The hairless creature looked sideways at him through the spraying dirt and gave a wail of despair. Daniel grabbed Sentino under the arms and backed, pulling her with him. She was a dead weight, but he could feel her heart beating strongly through her coveralls.
Something came around the bend just beyond where the creature was digging into the sidewall. It completely filled the passage, brushing cascades of soil down where its shoulders rubbed. Daniel couldn’t get a good look at it since his own body blocked most of the light coming from the main gallery, but he could tell that it was black and bigger than he was.
The smaller creature went “Wheek! Wheek! Wheek!” and vanished, apparently dropping into an adjacent passage. The newcomer paused, its eyes focused on Daniel and Sentino. Its four canines projected forward to crisscross like paired ice-tongs, perfect tools to take living prey. It hunched like a cat preparing to spring.
Daniel stepped over his crewman’s body. “Unit, get Sentino out of here!” he shouted. “Somebody drag her—”
The predator flowed toward him like a snake striking. It pushed off with its spatulate forepaws but folded them back against its sides in the course of the motion.
Daniel caught it by the neck, shoulder-broad and covered with a ruff of bristles. The fangs clashed just in front of his visor. The impact was like that of a charging bull. Daniel had braced himself, but it threw him back anyway.
His right boot tramped something soft—Sentino’s outflung hand, but he lifted his foot and felt her snatched back with no more ceremony than a case of rations would get. That was fine: dinner was just what she’d be if they didn’t get her back quickly.
Daniel couldn’t hold the creature, didn’t want to hold it, but if he didn’t continue fighting it would push him over backward. Then the only question was whether it’d tear his throat out or start by devouring his belly.
“Watch this bastard!” he wheezed. “I don’t know how big . . .”
His toes skidded slowly backward down the passage. He felt his left knee start to buckle. He twisted that foot sideways in a desperate attempt to get more traction.
The jaws closed again. This time the tip of one lower fang hit Daniel’s visor and slammed his helmet against the passage roof. Despite the shock-absorbant liner, Daniel’s consciousness shattered into white light. As he felt himself going over, he kicked out blindly with both feet.
The predator made its first sound, a whuff of surprise as Daniel’s bootheels hammered its muzzle. It flowed forward again.
Hogg, leaning over his master, socketed the impeller in the predator’s right eye and squeezed the trigger. The whack! of the weapon’s circuitry merged with the CRASH! of dense bone disintegrating at the impact of the hypersonic pellet.
The creature lurched into the central gallery and sprawled, its paddlelike hind legs covering Daniel’s torso. Its body struck Hogg and sent him spinning away, though he still kept hold of the impeller. Sun drove the shovel into the creature’s neck; it skidded off, gouging the floor and narrowly missing Daniel’s hand. Other spacers were hacking with their knives.
“Get back!” Daniel shouted. “It’s dead! Back away before you hurt somebody!”
He clutched his hands in to his chest, reminded by the comment that “somebody” might very well be him. The creature’s head and feet twisted upward in a convulsion; Daniel used the respite to snatch his body clear of a weight that he hadn’t been able to shift with his own strength.
He got shakily to his feet. Barnes put an arm around him and lifted him several steps back to where the creature’s spastic movements couldn’t knock him down again. Its limbs were modified for digging, but claws that cut through rocky clay would be just as destructive if they met human bone and muscle.
The creature flopped over on its spine and finished dying. Hogg’s pellet had lifted the back off its skull, but the face wasn’t seriously damaged save that one eyesocket was empty.
It weighed half a ton. It was as ugly as anything Daniel had ever seen. The foul breath that had blown from its mouth as it attacked now hung over the body like a miasma.