Aurona, page 37
About twenty blurred miles into the rainforest the Spyrin’s PIL signals slowed, forcing the sleds to auto-decelerate. Soft morning light was filtering through the palms ahead. Releasing their belts, they leaned forward and craned their necks to see.
With a deep, ear-slitting roar, the four Spyrins were suddenly beside them! The men recoiled in their seats, their hearts hammering. The basso profundo quartet gathered in a circle, flashed their blinding searchlights in some kind of strange code, then banked in formation toward the clearing to merge into an enormous black cloud of glistening wings.
The men slipped out of the forest into a swampy clearing, then stopped a short distance away to watch, nervously rechecking their cloaking devices. As they turned up their audio, they could hear the roar: echoing with hollow-sounding thunder, the last of the great, venomous cloud of Spyrins were disappearing into a huge, rectangular opening about nine feet above the ground.
Adam began to feel weird, his mind racing. Had he seen this before? The sleds were hovering rock-steady, their fine blue laser locator beams focusing on nearby stationary objects. He shrugged it off. On his whispered cue they settled to the ground on their runners, squishing into the soft muck to wait. All of a sudden, a powerful feeling of déjà vu swept over him. Yes! He’d been here before: the jungle, the swamp, everything fit! Excitedly, he slid to the edge of his seat and looked around, still not believing his eyes.
They were beside a boggy stream, with what appeared to be a huge wall on the other side. He slumped back, his gut quaking, staring intently at the huge, precisely fit stones. “The G-galaxy Room!” he stammered. “The-the Outpost!”
Tola laid a hand on his shoulder. “Ah, what’s that, sir?”
Holding up a finger, he opened the audio channels and began to whisper excitedly into his mike. “Okay, now listen, guys. You may not believe this, but I’m pretty sure I know what to expect here! As you enter that big rectangular opening, you should find a tunnel to the left, sloping down into a long, slippery ramp. There’s a wall at the end with, ah, Dazeen spikes sticking out of it,” he paused, realizing what he’d just said. “Dazeen spikes?” he mumbled. “But that’s impossible! How’d they get them back to the Earth?” As the men exchanged uneasy looks, he continued, almost in a daze. “Then you turn to the right when you get to the wall. Yes, to the right! Follow me so far?
“Ah … sir?” Tola asked hesitantly, pulling his hand away.
“Next!” Adam held up a finger. “A spiral staircase should be at the end, going way, way down into this humongous domed vault. Hey, come to think of it, the environment down there should be perfect for a nest. Yes! And the Spyrins shouldn’t be able to get out any other way, because there are no other exits, just a bunch of small ventilation shafts going up to the surface! The shafts are probably out in the woods on the other side of the wall!” His voice was shaking in excitement. “Yes! Yes! Our plan should work flawlessly!”
After a long silence, Kron probed gently. “Sir? Ah, how…?”
“Intuition,” he interjected quickly. “Ah, let’s just say I’ve seen it all before.”
Another silence. Their minds were racing.
“Hey! I’ll fill you in later!” he blurted. “Let’s go!”
They men glanced nervously over their shoulders.
“C’mon, c’mon, we’re wasting time!” Adam shouted impatiently. “Crank up those generators! Unlatch your safeties and set your Stiflers to ‘kill’!”
They leaped into action, raising the four generator barges into the air and maneuvering them carefully to fit tightly across the rectangular opening. After snipping small, flat sections of Flexnet into various sizes, they plugged the spaces around the edges and sprayed Flexfoam over them. In minutes they had an airtight seal.
Without warning, a deep buzz thundered behind them! A chill ran down their spines and they spun around, their hearts in their mouths.
A Spyrin! The lone straggler was furiously strobing his light, clacking his jaws, and jabbing his stinger. The shredded, partially eaten body of a Dazzor bird was dangling limply from the hooks on his feet, trailing along the ground like a battered, blood-streaked pennant. A single, glowing feather fell into the stream and slowly drifted away.
Adam’s hands were shaking in anger. “Steady, men….” They aimed their Stiflers, awaiting his command.
“Waste that mutant scum!”
They fired in unison. As twenty blazing arcs bored into their target, the Spyrin’s body immediately hissed and swelled, the abdomen ballooning grotesquely. With a loud retort, the insect exploded violently in a ball of superheated steam and smoking body parts!
“Yes!” They ducked, slapping high fives and jabbing their fists into the air.
Amidst the steaming clumps of wings, claws, legs and guts, the Dazzor’s small body dropped in a crumpled heap. Impulsively, Adam vaulted off the generator barge and dashed out into the clearing, picking his way through the swampy muck.
The bird’s body was still warm when he picked it up. He turned it over gently, his hands shaking. “Damn!” He snapped his head up, his finger pointing emphatically at the generators. “Let’s do this thing!”
They bent into action with renewed purpose: the four generators roared to life, pumping clouds of billowing, suffocating smoke down the passageways. It didn’t take long to reach the first hornets. There was a faint, questioning wail, followed by a pencil beam of light stabbing up into the dark forest canopy.
Kron spotted the bright, moving line on the other side of the wall. “Huh?” He stood on his toes on top of a barge. “Wow!” he gasped. “Look at that!”
The men scrambled over the top. Looking like mute exclamation points, ten tightly focused beams were flashing in alarm, stabbing up through the ventilation shafts into the morning fog. In a gathering light-storm of fury, mist and shadow began to strobe in a maelstrom of insanity.
A great roar began. Somewhere beneath their feet, hundreds of black wings thundered, making the ground vibrate. Wide-eyed, their nerves on edge, the men could only imagine the flying forms under them, colliding and thrashing in a terrifying, hollow-sounding roar of death and confusion. They watched and listened, their fists clenched tightly at their sides. The ventilation shafts were only revealing a telltale light-glimpse, a screeching sound bite of the writhing, subterranean agony. A cracking sound took over. Doomed, asphyxiating, the wailing Spyrins were crunching into each other’s exoskeletons with their powerful mandibles and frantically stinging anything that moved.
Adam’s heart was pounding. “Good grief,” he breathed. “This smoke is more powerful than I thought! Hey, I just thought of something. We don’t want to choke the whole jungle with it! As soon as we see it shooting out those shafts, we’ll cut off the generators and wait for stuff to finish its work down there.”
The lights flickered and the faint wails continued for an endless, adrenaline-pumping span. Suddenly, ten vertical puffs of smoke shot out! They silenced the generators immediately and waited, listening to the quiet pulse of life returning to the jungle.
It was done. Tilting his head back, Adam let out a long, tremulous sigh. “Hallelujah,” he whispered, shaking his head. “Okay, guys. Ready for recontainment?”
Regaining his composure, Kron gave him a thumb’s up and twirled a few dials. As the four freewheeling generator pumps began to inhale deeply, ten swirling vacuum currents materialized over the air shafts: graphically revealed by the the smoke and mists, they looked like mini tornadoes. The pumps sucked the smoke back up through the passageways and into the hoses, filtering it through a series of fine, wet, vibrating screens. Something like concentrated slurry began to plop down into small, clear jars.
“Wait a sec….” Adam vaulted nimbly over the top of the wall and sprinted over to the nearest shaft. Bending down, he plugged the hole with his hand, gauging the strength of the suction. “Wow! Very powerful!” He yelled over the noise of the machines. “Four generators are a bit of overkill,” he shrugged. “Well, it won’t be long now!”
Shortly, all the air quality indicator dials read optimum: fresh air was now being sucked out of the nest. They eagerly hit the switches and ripped the sticky Flexfoam off the stone. As the barges backed away, a heap of Spyrin bodies tumbled out. They hopped into the opening, kicking the last of them over the edge with their muddy boots.
“Vengeance is ours!” Adam’s voice echoed, already halfway down the ramp. “Hey! Footgrippers turned up? Stiflers ready?” Spooked, the men entered the tunnel behind him, climbing over piles of stiff, spiky bodies.
Every detail was exactly where Adam had predicted: the ramp, the wall, the spiral staircase, everything. With Asron torches blazing, they filed silently down the spiral staircase and stepped out into the vault, lining up against the great, curving wall of gold. As Tola swept his torch upward, he let out an involuntary gasp. “L-look!”
Far above their heads, an enormous nest was swinging back and forth, hanging precariously from the center of a deeply embossed gold medallion. A few Spyrins were still hanging from it, twitching weakly. As their flickering searchlights blackened with a lingering hiss, they released their tenacious hooks and fell, tumbling through the air onto a mountain of black bodies.
“Wow!” Adam shook his head. “Look at this mess! Well, we’ve got our work cut out for us! Anyone remember to bring the rope and antigrav grapplers?”
They stared silently at each other, overwhelmed.
“No? Okay, two of you, upstairs on the double! Hup! Hup!”
They returned with the equipment clattering down the stairway behind them and everyone whipped into action. Handling the spiky bodies with thickly gloved hands, they clamped small, humming antigrav grapplers onto the thorax of each insect and turned up the power to lift the heavy carcass about a foot off the floor. As the men tethered them onto the rope and packed them tightly together, the monumental task finally began to make sense. In no time at all, they had a long line of Spyrin bodies ascending the stairway, looking like a string of floating, burnt-out lightbulbs.
At the entrance, another group released the black carcasses from the grapplers’ hooks and tossed them over the edge. Adam snatched the loose end of the rope and pulled it back down into the vault, a string of empty grapplers floating along behind him. At the bottom, he quickly tied the loose ends of the rope together and formed a continuous loop.
At the top, the men quickly realized his scheme.
“Well, waddaya know! A conveyer belt! I swear, that man’s a genius.”
“Would you have thought of this, bean-brain?”
“Ah, no. I’d still be doing a ton of grunt work, you know, sweating, schlepping these bad boys up the stairs one at a time?”
“You’re right. Me too. Well, we should be glad we got Adam in charge, because we’d all be dead by now. Remember how he saved us on the Obelisk planet?”
“Yeah, but then again, how’d he seem to know the exact layout of this hive? We all know he’s never been here before! It’s creepy, if you ask me! Creepy!”
They heard a chuckle in the shadows. Adam jumped out, popping his eyes.
Startled, they grinned nervously and dumped Spyrin bodies a bit faster.
“How’d I know? This Bandor cave is an original model of the Outpost I explored back on the Earth! I was just a kid then, and we were in New Guinea…. Oh, I’ll tell you the rest later,” he teased. “Maybe.”
The taller one squinted at him in the bright morning light. “Ah, you said that this cave is the same as one you went into on the Earth?”
“Yes. Exactly. Apparently, it’s only one of thousands throughout the universe.”
“The Bandors came to the Earth?” he persisted.
“Eons ago. They called their Earth-cave an Outpost.”
“Oh.” They glanced at each other, shrugging undecidedly. “I think we get it?”
He smiled, saluted, and turned on his heel, purposely leaving them with their mouths hanging open. Downstairs, the pile was nearly gone. As the last of the Spyrins were untangled, a great bulging lump lay exposed near the center of the room.
Kron instantly recognized the hulking form. “The queen!” he pointed. The wingless body was several times longer than her workers; reduced to nothing more than an egg-laying machine, her swollen abdomen looked like a water balloon about to burst. He poked at the taught-looking membrane with the toe of his boot, letting out a low whistle.
Whooee! Gotta be extremely careful with this one, sir! Maybe use some extra wide body slings? Whaddaya think? We don’t wanna be, ah, shall we say … mopping up, do we?”
Adam grimaced. “Perish the thought!”
Suddenly, a shout echoed down the spiral stairs, and then one of the men burst excitedly into the round room, skidding across the glass floor. “Animals! Hundreds of them! They’re swarming out of the jungle and carrying away all the Spyrin bodies!
With a loud whoop, Adam jabbed his fist in the air. “Yes!” He spun to his men. “The ultimate in poetic justice! Let’s go watch the great feast of revenge!”
“Hold on, guys,” Tola smiled mischievously, “got your black ties on? There’s Smoked Spyrin on the menu!”
Laughing, they maneuvered the queen’s bulky, floating body up the spiral staircase. As the excited group crowded the entrance, Tola jumped up and down, trying to see over their shoulders. No go. He dropped to his knees, squeezing between their legs. As he approached the edge, a loud squealing greeted him. He looked down into a great free-for-all: there was an enormous, roiling melee of beak and scale, tooth and claw, feather, fur and flying Spyrin parts. Suddenly, beyond the turbulence of bodies, he saw something else. He focused into the distance. Some great, striped beasts were having a field day.
“R-Razahs!” he pointed.
Adam studied them a moment. “There’s another feeding frenzy out there, and they’ve got a lot of food. I’m sure they’re not interested in us!”
“You’re right,” Tola grinned. “They’re finishing off the fattest fare from the fringes of this frenzied flock!”
The men glanced down. “From the fringes…? Frenzied…?” They poked at him with their boots. “Go for it, round man!”
Laughing, Tola fended them off. “Hey!” He poked at the queen’s body with his finger, grinning mischievously. “We got more ammunition! We’ve saved the best for last!”
They got the idea immediately. Sliding the bloated body to the edge of the opening, they counted to three and rolled the great sack over the edge. It hit the ground and ruptured, releasing a torrent of gooey, oval whitish eggs.
“There ya go!” he quipped. “Dunk for dessert, you delirious denizens!”
Squealing loudly over their heads, a new group joined the frenzy: aeronautas! Hundreds of them! The billowing cloud descended, hissing and letting out volumes of gas to lose altitude. “Pop, pop, pop….” As one of them brazenly scuttled by Adam’s head, he snatched it by its coiled snout. “Gotcha!” It thrashed helplessly, it’s squealing lost in the din. He plunked himself down on the edge and stuffed the creature between his legs to study it. The men crowded around him, kneeling for a closer look.
“Hmmm,” he mumbled, “let’s see what makes these babies tick.” He squinted through the creature’s thin, whitish membrane. “What in the world? Water?” He sloshed the bubble around. “Hey, Kron, got a portable air quality indicator on you?”
Startled, Kron checked his pockets. “Ah, yeah! Got one, sir!”
“I’m gonna give him a little squeeze. You check to see where the gas comes out.” He applied a gentle pressure with his legs. The snout fluttered.
“Th-the nose?” Kron’s eyes popped. “He farted out his nose?”
Hooting, they elbowed each other as Kron took the sample. “Huh? Y-you’re not gonna believe this, sir!” He stuck the dial in front of Adam’s face.
His eyes widened. “Hydrogen? That’s…. Owww!” He jerked his hand away. “Hey! This little sucker just shocked me! He-he’s got a zapper!” He pushed on the spot again and got the same response. “Ouch! Hey, what gives?”
“What is it, sir? A stinger? Spikes?”
“No, it feels like electricity! But-but how could that be?” As he mulled it over, a light dawned. “Of course, that explains the water! These little piglets must be able to break the water molecules down into their two basic components with….”
Kron cut in. “No! Come on, electrolysis?
Adam continued. “Bingo! The hydrogen provides the lift and the oxygen’s simply absorbed into his body through respiration!” He sloshed the squealing balloon creature around. “And look! The water acts like ballast to keep him upright! No wonder these guys need to be near water all the time! We’re in the middle of a swamp here, right?”
He stood up and let the Aeronauta go. Just as he’d theorized, it released squirts of excess water as ballast, leaving a long trail of drops behind him. With a sudden, loud squealing, the enormous cloud of living bubbles followed his lead and began to climb, releasing their collective water ballast in a torrent. Each held a single, treasured, six-inch Spyrin egg coiled in their snout. As the cacophony rose to the jungle canopy, a loud slurping sound replaced it from base of the wall. They looked down. A lone, hungry straggler was noisily sucking up the contents of a broken egg.
“Well,” Adam pointed, “that should mark the end of this Spyrin colony, except for the dead larvae down in the nest. Let’s go finish the job.”
“Wait.” One of the men held out his hand, offering him a piece of smooth, leathery-looking paper. “What should we do about the nest itself, sir?”
“Hey, wow! This is a piece of nest?” He tried to tear it apart with his hands. “Tough stuff! We could just grind it up and spray it onto the forest floor. You know, like mulch?”
“Dust to dust,” Tola mused, quietly. “Poetic justice again, sir.”
Adam chuckled. “But we really should bring a chunk of it back to our lab and put some brains to work on it. There are hundreds of uses for cellulose!”
Peter’s voice rose hesitantly from the back of the group. “What about the gold? What do we do with all the gold down in the dome?”
With a deep, ear-slitting roar, the four Spyrins were suddenly beside them! The men recoiled in their seats, their hearts hammering. The basso profundo quartet gathered in a circle, flashed their blinding searchlights in some kind of strange code, then banked in formation toward the clearing to merge into an enormous black cloud of glistening wings.
The men slipped out of the forest into a swampy clearing, then stopped a short distance away to watch, nervously rechecking their cloaking devices. As they turned up their audio, they could hear the roar: echoing with hollow-sounding thunder, the last of the great, venomous cloud of Spyrins were disappearing into a huge, rectangular opening about nine feet above the ground.
Adam began to feel weird, his mind racing. Had he seen this before? The sleds were hovering rock-steady, their fine blue laser locator beams focusing on nearby stationary objects. He shrugged it off. On his whispered cue they settled to the ground on their runners, squishing into the soft muck to wait. All of a sudden, a powerful feeling of déjà vu swept over him. Yes! He’d been here before: the jungle, the swamp, everything fit! Excitedly, he slid to the edge of his seat and looked around, still not believing his eyes.
They were beside a boggy stream, with what appeared to be a huge wall on the other side. He slumped back, his gut quaking, staring intently at the huge, precisely fit stones. “The G-galaxy Room!” he stammered. “The-the Outpost!”
Tola laid a hand on his shoulder. “Ah, what’s that, sir?”
Holding up a finger, he opened the audio channels and began to whisper excitedly into his mike. “Okay, now listen, guys. You may not believe this, but I’m pretty sure I know what to expect here! As you enter that big rectangular opening, you should find a tunnel to the left, sloping down into a long, slippery ramp. There’s a wall at the end with, ah, Dazeen spikes sticking out of it,” he paused, realizing what he’d just said. “Dazeen spikes?” he mumbled. “But that’s impossible! How’d they get them back to the Earth?” As the men exchanged uneasy looks, he continued, almost in a daze. “Then you turn to the right when you get to the wall. Yes, to the right! Follow me so far?
“Ah … sir?” Tola asked hesitantly, pulling his hand away.
“Next!” Adam held up a finger. “A spiral staircase should be at the end, going way, way down into this humongous domed vault. Hey, come to think of it, the environment down there should be perfect for a nest. Yes! And the Spyrins shouldn’t be able to get out any other way, because there are no other exits, just a bunch of small ventilation shafts going up to the surface! The shafts are probably out in the woods on the other side of the wall!” His voice was shaking in excitement. “Yes! Yes! Our plan should work flawlessly!”
After a long silence, Kron probed gently. “Sir? Ah, how…?”
“Intuition,” he interjected quickly. “Ah, let’s just say I’ve seen it all before.”
Another silence. Their minds were racing.
“Hey! I’ll fill you in later!” he blurted. “Let’s go!”
They men glanced nervously over their shoulders.
“C’mon, c’mon, we’re wasting time!” Adam shouted impatiently. “Crank up those generators! Unlatch your safeties and set your Stiflers to ‘kill’!”
They leaped into action, raising the four generator barges into the air and maneuvering them carefully to fit tightly across the rectangular opening. After snipping small, flat sections of Flexnet into various sizes, they plugged the spaces around the edges and sprayed Flexfoam over them. In minutes they had an airtight seal.
Without warning, a deep buzz thundered behind them! A chill ran down their spines and they spun around, their hearts in their mouths.
A Spyrin! The lone straggler was furiously strobing his light, clacking his jaws, and jabbing his stinger. The shredded, partially eaten body of a Dazzor bird was dangling limply from the hooks on his feet, trailing along the ground like a battered, blood-streaked pennant. A single, glowing feather fell into the stream and slowly drifted away.
Adam’s hands were shaking in anger. “Steady, men….” They aimed their Stiflers, awaiting his command.
“Waste that mutant scum!”
They fired in unison. As twenty blazing arcs bored into their target, the Spyrin’s body immediately hissed and swelled, the abdomen ballooning grotesquely. With a loud retort, the insect exploded violently in a ball of superheated steam and smoking body parts!
“Yes!” They ducked, slapping high fives and jabbing their fists into the air.
Amidst the steaming clumps of wings, claws, legs and guts, the Dazzor’s small body dropped in a crumpled heap. Impulsively, Adam vaulted off the generator barge and dashed out into the clearing, picking his way through the swampy muck.
The bird’s body was still warm when he picked it up. He turned it over gently, his hands shaking. “Damn!” He snapped his head up, his finger pointing emphatically at the generators. “Let’s do this thing!”
They bent into action with renewed purpose: the four generators roared to life, pumping clouds of billowing, suffocating smoke down the passageways. It didn’t take long to reach the first hornets. There was a faint, questioning wail, followed by a pencil beam of light stabbing up into the dark forest canopy.
Kron spotted the bright, moving line on the other side of the wall. “Huh?” He stood on his toes on top of a barge. “Wow!” he gasped. “Look at that!”
The men scrambled over the top. Looking like mute exclamation points, ten tightly focused beams were flashing in alarm, stabbing up through the ventilation shafts into the morning fog. In a gathering light-storm of fury, mist and shadow began to strobe in a maelstrom of insanity.
A great roar began. Somewhere beneath their feet, hundreds of black wings thundered, making the ground vibrate. Wide-eyed, their nerves on edge, the men could only imagine the flying forms under them, colliding and thrashing in a terrifying, hollow-sounding roar of death and confusion. They watched and listened, their fists clenched tightly at their sides. The ventilation shafts were only revealing a telltale light-glimpse, a screeching sound bite of the writhing, subterranean agony. A cracking sound took over. Doomed, asphyxiating, the wailing Spyrins were crunching into each other’s exoskeletons with their powerful mandibles and frantically stinging anything that moved.
Adam’s heart was pounding. “Good grief,” he breathed. “This smoke is more powerful than I thought! Hey, I just thought of something. We don’t want to choke the whole jungle with it! As soon as we see it shooting out those shafts, we’ll cut off the generators and wait for stuff to finish its work down there.”
The lights flickered and the faint wails continued for an endless, adrenaline-pumping span. Suddenly, ten vertical puffs of smoke shot out! They silenced the generators immediately and waited, listening to the quiet pulse of life returning to the jungle.
It was done. Tilting his head back, Adam let out a long, tremulous sigh. “Hallelujah,” he whispered, shaking his head. “Okay, guys. Ready for recontainment?”
Regaining his composure, Kron gave him a thumb’s up and twirled a few dials. As the four freewheeling generator pumps began to inhale deeply, ten swirling vacuum currents materialized over the air shafts: graphically revealed by the the smoke and mists, they looked like mini tornadoes. The pumps sucked the smoke back up through the passageways and into the hoses, filtering it through a series of fine, wet, vibrating screens. Something like concentrated slurry began to plop down into small, clear jars.
“Wait a sec….” Adam vaulted nimbly over the top of the wall and sprinted over to the nearest shaft. Bending down, he plugged the hole with his hand, gauging the strength of the suction. “Wow! Very powerful!” He yelled over the noise of the machines. “Four generators are a bit of overkill,” he shrugged. “Well, it won’t be long now!”
Shortly, all the air quality indicator dials read optimum: fresh air was now being sucked out of the nest. They eagerly hit the switches and ripped the sticky Flexfoam off the stone. As the barges backed away, a heap of Spyrin bodies tumbled out. They hopped into the opening, kicking the last of them over the edge with their muddy boots.
“Vengeance is ours!” Adam’s voice echoed, already halfway down the ramp. “Hey! Footgrippers turned up? Stiflers ready?” Spooked, the men entered the tunnel behind him, climbing over piles of stiff, spiky bodies.
Every detail was exactly where Adam had predicted: the ramp, the wall, the spiral staircase, everything. With Asron torches blazing, they filed silently down the spiral staircase and stepped out into the vault, lining up against the great, curving wall of gold. As Tola swept his torch upward, he let out an involuntary gasp. “L-look!”
Far above their heads, an enormous nest was swinging back and forth, hanging precariously from the center of a deeply embossed gold medallion. A few Spyrins were still hanging from it, twitching weakly. As their flickering searchlights blackened with a lingering hiss, they released their tenacious hooks and fell, tumbling through the air onto a mountain of black bodies.
“Wow!” Adam shook his head. “Look at this mess! Well, we’ve got our work cut out for us! Anyone remember to bring the rope and antigrav grapplers?”
They stared silently at each other, overwhelmed.
“No? Okay, two of you, upstairs on the double! Hup! Hup!”
They returned with the equipment clattering down the stairway behind them and everyone whipped into action. Handling the spiky bodies with thickly gloved hands, they clamped small, humming antigrav grapplers onto the thorax of each insect and turned up the power to lift the heavy carcass about a foot off the floor. As the men tethered them onto the rope and packed them tightly together, the monumental task finally began to make sense. In no time at all, they had a long line of Spyrin bodies ascending the stairway, looking like a string of floating, burnt-out lightbulbs.
At the entrance, another group released the black carcasses from the grapplers’ hooks and tossed them over the edge. Adam snatched the loose end of the rope and pulled it back down into the vault, a string of empty grapplers floating along behind him. At the bottom, he quickly tied the loose ends of the rope together and formed a continuous loop.
At the top, the men quickly realized his scheme.
“Well, waddaya know! A conveyer belt! I swear, that man’s a genius.”
“Would you have thought of this, bean-brain?”
“Ah, no. I’d still be doing a ton of grunt work, you know, sweating, schlepping these bad boys up the stairs one at a time?”
“You’re right. Me too. Well, we should be glad we got Adam in charge, because we’d all be dead by now. Remember how he saved us on the Obelisk planet?”
“Yeah, but then again, how’d he seem to know the exact layout of this hive? We all know he’s never been here before! It’s creepy, if you ask me! Creepy!”
They heard a chuckle in the shadows. Adam jumped out, popping his eyes.
Startled, they grinned nervously and dumped Spyrin bodies a bit faster.
“How’d I know? This Bandor cave is an original model of the Outpost I explored back on the Earth! I was just a kid then, and we were in New Guinea…. Oh, I’ll tell you the rest later,” he teased. “Maybe.”
The taller one squinted at him in the bright morning light. “Ah, you said that this cave is the same as one you went into on the Earth?”
“Yes. Exactly. Apparently, it’s only one of thousands throughout the universe.”
“The Bandors came to the Earth?” he persisted.
“Eons ago. They called their Earth-cave an Outpost.”
“Oh.” They glanced at each other, shrugging undecidedly. “I think we get it?”
He smiled, saluted, and turned on his heel, purposely leaving them with their mouths hanging open. Downstairs, the pile was nearly gone. As the last of the Spyrins were untangled, a great bulging lump lay exposed near the center of the room.
Kron instantly recognized the hulking form. “The queen!” he pointed. The wingless body was several times longer than her workers; reduced to nothing more than an egg-laying machine, her swollen abdomen looked like a water balloon about to burst. He poked at the taught-looking membrane with the toe of his boot, letting out a low whistle.
Whooee! Gotta be extremely careful with this one, sir! Maybe use some extra wide body slings? Whaddaya think? We don’t wanna be, ah, shall we say … mopping up, do we?”
Adam grimaced. “Perish the thought!”
Suddenly, a shout echoed down the spiral stairs, and then one of the men burst excitedly into the round room, skidding across the glass floor. “Animals! Hundreds of them! They’re swarming out of the jungle and carrying away all the Spyrin bodies!
With a loud whoop, Adam jabbed his fist in the air. “Yes!” He spun to his men. “The ultimate in poetic justice! Let’s go watch the great feast of revenge!”
“Hold on, guys,” Tola smiled mischievously, “got your black ties on? There’s Smoked Spyrin on the menu!”
Laughing, they maneuvered the queen’s bulky, floating body up the spiral staircase. As the excited group crowded the entrance, Tola jumped up and down, trying to see over their shoulders. No go. He dropped to his knees, squeezing between their legs. As he approached the edge, a loud squealing greeted him. He looked down into a great free-for-all: there was an enormous, roiling melee of beak and scale, tooth and claw, feather, fur and flying Spyrin parts. Suddenly, beyond the turbulence of bodies, he saw something else. He focused into the distance. Some great, striped beasts were having a field day.
“R-Razahs!” he pointed.
Adam studied them a moment. “There’s another feeding frenzy out there, and they’ve got a lot of food. I’m sure they’re not interested in us!”
“You’re right,” Tola grinned. “They’re finishing off the fattest fare from the fringes of this frenzied flock!”
The men glanced down. “From the fringes…? Frenzied…?” They poked at him with their boots. “Go for it, round man!”
Laughing, Tola fended them off. “Hey!” He poked at the queen’s body with his finger, grinning mischievously. “We got more ammunition! We’ve saved the best for last!”
They got the idea immediately. Sliding the bloated body to the edge of the opening, they counted to three and rolled the great sack over the edge. It hit the ground and ruptured, releasing a torrent of gooey, oval whitish eggs.
“There ya go!” he quipped. “Dunk for dessert, you delirious denizens!”
Squealing loudly over their heads, a new group joined the frenzy: aeronautas! Hundreds of them! The billowing cloud descended, hissing and letting out volumes of gas to lose altitude. “Pop, pop, pop….” As one of them brazenly scuttled by Adam’s head, he snatched it by its coiled snout. “Gotcha!” It thrashed helplessly, it’s squealing lost in the din. He plunked himself down on the edge and stuffed the creature between his legs to study it. The men crowded around him, kneeling for a closer look.
“Hmmm,” he mumbled, “let’s see what makes these babies tick.” He squinted through the creature’s thin, whitish membrane. “What in the world? Water?” He sloshed the bubble around. “Hey, Kron, got a portable air quality indicator on you?”
Startled, Kron checked his pockets. “Ah, yeah! Got one, sir!”
“I’m gonna give him a little squeeze. You check to see where the gas comes out.” He applied a gentle pressure with his legs. The snout fluttered.
“Th-the nose?” Kron’s eyes popped. “He farted out his nose?”
Hooting, they elbowed each other as Kron took the sample. “Huh? Y-you’re not gonna believe this, sir!” He stuck the dial in front of Adam’s face.
His eyes widened. “Hydrogen? That’s…. Owww!” He jerked his hand away. “Hey! This little sucker just shocked me! He-he’s got a zapper!” He pushed on the spot again and got the same response. “Ouch! Hey, what gives?”
“What is it, sir? A stinger? Spikes?”
“No, it feels like electricity! But-but how could that be?” As he mulled it over, a light dawned. “Of course, that explains the water! These little piglets must be able to break the water molecules down into their two basic components with….”
Kron cut in. “No! Come on, electrolysis?
Adam continued. “Bingo! The hydrogen provides the lift and the oxygen’s simply absorbed into his body through respiration!” He sloshed the squealing balloon creature around. “And look! The water acts like ballast to keep him upright! No wonder these guys need to be near water all the time! We’re in the middle of a swamp here, right?”
He stood up and let the Aeronauta go. Just as he’d theorized, it released squirts of excess water as ballast, leaving a long trail of drops behind him. With a sudden, loud squealing, the enormous cloud of living bubbles followed his lead and began to climb, releasing their collective water ballast in a torrent. Each held a single, treasured, six-inch Spyrin egg coiled in their snout. As the cacophony rose to the jungle canopy, a loud slurping sound replaced it from base of the wall. They looked down. A lone, hungry straggler was noisily sucking up the contents of a broken egg.
“Well,” Adam pointed, “that should mark the end of this Spyrin colony, except for the dead larvae down in the nest. Let’s go finish the job.”
“Wait.” One of the men held out his hand, offering him a piece of smooth, leathery-looking paper. “What should we do about the nest itself, sir?”
“Hey, wow! This is a piece of nest?” He tried to tear it apart with his hands. “Tough stuff! We could just grind it up and spray it onto the forest floor. You know, like mulch?”
“Dust to dust,” Tola mused, quietly. “Poetic justice again, sir.”
Adam chuckled. “But we really should bring a chunk of it back to our lab and put some brains to work on it. There are hundreds of uses for cellulose!”
Peter’s voice rose hesitantly from the back of the group. “What about the gold? What do we do with all the gold down in the dome?”
