Beowulf's Children (41 page)

He could see pterodons circling overhead... and nothing ahead. He was seeing through a curtain of grass. Then he wasn't, because they'd driven out of the grass into a neatly cut lawn. He grinned, speeding up, enjoying the view. High grass to left and right. Still he saw nothing of a mystery creature, until Katya spoke.

"We're looking at the aft end. Justin, we've found the Scribe!"

Scribe? Perspective came. It was almost half the horizon, a geographical feature moving slowly away from them. It was camouflaged, but that wasn't it. He hadn't seen it because it was too big!

Katya was laughing at him. He'd gasped like a dying man. Justin said, "Cassandra, sanity check. Could this be the Scribe? The thing that draws paths we see from orbit?"

"It leaves a path identical to the Scribe tracks," the computer said.

"Absent conflicting data this is a valid conclusion."

They moved closer. No sign of eyes, this side of the beast. Not much detail at all, just the edge of a tremendous shell, the color of bare earth, moving slowly away.

It didn't waddle. It cruised. In its wake the grass stood a few inches high, dotted with truncated haystacks two feet tall. Droppings?

Something like a tremendous flattened crab slid up to one of the heaps, moving no faster than the Scribe itself, and over it without a pause. A juvenile?

Talking to himself, talking for Cassandra's records, Justin drove the trike into the grass again. Three pterodons were circling high above him. He rode half-blind through the prairie grass, swinging wide around the now invisible beast. "Don't want to startle it," he told Katya, and was suddenly whooping.

A small fist whacked him between the shoulders. "What?"

He could hardly speak for laughter. "Pictured it rearing up. Pawing the air. Don't mind me."

He must be far ahead of it now. There was a stand of horsemane trees, uphill. He pulled the trike into their shade, turned off the engine, and waited. The pterodons were still with him. A fourth came to join them. One peeled off and flew toward the Scribe.

A thing that size... it wouldn't try to plow trees under, would it?

They were on a slight rise, three kilometers ahead of the chamel herd. Down below them, now more than two hundred meters away, was the largest creature that Justin had ever seen in his life. A crab... clearly derived from a crab shell, like the Avalon crabs, like the fixed-wing birds. But you could build a city on its back! Or a village anyway...

In fact, a pterodon was landing on its back to join more than two dozen others. Five merged circles, a communal nest, sprawled along the front of the shell.

A deep blue line ran across the front of the Scribe at the level of the grass. It seemed to ripple. Lips, or just a lower lip... maybe.

Otherwise nothing about the beast was in motion. It slid along like a raft on a wide river. Any motion must be taking place beneath the shell. Others of its kind, Avalon crabs and bugs and birds, made do with four motive limbs and endless ingenuity in the shapes of their shells.

Katya rose from her seat, lifted a pair of war specs, and gave a low whistle. She nudged him, and passed them over.

The beast was even more impressive when seen through the glasses. As large as—"Cassandra, is this the largest animal we know of?"

"Negative. The blue whale is larger. This is comparable in size to the largest of the herbivorous dinosaurs."

"Thank you." The edge of the shell dipped to become skids or skis. A half-dozen snouters grazed placidly along one flank. The beast was as large as half the main colony, and flat. It must have nearly the mass of a blue whale, but it was flatter, and wider than it was long.

There: eyes. Justin had thought they'd be higher. They were bedded in the long blue lips, too low to give the Scribe a decent view. He zoomed on one eye, and it was looking back, examining Justin and Katya, utterly unconcerned.

It wasn't until Justin focused the lenses more carefully that he saw what Katya was excited about.

There were grendels hanging from the shell. Two... no, three distorted grendel-shapes hung from the front and side of the shell, like, hanks of hair. Mummies, not quite skeletons, but long dead, he judged.

Katya was saying, "Looks slow. Let's lake a closer look."

The Scribe continued on its placid way as they approached. Five pterodons rose to circle above them. Snouters scurried away around the curve of the stupendous beast. They didn't seem terribly worried. The little Scribe, if that was what it was, hadn't been afraid either. But those dried corpses were grendels!

"Cassandra," Justin said, "backtrack."

The trike's little holostage sprouted a relief map of the locality. Cassandra recreated the beast's path as it meandered among similar paths in the grasslands. There were other curves and loops of lighter grass on the flat prairie background, and they crossed only rarely.

"How close does it get to running water?" he asked, but he saw the answer as he spoke: the path dipped to touch the river, and lingered there.

Cassandra said, "Quite close, and frequently. The path often parallels waterways."

"Does it enter known grendel territory?"

"Affirmative."

"Thank you," Justin said. "Hallelujah."

"There are things that aren't afraid of grendels," Katya said.

"Obviously. Not this creature, not its young. Not the pterodons nesting on its back."

"And the snouters?"

"Don't know. Maybe they stay on the veldt when Momma Scribe drinks."

Justin stood up on the seat of the trike to watch the creature. It drifted like an island, placid and unconcerned, as if it had never been threatened in its life. Indeed, it was difficult to imagine what could harm such a beast.

He raised the binoculars and focused on one of the mummified grendels.

The four mummies looked about the same state, the same age. That might have been a coordinated attack, for all the good it had done them. Each was hanging by its tail.

"Its defenses seem to be passive," he said. "Its sheer size, and something about the shell that traps grendels."

Katya asked, "Some sort of mucilage?"

"More like Velcro. Maybe. I want to see." He levered himself off the trike and walked through the high grass toward the Scribe. He pulled his microphone aside and told Katya, "You could put a castle on this thing. Come, I will make you Queen of the Scribeveldt."

The shell was all pentagonal plates, like shields a couple of feet across. Shields, and white tails hanging between the edges, here and there. Bones?

Cadmann had spoken of Roman army shields: the warriors held them in a closed array, each warrior's shield guarding the man next to him, in the days of swords and spears. Roman shields would trap enemy spears... like Velcro he'd been right about that.

Katya said, "Not a castle. Tents. A pavilion, a summer palace. The serfs will have to wear special shoes."

"Yeah, wouldn't want to hurt the shell."

He was vaguely aware of a skeeter's buzz, far-off and insignificant, and almost didn't register it until he heard the voice in his earphone. "What in the hell are you doing?" Jessica asked.

"I'm getting closer," he said. "This thing could care less about me."

"You don't know that." Her voice was irritated.

"It's good to know somebody cares," he said.

Jessica brought the skeeter closer and watched Justin and Katya approach the mountainous Scribe. The lawn behind it stretched to the horizon. It was easy to imagine such a herbivore trolling the entire continent, perhaps looking for a mate, collecting a herd of animals who hid beneath its shell for safety.

It was impossible to imagine a carnivore of equivalent size. Even blue whales, while technically carnivores, were passive filtration feeders. The malevolent Moby Dick had been their little brother. So Justin was probably safe. Probably.

Still.

She was irritated. She wanted to be mad at him. He had sided with Cadmann against them, against Aaron, and was a traitor of sorts, dammit. And he wasn't really her brother, for all the talk about two mothers and a dad. Justin's father was Terry Faulkner, he wasn't related to Cadmann at all, and yet he'd sided with the colonel against the Second. She wanted to stay pissed at him, but hated the way her chest hammered in response to the visual input.

Dammit, dammit, dammit. Only Justin and... and Aaron. Only the two of them could drive her this crazy.

He was twenty feet from the creature now. Its eye, a spheroid four feet across with a black iris, its tiny-seeming eye was on Justin and it just didn't care. To Jessica he looked so small. She could see his point. He was nothing in comparison to a beast such as this. Why should it pay him any mind whatsoever? And yet... and yet... Avalon Surprise.

The pig things snorted and ambled away. They were rooting around in the grass, moving when they had to stay ahead of the Scribe's long blue lip.

She brought the skeeter in for a closer look, and the snouter looked up, more alarmed by the whirring, flying thing in the sky than it ever was by Justin's presence.

"What are you doing now?" she demanded.

"Getting close-ups for the record. Jess, Chaka is going to absolutely love this! I'm looking at the bones of a grendel's tail, with a couple of vertebrae still attached. The rest of it could have fallen off years ago.

The spikes on the tail are caught between the edges of the plates of the shell. It catches their tail spikes and they can writhe themselves into a coma for all the good it does them. These bones, they're cracked—"

"Cassie!" Jessica howled. "Where are your safety overrides?"

"Working," Cassandra said, and went silent.

It came to Jessica that checking all of Cassandra's protective measures might be the work of months, or lifetimes. "Cancel that last question. You hear me, Cassie?"

"Canceled. Justin is safe by my current parameters," Cassandra said. "I have backtracked this creature over the past year. It is not an aggressor. Grendels do not survive in its domain. I find no other local predators thus far."

Current parameters. "When were your current safety parameters updated?"

"Eighty-seven days ago."

Three months ago. Edgar had been fiddling with Cassandra, likely at Aaron's instigation, giving the Second more freedom to explore.

"Might as well join the madness," she said, and brought the skeeter down a hundred meters away from the moving mountain. The Scribe didn't look able to move quickly, but she didn't want it accidentally changing course and crushing her skeeter.

She was glad to see Katya up and around and looking so damned chipper. She didn't completely agree with Justin's choice of women, but what the hell, she didn't really have anything to say about it, did she?

The wind came cleanly through her lungs as she jogged toward them through armpit-high grass. The rapidity of her approach seemed to attract Momma Mountain's attention, and it turned its eye sluggishly toward her. Taking her time. It was impossible to imagine something like this having any potential for speed.

Justin was only ten feet away from it, playing his camera over four sets of trapped bones. One was no more than several joints of a grendel's tailbones. The others were distorted mummies.

It seemed clear what had happened. Momma Mountain had approached the river to drink. Each grendel in turn, or all together, had made a suicidal charge and gotten stuck. Each had thrashed... that one seemed to have actually torn some of the plates loose, but it had done it no good. It hung limply, its bones cracked, as if it had shattered itself in those final convulsions. As if it was too powerful to live.

The great herbivore's lip rippled steadily, mowing two-meter-high grass.

"We have to see what's going on under there," Justin said. "Drop a camera—"

"Harden it," Jessica said, as if they'd been talking all along. "It'll get chewed up."

"Yeah, hardened, with a light—"

"A little light. Camera set for low light."

"Right, it must be permanent night under there. We don't want to blind... a whole damn ecology under there, I bet. Cassandra, we need that camera. How long to make one up?"

"That will depend on priorities. The practical answer is that I can fabricate it in Camelot and put it aboard the next supply shuttle."

"Tell Edgar."

One of the pig things came close, evidently emboldened by the nearness of Momma Mountain. Jessica took a step toward it, and it scampered away.

Justin's expression was hard to read. He said, "Watch this."

Katya echoed that. "Watch this," she said, nearly glowing with pleasure as Justin crouched, extending his hand. It held a handful of balled grass. He was very still.

At first the snouter just stared at him, but then it came close, and then closer, and then she couldn't believe it, but the thing was eating out of his hand. It had actually begun to lick his hand when it suddenly shook its head, startled at its own boldness, and backed away.

Justin brushed his hands off on his pants.

"What was that all about?" she asked.

"Dunno."

"You taste like a meat eater," Katya said, and licked his ear. He laughed, and put his arm around her.

Jessica found herself feeling enormously irritated. "Well—is it safe to bring the herd through here?"

"Safe as houses."

"We've got a water hole up ahead. Half a day." She didn't know why she said the next thing, but she did. "It was mapped as a grendel hole last month. You want to be in on the kill?"

"Sure." He kissed Katya briefly. "Katya—you take the trike, I'm going for a little skeeter ride."

Katya looked at Jessica, smiled, then pulled Justin around for a real honey of a kiss, long and deep and sincere as hell.