Metal Swarm - Kevin J. Anderson [232]
The breedex regarded him as if it knew exactly who Davlin Lotze was, knew everything about his past and his secrets. Could it have residual memory echoes from the Llaro colonists? Even if it did, he expected no mercy. He tried to push himself up, but could not balance on his broken leg. 'What do you want with me - with any of us?’
The chamber filled with a buzzing, chittering din, as if he were in the middle of a cloud of locusts. He received no answer - at least nothing he could understand. The background buzz grew louder. His blood continued running onto the stone floor, and he nearly passed out as black curtains of weakness fluttered around him. Davlin remained conscious only by sheer force of will. 'What do you want?’ he shouted again.
The thoughts of the breedex mind pounded against him like a physical wind. His skull ached. Behind him, workers scritched and scrabbled, slathering resinous concrete material across the doorway, walling him into the breedex’s chamber with the domates. The domates stood at attention, waiting, willing.
Davlin tried to crawl away, but he had nowhere to go. He refused to accept that it was futile. 'Humans don’t deserve this. We were never your enemies. Understand us before you try to destroy us, because we will fight back.’
The plural mass that formed the bulky hive mind began to dissociate. Hundreds of thousands of the grubs - larvae of various sub-breeds - sloughed down. The breedex lost its shape, becoming a ravenous myriad. The hungry pieces squirmed and writhed toward Davlin.
But first they encountered the passively accepting domates. By consuming the striped domates, the grubs would mature into large monsters, subtly different^from the previous generation, stronger and more aggressive. At the moment they were small and individually weak.
Davlin used his balled fists to smash the grubs as they came at him, crushing one after another into the floor. But it was like trying to stop a downpour by catching individual raindrops.
In the middle of what had been the shifting body of the breedex, he saw a larva that was shaped differently. It rose like a miniature king cobra, and Davlin understood intrinsically that this was the seed of the next generation’s breedex. It turned its glinting eyes toward him, fixing on his face. The breedex wanted to acquire him personally.
More grubs crawled forward. The domates waited, their segmented limbs spread wide, their hard shell casings cracked open to provide access to the tender flesh inside.
Unexpectedly, Davlin spotted a glint of metal, a square box no larger than the palm of his hand. Margaret’s wind-up music box. Knowing the music’s strange power over the Klikiss, he rolled away from the grubs, ignoring the pain in his back, ribs, and leg. He tried to grab the device, but one of the domates snatched Margaret’s keepsake - and smashed it into little metal pieces. The last tinkle of sound was not at all musical.
Now Davlin did feel despair. He collapsed backward, looking up just in time to see waves of hungry larvae sweeping across the striped bodies of the domates. They began to tunnel in, burrowing, chewing, digesting. The myriad little creatures made swift work of all eight domates, and the large carcasses toppled into sticky, dripping debris like driftwood floating on the tide.
When the breedex larva approached him, Davlin did not recoil. Instead, he threw himself forward, ignoring the pain. He had been trained to fight, to kill, not to surrender. His hands wrapped around the writhing creature, but it was slick and tingly, as if covered with liquid electricity, tangible thoughts. Davlin grasped it, and instead of struggling away, the breedex larva