Rex Dean Levie by The Insect Warriors

Author:The Insect Warriors [Warriors, The Insect]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-09-05T23:27:43+00:00

The stocky redhead did not notice Tail's slight wince at the mention of Bright Potter, and he continued.

"You'd better watch out, Tall. That girl's been after you for years, and the way she's been going, she's going to come after you with a bow next."

"That's the only way she'll ever get him, too!" Peewee said, laughing. "Come on, let's eat. How far away did you say the gorge was now, Tall?"

VIH

Two-hundhed-and-eighty-eight strong, the second detachment filed through the double gates that barred the river entrance to the gorge, staring curiously at the forty-three scarecrows that lined the walls of the gorge on either side. Having shelters waiting for them at the end of each day's march had saved the larger body the worst of the hardships of the trip, and there were still traces of display in their armor as they marched.

Tall and Clever, who had returned ahead of the larger group to prepare the reception, had their hands full with the task of assigning living quarters and duties to the new arrivals. Temporarily, the settlers would be housed in two large barracks, one for the men and another for the women, but each of the married couples was also assigned to an individual cave among the thousands that lined the gorge, and in the days that followed most of the individual residences had been occupied.

The women labored with the men, and while a large portion of their energy was still devoted to the storage of food, they could now spare the personnel to begin the task of building. Where the hunting parties had consisted of twenty or thirty men before, now groups of a hundred to two hundred swept through the jungles and the borders of the swamps, clearing the woodland of game during the day to have it filled overnight from the inexhaustible reservoir of the hinterland jungles.

In carefully prepared incubation chambers the eggs of the vital black widows hung in their cunningly woven sacs, and wasp grubs gorged on their provender blissfully unaware that they were fated to a life of captivity to sate the colony's need for venom.

Clever lovingly unloaded each priceless piece of his equipment and transferred it to the cave that served the two men as home and was now to become his laboratory as well. With the acute manpower shortage eased, Tall left the inventor to his own devices and spent sleepless nights in assisting his friend complete several new devices to test several new ideas.

But by day the responsibility remained, and under the lanky leaders supervision a full-scale foray returned with several silk spiders of a considerably larger breed. Soon thereafter a scaffold of silk began to rise above the city, to grow in the weeks that followed into a tightly meshed netting of multi-skeined silk that not even the largest predator could hope to penetrate. Eventually it would stretch from the notch that gave issue to the river to the barrier of rock across the mouth of the gorge, and a

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