by Huskyteer
He pushed his foot down on the accelerator and the Sandray lunged forward; it was more responsive than any vehicle he’d ever ridden in, much less driven. It was hungry for speed. He wound down the track that led away from the City, feeling the tires grip the ground as he made narrow, tight turns. He glanced at the radar. There were no alerts, so he accelerated, the engine eager, the speed pressing him back into the seat where Kamil sat every night.
He checked his mirrors, watching the City dwindle into a fist of twinkling lights behind him. He had left it all behind. He raced up a dune and launched off of the top, feeling a giddy rush as for a moment he hung in the air, the Sandray flying toward the stars, then landing with a bone-shuddering jolt, wheels spinning in the sand for a moment before catching and shooting him forward again. He whooped with joy and raced to the top of the next, ramping over the crest of the dune, grunting as he landed. The jagged mountains were much closer now, surprisingly so. He had never imagined the Sandray could move this quickly. Doubt nudged at him. He was farther out than he had intended to come. He should probably stay closer to the City, just in case.
Above him, a shadow flickered across the stars, and he felt his hackles raise. A shrike. It could be nothing else. And he had barely even seen it. It had been just a passing darkness. There would be no way he could fire on it without trac goggles. He had been foolish to leave without them. It was a stupid mistake, not a ranger mistake. Cursing himself, he turned the vehicle around, looking for the twinkling lights of the City. They were gone. The shadow slid across the sky again, a ripple in the heavens, and a sudden surge of nauseating panic rose in his gut. Where was the City? He scanned the horizon in panic. He had just seen it behind him. Had he gotten turned around?
The shadow was lower now, and now he heard the scream of the shrike, a bone-chilling, piercing cry. He remembered the rover he’d seen his first day, the one that had been plucked up off the sand by a giant shrike. He couldn’t stay here. He accelerated, turning the Sandray toward the right—he thought maybe he’d drifted a bit to the left when coming out—and sped up the nearest dune. He could hear sand spray the undercarriage as he accelerated. He crested the top, and panted in relief. There was the City, after all, a tiny glint of light that had been hidden behind the dune. He turned toward it, speeding up. As he headed up the following dune, still accelerating, a huge, dark shape swooped just over the top of the Sandray. He could see very little of it in the moonlight, just shimmery gleams on a dark, black carapace. He looked down just in time to see the boulder jutting up out of the sand near the top of the dune. There was a quiet crunching sound.
The restraints cut into his shoulders. He was jostled around wildly, the view through the windows whipping between stars and sand, stars and sand. Then they shattered. Something smashed into the side of Rakin’s face.
He was still. He could hear wind. The groan of stretching metal. He was hanging upside down in the restraints, and blood was running from his nose to spatter onto the roof of the Sandray. His face throbbed. Gingerly, he explored with his tongue and found teeth missing on the right side of his muzzle, which ached. It might be broken, he thought. He was in so much trouble.
He groped for the clasp for the restraint and unbuckled it. He tried to brace himself against the roof with his free paw, but he still fell against it with a thump that made him yelp. Broken breakproof glass cut into his paw and shoulder. Gripping the door frame, he dragged himself inch by inch out of the rover into the night air. From here he could see that the Sandray was utterly destroyed. He didn’t care now about his teeth, about his possibly broken muzzle. None of that mattered. He would forever be known in the City as the kid who stole Kamil’s Sandray and wrecked it in the desert.
The scream of the shrike came from just overhead. Maybe he wouldn’t have to worry about it at all. He dragged himself alongside the rover, hoping to hide against it, but then the sand beneath his side shifted and began to slide down the dune. The rover above him creaked, tilted, and then the side of the dune collapsed. Rakin scrambled through the sand as he slid downward with the rover, but the ground sifted beneath him, and at the bottom, the Sandray tilted forward and rolled on top of him.
* * * *
He woke in darkness. His vision was blurry and his face throbbed with pain. His arm and shoulder hurt, too. Through the coppery scent of blood in his nose, he could smell something else: a fetid, rank odor like the stink of a centipede or a scorpion hole. And now he was aware of the whispering all around him, sibilant and unintelligible, reverberating as though he were in a huge, empty room. Amidst the whispering, too, he could hear other sounds. Low, warbling croaks. The rasp of hard chitin against stone. Endless clicks and taps. They came from everywhere, from all around him, from overhead and even below. He was in a shrike lair. He had heard they took their prey back to their holes. A scream grew and grew in his chest, but would not come out.
“You awake.” The voice was thickly accented, half hiss, half croak. “How you feel?”
Fear nearly choked the words away. “Who are you? Where am I? I can’t see.” Talking felt strange, stiff. Something pulled at the fur on his muzzle when he spoke.
The voice was silent for a moment. Then it said, “You not frighten. I make light.”
A spark flared in the darkness, revealing strange, distorted shapes. It flared again, and then spread to a small flame that burned some wispy tangle of material. The firelight lit the gaping jaws and shining black eyes of a shrike. Its antenna twitched spasmodically.
Rakin screamed. He screamed and screamed until his breath was gone, and then he screamed breathlessly. The noise sent the lair into a commotion; the whispering grew louder, from all around, and he could hear things moving in the dark.
The shrike gazed at him with those unreadable, flat eyes, neither moving nor speaking. When Rakin finally stopped screaming, it continued as if there had been no disruption. “You hurt? Likik find in…in ground. By mah-shin. You make many bloods.”
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Shrike didn’t talk. They were savage, brutal beasts. “Are you going to eat me?” he asked.
At that, the shrike tilted back its head and made a loud clicking sound, its antenna bobbing up and down, and from all around the lair, Rakin could hear that clicking echoed back by what must have been hundreds of other voices. “Peoples no eat jackal,” it said in a very firm tone. “Taste of jackal bad. Jackal small. Dangerous. Likik find. Likik take jackal to the home. Help the bloods.”
It reached toward Rakin with long, curved talons, and he shrank back in terror, but it only nudged the edge of his muzzle with the tip of one claw. There was something there, on his muzzle. He reached up and found that his face had been bandaged with something. He couldn’t tell what. Now that he was aware, he could feel that his arm and leg had also been bound in some kind of wrapping. Why would the shrikes have done this? His thoughts were fuzzy. Maybe he’d hit his head in the crash and was imagining all this. But no, it all felt too real.
“Give medicines to jackal,” the shrike continued. “Good for peoples. Good for jackals too. Hope.”
“You tried to heal me?” Rakin asked in astonishment. “Why? You’re monsters.”
“Not monsters!” the shrike said in a loud voice, making the walls chitter. “Not. Peoples. Look.” It lifted up the flame, then, up over its head, and then the flame began to burn more brightly. Now Rakin could see in the flickering light that he was in an enormous cavern, stretching far above his head and out to either side beyond the light of the flame. The walls were covered with an expanse of shifting black carapace, grasping talons, twitching antenna, swaying tails, and broad, leathery wings stretching, jostling, and folding. Rakin was lying on a cushion that was on placed a ledge of rock, above a dark precipice, and below he could see more shrikes crawling and swaying in the darkness.
Another crawled up over the ledge, black and predatory, and he had to stifle another scream as it approached. It came toward him and looked him up and down, se
eming to pay particular attention to his bandages, which he could now see were made of the broad leaves of some sort of plant he didn’t recognize. It made a dry, inquisitive clicking sound, and the first shrike answered back in kind.
To Rakin, it said, “This Likik. Likik find. Help jackal.”
He stared back at the menacing face regarding him. This thing had saved him from the crash? He opened his mouth to protest that it shouldn’t have attacked him, but it hadn’t, had it? It had just flown back and forth over him. “Thank you,” he heard himself say.
The shrikes looked at each other, clicking to each other again. “Jackal in kill mah-shin. Likik fear. Likik have mother. Likik have childrens. Then, kill mah-shin. Very anger and fear. Want kill jackal. Then see jackal not…” It trailed off, seeming to search for words. “Not bad jackal,” it said finally.
Kamil. They meant Kamil. They’d recognized the Sandray and hated it, but had not attacked him when they saw he wasn’t Kamil.
“Not bad jackal. Not kill Likik. But mah-shin…break. Likik help.”
“Why did you help me?” Rakin asked. The other shrike turned toward him, and five or six slender tongues slid from between its sword teeth, dripping with venom, and licked its jaws. Rakin fought a surge of revulsion at the sight of it.
“Likik help jackal. Jackal help people.” The shrike tilted its head back and emitted a shrill cry. Rustling and scratching sounds came from the darkness, and then more shrikes appeared, shepherding something before them. Rakin sat up taller to see what was illuminated by the flame.
There were things crawling along the ledges and up the cliffs, things that were like shrikes but much smaller, wingless, with rounded heads and wide black eyes. They gripped into the rocks with slender claws and peeped at each other in timid-sounding voices. The shrikes moved among them with careful steps, caressing heads and limbs with gentle touches of their talons.
“Our childrens,” the shrike said. “Not fly now. When fly, when hunt, new. Young. Almost all die. Bad jackals kill.” It looked over its carapace at the teeming mass of young shrikes and gave a little shiver. “Not want childrens die. Not want people die.”
It reached down to the floor and picked up what looked like a metal box, wrought in intricate geometric patterns. This it held out to Rakin in both talons, and then, taking a deep breath, said, “Our peoples have fought for very long. Please, take this message back to your own respected people. Tell them we want peace. Tell them we want no more killings. We include a payment, our people’s greatest riches, as sign to prove we tell the truths.”
Rakin stared at the box, and the shrike extended its arms forward, pushing the box toward him. “Likik help jackal. Jackal help people. Save us. Save our childrens.” Rakin reached toward it in wonder, and the lair filled with louder chitterings and hisses. He took the box in both paws. It was solid and cool and heavy. The chittering grew louder and louder, and then Rakin’s ears twitched. He could hear another noise: the rumble of an engine. A rover engine.
Cries of alarm began going up from all around the lair, shrill and deafening. The shrikes positioned themselves over their young, lifting their arms in protective gestures. Rakin turned to face the sound of the engine approaching behind him, and now he could see headlights panning across the walls of the cavern, illuminating in pools of light the teeming, oily surface of the sea of shrikes that clung there. They screeched and tried to scramble away from the light when it fell across them.
The rover slid around the corner and came straight toward Rakin, the headlights now so bright they blinded him. He lifted his arm across his eyes, the other out before him as if with the power of his will he could stop the vehicle bearing down on him. It turned sideways, sliding to a stop on the rocky floor, and a door opened. Kamil sprung from the car, guns in each paws, goggles over his eyes. As soon as he appeared, the shrikes roared and hissed in unmistakable menace. The talking shrike chittered back at them unintelligibly, and the lair quieted. Kamil’s ears were pricked as he panned the area, then went back. He trained both his weapons on the squirming mass of pupa, who made anxious-sounding noises at their keepers. The keepers shuffled back and forth in front of them, trying to wedge themselves in the way of the guns. “Get in the rover, kid,” Kamil snapped.
Rakin cringed. Kamil was no doubt furious with him for crashing the Sandray. “How did you find me?” he asked.
The ranger’s voice was clipped with anger. “Tracking beacon in my helmet. Are you waiting for the damned things to eat you? You’ve screwed up enough today, don’t you think? Get in the damned rover.”
“You don’t understand,” Rakin said. “They’re not going to attack. They just want to stop the fighting. These people helped me.”
Kamil snarled, his lips curling around his fangs. “They’re not people, you naïve pup. They’re monsters. This is why you were assigned as an engineer, not a ranger. You don’t have the instincts. Now for the last time, get in the god-damned rover.”
An engineer. Rakin’s eyes turned toward the rover. It wasn’t the Sandray, but it was still a pretty powerful rig. He’d seen it in the Garage before he’d left, and it had been pristine. Now it was damaged. There was blood spatter across the roof and side, and a solid dent in the front fender. All down the hood there were long rents in the metal, going down to the fender. He could see a dent from below in the back bumper. He heard Khaal’s voice in his head. Think about what’s wrong with it. What happened first?
The blood spatter on the roof suggested Kamil had gunned down something either flying or leaping overhead. A shrike. Then the dent in the front fender. It had landed, probably crashed. Then Kamil had rammed it with the rover. But the blood spatter was across the side and roof, which meant that it wasn’t flying ahead of it. It had been going to the side. Kamil would have had to have turned back around, delaying his mission, to run the thing down. Rakin looked at the tears in the hood where the shrike had clung to the metal, digging in its talons, trying to save itself from being pulled under the rover. The dent in the bottom of the fender where the rover had bounced down on top of it, certainly killing it.
“Kamil,” Rakin said, but his words were drowned out by a gunshot. There was a shriek from the roof of the cavern, and then a dark shape plummeted down from darkness, past the glow of the flame, and back into darkness again. There was a thump below. Furious hisses filled the lair, the shrikes guarding the young lifting their arms in a threatening posture. Rakin froze in place. In the pools cast by the headlights, he could see the walls moving, crawling toward him.
The air rustled, and Kamil cried out in pain, dropping to one knee, still keeping his guns trained on the squirming mass of young shrikes. Their keepers began desperately shepherding them over the edges of the precipice. There was a tear across his thigh, a dark stain. “Bastards got me with a barb,” he growled. “You see? They’re about to kill us both. Get in the rover.” Then there was another rustle, and Kamil howled, dropping one gun and clutching at his side as he fell over. The shrike who had spoken to Rakin turned and shrieked something toward the cavern. “No more killings,” it shouted. “Go now so no more!”
Panic flooded through Rakin. He darted for the rover, box clutched under one arm, and leapt inside. Kamil dragged himself toward the door on one elbow, a paw pressed to his side. He groped clumsily at the seat and wheel, but couldn’t pull himself in. “Help,” he wheezed. Rakin leaned over, grabbing him under both arms, and with a surge of strength he didn’t know he had, hoisted the ranger into the car, pulling him over into the other seat, and then slamming the door shut.
Kamil pushed himself upright in the passenger seat, holding his side and wheezing. “Can’t drive,” he groaned. “You’ll have to. Try not to…wreck this one.”
“Okay.” Rakin slid the seat forward, gripping the wheel, and pulled about.
“Hold on,” Kamil growled. “Don’t move.” He leaned over, took the gunner sticks, and gripped them in both paws. The red warning lights in the dash that meant the weapons
were armed glowed brightly.
“What are you doing?” Rakin demanded, his fur lifting.
“What I have to.” Kamil set his teeth and then squeezed down on the triggers, sending a spray of bullets across the front of the rover. Likik and the talking shrike flailed spasmodically in the gunfire.
“No!” Rakin wailed, but it was too late. Kamil had turned the guns on the young shrikes, mowing down the guardians in a couple of seconds, the bullets tearing into the bodies of their young and ripping them to pieces. They went down in a wave and lay twitching. The air was full of screams.
“All right, go now, go!” Kamil roared.
Rakin was frozen. He couldn’t move.
“Quick, while they’re trying to help their young. I bought us a minute, but not much more than that. Drive!”
Rakin gripped the wheel in both paws. He tried to drive. He couldn’t. There was a series of loud clanks from the hull as the shrikes pelted it with barbs. The walls and floor all around were moving, a mass of surging black oil rising around them. Claws hammered at the sides of the rover, rocking the vehicle, black pincers peeling away the edges of the doors. A shrike landed on the hood, screaming in the window at them, and then it hammered its claws down on the glass, white cracks spidering out from it.
Kamil leaned over, wincing at the pain in his side, and pressed the barrel of his gun against Rakin’s jaw. “I said drive.”
He recovered his ability to move, and wheeled about, tumbling the shrike on the hood off into the darkness. He threw the car into gear, and then accelerated, heading back the way Kamil had come. He was shaking, acutely aware of the precipice to once side. Kamil had navigated it, but Kamil had had the goggles. Rakin couldn’t see exactly where it was, and one wrong turn would send them careening over the side. But he couldn’t slow down—behind him he could hear the rumble of pursuing shrikes, the skittering of their claws along the rock walls audible even over the roar of the engine. Kamil looked back, swore, and then spun the turret around, firing backward as Rakin sped around corners, following the safe path illuminated by the headlights. Then they were out in the open air again, back under the stars and on the sand. Kamil stared back behind them for a few moments, then groaned and slumped down into his seat.
