A Season for Slaughter

Chapter 52 The Cacophony and the Ecstasy

We hung mikes down to fifteen meters to pick up individual voices and threads of melody. The mikes higher up were for texture, flavor, and harmony. We let the LI engines chug away on the nest-song for nearly twenty minutes before we started feeding it back to the worms. By that time, the central plaza of the mandala nest was so filled with crimson horrors that there was no room for any more to crowd in. But even so, they kept arriving.

It was a sea of fat red bodies beneath us. The worms clustered and clumped and eddied in pools of nervous activity. Dwan Grodin estimated-she was plugged into the LI network-that there were over a hundred thousand of the monsters just in the central arena alone, and at least half that many more still trying to push their way in. At the edges of the crowd, where the avenues led into the arena, they were climbing over each other. The pace of movement was increasing throughout the crowd. Soon they would be frenzied. And after that-

We had no idea what would happen.

The singing was louder now. Almost painful to listen to. It plused. It throbbed.

The probes we'd planted earlier were relaying horrifying ground-level pictures. If the worms had noticed the funny little spider-like objects that had attached themselves to the walls and sides of their nests, they hadn't reacted in any way we could see.

The images that came back to us were bizarre and unbelievable. They glowed on our terminals and on our wall-sized screens. They surrounded us with close-up stereo views of the floor of hell. Indescribable images. Fragments of eyes, mouths, claws, mandibles, antennae-and always the horrible red fur. The color streaked past the cameras; again that frightening strident orange the shocking crimson, the brooding purple, the cancerous pink; and all the shades between. We looked across the sea of hunger. All courage fled.

The expressions around the observation deck-where we could see them in the darkness-were pinched and strained. Lizard and Captain Harbaugh withdrew to the upper deck, where they sat talking quietly. My guess was that Lizard was trying to ease the captain's concerns. This airship was in a terrifyingly precarious position, and every single one of us knew it.

I saw Dwan Grodin trembling on the other side of the video display. She looked ghastly in the gloom, with the light of the table shining up and giving her face a sickly green reverse illumination, she was shadowed where she should have been lit, and illuminated where she should have been dark. She looked like some kind of ghoul. Her lower lip was trembling, but to give her credit where credit was due, she was totally focused on the display in front of her. She was doing her job.

The rest of the observation team looked a lot less certain-they were almost on the edge of panic. They were so disturbed by the surging sea of crimson fur and lidless black eyes below us that several of them were close to hysteria. They looked like the relatives of the guest of honor at a hanging. I took particular joy in watching the blood draining out of Clayton Johns's face. As I walked by him, I patted him gently on the shoulder and whispered. "Relax." He flinched and looked like he wanted to kill me-but to give him his due, he managed a nod and even a vaguely disgruntled "Thanks."

Finally, the LI engine said it was ready to go.

I touched my headset and whispered the information to Lizard; I looked up to where they sat on the upper deck. Lizard spoke the captain, the captain nodded, Lizard's voice came back to me: Go ahead.

It began slowly. We seeped in the sound so softly at first that even we could barely hear it, and there were speakers all around us. We brought up the gain in imperceptible notches and watched the roiling worms with trepidation. The external display had been synchronized to the ship song. As the sound rose toward audibility, so did the lights along the sides and the belly of the Bosch come glimmering up in Chtorran colors.

The worms sighed.

We could hear it rising up through the open cargo access, a sound like desperate wind.

Dwan Grodin stared across the video display at me. She looked frightened. "Are th-they supposed't-to d-do th-that?" Her rubbery face was starting to constrict. Her eyes were white.

I nodded. I felt abruptly compassionate toward her. This was beyond her experience. "Don't worry. They're doing exactly what they're supposed to do. We just haven't seen this before. It's okay, Dwan," I said. "You're doing fine. Just keep monitoring." And then I turned away from the table, wondering if my own fear was showing. We were hovering in place only twenty-five meters above the largest concentration of alien life forms that had ever gathered in one place on the planet Earth. All that held us away from certain death was a million cubic meters of helium.

Below… the worms were singing to us.

Was it a love song? A song of worship? A song of greeting? Or maybe just some mindless humming that the creatures did before suppertime.

Don't think about that.

We kicked the sound up a notch, the lights as well-we were audible now, visible too-and the sound of the worms swelled enormously.

Above the nest, the great sky-worm finally revealed itself. It joined the song. It sang.

And the worms went crazy.

They amplified themselves-all their sounds, all their movements. They surged back and forth in waves that spread and spiraled outward through the crowd. We watched in horror as the whole mandala squirmed. It pulsed like a malignant heart.

And then-

The song of the nest began to change.

It rose in pitch. It expanded like a slow explosion. The throbbing rhythm of it sped up alarmingly and twisted into patterns too complex for the human ear to follow. Strange harmonies arose, forming bizarre patterns that swirled, wove around, and turned back in upon themselves. I'd never heard anything like it before.

Any specific moment of it sounded exactly like every other moment. Except, it wasn't. As we listened, we heard mysterious internal chord progressions. We heard a precession of beats as different parts of the sea of worms shifted their rhythms. We heard a moaning background chorus that seemed somehow detached from the main voice. Each part of the nest was responding to every other part, and even though the song remained unchanged, it was never twice the same. No orchestra on Earth could ever have matched either the beauty or the horror of that cacophony.

We all stood entranced. The music of the nest. Alien. Ethereal. Hypnotic. Compelling. Unearthly.

The ecstasy rose around us. A hundred and fifty thousand alien instruments resonated. The music was sublime.

We hovered in the darkness and the sound submerged us all. It filled us and thrilled us and before it was through, it would probably kill us as well.

I remembered that first time in the very first nest I'd entered-and all the other times I'd heard the song as well

A longing.

The feeling came swelling up inside me. Intoxicating. Hallucinogenic. I wanted to… drop everything and go run naked to meet my…

-shook my head to clear it.

Oh, my dear God. We're not immune to its effects.