Hunted Read Online Free PDF Page A

cracking ship security or gumming up fuel lines, but they were never allowed to out-and-out kill you.
    They could, however, steal stuff. Valuable stuff. Like hive-queen venom.

    Willow’s defense cloud chafed me hard for twenty seconds. Then it swept away, heading for the hold and the bigger battle. I was left on the deck, feeling as if a whole layer of my skin had been chewed clean off.
    It had. My right hand was covered with stinging pinpricks of blood, like I’d scraped it full strength against rough concrete. As for my clothes…well, the little hunter-killers had ripped furiously into the fabric, chewing it to tatters wherever they found the least little microbe lurking in the weave. Natural microbes or otherwise. Considering how many microbes there are everywhere, I scarcely had an intact stitch left on my body.
    Good thing there was no one on board to see me.
    I hurried back to my cabin for new clothes. And to wash off my blood-specked hand. While I was dressing, I asked the ship-soul what was happening down in the hold.
    “Our defenses are engaging the enemy,” the ship-soul answered. “There is ongoing opposition.”
    “So the nanites are fighting back?”
    “Some are providing cover while their fellows retreat. Our defenses have numerical superiority, but are encountering difficulties.”
    “Show me.”
    The vidscreen in my cabin wasn’t nearly as big as the captain’s, but it still gave a decent view of the hold. Not that I had much to see: the black cloud of Willow’s defenders were bunched up close to the door and trying to push farther into the room. Something unseen was pushing back, bottling up the cloud in a pocket around the hatch.
    Our forces and the enemy, fighting nano-a-nano.
    “Can you magnify the shot?” I asked the ship-soul. “I want to see what they’re actually doing.”
    The picture switched to microscopic resolution: four black hunter-killers, each with a blobby body, a whiplike tail, and a jaggedy pincer claw, had surrounded a much smaller enemy. The enemy looked like it was made from jelly, and shaped like a ripped-out eyeball—a juice-filled balloon with a little bulge on the front and a stringy tail out the back. The tail was for propulsion, so the little beastie could swim through air like a tadpole through pond water; the bulgy bit up top probably held the nanite’s tiny brain. As for the main balloon body, it was full of grass green fluid…Mandasar venom, stolen from the dead queen.
    The hunter-killers closed in fast, whipping their own tails and driving forward till the enemy was within pincer range. They all grabbed on at the same second: four claws scissoring into the enemy’s jelly body and slicing right through. The eyeball didn’t try to defend itself…and it didn’t have to. As soon as its body got cut open, venom splooged out onto all four attackers, beading up on their claws and slopping back onto their bodies. The hunter-killers suddenly started jerking their tails as if they were having fits, two of them flying right off the screen while the other pair jittered like crazy till their claws broke off.
    That venom was wicked stuff. Especially against hunter-killers who weren’t built for chemical warfare.
    I sat back from the vidscreen and chewed a bit on one of my knuckles. Our hunter-killers were programmed to attack four-on-one, I knew that much…so for each enemy eyeball destroyed, four of our guys would be taken out by the venom spill. Not such a great ratio for our side. We’d still win in the end, by sheer force of numbers— Willow carried at least three full defense clouds, and could manufacture more pretty quick—but by the time we fought through the nanites who were trying to delay us, the other invaders would have retreated to other parts of the ship. Finding them would be a real needle-in-the-haystack.
    Of course, the computers would handle the search. Nothing for me but to sit back wondering what it all meant.
    Who in the world could smuggle