Charles Sheffield - The Mind Pool

The great game preserves of Earth’s equatorial and polar regions still existed, but hunting was strictly forbidden. Blood lust had to find other outlets. Adestis was one of the most recent, and perhaps the best ever.

Dougal MacDougal loved Adestis. Lotos Sheldrake had never tried it until today, but she hated the very idea of it. She had come along as part of MacDougal’s safari only for her own purposes.

She clung to her bright-sided weapon and struggled across spongy ground after the Ambassador. The air was thick and humid, and it was filled with large, drifting spores that floated along easily in the hardly noticeable gravity. Lotos batted them away from her head and peered in front of her for a first sight of the group’s destination.

There it was. No more than a few minutes walk away, the enormous brown tower reached far up towards the grey sky. Already Lotos could see the first file of pale-bodied warriors moving nervously around the entrance holes. They were tasting the air, feeling the approach of danger with their sensitive antennas.

Dougal MacDougal strode confidently in front, heading straight for the giant round-topped citadel. The forty other party members followed, with Lotos bringing up the far rear.

She suspected that she had too much imagination for this sort of enterprise. Already she could visualize the curved jaws of the defending soldiers tight around her waist, or the sticky and madly irritant spray enveloping her. The projectile weapon that she was carrying would kill a warrior outright — if she aimed true and made a hit in the head or the even more vulnerable neck. A body shot would not do. The soldier might die eventually, but before it did so the creature’s dying reflexes would make it fight on, killing anything that did not smell and taste right. And the soldiers were only the first line of defense. Beyond them lay the dark interior tunnels, swarming with their own defenders loyal to the death. Surrender or acceptance of defeat was unthinkable to the inhabitants of the tower. For the attacking party to succeed, it would have to penetrate to the central chamber, and kill its giant occupant.

Dougal MacDougal led the way to the base of the structure. Avoiding the main entrances, he fired a thread-thin grapnel line to a point high above ground level. With a running pulley he hauled himself easily up, to many times his own height. In half a minute he was braced against the hard wall of the mound, chipping a secure foothold. The others followed, helping each other. There was little risk at this stage, since even a direct fall would not be fatal.

Clinging to the pulley line, half a dozen of the attacking group lifted sharp picks. They hacked at the hard cement of the mound until they had made an opening big enough to crawl through.

Far below, the soldiers were in total confusion. They ran here and there, touching each other with their antennae and criss-crossing the approach routes to the tunnel entrances. None thought to crawl up the side of the tower.

“All right.” MacDougal was panting and excited — far more enthusiastic for this than for anything in his official life. “That’s big enough. Everybody inside.”

Lotos scrambled through, last in the group. She found herself in a spiral tunnel that wound steeply down toward the middle of the fortress. There was an overpowering smell here, of chemical secretions and fungal growth, and the curving wall was made of the same hard cement. But the tunnel was deserted. They ran along it at top speed, until after a hundred steps the leaders skipped to a halt. Scores of defenders were emerging from side passages, blocking the way ahead.

“Shoot your way through.” MacDougal was waving his weapon around, as much a menace to his companions as to the enemy. “These are no real danger — but keep your eyes open for the soldiers. They’ll know any minute what we’re up to, and they’ll be after us.”

The projectile weapons were powerful enough to blow asunder the soft bodies of the workers. But there were hundreds of them. Progress became slower and slower, through a carnage of dying tower-dwellers. Lotos found herself skidding in disgust over layers of pallid flesh and greasy body fluids, losing her footing every few seconds. She was last of the group again, at least ten paces behind the rest. If the soldiers came from behind … but the big central chamber was in sight ahead.

Lotos paused to catch her breath. And heard from behind her the scrabble of hard claws on the runnel wall.

She turned. Less than twenty paces away were seven warriors, approaching at top speed. She screamed a warning, lifted her weapon, and fired it on automatic. A stream of projectiles cut into the warriors. Four curled into death spasm, knotting their bodies on the hard floor of the tunnel.

But the other three were still coming. Lotos blew the head clean off one of them, and cut another in half with a hail of fire. The last one was too close. Before she could aim her weapon, mandibles as long as her arm reached forward to grip her at chest level. Their inner edges were sharp and as hard as steel.

Lotos’s arms were pinned to her side by the encircling jaws. She could not free her gun, or fire it at the soldier. She heard the others of the party shouting at her, but they could not get a shot at her attacker without hitting Lotos. The pressure on her chest increased, from discomfort to impossible pain. Lotos could not breathe. She felt the bones in her arms crack — her ribs cave in — her heart flatten in her chest. In the final moment before she lost consciousness she bit down hard on the switch between her rear molars. As everything turned dark she felt a gush of blood in her throat, jetting up from her lungs into her gaping mouth . …

THAT IS THE END OF ADESTIS FOR YOU. Lotos was sweating and shivering in the balcony seat, the harsh voice sounding in her ear. REMAIN SEATED AS A SPECTATOR IF YOU WISH, BUT YOUR FURTHER PARTICIPATION IS PROHIBITED.

She ripped off her headset and threw it aside, leaning over to stare down at the sandy arena below. The attack on the termite mound was continuing. With the conclusion of sensory contact, her own five-millimeter simulacrum had “died” down there. And just in time! Lotos was still in agony, still feeling the pressure on breaking ribs and cracking spine — still tasting blood in her mouth. Adestis did not let losers off easily. If she had failed to activate the Monitor switch, the chance of death from heart failure was better than one in four. In any case, the pain was real enough. It would go on for hours, even though she was out of the game. That realism was one perverse reason for the huge popularity of Adestis.

Lotos glanced around her. Over half the forty participants had already returned. They were all alive, and clutching eyes, heads, or ribs — the soldier termites had their preferred targets. The other twenty players still wore their headsets and were crouched blindly in their places.

There was a gasp from Dougal MacDougal’s cowled figure, three seats away on Lotos Sheldrake’s right. It was followed by a boil of activity near the bottom of the ten-foot mound, far below the spectators’ gallery. Either the intruders had managed to kill the queen and they were fighting their way out, or the number of defenders had been too much for them and the attack was being abandoned. Tiny human-shaped figures, less than a dozen of them, came racing out of one of the tunnels at the base of the mound and scattered across the sandy plain. They were far from safe. Dozens of maddened termite soldiers were after them, dashing in from all sides.

The projectile weapons fired continuously — and uselessly. In less than thirty seconds all the figures were buried under swarms of furious defenders. One by one, the players around Lotos shuddered back to their own body consciousness.