forearm shadow was wide and bright and welcoming.
She came to him, held him, and he buried his face in the warm notch between her neck and shoulder and felt her cool, moist teardrops against his skin.
They kissed in a roar of dying Skeeter engines. The whipping air began to still, and at last he could hear her whispered words.
"—you so much," she said, and kissed him again. She looked up to him, eyes shining with pride and relief. "You're done now," she said.
"Yes."
"Then let's go home."
He kissed her this time, marveling at the simple pleasure it gave him.
He nodded. "Let's go home."
Chapter 23
MENDING WALLS
For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, or a great deed, does not make a man blessed or happy.
ARISTOTLE, Nicomachaen Ethics
Tweedledum barked energetically, wagged his tail and pranced to attract Cadmann's attention.
Cadmann chuckled indulgently and ignored him. He pointed down the hillside at the bare-chested workers who labored to widen his patio. "The house as planned now will be about twelve hundred square feet, with maybe another four thousand feet of greenhouse."
A warm wind from the south had blown away the usual mists. The view ran forever, from the tiny workmen across land and ocean to tiny mountains on the continent itself. It was as if he could see the whole planet.
They'll call it the new world. They always do, but it's as old as Earth, and we've taken it as we took the Earth.
Good day for this. Beside him, Carlos Martinez nodded solemnly: the role of video host suited him to the hilt. "I just can't believe how much progress you've made in the past five months."
"It's been a lot of work, but given enough time and manpower, almost anything is possible—"
"Hold it. Cad," Sylvia called from the hillside above them. "The field of focus is off."
"Can't have that. Casa Weyland is the star of the show."
Cadmann swallowed his irritation while Carlos climbed up to help
Sylvia fiddle with her video pack.
Building a documentary had sounded great ten light-years ago. It was fair enough. Building an interstellar starship had put the Geographic Society massively in debt. They were entitled to know the results. They would learn from the first expedition's mistakes. Sales to Sol system's twelve billion would help to finance a second expedition.
In practice the running documentary had become a pain in the ass. Cadmann might have given the whole thing a pass but for the chance to see his two friends.
He looked back down the hill, out over Cadmann's Bluff, down to where Mary Ann sat holding Sylvia's seven-week-old son. She waved one of Justin's chubby hands at them, and some of his irritation dissolved. Three months of pregnancy remained to her, and it warmed him to have a preview of his future family. Mary Ann's fringe of pale golden hair riffled in the mild salt breeze. She hugged their surrogate child while Tweedledee sat contentedly at her side. The sprawling silver ribbon of the Miskatonic split the valley behind and below her.
His crops were coming up in rows of green and yellow now, and the cages rustled with Joes. He was proud of what he had wrested from the soil, but his true joy was the spreading infrastructure of his homestead.
Hendrick Sills, Gregory Clifton and two former members of his kill team were immediately below him, deepening the boxlike foundation of his house. The original structure had been expanded east and west, but building farther back into the hill added the possibility of clerestories—staggered, louvered roofs that allowed greater view, greater access for light.
The effort would have exhausted a lone man. In the three and a half months since the death of the sixth grendel, the Colony had demonstrated its gratitude in the only way it knew how: by contributing time and labor. So the earth was broken, rocks moved and walls raised, floors and ceilings extended.
Cadmann's Bluff had become the showpiece of Tau Ceti Four.
Carlos clumped back down the mountainside. "All right. Repitan, por favor. "
"Hold it, Carlos, just hold it. This is getting old real quick."
"Don't be a spoilsport," Sylvia chided. "The view is beautiful. I've got the house, the bluff, the Colony, the northern mountains and the tips of the mainland peaks. Do you have any idea how rare it is for a hundred kilometers of mist to burn away?"