I had no idea what to do.
Shoot it, I thought… but the laser-rifle was, in hindsight, not the best weapon I could have selected. A few pencil-thin holes right through its body were not going to massively impede this creature. No point aiming for specific areas of brain function, either: it hardly had a brain to begin with, even before giving birth to the young that would eat that tiny knot of neurones. The laser was a pulse-weapon, the beam too transient to be used as a blade. I would have been better off with the scythe I had used against the imposter…
‘Tanner. Stay still. It has a lock on you.’
Out of the corner of my eye — I didn’t dare move my head — I saw Cahuella, approaching in a near-crouch. He had the crossbow against his shoulder, squinting along the weapon’s long haft.
‘That won’t do much more than piss it off,’ I said, in not much more than a hiss.
Cahuella answered in a stage whisper, ‘Yeah. Big time. The dose was for the first one. This one’s no more than fifteen metres… that’s twelve per cent of the body volume, which means the dose’ll be eight times too strong…’ He paused and halted. ‘Or thereabouts.’
He was within range now.
Above me, the head swayed from side to side, tasting the wind. Perhaps, following the other, larger, adult, it was impatient to be moving on. But it could not let this possibility of prey pass without investigation. Perhaps it had not eaten in months. Dieterling had said that they always had one last meal before fusion. Maybe this one was too small to be ready to bind with a tree, but there was no reason to assume it was not hungry.
Moving my hands as slowly and smoothly as I dared, I slipped off the rifle’s safety-catch, feeling the subliminal shiver as the discharge cells powered up, accompanied by a faint rising whine.
The head bowed toward me, drawn by the rifle.
‘This weapon is now ready for use,’ the rifle said brightly.
The snake lunged, its wide mouth opening, the two attack-phase eyes gleaming at me from the mouth’s red roof, triangulating.
I fired, straight into the mouth.
The head smashed into the dirt next to me, its lunge confused by the laser pulses. Angered, the snake reared up, its mouth wide, emitting a terrible roar and a smell like a field of butchered corpses. I had squeezed off ten rapid pulses, a stroboscopic volley which had punched ten black craters into the roof of the mouth. I could see the exit wounds peppering the back of the head, each finger-wide. I’d blinded it.
But it had enough memory to remember roughly where I was. I stumbled back as the head daggered down again — and then there was a glint of bright metal cleaving the air, and the thunk of Cahuella’s crossbow.
His dart had buried itself in the neck of the snake, instantly discharging its payload of tranquilliser.
‘Tanner! Get the fuck away!’
He reached into his bandolier and extracted another dart, then cranked back the bow and slipped the second dart into place. A moment later it joined the other in the snake’s neck. That was, if he had done his sums correctly, and the darts were both coded for large adults, something like sixteen times the dose necessary to put this specimen to sleep.
I was out of harm’s way now, but I kept firing. And now I realised that we had another problem…
‘Cahuella…’ I said.
He must have seen that I was looking beyond rather than at him, for he stopped and looked over his shoulder, frozen in the action of reaching for another dart.
The other snake had curved round in a loop, and now its head was emerging from the left side of the trail, only twenty metres from Cahuella.
‘The distress call…’ he said.
Until now we had not even known they had any calls. But he was right: my wounding the smaller snake had drawn the interest of the first, and now Cahuella was trapped between two hamadryads.
But then the smaller snake began to die.
There was nothing sudden about it. It was more like an airship going down, as the head sunk towards the ground, no longer capable of being carried by the neck, which was itself sagging inexorably lower.
Something touched me on the shoulder.
‘Stand aside, bro,’ said Dieterling.
It seemed like an age since I had left the car, but it could only have been half a minute. Dieterling could never have been far behind me, yet for most of that time Cahuella and I felt completely alone.
I looked at what Dieterling was carrying, comparing it to the weapon I had imagined suitable for the task at hand.
‘Nice one,’ I said.
‘The right tools for the job, that’s all.’
He brushed past me, shouldering the matte-black bazooka he had retrieved from the weapons rack. There was a bas-relief Scorpion down the side of it and a huge semi-circular magazine jutting asymmetrically from one side. A targeting screen whirred into place in front of his eyes, churning with scrolling data and bullseye overlays. Dieterling brushed it aside, glanced behind to make sure I was out of range of the recoil blast, and squeezed the trigger.
The first thing he did was blow a hole through the first snake, like a tunnel. Through this he walked, his boots squelching through the unspeakable red carpet.
Cahuella pumped the last dart into the larger snake, but by then he was limited to doses calibrated for much smaller animals. It appeared not to notice that it had even been shot. They had, I knew, few pain receptors anywhere along their bodies.
Dieterling reached him, his boots red to the knee. The adult was coming closer, its head no more than ten metres from both of them.
The two men shook hands and exchanged weapons.
Dieterling turned his back on Cahuella and began to walk calmly back towards me. He carried the crossbow in the crook of his arm, for it was useless now.
Cahuella hefted the bazooka and began to inflict grievous harm on the snake.
It was not pretty. He had the bazooka set to rapid fire, mini-rockets streaking from its muzzle twice a second. What he did to the snake was more akin to pruning back a plant snip by snip. First he took the head off, so that the truncated neck hung in the air, red-rimmed. But the creature kept on moving. Losing its brain was obviously not really much of a handicap to it. The slithering roar of its progress had not abated at all.
So Cahuella kept shooting.
He stood his ground, feet apart, squeezing rocket after rocket into the wound, blood and gore plastering the trees on either side of him. Still the snake kept coming, but now there was less and less of it to come, the body tapering towards the tail. When only ten metres were left, the body finally flopped to the ground, twitching. Cahuella put a last rocket in it for good measure and then turned round and walked back towards me with the same laconic stroll Dieterling had used.
When he got close to me I saw that his shirt was filmed in red now, his face slick with a fine film of rouge. He handed me the bazooka. I safed it, but it was hardly necessary: the last shot he had fired, I saw, had been the last in the magazine.
Back at the vehicle, I opened the case which held replacement magazines and slotted a fresh one onto the bazooka, then racked it with the other weapons. Cahuella was looking at me, as if expecting me to say something to him. But what could I say? I could hardly compliment him on his hunting expertise. Apart from the nerve it took, and the physical strength to hold the bazooka, a child could have killed the snake in exactly the same manner.
Instead, I looked to the two brutally butchered animals which lay across our path, practically unrecognisable for what they had been.