Beowulf's Children (58 page)

The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia

Cadmann watched the skeeters take off, then returned to the dining hall to rejoin Sylvia. "Bees," he said. "I can't get over it. We were so bloody careful! Divert the streams, build grendel-proof shelters. Satellite observations. Nothing could get to Deadwood Pass—how could we know a swarm of Avalon bees would blow over that pass?"

She reached across the table to take his hand. "It wasn't your fault, you know."

"The hell it wasn't. We had all the clues, explosions in the mines, and instead of coming over here to look for the real cause we wondered how the Pranksters could have done it."

"More my fault than yours, then," Sylvia said. "I'm the biologist. And I never guessed. Cadmann, stop blaming yourself."

"Sure."

The comm card chirped.

"Cadmann here."

"Amigo, we have it."

"The nest?"

"A nest, certainly."

"How big is it? How close are you?"

"I'm looking into a long valley," Carlos said. "I'd see more from a peak—Cassandra, that peak—Cad, the valley runs northeast from here, with a meadow down the center. The peak, call that Spyglass Hill for reference, is at the southeast end, forty-three kilometers distance bearing two-sixty-five degrees from Shangri-La. It's a long flat valley nestled in between ridges. There's a shallow stream. No indication of grendels. Let me say that again, no indication of grendels."

"There wasn't any indication of grendels at the lake up there either," Cadmann muttered.

"I have not forgotten that. The nest is below the peak. It's the size of a hill, a lumpy hill with no sharp edges to it, ten meters at the tallest. It's big, I make it ninety meters by a hundred and eighty. I'll make my way to the top of Spyglass and get a better measure, but it's big. Cad, it might not be the only nest. We've all converged on this valley, six search parties following bees, and we all ended here."

"Compadre, that implies a lot of bees."

"You know it. Colonel."

"Okay, we'll come look." He glanced at Aaron... but Aaron didn't try to interrupt, and this wouldn't be Cadmann Weyland's first siege. "We need poison gas... wouldn't it be nice if they had a ton of cyanide sitting in a warehouse?"

"No cyanide, but we do have some good insecticides," Aaron said. "You insisted. Remember? Do you think we will need them?"

"Probably not. Carlos, don't get too damn close to that nest. Bees protect their hives, and Avalon bees have a similar lifestyle."

"It's very likely they will," Sylvia said. "There would be strong evolutionary pressure to do that. Carlos, he's right, be careful."

"You know it."

"Here," Carlos called. "Follow the coffee smell."

Carlos had a full campfire going, with long sticks poking out of it, and a coffeepot braced on the sticks. Pouring, he said, "I thought I might want a torch right handy. Those bees are like little flying firecrackers, don't you think? Your people used to celebrate the Fourth of July that way, before the Green laws got so anal retentive."

Cadmann sipped, looking down through war specs.

The bees were big enough to see as individuals, even from here, from a hundred and twenty meters away and uphill. There were thousands. The nest... hard to tell where it ended; the edges faded out into low bushes and tall swamp grass.

Magnify. "There are several varieties," Cadmann said. "Most are under ten centimeters across, but there are larger ones too."

"Possibly soldiers," Sylvia said. "Terrestrial ants and termites develop lots of different forms. I never heard of bees doing that, but I don't suppose there's any reason they couldn't." She moved up beside him and adjusted her war specs. Then she shuddered. "They don't look dangerous."

"Even so, I would not care to go down there and dig up the nest," Carlos said.

Cadmann continued to study the valley. "There doesn't seem to be much that's moving down there," he said. "Except for the bees."

Aaron fished out his comm card. "Aaron here. Who's on duty?"

"Trish Chance."

"Trish, we need things to happen fast."

"Gotcha."

"There are a lot of these things here. They don't look dangerous, but how would we know? Look to the arsenal. Flamethrowers need to be charged up. Think about anything else we can use. And what skeeters do we have?" Aaron demanded.

"Three charged up. One out. It's been cloudy, and the batteries—"

"Right. Okay, hang on to one for equipment. Cassandra, what small mesh nets are available?"

"Four of the twenty-meter nets, one damaged. The others would not hold a creature of the size described."

"Thank you. Trish, get somebody to bring out those nets. Cassandra, please keep available a current display of nest locations as they are reported."

"Done. Ask for NESTMAP."

"Nestmap, please," Cadmann said.

His war specs dimmed, and when he looked out into space he could now see a projection of the valley. A blinking net of bright lines surrounded an irregular mass that looked vaguely like an African termite nest. Dimmer lines indicated areas where more nests were suspected.

"Thank you. Enough."

The image faded. Aaron still asked questions and gave orders. Doing as well as I would, and he knows what's here. He'd have been a good officer back when we had wars.

Three skeeters rose from Shangri-La. A fourth, not yet in, would take off as soon as various factions could agree as to what should go aboard.

"I just want to be sure we learn everything we can from here," Cadmann said.

"We have to take it to the bees sometime," Aaron said.

"I know. Cassandra, is there any way we can get an ultrasound map of the inside of that thing? Before we open it up?"

Carlos said, "Cad, I'll go off down the ridge if you'll give me the war specs. Give Cassandra a view from some other directions."

Cadmann pulled the specs off his tired eyes' and handed them over.

"Have you got a flashlight?"

"I do," Katya said.

Sylvia said, "Want some company? Yes, Cad, I have a flashlight."

As the three receded, Aaron said, "They must find this stuff pretty dull."

They hate arguments, Cadmann thought. "I love it myself," he said.

"Planning a siege. Aaron—"

"I'd go in now."

"I wouldn't even try to take out a wasp's nest at night."

"They'll be torpid," Aaron said.

"We'll wait," Cadmann said.

Unsettling shadows fell through the valley. To Cadmann's tired eyes, the bees were no longer visible as bees, only as swirls of motion. There were more now, streaming back into their nest.

Pterodons, much bigger, still wheeled in sunlight. "Those must stick to the heights," Aaron speculated.

Sylvia said, "And fall to the bees when they get old and sick." She shivered. Cadmann fished a windbreaker out of his pack and helped her into it.

Bigger pterodons yet were converging above. These pterodons had never seen skeeters, and the sight gave them fits. One skeeter wheeled off and began to circle the valley. Three more followed each other down to Beehive Peak.

They unloaded tents and safety domes and crates of electronic gear, as well as tanks of insecticide. He watched a grinning fifteen-year-old lugging a box of thermite grenades.

He was a little alarmed to see someone as young as Carey Lou this close to danger, but he kept his mouth shut. He'd just have to try to ensure that danger was kept to a minimum.

"Everybody carries a safety sack!" he bawled, and there were no disagreements. If Carey Lou dropped his for even a second, he would tan his hide!

His comm card was talking: Trish. "Dammit, I say we attack it tonight.

They won't be as active."

"You heard Colonel Weyland," Carlos said. "We can't see well, we don't know what we're up against. It's insane not to wait for daylight—"

"All right. Let's say we wait for daylight," Evan Castaneda said reasonably. "What then? We don't have enough poison to take out one of those things. I think we should postpone the whole thing, go back and cook up about a hundred gallons of nerve gas—"

"We need to study them—"

"We'll study their corpses! These things killed Linda! And Joe—"

"Ah, I think—" Aaron tried to say.

Carey Lou broke in, his thin, reedy voice excited. "Wait a minute. We learned it in school, we used Foo Foo gas on a grendel twenty years ago. Like napalm, right? We can hit ‘em with that, like in the movie ‘Them'. Drive ‘em down into the nest, pump more in the top, and just cook the sonsabitches!"

The group fell silent, awed by the purity of their youngest member's bloodlust. Aaron's face had darkened.

"We appreciate your sentiments," Cadmann said reasonably. "But try to watch the language."

"Oh, yeah," he said sheepishly. "Sorry."

The last skeeter settled near the others. Little Chaka eeled out, turned to help Big Chaka. "There is," said Big Chaka, "definitely another nest at the north end of this valley. Maybe three or four."

"Damn," Cadmann said. "Cassandra, get together with the Chakas and make some maps. We don't want to rile more than one nest at a time. Trish, you still on? How close are we to having those nets? I want to look them over."

"Listen," Big Chaka began. "About your assault. Have you considered—"

"Freeze it. Consider this," Aaron snarled. He had a thermite grenade in hand, and twisted it atop his grendel gun.

Cadmann said, "Hey, kid—"

Aaron fired downslope.

His war specs spoke to Carlos in Cadmann's voice. "Carlos! Katya! Get back here fast! Get to the skeeters!"

"We're nearly back. What—"

Katya gaped down at the mound, her jaw dropping.

"Aaron fired an incendiary into the nest!"

"What? Why?"

Answer came there none. It was the kind of question that can cause strokes.

The beehive's peak erupted like a volcano. Puffs of flame, first, and then swarming points. Thousands of points of fire streaked away like rapid-fire tracer bullets, and exploded in tiny flashes.

Other parts of the mound erupted too. (Katya was sprinting, but Carlos couldn't do that and watch too. Cassandra's record depended on his war specs.) The peak of the beehive was 120 meters distant, but the hive had more exits, more showing every second as fireballs followed by swarms of tracers. One source was only fifty meters downslope, and that next was closer yet.

The terror wasn't the flaming bees, Carlos realized. Those made a hell of a light show, dying in vengeance for Linda Weyland and Joe Sikes. Carlos shifted his war specs to infrared.

The firepuffs were almost blinding. But there they were, the bees that weren't burning, flying in all directions, tens of thousands of bits of red-hot shrapnel looking for any enemy at all. A thousand abruptly converged in the air like an explosion in reverse, and that poor bloody pterodon wouldn't reach the ground as anything but bones. Carlos broke into a run, watching his feet and to hell with Cassandra, there were cameras on the skeeters.

Aaron was grinning like a grendel. "It didn't take all that diddling around! All it takes is one incendiary round per beehive! Flying firecrackers, Carlos said—"

Cadmann boosted Sylvia into one of the skeeters and pulled himself after. "Start the motor on idle."

"Trish, no problems?" He laughed at his buzzing comm card, Trish attempting to chew him out. "Right. Cadmann, there's a time to just do something. There's another nest confirmed, right? So when we go after that one tomorrow, we'll know a lot more about beehives than we knew ten minutes ago. Here comes Katya."

With Katya were both Chakas, looking madder than hell. Aaron's buoyant mood began to deflate.

Big Chaka's voice was tight and angry. "What in the hell was that all about?"

Aaron explained. "I was getting revenge for Linda and Joe, and killing about ten thousand dangerous animals. And I'm going to kill fifty thousand more tomorrow, right, Cadmann?"

Cadmann was watching the Chakas. "I don't think they agree."

Little Chaka looked at Aaron with open irritation. "If this planet has taught us anything, it's the danger of mindlessly throwing an ecology out of balance. Under normal circumstances these things don't hurt human beings. But guess what? Two klicks from the north end of this valley is a river. For twenty klicks east and west, we have had unusually low grendel sightings. Doesn't that suggest something?"

Aaron looked as if he wanted to choke. "Suggest what?"

Little Chaka's voice was infuriatingly reasonable. "I think that the show is over for the evening. Let's go back to Shangri-La. We can go bee hunting again tomorrow, but this time, let's go to find things out. We can always kill them."

"They're the enemy," Aaron said.

"They may well be," Big Chaka said. "But they are also a largely unknown enemy."

"What my father is saying," Little Chaka continued, "is that we don't know enough, and until we do, leave the bees alone."

Aaron met Little Chaka's gaze for a blistering ten seconds; then something shifted between them, and Aaron was the one to nod acquiescence. "All right," he said finally. "All right."

THUNDER

The best of men cannot suspend their fate:

The good die early, and the bad die late.

DANIEL DEFOE

Edgar looked up from his computer screen to find Trish glowering at him. He said, "I take it you got my note."

"Note. Yeah, note, I got your fucking note."

"Gotcha! Hey, I didn't intend it to make you that angry. I have to go back to the island. They need me. Ruth needs me."