by Sara King
“You know, you look kind of familiar,” Slade said.
The Huouyt ignored him.
“Kind of like an asshole I once knew.”
No comment from Mr. Cleft.
“She’s out there,” Slade commented. “A rifle-carrying wraith. A demon in black. And she’s gonna put you down.”
The Huouyt in Useless Form twitched, but said nothing.
“I can just imagine what your buddies are going to think when Rat and I walk back to camp unscathed.”
Still peering out at the silent vegetation, the Huouyt with the incredible chin said almost distractedly, “I’ve heard Humans don’t actually need their feet.”
“I wonder how many of your buddies are still back there, waiting for the all-clear to pack up and head back to your ship,” Slade went on. “I’m guessing three. Just enough to watch each others’ backs, but not enough to be a waste of resources.”
“Silence!”
“In fact,” Slade went on, “I’m betting you’re wishing pretty badly right now you’d brought the last three on this doomed mission, aren’t you?” Slade snorted. “But that’s typical Huouyt arrogance for you. Who would’ve thought a Human would be kicking the ass of five Va’gan assassins?”
“You will not distract me,” the Huouyt said, without looking at him. “Stop trying.” He was still scanning the woods ahead of them with the focus of a cat.
“She’s a girl, you know,” Slade said. “You’re getting your ass handed to you by a girl.”
“I swear to the ghosts, if you don’t shut up, I will negate you, regardless of what I promised.”
“So you promised,” Slade said, delighted. “Let’s examine that, shall we? It’s obvious the Huouyt are embroiled in yet another scheme to take over the universe—yawn. So did Mekkval wait a few days to give Rri’jan Ze’laa back his zora, or did he simply restore it once they were back in his chambers?”
The Huouyt twitched, but kept watching the brush.
“Interesting,” Slade said. “So they’re in cahoots. Let me guess—they want to divide the universe into two hemispheres for their respective species and enslave everyone else using the powers of yonder telepath and his loveable telekinetic and telemorphic friends.”
That made the Huouyt turn to look at him.
“So Twelve-A did survive,” Slade said, delighted. “I thought he might be a tricky one to put down, when the time came. How many did he take with him? Twenty? Forty? Probably as many as he could salvage from the Containment wing, am I right?”
The Huouyt cocked its head at him.
“So the Huouyt Nation is here on a secret mission to take back as many experiments as it can find—probably under the guise of collecting the experiments for Mekkval, because he’s the only one who could order the blockade net to open back up for your escape off the planet—and you want to use my superior brain to help you figure out why the cloning isn’t duplicating abilities of the mind as well as the flesh, once you have faked your demise to Mekkval and deposited the experiments in a secret Huouyt lab of your choice.”
“If you open your mouth again, I’m going to kill you,” the Huouyt said.
“Are you sure I’m not one of your old teachers, checking up on you?” Slade said, grinning.
The Huouyt narrowed his eyes, but went back to listening to the forest for signs of Rat’s passage. Interesting, because it meant they really wanted Slade alive. Then a stick snapped somewhere nearby, almost imperceptible, and his brother’s perfect chin swiveled to face it.
“I suppose the real question,” Slade said loudly, “is whether or not Mekkval knows you plan to double-cross him. He’s not stupid, so he must know, which means he has a plan. But then again, the Huouyt know that, so they probably have a strategy to circumvent his plan. Question is who thought the most number of moves out. Personally, I’d put my money on the Dhasha. He’s old enough he’s learned how to bluff with the best of them, and as we’ve already demonstrated here today, the Huouyt are nothing if not arrogant, totally secure in their own superiority over other races, which leads them to miss things—like the fact the girl they came to kill has killed more Huouyt, Dhasha, or other top-tier targets than any other warrior in the universe, even more than my unloveable brother Zero.”
With smooth, psychotic purpose, the Huouyt swiveled and raised his gun to Slade’s forehead.
Then, like an avenging angel in Congie black, his booted barbarianess lunged from the forest only feet from where they’d been sitting and swiveled to kick the gun out of his brother’s perfect football-player’s hand, sending it flying into the brush and scraping the barrel across Slade’s forehead in the process.
“Ow,” Slade said, reaching up and finding blood.
But his plight was already forgotten. The two assassins were engaged in an epic life-or-death struggle that disappointingly wasn’t the choreographed elegance that Slade had come to expect from live-action movies. Instead, they were kicking, elbowing, eye-gouging, and using every facet of their surroundings to their advantage, clumsily hopping over root bundles and fallen logs and flinging distractions of branches and dirt clods at each other with one hand as they desperately tried to get a bead on their opponent with the other…
#
Damn! Rat’s main goal had become trying to keep the Huouyt from touching any part of her body—a deadly proposition, considering who she was dealing with—and she was losing ground. The Huouyt was fast, efficient, deadly… And wearing Zero’s body.
She had to keep reminding herself that she wasn’t actually fighting Zero, but an impostor that somehow had access to Joe’s genetics. Even with that knowledge, however, it unnerved her on a basic, instinctive level. Was Zero working with the Huouyt? Or had they collected his DNA somewhere else, from one of his discarded whiskey glasses, from his corpse? Or had it been the Watcher on Koliinaat? If it was the Watcher, how had they gained access to that kind of information? It would have required a command from the Regency to unlock the genetics files…
All that was twisting frantically through her brain even as she fought the primal fear that she was fighting Zero. If there was one creature in Congress she would have refused as a mission, it was Zero. She had seen him fight, and she knew the two of them were equally matched. Just the body of Zero was giving her enough of a pause to make her clumsy, less confident. Which was, she estimated, exactly what the Huouyt had been aiming for.
And here Rat had actually thought she could take the Huouyt alive.
On Eeloir, Rat had made a pact with herself never to try to take a Huouyt prisoner again, and with every plasma shot that barely missed her face or vitals, she was being reminded of why. They were smart, and they were infinitely harder to kill than a Human.
It was about the same time she had given up on taking the Huouyt alive and had begun desperately trying to regain her control over the situation when Sam, who had been forgotten as the lesser danger, kicked the Huouyt in the Human-patterned knee, and there was a weird pop as he crumpled with a scream. Instincts taking charge, Rat, who was trembling with the struggle to stay one step ahead of the assassin, shot the Huouyt until he stopped twitching.
Then she spun on Sam, aimed her gun at his face, and said, “Age old question. Which came first?”
Sam rolled his eyes and made a disgusted sound. “I told you. Anyone with any basis in science would tell you it was the—”
Rat lifted her gun and glanced in the direction the Huouyt was trying to drag Sam. So they had some sort of working vehicle…
“—chicken,” Sam said.
Rat whipped around and put the gun back to his head before she realized he was grinning. He winked one of his electric blue-white eyes. “Just kidding. Egg all the way, baby.”
“You realize you almost got shot?” Rat cried.
“I couldn’t help it,” Sam said.
And he probably couldn’t, at that.
Sam squinted at her. “Did you really not know I was making shit up about the chickens?” he
demanded. “I mean, I was sure only an alien would get that stuff wrong.”
Reddening, Rat said, “Earth hasn’t been my home for seventy-four turns.” She started cutting him free of his bonds.
Sam just blinked at her as the ropes fell from his wrists. “But the size of a hippopotamus? And spitting venom?”
Rat went back to searching their surroundings. “I don’t know how big a hippopotamus is and I’ve fought things that spat venom a dozen different times on a dozen different planets. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility.”
Sam actually looked at her with what appeared to be a newfound respect. “Huh,” he said. “Guess it’s a good thing I didn’t quiz you about chickens.” Then he glanced around them at the forest. “So he was probably leading us towards his skimmer, since whoever hired him is going to want evidence of death and Huouyt are lazy, so hauling a body long-distance probably wasn’t on his to-do list. If you were a Huouyt, where would you land a skimmer to hunt for us?”
“You’re looking for a spaceship, not a haauk,” Rat informed him. “Huouyt wouldn’t have gotten caught dead on this planet during Judgement, so they had to get on the planet afterwards somehow—probably a high-grade courier, the kind reserved for Regency members or Ooreiki priesthood. That means a spaceship—and we’re probably talking dozens of Huouyt. They’ll have landed in a lake or ocean somewhere. Huouyt are aquatic in their natural form.”
Sam gave her a look like she had just explained, in finite detail, the results of adding two and two. “Obviously.” He waved a hand. “Not so obvious is that they had to walk to get here because they found a goddamn chicken, but only after they figured out I wanted chickens, which means their landing site is somewhere nearby because they’ve been trekking back and forth, which means it’s highly unlikely it’s a spaceship, since there aren’t any large bodies of water nearby and they wouldn’t want to leave it exposed to a kreenit. It also means they want something from us, otherwise we’d probably be dead by now. Therefore, I want to figure out where they put their skimmer and disable it so they can’t escape to their main ship before I capture them all and interrogate them properly.”
Trying not to feel ruffled at what really was obvious, Rat said, “You can’t capture Huouyt. That’s suicide, especially without containment facilities.”
But Sam just waved her off. “I saw some barrels a farmer was using for food storage in that barn a few miles away. That’ll work to hold them.”
Rat frowned. “You want to kill them, I can do it for you.” She was not going to relive Eeloir all over again.
Sam just laughed. “Find me their skimmer. I’ll take care of the rest.”
Rat peered at him a moment, considered telling him that during combat and other war-like activities, she was in charge, but then realized what day it was and really didn’t want to listen to him whine about Tuesday. “Fine. Get behind me. I’ll see if I can find their trail.”
As Rat began searching their surroundings for signs of recent passings, Sam sat down beside his brother’s corpse and started opening its mouth and prying open its eyelids so he could peer into its eyeballs. As if that were not creepy enough, he got out a little pocket knife and started slicing away at the nostrils, revealing the inner workings of the sinuses as she was trying to concentrate on tracking.
“Can you not do that?” Rat asked, finding the weird crunching of bone and sinew as he yanked Zero’s jaw away from his skull incredibly distracting.
“This is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to dissect a Huouyt,” Sam said, not stopping.
“That’s your brother’s body,” Rat insisted. “Have some burning respect.”
“Respect?” Sam snorted, flicking a piece of cartilage aside. “For that self-obsessed boozer? I don’t think so.”
Rat squinted at Sam, yet again presented with the disturbing fact that Sam seemed to have an unhealthy hatred of the brother who had saved his life. “He rescued you from that Congie prison,” Rat growled. “They were going to execute you.”
Sam laughed. “Execute me?” He giggled as if he thought that were funny. “No, they were interviewing me. ‘Hey Ghost, you wanna eat today? What’s wrong with this design?’ ‘Hey Ghost, you need to take a piss? How do you think we could improve this drive system?’ ‘Hey Ghost, you want the lights turned on? Great, ‘cause we’ve got this really cool puzzle for you to work out that has absolutely no basis in reality aside from the fact we’ve been working on the same thing for a thousand years and haven’t come up with a solution…’” He snorted and went back to prying at Zero’s face with a knife.
“Shouldn’t you go get the clothes off another one and get dressed or something?” Rat demanded, more than a little unnerved when he leaned down and started slicing at the roof of his brother’s mouth.
Distractedly, Sam said, “Probably got fleas. The last one I killed had fleas.”
Rat squinted. “The ‘last’ one? Why didn’t you dissect that one?” It was really disturbing to watch him cut away on his brother’s braincase.
“I had to pass its corpse off as a Human and I never got a chance.”
Rat frowned and looked back at him, finally realizing what he had said. “Wait. You killed a Huouyt? You?” That was…not very likely. Especially for a civilian. Even untrained Huouyt were able to take victims’ patterns as easily as changing a skin.
“Don’t sound so surprised,” he chuckled.
“If you never cut him open, how did you even know it was a Huouyt?”
Sam laughed. “Oh, believe me. I knew. It was a Va’gan someone hired to kill me.”
Rat lowered her gun and scowled at him. “These were Va’gan Huouyt. There is no way you killed a Va’gan Huouyt.” He had just proven that in bloody, screaming, whining detail.
Sam ignored her. He had his tongue stuck in the corner of his mouth and was shoving his finger up the hole he had made in his brother’s nasal cavity, presumably feeling for the brain. “The pattern it takes really is genetically identical, isn’t it?” he commented, as if he were examining a carrot. “It’s not just a façade. That’s awesome.” He yanked his finger free and wiped it on the Huouyt’s shirt. “I wonder how they manage it.”
“That red wormy thing in its chest,” Rat said, distractedly. “They use the genetic material of their victim to take his or her form.” She had seen—and killed—enough Huouyt to know that the zora was key to the Huouyt’s transformational abilities.
“Yes,” Sam said, turning his attention to the red wormy appendage that had been partially dissolved by plasma, “but how do they get it out to transform? It looks pretty locked in place.”
“Water,” Rat muttered. “They’ve gotta douse themselves in water to change back.” Then she irritatedly insisted, “Look. Sam. You didn’t kill a Va’gan Huouyt. If you did, they would have sent more until you were dead.”
Sam shrugged. “You kill them with enough authority, they stop trying. Kind of a professional respect thing, I think.”
“And they only sent one,” Rat growled. She didn’t believe it. Not at all.
“Yep.” He got up and went over to the Jikaln’s corpse and nudged the exposed primary stomach with his boot. “Oh lookie. It was eating chicken. Feathers and all.” He said it like he had discovered a gold mine.
Rat came over to look. Indeed, the stomach seemed distended, with a wet mass of reddish feathers oozing from the slit Sam had cut into the white stomach wall. “Why would a Huouyt eat chicken? They’ve got ration packs.”
“My guess is they’ve probably been on the planet longer than they anticipated, and they’re shit-scared of leaving without what they came for,” Sam said. He pulled off the remnants of another Huouyt’s shirt and started carefully piling the bloody feather-mush from the Jikaln onto the garment’s flat center. When he was done, he tied the T-shirt up carefully at the corners, creating a little wet sack of masticated raw chicken.
Rat found herself staring. “Sam?”
“Yes?” he asked, as
if it were the most natural thing in the world to be naked, carrying the contents of a Huouyt’s stomach in a repurposed tee.
“What are you doing?” Rat asked.
“Saving mankind, one chicken at a time,” Sam said. “Does the zora have to be in one place, or can it be moved?”
“It can be wherever the Huouyt wants it to be,” Rat said. “Sam, I am not eating that.”
“You said you were hungry,” Sam said, sounding totally confused. “Chicken is food.”
When she continued to stare at him, he frowned and added, “You like chicken.” His frown deepened and he said, “In fact, you like chicken so much you butchered my entire flock for a few drumsticks.”
She shuddered. “You can eat it. I’ll starve.”
He continued to look perplexed. He glanced at her, then at his sack of chewed chicken parts, then back to her. “Okay,” he said reluctantly, “but maybe you should try it before—”
“No,” Rat said. “Never. I’d rather eat Dhasha flake.”
Sam started to object, but Rat quickly walked away before he could try to convince her to eat the contents of a Huouyt’s stomach because, in her current state of hunger, he might actually manage to do it. “Let’s just get out of here.”
But Sam made her wait as he examined the other four stomachs to ascertain there was no chicken inside. Shuddering, Rat walked ahead to wait.
She found a recently-walked trail, and in a few short minutes, Rat found the Huouyt haauk hidden behind a fence in some Pre-Judgementer’s now-brown and weed-infested backyard. It was a covered 8-person model, with a trunk for storage, obscured with a salvaged tarp from a dead guy’s backyard.
“As long as we don’t take it more than ten feet off the ground,” Sam said, the bloody sack slung over one shoulder, “the patrol bots overhead shouldn’t shoot us down.”
