Beowulf's Children

He blinked, hard. Katya was still alive, the grendel hadn't reached her yet. He threw off the quick-release buckles and dived forward. He screamed "Hey!" and swung his fist, co

It roared, deafening in the confined space, and turned to snap at him.

Stu screamed, suddenly registering the insanity of what he had done, and jerked his safety webbing loose. He rolled out of the skeeter, spilling into the snow, and kicked the door shut behind him. The enraged grendel was coming through the Plexiglas windscreen. Ignoring the hysterical Katya, it pounded its way through the Plexiglas of the door and flowed after Stu like a shark through water.

How could the dying beast move at all? Stu staggered flailing through the snow. He'd left his gun... he never would have had time to reach it, but how could it still move? It flashed into speed and was on him. He'd gone no more than a dozen meters.

Justin was moving even before the skeeter struck the ground. The snow was driving now, a sudden flurry that blinded, but it would confuse the grendels as well.

"Justin!" Derik yelled behind him. He didn't care. Katya was in mortal danger, and there was no way that he could leave her to die.

He pitched forward into the snow and peered out through his goggles.

Feasting, near the skeeter. He recognized Stu's jacket.

Justin clamped his mind down on nausea and fear and grief. Business now. Mourn later. Think.

That grendel was busy. It looked to be dying, ripped open, for that matter. It might even warn others away: its natural territoriality would protect Katya for a few moments.

He heard Katya whimper, and almost lost his resolve. Almost. There was a plea, a cry of "Justin! Help me!" He felt it reach right under his logic, and twist.

He remembered what Carlos said about his bride, up on the cliff. That he had never forgiven himself. That he had learned something about himself at that moment.

Justin could pull back to the safety of his encampment, and let whatever happened happen. Wait for the storm to abate, or for the grendel to finish its meal, and decide what to do about the whimpering woman.

And find out whether or not he could live with it, later.

Closer.

"Justin—" Katya screamed.

And—

Grendel flash.

Memory: the Learning Center, the domed building in the very center of the colony. Cadma

Now they're next to a river. It's a cartoon, not real at all, and everything is moving slowly.

Suddenly, something ugly pokes its head out of the water. Not real ugly: comic book ugly, exaggeration ugly, with pop-eyes and blacked-out broken teeth and an idiot expression. If a grendel had been in Dumbo's circus, this would be it.

Cadma

Justin claps, delighted.

"Now your turn," Cadma

The thought passes. Little Justin takes the control. This is fun.

At twelve, the virtual game is a regular thing. Every week Cadma

And at some point in the Game (and there might be a dozen other objectives within a game) there will be a grendel flash.

Every week for years, a different component of skill has been nurtured. Instant response. Aim. Relax under pressure. Multiple targets. Automatic sca

The intent is to groove one neurological response pattern. Cadma

The grendel depends upon its speed. But unless you have been foolish indeed, you will have a second or two before it is on you. We will train you to respond in less than two-fifths of a second. We will train you to bring your weapon to bear, to evaluate risk, to fire twice in precisely the correct pattern, it will be a reflex, completely unconscious. We can give you this gift.

You will survive.

Pale death came at him in a whorl of snowspray. Justin's hands moved faster than his brain could follow, lining up with perfect coordination. The thing accelerated to over 120 klicks an hour in the time it would have taken him to blink. If he had blinked. But that was training too. Calm breath. Don't blink. Fire twice.

The first bullet tore into the grendel's throat, carrying enough shock to drive it sideways, off line, so that he wouldn't be bowled over by its charge. The second was an incendiary round, heat for the heated, to jolt the beast across an invisible metabolic line.

It reeled back, torn, bleeding, dying. Its eyes locked with his, its feet splayed, bright red blood staining the snow which whirled and pelted between them.

Grendel flash, left! He shot it again, between its eyes, and tore off the top of its head. He spun left—

The grendel above Stu was gone. Not gone: he caught its madly whipping tail following it into a snowbank.

Someone fired from behind him, twice. Derik. Justin said, "Hold off."

"Why?"

"All the other grendels are hamburger." Justin was still taking it in.

A mistake in judgment here could be terribly embarrassing.

Stu's ravaged corpse lay in a pit in the snow. The grendel had been terribly injured; he'd seen its intestines hanging in coils. Its spraying blood, nearly boiling, had melted cubic meters of snow. Three or four more dark pits led to the snowbank: more splashed blood. The grendel had disappeared into snow there, and Stu's two exploding bullets were interlocked pocks right in the middle of that; but Justin had seen snow shift to the right, and now he saw it shift again. The grendel wasn't moving now—huddling, he thought—but the heaped snow was melting.

Justin said, "I'd like to give Chaka an intact corpse."

"It's still dangerous."

"Sure, we have to kill it, not study it. Do I hear the voice of Zack Moskowitz? Cover me."

Rifle at the ready, he ran to the skeeter as Derik covered him. Katya was cowering in the back, somehow wedged behind the seat. Her arms were wrapped around her chest, and a rictus of terror distorted her face.

She looked at him without seeing. He put his hand across hers. "Come on," he said. "You're safe."

She clutched at his hand. He bent to the floor of the wrecked skeeter, picked up Stu's grendel gun, and wrapped her hands around it.

And that settled that. The weirds did cooperate.

Speed was seeping into Old Grendel's blood despite all she could do. In all her life she'd never seen anything like this. The Cold Ones too could cooperate, it seemed, when there was prey enough to feed all. But against the weirds—

The last of them had fled. The smallest, she hadn't even tried to kill anything. The small Cold One had watched, and now, steaming with speed, was fleeing up toward the highest snowbank on the hill. Toward Old Grendel, buried in snow but for snorkel and eyes.

Old Grendel smashed into her flank, sank teeth just ahead of her hind leg, and ripped flesh away. The snow grendel, turning with the impact, smacked sideways into the snowbank. In a blur of snow she clawed her way out, but Old Grendel was a blurred hot streak, receding.

She went straight downhill in the shadow of a gully. The weirds would not see her. Dying snow grendels and their own wounded would hold their attention. She was ru