Page 54 of The Inheritance
Oh.
The cream eggs came from the spiders. This one didn’t. This was one of them, a baby spider herder. A creature of an alien civilization, not just a sentient or a sapient. The official term was sophont, a being not born on Earth with intelligence comparable or greater than human and a capacity for creating a civilization.
I sat down and looked at it. A child separated from its parents, stolen to become wasp food and to be devoured by grubs before its first moment of awareness.
It was so much.
For millennia, humans were terrified of being eaten. It was the most primal of our fears. It drove our progress and our relentless pursuit of technology. We conquered the planet to keep our children safe from the predators that roamed in the night. We thought we put this anachronistic horror behind us. And then the gates appeared, and the ancient fear came roaring back. Once again, we were scared that monsters would attack and devour our children, and all our weapons and our progress would do nothing to stop it.
I hugged the egg gently and stayed like that until the inner storm passed inside me. I would get back to my children. And I would return this child back to its family.
In total I found five spider eggs that were still glowing, including the coral one. Now, I had to get them out and get down to the bottom of the cavern without getting killed. I needed a rope.
Well, there was a lot of spider silk around.
I cut a tendril of the spider thread from one of the hollowed-out cocoons on the wall and pulled on it. It came loose, dragging chunks of wasp paper with it. It was about the width of a thick thread and feather-light.
I flexed. One point eight millimeters in diameter, slightly thinner than cooking twine. Wow. The tensile strength was off the charts.
I weighed one hundred and fifty-seven pounds before the breach. I checked my weight regularly. The DDC gym had an abundance of scales. The DDC monitored all government-employed gate divers for any unusual changes. They checked weight and height every three months, bloodwork every six.
I focused on myself. One hundred and fifty-one pounds. A six-pound weight loss. As I suspected, all that healing and fighting came with a price. This tiny strand of spider silk would hold ten times my weight. The eggs weren’t heavy, only large. That just left Bear.
I glanced at the dog and froze.
Ninety-four pounds.
That couldn’t possibly be right. I had checked her before and she was at seventy-six pounds. She had gained eighteen pounds. It wasn’t possible. Even if my sense of time was completely off and we’d been in the breach for a week, a dog couldn’t just gain eighteen pounds in seven days.
“Bear, come here, girl.”
The shepherd trotted over. I ran my hand over her body, feeling her flanks and back under the fur. There wasn’t much fat there, quite the opposite. She was on the leaner side. Judging by feel alone, she could use a few more meals.
I tried to recall her general dimensions, and they popped into my head from memory.
Bear was three inches taller and four inches longer.
I struggled to process it. She was taller and longer, which meant her bones elongated. Growing that fast should have put a huge strain on her body.
It had to be stalker regeneration. She’d been eating every chance she got, and her new accelerated healing must’ve been putting these calories into her growth.
I flexed again, focusing in on her, looking for any abnormalities. Perfectly healthy. Nothing strange. Just a very large dog. Also, her harness was on way too tight. I had noticed that before and loosened it, but she must’ve grown since then.
I would need the harness to get her down to the floor of the cavern, but once we cleared that hurdle – assuming we survived – I would have to take it off. It was as big as it could be and already pinching her body. If she got any bigger, it would hurt her.
There was nothing I could do about Bear’s explosive growth. It was what it was. One thing was for certain, I needed to feed her better. If she was growing, she would need more calories. The next time we downed a stalker or maybe one of those goat things, I would let her eat all she wanted.
For now, I had to concentrate on making a rope. The twine-sized spider silk would hold my weight, but it would also cut my hands. I had to make it thicker and figure out some way to shield my fingers.
I pulled on the silk, and it came loose. If my luck held, it would be one long rope, and I had a lot of cocoons to work with.
The rope took a lot longer than expected. I must’ve been at it for about three hours, but in the end, I didn’t just have a rope. I had two, braided together from several lengths of the spider twine. I also made a net sack into which I loaded the spider eggs, all but the coral one. That one would come down with me. I pried a paper cap off the cluster of tubes I had dropped to the ground. It was thick like canvas, but flexible, and I managed to work it into a crude sack. I put the coral egg into it and secured it with Bear’s leash.
Bear trotted out of the cave and came back in. She started doing it a few minutes after I began working on the rope. I read somewhere that German Shepherds liked to patrol. Nothing could get onto the ledge from below and if something came in from the tunnel, we could hold it off here in the nest, so if patrolling made her feel better, there was no reason to keep her from it.
I coiled my ropes and walked onto the ledge. Below us, about one hundred yards away, the spider herders blocked the floor of the cavern. There were seven of them and behind them massive white spiders splattered with black loomed, each at least twenty feet tall.
Okay then. This altered things.
