Black Hole Sun - David Macinnis Gill
CHAPTER ?
Outpost Fisher Four, South Pole, Mars
ANNOS MARTIS 238. 4. 5. 17:11
Now come the mousies nosing out their hole, thinks Kuhru as he wipes fresh bone marrow from his snout. Three pretty little mousies. Humans. Females. Ripe and soft and full of warm blood. He shudders. It will be ecstasy to hunt them down.
“Steady, you mongrels!” Kuhru growls at his snipers, both built like him, with gnarled manes of black hair, matted beards, their faces cratered with pox marks and battle scars. “Miss the shot, and I’ll flay your miserable hides.”
He tracks the girls as they scurry from the closed mine shaft onto the tundra. Ore buckets in hand, they fight the lacerating winds, oblivious to the snipers’ red laser dots dancing on the backs of their heads.
A dozen meters from the shaft, they begin digging. One keeps watch.
Kuhru snarls when he sees pillars of their cold breath. Careless. Stupid. Soft. Such easy prey. “Fire, you dogs!”
Crack! Crack! Two girls drop.
Crack! The third girl falls writhing on the ice, a bullet hole in her calf.
“Not the leg!” Kuhru roars. He punishes the snipers with the bone he sucked dry, slamming the heavy knot of the hip joint against their skulls. “I said, not the leg!”
Then he bounds down the rise, his knuckles almost touching the ice. The wounded girl doesn’t see Kuhru until he blots out the sun. She screams and tries to crawl away.
“Dr?u!” she cries, her voice a rasping whisper. “No, no! God, please no.”
Kuhru kicks her wounded leg. Laughs as she passes out, her head striking the tundra with a clack. An amusing sound. Lovely little mousie. How easily he could snap her soft neck and suck the life out of her body.
He squats and breathes her in, then notices something clutched to her chest. A shell? Here? He plucks it from her grip. It is as wide as his hands, the ridged back marked with a hexagonal pattern. He stuffs it in his belt.
“Wake up, mousie,” he growls, spitting into her face. “Crawl back into your hole and tell the miners this,” he says, when her eyes open. “My queen demands six for her table.”
“No!” the girl screams, and pounds him with her fists. “You’ll take no more from us.”
“Dr?u take what the Dr?u want!” Kuhru backhands her, and blood flies from her mouth. “Six children. The queen gives you ten days.”
“What about…” she says, her voice fading, “…my friends?”
He stands and slings the dead little mousies over his shoulder. “The Dr?u don’t waste good meat.”