Sorna shook her head as she watched the Beast complete its full rotation, its tail snapping round as it went back to shaking its head back and forth. The two of them, Beast and ship, were now alarmingly close to the city, she could make out the details of the pestering ship and see that, bizarrely, there was a person hanging in the cradle beneath it.
It was almost certainly a human she thought, no other race in the galaxy would be insane enough to be in a position like that. They probably thought it was fun. She noticed as well that the ship looked rather like the drawings of bees she had seen from her text books on the Human’s home planet, adding weight to her hypothesis.
Suddenly the ship dived down past the great head of the creature and Sorna watched as it noticed the little bee and went to snap again, the ship darting even lower and disappearing behind the colossal creature for a second. It really was massive she thought, stories failed to do them justice, it nearly filled the sky above her, the swirling clouds obscured by plates of hard chitin.
Then the bee appeared again, swinging up underneath the Beast, close enough that Chlora actually watched the man in the cradle as he flew past. He glanced at her as he went by and did an almost comical double take. He watched her in confusion as he swung by and she gave him a little wave, not really knowing what else to do. He was still for a second, but then threw back his head and she could see him laughing as he shot off on a wide arc.
When he swung back around though he was fixated on a contraption in front of him, cranking at an archaic metal gear system, a wickedly sharp black spike jutting out from it. The ship blasted up and away from her, carrying him with it as the Beast passed above.
She frowned. She didn’t know much about Shrikes, only stories again, generally told by the same people who made things up about Beasts. Shrikes were Humans, no they were Hannas, no they were a strange sect of Oans from a lost moon. They fought Beasts, killing them with swords and axes and gunpowder, no they used antimatter displacers, no they beat them to death with their fists. That one had always got a few laughs. Well she could see now that at least one of them was a human, she had always assumed they had been human, what other race would be insane enough to tackle a beast up close? How do you kill something that big? Can you kill something that big? She imagined she would find out, or at least she would certainly see them trying.
The beast let out a great roar and convulsed, a shiver flowing down its body. She squinted at the ship and saw what appeared to be a wire linking from the yellow hull to the great creature’s gaping jaws. As she watched there was another great roar and all at once it dived. A smile spread across her face for a second but then her eyes went wide and she screamed. The sudden change in direction itself wasn’t terrifying, nor the frustrated roaring or gnashing of teeth. What was terrifying was that the Beast was diving straight for the city. Not only that but it was diving straight down at the exact point where years ago the mayor had built the public shelters, where the entire population of her city was now taking cover.
#
“Yes!” Came the shout through the Vox Comm to Hicks. He smiled as he saw the tell-tale shiver go through the Beast.
“Pull me up!” he shouted, and there was a whine as the winch began to quickly spool the cradle in. As the colossal Beast suddenly pushed downwards he glanced back to the little local he had seen on the top of the silvery silo earlier. Brave little thing he thought, smiling to himself. Mad, but brave. He squinted at her and could just make her out against the white backdrop of the tower. She was jumping up and down, waving frantically at him. He nodded and waved back at the girl, smiling.
She didn’t stop waving. He watched her for a while, his smile quickly turning to a frown. Some body language was universal and he saw now that what she was showing wasn’t happiness, it was fear. He zoomed on her with his helmet’s HUD. She was waving frenetically, pointing at the ground and mouthing in a language he couldn’t understand.
“Suit patch through to the Hub and get me a lip read” he said quickly to the helmet as the beast began to descend. There was a short pause as the information was relayed back to the Hub network. “Shelter. Public. Shelter. Public. Unintelligible. Shelter.” The mechanical voice relayed to his ear piece. He went white, he understood immediately and the world began to slow as adrenaline flushed his system. He used it to think quickly.
He had to divert the creature. How? He grimaced because he knew how. Harken really wasn’t going to like this. He estimated he had perhaps a minute before the Beast crashed into what he assumed was the main concentration of the local population.
“Trish dive dive!” He shouted into the earpiece, and bless her the pilot responded immediately without questioning, the Seillean suddenly hitting free fall and faster as they raced the creature down.
The winch pulled him in, the gravity dampening field taking over and allowing him to jump the last two metres into the cargo bay.
There were confused cries from the other crew members but he cut over the top of them. “That thing is diving for the public shelters, we need to move it out the way. So we’re going full bait mode. Shrikes tether up, 30 seconds, you still have a job to do.”
The twins, who had been standing at the back of the bay didn’t miss a beat and leapt across the open bay doors to the winch and almost before he had finished the instruction they were tethered to it on individual nanotube filaments. Lexi opened a small container and plucked out a pair of what looked like shimmering metal sleeves and tossed one to her brother and slipping the other set over her own arms.
“Trish get beneath it and pop flares, parachutes, anything and everything, make noise, make it bright, we need to keep that fucker off ground.”
“Aye sir”. She sounded flustered. Warning lights and safety valves were flashing on in a cacophony of noise and light in the relative gloom of the cargo bay as they rushed towards the ground. Hicks opened a container and pulled out a pair of seemingly uninteresting black metal spikes, throwing one to each of the twins.
“It’s gonna be bumpier than if she had landed, but it should be smooth enough. Ready?” he asked the twins who nodded enthusiastically in reply, clicking their helmets shut “Then go! Go!” he shouted and the two other humans glanced briefly at one another, grinning, before launching themselves gracefully out of the bomb doors, arms spread in perfect swan dives. “And don’t waste those lances!” he shouted after them.
Outside the ship had just overtaken the Beast and bursts of flares were filling the air, burning with a ferocious intensity in the Hydrogen heavy atmosphere. Lights and sirens blared from the rear of the yellow ship as Trish made the Seillean as noticeable as possible. On the tethers the twins were winding back and back, closer and closer to the great creature, and over the Vox Hicks could hear them laughing as they were dragged along in freefall.
“Gotta pull up Captain!” came a reasonably panicked shout from the Trish the pilot as they sped towards the ground.
“Go Trish!” Hicks shouted over the roars of the air and the Beast behind them. The Seillean lurched beneath them, cutting suddenly at ninety degrees as the twin fusion propulsion systems flipped and whirled into new positions to accommodate the pilot and on board computer’s instructions. They were now skimming the tops of buildings and the two Shrikes’ lines went loose.
Hicks held his breath. There was a moment of almost bizarre silence as the warning lights and sirens flicked off and they rushed perpendicular to the surface of the planet. He glanced down and saw a small square passed beneath them. Then there was a deafening crash as the Beast hit the ground and his heart sank.
#
Sorna held her hand over her mouth as she watched. The ship and the Beast were in a perfect dive with one another, the little yellow bee blasting off all sorts of odds and ends in what looked like a desperate attempt to catch the Beast’s attention, flares burning almost blindingly. The two plummeted to the ground and she gasped as the bee disappeared beneath the level of the buildings, lost from her vision for a second, but to her immense relief it suddenly bobbed up again above them again, rushing off across the building tops.
The Beast did not change its angle though and She looked away as it approached the ground, sure it would collide, crushing the entirety of her city’s population and sure enough two seconds later there was a deafening crash.
She couldn’t bear to look, for a heartbeat at least.
Then the crash carried on. It was less of the world ending bang as she had expected, but more of an ongoing series of smaller crunching, breaking noises. She looked back at the monstrous creature to see it was now snaking its way along the ground. At the very final moment it had turned at ninety degrees and rather than falling full force into the public bunkers it had scraped against their top and was now skirting along the surface of the planet, chasing after the noisy little bee.
“YES!” she screamed in relief, jumping up and down on the towers top, “YES YES YES!”
The Beast was charging recklessly, angrily, knocking down buildings and houses as though they weren’t there. It didn’t matter though, they were empty, their inhabitants safely squirrelled away in the public shelters, which the creature was now flowing safely over the top of. She grinned to herself, they were probably absolutely terrified in there.
She watched as the enormous creature chased the ship for a time, roaring and snapping at it as it tried to catch up, getting very close one or two times. It seemed to be working itself into a frenzy, shaking its head harder and roaring louder and louder.
And then it died.
She blinked. Her head cocked as she watched. The Beast was dead, it had barely given a final roar before it slumped into the outskirts of the deserted city. She watched a little longer to see if this was another act in this bizarre dance the two had been performing but no, it was definitely dead. It had suddenly simply stopped moving, stopped crushing buildings, stopped... everything. It had simply collapsed into the ruins of the city’s houses, its enormous tail crashing to the ground last as the dust flowed around it, caught on the East wind.
“Errr...” she said out loud.