Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

  “I’m sorry,” Jenny said.

  Nicole offered a placating wave and replied, “Not your fault.” But then she had to hunt for an appropriately simple phrase in Trade when her colloquial response went right over the other woman’s head.

  “I must learn better. More quickly.” Jenny was just as frustrated as Nicole. Unfortunately, it wasn’t merely a matter of learning the words; the pronunciation was an integral element in their true meaning. Sibilants for her were fine, it was the gutturals—with clicks and swallowed glottal stops and all manner of growls, fully half of which were subvocal grace notes—that caused the problems. The point of Trade was to craft a dialect of Hal that both races could manage to speak and comprehend with a modicum of ease. Nicole suspected it was also to deny humans the full richness and eloquence, not simply of the Hal language, but of their society. Like learning to write Japanese as a phonetic expression of speech, without ever tackling the challenge of kanji.

  Something still didn’t feel right, as Nicole took another circle from her vantage point. In her mind, beyond and below any level of conscious awareness, tied into her physical memory of smell and sight and taste, was a sense of what this world should be. Only it didn’t quite fit.

  There was a crease of light at the distant horizon, so bright and sudden it made her blink, and in that fractional amount of time the sun leapt a full diameter into the sky.

  “Dawn,” she said. And, knowing Jenny wouldn’t understand what she was saying, pointed towards the house. “We’ve got a long day ahead, Jenny. Time to go.”

  She had no warning. A movement right at the corner of her eye came simultaneously with a reflexive collapse onto her back and a cry of alarm from Jenny. As Nicole hit the ground, she kicked off one leg, propelling herself onto her stomach and from there into a combat crouch, while her assailant—perceived in blurred passing as a grown Hal, dressed in casual hunting attire—rolled out of one attack and right into another. She met him in midleap, going with the flow of his charge and adding to it some impetus of her own as she pitched him over her shoulder. She spun after him, low to the ground, one leg extended to scythe his out from under him. Unfortunately, he’d anticipated this move and was ready with a counter of his own that dropped her hard enough to leave her momentarily breathless.

  Before the scrap could proceed any further, though, Jenny blindsided the Hal with a hard football tackle. Her follow-through was a strike to the throat that would have done some serious damage had it connected, but Nicole launched herself at her friend, knocking Jenny aside and catching the brunt of the blow on her own shoulder.

  Jenny was aghast at having hurt Nicole, but also totally confused about the situation, as the Hal called out to her in English, holding his hands up to further allay any concerns about his intentions. Nicole lay where she fell, concentrating on the modest black hole of pain where Jenny’d nailed her. For all her modest stature and demeanor, the woman could hit.

  She said as much to Kymri as he helped her sit up. He obliged them both with two-way translation. For all that Jenny was a third-generation Highlander, there were those—mostly summer people, from the lowlands or below the border in England—who looked askance at the immigrant Scots and sometimes came to the islands looking for trouble. While there were always plenty of friends to come to her aid, she preferred to stand up for herself. First rule she’d learned was that once something starts, go in with all you’ve got and finish it fast.

  “I feel fortunate,” said Kymri with a chuckle as he rubbed Nicole’s aching shoulder.

  “You should. If she’d connected, we’d be waiting for an emergency Medivac.”

  “That would have put something of a crimp in my plans.”

  “Which are,” Nicole wondered, with more of a bite than she’d intended.

  “I asked you to trust me, Shavrin’s-Child... ”

  “You did. I do. Don’t push it.”

  Sensing a sharpening in the mood, Jenny motioned Kymri away and probed the soreness. It hurt enough to provoke a visible reaction.

  “Nothing’s broken,” she told Nicole through Kymri. “But you should have a lovely bruise.”

  Nicole growled unenthusiastically as Jenny said something else to Kymri.

  “The good doctor wants a reason for my presence here,” he passed on to Nicole.

  “Makes two of us, old lion.”

  “I missed our old sparring sessions. I wanted to see if you’d lost any of your edge.”

  “Truth and half truth.”

  He looked uncomfortable as he faced out towards the city, one arm tucked protectively against his side where he’d been shot a half-dozen years before. Nicole thought at first he was looking at the city, but the angle of his gaze was wrong, a shade too high and off to the side, as though at something up in the sky.

  “Have I?” she prompted. “Lost my edge?”

  He coughed amusement, with a silent promise to put the question aside until their-next encounter.

  “You didn’t hear me coming,” he said at last.

  “You missed,” was her quiet riposte.

  “Take a cue from your companion,” he told her seriously. “Not every duel will be in fun.”

  “That a warning, or a challenge?”

  “You have been summoned before a committee of the Council,” he said. “An informal gathering, somewhere between a conversation and an interrogation.”

  “They want to see the elephant.” She deliberately chose a human metaphor. The thought that had come instinctively to mind was, They want to see how the cub walks. On two feet or four. Everything about the Hal came back to that, the demarcation between their evolutionary ancestors and themselves, as though the transition were of recent memory. That, and their relationship with the ocean.

  Kymri wasn’t amused.

  “I understand your need to be human, Shavrin’s-Child,” he told her.

  “I am human,” again, with that extra sharpness.

  “Not today. And not until you’ve faced your Harach’t’nyn.”

  “I know all that, Kymri, Shavrin made it very plain.”

  “Listen to her. Listen to me. There is more at stake than you know.”

  “But not so much that anyone’ll bother to tell me.”

  “Save your anger, child.”

  “Save your breath, Kymri. I know how to behave. I won’t disgrace the side.”

  They faced off a minute longer, and Kymri looked as though there was something else he wanted to say. But he needed an opening from Nicole, some sense that his words wouldn’t fall on hostile ears, and she wasn’t in the giving mood. So he stalked away in anger that came from deep within and had nothing really to do with her or the specifics of the moment. And it was suddenly her turn—in a breathtaking reversal of roles—to want to run after him, reach out, offer a companion’s hand. The human in her actually took a first step...

  ...but the Hal, sensibly, held her back. Because in his black mood, Kymri would have most probably reacted from the heart, with a physical expression for his fury. Nicole, being a friend, would have taken the blow. Being human, her body would have paid the price.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  She’s on shore again, sprawled belly-down, with water from a receding wave tickling her belly as it wriggles and races down the shallow incline. She coughs for so long and so hard she’s sure she’ll tear her insides out. As it is, the spasms are so violent each delicious breath comes with its own pain. She doesn’t care. The marvel is that she has breaths to take and pain to be felt. She rolls onto her back, squinting her eyes against the sun-sparkle off the waters, not at all sure what she’s searching for. She sits through the remainder of the day and the night that follows, stirring only to keep her distance from the next high tide. Certain as she watches and waits that she is being watched in turn by an intelligence and a curiosity that puts hers to shame.

  Over the next few days, Nicole had cause more than once to think back over that conversation with Kymri and
reflect on his innate gift for understatement.

  Her encounter with the Council was indeed something more than a conversation, but only fractionally less than a full-court interrogation. Not every duel, she was reminded, was fought with physical weapons.

  They came at her every which way, and wholly on their schedule—which meant whenever they felt the mood, whether day or night, in public circumstances or the most intensely private. She was quizzed on matters of protocol and etiquette, on history, on behavior. At last—as reward or another test, she wasn’t quite sure—Nicole was flown halfway across the continent, to be Witness at a Bonding of two members of Shavrin’s Range Guide crew. One of the pair stirred a memory, though Nicole had to be reminded of his name, but she drew a complete blank on the mate. The feast lasted through the night and while Nicole restricted herself to the most innocuous of refreshment, the mood was so riotously infectious that she was as jazzed as anyone by the time morning came. So, when the suggestion was made that all present—still able to walk, that is—embark on a ritual Hunt, she found herself as enthusiastically eager as the rest.

  Somehow, she found herself on point, stumbling along a mist-draped woodland trail, dimly recollecting that the honor had come to her after a highly embellished—and ridiculously juiced—retelling of the battle between the remnants of her Wanderer crew and Shavrin’s, and the raiders who’d seized Range Guide. Of how Nicole, armed with a crossbow—as she was now—had gone out alone against the raiders’ commander, a renegade Air Force officer named Daniel Morgan, who carried one of the Hal rifle blasters, a directed energy weapon capable of effortlessly punching holes through battleship armor. The footing was awful, the light worse, casting everything in degrees of shadow, with no hard edges to be found in this forest except by tripping over them.

  After a couple of awkward staggers and one legitimate tumble, Nicole tucked herself up under the trunk of the nearest, biggest tree to take stock of herself and the situation. Thinking about Morgan sobered her up, always did, it took hardly any effort at all to remember the ozone stink in the station’s stale air from the blaster’s discharge, or the way its beam lit up the darkness like a searchlight from Hell.

  She sat very still and listened to the forest around her. There was a lot less noise than she expected, especially from such a crowd of drunken revelers.

  Ideal circumstances for an accident, she thought, using her fingers in the darkness to check the action on her bow, assuming I’m not being paranoid.

  According to Hana, there was still nothing to report concerning the decompression of the Garden. Rose Guthrie’s teams were no closer to solving the mystery than when they started, which was generating some serious heat from the Bridge. In no way was Hobby prepared to accept any sort of major failure aboard his vessel, much less one that remained inexplicable. As far as Hana was concerned, though, it was of a piece with the Swiftstar ambush in Earth orbit. Clearly, someone had strung an extraordinarily sophisticated software chain to disable all the relevant systems—it was far too comprehensive a crash to be coincidence or accident, that had been assumed from the start—but they were kamikaze commands that self-destructed upon activation. No evidence left to lead investigators to the perp; none, in fact, to indicate that anything amiss had even happened.

  A tremendous crash erupted so close at hand Nicole nearly jumped out of her skin, something charging through the brush that was so big and powerful it didn’t care who heard. Her startled brain immediately—instinctively—put a name to the noise: p’m’taie, a four-footed omnivore, sort of an adolescent elephant with the agility of a mountain goat and the disposition of a great white shark, possessed of enough brain to make its tusks and brute strength truly dangerous.

  The Bonding party had been hunting smaller game, if there’d been even a hint of a p’m’taie in the vicinity they’d have stayed close to the lodge. Common wisdom held that the p’m’taie were as eager for Hal trophies as the other way round. The unassailable fact was that the ratio of slain over the generations was pretty much 1:1.

  She had an arrow nocked, a half dozen in the quiver clipped against one hip, plus a knife. For all the good they’d do her, she knew she might as well be wholly unarmed, and she glanced upward to see if her tree could be climbed. Problem with that was, what to do if the p’m’taie decided to knock it down? That too had happened over the years.

  Then, the decision was made for her by a hoarse scream, too close at hand to be ignored. She found a shallow ravine just beyond her tree—by nearly pitching herself headlong into it—and scrambled along the edge, following the noise of the fight, hoping that would mask any sound of her approach because there was no way she could move fast and silently.

  She heard another outcry, this of defiance, a different voice than the one she’d heard before, and the basso grunting of the beast. Below her feet, the ravine deepened and widened, forming an oblong bowl-shaped depression that gave the

  p’m’taie plenty of room to maneuver. A Hal was backed hard against the wall, under a lip that prevented her from climbing any higher, with only the length of a spear between her and the beast. She was still yelling but the animal didn’t appear to mind; both knew the only possible outcome.

  Nicole had an emergency lamp clipped to her belt. Quickly she strapped it onto an overhanging branch, angling the lens as best she could and ready to sell her soul for some duct tape—which prompted a wild grin, because if she was making that kind of offer, then a rifle blaster would be by far the more practical request. The Hal was jabbing at the beast, as though trying to provoke an attack; Nicole remembered the other voice she’d heard and realized the woman was trying to protect someone else. Her hope had to be that she could keep the p’m’taie occupied long enough to attract the other hunters and thereby save her companion.

  Sorry, kiddo, Nicole thought as she finished her work, I’m afraid I’m all you’ve got.

  She put a bolt in her teeth, and centered the cross hairs of her scope on the animal’s side. She had no illusions about this shot, it was basically to catch the beast’s attention. She pulled the trigger.

  With a roiling cry that was as fearsome as its appearance, the p’m’taie wheeled away from the Hal. It was faster than Nicole had expected but how fast became brutally apparent when it lashed out suddenly with both hind legs, breaking the woman’s spear in two and catching her full in the chest to hurl her back against the wall of the ravine. She went down like someone body-slammed by a truck, and Nicole flicked both switches on her lamp.

  Instantly the ravine was flooded with million-candlepower blue-white light. At the same time a piercing siren savaged what remained of the predawn stillness. As if that wasn’t enough, Nicole knew that “Mayday” transponder signals would be flashing on at least a score of receivers—and for once she was sincerely thankful for her special status among the Hal. All she had to do now was survive until rescue arrived.

  She stayed in the shadows behind the beam, scooting sideways along the lip of the ravine while the p’m’taie shook its massive head and blinked disturbingly large and aware eyes to try to restore its vision. A head-on shot was useless, the beast was too heavily protected by folds of leathery skin that were the functional equivalent of armor. Her bow didn’t have force enough to punch its bolt through its skull.

  The p’m’taie went for the lamp, the sheer power of its forward momentum sufficient to drive it almost all the way up the slope of the ravine. It tried to leap but here its strength and size turned into a liability; so much dirt had been churned up that the beast couldn’t find decent footing. Again and again, it hurled itself at the wall—Nicole assumed it was trying to uproot the tree or shake the lamp loose—but she’d fastened it more securely than that. From its actions, she also deduced that the siren was causing the beast more annoyance than the light.

  It turned back toward the fallen Hal, still crumpled across the way, and made a deliberate show of preparing to charge. Too deliberate a pause, too much of a display, it was daring her t
o respond and letting her know the full price if she didn’t.

  When it made its move, Nicole put her second bolt into the p’m’taie’s thigh, as close to the joint as she could place it. The beast stumbled, as though that leg had been lassoed out from under it. She took off herself as soon as she fired, scuttling back the way she came, so that when it went for where she’d been she had another clear shot at its flank. That bolt went into the hip hollow where hind leg joined the torso.

  She hadn’t counted on the p’m’taie’s terrifying speed. From a standing start, it wheeled and leapt, and only a reflexive panic spasm backward—a reaction that would have done a startled kitten proud—saved Nicole as it crashed onto the lip of the ridge where she’d been hiding.

  It howled its fury and frustration, forelegs holding it in place while its rear hoofs tried to find sufficient purchase to kick it all the way over the top. Nicole had no illusions about her fate if it was successful, and for a moment was tempted to run. No sense wasting an arrow with a head shot, that would only make the creature madder.

  Then, suddenly, it tumbled backward. She scrambled forward—aware of the risk she was running but also just as positive the beast wasn’t faking—as it toppled off-balance, onto its side, onto its back. She fired without consciously aiming, a bolt to the lower belly, but it recovered its feet before she could nock another arrow. Common sense demanded that she withdraw to the cover of the trees and cede the beast the next move, but she couldn’t take the risk it would go for the fallen Hal. It wasn’t moving as easily as before, as it took a stance facing her, and she wondered if her second shot had done some damage. She took a few steps along the lip of the ravine, and the p’m’taie did a little crab step to keep its head towards her. She went back the other direction; it did the same. Its head was down, its lungs working like some giant bellows, each exhalation making little depressions in the earth beneath its lowered nostrils.