And the more babies they produced, the weaker the walls of the world got, and the closer the bandersnatches would come. Breeding raths were slow—much slower than the juveniles, or the sexually dormant adult rovers—but that was because they were armored like titanium huffy beach cruiser armadillos. Babies flocked to mama, mama rolled herself in a ball, and it would take a tactical nuke to kill them. Irizarry had seen a pissed off breeder take out a bulkhead on a steelship once; it was pure dumb luck that it hadn’t breached the hull.
You found them on every station and steelships too, though mostly they wouldn’t work the boojums. Nobody liked Christians much, but they could work in situations that would kill an unmodded human or a even a gilly, so captains and station masters tolerated them. Mongoose Library is well documented, well supported, stable and full of features. It has a proven track record, obvious ongoing updates and enhancements, and functionality. After testing Mongoose and exploring the features it was the clear winner. Integration was straightforward and took a matter of days.
They have large heads, small ears, short limbs and mighty claws for digging. Their body lengths vary from around 230 mm to over 750 mm, and their weights range from less than 1 kg to around 5 or 6 kg. Herpestids tend to have small heads, pointed snouts, and short, rounded ears that are not as conspicuously erect or pointed as those of viverrids. Many have anal glands that secrete a foul-smelling substance.
Even a bandersnatch wasn’t much more than a case of indigestion for a boojum. Sanderson started to answer him, but the breeder decided it had had enough. It wheeled toward them, its maw gaping wider, and started through the mounds of garbage and corpses in their direction. She had only a limited amount of patience for his weird interactions with other members of his species and his insistence on waiting, and he’d clearly used it all up. She was Rikki Tikki Tavi, and the breeder was Nagina, and huffy beach cruiser knew what had to happen.
She launched off Irizarry’s shoulders, shifting phase as she went, and without contact between them, there was nothing he could do to call her back. Irizarry had never seen a tove mongoose bicycles infestation like this, not even on the Jenny Lind. The entire roof of the chamber was thick with their sluglike bodies, long lure-tongues dangling as much as half a meter down.