Galactic Mage 4: Alien Arrivals by John Daulton Page B

herself once again looking across the thigh-high fluff of what seemed a fog of ferns.
    She got down on her hands and knees and peered underneath the level of the fern leaves, as if looking for something beneath a low table. The light, filtered once more through the screen of ferns, was dim enough that Pernie couldn’t see beneath it very well.
    She crawled right up to the edge of the fern meadow and peered deeper inside. Nothing moved. There was only the yellow powder everywhere, a soft, dusty bed of it that covered the entire expanse beneath the delicate fern leaves. She saw no sign of the many-legged monsters anywhere.
    There were, in a few places, high spots in the powder, long lumps barely discernible at first, but, as she watched, distinctly dunelike in how they appeared. Modest dunes, to be sure, but they were conspicuous once she noticed them. She counted four of them within range of her sling.
    Willing to take a chance at being wrong, and completely unwilling to go into the dust and risk her vision once again, she stood and crept away from the ferns. A quick scan of the surrounding jungle suggested she was still alone. She set herself to the task of setting up her trap.
    She began by making a noose at one end of the sturdy cord she had made, this one nearly as thick around as her thumb. The other end she tied firmly around a nearby tree. She stretched the line of her handmade rope out toward the ferns as near as it would go and then spread the noose out on the ground near her feet. Satisfied, she hunted around for a nice big bashing rock, something big enough to mangle the many-legged monster if her plan should go awry. Once she had one of suitable size, not much bigger than a pinecone from back home and with a reasonably sharp point as well, she knelt down next to her spread noose and extracted three of her remaining sling stones.
    She loaded her little weapon and squinted into the dim space beneath the ferns again. Locating one of the long lumps in the powder, she set her sling spinning furiously. The stone shot out and struck the lump with a puffy thump .
    Just as she had supposed, up from the dusty yellow stuff came one of the long, squat creatures, its head end up and its eyestalks moving all around.
    Pernie remained motionless as she watched it looking for the source of its recent injury. She couldn’t tell how much, if at all, she’d damaged it, but clearly it was alarmed.
    It didn’t seem to see her standing there, but in a matter of moments, one of the other lumps in the powder shook itself and rose up from the dust as well. This one was bigger than the first, the flat gray length of its gently arcing shell a full four hand’s widths wide. The two of them chattered at one another, the little round Os of their mouths like dark spots in the dusk-light of their under-fern world.
    Pernie feared they would wake up others, so she quickly sent another sling stone on its way. This one struck the first creature right below its eye, breaking the appendage halfway off. The creature flopped over on its back with the force of the impact, and all its legs began to tie invisible knots in the cloud of dust stirred up by its violence.
    The larger one let out a low, frightening hiss, and with it, up popped two more creatures from powdery dunes nearby. All three directed their waving eyes to right where Pernie was.
    They chattered at one another for a moment more, and Pernie sent another stone at the smallest of the three just before they charged.
    Her stone struck true, catching the creature like the last, right at the base of an eyestalk, and like the one before, this one hissed and flipped onto its back, though only for a moment before it rolled up tightly into a ball, a perfect sphere of itself, its grayish shell all wrapped around it to protect its soft parts from yet another attack.
    The other two came on strong, and their astonishing speed cleared the distance between them and their assailant almost instantly. Pernie