From behind the face-plate, Spero flashed a double row of teeth. "Stop stalling for time, Keating. You had your chance on the ship, and you muffed it. Now it's my turn!"
Carl waited—waited while Spero's gloved hand tightened against the trigger-switch. The bolt coil snapped back. There was a dull click—nothing else....
"Did you really think I'd be stupid enough to leave you alone with a case full of live guns?" Keating said thinly.
Bewildered, Spero snapped the rifle down to chest level, fumbling awkwardly with the trigger assembly.
"It won't work," Carl said indulgently. "Before we left the ship I removed the anodes from every gun in the case. It's an old army trick, in case you haven't heard."
With Spero glaring at him, Carl allowed his arm to brush against his own needle gun. He didn't bother to draw.
"I think your friends are waiting for you," he said.
Back in the control room, Carl went through the motions of readying the ship for take-off. Back in the galley he could hear Diane sobbing softly.
Idly, he glanced out of the amber blister ports toward the big sphere-like structure that rose out of the sea of purple mud. It looked evil, and ominous-looking against the rain-sodden backdrop of the saroo forest.
Then from the edge of the tree line, moving shapes suddenly began to make an appearance. He rubbed his eyes. There were hundreds—no, thousands of them. Slowly and curiously they poured out of the rain-soaked forest, deliberately converging on the open lock-doors of the huge, white building. Some were carrying sticks, some stones, some nothing. It was as if the mystic forces of evolution had chosen this exact moment to endow the chowls with an emotion hitherto lacking in their makeup. Call it hate; call it self-preservation; call it anything you like, it was something they hadn't had before, yet needed badly.