“The skis?”
“Yes, hand me the case with my skis.”
“Anything you say, babe.”
Chantal removed the canvas cover from her second shoulder weapon, taking a moment to fit the first warhead to the front of the four-foot, tubular launcher.
“Is that a bazooka?” Matthew asked.
“We call them rocket-propelled grenades, now, dear. But you’ve got to help me here, now — make sure there’s no one directly behind me when I fire.”
“Got it.”
“I’m serious, this thing puts out a five-foot tail of flame; keep them clear.”
She sighted on one of the approaching saucer ships, or tried to. Instead of moving in smooth arcs it seemed capable of an unreasonable amount of jinking.
One of the few Yanks who’d flown with the RAF in the Battle of Britain and lived to tell about it attributed his survival to his terrible flying form. Other pilots flew in graceful arcs and curves, he explained, so the German fighters knew just where to place their deflection shots so the Tommies would fly right into their streams of lead. But this guy shoved and slammed his stick and pedals, jinking around the sky like a spastic, with the result that no one could ever hit him.
Finally she fired — just as the saucer craft jinked, of course: a clean miss.
Behind her, a few shouts as the naked or nearly naked tree people finally got a convincing demonstration of why Matthew had been shooing them away from the area immediately behind Chantal and her launching tube.
“Damn!” She only had five rounds. Deliberately, now, she loaded a second round, steeled herself to wait till one of the alien craft — firing its own blistering heat rays, which seemed capable of setting fire to any part of the tree forts they hit — came even closer, and slowed enough that she wasn’t having to track it madly across the sky. Finally she clenched all her muscles, squeeezed …
And put the round directly through one of the ports on the side of the craft. Immediately there was a “crump” of flame inside, the saucer started to emit a gratifying cloud of brown-black smoke, tipped to the diagonal, and slid directly down to the ground, burying its rim several feet into the soft forest loam outside the border hedge. One of the arachnids, stunned and obviously wounded, crawled out and started to stagger around. She wondered how the heck any number of the big spiders could fit inside a saucer craft of that size, but then remembered how small a spider could look when it folded its legs.
Bidge and two of the male Pthang bravely threw out a ladder, each grabbed an eight-foot lance with a razor-sharp flint point, and scuttled down. They raced over and finished off the injured man-high spider with their flint-bladed lances, slicing away the long, defensive forelegs until they could drive their points home in its head and body. There was no wasted motion in their movements. They seemed to operate as a team from long practice. Bidge lacked the shoulder strength of her male companions but — tallest of the three — she was the one who exultantly danced inside to strike the first fatal blows, her sinewy form coated in a sheen of sweat from her exertions.
Chantal realized that — with Bidge herself so obviously unashamed — her nakedness was actually starting to seem natural. What were they supposed to wear for this kind of work, prom gowns?
Loathsome yellow stuff oozed out as the beast snapped its fangs on empty air a final time — missing Bidge by mere inches — before it collapsed and lay quivering on the ground.
The Pthang in the tree forts were using some of their precious water supply to douse the fires that had been started by the saucer’s heat rays. Here and there they tried to beat them out with their hands and arms, suffering painful burns that someone would have to deal with later. And here and there a Pthang defender was down, writhing, having been hit by the heat rays, directly.
Now the remaining saucers were landing, more than 100 yards out, and disgorging their eight-legged assault troops.
“Am I correct in assuming those bugs can climb trees?”
“Climb very fast,” confirmed Bidge, who herself had just climbed back into the tree-fort and now sat panting on the floor, between gulps of water from a leather bucket mounted on the guardrail. Her substantial breasts heaved as she fought to make up her oxygen deficit. “Eat many Pthang.”
“They eat you?”
“Eat many Pthang.”
“Jesus Christ.” Chantal set her grenade launcher aside, re-slung her .50-caliber, steadied it on the safety rail, and exploded a few approaching spider heads, but quickly admitted, “Matthew, there are too many for me, and I don’t have a lot of rounds left, anyway. The idea was to do a quick in-and-out here. Without resupply both these weapons are going to run out of fodder, real soon.”
Behind them, in the center of the village, century-old Henry Annesley had been carried out onto the porch of his tree dwelling on a litter. There, propped up on one elbow, he bestowed advice on his grandson Turok, the sturdy 60-year-old being officially in command. Turok gradually fed some support troops to the area under attack, but was cautious not to strip the rest of the outer defensive wall of tree forts completely.
Sure enough, here now came an attack by three more saucer craft from the northeast, almost due opposite the direction of the initial attack. If the spiders had expected to find the Pthang had all been drawn away to the site of the first attack, leaving themselves defenseless to the rear, they were rudely awakened as two of the ballistae on the far side of the perimeter fired. One of the great six-foot shafts clanked harmlessly off the side of a saucer, but the other penetrated the side of a second craft and remained impaled there. The ship did not crash, but it did begin to behave erratically, apparently experiencing some difficulty maneuvering.
Back at the initial point of contact, things were not going well. Most of the available men were now engaged with the arachnidae at lance-point, having descended to the ground, where they formed a makeshift phalanx behind the hedge, presenting the attackers with a wall of spears rather than single fighters who could be easily outflanked and surrounded.
But because a few fighters were still tied up forming rudimentary bucket brigades to deal with the fires set in the wooden strongpoints by the heat rays of the arachnids’ saucer craft, the Pthang simply didn’t have the manpower to extend their line as far to either side as they needed to. The spiders started moving to the flanks, intending an envelopment. Chantal saw a number of the Pthang spearmen lifted by their own spears and tossed to the ground, from which they were slow to rise. The spiders were simply too large, too quick, and too numerous. As the spearman moved to the flanks to prevent being encircled this tended to break up the strength of their close-packed formations. Blood spurted as several of the spearmen were slashed across the arms or chests by the spiders’ serrated, razor-sharp forelegs. One was picked up and his head bitten off, the way a child would bite the head off a chocolate Easter bunny. The arachnid in question stood still for a moment, chewing thoughtfully. It seemed to be enjoying its crunchy treat.
Chantal tried to remain calm, taking clear shots at spider heads when she could, exploding, two, four, five … but “Honey,” she gritted her teeth, “I’ve only got a couple of rounds left and it’s not going to be enough to win this thing.”
Then, to the accompaniment of much pointing and shouting from the largely unengaged tree fort to Chantal’s left, there now emerged from the southern tree line a mob of several hundred furry cat-like creatures, tails held high, mostly running upright on two legs — though they’d occasionally lean forward and hit the ground with a pair of forepaws, turning their style of locomotion into an easy gallop — all led by Skeezix. Skeezix himself was barely five feet tall. But while that made him taller than most of these cat people, he was still pumping his legs like mad to stay in the front rank, while the cat creatures loped along beside him with no apparent effort.
The cat people were fully furred. They had three-foot tails, which they mostly carried upright behind their backs. If they wore any garments at all they were leather
vests — going bottomless appeared to be de rigeur in the Sixth Dimension. One particular black female ran beside Skeezix, rubbing up against him whenever possible, occasionally bending to sniff his butt.
The big spiders turned and paused where they were, puzzled by this attacking wave of small creatures with no visible weapons. Or perhaps they already had some idea of the kind of trouble the cat creatures could present.
“Felinidae! Felinidae!” the Pthang were pointing and shouting.
And then the advancing cat people started to emit a strange, keening yowl, which grew louder as more and more of them took it up, one picking up where another left off, settling in at a frequency near the top of the range of human hearing. Imagine two male cats fighting on the backyard fence. Multiply the piercing racket several hundred times over. Those Pthang who weren’t actually fighting covered their ears and winced.
But in fact, it was quickly evident the dominant frequencies of this tremendous keening noise were above the range of human hearing. For the effect among the arachnidae was far more pronounced.
The giant spiders began hopping and stumbling, losing their balance. They pressed their long, sharpened forelegs firmly to the sides of their heads, where their ears would have been if they’d had ears. In obvious pain, they started making a hasty retreat toward their parked saucer craft, some of them stumbling and falling, clearly having trouble retaining their balance.
Racing outside their defensive hedge line, a few of the bravest Pthang warriors, mostly men but including Bidge and a few of the larger women, pursued them, poking at them with their spears, actually cornering and destroying one, again slicing off first the forelegs and then the rest of the legs of their former attacker, until it could only cower and shiver as they slashed it to bits. But in short order the remainder of the giant hairy arachnids had re-boarded their saucer craft and zoomed away to the west.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
There was no rest for Chantal. The tribe’s version of a doctor seemed pretty expert in setting and splinting broken limbs. They also had some kind of green salve with a topical anaesthetic effect — since it actually appeared to work it would have been promptly banned for home use where Chantal and Matthew came from. But otherwise the burns from the arachnids’ heat rays were left to whatever Chantal had available in her first aid kit. Matthew pitched in. The patients were surprisingly stoic — to the point where the local witch doctor, or whatever he was, was called upon more than once to insist they honestly report how much it hurt. Her supplies, including antibiotic, were running low by the time they finished, but they did what they could.
The battle won, the majority of the felinidae turned back to the south, anxious to reach the relative safety of their own lands on the far side of the river before nightfall. Six or eight stayed behind, though, Skeezix explaining to Turok and old Henry Annesley — and Matthew and Chantal — that these representatives of the cat people were willing to negotiate a mutual defense pact to deal with future arachnid attacks in exchange for recognition of felinidae hunting rights south of the river.
Receiving a nod of approval from his grandfather, Turok agreed that final details of such a peace would be worked out over a feast. The central cooking fires were re-lit and the victorious Pthang warriors hauled in the freshly butchered legs of Chantal’s tyrannosaur kill to be set to roasting over the flames. There appeared to be enough meat there to feed the village for days. They also set some spider legs to roasting — Bidge earnestly assuring Matthew and Chantal that the legs made delicious eating, once you singed off the hair.
Matthew congratulated Skeezix on his diplomatic coup, at which the Skeezer lowered his voice and admitted “They’re so happy to finally be talking at all that I get credit for a lot more translating than I can really do. Truth is, our cats back home don’t really talk in sentences this way; I doubt I understand more than half of what anyone’s saying to me.” With the aid of rough maps of the river and some stick figures drawn in the dirt, however, a working agreement was soon hammered out, and the Pthang medicine men began brewing up their potent victory brew, which Chantal noticed contained some familiar looking mushrooms and the little green cacti Matthew had mentioned.
The potion would give all of the tribe visions that night, Turok explained, and with luck by the next month all the women would be with child.
“Without any help from the men?”
“Oh, of course men must do their part. And given how small our numbers now, I’m afraid some will need all their strength to perform their duties this night. But the potion the shaman brews will help, of course.”
Turok and his grandfather weren’t going to entirely relax their guard, though. Even as quarters were being arranged for the visiting felinidae delegation, they ordered six large watch fires built well outside the perimeter hedges, to be lit shortly after sunset, while about two dozen adults who had manned the tree forts not directly involved in the day’s fighting — many of them women already pregnant, Chantal noticed — were assigned to skip the festivities and patrol just inside the hedges till daybreak.
“Are we drinking this?” Chantal asked Matthew an hour or so later, darkness having fallen with the perimeter bonfires well ablaze, as the gourds full of potion were offered to the three visitors from Earth One.
“Yes. Start slow if you like, but the Pthang are homo sapiens, as far as I can tell. If it doesn’t kill them, it shouldn’t kill us. Anyway, old Henry swears by it, attributes his longevity to frequent consumption. I recognized some Lophophora going in there, and the fungi I’m pretty sure were Stropharia cubensis. With any luck, the Gods will talk to us tonight.”
“And they say all the women will be with child.”
“I haven’t noticed a whole lot of celibacy among the Pthang, to begin with. But with the number of predatory species they have to deal with, obviously a high fertility rate is to be desired.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“What?”
“That I might be included in this ‘with child’ business?”
“Not at all. In fact, I kind of thought you might be, already.”
“Oh good. How did you know?”
“Chantal, as we grow old, some of us thick-headed men learn some things besides how to drink beer and fart. You’ve got the same glow about you as Marian, the Christmas Madonna glow.”
“OK, you’re the Magic Man, no keeping any secrets from you. I was going to tell you after we got back. I didn’t want to worry you.”
“You didn’t want to worry me? You’re fighting off dinosaurs in the Sixth Dimension with a rifle the size of some Civil War fieldpiece, knocking yourself on your ass every time it fires, and you didn’t want to worry me?”
“I’m not sure they are dinosaurs, technically.”
“Thank you. I feel so much better.”
As the drumming began, with much whooping by the firelight and ritual dances to honor the spirits of the tyrannosaurs they’d been eating (at which any good anthropologist would have been in seventh heaven, but probably cursing the absence of cameras) Matthew led Chantal to the honeymoon suite, at the third level in the highest tree, under a canopy of stars and a horizontal quarter moon.
“This is where you’ve been camping out, a crib of straw just big enough for you and Bidge? Gonna get a little crowded up here for the three of us.”
“Bidge has plenty of suitors for her affections. In fact, I’m sure she’s already very busy, tonight. I think the tradition is that everybody pretty much does everybody, except for the real elders, and there aren’t many of them. Took some explaining to make them understand I was going to wait for my steady date.”
“You’re serious?”
“You already knew that,” Matthew smiled.
“I had hopes.”
“I missed you.”
“I certainly hope so.”
“You do have to make sure you don’t get up in the middle of the night and head down the hallway to pee, though. As you can see, no hallway, ot
her than that ladder.”
“I noticed that. Does it sway?” Chantal asked. She didn’t normally have a fear of heights, but she had also never trusted knots tied by other people.
“Yes. Up this high, the wind can set us moving. The rhythm is actually nice, most nights. If a real wind comes up, we’ll have to climb down a level. Though we wouldn’t find as much privacy, needless to say.”
“Wow. Are there that many stars where we live?”
“Light pollution keeps us from seeing at least half of them, anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard. Pretty much anywhere in Europe or North America, actually, except the Arctic, or the Baja, or Eureka, Nevada.”
“Eureka, Nevada.”
“Right.”
“Is there actually a Eureka, Nevada?”
“Of course. They’ve even got an opera house.”
“I never know when you’re kidding.”
“I never kid.”
She sighed.
“Amazing. I can see nebulas, lots of them.”
“You have good young eyes,” he replied.
“The stars look the same, but … different.”
“That’s exactly right. The same, but different.”
“Do you know where we actually are?”
“I know exactly where I am.”
“And are you gonna tell?”
“I’m here with my lady love.”
“Oh. Right answer.”
Matthew leaned over to kiss her. Chantal let out a little shriek and pulled away.
“Babe. What’s the matter?”
“Darling, I’ve missed you. I want to make love to you, now. I’m certainly not going to turn you away and have you go looking for some action with the buxom Bidge down there in Orgy Central. But we’re going to have to figure out a way that doesn’t involve you putting any weight on my right shoulder.”
“You’re hurt.”
“For your information, the only position from which they recommend shooting the .50-caliber is prone, so your whole body absorbs the impact. Seated, maybe. Even then, most of those shooters have twice my body weight. But swinging the thing around like you’re wing-shooting for doves?” Wincing, Chantal peeled her way out of her shirt. Even in the dim glow of the Cheshire-Cat quarter moon and the firelight from below, Matthew could see her entire upper arm and the front of her right shoulder were covered with mottled bruises, probably blue and black and yellow in any true light, some of them likely to be turning some lovely greens and purples tomorrow.
The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) Page 21
