He peered over the top. From this vantage point, he had a clear view of the nest, about two hundred yards away. Two hundred yards was, under normal circumstances, the absolute limit of his weapon’s range. He couldn’t get any closer—there was no cover of any sort—and the beasts were sitting around the edges of the nest, looking this way and that, on habitual alert.
He paused to consider the effect of lower gravity and thinner air on the aiming and distance of his 1911. A round would travel farther and have less drop and wind deflection. With the weapon’s seven-plus-one capacity, and a spare mag with another seven, he had fourteen shots to take down the creature and, if absolutely necessary, its nest mates. Those were not good odds.
He briefly considered the possibility that, if he killed the queen, the rest might die. But that was not the case with similar creatures on Earth: kill a queen termite, or bee, and the colony simply bred a new one.
Pendergast wondered how acute their hearing was. Although he couldn’t see anything that looked like ears, he was confident they could make out sounds, given the cries the creature emitted back in Savannah.
He didn’t have much time to work out the problem. He picked up a small rock and threw it far to his right, then quickly peered over the rim with his monocular to observe the effect.
The rock made a small clattering noise about fifty yards away. The effect was dramatic: the brutes suddenly straightened up, their insect heads whipping around in the direction of the sound, bug eyes staring, mouth tubes twitching.
It seemed that their hearing was quite keen indeed.
He noted movement in the distance, coming in over the crater rim. He froze as a shape appeared in the sky. It was much bigger than the others, truly gigantic. He glassed it as it circled for a landing at the nest: it was brawny as well as massive, with a head twice as big as the queen’s, its wicked proboscis slick with grease, the veins in its taloned legs bulging and flexing as it settled in, folding its wings and making soft noises to its nest mates.
This was obviously the male.
Pendergast cursed himself for not realizing sooner the others were all females. Now he’d have to contend with this monster as well. Despite having sworn off hunting, he bitterly missed his Holland & Holland .500/465 royal double rifle, powerful enough to take down anything.
Such wishful thinking was useless, however, and he put it aside. There was the question of behavior to consider. In some species, the male was the main defender of the herd; in bees and some other social insects, however, the females were. He wondered what the case was with these brutes.
He tossed another stone.
The creatures all went on high alert again, but it was the male who spread his wings and flew up to investigate, gliding over and circling the area where the stone had fallen, looking around with its compound eyes. Pendergast made himself as invisible as possible behind the edge of the lava cone. The male, satisfied nothing was amiss, returned to the nest.
Now Pendergast understood: to have any hope of targeting the female, he would have to kill the male first.
The next question was where to place the shot. If the thing even had a heart, guessing its location would be too risky, given its size and alien physiology—and besides, if it was truly like a mosquito, it might have three hearts, as mosquitoes did.
That left a head shot as the preferred method of attack. A great pity the head was so small in relation to the body: the alignment would have to be perfect.
Pendergast tossed another rock, carefully calculating its distance and location, then braced himself, Les Baer at the ready. With a rattle, the rock hit the ground not far from the base of the cone.
At this, the male’s head jerked up again, then the thing took off with a screech, more alert than before. It swooped over the area where the rock had fallen, eyes swiveling on short eyestalks, peering everywhere. Its return route, Pendergast hoped, would take it close to the cone.
The beast circled a few times, finally satisfying itself there was no threat. As it turned to fly back to the nest, Pendergast waited—gauging the perfect moment—then stood up and cried out, waving his arms.
The thing swerved in midair, locked eyes, and flew straight at him—aligning itself exactly as Pendergast had hoped. He raised his weapon, waited a beat. As it closed in on him, he saw the beast was even more brutally ugly than he’d believed: puckered skin like a rhinoceros, covered with greasy bristles and webbed with bulging veins like pipes.
He squeezed the trigger twice, a double tap into the head, the Les Baer bucking fiercely. As the beast gave a roar of fury, Pendergast threw himself down and it came careening past the cone, talons rasping the lava above his head. To his dismay it flapped back around, flying lopsided, one of its eyes hanging from a torn stalk. Its syringe-like proboscis was quivering, shooting in and out, and Pendergast was so close that he could make out rows of needlelike teeth within it.