The End
The vibration wasn’t initially severe, but the pulses built and formed harmonics. Standing waves humped the swampy soil. An old woman near Farrell at the front of the column fell down.
The thing rose slowly, visible both through the relatively sparse trees and above the spreading canopy. The segmented outer shell was rusty maroon with yellow-gray blotches. It would have passed for a hill of the coarse rain forest limestone.
It had passed for a hill when the survey ship orbited Bezant.
“C41 to the front,” Farrell ordered as he extended the tube of a 4-pound rocket. It wasn’t going to be enough. Heavy Weapons Platoon, full-strength and fully equipped, wouldn’t have been enough, but hell, you had to try. “Strikers who pass the trailer, bring all the extra rockets. Admin, get the civilians moving back fast. Throw all your gear away but don’t leave people behind. Six out.”
The creature advanced like a snail on rhythmic pulsations of its undersurface. Because of its size it moved as fast as a healthy man could walk on smooth ground. The shell slipped down with every forward pulse, then lifted again. The lower edge of each shell segment was pointed the way a snake’s scales are. They gouged away everything in the creature’s path like the bite of a shark whose teeth were three feet long.
The civilians weren’t healthy and the bulldozer’s path wasn’t smooth. Only a fraction of the Kalendru expeditionary force had escaped the snail’s attack, and they were crack troops.
Strikers jogged to the front of the column. Most of them carried rockets. They waited for Farrell’s fire command. No point in wasting warheads on branches when you knew the target was going to clear you a field of fire in a moment or two.
“Major,” Manager al-Ibrahimi said. “Don’t throw away your personnel! You can’t stop that creature but you may be able to escape.”
“Get your ass out of here, civilian!” Major Arthur Farrell shouted. “This is a tactical decision and I’m in tactical command! Get your people back. We won’t be able to hold it long.”
We won’t be able to hold it at all. But hell, you’ve got to try.
Seligman was so focused on the ground twenty feet in front of the bulldozer that he didn’t notice the creature rising out of the jungle three hundred yards to the side. He increased power to the left tread by minuscule increments to avoid losing traction as he tore the blade through a root.
The ground was shuddering like a lake in an earthquake, but you didn’t notice that aboard the tractor. Matt had seen the creature, though. Was it a snail?
Esther Meyer raised her visor’s magnification to x64, as high as she could focus on the vibrating deck. The thing’s teeth were the plates of its shell. They sawed from side to side as the creature advanced, grinding trees to bits the way a gear train chews twigs that fall in.
The snail must have a mouth on the underside, though, or there’d have been a wrack of destroyed vegetation to the sides of the path through the jungle. Meyer had wondered about that trail when she echoed Blohm’s imagery. She’d learned a lot about clearing jungle by riding the dozer.
A rocket skimmed the jungle canopy and struck near the peak of the snail’s shell. That wasn’t the target Meyer would have chosen for the round she’d started to arm, but the lack of result showed her it didn’t make any difference.
The warhead burst with the usual blue-white flash and a spurt of dust blasted from the shell. The dust settled. One of the snail’s teeth had shattered. The stump dropped from the socket shielded by the points of overlying denticles.
As the snail throbbed forward to take another bite from the jungle, the segments of its covering shifted and reformed. Meyer couldn’t see any change from the normal chewing motion of the teeth, but at the end of it the shell showed no sign of damage. Denticles had moved forward from the back or sides. The creature’s ability to shape its body beneath the armor meant that no part of its flesh would be unprotected despite C41’s firepower.