Peter Watts - Behemoth

But then he yanked on the stick and the chopper reared back, losing its nerve at the last moment. Suddenly she weighed a hundred tonnes. They faced the sky; the world skidded around them, earth and glass and far-off cloud rolling past the windshield in a blurry jumble. For one astonishing moment they hovered . Then something kicked them hard from behind: from behind, the sound of cracking polymers and tearing metal. They lurched sideways and that magical rotor slashed the earth and stopped dead, defeated at last. Lenie Clarke stared up mad-eyed at a great monolith leaning crazily against the night sky, descending along with the darkness to devour her.

"Lenie."

She opened her eyes. That impossible mouth still yawned overhead. She squeezed her eyes shut, held them closed for a second. Tried again.

Oh .

Not a mouth after all. A great charred hole, partway up the north façade, stretching across ten gutted floors or more.

Rio , she realized. They never repaired the damage .

The roof of the building was clearly visible, straight ahead through the forward windshield. The lights up there had gone out. The whole building seemed to lean to the left; the chopper's nose was twisted up at a thirty-degree angle, like some mechanical mole that had breached from the earth and torqued on its axis.

Their ride was sockeye. The tail boom must have either crumpled at their backs or snapped off entirely.

Pain in her chest and arms. There was something wrong with the sky. It was—that was it, it was dark . They were in a clave, where static-field generators hummed endless electricity into the air. Sudbury's sky should have been flickering. Before they'd fallen, it had been.

" Lenie ."

"Was that—was that a pulse?" she wondered.

"Can you move?"

She focused, and located the source of the pain: Lubin's backpack, hard and lumpy, clutched tightly as life itself against her chest. It must have risen from the floor during the dive, she must have grabbed it in midair. She remembered none of it. The slit along its top puckered like a mouth in her embrace, affording glimpses of the stuff inside—an angular jumble of tools and ordnance pressing painfully into her flesh.

She willed her grip to relax. The pain subsided.

"I think I'm okay. Are you—"

He looked blindly back at her through sandblasted eyes.

An image from the fall came to her, unregistered until now: Lubin's pince-nez, sailing gracefully towards the back of the cabin. Clarke unbuckled and twisted to look behind her. Sudden sharp pain splintered down her spine like cracking ice. She cried out.

Lubin's hand was on her shoulder. "What?"

"Wh—whiplash, I think. I've had worse." She settled back in her seat. No point in looking for the pince-nez anyway; the pulse would have fried them as thoroughly as it had the chopper.

"You're blind again," she said softly.

"I packed another pair. The knapsack's shielded."

Its open mouth grinned at her, zipper-toothed. Realization crashed over her in a sickening wave. "Oh, fuck , Ken, I–I forgot to zip it up. I'm—"

He waved away her apology. "You'll be my eyes. Is the cabin breached?"

"What?"

"Any breaks in the fuselage? Anything big enough for you to crawl through, say?"

"Uh—" Clarke turned again, carefully. Pain feinted to the base of her skull, but stopped short of outright attack. "No. The rear bulkhead's crumpled to shit, but…"

"Good. Do you still have the pack?"

She opened her mouth to answer—and remembered two carbonised mounds staring into the sky.

" Focus , Len. Do you—"

"It doesn't matter, Ken."

"It matters a great—"

"We're dead , Ken." She took a deep, despairing breath. "He's got an orbital cannon, remember? Any second now he'll just—and there's not a fucking thing we can—"

" Listen to me ." Suddenly, Lubin was close enough to kiss. "If he was trying to kill us we'd be dead already, do you understand? I'd doubt he's even willing to bring his satellites online at this point; he doesn't want to risk losing them to the shredders."

"But he already —the pulse—"

"Didn't come from orbit. He must have packed half the floors in that building with capacitors. He's not trying to kill us. He's only trying to soften us up." He thrust out his hand. "Now where's the pack ?"

She handed it over, numbly. Lubin set it on his knee and rummaged inside.

He's not trying to kill us . Lubin had made that claim before, laid it out as part of his working hypothesis en route from Toromilton. Clarke wasn't entirely sure that recent events bore him out, especially since—

A flicker of motion, just to the right. Clarke turned and gasped, the pain of that motion forgotten in an instant. A monstrous face stared back through the bubble of the canopy, centimeters away, a massive black wedge of muscle and bone. Small dark eyes glinted from deep sockets. The apparition grinned , showing sawtooth serrations embedded in jaws like a leghold trap.

In the next moment it had dropped out of sight.

"What?" Lubin's face panned back and forth. "What do you see?"

"I–I think it used to be a dog," Clarke said, her voice quavering.

"I think they all did," Lubin told her.

Tilted at the sky, she hadn't seen them arrive; she had to look down to see forward , and now—through the ventral bubble between her knees, over the edge of the door if she strained from her seat—the darkness seethed on all sides. The apparitions did not bark or growl. They made no sound at all. They didn't waste energy on brute animal rage, didn't throw themselves slavering against the hull to get at the soft meat inside. They circled like silent sharks.

Boosted light stripped nothing from these creatures. They were utterly black.

"How many?" Lubin ran one hand across his grenade pistol; the ammo belt lay across his knees, one end still trailing down into the knapsack between his feet.

"Twenty. Thirty. At least. Oh Jesus, Ken, they're huge , they're twice as big as you are…" Clarke fought rising panic.

Lubin's pistol came with three cartridge slots and a little thumbwheel to choose between them. He felt out flash, shipworm, and clusterfuck from the belt and slotted them in. "Can you see the main entrance?"

"Yes."

"What direction? How far?"

"About eleven o'clock. Maybe—maybe eighty meters." Might as well be eighty lightyears .

"What's between there and here?"

She swallowed. "A pack of rabid monster dogs waiting to kill us."

"Besides that."

"We're—we're on the edge of the main drag. Paved. Old foundations either side, pretty much razed and filled." And then, hoping he wasn't heading where she feared—hoping she could deflect him if he was—she added, "No cover."

"Can you see my binocs?"

She turned carefully, torsion and injury in uneasy balance. "Right behind you. The strap's caught up in the cleat over the door."

He abandoned his weapon long enough to disentangle the binoculars and hand them over. "Describe the entrance."

Range-finding and thermal were dead, of course. Only the raw optics still worked. Clarke tried to ignore the dark shapes in the blurry foreground. "Bank of glass doors, eight of them. They're set into this shallow indentation in the façade, CSIRA logo on top. Ken—"

"What's behind the doors?"

"Uh, a vestibule, a few meters deep. And then—oh, last time there was another set of doors further in, but those're gone now. There's some kind of heavy slab instead, like a big dropgate or something. Looks pretty featureless."

"What about the side walls of the vestibule?"

"Concrete or biolite or something. Just walls. Nothing special. Why?"