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"Weapons on full lethal except Molly," Lankur stated flatly.
"Don't give anything or anybody a chance to pick you off first.
Check equipment, then report."
Molly didn't even draw her pistol. She doubted if she could harm anything,
even something trying to kill her. The fear of death, or the unknown, didn't
enter her mind. To the Syn, it was always "now."
"Okay, everyone. Let's go in," Tris Lankur said in a flat, yet determined
voice.
The eerie, opaque, cream-colored walls seemed almost to be dissolving about
them, although intellectually they all knew it was really just an effect
designed by some mind alien to each and every one of them.
"Keep your suit lights on," Lankur warned them. "We get to depending on this
place and suddenly something cuts the power. On your guard."
"We may be nuts but we aren't dumb," Jimmy McCray mut-
tered in reply.
"I'm going through that entrance there," the cymol said, pointing.
"Durquist left. McCray, right. I'll go through the middle, you two follow on
my signal or if I open fire."
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He crouched down and let the other two get into position, 282 jack L. Chalker
then checked and double-checked his rifle, took a deep breath, and charged
into the nearly heart-shaped opening.
For a moment there was silence, then Tris Lankur's voice said, "It's all
right. Come on in. There's nothing alive here . . . now.
Modra, come on up with us if your stomach will take it. It's worse than the
base camp. Molly, you were bothered by that scene. I'm not real sure you
should see this."
That brought them all in in a hurry, with Molly, somewhat indignant at the
patronizing, charging right through. She and the others stopped dead just
behind Tris Lankur, who was standing stock-still, seemingly transfixed by the
scene.
Everywhere there was blood. Red blood, green blood, blue blood, all the colors
of the rainbow, smeared all over in such abandon it seemed like the work of
some mad artist.
The chamber was huge, far larger than could be accounted for by the apparent
size of the "house" or whatever it was, with the slightly rounded floor
characteristic of the rest of the place, and in the center were the remains of
what had once obviously been two pillars rising from floor to ceiling,
although it appeared to need no support which was good, since a substantial
portion of the pillars was now gone, shattered fragments mixed in with the
blood.
It was Lankur who moved first, walking over to the closest remains of what
might have once been a living creature. The heaps of bone, flesh, and muscle
were so mangled and distorted that it wasn't even possible to determine its
racial origin.
He approached the bloody, twisted lump cautiously, almost as if he expected it
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to come alive in some hideous form and leap upon him, even though cymols were
supposedly immune to fear and imagination's tricks, and that thing was through
ever leaping anywhere.
"It's been gnawed," he said hoarsely. "Who whateverdid this, it
indiscriminately tore up and gnawed on every one of them. It was a blood
feast, without any sense or reason at all. The ones back at the camp were just
sadistically murdered not these. What in hell did they set loose in here?"
The Durquist moved next, over to Lankur's right and near the ruined pillar.
"It was our doing, whatever it was," he noted.
"This is was a Durquist. Mangled, but ungnawed. Whatever it was knew not to
eat a Durquist."
Of all the known creatures, the Durquist was the only one
THE DEMONS AT RAINBOW BRIDGE
283
whose flesh had proven toxic to any living thing that consumed even a small
part of it.
Modra Stryke walked carefully through the carnage and up to
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nearest the Durquist. She was shaken, certainly, by the sight, but she was
also a pro. She could be sick later.
"There appears to have been some kind of hollow center in the pillars," she
noted. "The rubble isn't quite enough for solid posts of that thickness and
height." She stooped down and picked up two shards, not randomly chosen but
selected for their obvious difference.
"Look at this," she said, holding one shard in each hand.
"The one here is better than ten centimeters thick. This one.
though, is very thin, very fragile a few millimeters, no more."
The Durquist's stalked eyes turned away from the sight of his dead relation to
the contents of her hand. "Interesting. Two enclosures, then, one inside the
other. The outer thick, perhaps for protection and support, the inner a
capsule? You suppose that whatever it was was in some sort of capsule,
suspended, and then the pillar was poured from the top down, over it, to seal
it in?"
"Yeah, but what was inside the thing?" McCray asked, look-
ing nervously around. "And where is it now?"
"Not here," the Durquist responded. "Not now. Whatever it was was big. Look at
the teeth marks here. And those really nasty marks there What could make them?
Fangs?"
"Their weapons seem to be still here," Tris Lankur noted.
**! found a few. Small stuff but it should still have been adequate to have
stopped just about anything / know."
"If they had a chance to use 'em," Jimmy put in.
"They did. You can see the marks on the walls all around you, and at least the
one pistol I just checked is totally dis-
charged. It's a near certainty that whatever it was wasn't invisi-
ble, or faster than lightning, and there were a fair number of people here.
Whatever it was got hit all right. Got hit and kept on coming. And it was
feist. There wasn't even the obvious el-
ement of surprise implicit in the base camp attack. I Uh-oh."
"What's the matter?" Modra asked, tensing.
Lankur kneeled down before another mass of mangled flesh, then reached out and
began peeling parts of it away. Modra, even McCray, found themselves averting
their eyes. "What the hell you doin', cymol?" Jimmy asked.
284
jack L Chalker
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"You said it right," Lankur responded. "I am a cymol and this is all that's
left of another. Jesus' The skull's been crushed'."
There was a sickening popping sound. "Ah! Got it!"
"What the hell are you doing, Tris?" Modra almost screamed.
It was like a dead man loose in a slaughterhouse.
"Sorry to be so ghoulish." he responded, "but I got what I
was looking for. Maybe damaged, maybe not. Hard to tell until
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I connect up."
They all turned in spite of themselves and saw that he was now standing,
holding something that resembled a crudely shaped lump of some dull,
lead-colored material to which small bits of organic matter still clung-
"I have one of these in my head," he told them. "Different size and shape,
probably different capacity, but something like this just the same. Odd never [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]