Scattered Suns - Kevin J. Anderson [48]
The armored growths had fallen into hibernating quiescence for the winter-long night, but either the bright lights or the farmers’ body warmth caused the anchored creatures to waken. Their cycle had been interrupted.
“I’d be careful,” Anton said.
Syl’k touched the large ch’kanh blossom. To her astonishment it cracked open like a scallop shell, its hard petals unfolding. The petals had unnervingly serrated edges. “I have never seen a flower like this.”
The anemone clamped around her wrist. In a single neat snipping movement it severed her hand.
Syl’k screamed. Mhas’k plunged forward to help his mate as all the anemone creatures came alive in a thrashing nest of tentacles. The petals opened and closed. Three of the largest blossoms seized Mhas’k by the shoulder, left arm, and right knee. They bit and chewed, and his blood splashed the ghostly armored stalks.
The agricultural kithman yelled, trying to drag himself away. Syl’k collapsed with blood spraying from the stump of her wrist. All the plants, large and small, bent down like a pack of hungry jaws. Their sawblade petals ripped through her protective suitfilm. In moments they devoured her amidst horrific sounds of tearing flesh and loud cracking bones.
Trying to fight his way free, Mhas’k thrashed so violently that he uprooted several of the ch’kanh, but even broken, their flexible stalks wrapped around his torso. The sharp stems became stingers that stabbed into his rib cage like knives, planting roots deep inside him.
It all happened in seconds. As the other refugees rushed forward, more ch’kanh turned questing maws toward them. Anton grabbed the burly digger Vik’k by the shoulder to keep him from jumping into the fray. By now the screams and gurgles of the two victims had fallen silent; they could hear only the thrashing and tearing of the carnivorous plants feeding.
Anton turned to see that the others had already fled. He hated leaving two of his companions behind, but Mhas’k and Syl’k were beyond help.
Sick at heart, the terrified survivors raced away from the thermal area and plunged once again into Maratha’s darkness.
Now they were six.
Chapter 21—RLINDA KETT
After a week en route, two shiploads of escapees from cold, dead Crenna arrived in the nearby Relleker system. Rlinda was pleased that their spirits were high in spite of all they had been through.
First, their sun had been killed by the hydrogues, its stellar fires entirely smothered in a battle with the faeros. Next, their planet had frozen over entirely—seas, continents, even the atmosphere. Then, on their escape flight from the dying system, the crowded escapees had been menaced by a group of marauding warglobes.
But the hundred colonists had survived, and they were finally coming to a safe place, relieved and happy. Rlinda was glad to have been of service.
“Governor Pekar isn’t exactly going to welcome them with open arms,” Davlin Lotze said, sitting beside Rlinda in the cockpit of the Voracious Curiosity.
“Aww, what a grouch. From what I’ve seen, Governor Pekar doesn’t welcome anything, but she’s not going to have much choice when we show up at her doorstep, is she?” Rlinda smiled wickedly, already imagining the flustered expression on the stern woman’s face. “Who knows? Maybe we can make her feel guilty about turning you down in the first place.”
A second ship, the Blind Faith, flew alongside them in space, so full of Crenna refugees that they had to stand in the corridors and storage rooms, or sleep packed like newborn kittens on any available floor space. But after seeing their colony planet turned into an instant ice cube, the survivors didn’t really mind the warmth or the companionship.
Rlinda adjusted the controls. “The Curiosity ’s flying like a drunken bumblebee with a brick on its back. I don’t think it’s ever been crammed