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"No time for that. Did you see anything?"
There was another sound now, the sound of a motor coughing to life, then purring smoothly. Rotors engaging. A dust cloud swirled up behind the animal hospital as a Skeeter rose from the air pad, orange landing lamps blazing.
One of the searchlights spun to follow. Light sheathed the craft in silver.
The Skeeter wobbled, off balance. There was a weight beneath its belly: a calf dangling in a sling at the end of a four-meter line. The animal wiggled feebly. Its legs and head hung with woeful vulnerability as the Skeeter corrected itself and buzzed off to the north.
"Shit fire, " Zack moaned.
"-and save the ammunition," Carlos muttered, shielding his eyes as they tracked the Skeeter. "I wonder who that is?"
Terry was right behind them, hands gripping the rifle. "I'll give you two guesses. Weyland and his tame ape, that's who."
"What is going on here!?" Zack yelled, ru
"I'm sure someone can," Terry said in disgust. Carlos had the distinct impression that Terry wanted nothing so much as to sight his rifle on the flying machine that was even now vanishing into the wall of mist. "I'm damned sure that somebody knows exactly what is going on."
The creature was curious and hungry, but mostly curious. There was often enough to eat, but never enough to learn, since the invaders came. Their mobile nests with the hard shells, the odd animals that shared their domain...
Its short lifetime had offered too little to stimulate its senses. Strangeness exerted a fascination. In the murky racial past there had been challenges, lethal unless understood. The threats were long gone, but the curiosity remained.
The invaders seemed to have captured tiny pieces of the sun and moons, and could make them shine where they wished.
It could not grasp how this could be so, could not even form the proper questions, and so the wondering died before it was truly born. Only a trace remained, in healthy caution and a driving urge to learn more.
Caution was virtually no inhibition at all. It could see their weakness: they were slow, they moved in herds like other beasts. They were merely interesting meat.
Still, there was something...
It crawled around the edge of the encampment, rounding the hill to the southwest, a hill that glittered with shiny squares. It bit one of them experimentally. The square was hard and tasteless and moist with dew.
The creature headed west around the fields, past the blowing wheat and corn, past a smaller field planted with soybeans, around to the edge of the calf pen.
It had been here once before, during the rain, and had been well rewarded for its efforts.
It was about to taste the fence when one of the circles of light glided its way. It scampered to the side, almost directly into a second glaring oval, and scampered backward for a few steps, staying in the darkness, playing hide-and-seek with it, while speed began to fizz in its veins. There was always a corridor of darkness to squeeze through, and the game was irresistible. It wiggled across the road toward the main camp, staying in darkness, always in darkness, until it was across the fence from the horse pen.
It watched them, paying little attention to the lights now, the patterns of movement absorbed so that it automatically moved enough to stay out of them. That game was too simple now. There was another, better game at hand.
The horses paced nervously now, staring out into the darkness as their noses scented what their eyes could not see.
It prowled around to the side, watching the horses. They moved quickly. Their skin was glossy and rich. The way their hair tossed with their fear was almost unendurably appetizing. It whined, its hunger assuming the proportions of lust, and sniffed at the fence. There was something wrong here, it could tell. Its nostrils burned a little to sniff it. Something wrong, but the danger meant less with every passing moment. It wanted one of the horses, wanted to bring one down, to outrun it, to leap upon it and break its neck, to rip open the flank and taste it, to gaze into its eyes in the moment of death...
Its teeth met the wire. Every muscle in its body locked in unyielding contraction as electricity ripped through the line. It bit down so hard that the wire snapped. It jerked free, screaming its fear into the night.
The captured sun surged after it. It ran, terrified of the vine that bit back, of the light, of things that it did not, could not understand. And a thing inside its body flared to life.
From a sac behind the peculiarly flattened lungs, a complex chemical pumped into its system. Its blood vessels swelled. Speed surged through its body. Its movements, already quick, accelerated as if a supercharger had been triggered. Its stubby legs churned at blur-speed as its heartbeat tripled.
The searchlights that swiveled frantically after it never had a chance.
It was overheating, burning as it ran, and as it plunged into the waters of the Miskatonic its skin nearly sizzled. It lay there, marinating in mud, extending its snorkel to the surface. Its heartbeat slowed, steadied, calmed. The chemical fire in its body faded slowly to ashes.
The fear and pain gradually faded, leaving a core of rage. Anger at the invaders who hadn't the good grace to be either prey or direct competitor. The invaders were rivals, and they were cheats! They were something that it did not understand at all, something that could hurt it in a way that it had never experienced pain, inspire a fear that was quite new to it.
One of their flying things came humming overhead, lights stabbing out and dissolving the swirling gray mist. The creature watched through the muddy water, blinking hatefully, fearfully.
It worked its way back upriver, its thick, reptilian body rippled slowly behind. Blood was in its mouth, and murder on its mind. Murder, not killing. Killing was for food or fun. This was an urge to hurt for the sake of hurting. Not to reduce their numbers, but to make them afraid, as it had been afraid. To repay the invaders for their gift of pain.
How, though? How to get in? It had looked everywhere, and everywhere that it looked were the hard, tasteless fire-vines which bit back. Everywhere except...
Above the river, up along the lip of the cliff, above the straight seventy-degree rise that the colonists had considered a natural barrier, there was no fence. Its eyes narrowed as it considered.
This was it, then. It would crawl up the cliff and give them fear, and death. It would teach them...
Stubby legs lifted it from the river muck, and it began crawling up the cliff. The first few meters were easy, but the farther it climbed, the steeper the wall became, until its feet lost purchase, and it slid back down into the water.
It lay there, disgusted, and then trotted a few meters to the right and tried again.
Stealthily now. Eyes narrowed, one foot carefully finding support, and then another. The purchase was a little better here: sedimentary rock, crumbling in layers, offering shelves for toeholds. The creature's heart beat faster as it considered the havoc it would wreak. It climbed higher this time, and when it started to slide, it fell a clean eight feet before its claws found purchase. It reached the water in a shower of rocks.
It seethed with rage now. Muscles flamed, eyesight blurred with red. Again its body began to boil. Its breath seemed to sear its throat. All thought, all considerations vanished in a burst of chemical speed.
It erupted out of the water, heart thundering in its chest, legs paddling crazily. There was brush, then naked shattered rock, then a flat rock face. Its momentum was so great that when the footing was gone it skimmed up the cliff face, momentum carrying it over places where there were no footholds at all.