‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Are you sure? We’re safe here. It’ll pass soon. I know they don’t have any deeply wired defensive instincts, but it might still decide we look like something worth eating. Are you sure you want to risk that?’
‘Take us closer.’
I fired up the turbine, gunning it to the minimum number of revs sufficient to give us lift, and crept the vehicle forward. Hamadryads were thought to have no sense of sound, but seismic vibrations were another thing entirely. I wondered whether the air-cushion of our car, drumming against the ground, sounded exactly like part of the snake’s diet coming closer.
The snake had arced itself so that the length of two-metre-thick body spanning the road was always elevated. It continued to move slowly and smoothly, betraying absolutely no sign that it had even registered our presence. Perhaps Dieterling was right. Perhaps all the snake was interested in was finding a nice tall tree to curl itself around, so that it could give up this tedious business of having a brain and having to move around.
We were fifty metres from it now.
‘Stop,’ Cahuella said again.
This time I obeyed unquestioningly. I turned to look at him, but he was already hopping out of the car. We could hear the snake now: a constant low rumble as it pushed itself through foliage. It was not an animal sound at all. What it sounded like was the continuous crunching progress of a tank.
Cahuella reappeared at the side of the vehicle. He had gone round the back to where the weapons were stored and had drawn out his crossbow.
‘Oh, no…’ I started to say, but it was too late.
He was already racking a tranquilliser dart into the bow, coded for use against a thirty-metre adult. The weapon, on the face of it, seemed like an affectation, but it made a kind of sense. A huge quantity of tranquilliser would have to be delivered to an adult to dope it as we had the juvenile. Our normal hunting rifles were just not up to the job. A crossbow, on the other hand, could fire a much larger dart — and the apparent drawbacks of limited range and accuracy were hardly relevant when one was dealing with a deaf and blind thirty-metre snake which took a minute to move its body length.
‘Shut up, Tanner,’ Cahuella said. ‘I didn’t come out here to see one of these bastards and turn away from it.’
‘Vicuna’s dead. That means we have no one to implant those control electrodes.’
It was as if I had not spoken. He set off down the trail, the crossbow in one hand, the muscles in his muscular back defined against the sweat-sodden shirt he wore under his bandolier.
‘Tanner,’ Gitta said. ‘Stop him, before he gets hurt.’
‘He’s not in any real danger…’ I started to say.
But it was a lie, and I knew it. He might have been safer than if he had been this close to a juvenile, but the behaviour of near-adults was only poorly understood. Swearing, I opened the door on my side, jogged round to the back of the vehicle and unracked a laser-rifle for myself. I checked the ammo-cell’s charge, then loped after him. Hearing my footfalls against the dirt, Cahuella looked back irritatedly.
‘Mirabel! Get the hell back into the car! I don’t want anyone ruining this kill for me!’
‘I’ll keep my distance,’ I called.
The hamadryad’s head had vanished into the other side of the forest, leaving an arc of body spanning the road with the elegant bowstring curve of a bridge. The sound, now that I came closer, was immense. I could hear branches snapping along the snake’s length, and a relentless susurration of dry skin against bark.
And another noise — identical in timbre, but coming from another direction completely. For a moment my brain sluggishly refused to reach the obvious conclusion, trying to work out how the acoustic properties of the jungle could echo the hamadryad’s progress so effectively. I was still wondering about it when the second snake burst through the treeline to my right. It moved as slowly as the first, but it was very much closer, which made the thing’s half-metre per second progress seem a lot swifter. It was smaller than the first one we had seen, but still monstrous by any standards. And I remembered an uncomfortable fact about hamadryad biology. The smaller they were, the faster they were capable of moving…
But the snake brought its hooded, deltoid head to a stop, metres from me and metres above my own. Eyeless, it seemed to float against the sky like a malign, thick-tailed kite.
In all my years of soldiering, I had never been paralysed by fear. I knew that it happened to some people, but I wondered how it was possible and what kind of people they had really been. Now, belatedly, I was coming to an intimate understanding of just how it could happen. The flight reflex was not completely decoupled from volition: part of me knew that to run could be just as hazardous as to remain fixed to the spot, motionless. Snakes were blind until they located a target, but their infra-red and olfactory sensitivity was acute. There was no doubt that it knew I was standing beneath it, or else it would not have stopped.
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,
