Peter Watts - Behemoth

The dogs bristled and held their ground.

She stopped. Turned to face the black tower.

The pack parted before her.

They moved as she did, yielding in some approved direction, closing behind in her wake. After a few steps her own shifting bubble of space fused with another; two pockets merged into a single oblong vacuole ten meters down the major axis.

Two great torn carcasses lay piled before her in a pool of blood and spilled intestine. A foot protruded unmoving from beneath the nearest. Something else-dark, slick, strangely lobate—twitched further along one bloody flank as Clarke approached. It looked like some grotesque swollen parasite, pulsing weakly, spilled from the guts of its disembowelled host.

It clenched . Suddenly the image clicked: a blood-soaked fist, knotted in gory, matted fur.

"Ken!" She reached down, touched the bloody hand. It jerked back as if stabbed, disappeared beneath the carcass leaving only the vague sense of some half-glimpsed deformity. The mass of carrion shifted slightly.

Lubin hadn't torn these two animals apart. He'd merely blown lethal holes in them. Their evisceration had happened after the fact, a demon horde ripping through their fallen comrades in pragmatic, remorseless pursuit of their target.

Lubin had used these two as a shield .

"Ken, it's me." She grabbed handfuls of fur and pulled. The blood-slicked pelage resisted her grip. Splinters of bone stabbed her hands through clots of muscle and fur. On the third try, the center of mass tipped past some crucial threshold. The carcass rolled off Lubin like a great log.

He fired, blind. Lethal shards sprayed into the sky. Clarke dropped to the ground—" It's me, you idiot! "—and stared panic-stricken around the perimeter, terrified that Lubin had jump-started a whole new assault. But the pack only flinched and fell back a few steps, silent as ever.

"Cl—Clarke….?"

He didn't even look human. Every square centimeter glistened with black gore. The pistol shook in his hand.

"It's me," she repeated. She had no idea how much of the blood was his. "Are you—"

"— dogs?" His breath hissed fast and panicky through clenched teeth, the breath of a terrified little boy.

She looked at her escort. They looked back.

"Holding back, for now. Someone called them off."

His hand steadied. His breathing slowed. Discipline reimposed itself from the top down, the old familiar Lubin rebooting himself through sheer force of will.

"Told you," he coughed.

"Are you—"

"Functional…" He got slowly to his feet, tensing and grimacing a half-dozen times. " — barely." His right thigh had been gored. A gash split the side of his face, running from jaw to hairline. It tore straight through the shattered socket of his right eye.

Clarke gasped. "Jesus, your eye… "

He reached up to touch his face. "Wasn't doing me much good anyway." The deformity of his hand, barely glimpsed before, was obvious now: two of the fingers were gone.

"And your hand—Ken, it—"

He flexed the remaining digits. Fresh membranous scabs tore open at the stumps; dark fluids seeped forth. "Not as bad as it looks," he said hoarsely.

"You'll bleed out, you'll—"

He shook his head, staggered slightly. "Enhanced clotting factors. Standard issue. I'm good to go."

The hell you are. But dogs crowded close on one side, fell back on the other. Staying put obviously wasn't an option either.

"Okay then." She took him by the elbow. "This way."

"We're not deviating." It wasn't a question.

"No. We don't have much choice."

He coughed again. Clotting fluid bubbled at the corner of his mouth. "They're herding us."

A great dark muzzle pushed her gently from behind.

"Think of it as an honor guard," she said.

A row of glass doors beneath a concrete awning, the official logo of the Entropy Patrol set into stone overhead. The dogs formed a semicircle around the entrance, pushing them forward.

"What do you see?" Lubin asked.

"Same outer doors. Vestibule behind, three meters deep. There's—there's a door in the center of the barrier. Just an outline, no knob or keypad or anything."

She could have sworn that hadn't been there before.

Lubin spat blood. "Let's go."

She tried one of the doors. It swung open. They stepped across the threshold.

"We're in the vestibule."

"Dogs?"

"Still outside." The pack was lined up against the glass now, staring in. "I guess they're not—oh. The inner door just opened."

"In or out?"

"Inwards. Dark inside. Can't see anything." She stepped forward; her eyecaps would adjust to that deeper darkness once they were in it.

If they got in it. Lubin had frozen at her side, the remaining fingers on his mauled hand clenched into an impoverished fist. The grenade pistol extended from his other hand, unwavering, pointing straight ahead. His ravaged face held an expression Clarke had never seen before, some smoldering picture of rage and humiliation that bordered on outright humanity.

"Ken. Door's open."

The thumbwheel clicked onto shipworm .

"It's open, Ken. We can walk right in." She touched his forearm, tried to bring it down but his whole body was gripped in a sudden furious tetanus. "We don't have to—"

"I told you before," he growled. "More sensible to go around." His gun arm swung to three o'clock, pointing straight at the vestibule wall. His useless eye stared straight ahead.

"Ken—" She turned, half-expecting the monsters at their backs to crash through the panes and rip his arm off. But the dogs stayed where they were, seemingly content to let the drama play out without further intervention.

"He wants us to go forward," Lubin said. "Always sets it up, always takes the initiative. All we ever do is fucking— react …"

"And blowing out a wall when the door's standing open? That's not a reaction ?"

Lubin shook his head. "It's an escape route."

He fired. The shipworm plunged into the side wall, spinning fast enough to shatter an event horizon. The wall erupted like a tabletop Vesuvius; filthy grey cumulus billowed out and engulfed them in an instant. Stinging particles sandblasted Clarke's face. She closed her eyes, choked on the sudden sandstorm. From somewhere deep in the maelstrom, she heard the tinkle of shattering glass.

Something grabbed her wrist and yanked sideways. She opened her eyes onto the swirling, soupy aftermath of the blast. Lubin drew her towards the ruptured wall; his ravaged face loomed close. "This way. Get us in."

She steered. He lurched at her side. The air was filled with the hiss of fine sifting debris, the building sighed at its own desecration. An empty, twisted door frame leaned crazily out of the murk. Pebbles of crumbled safety glass crunched beneath their feet like a diamond snowfall.

There was no sign of the dogs, not that she'd be able to see them anyway unless they were on her. Maybe the explosion had scared them back. Maybe they'd been trained to stay outside no matter what. Or maybe, any second now, they'd find this broken doorway and pour through to finish the job…

A ragged hole resolved in the wall before them. Water ran from somewhere beyond. A ridge of torn concrete and rebar rose maybe five centimeters from the floor, the lip of a precipice; on the other side there was no floor, just a ruptured shaft a meter across, extending into darkness both above and below. Twisted veins of metal and plastic hung from precarious holdfasts, or lay wedged across the shaft at unforeseen angles. A stream of water plummeted through empty space, spilling from some ruptured pipe above, splattering against some unseen grate below.

The wall across the gap had been breached. There was darkness beyond.