A Fire Upon the Deep Read Online Free PDF Page B

the much higher pitched tones of organized thought; God, the creature was noisy. At this distance, the sounds were muffled and distorted. Even so, they were like no mind he had ever heard, nor like the confusion noises that some grazers made.
    "Well?" hissed Jaqueramaphan.
    "I have been all around the world -- and this creature is not part of it."
    "Yeah. Well, it reminds me of mantis bugs. You know, about this high --" he opened a mouth about two inches wide. "Great for keeping your garden free of pests ... great little killers."
    Ugh. Peregrine hadn't thought of the resemblance. Mantises were cute and harmless -- as far as people were concerned. But he knew the females would eat their own mates. Imagine such creatures grown to giant size, and possessed of pack mentality. Maybe it was just was well they couldn't go prancing down to say hello.
    A half hour passed. As the alien brought its cargo to ground, the Flenser archers moved closer; the infantry packs arranged themselves in assault wings.
    A flight of arrows arched across the gap between the Flenserists and the alien. One of the alien members went down immediately, and its thoughts quieted. The rest moved out of sight beneath the flying house. The troopers dashed forward, spaced in identity preserving formations; perhaps they meant to take the alien alive.
    ... But the assault line crumpled, many yards short of the alien: no arrows, no flames -- the troopers just fell. For a moment Peregrine thought the Flenserists might have bit off more than they could chew. Then the second wave ran over the first. Members continued to fall, but they were in killing frenzy now, with only animal discipline left. The assault rolled slowly forward, the rear climbing over the fallen. Another alien member down.... Strange, he could still hear wisps of the other's thought. In tone and tempo, it sounded the same as before the attack. How could anyone be so composed with total death looming?
    A combat whistle sounded, and the mob parted. A trooper raced through and sprayed liquid fire. The flying house looked like meat on a griddle, flame and smoke coming up all around it.
    Wickwrackrum swore to himself. Goodbye alien.
     
     
    The wrecked and wounded were low on the Flenserist priority list. Seriously wounded were piled onto travoises and pulled far enough away so their cries would not cause confusion. Cleanup squads bullied the trooper fragments away from the flying house. The frags wandered the hummocky meadow; here and there they coalesced into ad hoc packs. Some drifted among the wounded, ignoring the screams in their need to find themselves.
    When the tumult was quieted, three packs of whitejackets appeared. The Servants of the Flenser walked under the flying house. One was out of sight for a long while; perhaps it even got inside. The charred bodies of two alien members were carefully placed on travoises -- more carefully than the wounded troopers had been -- and hauled off.
    Jaqueramaphan scanned the ruins with his eye-tool. He had given up trying to hide it from Peregrine. A whitejackets carried something down from the flying house. "Sst! There are other dead ones. Maybe from the fire. They look like pups." The small figures had the mantis form. They were strapped into travoises, and hauled out of sight over the hill's edge. No doubt they had kherhog-drawn carts down there.
    The Flenserists set a sentry ring around the landing site. Dozens of fresh troopers stood on the hillside beyond it. No one was going to sneak past that.
    "So it's total murder." Peregrine sighed.
    "Maybe not.... The first member they shot, I don't think it's quite dead."
    Wickwrackrum squinted his best eyes. Either Scriber was a wishful thinker, or his tool gave him amazingly sharp sight. The first one hit had been on the other side of the craft. The member had stopped thinking, but that wasn't a sure sign of death. There was a whitejackets standing around it now. The whitejackets put the creature onto a travois