“It can’t get—” Abbado said, trying to estimate the risk of tossing his right-hand grenade past the head and neck.
The creature licked out a twenty-foot tongue flaring at the tip into a pair of sucker-tipped mandibles. It gripped Abbado around the waist and snatched him back toward fangs as long as his forearm.
Matushek and Horgen fired rockets simultaneously. The warheads detonated deep in the creature’s skull. A fireball of unexpended fuel seared Abbado’s bare hands as the double shockwave snatched the grenades away from him.
“Fire in the hole!” he wheezed as he went over in a backward somersault. He’d only been ten feet from the rocket warheads when they went off. The half of the tongue clinging to him flew free and thrashed into the jungle in the same general direction as the live grenades.
What remained of the creature’s head flailed the hull in a sleet of stinger pellets until another rocket severed the neck. Abbado’s grenades lifted bubbles of seared foliage without harm to the strikers. An instant later, two shooting trees burst with sharp cracks. Their spikes stripped narrow cones of the jungle still farther away.
Foley stepped past the huge head. The lower jaw twitched, but it had no upper surface to close against. He tossed his grenades into the opening, then added another pair to replace Abbado’s.
Abbado wobbled to his feet. Orange fire and the stench of burning meat belched from the cracked seam.
“Let’s get them,” Abbado croaked as he staggered forward.
Waiting for the Axe
In theory Sergeant Guilio Abbado was still in command of 3-3, but none of his strikers had paid the least attention to his wheezing demands to be the first through the opening. The only reason Foley lifted him at all was that Abbado was so obviously incapable of giving Foley a boost instead.
The headless creature thrashing inside weighed at least five tons. The fuel-air explosions hadn’t disintegrated or even dismembered the corpse, but they had burned every square inch of its hide.
The stench of blackened flesh was overpowering. Abbado switched to his helmet’s small air bottle as much for that reason as because the grenades had used a lot of the available oxygen.
He’d set his visor on infrared instead of enhancement, the low-light default setting. Hot gas from the bombs swirled in confusing veils but the figures of the strikers ahead of him were sufficiently sharp. The split seam let a fair amount of light into this compartment, but that wouldn’t be true of those further toward the bow.
The vines that entered the ship terminated in bunches of fruit the size of soccer balls, hundreds of them. Grenade blasts had crushed them to reeking pulp against the bulkheads.
The fruit could be of no benefit to the plant, but they’d served as food for the creature. It must have entered through the same opening as the strikers, then grown to its final monstrous size on the diet.
The remains of at least twenty Spooks lay in a fetid mass at the bottom of the compartment. Each body had been bitten in half but not devoured. The creature was a killer without being a carnivore.
The four companionways to the deck above were horizontal tunnels. The interdeck hatches had buckled and couldn’t close. Abbado scrambled after Caldwell in the lowest passageway. The steep, narrow treads were vertical obstacles.
The leading strikers hurled half a dozen electrical grenades to clear the third and highest deck. Abbado, panting and dizzy, entered a moment later. There were Kalendru bodies among jumbled gear. The Spooks had been killed in the crash a week or so earlier.
“Nobody left, sarge,” Horgen said in faint disappointment. 3-3’d hoped for a fight with something the strikers understood, not leaves and vines. Learning there were no Spooks alive in the ship was like being bilked of a steak dinner after a week of living on lettuce.
The compartment and the one below showed no indication of occupancy following the crash. If Spooks had initially survived, the creature had seen them off. The length of its neck and tongue would have permitted it to scour both levels even though its swollen body couldn’t fit through the companionway. There were lasers among the other debris, but ordinary Kalendru troops didn’t carry weapons heavy enough to deal with a monster the size of that one.