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.
‘I don’t think Vicuna could have helped us very much,’ I said.
He looked at me, then shook his head, as much in disgust at my own mistake — that I had forced him to save my own life and lose his chance to capture his prey — as acknowledging the truth of what I said.
‘Just drive, Tanner,’ he said.
That night we established the ambush camp.
Orcagna’s trace showed that Reivich’s party was thirty kilometres north of our position and moving south at the same steady rate he had maintained for days. They did not appear to be resting overnight as we did, but as their average rate was somewhat slower than what we were managing, they were not covering much more ground in a day. Between us and them was a river that would need to be forded, but if Reivich made no serious mistakes — or decided against pattern to stop for the night — he would still be five kilometres up the road by dawn.
We set up the bubbletents, this time shrouding each in an outer skin of chameleoflage fabric. We were deep in hamadryad country now, so I took care to sweep the area with deep-look thermal and acoustic sensors. They would pick up the crunching movement of any moderately large adults. Juveniles were another thing entirely, but at least juveniles would not crush our entire camp. Dieterling examined the trees in the area and confirmed that none of them had released juveniles any time recently.
‘So worry about the dozen other local predators,’ he said, meeting Cahuella and I outside one of the bubbletents.
‘Maybe it’s seasonal,’ Cahuella said. ‘The time when they give birth, I mean. That could influence our next hunting trip. We should plan it properly.’
I looked at him with a jaundiced eye. ‘You still want to use Vicuna’s toys?’
‘It’d be a tribute to the good doctor, wouldn’t it? It’s what he would have wanted.’
‘Maybe.’ I thought back to the two snakes which had crossed our path. ‘I also know we almost got ourselves killed back there.’
He shrugged. ‘The textbooks say they don’t travel in pairs.’
‘So you did your homework. It didn’t help, did it?’
‘We got out of it. No thanks to you, either, Tanner…’ He looked at me hard, then nodded at Dieterling. ‘At least he knew what kind of weapon was needed.’
‘A bazooka?’ I said. ‘Yes. It worked, didn’t it? But I don’t call that sport.’
‘It wasn’t sport by then,’ Cahuella said. His mood shifted capriciously and he placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘Still, you did your best with that laser. And we learned valuable lessons that will stand us in good stead when we come back next season.’
He was deadly serious, I saw. He really wanted that near-adult. ‘Fine,’ I said, wriggling free of his hand. ‘But next time I’ll let Dieterling run the whole expedition. I’ll stay back at the Reptile House and do the job you pay me for.’
‘I’m paying you to be here,’ Cahuella said.
‘Yes. To take down Reivich. But hunting giant snakes doesn’t figure in my terms of employment, the last time I checked.’
He sighed. ‘Reivich is still our priority, Tanner.’
‘Really?’
‘Of course. Everything else is just… scenery.’ He nodded and vanished into his bubbletent.
Dieterling opened his mouth. ‘Listen, bro…’
‘I know. You don’t have to apologise. You were right to pick the bazooka, and I made a mistake.’
Dieterling nodded and then went to the weapons rack to select another rifle. He sighted along it and then slung it over his shoulder on its strap.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m going to check the area again.’
I noticed that he was not carrying any image-amp goggles. ‘It’s getting dark now, Miguel…’ I nodded to my own pair, resting on a table next to the map which showed Reivich’s progress.
