The spider suddenly fled, running away and tucking itself inside a curled-up leaf—its home.
“Most of ’em scare easily,” Karen said to Erika. She cut another thread, and the two women fell free, while Karen called back to the spider, “Sorry, sweetheart.”
They landed together on the ground amid a tangle of sticky silk. Erika was badly shaken. “I thought I was going to die.”
Karen pulled threads of silk off her. “Nothing to worry about as long as you know the structure of the web.”
“But I’m a beetle person,” Erika answered.
Peter and Danny landed nearby, crashing into leaves. Finally Rick appeared, lowering Amar with the help of the rope. They gathered in a group at the base of the ohia tree, and Peter explained the change of plan. They would head for Tantalus.
Ten minutes later, with Rick and Peter carrying Amar between them, they entered a fern forest, a seemingly endless maze of sword ferns, tall and dripping with moisture, arching over tunnels that ran in all directions. Koa trees, olopua trees, and white kokio hibiscus trees sprang from among the ferns, twisting into the upper story of the forest.
Peter sighted with the compass. “That way,” he said, and they began to walk down a long, winding passageway among the ferns. Fronds arched far overhead, covering the world in green.
Danny was stumbling along, when he stopped, stared at Amar Singh. Danny’s eyes widened. “He’s—he’s bleeding.”
Nobody had noticed. Rick lowered Amar, and Amar sank to his knees, while a rivulet of blood trickled out of one nostril and ran across his upper lip. The blood began falling to the ground in a steady drip.
“Leave me,” Amar whispered. “I have the bends.”
Chapter 26
Beneath the Green Canopy
30 October, noon
T hey’re hiding in there,” Telius said to Johnstone, looking through binoculars into a mass of sword ferns on the forest floor. The two men were hanging upside down in their seat harnesses in the hexapod. The machine, in turn, hung upside down from a leaf in the pandanus tree, clinging to the leaf with its feet. They had been able to get a fix on the radios.
Telius stared for a while, then gestured silently with one finger: Drop us.
Johnstone hit a button and the footpads let go of the leaf, and the hexapod went into free fall. Johnstone, working the controls, folded the legs under the vehicle as it fell. It tumbled a few times, its legs tucked underneath it, and hit the ground, and bounced, and came to rest upside down. The roll cage had protected the humans inside.
Johnstone popped open the legs. They lashed out and flipped the vehicle upright, and the hexapod moved off, stalking its way around the edge of the fern forest, and went into the ferns. Telius stood up and turned his head, listening. He had heard them talking. He indicated with his finger where the people were, then directed Johnstone to drive up a fern stem.
The hexapod climbed the stem, got in among the fronds, and stopped. Telius took up the binoculars and stared through them. He had acquired the targets. Six of them, down below. Somebody was sick, had a bloody nose. Might be the bends. The others were gathered around the victim. Indian guy, looked like. Blood streamed from the guy’s nose and over his upper lip and chin. Yup—the man had the bends. He was a goner. “Poor fucker’s having a bend bleed-out,” he murmured to Johnstone, who grunted.
As he studied the group, Telius identified the leader—slender guy, light brown curly hair, standing slightly apart and talking to the others, who listened. This was the individual who’d taken leadership of the group, Telius could see it. Telius could always tell an officer. You drop the officer first, of course.
A good setup. Telius nodded to Johnstone and took up the gas rifle and aimed it at the group’s leader, while Johnstone took up spotter duty, training his binoculars on the target and speaking to Telius. Telius looked through the scope and put the crosshairs on the leader’s head. The range was long, about four meters. A slight breeze stirred the fern leaf and the hexapod. Telius shook his head. Not stable. The shot was a little chancy, and Telius left nothing to chance. He would have to make several kills in quick succession on moving targets, because the moment he dropped the leader, the others would scatter like frightened rabbits. He gestured to Johnstone, meaning, get us lower.
Johnstone turned the vehicle, and it began creeping down the fern leaf, hunting for a more stable position. Then Telius signaled to Johnstone to stop. Telius unbuckled himself and fell out of the hexapod, spun once in the air, and landed on the ground on all fours like a cat, rifle on his back. He crept closer to the targets.
Peter broke open the medical kit and knelt over Amar, holding a compress to Amar’s nose. He didn’t know what to do. The nosebleed would not stop.
“I’m useless. Please go on,” Amar said.
“We’re not going to leave you.”
“I’m just protein. Leave me.”
“Amar’s right,” Danny said, touching his sling arm. “We have to leave him. Or we’ll all die.”
Ignoring Danny, Peter took the compress away from Amar’s nose; it was soaked. He had lost a lot of blood, and he had become anemic. And the bruises all over Amar’s arms…it seemed as if the centipede venom had accelerated the bends in Amar. And decompression was the only treatment for the bends, yet they were no closer to Nanigen.
“We have to call for help on the radio,” Danny said, plunking himself down and glowering at the others.
“Danny could be right,” Erika said. “Maybe there is some good person at Nanigen—”
“Maybe we should call,” Karen said. “It might be our only chance to save Amar.”
Peter stood up, holding a radio headset. “All right.”
From lower down on the fern stem, Telius took aim. He had the leader in the crosshairs of his gas rifle, but now the leader was bending over the guy with the bends, trying to help him. Hmm. Maybe he could get both of them with one shot. The leader and the bleeder—yeah. He adjusted his aim, squeezed the trigger, and the gas rifle kicked viciously.
There was a sudden hiss. A steel needle, seemingly a foot long, zipped past Peter’s neck, tearing his shirt, and entered Amar Singh, and detonated. The explosion threw metal fragments and blood in all directions. Amar jerked into the air, yanked off the ground, and his body seemed to come apart. Peter froze, a quizzical expression on his face, while Amar and pieces of Amar spattered around Peter.
Peter stood up, covered with Amar’s blood. “What—?” he began.
The others watched it happen as if it wasn’t real.
Karen looked around. “Sniper!” she screamed. “Get cover!” She began to dash for the nearest fern, but saw that Peter wasn’t moving—he seemed paralyzed, as if he couldn’t process what had just happened.
The sniper’s second shot hit a leaf over Peter’s head and exploded. The blast sent Peter to the ground. Karen realized the sniper was aiming for Peter. She swerved and ran toward Peter, and grabbed him. “Duck and zigzag!” she screamed at him. He needed to get away but not make any predictable movements: the sniper could pull lead on Peter, and hit him as he ran. “Go!” she yelled at Peter.
Peter understood. He began to run, left, right, left—left—stop. Run. Always heading for the cover of ferns. Karen ran, too, zigzagging, staying with Peter but not too close to him, wondering if the next shot…
Peter tripped, fell, and sprawled.
“Peter!” she screamed. “No!” Peter had stopped moving; he had become an easy target.
“Karen—get away—” Peter said, hauling himself to his feet.
These were his last words. In the next instant a needle flew through Peter’s chest, exploding as it went. He toppled. Peter Jansen was dead before he hit the ground.
Chapter 27
Fern Gully
30 October, 12:15 p.m.
R ick Hutter felt Karen King lift him up by his shirt, dragging him out of what he thought was a good hiding place, and heard her say, “Get up—go!” He noticed his blo
wgun lying on the ground, picked it up, grabbed the dart kit, and sprinted for cover. He lost track of Karen; he had no idea where she had gone. He ran underneath a stick, bashed through some leaves, and began to run among fern stems looming over him. That was when he saw the insect vehicle. A six-legged truck up there on the fern, clinging to a frond and moving along it, making a faint whine, driven by a man wearing armor. It was a man just Rick’s size. A micro-human. The man seemed experienced and confident.
The man stopped the vehicle, held up a strange-looking gun with a large-caliber muzzle. He loaded a metal needle in the breech, took aim through a scope, and fired. The gun kicked, giving off a hiss.
Rick had flung himself down behind a rock, where he lay on his back, panting, while he watched the man shoot. The man seemed relaxed. Comfortable with murder, Rick realized, while a hot rage welled up in him. The man had butchered Peter and Amar in cold blood. Rick was still holding the blow tube. Get off a dart at that bastard, anyway. I think Karen just saved my life. It was dumb to stay crouched like that. She pulled my ass out of a bad place.
He opened his dart kit and took out a dart. Looked at it with a sense of futility. It was just a splinter with a metal point made from a dinner fork. Never get through that bastard’s armor. He opened the curare jar and jammed the tip into the sludge and twirled it, choking back a cough as an odor wafted from the jar. Put a hot load on the dart anyway.
He fitted the dart into the tube, and rolled over, and looked out past the rock.
The vehicle wasn’t there. It had moved out of sight.
Where?
Rick crept out from behind the rock, listening, looking around. He heard a whining sound to his left. The bug truck. He got up and ran toward the sound, and when it got louder, he dove into a clump of moss and waited. The sound got closer. Carefully he looked out of the moss.
The bug truck had crawled up on the moss and stopped almost directly above him. He was looking at the bottom of the truck. He couldn’t see the man from here.
There was another hiss. The man had fired again.
Rick had no idea if anyone but himself was still alive. Karen could be dead. Erika, too. They were being slaughtered.
It made him furious.
It made him want to kill. Even if it cost him his life.
The man had stopped firing, and now the truck advanced. It came to a halt a short distance away, and he heard the man talking on a radio. “There’s a female at your three o’clock. Bitch has a knife.”
Bitch.
Karen.
No—she was about to be shot. He started crawling frantically through the moss, then got himself wedged under a fallen leaf. He was looking right up at the man. The man wore a helmet, a breastplate, armored plates over his arms. His chin was bare. Bare neck.
Rick aimed for the man’s neck. Try to hit him in the jugular. He inhaled slowly, trying not to make a sound, and blew with all his might.
The dart missed the man’s neck, but landed in the soft flesh under his chin, and drove deep, buried up to its fluff. It had entered the man’s chin just above his Adam’s apple and gone upward. Rick heard a choking scream and the man tumbled down into the vehicle, out of sight. He heard wet cough, then thrashing, thumping. The guy was seizing, flopping around like a fish inside the truck. Then silence.
Rick loaded another dart into the blowgun, and jumped up on the truck. Ready to shoot again, he looked inside. The man lay sprawled, face cherry-red, eyes popping, frothy mucus drizzling out of his mouth—cyanide poisoning, Rick realized. Only the tail puff of the dart remained visible, a wisp of cotton stuck under the man’s chin. The dart had punched vertically upward through his tongue and the roof of his mouth and pierced his brain.
“That was for Peter,” he said. His hands were shaking, then his whole body began to shake. He had never killed a person before; hadn’t thought he was capable of it.
Off to his right, he heard another hiss.
Oh fuck, not another one, he thought—another sniper out there. Shooting at my friends. Get the bastard.Rick leaped from the truck and began running toward the sound, holding the loaded blowgun. As he ran, he noticed that things had gotten darker overhead, and then he saw…a shadow moving in the ferns. He stopped running. Suddenly he felt very, very small and completely powerless. He couldn’t believe how big the damned thing was.
Karen saw the man rise up between two fern stems. He was a small man, agile and catlike in his movements. He wore camo armor and a glove on his right hand. His left hand was bare and was closed around the gun’s trigger, and the gun was aimed at her. He was about one meter away. Close enough.
She had drawn her knife. It was no match for the gun. She glanced around. No cover.
He moved out from behind the fern stems, keeping the gun trained on her. He seemed to be playing with her, for he could make the shot easily. He spoke into a throat mike: “Found her.” After a pause he added, “You copy?” Evidently he didn’t get an answer. “Copy?”
He still didn’t get an answer. He stepped forward.
It was then that Karen saw the shadow behind the man. At first she didn’t know what it was. She saw something brown and covered with fur, buried in a cluster of fern fronds. It moved slightly, then stopped. She thought it must be a mammal, maybe a rat, because of the brown fur and because it was really big. But then a leg appeared, a long, tapering, jointed leg, an exoskeleton covered with bristly brown hair. Then a fern frond was pushed aside, and she saw the eyes. All eight of them.
It was an enormous spider, as big as a house. The spider was so vast it seemed almost unrecognizable as a spider. Karen knew the species, though. It was a brown huntsman, common in the tropics. It was a carnivore, too. Huntsmen spiders don’t build webs. They are ambush predators, and they hunt on the ground. This one was holding its body close to the ground—a sign that it was hunting. It had a flattened body, protected by hair, with sickle-shaped fangs folded under bulbous appendages. This one was a female. She would crave protein, Karen knew, since she was making eggs.
Karen was struck by the stillness of the spider. Since it was an ambush predator, the fact that it wasn’t moving was bad news. This meant it was hunting.
The man stood with his back to the spider, unaware of it. Its constellation of eyes stared at the man, like droplets of black glass. Karen heard a soft, moaning intake and exhalation of air flowing through the spider’s lungs, located in the spider’s abdomen.
“Johnstone. Do you copy?” the man said.
He paused, listening for his partner.
“What happened to your friend?” Karen whispered. Make him talk.
He just looked at her. Not a chatty one.
She kept her body very still. No sudden movements. She knew that a spider couldn’t see very well, even with so many eyes, but a spider had highly accurate hearing. Ten “ears” were scattered over each leg—holes in its armor that picked up sounds. Eighty ears, all told. In addition, the thousands of hairs on its legs were also listening devices, vibration sensors. The hearing organs on its legs gave the spider a 3-D sound-image of the world.
If she made any noise or vibration, the spider would form a sonic image of her. Would recognize her as prey. The attack, she knew, would happen in the blink of an eye.
She knelt, very slowly, and picked up a rock. Raised her arm slowly.
The man smiled. “Go ahead. If it makes you feel better.”
She threw the rock at him. It struck his breastplate and bounced off with a thump.
He raised his gun at her and took aim through the scope and chuckled just as the fangs closed around him and yanked him into the air, crushing his gun. He screamed.
The spider took a few steps forward and then, surprisingly, flipped itself over on its back, while Karen sprinted for safety. Lying on its back, it lifted the man into the air, sinking its fangs deeper. The razor-sharp, hollow tips punched through the man’s armor, and began pumping venom into him.
His body swelled up as the venom press
urized it, until his armor began to make popping sounds, and blood mixed with venom began squirting out of the cracks in the armor. As the venom went to work, his spine curved backward and his head whipped back and forth. Neurotoxins in the venom set off a firestorm in his central nervous system. He began to writhe, and went into convulsions, a grand mal seizure. As he seized, his eyes rolled up into his head until only the whites showed. Then, abruptly, the whites turned hot-red. Blood vessels had burst in his eyes, as they were rupturing everywhere in his body, for the venom contained digestive enzymes that liquefy flesh. Internal hemorrhages flooded the man’s body, until his heart stopped.
The spider venom was Ebola in thirty seconds.
The spider continued to pump poison into the body until the armor began to crack and split. The breastplate popped open, and the man’s viscera peeked out, drizzling venom.
Karen had taken cover behind a fern, where she found Rick crouching, blowpipe in hand.
They watched the spider process its meal.
Having killed the prey while it lay on its back, the spider flipped over and stood upright on its eight legs again, and began cutting up the prey. It gripped the man in its palps, a pair of hand-like appendages on either side of its mouth. The fangs opened like folding knives; they had serrated inner blades. The blades macerated the body, chopping it into a bloody mash of flesh, broken bones, and intestinal contents, mixed with scraps of Kevlar and pieces of plastic. Using its palps, the spider handled the meat-mass deftly, molding and shaping it into a food ball, while squirting digestive fluid into the mass through the tips of its fangs. In a minute or two, the human remains had been turned into a spheroid of liquescent pap speckled with bone fragments and shredded armor.
“Interesting,” Karen whispered, and turned to Rick. “Spiders digest their food outside their bodies.”
“I didn’t know.”
Having digested its prey, the spider placed its mouth firmly on the food ball and began sucking fluids out of the mess, while its stomach made a steady pumping noise. The eyes gleamed with a faraway expression, Karen thought, or maybe a look of satisfaction.