Old Mars

He was tying this to the barrel of his Banning when he felt something moist, cold, and scaly slip around his ankle and give it an experimental tug.

He yanked free. It took a tighter hold. It seemed patient. It knew he couldn’t escape. He’d done his best to keep clear of the wombot’s sensors, but his movement had already alerted the thing. It chickled out a challenge. Again, he tried to yank his leg away.

The wombot spit a bubble of death syrup all over the nearby rocks. They weren’t going to waste valuable gas or darts on him unless they had to. At least he wasn’t going to need a white flag. Now he knew that they wanted him dead rather than alive.

Below Mac, the ground powdered. The tentacle tugged harder and the area beneath him broke open, dragging him down a fissure, scraping every inch of his day suit. The suit’s circuits wouldn’t survive another attack. Suddenly, it was inky-dark. He heard the odd rattle and boom of the thing’s heart-lung. He forgot the native name someone had guessed at, but it was without doubt an ock-croc.

Mac Stone prepared himself for death.

2 To Destroy the Future

HE WAS STILL TRYING TO POINT HIS PISTOL WHEN THE FISSURE became a tunnel, thick with something caked around its sides. The worst stink in creation. Croc dung! Threat of death really did sharpen the memory. That’s what it coated its long burrow with. The Martian wanal or ock-croc was the only large predator left. These giant, tentacled reptilian insects drove deep burrows using old blowholes or wells; they weren’t particular. They hibernated for years, woke up very hungry. The first hatchling typically ate all its siblings and sometimes its parent. Then it ate whoever was still hibernating. Although not radioactive themselves, they preferred areas still “buzzy” and lethal to humans. If the croc didn’t eat Stone right away, the chances were he’d soon die painfully of radiation poisoning.

“Oh, damn!” He couldn’t do anything with his holstered gun. The thing seemed to know precisely how to catch him so he did it the least damage. He had to be many meters down now, the Banning long since passed out of sight and no longer his main fear. A bionic wombot might follow him, but so far he felt relatively sanguine about that. The chances were the croc would also eat the wombot, built-in explosives and all. The thought gave Mac a brief moment of satisfaction.

The tunnel opened into a pit occupied by a huge pulsing head with six round eyes the size of portholes, which slowly retreated from him as a single tentacle—one of many—dragged him deeper.

Mac did all he could to slow his descent into the pit, where its own green-yellow luminescence revealed the croc’s enormous carcass. A nightmare of snakelike waving arms with a long snout full of dagger-size needles for teeth, the wriggling body a black blob of scaly horror. More tentacles snared him so that he couldn’t move any part of his body without making things worse. He was resigned to what must happen next.

He heard a double click as the thing disconnected its jaw, ready to swallow him. Then he thought he heard human speech. One tentacle released his right arm. If he could only get hold of his gun, he might not kill the croc but he’d give it the worst attack of indigestion it had known in all its long, quasi-reptilian life. He made one last lunge. His fingers clutched for the butt.

As his Banning came loose, something else fell out of the air and rattled on the rock. He looked down and saw a tiny blue flickering of flame. Voices seemed to jeer inside his head.

He felt horribly cold. At this rate, he’d freeze to death before the croc ate him. The questor had found him just as he was making camp. He’d had to move fast. When the Martian night caught him without his Hopkins blanket, it would be over anyway. The wanal only had to wait for him to lose a little more heat. They were famous for their cunning patience. Once, there had been a dozen varieties of the creature. Mac had seen pictures of them in the old hunting cubes of the Sindolu, the extinct nomads of the northern hemisphere, from whose encampments a few artifacts had been miraculously preserved. The wanal they had feared most had massive mandibles and ten tentacles. This was that kind of wanal.

It reached out for him again, giggling its nasty pleasure. Then it hesitated. Something red and dripping was thrown to it over the edge of the pit. Then a sharp command came from the darkness and it backed off, peering hungrily from him to the meat.

Snagging the hard case containing the flickering blue flame, Mac pocketed the thing and made haste to clamber as best he could up the other side of the rough pit. The slippery shale made climbing difficult, but he virtually levitated himself out of there. He took the case with the flickering flame out of his glove and put it on the palm of his hand. It made a small hiss. What in the nine inhabited worlds was it? He sensed danger, glanced to his right.