Bloodless (Aloysius Pendergast #20)(101)
Moving the monocular away from this grotesque sight and glassing the surrounding creatures, Pendergast saw that one of the farthest from the queen had exactly the same scar of a cross on its left wing as did the brute in Savannah. This must be it: the double of the creature attacking Savannah; the one he had come to kill.
Having been a big game hunter in past years, he knew what he had to do. This was going to be a classic big-game-style stalk. But armed with only a handgun, he would have to get close—very close. And he would have to find a way to draw it away from the others: whether he could kill one such creature was debatable, but he had no chance at all against the entire hive.
He returned the monocular to his pocket, tested the direction of the wind with a damp finger, and then began creeping over the ridge.
73
THE WIND, AT LEAST, was in his favor, blowing from the direction of the nest. He didn’t know if the creatures could pick up the scent of a human, but he would not take the chance.
He felt the intense pressure of time. For every minute he spent hunting the beast in this world, people were being killed in his. His watch was useless, but he knew at least half an hour had passed since he’d witnessed the smoking destruction of Savannah on the Times Square news screen. In another thirty minutes, the Savannah he’d seen would have become reality. With this in mind, he redoubled his pace.
Below and to his right, the crater rim graded into hundreds of steep splatter cones—dead volcanic formations created by lava blowing out of a vent. Here and there he could see smoking fumaroles dotting a rough lava plain. This plain offered the best approach to the nest: But there remained the difficult, if not impossible, task of drawing the one creature away from the rest.
Pendergast moved along the slope with exceeding caution, descending into the valley of the cones. The smoke and steam pouring from the fumaroles provided an excellent screen, allowing him to move from one to the next without being observed. The air stank of burnt rubber and sulfur. He moved forward as swiftly as he dared through the forest of outcroppings until he had reached its end. Taking cover behind the cone closest to the nest, he decided to chance climbing it in order to get a better view.
The cone was steep, but the rough lava that formed it offered many hand-and footholds, and he was able to ascend quickly in the lower gravity. At the top was an opening, a narrow chimney of frozen lava about three feet in diameter, a lava pipe or tube in its center widening as it arrowed down into darkness. The cone appeared to be dead, with no smoke or steam rising from it.
He peered over the top. From this vantage point, he had a clear view of the nest, about two hundred yards away. Two hundred yards was, under normal circumstances, the absolute limit of his weapon’s range. He couldn’t get any closer—there was no cover of any sort—and the beasts were sitting around the edges of the nest, looking this way and that, on habitual alert.
He paused to consider the effect of lower gravity and thinner air on the aiming and distance of his 1911. A round would travel farther and have less drop and wind deflection. With the weapon’s seven-plus-one capacity, and a spare mag with another seven, he had fourteen shots to take down the creature and, if absolutely necessary, its nest mates. Those were not good odds.
He briefly considered the possibility that, if he killed the queen, the rest might die. But that was not the case with similar creatures on Earth: kill a queen termite, or bee, and the colony simply bred a new one.
Pendergast wondered how acute their hearing was. Although he couldn’t see anything that looked like ears, he was confident they could make out sounds, given the cries the creature emitted back in Savannah.
He didn’t have much time to work out the problem. He picked up a small rock and threw it far to his right, then quickly peered over the rim with his monocular to observe the effect.
The rock made a small clattering noise about fifty yards away. The effect was dramatic: the brutes suddenly straightened up, their insect heads whipping around in the direction of the sound, bug eyes staring, mouth tubes twitching.
It seemed that their hearing was quite keen indeed.
He noted movement in the distance, coming in over the crater rim. He froze as a shape appeared in the sky. It was much bigger than the others, truly gigantic. He glassed it as it circled for a landing at the nest: it was brawny as well as massive, with a head twice as big as the queen’s, its wicked proboscis slick with grease, the veins in its taloned legs bulging and flexing as it settled in, folding its wings and making soft noises to its nest mates.
This was obviously the male.
Pendergast cursed himself for not realizing sooner the others were all females. Now he’d have to contend with this monster as well. Despite having sworn off hunting, he bitterly missed his Holland & Holland .500/465 royal double rifle, powerful enough to take down anything.
Such wishful thinking was useless, however, and he put it aside. There was the question of behavior to consider. In some species, the male was the main defender of the herd; in bees and some other social insects, however, the females were. He wondered what the case was with these brutes.
He tossed another stone.
The creatures all went on high alert again, but it was the male who spread his wings and flew up to investigate, gliding over and circling the area where the stone had fallen, looking around with its compound eyes. Pendergast made himself as invisible as possible behind the edge of the lava cone. The male, satisfied nothing was amiss, returned to the nest.