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He touched it to make sure. Reaper cloth! These creatures produced - wove, even - a rough version of the fabric.
Valentine was tempted to chop off the nearly empty teardrop. But he had to find Hornbreed.
Valentine searched the walls and ceiling, waving the LEDs at the end of his prods, probing corners. He explored deeper into the cave, felt one of the worm things nudge his foot.
He jumped, and came face-to-face with Hornbreed's upturned face. Dozens of the smaller creepy-crawlies were passing the pilot up a
living conveyor belt to the ceiling, where the shadowed mass rubbed its limbs against one another expectantly. Sightless eyes looked past him into darkness, but Valentine heard the faint wheeze of Hornbreed's lungs, and drool ran out of the corner of his mouth.
"Sorry, Equality", Valentine said. He reached and struck Hornbreed in the buttock with the cattle prod.
Flash-tzzap! The body convulsed, broke away, and fell as its handlers broke contact, or had their pincers torn loose by the muscle spasms. The thud of Hornbreed hitting the cavern floor sent the white larvae humping away.
A rattling like dry bones falling from a crypt creche, and Valentine looked insectoid death in the not-face. Eyes like gemstones glittered in the reflections of the LEDs on his prods.
"Noogh... enoogh... havin' a heart attack", Hornbreed bubbled.
The two upper front limbs on the hunter-gatherer struck down and forward. Barbed stingers missed as Valentine dived out of the way, lunging with his prods, but the hunter-gatherer matched him in their dance, keeping the eye clusters toward him. The red tip of the tongue-carrier retreated farther into its forebody.
Valentine lunged for the red mark like a dueling Musketeer, scored a palpable hit. Flash-tzzap!
The hunter-gatherer collapsed, legs twitching. Valentine's world whirled as he was jerked off his feet by jointed arms that enfolded him in a firm, irresistible, yet gentle embrace. Twin stingers pinched him at his chest, but couldn't penetrate, emptying themselves uselessly on his leathers. The prod he'd just used fell where his feet had been a second before.
Valentine struck wildly behind with his other prod, convulsed as the current traveled up the hunter-gatherer's limbs and across his chest. Heart stalled, then pounding in shock, he fell to the ground, suddenly at war with his body. None of his limbs seemed to remember how to function.
The hunter-gatherer who'd got him from behind batted at him
with one of its legs, but it was just a reaction to the charge. Valentine managed a roll toward Hornbreed.
"What the Kur's this?" Hornbreed gasped, batting weakly at the smaller, rat-sized bugs. Every move brought a wince.
Some of the Christmas tree ornaments above rocked as the roof creature shifted.
Valentine managed to slow his heart, retrieve his rifle. "Can you walk?"
"Lookit my back. It feels like there's about two kilos of flesh ripped out". Hornbreed came to one knee, turning.
Valentine saw a purpurant swelling at Hornbreed's right shoulder blade. He guessed that the welt was the size of a dinner plate.
"You got stung by one of these bastards". Valentine's body was back under control and he felt strangely calm and placid. The bugs weren't so bad, just little machines doing their jobs.
Or very big machines, like the one above... ...and coming down.
Christ, it's as big as a whale.
Valentine flicked on the gun light, saw ring after ring of arms around a lipless, spiny orifice, a zeppelin of a body behind, long thin arms that couldn't possibly support that mass, froze up until his eye and trigger finger, acting perhaps for their individual preservation against an overwhelmed brain, fired up into it.
It accepted the bullets in silence. A few of the arms around the central orifice stiffened...
Before the cartridge casings even finished their tinny bounces Valentine grabbed Hornbreed by the shoulder, pulled him up and along, when he wasn't moving right got under the pilot's armpit, and half carried him in a stumble toward the exit, carbine in its sling bouncing against his plated leathers. Hornbreed screamed out his agony like a police siren.
Another hunter-gatherer entered, a coyote borne in its tonguelike front appendage, ignoring them and the chaos within. Valentine regretted the dropped prods, grabbed Hornbreed by the collar, and
dragged him, shrieking in pain, like a resisting dog, through the low entrance aperture.
A hunter-gatherer's captured limbs darted into the crack, and closed on Hornbreed's leg. Valentine found the carbine's trigger and sent four bullets to the source of the limbs with the serene, observant corner of his mind trying to remember just how many rounds the little minidrum at the bottom of the carbine carried. But the legs let go.
Hornbreed was crying, blubbering to be left in peace, but Valentine got him up the shaft of near-vertical stairs, pushing from behind the whole way. He made it to the locker and retrieved another prod and was tempted to use it on Hornbreed to calm the pilot down. Instead he half carried him out of the cave and to his pack.
