Micro

Karen listened to the wasp coming. She crouched in the chamber at the foot of the vertical shaft, with Rick lying on the floor behind her. The sounds were frightening-and informative. A sharp smell wafted into the room-an advance wave of the mother’s fury.

Karen got out her diamond sharpener and began to frantically hone her machete, zing, swish, zing. “Hang on, Rick,” she muttered. She worked the sharpener over the steel, bringing the blade to an extreme edge. It would have to slice through massive bioplastic armor. Then she poised herself by the opening with the blade raised over her head. “Come on, come on,” she muttered.

The mother reached the bottom of the shaft. There was a pause.

And then the wasp’s head, huge, black-and-yellow, appeared in the opening.

Upside down.

She swung the machete at the wasp’s face with every ounce of her strength.

The blade bounced off the wasp’s eye, leaving a mark. The lady had armored eyes.

The wasp thrust her head-still upside down-into the room, snapped her jaws around the machete, and tore the blade out of Karen’s hands, dragging it back into the hole. Karen heard crunching metallic sounds: the wasp was cutting up her last weapon.

The room shook: the wasp was pounding her wings against the tunnel walls. Getting ready to charge. She heard the wasp gasping.

She glanced over her shoulder, and her headlamp beam passed over Rick. He looked dead-

In swinging her head around, she became aware of the little knife dangling from her neck. She’d sworn never to carry it in her pocket again. My knife. She thumbed the blade open and yanked the cord off her neck.

The wasp’s head was in the room now-still upside down-and the jaws snapped at her. Karen dove down to the floor, and slid her body underneath the wasp’s upside-down head. The head was covered with bristles. She gripped the bristles. The head jerked up and down, battering her against the floor. The wasp could see her: a trio of little eyes stared at her from the top of the head.

Karen clung to the head as it rotated and beat her against the tunnel, the jaws crossing and snapping. She was getting a terrible thrashing. Even so, in searching for a grip, she reached behind the wasp’s head and managed to get her fingertips wedged in the occipital suture, the crack between the head capsule and the pleuron, the first armored plate of the thorax. This was the back of the wasp’s neck. There was a joint in the armor at that spot. Her fingertips felt soft tissue in the crack.

The neck was so narrow that she was able to wrap her fingers entirely around the wasp’s neck. She had gotten a stranglehold. Maybe she could choke the wasp.

At that moment, the wasp jerked backward into the tunnel, dragging Karen along. Now she was jammed in the tunnel, being crushed by the wasp’s head, which continued to hammer against her body. The wasp curled its body, and Karen realized it was trying to bring its abdomen forward and sting her. The wasp pushed her back into the room again, and began twisting, trying to throw her off its neck. But she held her grip. Having located the neck joint, she let go of the neck with one hand, grabbed her knife, then slipped the tip of her knife into the crack. Then she quickly ran the knife blade around the neck, following the crack and sawing as she went. All the way around.

The wasp’s head fell off.

It rolled on top of her, and she scrambled back into the room, followed by a spurt of blood.

The mandibles snapped twice and froze. The body exsanguinated fast, blood spewing out of the severed neck all over Karen. The wings of the headless body thumped against the walls in the tunnel, the wing-beats weakening and slowing down, until the corpse quieted and lay still.

Karen pulled herself away and knelt by Rick and took his hand. She was shaking badly. “I did it.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Rick saw movement behind her. He blinked his eyes and shouted in his mind: Look out!

The master brain inside the severed head had lost contact with the eight minor brains in the wasp’s body, but those minor brains were still sending out messages to the rest of the body. The wasp’s legs went into action, dragging the headless body into the room. The abdomen curled and thrust forward, and the stinger came out.

A noise at her back made Karen whirl around. Just in time she saw the stinger coming, and jumped aside as the abdomen slammed her into the wall. She struggled, trapped, as the sting waved past her face. She saw the twin blades working against each other, inches from her eyes. The sting palps popped out and tapped her cheek, and entered her mouth. But finally the stinger went still, lightly resting on Karen’s collarbone, the blades bared. A dewdrop of poison swelled from the blades and hung there. She could see her face reflected in the droplet of wasp venom.

She delicately extricated herself from under the sting, avoiding contact with the liquid and blades. Then she got down on her knees and wiped the dirt from Rick’s face. “How’re you doing, soldier?”