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Back The Nest Save as PDF
Chapters (82)
  1. Cover
  2. Copyright page
  3. Introduction by Will Errickson
  4. Acknowledgements
  5. TREMORS
  6. 1
  7. 2
  8. 3
  9. 4
  10. 5
  11. 6
  12. SUSPICIONS
  13. 1
  14. 2
  15. 3
  16. 4
  17. 5
  18. DREAD
  19. 1
  20. 2
  21. 3
  22. 4
  23. 5
  24. 6
  25. WITNESS
  26. 1
  27. 2
  28. 3
  29. ALERT
  30. 1
  31. 2
  32. 3
  33. 4
  34. 5
  35. ENCOUNTER
  36. 1
  37. 2
  38. 3
  39. 4
  40. 5
  41. 6
  42. HAVOC
  43. 1
  44. 2
  45. 3
  46. 4
  47. 5
  48. 6
  49. SEARCH
  50. 1
  51. 2
  52. 3
  53. 4
  54. 5
  55. CLASH
  56. 1
  57. 2
  58. 3
  59. 4
  60. 5
  61. 6
  62. 7
  63. COUNTERATTACK
  64. 1
  65. 2
  66. 3
  67. 4
  68. 5
  69. 6
  70. 7
  71. VICTORY
  72. 1
  73. 2
  74. 3
  75. 4
  76. 5
  77. 6
  78. 7
  79. 8
  80. 9
  81. EPILOGUE
  82. About the Author

Hubbard did not see Elizabeth Carr’s admiring eyes on him. She would have liked to reach out and touch him, but the shadow of Wanda Lindstrom’s death stayed her hand. It was not a time for sentiment.

Amos Tarbell was asking, “Peter, what if you let them loose and they get away from you in the leaves or wherever the hell? They’re damn slick and sly.”

“Precisely. The Geiger should pick them up. I expect they’ll be laying down trail signal—including the radioactivity—all the way.” Hubbard did not deny himself the tingle of nonscientific pleasure he felt at the thought that the roaches’ own adaptive mechanisms would be working against them this time.

Stephen Scott held his mug out to Elizabeth for more coffee. “If it will get the cockroaches, I’m all for it! I think it’s a brilliant idea, Peter!” he praised.

“We have another positive element going for us,” the biologist said. “Remember about trophallaxis?—the way one insect regurgitates its stomach contents to feed another, and so on all around a colony? I think these roaches sometimes follow that behavior. If so, our messengers will soon be sharing their radioactivity with all their brothers and sisters. It might take twenty-­four hours to contaminate the whole group, but that would give us a broader signal on the Geiger counter if I should somehow miss the trail of these particular fellows.”

“And help track down strays, too!” the sheriff appreciated.

“Brilliant!” Elizabeth applauded again. The others haggardly smiled their appreciation as Peter Hubbard rose to put his strategy into action.

2

TWO

If the cockroach enclave had indeed been the higher-­order vertebrate it resembled in many ways, the Colony could now be thought of as nursing its wounds in its lair after losing a bloody jungle battle.

The viscid Dome in the inky murkiness of the Nest was throbbing erratically with unfamiliar nerve currents. The organism’s unease was only partly due to the strangeness of the recently moved domicile. The discomposure was deeper. The group was incomplete. It was as if an animal like a wolf had lost a limb. No blood flowed out here, but the missing layers of weight, of motion and odor and sound, were somehow akin to an open wound.

The disturbance, an inchoate inner distress, took the form of tiny sparks of neural electricity that ran irritatingly along the roaches’ ganglia: Why hadn’t the fellow colonists returned from the battle to which the Dome had sent them? Where were the fighters who had the mission of keeping Enemy away from the retreat?