Grassers were not bred to fight. Just the opposite, in fact: for seven hundred generations, Korunnai had bred their grassers to be docile and easily led, obedient to commands from their human handlers and their akk dog guardians, and to grow large and fat to provide plenty of milk, meat, and hide.

On the other hand, an adult grasser bull could mass over one and one half metric tons. His gripping limbs—the middle and forward pairs—were powerful enough to uproot small trees. One of the grassers’ favorite treats was brassvine thorns, which had a hardness approaching durasteel; bored grassers had been known to worry off chunks of armor from steamcrawlers.

And seven hundred generations was not all that long a span, on an evolutionary scale.

These grasser bulls had been forced into confined quarters for weeks, under incredible stress and in constant danger from each other. Today they had endured a shattering bombardment that was entirely beyond their comprehension; the most closely analogous event for which their evolutionary instincts had prepared them was a volcanic eruption. The instinctive grasser response to eruption was blind panic.

Honking, hooting grassers flooded from the tunnel mouth. The regulars discovered that a blaster rifle was only of marginal use against a 1,500-kilo monster crazed by an overload of stress hormones. They also discovered that limbs powerful enough to uproot small trees were easily capable of pulling a man’s legs off, and that jaws that could dent armor plate could, with a single chomp, make such a bloody mush of a man’s head that one couldn’t tell fragments of his helmet from fragments of his skull.


- Shatterpoint, Chapter 18