Hunted lop-4

by James Alan Gardner

  The warrior charged straight past me, with way too much momentum to stop. If he’d had any experience fighting humans, he would have kept going; but he dropped his lobstery tail as a brake, dragging it along the ground like Mandasars always do when they want to slow down fast. For sure, he intended to swing around and take another grab at me… but I was right behind him now and his tail was close in front of my feet.

  So I ran up his tail and threw myself flat onto his back.

  Mandasar warriors can jump, but not nearly as much as a bucking bronco. Like I said, they’re built wrong for horse tricks — eight legs just can’t hop as wildly as four. I held on just fine by wrapping my arm around his throat in a neck-bar… not tight enough to crush his windpipe, but every time he bounced, my arm dragged across the little sections of carapace that covered his neck. My combat instructors on Troyen said that applying pressure there made the plates of the outer shell grind into the soft flesh beneath, smushing it and pinching it. Apparently you dig into three nerves at once: major nerves that feel fierce stabbing pain but don’t suffer any real damage.

  So I kept my hold jammed in strong while the rest of my body flopped about on the warrior’s back. I got bruises and bumps galore, but from the sound of it, I wasn’t suffering half as much as the kid I was squeezing. He screamed blue murder and scrabbled with his Cheejreth arms trying to pull me off, while his waist pincers clacked sharp and angry, not able to reach any part of me.

  I could smell the battle musk rising thick off his skin: Battle Musk C, the one that smells like strong sweet caramel. It meant he was scared and starting to lose his head. The scent glands for Musk C only kick in when a warrior is feeling desperate — a signal telling his comrades-in-arms he needs help, even if he’s too stubborn to admit it. Lucky for me, there weren’t other warriors around… and the Mandasars back at the dome, the workers and the gentle, would never dream of joining the fight. It would be a horrible insult to this warrior’s honor, the tiniest suggestion that he’d need help from other castes in dealing with an unarmed human.

  After ten seconds of trying to toss me off, the warrior settled down a bit: either trying to think of new tactics, or just not keen on scrunching up his throat anymore. While he considered his next move, I left my one arm in place around his neck, but reached out with the other hand and wrapped it around the end of his snout.

  A Mandasar’s muscles for opening his mouth aren’t very strong — if you hook your thumb on his nose spike and your fingers under his jaw, you can easily hold his mouth shut. Work it right, and you can even press your palm up against his nostrils. You never get a perfect seal, but he still has serious trouble taking in air… especially when he’s panting from trying to buck you off. It’s a good way to impress a sparring partner that you’re in control, but not so life-threatening that he thinks you want to smother him dead.

  Another few seconds of that and the kid under me stopped struggling. He said something out the side of his mouth, but with his jaw held shut, the words were too muffled to understand. I loosened my grip and let him try again.

  "Give," he said.

  "What?" I asked, letting go completely.

  "Give up." He shook his head and snorted to clear his nose. "I." He shook his head again, then sneezed full force, spraying out a hurricane of spit and mucus. "Surrender, I. Yield, I. Grovel I, you stinky hume."

  The warrior flapped one of his Cheejreth arms across the tip of his snout, like wiping his nose on his sleeve. "No fight wanted I but all, save you with nonwords made mock of me." He swung his head around till he could glare me full in the face with his beady black eyes. "What in hot hell means Naizo?"

  10

  SMELLING SOMETHING AWFUL

  I slid off the warrior’s back, making sure to keep clear of his pincers. He didn’t even look in my direction — too busy cleaning his nose with his hands, fussing and blowing and sniffling.

  "Naizo is a short form," I said, then waited for him to finish an especially liquidish round of snorting. "It stands for Nai halabad tajjef su rellid puzo. Have you ever heard that?"

  His whiskers gave an angry flick; for a second I thought he was going to attack. I hopped back fast into a defense position, but he contented himself with a bristly glare. "Contemptible your accent. Twist the words sideways, almost to mockery… yet choose I to think it is mere hume ignorance."

  "How would you say it then?"

  The warrior stared at me a second more, then intoned his own version of Nai halabad tajjef su rellid puzo. He recited it in a deep reverent voice, like he might be saying a prayer… but his pronunciation was halfway between gutterspeak and baby talk. A Mandasar from Troyen would break up laughing at the very sound; either that, or slap the boy on the nose.

  "Um," I said. Which obviously wasn’t the worshipful praise the warrior expected, so I added, "Interesting. Very interesting."

  I shouldn’t have been surprised at the warrior’s horrible accent. The Mandasar children had come to Celestia a whole twenty years ago; back then, this warrior must have been a mere hatchling… baby talk only. On the other hand, a baby wouldn’t know big formal sentences like Nai halabad tajjef su rellid puzo. The warrior must have learned that later on — either from an older Mandasar kid, or from a human who’d picked up the words but not how to pronounce them properly.

  Why didn’t the warrior have a better teacher for his own language? I knew the answer, and it didn’t reflect too well on my own family. If you want the honest truth, the evacuation had been my father’s idea — his pet project, planned and executed by him from start to finish.

  No one had even considered the possibility of getting the kids out till Dad suggested it to Sam. I actually read the message he sent from New Earth. Sam was supposed to take credit for the notion, so she could win brownie points with grateful parents on Troyen… but it was Dad who organized the big navy airlift to ferry youngsters to the nearest safe planet.

  "Just a temporary thing," Sam told me. I was sick in the palace infirmary by then, with a big isolation room all to myself. Humans weren’t supposed to visit unless they wore rubbery orange isolation suits, but Sam never followed the rules. She’d handpicked my doctors and nurses; they let her do whatever she wanted, almost as if she were an honorary queen. So she held my hand like she couldn’t possibly catch Coughing Jaundice herself, and she said, "The evacuation is only for a few weeks. Till I get the situation here back under control. Dad made a lot of important friends when he was a bright young diplomat on Troyen; now he’s keen to keep them happy. If a few Mandasar nobles want to send their kids to safety, Dad’s glad to arrange it."

  Don’t ask me how helping a few friends turned into the full-scale removal of ten million young Mandasars; but things have a way of snowballing. When word gets out rich and powerful people want their kids offplanet, folks who aren’t so well heeled start clamoring for the same thing. Dad refused to take any adults — just a bare minimum of Mandasar nursemaids — but he found a place for every child who was brought to the transport depots.

  When anyone asked who’d look after the kids, Dad promised he was sending "trained caregivers" to Celestia. "What a scam!" my sister had said, rolling her eyes. "People on Celestia will never know what hit them. The thing is, Edward, Celestia is an independent world sitting right in the path of Technocracy expansion. They’re undeveloped and underpopulated, not to mention their environment is nicely compatible with Terran life. Everyone knows the planet is a juicy prize the Technocracy wants to scoop up… and the Celestian government is sweating its tits off, trying to attract nonhuman immigrants to fill up all that inviting empty space."

  Sam laughed. "At this very second, folks on Celestia are congratulating themselves how lucky they are to get ten million Mandasars. Warm bodies to add to the census so they can tell the Technocracy, ‘Hey, you can’t take us over, we’ve got a thriving population here.’ What the Celestians don’t understand is that the ten million kids are going to get twenty million humans to take care of them�
�� courtesy of the High Council of Admirals. Celestia will find itself inundated with Homo sap guardians, and if anyone complains to the League, we’ll say we’re only acting from compassion for the poor wee lobsters."

  "But," I said, "if the kids are only going to Celestia for a few weeks…"

  "When the kids go home," Sam replied, "the baby-sitters will stay. What can Celestia do? It’s one thing to run off a few dozen squatters… but not twenty million. Especially not twenty million cranky pioneers who’ve been waiting impatiently for land of their own. This time next week, Celestia will be a de facto human settlement, answering only to Alexander York, Admiral of the Gold. Colonization by fait accompli."

  So the people supposed to tend the kids weren’t trained caregivers at all; they were a bunch of get-rich-quickers who’d been waiting for colony homes to open up anywhere in frontier space. I guess they had visions of marching down to Celestia and owning the place within a year, while the current nonhuman inhabitants got shunted into reservations and scut jobs. Most of the would-be land-grabbers had no idea how hard they’d have to work to establish any kind of homestead… and they definitely didn’t have a clue how to raise Mandasar hatchlings.

  That wouldn’t have mattered much if the children had really only stayed a few weeks. But then the war broke out full bloom back on Troyen and the Technocracy pronounced a quarantine: Troyen was off-limits, nobody in or out. The kids on Celestia couldn’t go home; they couldn’t even get teachers of their own species, except for the tiny number of Mandasars who’d been offplanet when Troyen fell under blockade.

  I can imagine my dad cursing a blue streak about the situation. He’d taken responsibility for the kids, and now he had no choice but to raise them. Somehow. Even if it cut into the "colonization and settlement fees" he’d collected from those Celestia homesteaders. Worse than that, the Admiralty demanded he educate the Mandasar kids in their own history and geography and all; otherwise, civilians would go crazy, throwing around words like "imperialism" and "oppression" and "cultural genocide." Still cursing, my father put out a call for people who knew anything at all about Troyen, so they could teach Mandasar children about themselves.

  Ten million kids need an awful lot of teachers. Dad couldn’t find nearly enough people who actually knew what they were talking about; up till the war, no one in the Technocracy paid much attention to Troyen. So the kids had had to get by with folks who didn’t know as much about hive culture as they pretended: who’d learned from books or ten-day tourist visits. Twenty years later, all that ignorance showed — I was no Troyen expert, but I’d spent fifteen years there with the diplomatic mission, plus another twenty years watching from the moonbase. I knew the difference between a decent accent, and one that sounded like a toddler with his mouth full of porridge.

  "My name’s Edward," I said, deciding it was safer to speak English rather than Mandasar. "I don’t mean any trouble to you or your hive. It’s just…" I stopped and waved at the evac module, still floating calmly in the canal behind us. "There was trouble with my ship. Up in space. And the escape pod just happened to land here."

  "Am Zeeleepull, I," the warrior answered. Zeeleepull was a Mandasar word meaning "dauntless" and "undefeated" and "stubborn"… a really popular birth name for warriors. He looked glumly at the escape pod for a few seconds, then asked, "More humes will come? Navy humes to find and reclaim you?"

  "I guess so. Maybe."

  The pod’s onboard computer was surely broadcasting "Come and get me" on the fleet’s emergency band. Jacaranda and Starbase Iris might have their hands full dealing with the black ship, but when they got free time they’d send someone to make a pickup. I wondered if they’d bother to search for me; none of Willow’s other evac modules had anyone inside, so the retrieval team might think this one had been empty too. Maybe the retrieval team would just load up the pod and leave, without asking anyone questions.

  I could always hope.

  So far, Zeeleepull and his hive-mates were the only ones who knew I was here. If I got out of sight before other people came out from siesta… and if I could persuade these Mandasar kids not to tell the navy they’d seen me… "Um," I said to Zeeleepull. "Could I maybe talk to your family a minute? Inside, in private somewhere?"

  He gave me a mistrustful look. At least, I think that’s what it was; on Troyen, I’d got the hang of reading Mandasar facial expressions, but I was twenty years out of practice. Zeeleepull stared at me a few more seconds, his breathing all huffy and puffy. Then, he turned away and headed for home, muttering over his shoulder, "Come then, you stinky hume."

  I followed behind him, wondering what he meant. Twice now, he’d called me "stinky"; was that just a sulky-kid insult, or did I really smell bad? Mandasars had tremendously more sensitive noses than humans, but they were also pretty broad-minded when it came to odors. A few things they hated, like the scent of their own race’s blood, but mostly they snuffled around, happy as dogs: interested in all sorts of smells, even ones humans thought were rude. Queen Verity once told me she thought Homo sapiens smelled "delicious"… which was kind of terrifying, coming from an alien the size of an elephant, but it definitely wasn’t "stinky."

  The only stink I could think of was the corpses back on Willow. I’d walked through the lounge often enough; maybe the smell of folks rotting had soaked into my clothes.

  As usual, I was wrong.

  Zeeleepull’s hive-mates didn’t look happy to meet me, but at least they showed good manners. "Hello, good day, good afternoon, you’re wet."

  Standoffish politeness was okay. I’d been afraid the Mandasars on Celestia might really be hostile toward humans; otherwise, why had Zeeleepull attacked me on sight? But as far as I could tell, these people just thought I was a nuisance — an unwanted stranger who’d dropped by at lunch.

  Besides Zeeleepull, the hive had four other members: three white workers, Hib Nib Pib (all neuter, of course); and a brown gentle (female) named Counselor. At least that’s how she introduced herself… she must have had a hidden name, but she’d never reveal it to someone she’d just met. The only surprise was how she used an English word for her public title instead of something in her own language. Then again, maybe English was her own language — she spoke it a lot better than Zeeleepull, and immediately took over the conversation.

  "You claim you’re with the navy?" she asked, looking hard at my uniform. It made me realize how bad I must look, all muddy and wet.

  "I had to swim," I said, pointing back to the canal.

  "No," she replied, her whiskers twitching. "You didn’t have to swim. You could have stayed in your capsule till someone came for you."

  "Ahh," the three workers said in unison, as if they were tickled pink by Counselor’s logic. Workers tend to adore gentles the way grandparents adore grandchildren: fond and admiring, but along the lines of, "Oh how clever the little one is." In a hive like this, Hib Nib Pib would do just about anything Counselor asked, but always as if they were indulging the cute little whims of a five-year-old. "You want us to spend twelve hours in the blazing sun, digging up carrots? Well, dear, if that’s what you really think we should do, I guess we could manage." If I were a gentle, it would make me tired and sad and angry — all those people treating me like I was childish and just a bit crazy. But I guess that’s the way gentles expect things to be.

  "I could have stayed in the escape pod," I told Counselor, "but I’ve been out in space for a long time and I felt like breathing fresh air."

  "More air you need even now," Zeeleepull muttered. "Dirty stink on your fingers."

  He made a great show of wiping his nose where I’d put my palm over his snout. All four of his hive-mates immediately poked their muzzles in to sniff me. Mandasars are like that: "You say it smells bad? Really, really bad? Really, really, really bad? Ooo, let me check." Hib and Pib aimed for my armpits while Nib took my crotch — I guess they knew the places where humans usually smelled strongest. Counselor, however, had paid attention to what Zeeleepull act
ually said; she pushed her nose toward my hands. One deep snort, then she jerked her head up and stepped back fast.

  "What is that?" she demanded.

  "Umm." I couldn’t help notice it was my right hand she’d been smelling. The same hand I put around Zeeleepull’s nose.

  The same hand that’d got queen’s venom spilled on it. But the venom was only a tiny dose days ago. I’d taken plenty of showers since then… not to mention bathing in fever sweat while I was sick. Could Counselor really smell venom after all that? Or was it just dirty water and mud, maybe something I’d put my hand into without noticing as I pulled myself onto the canal bank?

  One way to find out: I’d just had a lot fresher dose of venom squish onto my cheeks in the escape pod. "Um," I said, "do you, uhh, smell the same thing on my face?"

  All five Mandasars leaned their muzzles toward me. Their whiskers quivered as they drew nearer, looking nervous and eager, both at once…

  The workers jumped back like I’d whacked them in the snouts. Zeeleepull held his ground but whipped his head away, nearly gouging me with his nose spike by accident. As for Counselor, she just dropped in a dead faint, planting her face into the deep dark soil.

  11

  MEETING THE HIVE

  Fast as I could, I knelt and lifted Counselor out of the dirt. Gentles are the smallest caste of Mandasars; they look frail and fragile in comparison to warriors or workers, but they still weigh as much as a hefty human adult. And they’re all floppy-awkward to pick up.