The transport crewmen dropped their tarp to stare. Diggers climbed from the excavation, summoned by shouts and the sound the worm made breaking out. Stephen had unwrapped his flashgun, but the worm didn't threaten us. It was undulating slightly away from the Oriflamme.
"I doubt it even has eyes," I said. "Maybe it hit a dike of rock that it's going to cross on the surface."
"All right, all right," Dole hectored. "You've had your show, now let's get this bitch ready to lift, shall we?"
Something dark green and multilegged climbed out of the opening the worm had made. This creature was about three meters long. Its mandibles projected another meter. They curved outward and back like calipers so that their points met squarely when the jaws closed.
The predator took one jump toward the worm it had been pursuing through the tunnel, then noticed the Oriflamme and the men outside her. The beast turned, hunched on three of its six pairs of legs, and leaped toward us.
"Back to the ship!" Dole bellowed. The men of his watch turned as ordered and ran for the excavation.
I unhooked my cutting bar. The main hatch couldn't be closed because of ice wedged into the hinge. There'd seemed no need to clean it while the excavation was still in process. .
A second beast like the first hopped from the tunnel; a third member of the pack was directly behind the second. The worm wriggled into the distance, perhaps unaware that its pursuers had suddenly turned away.
The leading predator covered ten meters at each hop. Because its legs worked in alternate pairs, the creature no more than touched the ice before it surged forward in another flat arc.
Stephen's flashgun whacked. The bright sunlight of Lord's Mercy dimmed the weapon's normally dazzling side-scatter.
The bolt hit the predator's first thoracic segment and shattered the plate in a spray of creamy fluid. The head, the size of a man's torso, flipped onto the creature's back. It was attached by only a tag of chitin. The enormous mandibles scissored open and loudly shut.
A fourth hard-shelled predator crawled from the tunnel. The three living members of the pack hopped toward us, ignoring the thrashing corpse of their fellow.
Either the creatures thought the Oriflamme was prey, or they were reacting to us individual humans as interlopers in their hunting territory. Either way, their intentions weren't in doubt.
Stephen clicked up the wand that supported his laser's solar charger, then spread the shimmering film. He hadn't brought spare batteries with him this time.
"I'll draw them away from the hatch," I said. I began walking out onto the ice field. I didn't trust the footing enough to run.
Stephen set his flashgun on the crates with the panel tilted toward the sun. He left it there and strode parallel to me, triggering his cutting bar briefly to spin the blades clear of ice. The predators angled toward us, one after another.
Ice powdered beneath the creatures every time they sprang. The bottoms of their feet were chitin as jagged as the throat of a broken bottle. It gave the beasts good purchase on any surface soft enough for it to bite.
A band of single-lensed eyes gleamed from a ridge curving along the top and front of each predator's headplate. Though the individual eyes didn't move, the array gave the creatures vision over three-quarters of the arc around them.
The nearest creature focused on me. Its mandibles swung a further 30° open, like a hammer rising from half to full cock. Its deliberately short hop put me exactly ten meters away for the final spring.
I threw myself forward, holding my bar vertical in front of me. The predator slammed me down, but I was inside the circuit of its mandibles instead of being pierced through both sides when the tips clashed together.
The knife-edged chitin was thicker than that of a Molt's carapace, but my bar's ceramic teeth could have sheared hardened steel. The blade screamed as I cut the left mandible away. The creature stood above me, ripping my thighs with its front pairs of walking legs.
I held my bar in both hands and cut into the predator's head. Side-hinged jawplates cracked and crumbled on the howling bar.
The creature sprang back. White fluid gushed from the wound in its head. The creature's abdomen was slender and hairy, like that of a robber fly. It twisted around under the thorax as the creature went into convulsions.
Stephen was holding the second predator's mandibles away from his chest with both hands. The beast shook him violently, trying to break his grip. Stephen had dropped his cutting bar. It lay beneath the creature's scrabbling back legs.
I rose and slashed at the base of the right mandible, again using both hands. My feet slid out from under me. I caught the target in the belly of my blade, but my long draw stroke cut into the joint at a flatter angle than I'd intended.
Weakened chitin cracked like a rifle shot. Stephen tossed the mandible away. A ribbon of pale muscle fluttered behind it.
Stephen still had to hold the remaining mandible to prevent it from impaling him. I stood and fell down again immediately. I was slipping on my own blood and fluids from the creatures I'd butchered.
The last predator poised ten meters from Stephen for the leap that would cut him in half. A laser bolt stabbed through its open jaws. The flux lit the creature's exploding head through translucent flesh and chitin.
Piet flung down the flashgun. The solar panel that had recharged it quivered like a parachute. He raised a cutting bar. "Handweapons only!" Piet shouted as he charged the wounded predator. Twenty men carrying tools from the excavation followed him, slipping on the ice.
Stephen let the creature throw him free. It poised to leap onto him again, predator to the last. Piet sawed three of its legs apart in a single swipe. In a few seconds, all the left-side legs were broken or sheared. Men hacked with clumsy enthusiasm into the creature's thorax.
I stood up, then fell over again. Hall and Maher ran to me. Stephen crawled on all fours behind them.
"Rakoscy!" Piet shouted. "Rakoscy, get over here!"
"Christ's blood, his legs've been through a fucking meat grinder!" Dole cried. "Bring that fucking tarp over here! We need to get him into the fucking ship!"
"Mister Moore," somebody said with desperate earnestness. "Please let go of your bar. Please. I'm going to take it out of your hand."
The last voice I heard was Stephen's, snarling in a terrible singsong, "He'll be all right and I'll kill any whoreson who says he won't!"
WEYSTON
Day 249
Piet lifted the cutter's bow so that we wouldn't stall even though the thruster feed was barely cracked open. The display held a 30° down angle to our axis of flight, paralleling the barren ground a thousand meters below.
"You know. ." Stephen said, one leg braced against the sidewall and his left hand gripping the central bench on which the two of us sat. "You're going to feel really silly if you have to explain how you got yourself killed on a sandhill like this."
"Tsk, don't call it a sandhill," Piet said cheerfully. "The name honors your uncle, remember. Besides, it's not a stunt, I saw something when I brought the Oriflamme in."
"And why shouldn't the officers go on a picnic?" I said. My legs were straight out, but I was trying my best not to let them take any stress. Though the shins were healing well, they hurt as if they were being boiled in oil if I moved the wrong way.
Lightbody's lips moved slowly as he watched the screen from the jump seat and separate attitude controls behind Piet's couch. I think he was murmuring a prayer. From Lightbody, that would be normal behavior rather than a comment on the way the cutter wallowed through the air. I doubt it occurred to Lightbody to worry when Piet was the pilot.