"Get us away from here! Quick!" ordered Dworn shakily.
Still wordlessly, her face smooth and mask-like, the girl set the walking machine in motion. It moved with a queer rolling gait which made Dworn dizzy, though it stilted over the irregularities of the ground with scarcely a jar. Dworn felt nakedly exposed, riding high above the ground in broad daylight, but he gritted his teeth and tried not to think of the probability of attack by some day-faring marauder. He supposed the spider girl, accustomed likewise to a nocturnal life, would have felt the same fear of the light, if she hadn't been hypnotized.
Under the drug's influence she apparently couldn't speak unless spoken to. However, there were questions he wanted to ask her.
First—"What do you know about the attack on the beetles last night?"
"I know there was a battle," said Qanya flatly, without looking up from the controls. "I didn't see it, but the Mother and some others were prowling at the time, and saw. It was the flying things, which have given us too so much trouble."
That, if true—and he judged that it must be true—confirmed his prior suspicion, and killed another suspicion he had entertained for a little while—that the spiders themselves might have been the ambushers. He demanded, "What do you know about those night-fliers?"
"Very little. We do not know just what they are or where they came from. They began appearing hereabouts only four months ago, which was three months after the Rim collapsed and the Mother decided that we should descend and try the hunting on this side. Since then they've grown more and more numerous. They fly by day as well as by night, and attack everything that moves. They've taken several of our Family, and I think they've made heavy depredations on the peoples that inhabit this region. We spiders would have abandoned the location before now, but we feared to be caught migrating in the open...."
Dworn gazed apprehensively out at the glaring desert that was rolling past the spider windows. The news that the aerial killers also operated by day was most unwelcome. But as yet there was no sign of an enemy.
He said, "The little ground machines—unarmored, made of aluminum. They're allied in some way to the flying ones, aren't they?"