Micro

No-she was about to be shot. He started crawling frantically through the moss, then got himself wedged under a fallen leaf. He was looking right up at the man. The man wore a helmet, a breastplate, armored plates over his arms. His chin was bare. Bare neck.

Rick aimed for the man’s neck. Try to hit him in the jugular. He inhaled slowly, trying not to make a sound, and blew with all his might.

The dart missed the man’s neck, but landed in the soft flesh under his chin, and drove deep, buried up to its fluff. It had entered the man’s chin just above his Adam’s apple and gone upward. Rick heard a choking scream and the man tumbled down into the vehicle, out of sight. He heard wet cough, then thrashing, thumping. The guy was seizing, flopping around like a fish inside the truck. Then silence.

Rick loaded another dart into the blowgun, and jumped up on the truck. Ready to shoot again, he looked inside. The man lay sprawled, face cherry-red, eyes popping, frothy mucus drizzling out of his mouth-cyanide poisoning, Rick realized. Only the tail puff of the dart remained visible, a wisp of cotton stuck under the man’s chin. The dart had punched vertically upward through his tongue and the roof of his mouth and pierced his brain.

“That was for Peter,” he said. His hands were shaking, then his whole body began to shake. He had never killed a person before; hadn’t thought he was capable of it.

Off to his right, he heard another hiss.

Oh fuck, not another one, he thought-another sniper out there. Shooting at my friends. Get the bastard. Rick leaped from the truck and began running toward the sound, holding the loaded blowgun. As he ran, he noticed that things had gotten darker overhead, and then he saw…a shadow moving in the ferns. He stopped running. Suddenly he felt very, very small and completely powerless. He couldn’t believe how big the damned thing was.

Karen saw the man rise up between two fern stems. He was a small man, agile and catlike in his movements. He wore camo armor and a glove on his right hand. His left hand was bare and was closed around the gun’s trigger, and the gun was aimed at her. He was about one meter away. Close enough.

She had drawn her knife. It was no match for the gun. She glanced around. No cover.

He moved out from behind the fern stems, keeping the gun trained on her. He seemed to be playing with her, for he could make the shot easily. He spoke into a throat mike: “Found her.” After a pause he added, “You copy?” Evidently he didn’t get an answer. “Copy?”

He still didn’t get an answer. He stepped forward.

It was then that Karen saw the shadow behind the man. At first she didn’t know what it was. She saw something brown and covered with fur, buried in a cluster of fern fronds. It moved slightly, then stopped. She thought it must be a mammal, maybe a rat, because of the brown fur and because it was really big. But then a leg appeared, a long, tapering, jointed leg, an exoskeleton covered with bristly brown hair. Then a fern frond was pushed aside, and she saw the eyes. All eight of them.

It was an enormous spider, as big as a house. The spider was so vast it seemed almost unrecognizable as a spider. Karen knew the species, though. It was a brown huntsman, common in the tropics. It was a carnivore, too. Huntsmen spiders don’t build webs. They are ambush predators, and they hunt on the ground. This one was holding its body close to the ground-a sign that it was hunting. It had a flattened body, protected by hair, with sickle-shaped fangs folded under bulbous appendages. This one was a female. She would crave protein, Karen knew, since she was making eggs.

Karen was struck by the stillness of the spider. Since it was an ambush predator, the fact that it wasn’t moving was bad news. This meant it was hunting.

The man stood with his back to the spider, unaware of it. Its constellation of eyes stared at the man, like droplets of black glass. Karen heard a soft, moaning intake and exhalation of air flowing through the spider’s lungs, located in the spider’s abdomen.

“Johnstone. Do you copy?” the man said.

He paused, listening for his partner.

“What happened to your friend?” Karen whispered. Make him talk.

He just looked at her. Not a chatty one.

She kept her body very still. No sudden movements. She knew that a spider couldn’t see very well, even with so many eyes, but a spider had highly accurate hearing. Ten “ears” were scattered over each leg-holes in its armor that picked up sounds. Eighty ears, all told. In addition, the thousands of hairs on its legs were also listening devices, vibration sensors. The hearing organs on its legs gave the spider a 3-D sound-image of the world.

If she made any noise or vibration, the spider would form a sonic image of her. Would recognize her as prey. The attack, she knew, would happen in the blink of an eye.

She knelt, very slowly, and picked up a rock. Raised her arm slowly.

The man smiled. “Go ahead. If it makes you feel better.”