by Sara King
“We saw those!” the man cried. “Multiple holes dug out and filled with their ovulations.”
“Really?” Sam said, lowering his voice nervously. “There were more than one? We’ll have to be careful harvesting the pod clusters from their dens.”
“Why’s that?” the man asked. Rat, too, was curious. Though she was by far not an expert, she for some reason had never thought of chickens as having ‘dens.’
Concern lined his face when Sam said, “I thought you’d found an isolated breeding pair, but you’re describing a brooding territory. The males congregate to fight for supremacy and the dominant ones grow much larger than the females—about the size of a large hippopotamus—and are incredibly protective of the brooding females, and if there were several herds of young gestating nearby, the dominant male will become more agitated and aggressive and will attempt to spit their venom at us if we enter their mating-zone. You know the Efrit, right? Like that.”
The man actually slowed a little, looking wary. “A neurotoxin?”
“It’s actually very similar to the one that the Efrit hivespinners can release in their death throes, except these can be aimed. It’s the same chemical compounds, too. Scientists found it utterly fascinating that it evolved for similar purposes on planets that are thousands of light-years apart.”
“I see,” the man said, looking down at his hands uncomfortably. He wiped them on his pants.
“Obviously it doesn’t work on Humans, though,” Sam said, waving his hand dismissively. “Only aliens. Before Judgement, those ailo scientists were actually looking into the potential of breeding chicken to harvest the male venom for pharmaceutical and military purposes, but they were having trouble buying the patents from Earth’s government, since chicken was developed by the Hershey Company and is therefore corporate property. Lawsuit went through the Regency and everything. I hear the Ooreiki wanted it bad, since the Huouyt are so susceptible to it. The venom has a ninety-percent kill rate just from contact.”
Rat rolled her eyes. Again Sam had launched into another over-her-head discussion about some inane subject she didn’t care or know anything about. Chicken farming was such a twentieth-century profession, anyway. The only ones who still knew anything about it were the ones who had run the machines in the artisanal foods farms. Hell, she had thought that they called unborn chickens eggs but that just went to show how much she really didn’t understand about her own homeworld.
The man, however, seemed to understand Sam’s ramblings without an issue. “Perhaps we should let Rat go first,” the man said. “A creature that dangerous… I’d feel better to have someone with a gun leading us.”
“Sure you would,” Sam snorted. “Rat, shoot him.”
Rat, who was busy looking over her shoulder, seeking out the movement behind a shadowy tree trunk behind them, frowned when his words registered and turned back to face them. “Huh?”
Sam gave her a stunned look. “You mean you didn’t…?”
The man chopped out with his foot and knocked Sam off his feet, hard onto his back. A moment later, the man had pulled a gun from the heavy folds of his coat, and was pointing it at Rat. “Mekkval said you had something special we could use. Obviously, he was lying, or you wouldn’t be in this situation. The hybrid furg, though, that we can use.” Then he started to pull the trigger.
By reflex, Rat made a gloved fist, at the same time depressing the obscure pressure point with a thumb. The concussive blast that hit the Huouyt made the charge go wide, but barely. Rat rolled and came up shooting.
But the Huouyt was already moving, getting behind a tree, pushing her to get her back to—
Even as her guts twisted ominously, Rat lunged backwards into the forest, allowing the Huouyt’s shot to fly past her.
Two of them, Rat thought, keeping track. She was not in a good fighting position, the small trees providing scant cover, and they were almost in a position to flank her. She prayed to the Mothers, yanked a thumb-sized slicer sticky-boom from the collection on her arm, and hurled it into the forest after the first one, hoping the tree the Huouyt was using as cover could double as a distraction.
Electric pink energy laced with currents of white blasted the area of impact, knocking down trees in a forty-dig swath as the white arcs lanced through them. The Huouyt screamed—the slicer arcs had unfortunately missed him—but his entire body was laced with fist-sized splinters of tree-trunk.
But Rat didn’t have time to follow up on it because the same tree that had peppered him was now crashing down towards her. She dove through the undergrowth, breaking branches as she rolled, tearing herself up and back into a run. As the smoke from the explosion cleared, she was in a better firing position for the first one, who was now thoroughly distracted with the arm-length splinters he was trying to pull from his body. She put two shots in its head and was about to put another in its chest when a plasma round hit the tree an inch from her left eye. Rat had a startled moment where she watched the bark disintegrate, sure that her own face was about to dissolve with it, then instinct kicked in and she ducked aside just as a second one went for her head. Beside her, the tree started to lean and fall, and Rat lunged backwards to get out of the way, her senses going ballistic as she realized she had just exposed herself to the first Huouyt.
When she looked up again, however, the first Huouyt was gone. Unfortunately, she didn’t have time to think about that because the second Huouyt was shooting at her again. She yanked another sticky-boom off her bandolier and hurled it in that direction. It was a sour smoker, this time, and she used the instant, opaque wall to get into a different position even as the Huouyt trapped inside screamed and tried to claw his way out of the acid fumes.
Meanwhile, somewhere on the smoke-covered ground behind her, Sam was screaming, too.
Feeling a little bad that she’d unintentionally hit Sam, Rat nonetheless used the distraction to change positions, then hunkered down, waiting. When the Huouyt stood up, damaged skin sloughing off, she put three shots through him and he slumped back to the ground to stay.
Behind her, Sam was limping closer to her, blubbering, holding his boil-covered hands out in front of him.
“Stay back, Sam,” Rat growled.
“My skin,” Sam babbled.
“It’s acid, yes,” Rat snapped. “We’ll take care of it later. Get your head down.” He probably had it in his lungs because the dumbass would have been sucking in breaths to scream, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it right now. She chanced a glance back at him again.
Sam had lowered himself into a crouch, but he was still dragging himself towards her, leaning heavily on a splintered branch he had acquired along the way.
“I said stay back,” Rat growled.
“Okay!” Sam cried, stopping. A moment later, the first Huouyt was shooting at her again, having sloughed off the plasma-damaged head—not many Huouyt who knew what they were doing actually put their brains and zora inside a pattern’s head, for it was an obvious place for a sniper hit—firing at her with just a couple eyes having been forged into the pattern of his victim’s neck in a rush.
But the glimpse of the emerging Human eyes where an Adam’s apple should have been gave Rat goosebumps all over. The usual Huouyt draftees that filled the Congressional ranks did not have the kind of training or discipline to create eyes that complex and that quickly outside of pattern, especially not wounded. Seeing it, she had no question in her mind that she was dealing with assassins. Good ones.
Knowing that, Rat swiveled, trained the gun on Sam’s forehead, and said, “Age old question. Which came first?”
Sam blinked. “The guy you just shot, I think…”
Rat shot him. Then she shot him four more times, because, headless, he yanked a laser knife from his clothing and was reaching for her with it. A half-dissolved zora spilled out of the wound in his abdomen, red and wormy in the smoky sunlight. He was wearing Sam’s shorts, T-shirt, and sandals.
Which meant Sam was probab
ly dead.
That knowledge hardened something within Rat. She had been struggling with the need to kill him, but now that he was dead, the sense of loss was hitting her much harder than she would have expected.
The first Huouyt had started firing again, so Rat found another slicer sticky, yanked it free, and hurled it at her opponent. She had only landed on Earth with twelve of each to last her the rest of her life, so instead of following it up with a sour sticky, like she would have preferred, she sprayed the area with plasma, knowing that plasma rounds would be infinitely easier to acquire in the future.
She must have hit something, because she heard something slump to the ground. As she maneuvered to get a better look, out of range of the cut trees that were only then starting to fall, she saw that one of the arcs had simply bisected the Huouyt through his chest, effectively cutting his zora in half. A tree fell on the truncated lower body, and the corpse didn’t even twitch.
Three down, Rat thought, wondering how many more there were.
“Rat!” Sam screamed from somewhere ahead, moving fast. “Tueeesdaaaaayy!”
Rat felt a startled pang of fear, then broke into a jog, trying to keep as low and fast as she could, without giving any potential onlookers a good shot.
She got close enough to see an un-patterned Huouyt hauling a totally naked Sam through the woods on the end of a cord around his tied hands, then his captor swiveled and started shooting at her. As Rat was ducking out of the way, Sam tried to pull his rope loose, but only succeeded in getting the Huouyt’s rifle butt to his face. Sam went down in a pile, whimpering, and the Huouyt went back to trying to figure out where she’d gone in his instant of distraction.
This would have been an excellent time for a sticky, but Rat was about ninety percent sure that was the real Sam, and she didn’t want to risk losing him from proximity to the blast.
And, while Sam was exposed, the Huouyt was hiding behind a fallen tree, using the root bundle as cover.
“You were given a mission!” the Huouyt called from behind the bundle. “You failed! Mekkval trusted you, and you betrayed him. We are only trying to finish the job!”
Feeling a pang of guilt, Rat nonetheless resisted the urge to reply back. If there was anything she had learned in her fight on Eeloir, when Huouyt got talkative, they were usually trying to outmaneuver their opponents. Thus, instead of watching the one behind the rootball, Rat started watching the forest around her, listening. She was relatively sure he was the last of his team, since the Huouyt usually worked in fours—four seemed to be the biggest number of Huouyt that could work together without killing each other more than twenty percent of the time—but Rat was cautious by nature.
Thus, she was in a position to see the shrubbery tremble as something crept up behind her while the Huouyt tried to distract her with a monologue. She caught the barest ripple of a Jikaln in camouflage before it stopped moving and vanished again.
Five of them, Rat thought, getting goosebumps as she started moving along a fallen log to her left, keeping a screen of leafy bushes between them. The last time she’d gone up against five Huouyt, the Va’gan Triad had taken exception to the fact that Mekkval had hired a team of non-Va’gans to do his dirty work. It had been one of the many times that her intuition had kept her alive where she should have died.
For five Huouyt to work together, something big had to be going down, and Rat would have given anything to be able to interrogate them afterwards, to figure out their purpose here. She couldn’t see them expending those kind of resources just to come after Sam—Huouyt hated the idea of giving up their genetics to anyone, and the fact that Slade was a walking, talking Huouyt hybrid had to really piss them off.
Behind her, the un-patterned Huouyt with Sam was still monologuing about duty and honor—two things a Huouyt respected about as much as flake and urine—and probably using Sam’s DNA to take his pattern while she couldn’t see him. Joy.
Still, if she couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see her. Realizing she had an opportunity as long as she could kill the Jikaln-patterned Huouyt in silence, Rat left her little patch of brush and began hunting the hunter.
“The great Rat,” the Huouyt went on. “Failed a mission. Could it be because she fell in love with her target?!”
Rat winced, but kept going in silence. That’s not what had happened. She’d simply been waiting for the right—
Realizing she’d had that exact same thought about a hundred times in the last two weeks, Rat had to come to the startling realization that there wasn’t going to be a right moment, and if she saved Sam from whatever the Huouyt planned to do with him now, then she was still going to have to struggle with that indefinitely.
She hesitated, watching the Huouyt in Jikaln pattern continue to slink towards her previous hiding place, the only evidence of its passing the sliding of brush against its camouflaged body.
They wanted Sam. Badly, it seemed. If she let them have Sam, then it solved her dilemma.
It would also remove the one man from her life that it seemed she actually got along with on a personal level, as crazy and convoluted as their relationship was. Rat hesitated, trying to imagine surviving the apocalypse without the self-proclaimed Tesla of the Congressional Era.
It wasn’t, she realized, going to happen. Not because she needed Sam to survive, but because surviving without Sam wasn’t going to have any appeal—as old as she was, as seasoned in war, death, and killing things, Sam brought a whole new perspective to the table that was unexpected and…fun.
The idea of going back to that one-dimensional existence no longer had the allure that it once did.
With that in mind, she circled around to the Jikaln-patterned Huouyt’s back and, despite the fact going into hand-to-hand combat with a Jikaln was about the same as trying to kill a tiger with a knife, Rat knew she needed to get some answers.
And to get answers, she needed to take prisoners…
#
Slade lifted his head at the odd sound in the brush, almost like a frog croaking. Above him, the Huouyt cocked his head, then slowly lowered Slade’s ‘leash’ to the ground in order to pull a second gun. “I have one round left, and I’m going to use it on the abomination if you don’t come out so we can—”
“He’s got two pistols with perpetual charges,” Slade called out to his lady love. “And he’s not going to kill me because he—”
The Huouyt spun to pistol-whip him in the face. Which, even though the Huouyt was in a weaker, non-patterned form with nothing but boneless, semi-aquatic tentacles, hurt. A lot. Slade coughed on blood and spat out a tooth. When he looked up again, the Huouyt had the barrel of one of its guns to his head, its creepy, psychotic, mirror-like eyes totally unreadable. Slade realized, gleefully, that that was what his eyes had to look like, and no wonder the people of the Guild thought he was psychotic and a mind-reader. He giggled.
The Huouyt blinked at him a moment, then growled. “You will remain silent or I will shoot you.”
“If you were going to shoot me, you would have done it already,” Slade chuckled.
And, for a moment, he thought the Huouyt would shoot him, but then it went back to trying to find Rat. For a Huouyt, it looked…frantic.
“You’re the last one left, aren’t you?” Slade asked.
“Shut up.”
“I mean, I’m sure there’s some still left in the camp,” Slade went on, “but she already took out all four of your ambush-buddies, leaving just you.”
“Shut up.” The Huouyt whipped around and slapped a tentacle to Slade’s arm. Which stung.
When nothing adverse seemed to happen, however, the Huouyt just squinted at that, then frowned at Slade. From the confusion on his face, it was pretty evident that something pretty awful should have happened.
Hallelujah for self-experimentation with Cursed Potions of Blindness and Impotence! Giving the Huouyt a wide grin—because Slade figured that would be the creepiest way to punctuate the Huouyt’s confusion—Slade said, “O
r maybe I’m one of your old Va’gan teachers, giving you your final test, unbeknownst to you.”
The Huouyt’s eyes actually widened momentarily before it said, “You’re not,” and went back to looking for Rat. As it did, it pulled a tiny vial from a pouch on its belt and uncapped it. Then Sam watched in fascination as a wormy red appendage extruded from a slit in its head to swallow the sliver of whatever had been in the vial.
Then, with horrifying quickness—fifteen point seven seconds, by Slade’s estimates—the previously un-patterned Huouyt took the shape of…
No way.
No. Way. Slade found his mouth hanging open, staring at the spitting image of Commander Zero, hero of the apocalypse.
“He just changed into my fucking brother!” Sam shouted into the bushes.
“Damn it!” the Huouyt snapped, spinning on him and slamming the gun into the side of Slade’s head repeatedly, rattling his perfect brain around quite thoroughly before he was done. “Silence!”
Slade thought it was fitting that it was the pattern of his uncouth, thieving thug of a brother trying to damage his brain where no one else had succeeded—the selfish bastard had always been jealous. “So do all Huouyt beat on people when they’re shit scared,” Slade laughed, spitting blood. “Or am I just special?”
Seeing he was getting nowhere, the Huouyt made a disgusted sound and turned to stare out at the forest, giving Slade an excellent profile of his brother’s perfect chin.
Slade got the brain, Joe got the chin. Brains the likes of which Humanity had never seen before had gotten Slade a lifetime of living on the run, fast cash and even faster women, IQ tests, psychological batteries, then eventually prison. And yet, that ridiculously flawless chin had gotten Slade’s useless brother put on every propaganda poster from here to the Old Territory, reverence from every Congie in the Congressional Ground Force, and free food and alcohol wherever he went. Damn that chin. Slade wanted a chin like that. He wondered how his life would have been different if he’d gotten the chin gene as well as the brain gene. Maybe when they got to the lab, Slade could give himself the chin-gene, too. He worried, however, that perhaps they were mutually exclusive…
