Expendables 01 The Deathworms of Kratos by Richard Avery; Edmund Cooper

Author:Richard Avery; Edmund Cooper [Cooper, Richard Avery; Edmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780449133064
Google: 1YRQGwAACAAJ
Amazon: 0449133060
Publisher: Fawcett
Published: 1975-08-11T21:00:00+00:00

Stage Two

The Secrets of Kratos

PHASE ONE

Investigation: Death’s Head

Conrad went out at first light. He took Andreas and Batista with him. They wore heavy, armoured jackets. They carried laser rifles. Among other things, they were looking for the robot John, who had been patrolling the perimeter, also armed with a laser rifle, during the attack.

Throughout the rest of the night, no one had slept. Batista had spent some of the time arming half a dozen of his favourite toys—cold nitro bombs. They were vacuum insulated steel spheres containing solid nitro-glycerine. The arming device was his own invention. Set the electronic fuse timing, throw the bomb; and, after the required interval, instant heat would be applied to the nitro-glycerine. Bang!

Batista’s speciality was not needed. The attackers had gone. But they had left behind them trails of devastation, one certain casualty, and one robot literally flattened into the ground.

John’s duralumin-clad control centre had been crushed as if it were silver paper. His steel limbs were distorted. He lay in a rut that was fully two metres deep.

“Where the hell is his laser?” said Conrad. It could not be found; maybe it was under him.

“These creatures play real rough,” said Andreas. “They can make one hell of a mess of expensive equipment.”

Batista fingered one of his cold nitro bombs lovingly. “I wish one would show its ugly head just now. I’d like to see how it reacts to a half-litre of nitro.”

“A head, we already have,” observed Conrad, pointing to the grotesque and horrifying thing that lay tangled in the wreckage of the perimeter wire. “I wonder what happened to the rest of the body? Did its friends somehow drag it away, or did they eat it? It’s a pity the searchlights were put out so soon… Well, thank goodness we haven’t had any breakfast yet. Let’s go take a close look, gentlemen. I’m not surprised Lieutenant Smith threw up. Even from here, it looks god-awful.”

From close up, the head was worse than horrific. It was obscene, repulsive in a way that could not be defined.

The mouth, frozen in the rictus of death, had thick grey lips that looked as if they were made of foamed latex. They were covered in a very regular fashion with pustules—or were they suckers? Suckers that might clamp on to prey struggling to escape. The lips, more than thirty centimetres thick, seemed fixed in a wide and horrible grin, as if the creature had died laughing. There were no teeth in the mouth. Evidently, the creature did not need to masticate. But there were four tight coils of muscular tissue. One at each side of the orifice, one centred on the top jaw and one centred on the bottom. Tongues or some kind of tentacles? Conrad surmised that they might have a function similar to the tentacles of an octopus or squid. Perhaps they could flash out, snatch the prey and draw it to the suckers on the lips, where the unfortunate creature would be stuck prior to being swallowed whole.

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