Beowulf's Children

If he hadn't been prepared for it, if he hadn't trained for it in computer simulations a thousand times, he would have been caught flat-footed. Damn but it moved fast, and straight for him. Every instinct told him to run—

The sights were aligned. He fired. The capacitor dart, traveling at twice the speed of sound, hit the grendel and dumped its juice. The grendel's nervous system flashed, and its brain was a char, even though its legs carried it on into the herd. Physics supersedes biology. The chamels scattered, but inertia carried the grendel into the herd, and one chamel went down under its bulk. Even in death the grendel closed its jaws on the chamel's throat. The other chamels ran until their collars brought them to a halt. They bleated their terror.

"They're coming in!" Derik screamed. His sleeping bag was next to Justin's, and now he was standing just to Justin's left. "Here they come!"

The snow spumed up in crisscrossing lines. Grendel flash. At least six. Justin sighted, locked, fired—a clean miss. He blinked and the grendel was a hundred meters closer, nearly atop him. Lock! He fired again, and Derik fired also. One of the darts struck the grendel dead into its throat. It ran on toward them. Physics supersedes biology—

Justin rolled one way and Derik the other. The grendel plowed through the center, right where he had lain. Its legs scrabbled in the air as it made a terrible pierced-boiler squawking sound.

A skeeter flashed down from above. Aaron was belted into the doorway, and had mounted a gun there. Armor-piercing rounds stitched across the snow, then along a grendel from tail to head. Blood sprayed the snow. Everyone expected a second grendel to attack the wounded one. They had seen that in recordings made in the Grendel Wars. A grendel was wounded and the others turned on it, sometimes generating a frenzy. It didn't happen here. The other grendels charged onward.

Hungry, Justin thought. Hungry, and wary, and they cooperate! The snow keeps them cooled off, and they cooperate.

Christ.

Skeeter VI. Katya's voice. "Grendel flash south-southwest."

"Targeting?"

"Negative."

"Jessica? Can you engage?"

"I've got it."

Justin had never been happier to hear her voice. She was to the south. He and Derik had the east, Chaka the north. Who was to the west? He didn't know. Nothing I can do anyway. Hold my sector, and hope the others hold theirs. This is what Dad meant about the First. They had to trust each other—

Skeeter II buzzed close overhead. Katya's voice: "We've lost visual. We've got Cassandra reconstructing our infrared images. The storm is interfering with transmissions. I'm not sure our onboards—"

There was a moment in which the sound rose to a crackle, and then it died out. Dammit. Justin heard it overhead, coming in too low. The snow increased, another flurry driving itself against him, and he cursed. He couldn't see anything.

The earphones crackled again. "Trying to see—"

And then—

Stu leaned out the door of Skeeter II. Too much was happening too quickly to let him keep the whole camp under observation. He wasn't worried. They had grendel guns far better than the ones the Earth Born used to win the Grendel Wars, and the Star Born were better trained, had better reflexes than the First. They'd rehearsed this in simulation, skeeters and Cassandra and the gu

That was in simulation, but this was different. Here the weather kept Cassandra blind, and he was nearly so, and his heart pounded and he sometimes forgot to breathe. He peered into the snow, but he couldn't see clearly.

"Stu, where the hell are they?" Justin's voice yammered in his earpiece.

"Bring it down a little closer," he told Katya. "Justin needs help."

"Right," she said. "Uh—I can't—"

"Yes?" he shouted.

"Nothing. I'll get in closer."

The meat milled right in front of Cold One, but the stink of death was in the air, and an alien chemical reek. There was much that she didn't understand here.

She bucked and snapped at a sister next to her, receiving a warning snap in return. It might have turned into a death match then and there, but for the meat—so much!--and for another thing. Others of her kind, others of her own brood had died here, and the stench of speed and grendel blood filled the air.

The air was filled with smoke and thunder as her sister burst open, spewing blood and bone and shredded flesh and speed. Something like blind panic hit her. She couldn't begin to comprehend what had just happened, but she had once seen the sky flash with light, rainfire, and that light climb down from the clouds to strike a tree. The tree had burst into flame.

And this was something close to that. The meat! The meat! So much of it. Yet the world was turning upside down, and she smelled death in every wind. The world was changing. Hell was coming, and any strange thing might be worth her life.

Like this: looming abruptly out of the sky was a burring thing that Cold One had only glimpsed between flurries, a birdie big enough to eat grendels, its wings invisible on speed. It swung down, then drew back as if suddenly aware that it had come too close to earth. A threat! A challenge!

Speed flooded through her body. A grendel would attack what it feared.

Justin saw Katya's skeeter come in low, circle, come back even lower. The sound and pressure of its rotors bore down on them and swelled until they filled the entire world. Suddenly it was only a few feet over his head. "Sleet!" he yelled, reflexively flinging his hands up in a doomed attempt to ward off disaster.

Katya was already trying to correct. The skeeter headed out into grendel territory, and began to rise.

"God," Derik said. "They're going to make it—"

The skeeter struggled to gain altitude against the wind and snow. The low power light winked on as she threw full power to the engines, but the skeeter tipped downward and fell. "Stu—we're going in," she had time to say.

Snow exploded, a white cloud against the windshield. The skeeter didn't want to respond to the controls, and a pale shape was coming at her eyes. She screamed and crossed her arms in front of her face as jaws came across the ship's nose. The grendel smashed through the front viewscreen. The skeeter banked violently to the left, and she lost all control. The skeeter fell into the snowbank. She had time to hope that the fall would crush the grendel, but then the rotor caught and threw up a shower of snow and dirt, and they cartwheeled forward and over, crashing down nose first. Her harness straps dug into her flesh but they held.

"Stu—" she shouted. "Stu, it's not dead!"

Stu wiped blood from his eyes. He'd lost his grendel gun in the crash. Up forward the slim torpedo head and much of its body were halfway through the shattered left-hand windscreen. The Jaws opened and closed. Snow heated by the internal heat of its speed steamed up from its snout and jaws. Those jaws snapped closed no more than a meter from Katya's face.

The grendel had been stu

Katya screamed. The thing whipped its head around and stared at her as if affronted by her noise, her motion, her very mortal fear. Stu saw the grendel, impaled, dying, work its way in through the window, saw its jaws close on her head. He closed his eyes, and wished that he could have closed his ears as well, the terrible cracking-ice wet crunching sound, the sudden explosive stench of blood and brains...