Larry Niven - The Barsoom Project

The first sound they heard was a tittering, scraping sound, followed by a dull crack.

Snow Goose crept up to the front of the line, to where the trail dead-ended against a ridge of rocks. She stealthily climbed up, and peered over. Within moments she returned, shuddering. “I… I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Orson’s embarrassment evaporated in a flare of curiosity. “Max? Let’s take a look.” He hefted his mutated spear as if he meant business. Maybe he did. He and Francis Hebert were the first to the top of the ridge: Hebert moved like an Indian scout. Max puffed as he climbed the last few feet, and then gaped at what he saw.

In a saucer-shaped stone depression thirty feet across lay a nest, a nest for birds the size of rocs. The parents were gone, and there had been six eggs in the nest. Two of the eggs had been shattered, the chicks within dragged out and brutally hacked apart.

Attackers were at work on a third egg. They might have been barrels covered with black hair… or obscenely fat, four-limbed spiders. Their fingernails were immense and crusted with filth, and grew out of the fingers like knives stuck on the ends of sausages. They chortled as a third Thunderbird chick, a wet, yellow-feathered infant the size of a plump turkey, struggled sluggishly for life. They tore it to pieces with their fingernails and consumed it raw. Each of the six monstrosities was larger than a man.

Orson ducked back beneath the ridge of rock. His breathing was asthmatically harsh.

“Do you know what that is?” Hebert’s little eyes were wide with excitement.

“ Yes, I know what that is!” Orson said. “The book calls them mountain trolls. Flesh-eaters, man. We don’t want to mess with them. I don’t remember anything about how to survive an encounter.

Hebert checked the action on his rifle, one of the few that hadn’t been converted. “Bull. We can’t let them kill the Thunderbird chicks. This is our chance to look good to the birds!”

Johnny Welsh and Hippogryph had joined them. Without peering up over the edge of the basin, everyone seemed to know exactly what would have to be.

“All right,” Hebert said. “Are we together on this?”

Snow Goose gulped. Yarnall gave the sky a dirty look. “No cheating,” he muttered.

“Then-let’s DO IT!”

Hippogryph and Hebert began firing. Hebert’s Remington was unimpaired by magic, but Hippogryph had to pause to add powder and shot with every blast from the flintlock.

The trolls screamed, their misshapen barrel bodies shuddering with the shock. A monster’s flat, hideous face dissolved to a smear of red light. It fell back twitching.

But the others charged, howling their rage.

With gibbonlike agility they scampered over the rocks, mouths dripping with Thunderchick blood and yolk, impossibly long arms sweeping out like scythes.

Fear froze him for a moment. Then Max broke free, ducked under the sweeping black arms, and thrust upward with his harpoon. The creature swatted the spear aside, and grabbed him by the arm. Not a hologram! Its other hand almost lovingly displayed the foot-long nails, traced them lightly across his neck, and then hissed and drew back-

Yarnall! The Guardsman smashed into it with his war club.

The troll squealed and released Max. Max hit the ground, heart triphammering.

All around him were scuffles, and screaming, and the sound of rocks sliding beneath climbing, running feet.

His hands searched until he found the harpoon. He grabbed it in the middle and turned as the troll advanced on Yarnall. Screaming, he raised the spear. It plunged deep into the furred back and-

(For just a moment, he wondered if he had seen correctly. In other circumstances he would have sworn he saw the head of the spear retract, and the flesh around the “wound” actually close in to grasp the haft. Ah, well…)

— the troll gasped in pain, blood flowing from its mouth. It turned and ran. Max wrenched his spear from its back as it plunged over the side of the cliff and disappeared into the clouds below.

Max and Yarnall slapped hands, then whooped and searched for fresh meat.

There, Trianna stood her ground, firing into an advancing hulk. Although its blood drizzled onto the rocky ground, still it plodded another step forward, and another.

Johnny Welsh and Max got there at the same time. Max, Unable to contain his exuberance, performed “Mr. Mountain’s Avalanche.” He sprang into the air, knees flexing to chest, feet hammering out, slowing down at the last minute so that his partner wouldn’t be hurt-

Oops.

The monster slammed into the ground, and Max heard it say “Ow, goddamn!” as it tried to crawl away.

Johnny Welsh was staring at him. “Well, I’ll be. Mr. Mountain! I watched you wrestle last month against Skinhead Slade!”

Max groaned. “Not so loud. I’ll tell you about it later. Let’s finish this up.”

“Pleasure!”

Nearby, a troll was being clubbed and speared into a glowing mess. The knifelike projections of its nails scratched blindly at the rock. The other trolls were either dead or in retreat. The Adventurers screamed challenge at them, and whooped with bloodthirsty joy.

“We beat ‘em!”

“Yeah!”

“We sure as hell did it!” Orson bellowed at the top of his lungs.

Snow Goose was examining the eggs. Where once there had been six, now there were three, and one of those had a cracked shell. She looked worried.

“What’s wrong?” Yarnall asked, wiping a smear of troll blood off his club.

“I’m… not sure we should be up here right now…"

Before anyone could ask why, the sky rang with a scream of primal despair. Above them, two titanic winged creatures circled in the sky. They were like eagles, only with silver fringes to their golden feathers. The sun caught their highlights, ignited them gloriously, transforming the Thunderbirds into flaming avengers. They circled twice, cawing, then plunged straight down at the Gamers, hooked talons spread and gleaming.

The male Tin-mi-uk-puk carried a caribou in its outsize claws. As it caught sight of the carnage it screamed and released the carcass. Gamers froze as it dropped toward them. That mass was carrying enough kinetic energy to kill Rambo XII.

The caribou brushed the edge of the nest and dropped into the mist amid a shower of leafy debris, lost before it crashed against the side of the mountain.

Max was frozen as the male approached and swooped down. As close as he came, it was the female who actually landed first. She stalked directly to her babies as her mate circled overhead.

She nudged one of the broken shells, her eyes and body language almost unendurably grief-stricken. One of the turkeysized, feathered corpses was still partially intact. She nudged it, pushed her great beak against its lifeless mass, before giving up and inspecting the other shells.

The male landed. The birds weren’t as big as houses, but certainly twice the size of dray horses, the size of small elephants. The smaller of them easily sported a twenty-foot wingspan. Their bodies were golden-eagle bodies tinged with silver. For birds, they were extraordinarily muscular. Each clawed footstep, each ripple of a wing conveyed a sense of majesty, authority, power.

The male studied each of them in turn.

“Nobody panic,” Snow Goose commanded. “We might just survive this.” She turned her head. “Mr. Welsh. Give me your charm. And no jokes.”

Johnny stared, then shut his mouth. He fumbled in his pack, extracted a small carved bird figure. Max caught only a glimpse of it as it passed from hand to hand, but it seemed exquisitely rendered in some dark, smooth stone.

The female approached the male and rubbed her great head against his, and they cooed together. He silently inspected the nest and intact eggs, then returned to nudge at the bodies of the slain monsters. He looked up at the Gamers with a clear question in those huge, black, intelligent eyes.