Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ALAN DEAN FOSTERwas born in New York City in 1946 and raised in Los Angeles, California. After receiving a bachelor's degree in political science and a master of fine arts degree in motion pictures from UCLA in 1968-69, he worked for two years as a public relations copywriter in Studio City, California. He sold his first short story to August Derleth at Arkham Collector Magazine in 1968, and other sales of short fiction to other magazines followed. His first try at a novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, was published by Ballantine Books in 1972. Since then, Foster has published many short stories, novels, and film novelizations. Foster has toured extensively around the world. Besides traveling, he enjoys classical and rock music, old films, basketball, body surfing, and weightlifting. He has taught screenwriting, literature, and film history at UCLA and Los Angeles City College. Currently he resides in Arizona. Chapter One It's hard to be a larva. At first there's nothing. Very gradually a dim, uncertain consciousness coalesces from nothingness. Awareness of the world arrives not as a shock, but as a gray inevitability. The larva cannot move, cannot speak. But it can think. His first memories, naturally, were of the Nursery: a cool, dimly lit tubular chamber of controlled commotion and considerable noise. Beneath the gently arched ceiling, adults conversed with his fellow larvae. With awareness of his surroundings came recognition of self and of body: a lumpish, meter-and-a-half-long cylindrical mass of mottled white flesh. Through simple, incomplete larval eyes he hungrily ab sorbed the limited world. Adults, equipment, walls and ceiling and floor, his companions, the cradle he lay in, all were white and black and in-between shades of gray. They were all he could perceive. Color was a mysterious, unimag inable realm to which only adults had access. Of all the unknowns of existence, he most pondered what was blue, what was yellow-the taste of the withheld spectrum. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html The adults who managed the Nursery and attended the young were experienced in that service. They'd heard generations of youngsters ask the same questions in the same order over and over, yet they were- ever patient and polite. So they tried their best to explain color to him. The words had no meaning because there were no possible reference points, no mental landmarks to which a larva could relate. It was like trying to describe the sun that warmed the sur face high, high above the subterranean Nursery. He came to think of the sun as a brightly blazing something that produced an intense absence of dark. As he grew the attendants let him move about in his crude humping, wormlike fashion. Nurses bustled through the Nursery, busy adults gifted with real mobility. Teach ing machines murmured their endless litany to the stu dious. Other adults occasionally came to visit, including a pair who identified themselves as his own parents. He compared them with his companions, like himself squirming white masses ending in dull black eyes and thin mouth-slits. How he envied the adults their clean lines and mature bodies, the four strong legs, the footarms above serving either as hands or as a third pair of legs, the deli cate truhands above them. They had real eyes, adults did. Great multifaceted com pound orbs that shone like a cluster of bright jewels (light gray to him, though he knew they were orange and red and gold, whatever those were). These were set to the sides of the shining valentine-shaped heads, from which a pair of feathery antennae sprouted, honestly white. He was fasci nated by the antennae, as all his companions were. The adults would explain that two senses were held there, the sense of smell and the sense of faz. He understood fazzing, the ability to detect the presence of moving objects by sensing the disruption of air. But the concept of smell utterly eluded him, much as color did. Along with arms and legs, then, he desperately wished for antennae. He desperately wished to be complete. The Nurses were patient, fully understanding such yearn ings. Antennae and limbs would come with time. Mean while there was much to learn. They taught speech, though larvae were capable of no more than a crude wheezing and gasping through their flex ible mouth-parts. It took hard mandibles and adult lungs and throats to produce the elegant clicks and whistles of mature communication. So he could see after a fashion, and hear, and speak a little. But sight was incomplete without color and he could not faz or smell at all. By way of compensation the teachers explained that no adult could faz or smell nearly as well as the primitive ancestors of the Thranx, back when the race dwelt in unintelligence even deeper in the bowels of the earth than they did now, when artificial light did not exist, and the senses of faz and smell necessarily exceeded that of sight in importance. He listened and understood, but that did not lessen the frustration. He would worm his way around the exercise course because they insisted he needed exercise, but he was ever conscious of what a pale shadow of true mobility it was. Oh, so frustrating! Larval years were the Learning Time. Hardly able to move, unable to smell or faz, barely able to converse, but with decent sight and hearing a larva was adequately equipped for learning. He was a particularly voracious student, absorbing everything and asking greedily for more. His teachers and Nurses were pleased, as was the teaching machine attached to his cradle. He mastered High and Low Thranx, although he could properly speak neither. He learned physics and chemistry and basic biology, including the danger posed by any body of water deeper than the thorax, where the adult's breathing spicules were located. An adult Thranx could float, but not forever, and when the water Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html entered the body, it sank. Swimming was a talent reserved for prim itive creatures with internal skeletons. He was taught astronomy and geology although he'd never seen the sky or the earth, for all that he lived be neath the surface. The Nursery was exquisitely tiled and paneled. Other sections of Paszex, his home town, were lined with plastics, ceramics, metals, or stonework. In the ancient burrows on the planet Hivehom, where the Thranx had evolved, were tunnels and chambers lined with regurgi tated cellulose and body plaster. Industry and agriculture were studied. History told how the social arthropods known as the Thranx first mastered Hivehom, adapting to existence above as well as below the surface, and then spread to other worlds. Eventually theol ogy was discussed and the larvae made their choices. Then on to more complex subjects as the mind matured, to biochemistry, nucleonics, sociology and psychology and the arts, including jurisprudence. He particularly enjoyed the history of space travel, the stories of the first hesitant flights to the three moons of Hivehom in clumsy rockets, the development of the posigravity drive that pushed ships through the gulf between the stars, and the establishment of colonies on worlds like Dixx and Everon and Calm Nursery. He learned of the burgeoning commerce between Willo-wane, his own colony world, and Hivehom and the other colonies. How he wanted to go to Hivehom when he learned of it! The mother world of the people, Hivehom. Magical, enchanting name. His Nurses smiled at his excitement. It was only natural he should want to travel there. Everyone did. Yet something more showed on his profile charts, an un defined yearning that puzzled the larval psychologists. Possibly it was related to his unusual hatching. The normal four eggs had bequeathed not male and female pairs but three females and this one male. He was aware of the psychologists' concerns but didn't worry about them. He concentrated on learning as much as possible, stuffing his mind full to bursting with the won ders of existence. While these strange adults mumbled about "indecisiveness" and "unwillingness to tend toward a course of action," he plowed through the learning pro grams, mitigating their worries with his extraordinary ap petite for knowledge. Couldn't they understand that he wasn't interested in any one particular subject? He was interested in every thing. But the psychologists didn't understand, and they fretted. So did his family, because a Thranx on the Verge always knows what he or she intends to do ... after. Gen eralizations do not a life make. For a while they thought he might want to be a philoso pher, but his general interests were of specifics and not of abstruse speculations. Only his unusually high scores pre vented their moving him from the general Nursery to one reserved for the mentally deficient. On and on he studied, learning that Willow-wane was a wonderful world of comfortable swamps and lowlands, of heat and humidity much like that of the Nursery. A true garden world whose poles were free of ice and whose large continents were heavily jungled. Willow-wane was even more accommodating than Hivehom itself. He was fortunate to have been born there. His name he knew from early on. He was Ryo, of the Family Zen, of the Clan Zu, of the Hive Zex. The last was a holdover from primitive times, for only towns and cities existed now, no more true hives. More history, the information that the development of real intelligence was concurrent with the development of egg-laying ability in all Thranx females. Gone was the need for a specialized Queen. Their Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html newly evolved biological flexibility gave the Thranx a natural advantage over other arthropods. But Thranx still paid respects to an honorary clanmother and hivemother, echoes of the biological ma triarchy that once dominated the race. That was tradition. The people had a great love of tradition. He remembered his shock when he'd first learned of the AAnn, a space-going race of intelligence, calculation, cunning, and aggressiveness. The shock arose not from their abilities but from the fact that the creatures possessed internal skeletons, leathery skins, and flexible bodies. They moved like the primitive animals of the jungles but their intelligence was undeniable. The discovery had caused con sternation in the Thranx scientific community, which had postulated that no creature lacking a protective exoskeleton could survive long enough to evolve true intelligence. The hard scales of the AAnn gave protection, and some felt that their closed circulatory systems compensated for the lack of an exoskeleton. All these things he studied and mastered, yet he was un settled in mind because he also knew that of all the inhabi tants of the Nursery who were on the Verge, he alone was unable to settle on a career, to choose a life work. Around him, his childhood companions made their choices and were content as the time grew near. This one to be a chemist, that one a janitorial engineer, the one on the cradle across from Ryo to become a public Servitor, another opting for food-processing management. Only he could not decide, would not decide, did not want to decide. He wanted only to learn more, to study more. Then there was no more time for study. There was only time for a sudden upwelling of fear. His body had been changing for months, subtle tremors and quivers jostling him internally. He'd felt his insides shift, felt skin and self tingling with a peculiar tension. An urge was upon him, a powerful desire to turn inward and explode outward. The Nurses tried to prepare him for it as best they could, soothing, explaining, showing him again the chips he'd studied over and over. Yet the sight of it recorded on screen was clinical and distant, hard to relate to what was occurring inside his own body. All the chips, all the infor mation in the world could not prepare one for the reality. Worse were the rumors that passed from Nurserymate to Nurserymate in the dark, during sleeping time, when the adults were not listening. Horrible stories of gross deformi ties, of monstrosities put out of their misery before they had a chance to see themselves in a mirror, which others said were allowed to survive for a life of miserable study as scientific subjects, never to be permitted out in society. The rumors grew and multiplied as fast as the changes in his own body. The Nurses and special doctors came and went and monitored him intensively. Around it all, encap sulating all the mystery and terror and wonder and hope, was a single word. Metamorphosis. The process was something you could not avoid, like death. The genes insisted and the body obeyed. The larva could not delay it. He had studied it repeatedly with a fervor he had never applied to anything else. He watched the recordings, mar veled at the transformation. What if the cocoon was wrongly spun? What if he matured too soon and burst from the cocoon only half formed or, worse yet, waited too long and smothered? Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html The Nurses were reassuring. Yes, all those terrible things had happened once upon a time, but now trained doctors and metamorphic engineers stood by at all times. Modern medicine would compensate for any mistake the body might make. The day came and he hadn't slept for four days before it. His body felt nervous and ready to burst. Incomprehen sible feelings possessed him. He and the others who were ready were taken from the Nursery. Befuddled younger larvae watched them go, some filling their wake with cries of farewell. "Good-bye, Ryo ... Don't come out with eight legs!" "See you as an adult," shouted another. "Come back and show us your hands," cried a third. "Tell us what color is!" Ryo knew he wouldn't be returning to the Nursery. Once gone, there was no reason to return. It would belong to another life, unless he opted for Nursery work as an adult. He watched the Nursery recede as his palette traveled in train with the others down the long central aisle. The Nurs ery, its friendly-familiar whites and grays, its cradles and compassion the only companions he'd ever had, all van ished behind a tripartite door. He heard someone cry out, then realized he was the noise maker. The medical personnel hushed him, calmed him. Then he was in a great, high-ceilinged chamber, a dome of glowing darkness, of perfectly balanced humidity and temperature. He could see the other palettes being placed nearby, forming a circle. His friends wiggled and twisted under the gentle glow of special lamps. On the next palette rested a female named Urilavsezex. She made the sound indicative of good wishes and friend ship. "It's finally here," she said. "After so long, after all these years. I'm-I'm not sure I know what to do or how to do it." "Me either," Ryo replied. "I know the recordings, but how do you tell when the precise moment is, how do you know when the time is right? I don't want to make any mistakes." "I feel ... I feel so strange. Like I-like I have to ... . " She was no longer talking, for silk had begun to emerge magically from her mouth. Fascinated, he stared as she began single-mindedly to work, her body contorting with a flexibility soon to be lost forever. Bending sharply, she had begun at the base of her body and was working rapidly toward the head. Layer upon layer the damp silk rose around her. body, hardening on contact with the air. Now he could see only her head. The eyes began to disappear. Around him others had begun to work. Something heaved inside him and he thought he was going to vomit. He did not. It was not his stomach that was suddenly, eruptively working, but other glands and organs. There was a taste in his mouth, not bad at all, fresh and clean. He twisted, doubled over, working the silk that ex truded in a steady, effortless flow as if he'd spun a hundred times before. He felt no claustrophobia, a fear unknown to a people who mature underground. Up, high, higher, around his mouth and eyes now, the cocoon rose. The upper cap nar rowed over his head. It was almost closed when a pair of truhands reached in and down through the remaining gap. Moving quickly, in time to his mouth movements so as not to become entangled in the hardening silk, they held a tube that was pressed against his forehead. The hands withdrew. Nothing else remained to concen trate on except finishing, finishing, finishing the Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html work. Then the cocoon was complete and the sedative that had been injected into him combined with his physical exhaus tion to speed him into the Sleep. A dim, fading part of him knew he would sleep for three whole seasons ... But it wasn't long at all. Only a few seconds, and sud denly he was kicking with a desperate intensity. Out, he thought hysterically, I have to get out. He was imprisoned, confined in something hard and unyielding. He shoved and kicked with all his strength. So weak, he was so terribly weak. Yet-a small crack, there. The sight renewed his determination and he kicked hard er, punched with his hands and began to pull at the pieces that cracked in front of him. The prison was disintegrating around him. He whistled in triumph, kicked with all four legs-then sprawled free and exhausted onto a soft floor. On his thorax the eight spicules pulsed weakly, sucking air. He turned his head and looked up, using his truhands to brush at the dampness still clinging to his eyes. Then other hands were on him, turning him, helping him untangle. Antiseptic cloths brushed at his eyes and there was a sharp smell of peppermint. A voice spoke sooth ingly. "It's all over. Relax, just relax. Let your body gather its strength." Instinctively he turned toward the sound of the voice as the last film masking his eyes was sponged away. A male Thranx looked down at him. His chiton was deep purple, so he would be quite elderly. Realization came in a rush. Purple. The adult's chiton was purple, and purple was a color that had been described to him and now he knew what it was and the ceramic inlay in the doctor's forehead was a single bar of silver crossed by two bars of gold and his ommatidia were red with gold and yellow central bands and they gleamed in the light of the room and ... and ... It was wonderful. He looked down at himself, saw the slim body, the seg mented abdomen, the four glistening wing cases, vestigial wings beneath, the four strong, jointed legs spraddled to his left. He raised a truhand, touched it with a foothand, then repeated the motion with the other pair, then touched all four sets of four fingers together. All around him he heard uncertain clicks and whistles as strange voices struggled to master new bodies. Someone brought a mirror. Ryo looked into it. Staring back at him was a beautiful blue-green adult, still damp but drying rap idly following Emergence. The valentine-shaped head was cocked to one side. Cream-white feathery antennae flut tered and smothered him in the most peculiar sensations. Smells, they were; rich, dark, pungent, musky, glowing, va nilla. The smells of the postcocoon recovery room, of his metamorphosed friends. He knew he'd been asleep not a few minutes or seconds but for more than half a year, that his body had changed and matured from a pulpy, barely conscious white thing into a gloriously streamlined adult. He tried to gather his legs beneath him and found ready hands on either side, helping him up. "Easy there ... don't try to rush yourself," a voice told him. Erect, he turned and discovered a wide window. On the other side stood a host of excited, mature Thranx. Ryo recognized the markings of two, his sire and dame. They were no longer kindly gray shapes. They had color now. Evidentially they recognized him, for they made greeting signs at him. He returned them, realizing that he now possessed the means for doing so. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html The hands left him. He stood by himself on all fours, abdomen stretched out behind him, thorax and then bthorax inclined upward with his head topping all. He looked back over his shoulder, down at his body, then down at the floor. He stepped carefully off the soft padding onto the harder outside ring. Experimentally, he walked in a slow circle. "Very good, Ryozenzuzex." It was the elderly doctor who'd supervised his Emergence. "Don't rush yourself. Your body knows what to do." Around Ryo his companions were taking experimental deep breaths, cleaning their eyes, testing legs and fingers, females wiggling their shining ovipositors, extending and recoiling them.. I can walk, he thought delightedly. I can see colors. He sensed the pressure of air around him and his brain sorted the implications. I can faz, and I can smell, and I can still hear. He thanked those who'd assisted him and marveled at the clarity of his speech; sharp clicks, beautifully modu lated whistles-all the intricate convolutions of Low Thranx. Years of study paid off now. He marveled at that, too, his four mandibles moving smoothly against each other as he made sounds of pure pleasure. Only one thing hung in his thoughts to mar his happiness: his body was complete but his future was not, for he still had not the vaguest idea what he wanted to do with himself. Eventually he drifted into agricultural services, for he felt a positive joy at finally being able to go Above and, unlike his highly gregarious fellow citizens, took pleasure in working outside the town. He drowned his personal uncertainties and confusion in work. Pushed by his clan, he took as premate a bright and energetic female named Falmiensazex. Life settled into a comfortable, familiar routine. His clan and family ceased to worry about him, and the old, nagging indecision faded steadily until it was nearly forgotten. Chapter Two It was the midday of Malmrep, the third of Willow-wanes five seasons and the time of High Summer. The weather was rich with moisture and the air rippled with heat. Ryo checked the readout on the console. Two assistants accompanied him on the scouting expedition into the jun gle. They were to survey the feasibility of planting two thousand bexamin vines. He'd argued long and patiently with the Innmot local council who had intended to plant the newly drained and cleared land in ji bushes. Ryo insisted that it was time to diversify local operations further and that bexamin vine, which produced small hard berries of deep ocher hue, was the most suitable candidate for planting. The berry fruit was useless, but the single seed that lay at the center of each, when crushed and mixed with water and a protein additive, produced a wonderfully sweet syrup that was nearly as nutritious as it was tasty. But the fifteen meter-long vines required more attention that the most del icate ji bush. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Nevertheless, the council voted three to two in favor of his suggestion. Ryo was quite conscious of how much was riding on the success of this planting. While failure would not shatter his solid reputation within the Company, a good bexamin crop would considerably enhance it. Whether a grand triumph was a good idea he wasn't sure, but he didn't seem to be progressing in any other directions. So he thought he might as well rise within the Company structure. "Bor, Aen," he said to his two assistants, both of whom were older than he, "break out the transit sighters. We're going to lay a line down that way." With right foothand and truhand he gestured to his left, to the northeast. They acknowledged the order by unpacking the instru ments and fixing them to the proper mounts on the side of the crawler. Ryo made sure the stingers were unstrapped and ready for use in case they should meet with an errilis. But nothing sprang from the tangled vegetation to chal lenge them as they powered up the instruments. Minutes passed and Bor was removing a reflective marker from its case when an explosion threw him violently to the crawler deck. The concussion bent the thinner trees eastward. Vines and creepers were torn free of their branches. Only his grip on the steering pylon enabled Ryo to maintain his footing. During the silence that followed, the three of them lay stunned, not knowing what to make of the violence. Then a frantic cacophony of screeks and wails, moans and weeping rose from the startled inhabitants of the jungle as they recovered from their own shock. A trio of splay-footed inwicep birds ran past the crawler, their meter-wide webbed feet barely tickling the swamp water, their necks held parallel to the surface and their thin blue tails stretched out behind them for balance. "Ovipositors acute!" muttered Bor. "What was that?" As if to punctuate the query there was another roar, less cataclysmic but still strong enough to rattle the treetops. Both assistants looked to Ryo for an explanation, but he could only stare south, the way they'd come, and perform instinctive gestures of befuddlement. "I've no idea. It al most sounds as if the generator nexus went up." "A collision at the transport terminal perhaps," sug gested Aen. "Not possible." Bor made a gesture of assurance. He was the eldest of the trio. "Only a monitor breakdown for the northern sector of the continent would allow such a disas ter. Even if that came to pass I can't visualize any collision of modules producing such an explosion." "That would depend on what they were carrying," said Ryo, "but I agree with you. A more likely source of such energy would be the Reducer complex south of town where they distill fuel alcohols." Aen concurred. "We'd best hurry back and see what we can do to help. There may be fire in the burrows." "I have clanmates who work at the Reducer." Bor was no less concerned than his friends. "And I," added Aen. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Ryo gunned the engine of the crawler. Broad exterior treads spun in opposite directions. The vehicle turned on its axis and Ryo sent it rumbling back down the path they'd crunched through the raw jungle. Ooze and water sprayed from the speeding machine's flanks as Bor and Aen hur riedly restowed the survey equipment. A fresh shock awaited them as they reached the edge of the jungle and were about to touch the farthest of the plantation access roads. Two large shuttlecraft of peculiar mul tiwinged design were resting there. In landing they'd made a ruin of several neatly tended fields of weoneon and asfi. The local airport was south of Paszex, a fact that Ryo could not reconcile with the presence in his familiar fields of the two strange ships. It was the older Bor who roughly took the controls from him and hurriedly backed the crawl er into the cover of the jungle. The action ended Ryes immobility, if not his confusion. "I don't understand. Is it some kind of emergency? Is that why they didn't set down at the port and ... ?" Bor interrupted him, pragmatism assuming sway over politeness. "Those are not Thranx, or anything else friendly. They are AAnn shuttlecraft. Don't you recall them from Learn ing Time? There has to be an AAnn warship somewhere in orbit around Willow-wane." Bor's words brought the segment of study back to Ryo in a rush. Powerful, antagonistic, and crafty were the words that best described the endoskeletal space-going AAnn. Their star systems lay farther out along the galactic plane than the Thranx worlds. Though war had never been declared between the two races, occasional "mistakes" were made by individual AAnn commanders who "overstepped their orders." Or so the AAnn apologies always insisted. Since the Central government on Hivehom was always practical about such matters, the errors never led to full scale combat. Such isolated incidents were irritating but rarely outrageous. The Grand Council therefore chose to protest such incidents through diplomatic channels. This policy was not much comfort to the three outraged individuals driving the crawler, an unusual state of affairs among a people normally respectful of authority. The trio could not sympathize with diplomats, since all they could see were two invading craft that had destroyed laboriously groomed fields, and the plumes of dark black smoke that rose like mutilated ghosts above Paszex. "We must dosomething." Ryo stared helplessly through the trees. Across the fields drifted the hiss of discharging energy weapons mixed with the lighter crackle of Thranx stingers and an occasional nasty cur-rrrupmph! from explo sive shells. "What can we do?" Bor's tone was one of calm accep tance. "We do not have-" His voice rose at the thought and his eyes gleamed like diamonds. "We do have weap ons." Ryo's hands pulled the largest stinger rifle from its hol ster. He needed all four to handle it. "Bor, you drive the crawler. Aen, you navigate and keep watch for the AAnn." "Pardon," Aen objected, "but in accordance with our re spective positions it would be my place to drive, Bor's to shoot, and yours to navigate." Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html "Rank is hereby superseded by circumstance." Ryo was checking the charge on the rifle. It was full. "I order you to disregard position." "If you wish me to ignore position then you cannot give me an order to do so," she argued smoothly. Bor settled the argument by plunging the crawler through the trees onto the field of cab-high asfi. They were soon submerged in ripe yellow pods just starting to droop from their green-and black-striped stalks. Noise and gunfire continued to issue from the direction of the town. That was natural. Also promising, Ryo thought. Having touched down unopposed in an unpro tected colonial region, the invaders quite likely would an ticipate little in the way of armed resistance. Certainly nothing as absurd as a counterattack. Ryo ordered Bor to aim the crawler for the parked shut tles. Ryo wished simultaneously for an energy rifle. That would be much more effective against machinery, the stingers having been designed for use against living beings. They approached quite near to the shuttles and still no one appeared to challenge them. The shuttlecraft were the first true space-going vehicles Ryo had ever seen. Paszex and Jupiq and even Zirenba did not rate a spaceport. Only facilities for less powerful suborbital craft. At Aen's suggestion, Bor swung the crawler sharply left and off the main cultivation path. Now they were smash ing crudely through the dense rows of asfi stalks. Fruit and stalks flew in all directions. Such casual destruction was normally worthy of severe condemnation, but under, the circumstances Ryo didn't worry about possible social consequences. And then, sud denly and unexpectedly, a single creature was standing just ahead and to the right of the rapidly advancing crawler. The AAnn was relieving himself and the abrupt appear ance of the crawler was a shock. He stumbled over his short pants and growled unintelligibly. The blunt, heavy jaws were filled with sharp teeth. A pair of black, single-lensed eyes peered from high on the two sides of the head. A single tail curved from behind. The large, clawed feet wore devices that resembled steel spats. Its short pants were matched by a shirt of dull color and a helmet forested with electronic sensors. A thick cord connected a bulky hand weapon to a pow er pack slung around the AAnn's waist. The muzzle swung around to point at the onrushing crawler. Civilized thoughts were subsumed by fury and Ryo never hesitated. Had he been the average worker, he would have died, but in the swamps Ryo had acquired reflexes that most hive dwellers lacked. There was a sharp crack from the stinger and a tiny bolt of electricity jumped from its tip to strike the AAnn squarely in the chest. The AAnn convulsed, jumped a me ter clear of the ground, and fell back twitching. He was motionless by the time the crawler rumbled past. Now the enormity of what Ryo had just done finally struck. He'd deliberately slain another sentient creature. For an instant Ryo was a little shaky. They could hear anguished, high-pitched whistles from the direction of Paszex. Primitive instincts overwhelmed the last of thousands of years of civilization. The hive was being attacked. Ryo was a soldier defending the burrow entrances. All that mattered now was defense.