HUNTING LIFE
Scene 49
The Sending tore into the mound in Wylwood Forest, hurling its locked doors aside in a tornado of branched violence. Slamming the inner doors, sealing itself in, it gathered its writhing limbs at the portal’s pedestal. A faint trace of life lingered, diffusing, over the panel. The Sending began feeling the surface, unaware of its symbols, until at last it generated an optic stalk to see them clearly. One by one it touched them.
One by one, hour by hour, the arrivals at the portals in the Home World offered no hints of life. Then the Sending tapped the Muathen symbol, and the chamber bloomed with the scent of living things. At last. It returned to Wylwood, leaving tidings for Ouboson, and gathered its tentacled branches to go back and explore. This world would feed its master forever.
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“Wait! Slow down!” Bunjaian called. Jaman was far ahead up the shaft, the Hounds far ahead of him. He was short of breath. He finally reached the portal chamber, where the others were inspecting the pedestal’s panel. The male Hound bent close to the panel, sniffing the symbols. He stood. Pointing at the Sirathen symbol. “That one.”
The female Hound looked at Jaman and the still-panting Bunjaian. “We probably won’t need your weapons, but get them ready. We only want the andro, but if any others get in the way, stop them.”
The male Hound sniffed again, nose in the air. “A lot of them,” he said.
“All right,” the woman said. “Let’s go.” She reached for the panel’s Sirathen symbol.
Before she could touch it, another symbol blazed red, and Bunjaian staggered back. Between the Hounds, facing Jaman, a dark and monstrous thing, its branches and roots reaching out, a pair of fanged jaws in its torso, great powerful short legs under it, appeared at the pedestal.
The Sending had come.
The fight exploded at the speed of bullets. Bunjaian’s eyes saw blurs; his brain could do nothing to react as he tried to raise his gun. The Hounds, dancing away off walls and ceiling, sliced dozens of limbs from the creature as it snatched them in mid-flight and gripped them with poisonous thorns. Jaman raised a beam gun, and the creature flung the gun from him and flung him the other way, smashing his head to shatter against the steel door. The woman Hound stabbed the creature in its midsection, twisting, hooking, and pulling its innards away from it. The man ripped its jaws apart with a double-ended blade, losing his arm; his screaming blotted the sounds of Bunjaian’s weapon as he emptied it at the creature’s legs; the woman Hound choked, jerked, arched, and expired; gripping a sodium incendiary, the man Hound shoved his remaining arm down the creature’s now-gaping midsection, detonating the grenade; the creature’s limbs shot straight out, fire surging through its trunk and up into its branchings; its last spasm drove a wood-hard spike into Bunjaian’s midsection; the man Hound’s ichor poured from his severed arm and he died; the creature, burning, collapsed flat into glowing embers.
Bunjaian, in agony, fallen to his knees with the spike through his guts, saw only bodies and ash. He fell over sideways, and everything went away from him.
