by Sara King
But the experiments are different, Rat reminded herself. They had killed entire battalions of Dhasha and exposed Huouyt in pattern, on public wave. The two biggest strengths of the two most powerful species in Congress and the Human experiments had executed them as effortlessly as crushing fleas, for all to see.
But then, was that truly bad? Weren’t the Dhasha and the Huouyt too powerful, tearing Congress apart in their struggles for power?
As she contemplated that, Sam slowly flipped through the pages of the hydroponics book, absorbing every diagram, every line of text. While all the other denizens of the camp were off playing cards or having sex, Sam was studying. Which told her that, under Sam’s cavalier mask of airheaded indifference, he understood his responsibility to those he led. He understood the gravity of their situation and was desperately trying to distract them all from the harrowing details of how they were going to survive Judgement. Seeing the lines of concentration on his face, the total focus, Rat suddenly understood he did enough worrying for all of them.
He would, Rat knew, remember everything he read perfectly until the day he died. Every step, every tip, every detailed instruction. Within his brain was the salvation of the Human race.
But would he actually use it to save them?
…or did he have something else in mind?
#
Ugh. Hydroponics. Not only was the subject boring, but it was too simple. In three minutes of interested thought—though Slade admittedly would have found it difficult to dredge up three minutes of interest about plants—he could have guessed the remedial content that the drooling furg of a PhD had written as if it was the Holy Grail of agriculture.
Slade got only a chapter and a half before he tossed the book into the fire, deciding it was worth more to him as BTUs than reading material. If, he decided, he needed to know sensitive pH requirements of tomatoes, he could deduce it by deconstructing their DNA, not by reading an utterly boring textbook on how to grow a single fruit-bearing plant that he didn’t particularly like to eat anyway. Too squishy, and the seeds were individually coated with slime. How disgusting.
Tyson, who had been lying beside the fire reading a hefty, dog-eared George R. R. Martin classic, raised a brow at the burning pages of tomato mediocrity. “Did you just throw an instruction manual on farming into the fire?”
“Yep,” Slade said, dragging his foot up to his knee to locate and pluck a splinter that had been bothering him for the last day and a half, ever since the Congie had made him run barefoot for complaining about how heavy his boots were.
“Don’t you think we’ll need that?”
“Not if you’ve got me,” Sam said distractedly. He grabbed Tyson’s knife from the apple wedge it was spearing and, eating the apple wedge, started digging at the sole of his foot with its razor tip.
Watching that, Tyson said, “What, not enough pictures?”
“Too remedial,” Slade said.
“Says it was written by a PhD,” Tyson noted.
“Like I said,” Slade replied. He retrieved the splinter, flicked his bounty aside, then stuck the knife back into the apple and went back to his end-of-the-world collection and dug around until he found a book about feeding oneself in the wild, entitled Primitive Hunting Tools and Techniques. He took a moment to bask in its much more manly feel, soaking in the bloody hunting scene on the front cover—a spear-bearing man facing off against sabre toothed cat over a primitive bison carcass. After an hour of reading an herbivore’s vegetarian drivel, Slade was ready for meat. Slade flipped it open and found himself looking at a picture of a leather-clad man swinging a pouch over his head, a caribou grazing nearby. He flipped backward a few pages.
Slings: Not Just for Small Game, the chapter heading read.
Slade raised a brow and started absorbing the fascinating details on how to kill something with a strip of leather and a rock. Not that there was much native wildlife left to kill, now that millions of starving people had taken to the countryside looking for their next meal, but Slade figured it was best to be prepared…
#
Rat was packing her gun away to return to camp, reluctantly coming to the conclusion that she couldn’t kill Humanity’s hope, when Sam had thrown the hydroponics book in the fire. She froze in horror. No, her eyes hadn’t deceived her. Like a petulant child annoyed with a toy, Sam had burned a book that could mean the difference between starvation and survival for an entire civilization. She quickly unpacked her gun again.
That was the last itch. The final, deciding factor in the internal struggle that had been raging within her for the last two weeks was the cold, undeniable fact that Sam really was that selfish. There was no noble inner core working for the betterment of Humanity. There was no deeper purpose, no virtuous goal he was trying to achieve. The moment he came across something useful, he got bored and burned it, then moved on to something infinitely more useless.
Primitive hunting tools? Over hydroponics?! Sam wasn’t interested in rebuilding the world. He was an overeager six-turn child looking to entertain himself in the wreckage of the Human race. The truth was even then smoking in the ashes of his campfire. She dragged her scope back to her eye, uncapped it, and zeroed in on his temple.
“Thanks for finally putting things into perspective for me,” Rat said, glaring at him. She put her finger on the trigger and was beginning to squeeze when she got that wrenching feeling in her gut she always got whenever something Very Wrong was about to happen. Because she’d lived too long not to pay attention—and because it was what had kept her alive—she rolled to the side only a moment before a high-grade plasma round disintegrated the front half of her rifle into a dissipating blue ooze. Rat took only a moment to recognize the familiar sight of evaporating matter only a foot from her face, then dropped her now-useless weapon and rolled backwards, away from the edge of her ridge, towards her pack and all of its various replacement guns.
An instant later, a quick burst of three more AI-targeted plasma rounds slammed into the ground she had just vacated and began to dissolve the earth and plant matter there, following her trail into the heavy cover.
Max! Rat’s panicked mind thought as she got low and scrabbled for another gun. Burn, burn, burn! He found me! Her heart took off like a runaway skimmer as more rounds hit the trees around her, lighting up the night with the bluish fire of plasma, barely missing her body as they were swallowed by the alien foliage.
Pinned down, her cover being assaulted, an inferior weapon in her hands, Rat realized she didn’t stand a chance.
Out of options, she pulled her plasma rifle and fired into the air, hoping someone in camp would recognize it for what it was and send in the cavalry to investigate.
Max
Slade was deep in his research, poring over a section about wooly mammoths and pit traps when Tyson lowered his book to his chest, frowning at the sky on the horizon. “You see that?”
“Yes,” Slade said, frowning at the page. “This mammoth’s trunk is too short to reach the ground. Was this guy an idiot?” He pointed to the diagram of the pachyderm with a snort. “What was it supposed to eat? Birds?”
But Tyson was sitting up, looking at something out in the darkness. “Sam, I think we have visitors.”
“Eh?” Slade forced his attention from the ill-conceived mammoth and glanced up. Out in the darkness of midnight, people were shooting at each other. Immediately he groaned. “Tyson, I’m busy. This chapter could mean the difference between life or death for our entire tribe. If they start shooting at us, then you can interrupt me.” He went back to trying to figure out how to run a mammoth into a trap. That could be useful someday…
“No, look,” Tyson said. “They’re shooting at that bluff. Sam, I think someone’s shooting at Rat.”
“Not interested,” Slade said, ignoring him. Some of the traps in the book were deviously constructed, with skewers facing downward, rather than upward, to make extracting oneself from a pit more or less impossible without helping hands to dig.
“At Rat,” Tyson repeated, grabbing Slade by the wriggling chin-fuzz and yanking his head painfully around. “Didn’t you say she had that Rodemax after her?”
Slade frowned, yet again suffering from Neanderthal-induced segue-shock out of the symphony of his mind as he blinked out at the warzone he didn’t care about. “What about a Rodemax?”
Then he saw the blue flash of plasma fire, then the glowing streaks of return fire, and his mind clicked into focus. He dropped Primitive Hunting Tools and Techniques and stood up with a cry. “Somebody’s shooting at Rat!”
“Should we go after them?” Tyson said, already slapping cartridges into his alarming array of guns.
But Slade was already bolting into the darkness at a run.
“Sam!” Tyson cried behind him. “You want me to call in the troops?!”
Slade leapt a particularly nasty clump of scrub-oak and trampled through the dried grasses on the other side, his combat boots thudding along with the pounding of his heart. All he could think about was his lady love, pinned down in the darkness, terrified and needing help.
In a voice that was even then fading from distance, Tyson called, “Sam, what the hell are you doing, man?!”
“Stay there!” Slade called over his shoulder. “Secure the base! I’ll handle this!” Besides being the best person for the job, he wanted to make sure that he alone was responsible for dragging his lady love back from the abyss of peril and danger, into the sweet rescuing arms of her hero. He could see it now, his triumphant victory over the evil AI gun, his combat boot grinding its lifeless circuits into the dirt, Rat clinging to his sweaty body in gratitude, still chained to some lowlife’s throne, fawning up at him in doe-eyed devotion, sexy brass slut-kini glittering in the firelight. Slade, meanwhile, would take a lesson from his brother and strike a triumphant pose after delivering the killing blow, head held high, massive sword propped on one hip, decked out in strategically-placed ultrasexy plate mail that showed off his huge chest, big bloody dwarven axe stuck in a holster on his back, the enormous crimson-coated crescent blades highlighting his muscular shoulders like the wings of an avenging angel. Yeah, that was a good image. He could even put on those fancy greaves the king gave him to look cool. Less armor class, but more sex appeal. Maybe she’d even give him Fridays, as a bonus.
“Stay here?!” Tyson was almost out of vocal reach—Rat’s forced daily deathmarches were definitely making an improvement. “You’re unarmed! Against a Rodemax!”
Slade actually stumbled a couple of steps as the glorious Dungeons & Dragons scene evaporated in his head. Whoops.
Guns, he reminded himself. Plasma. Huouyt AIs. Government patrol bots.
Slade looked down at himself, dressed in nothing but an industrial-strength thong and combat boots—not super-enchanted, pec-highlighting plate mail—then swallowed and looked at the high-grade plasma that was even then sizzling up and down the slope ahead of him.
Seeing the brutal exchange of supertech weapons, Slade decided he really needed to stop playing D&D with himself in his head when he was bored. At the very least, he needed to get someone else involved. And dice. He needed dice. This random rolling in his highly developed brain was undoubtedly biased somehow. No wonder he kept getting criticals.
“Sam!” Tyson cried. “Slade! Goddamn it, man, it’s dark out there and they’re professionals!”
Professionals. It took Slade a minor moment to realize what Tyson was talking about. When he did, he flinched. Assassins. The real thing. Whereas he had spent the major portion of his geekdom imagining himself a shifty rogue or a beeftank warrior fighting dragons and lopping off heads in spectacular style, they’d actually been doing it.
This could get ugly, Slade realized. Now that he was away from the light of the fire, the cold, moonlit air was making his nipples tighten uncomfortably. His gonads were doing similar uncomfortable things, to the point where he really wouldn’t want Rat to see him like this.
Then again, the girls loved a good hero, plate mail or not, and that brass bikini looked good on her, and if he managed to take care of her Rodemax problem for her, she would owe him another day of the week. Plus, he had heard someone in his flock discussing his blacksmithing hobby from before Judgement. Slade would have to get Rat to model a few things for him…
“Slade!” Tyson shouted, barely audible in the darkness behind him.
“Not now!” Slade shouted back. Slade glanced around the abandoned roadbed where he stood, cataloguing his assets. His massive mental cogs started turning for all of two seconds, then he began stripping off his lady love’s instrument of torture, further exposing his balls to the cold chill of midnight. He put the ass-riding end of the thong into the dirt, stomped on it with a booted foot, and with both hands, ripped the pouch free of its third bungie. Bending just long enough to snatch up three stones from the ditch, he broke into a run again.
“Sam, dammit!” Tyson shouted from behind him.
Slade ignored him and began positioning a stone into the canvas pouch that had only moments before been cupping his balls. Now, according to the enchanted skillbook he had acquired on his last raid of the mages’ guild, all he had to do was make a single rotation with his wrist and let go at the proper time…
#
Rat had repositioned herself into a different firing location and was scouting out Max’s last known whereabouts with her scope when she saw Sam sneaking up the hill towards her enemy. Naked. In one hand, he held his thong. Ruined. Again. In his other hand, he seemed to be holding something small, like a pebble.
Rat realized she was staring, so she quickly flopped back behind cover and tried to process that staring at a tree trunk, instead.
Fact: Sam was brilliant.
Fact: Sam was charging up a hill, alone, with a thong.
Fact: Sam was also insane.
Fact: Sam was probably trying to save her.
Fact: Sam was about to die.
Interested, now, Rat shifted position and found a new vantage point. As she expected, she found the teenage furgling carrying Max pointed in the wrong direction, aiming down over the opposite end of his hill. She couldn’t, however, get a clear shot of anything but his foot and lower calf. She was taking aim at this—she might as well disable the guy’s locomotion, since he had her pinned on the damn ridge with no way down he couldn’t cover with his scope—when she saw Sam ease up out of the bushes about six rods behind the shooter with all the focus and caution of a Dreit stalking its prey. His creepy purple-white eyes were fixed on the back of the would-be assassin’s head, lines of concentration in his ageless face.
As Rat frowned and watched, Sam stretched out his thong, placed whatever was in his hand in the pouch it made, and started gingerly swirling it around, much like he had on his last striptease. After a couple rotations, something fell out of the pouch made by his crotch and Sam immediately fumbled to pick it back up.
“Sam, what the hell?” Rat demanded through the scope. True, the man had been about to die, but now he was obviously trying to save her, and if he died trying to save her, Rat would feel bad for a few minutes. Well, at least a minute. She loved hydroponics…
#
“What was that sound?” the hobgoblin lying on the ground whispered.
“Nothing dangerous,” his enchanted weapon replied. “There is no life-form larger than a lobe within six rods, and no plasma or laser weaponry for half a length, the closest being Rat’s pathetic excuse for rifle over on that hill at exactly two thousand and eleven digs away.”
“No, it sounded like a rock falling.” The hobgoblin tried to look over his shoulder.
“Like I said, slimer, I took that into account. The object was travelling at subsonic speeds and is therefore either a branch falling or a disturbance by local fauna. It is categorically not a threat. Rat is the threat, and if you don’t move to the shooting location I gave you, immediately, she’s going to kill you.”
The Rodemax’s anti-personnel ward, as expected, had a
six-rod area of effect. Gorthrak the Destroyer carefully lowered another stone into the pouch of his +2 industrial-strength giant sling, careful to stay at a distance of six and a half rods. He was taking a -4 to hit due to the sling’s abnormal size, but with his new queen’s unexpected help, he had been rapidly improving his stats the last few weeks, so his to-hit chance was evening out. Gorthrak carefully pulled the sling tight and judged its weight. Lead or adamantine shot would have had a preferable heft, but he’d managed to find diamond-studded mithril in his scavengings of the riverbed, which would have to do.
Carefully, Gorthrak sighted in on the man on the ground, took a steadying breath, and swung the stone hard, in an arc.
The diamond-studded mithril pellet swung wide—way wide—and embedded itself a full foot-deep into tree trunk a few dozen digs from its target, splintering the trunk with an explosion that made the tree shudder and leaves and twigs rain down like hail.
Damn. The Rodemax obviously had some sort of deflection spell worked into the ward. Two shots left. This wasn’t looking good…
On the ground, the guy stopped crawling towards the opposite edge of the bluff. “Dude, did you hear that? Something bounced off a tree over there. What if she’s behind us?”
“I assure you, Rat is still down there. I can see her heat signature. Now keep the furg-loving scope on her or I can’t see what I’m doing.”
“Why should I keep it on her? There’s dirt in the way.”
“I can see through dirt, furg,” the Rodemax said.
“But I thought I heard—”
“Do you want me to shock you again?” the Rodemax demanded.
Ooh, a lightning weapon. Gorthrak had always wanted a lightning weapon. And a Rodemax was a legendary artifact, an object so incredibly rare that just the act of picking it up and living to tell the tale would increase his renown severalfold. Of course, as with all intelligent weapons, there was the potential for a personality conflict, but with Slade, the potential of the weapon’s personality dominating his own wouldn’t be an issue. Even though a Rodemax’s intelligence was at minimum twenty, Slade’s was forty-five. Beyond ancient dragon status. Not an issue.
