Apex

by Robert Appleton

  That the two species shared a common ancestry she was now convinced. All this made sense in a deductive scramble that lasted the length of the breath she held while the creature rampaged across Miramar green. The tourists who didn’t lie flat or reach the hotels in time were scythed off their feet. Tenax’s limbs had grown spines that it used like spiked clubs, in addition to its deadly wing tips. No one, nothing stood in its path. Stopper snarled and went ballistic on the end of his lead. Jan wasn’t sure she could hold him, so she refused Vaughn when he handed her the strap. Instead, she hauled the bag of dog food off his shoulder and tossed it away. “We need to lock him in the hold. You take him. I’ll get whatever weapons I can use.”

  He gave her a blank look, regarded the bag of Rip ’Ems on the ground, then pulled his Kruger from its holster. “Rifles and grenades,” he said. “Nothing short range. We’re not getting anywhere near that thing.”

  Holidaymakers’ screams didn’t relent. Tenax’s thunderous caw preceded each color-shock it cast at them. Tourists lay dead or immobilized with dread all across the lawn. Many of the others were at the hotels, but the foyer airlocks only admitted a dozen at a time. The fight to gain entry was savage in its own way, friends and strangers and family members alike competing to squeeze into spaces too small for them. Survival of the fittest ruined it for everyone – with so many crushing the entrance, the outer airlock doors couldn’t close. Only the arrival of tenax persuaded the hindmost to give up and make a run for it, either to the HQ building or the LZ.

  By the time Jan had snatched a pair of rifles, a Hodiak pulse pistol for herself, and two belts of grenades from Vaughn’s arsenal, tenax was on the roof of Coriander Hotel, digging into the skylight suite. The punch of depressurized air escaping as its wing tips pierced the windows made it dance a macabre jig on the roof. Then it impaled the poor occupant while he was being sucked out, and swallowed him whole, its succubus-like maw able to dislocate and retract around its victim. Spirals of teeth and throat muscles dragged the meal into its belly, likely for a quick but unimaginable digestion – its metabolism was unprecedented. A horrific way to die.

  The survivors scattered. Some made it through the airlocks when panic and violent repulsion finally cleared the hatchway doors. Meanwhile, the more resourceful rangers, alongside the armed COVEX men, were peppering tenax with shots from range. But they were using pulse weapons. Like Vaughn had warned, those were no good for penetration. Up close, they could wreck anything in their radius; distance blunted their effectiveness. A handful of minor holes in the creature’s wings would not be enough to deter it.

  “Come on, let’s use the craft for cover,” Vaughn told her, cocking his rifle. “Shoot, then hide, shoot, then hide. Don’t let it get a bead on us.”

  “Okay.”

  Their first volley hit its outstretched wing as it spun to face the COVEX people. The wing fluttered. Jan’s next shot ricocheted off its armored breast. Vaughn’s caught it square on – the bullet made a hole. There was no sign of blood, though. No telling how thick the shell was. A third volley missed entirely as the creature leapt toward the administrative complex and the hospital, where the COVEX shooters dashed for cover.

  Jan and Vaughn now had a clear shot at tenax’s back. She was about to suggest they aim for the less-protected spot between its shoulders, the spot where the dogs had—

  “Stopper?”

  A pair of tenacious creatures attacked tenax from behind. They savaged the tendrils hanging from its bottom quarters. When it tried to sweep them away, they held on for dear life. It was tough to see through the splashes of groundwater and mud, but it sure as hell looked like—though it couldn’t be—no, it absolutely was—Stopper was down there, fighting alongside Flavia! Her boy had somehow escaped his cage, fled the ship’s hold…and was trying to finish what he’d started in the frozen north.

  “Oh God, no! Stopper!” Her body reacted of its own volition, kicking into a full sprint before any kind of plan had formed. She was partway across the green when she glanced back and saw Vaughn following at top speed.

  “Wait!” he yelled. “Don’t make yourself a target.”

  She ignored him, hurdled the crushed bodies strewn across the lawn. Her only thought was of putting herself between the monster and her boy. Grenades! That was the best way to distract it.

  “Jan, don’t get too close.”

  “Shut up. I’m done listening to you! You told me he was safe.”

  “I—I thought I…I was sure the cage door—”

  “You screwed up. Now I have to do what you couldn’t.”

  A terrified little girl rocked in deep shock, nursing her dead mother’s hand as though it was all she had left in life. Jan ran on, but silently vowed to come back for the girl later. She glanced back to seal that vow, to make a mental note of the family’s position, when Vaughn scooped the girl up onto his shoulders and made for Mirage Hotel. A swell of pride for her man only lasted a moment. The dogs’ barks were now audible. They’d had to let go of tenax’s tendrils while it was airborne. But it didn’t take flight. It wheeled around to face them instead.

  The moment she’d dreaded ever since it had first shown its claws was now upon them. Jan could feel her anchor straining over a bottomless drop, about to snap. Tenax reared up when it saw the two dogs. An instinctive recoil sparked by a recent defeat. But this was a predator that did not give in to fear. Jan snatched a grenade from her belt, twisted the pin wheel half a turn counter-clockwise to arm it. She was too far away for it to reach tenax, but she tossed it all the same. To distract it…

  The great wing tips slammed down. Stopper and Flavia had already begun to move, in opposite directions around its flanks. The spears dug into the mud, having missed their targets. Jan’s grenade punched a crater in the lawn in a deserted spot to her left. Whether the shock from this caused tenax’s violent wing flex, it was hard to know. But as the massive wings flapped taut, one of them crashed into Flavia, hurling her toward the hospital. She bounced and rolled in a horrible posture, and lay still where she landed.

  Stopper again got hold of one of those loose tendrils. He bit it hard, clawed at it. Tenax flung him off. Another attempt to impale him missed by inches, Stopper dodging to one side at the last moment. He had the measure of this thing, could predict its attacks. But there was nothing he could do to stop it. This was no contest – sooner or later tenax would crush him.

  “Hold on, boy.”

  Jan readied another grenade, but the area she was running across was the most crowded part of Miramar. The dead littered the lawn, but there might be wounded among them, and those simply too frightened to move. There was nowhere she could safely throw it.

  A steady battery of gunshots peppered tenax, but they weren’t achieving much penetration. She noted a small spear or a dart of some kind lodged in the vulnerable spot between its shoulders. No, make that two darts. Three. Whoever was firing them was deadly accurate. Carlisle? Would they even have any effect?

  Tenax wheeled round again, this time facing Jan’s cabin and the river. It flapped its wings, hovered several meters off the ground, and made ready to attack somebody in that direction. But the sun was in its eyes. Its stunning projection of light and color seemed to require a specific angling of the sun’s rays. So it spun back toward the dogs instead. Flavia had limped to her feet, and Stopper bounded across to protect her, barking his head off. Tenax readied its concussive weapon, to rid itself of the two troublesome canines once and for all.

  Jan pocketed the grenade, slung her rifle off her shoulder instead. She took a deep breath and fired on the even slide of her exhale. Her shot hit tenax between its shoulders, breaking one of the dart shafts. The sting rattled the creature. But after a spasm that rippled down its segmented torso, it resumed its killing strike.

  “No!”

  Firelight met flame. Where the streaks of vivid color distorted the ground around the dogs, a tongue of orange fire jetted out against them. Through them. This one engulfed tenax, for
cing it to fold in its wings for protection. It backed away from Stopper and Flavia.

  Jan almost cheered when she saw Ruben hobbling out from behind the hospital wielding the flamethrower. Its jet reached a good ten meters. If the fuel tank on his back was full, this could change things.

  Isherwood darted out from behind the adjacent building, one of the depots, and flung a Molotov cocktail onto tenax’s back. It exploded, its flames engulfing the creature once more – shrieks of pain split the air across the compound. Two COVEX men tossed glass bottles that smashed onto its wings. The flammable contents spread the blaze all across its wing span. Desperate flaps only fanned the flames. Another well-aimed jet from Ruben’s flamethrower ignited the liquid further.

  Tenax now really did resemble some monstrous demon burning in its own hellfire.

  Using the reprieve his intervention had won him, Ruben dropped the flamethrower unit and, with an almighty effort, despite a horrid limp, carried his wounded wolf around the back of the hospital to relative safety.

  It gave Jan an idea – such an elementary one – how the hell had she not thought of it before? She’d only used it to summon Stopper on every outing on every continent for the past twenty-odd years. She took a breath, lifted her visor, and blew the pink whistle with all her lungs had left. Its pitch was too high for humans to hear. But Stopper heard it as clear as a bell. He bolted toward Jan and didn’t look back.

  She crouched to greet him, and held him tight. His ragged panting and the heat emanating from his muddy, sweaty body were dearer than anything in her world. She hadn’t come this close to losing him since the White Water ordeal. And it was a shocking reminder that while they’d both been blessed with the Fleece’s gift of regeneration, of slow ageing, they remained as vulnerable as any other creature on Hesperidia to the lethal whims of these super predators.

  “You’re coming with me, darling. We’re getting you far away from here.”

  She didn’t have his lead, but he was tall enough for her to hang onto his collar as they made their way back to Vaughn’s ship. That same lawman joined them at a jog. He was about to say something conciliatory when a crash from the hospital complex spun them around once again. Tenax was on its back, making mud angels with its wings, using the groundwater and the mud to quell the flames. It worked so well that there was only smoke left after a few moments’ writhing.

  One of the COVEX men ran across to pick up the flamethrower. Tenax leapt up, incensed, and impaled him with a swipe of its smoking wing. It devoured him. The other COVEX rep suffered a similar fate before he could get inside the depot. Isherwood, who had gotten inside, was now the target of its full, untrammeled rage. Tenax could see him through the window as he readied his next weapon – a maghammer, for close quarters. No way would that work.

  But what else did they have? Fire hadn’t stopped it. Bullets had little effect. Grenades might work, but who was going to risk getting that close?

  “We’re going to have to lure it away from here,” said Vaughn.

  “How?”

  “My ship.”

  “But that concussion weapon – we don’t know what that’ll do to the ship’s circuits.”

  “Then we’ll stay out of range.”

  While they jogged, tenax wreaked its vengeance on the hospital and the depots and anything standing that smelled human. They reached the ship. Jan herself made sure that the door to Stopper’s cage was locked with him inside it. Then she joined Vaughn in the cockpit. “You know, if we can’t get rid of this thing, we’re finished on Hesperidia,” she said, and her jaw clenched so tight it quivered.

  “I’m going to take it out.”

  “How?”

  “You do know this bird’s armed, right?”

  “Pulse cannons,” she said. “And you do know you’ve never fired them before, right?”

  “How do you—”

  “You told me. Dogfighting’s not your thing, Vaughn. You forget I know everything about you.”

  “Then you should know I’m a quick learner.”

  She sighed, strapped herself in. “Just get us up there, and make sure we can outfly this thing.”

  “Well, unless it can go supersonic…”

  “I don’t know. This thing has a bag of tricks that borders on the spooky.” She activated her omni goggles and zoomed in on tenax at high magnification as it rampaged across the hospital roof, piercing the reinforced windows and jumping at the punches of depressurization as though it was popping bubble wrap. But on the spot between its shoulders, there were now over a dozen darts embedded. At higher magnification, their shafts appeared serrated, slightly curved, almost like bone. They bore oily, marbled patterns, pastel-colored. The creature’s upper limbs reached around its back occasionally, trying to reach the darts, but couldn’t touch them – that one spot, just as the dogs had figured on the glacier, was its Achilles heel.

  As Vaughn took off, another dart landed, right in the middle of the cluster. And if Jan wasn’t mistaken, tenax’s next move, to swivel and lumber across the roof in the direction of her hut and the river, was more sluggish than before. It no longer raged but appeared irritated, vexed. Something from the trees had gotten under its skin, and it was heading over there for a reckoning…away from the tourists.

  Now was the perfect time to hit it with everything in the ship’s arsenal.

  Vaughn gained elevation and banked wide, then arced eastward across the tree-line, over the phalanxes of disparate species bristling their collective defiance, and positioned the ship for a strafing run across the monster’s path. He repeatedly pressed the fire button on the grip of his joystick.

  Nothing happened.

  “Shit.”

  “What is it?”

  “I forgot to arm it.” He flipped the protective casing over a toggle further up the dash, and flicked the switch to ‘LIVE’ mode. His dive brought him too close to tenax, so he had to veer away over the hub complex before he’d had a chance to shoot. To circle back for another run.

  The creature shrieked and lifted off in pursuit. A sharp double clack shot through the fuselage, as if something small but hard had hit it. Jan swore she heard a persistent hiss that hadn’t been there before.

  “We didn’t pressurize,” Vaughn reminded her. “So if something pierced us, it’s just Hesp air anyway.”

  That was about as reassuring as his aerial combat brio so far – not very. Jan wondered what other gifts he had in store. A good thing his ship was far, far quicker and more maneuverable than tenax. “Let’s take this to a safe distance,” he said, leading the creature east over the veldt.

  Herds of fast-moving redback galunts hopped away from the ship’s approach—or was it tenax’s—in perfect unanimous sequence. The flying predator ignored them. Its ire was fixed on Vaughn’s vessel, which it probably deemed a rival for supremacy.

  “Okay, here we go. How about we try this again?”

  “You’ve got it this time,” she said.

  A swift, deliberate circle brought them onto a head-on collision course. At about thirty meters out, Vaughn squeezed the fire button.

  Nothing happened.

  “God damn this thing!”

  He switched hands, squeezed the button until his knuckles whitened and his face turned crimson.

  “Vaughn?”

  “I know. Shut up!”

  “We don’t have time for—”

  His growl of frustration hiked to a bellowed crescendo and ended with, “This fucking thing!” He hammered the dash with his fist, then banked left. A searing flash filled the cockpit. It was brighter than the sun – the sum of all colors. Jan flung an arm up to shield her eyes, and realized she couldn’t see past the white blotches clouding her vision. Blinking only gave them a silver lining.

  “Vaughn, tell me you can see!”

  “Ah…out of one eye.”

  “Thank God.”

  “You?”

  “I’m almost blind.” She gripped her seat arms. “Where are we?”


  “I don’t—I mean I think we’re…Christ, where did it go?”

  “Heading.”

  “Ah…three-seven-zero.”

  “Three-seven-zero?”

  “No, no. Wait. That’s a one. One-seven-zero. We’re heading south by southeast.”

  “And where’s tenax?”

  “Who the hell’s ten—oh, the creature. It’s…ah…shit, I really don’t, ah…”

  “Vaughn, you’re dazed. You’re not thinking straight.”

  “The hell you say! In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

  “Focus. Can you see it in the rearview?”

  “No.”

  “What’s our heading now?” she asked, mashing her eyes closed and then opening them wide, working the muscles, the blood flow. Her peripheral vision had improved a little, but the main blotches hung there like clouds of static interference.

  “Zero-six-five.”

  “So we’re still circling.”

  “Yeah, I wanted to get us away from…what did you call that thing again?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Vaughn, I think you’re suffering from shock. We must have flown through some kind of distortion field – the creature’s primary weapon has something to do with bending light energy.” No response. “Why don’t you straighten us out and keep to that heading. Then take us up.”

  “Up how high?”

  “Until we’re too high for ten—the creature to follow.”

  “You mean until the shock wears off?”

  Jan sighed. “Something like that.”

  “Hey! I think the vision in my other eye’s coming back. Not too shabby, huh.”

  “That’s good. Vaughn—heading.”

  “Ah…still zero-six—.”

  Ugh! A sudden drop in altitude lurched her stomach into her throat. A terrific thud from the rear of the ship shook the cockpit. Then another. The creature’s shriek filled the vessel. Its stalks of colored light fanned out around the windscreen, creating a kind of warped tunnel that enveloped the ship. The aurora effect filled her vision around the fading splotches, but wasn’t as bright because tenax was behind them. No, it had latched onto them.