The things had leaped into the circle around the fire like bolts of death; there was a shotgun roaring, taking down any man who got his hands on a weapon. The others were killed or disabled by the terrifying thing with its whip like tentacles that stabbed like spears.

They hadn't had a chance. The things were so fast it was hard to follow their movements. They were also hideously strong.

Most of the men had been killed, except for Rhem, Larshel Deveaux, and Dugen Schuppet, who had survived because they were the most intoxicated and thus were slow in getting up.

Then they and the other survivors had been pushed into the goat pen. The goats were set free, and having had a good look at the alien creatures, they headed away from the canyon at top speed and were not seen again.

Reena was so frightened she couldn't think straight. There just didn't seem to be any way out of this.

Reena felt she was way too young to die.

Rhem and Larshel were not sure that Gugen Schuppet was going to last much longer. He had a stab wound in his belly and some severe lacerations on both arms where he had tiled to grapple with the thing when it burst into the cave. His body was caked in blood and filth. His breathing was labored and he hadn't spoken in hours. Rhem imagined severe peritonitis would soon carry him off.

Larshel leaned over to Rhem and murmured, for the umpteenth time. "Gugen's slipping, I don't think he's gonna make it."

Rhem did not reply.

Gugen's eyes were closed.

Larshel licked his lips and hugged himself with his thick arms. He kept glancing over to the thing that stood outside the pen and then looking away.

It would pick another of them soon, and they all knew that to be selected meant enduring an agonizing death. Each of the three women and four children already taken out had been taken into the other cave and induced to scream for a minute or more apiece. None had been seen since.

Rhem was praying very hard that it would not be him taken next. But there was only one child and two women left. One of the men was sure to be taken next.

He looked to Reena again, but she was still frozen. She didn't want to talk. So she was trying to think of a way out of this. Well, Rhem had news for her: there wasn't any way out. The creatures or demons or whatever they were, were in complete control.

Rhem turned away from Larshel and saw something that made him lurch involuntarily. The other one was coming; it was time to pick the next victim!

Everyone in the pen stood stock-still, watching it approach. The child, a little girl of no more than five, started to whimper and then cry. Rosa held her, smothering the sound against her ample belly.

Rhem stared at it helplessly. What were those flowerlike things that twitched and wobbled and turned this way and that? Were they eyes? And why was there a travesty of a human face worn like a mask by each of the things? And what were the green things like worms that popped and hissed beneath the lean, long chins?

The thing paused in front of the men. Briefly it seemed to consider Gugen Schuppet; then it turned on Rhem Kerwillig.

With an odd atonal noise the thing pointed to Rhem.

His heart hammered in his chest, his stomach constricted. It was hard to breathe.

The other thing was opening the gate to the goat pen.

It was like being selected from the chicken house, grabbed for the pot, with the neck to be wrung.

Rhem could not move. The thing with the shotgun strode up to him and threatened him with the shotgun butt. This close to its shining gray skin he could smell the faint fishy odor.

He moved on legs that felt like water. Reena was visibly relieved; she avoided his gaze.

The other creature waited for him; then, as he approached it, it turned on its heel and set off, confident that he would follow without resistance.

Rhem followed. At the mouth of the cave he tensed, ready to run for it although he knew he had no chance of escape. He'd seen how fast these things could run.

The creature was facing him again. It pointed to a careful pile that had been made of all the dubtigers'

audio-video equipment.

Rhem goggled. What did it want?

It pointed to the equipment again and then pointed to Rhem.

Rhem felt a tiny fucker of hope. Maybe it didn't want to kill him.

Rhem came to life. He reached down and picked up the first thing to hand, a Dorgen TV/audio unit for high-quality video.

The creature seemed to study him intently.

The Dorgen's fuel cell was still going strong. The thing was bent close to him; the orange flowerlike organs were twitching and shifting between Rhem and the Dorgen set.

Rhem switched the set on by pressing the white spot on the top. The major screen flashed to life; it wore four windows, split on the center line. Rhem set it down on the ground.

The thing was immediately intent on the set. The flowerlike things twitched back and forth. Rhem felt a wave of bitterness.

"That's what you wanted, eh? You did all this killing to get us to switch on the TV for you, eh?" Rhem's voice was cracking with barely controllable hysteria. "You didn't know how to ask nicely, did you?"

The thing turned to him for a moment. The orange flower things wobbled. The dead face of Count Karvur stretched and contracted like so much chewing gum. Then it motioned back to the stack of equipment.

The intent was obvious.

It wanted to know what the various bits and pieces did. It seemed incomprehensible to Rhem. What in all the hells did a demon want with this stuff?

Rhem picked out the things that still worked. There was a shortwave radio, and several walkie-talkies that they'd obtained in ransom for a Regulator in a South Arente cattle district.

Then there was a senso set and a keyboard computer with a purple extension cord plugged into one of its ports. Oona Lacordi had bought that, on their last excursion into civilization, three years before, when Rhem and Oona had taken counterfeit ID and ridden the bus down to Frentana Beach. For Rhem it bad become an increasingly bright memory over the subsequent years.

Rhem plugged it into the Dorgen video unit and pressed the tabspot on the right side.

"Hello," announced the machine's resident software in a soft, husky female voice.

Rhem hit the keys to open the software up to visual inspection.

"Press Release if you wish to operate in silent mode," the keyboard said.

Rhem did so and the software shut up.

The creature was especially interested in the keyboard. It reached over and took it away from Rhem. It held it with the bony hands of its humanlike arms. The tentacles, which grew straight out of the flesh of the upper arm and the underarm area, ticked and tapped across the keyboard. The screen responded, windows opening and closing on different data fields. Colorful graphics romped in some of the fields, text blocked out others.

The creature seemed positively excited by this discovery. Abruptly it held out the keyboard to Rhem.

Tentacles tapped around the edges.

Rhem took the board and worked the keys further. Repeating procedures, digging up the software encyclopedia and putting the interlingua alphabet onscreen.

Thus passed two hours or more, by which time the creature had mastered some of the elements of human language and computer language and was communicating directly with the software.

Soon afterward it set the board down and stood up and gestured for Rhem to return to the goat pen.

Longingly Rhem looked out across the floor of the canyon, past the corpses of the others where they were piled.

"Look," he said with an eloquent gesture to the dark. "How about letting me go? Didn't I do what you wanted? Why not let me go, eh? I won't do you any harm. Hell, I'll never even look back."

The thing moved closer. The tentacles were stiffening; their tips gleamed, hard as assegais.

It gestured with its arm to the goat pen.

The other thing had got to its feet and cranked the action on the shotgun.

There was no escape. Rhem did not want to die. He stumbled into the pen.

"You shoulda made them shoot you, Rhem," Larshel mumbled.

The thing holding the shotgun walked over to the pile of corpses and swung a machete and cut off an ann.

Taking big bites from the arm, it walked back to its position close to the pen.

Meanwhile the other monster was still absorbed in watching the Dorgen TV. It fucked channels. It downloaded snippets, running them over and over on an inset window.

Hours went by. The humans in the goat pen shivered as evening's chill descended.

As it got darker the men watched the distant TV screen, their eyes caught helplessly by the hypnotic, brilliant jewel. Screens within screens, a dozen images at a time, cascades of graphic breakouts in blue and yellow, schematics in red-the thing had it pulsing madly.

And then, at last, as they had known that it would, the dreadful creature stood up and turned away from the Dorgen screen. It approached the goat pen.

This time it singled out Larshel Deveaux.

Larshel did not want to go. He fought, briefly, with the thing. It came at him and he evaded the grasping hands and spun round and delivered a tremendous kick with his shinbone, right into the thing's side.

It staggered and fell back. The tentacles whipped the air; Larshel moved smoothly backward out of range and ran into the edge of the goat pen. It moved in, and with a blur of motions the tentacles seized his wrists while it punched him in the solar plexus several times.

He dropped to the ground and was seized by the back of the neck and dragged out of the goat pen and into the cave.

Once it had him well inside the other cave it laid him on the floor beside a row of egg-shaped things the size of human bodies. They were dark, even black at top and bottom, and pink in the middle. They were ripening rapidly.

Soon it would be time for the offensive.

But first there would need to be the ceremony of ghosht. The host creature was exhausted, worn out on a cellular level. A fresh host was needed.

Larshel shivered on the ground. The thing stood over him in the darkness, illuminated solely by the fuckering light of the TV screen outside the cave.

As he watched, it seemed to crumple, as if it were deflating like a flat tire.

Then something like a small conifer tree with white branches was standing there, while the rest of the creature collapsed in a tidy pile in front of it.

Like an overcoat removed and dropped to the floor. Then the tree was also collapsing, the branches slumping into the trunk until it resembled a gray-white pole. Then this, too, collapsed and became a slithering thing, somewhere between a snake and a gigantic slug, that crawled up and onto Larshel's body while he shrieked and twisted.

Razor-sharp spines grew out of the thing and gripped Larshel while tentacles roved over his body and forced their way into every cavity.

Then, with a last convulsive shriek and the compression of his throat muscles, Larshel's body was taken.

The Battlemaster's plan was in motion now.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.

HOURS LATER LARSHEL DEVEAUX RETURNED FROM THE OTHER cave. He was the first one to do that. The other surviving captives watched him come with wide eyes. What did this portend?

But something had happened to Larshel. He was clearly not himself. He walked a little unsteadily; his head was carried at a queer angle. Rhem Kerwillig knew at once that something was very wrong. Where was Larshel's familiar rolling gait? Nor did Larshel respond to greetings from the women in the cage.

Rhem knew then that it was not Larshel, but some grim simulacrum of the man, made by the thing.

"That's not Larshel," he snarled. The women screamed and crouched back.

Larshel approached the goat pen and stopped to stare inside. The eyes fucked around; the face was expressionless. Rhem was utterly certain that it was not Larshel who controlled it.

The women quieted. Rhem stared, shivering slightly in the cool air of the early morning. There were several hours before dawn. The thing gestured, made a strange grating sound. The other creature tossed it the shotgun and then opened the pen and entered and examined Gugen Schuppet.

Gugen was dead. The creature rose and strode across to the women and seized Reena by the arm.

She wailed and thrashed and begged Rhem to help her.

There was nothing he could do and he knew it. He averted his face as she was dragged away into the cave. The other women wailed and the child sobbed, and then Reena began to scream and her screams took on the maniacal strength that they had heard, time after time, whenever someone was taken away into the other cave.

Meanwhile the thing that looked like Larshel Deveaux stood there by the goat pen holding the shotgun at the ready.

Occasionally it emitted an eerie wheeze, the sound of gases escaping the creaking flesh. Once it gave an odd groan as if something hot was cooling slowly in its innards.

This appearance of outward stolidity was only the result of the Battlemaster's lack of experience in operating a deceptform, an unmodified hostform for infiltration purposes. In fact, the Battlemaster felt anything but calm.

It was alone in all probability. It had no orders. What was it to do? At all costs it must avoid destruction, that much it understood. But then what? Fresh orders were necessary to a proper decision.

Thus it was essential to obtain access to certain computerized records; there were star charts of particular interest.

However, they could only be accessed in person, and thus the need for deceptforms. The human type was very alien to the Battlemaster's experience. To control the host in this mode was difficult. Nor could full sensors be extruded. Thus the Battlemaster was reduced to taking the sensory information from the hostform brain centers. The creatures were equipped with remarkably poor sensors except in the optical area.

Of course, the hostforms were feral, unmodified. Their social organization was some kind of loose alliance between hosts of individuals compressed into vast societies, mostly gathered in artificial land reefs. Thus their sensors were the product of evolution, not of the perfecting hand of science.