Chip shrugged, nearly dislodging her. “Well, whatever it is, they communicate. Even when they’re dying. And even if we win every fight, we’re getting into a worse and worse situation, Bronstein.”
The bat looked around at the tunnel-mounds that walled in the half mile wide strip of wasteland they’d found refuge in. The mounds were higher, and the strip narrower. “We need to break out of here,” she said.
Chip voice reflected his tiredness. “We need to stop being chased.”
“They won’t stop until we’re dead,” mused Bronstein. Her face folds wrinkled even further. Chip thought that if there was anything in the world uglier than a bat’s face, it was the face of a thinking bat. Then she said slowly . . . “So maybe we should die for them, then. Let them tell their commanders we’re dead.”
Chip snorted. “What do you suggest? We hold them over a fire and make them say: ‘The enemy are dead, Commander’?”
“Something like that,” muttered Bronstein. “I’ll think of something . . .”
* * *
The next ambush centered on a roll of barbed wire, either a relic of the war or a leftover from when this had been farmland. It was impossible to tell. What had once been fertile fields dotted by the occasional farmhouse had been completely ravaged—first by the fighting, and then by the typical Magh’ methods of expanding their scorpiaries.
The party of Maggots that were closest and had to be ambushed were foragers or scouts. Probably scouts, because there was nothing left to forage. This area had already seen intensive work from the foragers. Not so much as one blade of grass survived. The Magh’ always removed any organic material and stowed it somewhere in their scorpiaries. Metal scraps, however, were usually ignored.
Hence the roll of barbed wire that Chip had literally stumbled upon.
He swore.
“Not tonight,” piped Melene immediately. “I’ve got a headache.”
Chip grinned. “You’d be so lucky.”
God help him, he was starting to enjoy his flirtation with Mel. If only she’d been a human female. Sigh . . .
He examined the wire, as Doc with blessed silent efficiency cleaned and strapped the slash on his leg. The wire was tightly spooled. A memory of Chip’s only attempt at fencing came back to him. He’d unrolled the pig wire carefully. As he’d been cutting the stuff, the brick he’d left on the other end, to keep it unrolled, must have got up and walked away.
It was not a nostalgic moment. Still . . .
“Hey, Eamon!” he called out. “What about this idea?” Chip explained how the newly unwound wire sprang back.
“You cannot be using that stuff. It’ll rip our wing membranes,” said Behan, one of Eamon’s pack-followers.
“Indade, it’s a fool you are, Behan. ‘Twill tangle the Maggots up, not us.” Eamon’s head was a closed shop—except for taking in ideas for generating mayhem. There he was as sharp as . . . as batfangs.
* * *
“Why should we wear them, when the bats don’t?”
“Because they can fly, Phylla.” Chip knew he was going to lose it soon. The rats were being cranky about Bronstein’s idea. The wire ambush had been a resounding success, but they’d been able to watch how the Maggots, dipping their long feelers to the broken ground, had been able to track them, step-by-step. They plainly followed a scent trace.
The rat-girl looked at her feet, encased in strapped-on pieces of Magh’ pseudo-chitin. “But they’re so . . . ugly.”
“Look good on you, Phyl,” Nym rumbled.
That was enough. Nym’s rare comments were valued. “Do you really think so?”
“Yes. Give you a bit of extra height.”
“But they’re not really my color.”
I’m going to lose it! Chip concentrated on making himself a pair of exoskeleton sandals, while the rats debated not the clumsiness or the slipperiness of the “shoes,” but their sex appeal.
* * *
They hid out on the hillside and waited and watched. A purposeful mob of Maggots arrived within twenty minutes.
“They knew exactly where to come. I told you. Comms, built in,” said Bronstein.
“It does seem the logical conclusion,” concurred Doc. “Philosophically valid, too. All the great logicians agree on the supremacy of mind over matter. I suggest we are observing, in action, Immanuel Kant’s famous noumenon, the thing-in-itself unknowable to the mere conscious intellect.”