by Sara King
Matt snorted. “Every Friday at Kink Night. Mistress was…” He glanced at Rat. “A lot like her, actually.” To Rat, he conversationally said, “You ever tried flogging him? I can show you a few techniques, if you’d like.”
Rat perked up.
“Get out,” Slade said hastily. “Now.”
Matt frowned. “But what about the position?”
“There is no position,” Slade said. “Out!” He bodily shoved the man outside and told Tyson to escort him back to his campsite with the instructions never to talk to Rat again, on pain of death.
Coming back inside, seeing that Rat was much too interested, Slade cleared his throat uncomfortably and said, “You know what? I’m pretty sure we’re done here. Two more isn’t gonna make a difference. Ten should do it.”
Rat cocked her head. “Do what?”
“You’ll see. Until then, make me something to eat. I’m hungry, slave-wench.” He grabbed his notebook and tossed it to Tyson on his way out of the tent. Seeing the first page, Tyson gave a grunt of interest before Slade was out of hearing range.
“Aside from that chicken,” Rat said, keeping up with him, “which you told us to protect with our lives, there is nothing to eat.” She was still dressed in full combat gear, which annoyed him. Sure, there were Huouyt around, but it was his day, dammit. A little alien inconvenience shouldn’t be allowed to ruin his day…
Making a sound of disgust, Slade said, “Fine. I’ll come up with something. But when I do, you will cook it.” He hesitated. “…right?”
Rat snorted. “What, you’re going to pull food out of your ass, Sam?”
“I’ll think of something,” Slade said. In truth, he had thought of something, but it was going to require the cooperation of a few aliens, and they had been proving rather uncooperative.
Nevertheless, Slade was hungry, and when the Tesla of the Congressional Era was hungry, his headaches—which were already getting worse by the day—became an all-consuming aching throb like something alien was trying to burst out of his head and embrace the world. If Slade had to change the chemical composition of a goddamn tree, he was going to have something to eat by nightfall, the Huouyt and their machinations be damned. “How are we coming on those barrels?”
“Look,” Rat said, getting in front of him and poking him in the chest, “So far today, you have had us collect four barrels, fill them with water in the center of camp, and you just made an ass out of yourself interviewing ten of the hundreds of people in our group, and you only found one Huouyt from one shuttle. You aren’t taking this seriously. There could be dozens—dozens—more out there in camp!”
Slade blinked at her. “That’s what I’m hoping.”
But that only seemed to frustrate her. “This isn’t a game, Sam.” She gestured at the skimmer, which was even then taking up an honored spot at the leaders’ campsite. “That was just a single skimmer off a drop-ship. That’s the kind of standard landing vehicle that comes with ninety-man teams and Dhasha contingents. There are more, Sam. You can’t find dozens of Huouyt that don’t want to be found. You need to start taking this ash seriously.”
“I am taking it seriously,” Slade said, frowning because she had gotten in his way. “And seriously, Rat, if you don’t get out of my way, we won’t be eating tonight.”
Rat gave him a really long look, then simply turned and walked away.
“I’m going to need your help!” Slade called after her.
Rat ignored him and kept going. Sighing deeply, Slade said, “It’s Tuesday!”
She stopped. Then, slowly, she rounded on him and stalked towards him and jammed her finger back into his chest. “This is dangerous. Believe me, I can’t express to you how dangerous a situation we are in right now. I was in a situation like this before, on Eeloir, and they killed everyone in my unit. If we don’t do something, they are going to kill us.”
“Go sit at the fire and sharpen your knife,” Slade said. “We’ll have the Huouyt in a couple hours.”
“How?” Rat demanded. “By sitting on our ass, Sam?!”
“Indeed.” Slade reached into his duffel, grabbed the book on horticulture called Advanced Plant Propagation Techniques, and sat down beside the fire. Opening its pages, he said, “Rat, you ever had an interest in biology?”
#
It was excruciating, sitting there on display in the middle of camp as the sun went down, knowing there were more Huouyt out there, knowing that they would be coming for their haauk in the darkness when their guard was down, and being totally unable to do anything about it.
Sam played a fool’s game. The Huouyt would find any way they could to reclaim their transportation, as a Huouyt’s life always came above its mission. Always. Sam seemed convinced that the Huouyt weren’t going to kill them, but Rat had fought Huouyt before. She knew the moment they realized they were in trouble, Sam, Rat, and Tyson were all dead.
So when Sam sat there, talking about botany and how to clone plants for three hours while her stomach knotted with the same intensity it got when she was sitting in someone else’s rifle sights, Rat started to count down the hours until she could take command of the camp and root the ashers out at the end of a gun.
Then Sam abruptly shut the book and said, “That’s enough time. Tyson? Where’s your stash of beef jerky?”
“Screw you, little man,” Tyson said, chewing on yet another stem of grass. Sam was technically a couple ninths taller, but Tyson had roughly the same body mass as an Ooreiki battlemaster.
“This is important,” Sam whined. “The fate of our—”
“If you say,” Tyson interrupted, “‘the fate of our civilization’ rests on me doing something for you because you planned on it without asking me one more time, I’m going to go into your tent and piss on your pillow.”
Sam blinked, then he said, “The fate of our society rests on you giving me your beef jerky in the next…” He cocked his head and got that funny look he always got when accessing his very annoying brain. “…six minutes.”
Tyson got up, casually tossed the grass aside, and went inside Sam’s tent. They heard the distinct sound of a zipper being pulled, then the patter of urination.
A minute later, Tyson emerged from the tent, zipping up his jeans. “It’s in the bottom of my backpack.”
Sam immediately got up to go retrieve the jerky, but Rat, who had to sleep on that bed, wrinkled her nose. “Seriously, Tyson?”
“Sorry,” he said, shrugging. “But it was satisfying.”
She sighed in disgust, more because she knew exactly how Tyson felt, not because she planned to ever sleep again with Huouyt in the camp. Besides, it wasn’t like the world was somehow bereft of decent bedding nowadays.
“Here,” Sam said, startling her by shoving several packets of jerky into her arms, then several packets into Tyson’s. “Make up nine backpacks full of essentials, like soap and pocket knives and rope and blankets and bottled water and wet wipes. Go to the nine guys I interviewed. Tell them we’re sorry I freaked them out and wasted their time, and that I was actually looking for a Huouyt who is hiding in the ranks somewhere and that for some stupid reason, I thought the best place to hide would be guys with kids. Tell them you know things have been tough, and that you hope this compensates for the crazy shit your leader has been doing lately, and that you’re probably going to kill him in his sleep one of these days if it makes them feel any better. Oh, and make sure you give Les a box of that dried milk. His kid should like that.”
Tyson stared down at his packets of jerky, then up at Sam. “You want me to give my jerky away.” He held up a hand. “No. Wait. You planned to give my jerky away. From the beginning. Your plan depends on it.”
“Yeah,” Sam said, frowning. “Why?”
Tyson punched him, hard, in the face. Then, as the Tesla of the Congressional Era fell on his ass in the dirt, Tyson turned to Rat and said, “Let’s go do this, before I change my mind.”
As they were leaving, Sam said from behind th
em, “Hey, you guys know where my binoculars are?” His voice was muffled from where his hand was covering his bleeding nose again.
“In the tent,” Tyson said. “Saw ‘em when I was taking a leak.”
“Thanks!” Sam cried, immediately getting up and going after them.
“You know,” Tyson said conversationally as they walked, “if that guy wasn’t a walking cure for Judgement, I would have put a bullet between his eyes already.”
“Know how you feel,” Rat said. They did as instructed, raiding the communal ‘depot’ for essentials, then carrying their prizes out into the main group to distribute. By the time they returned to the leaders’ fire on the hill, they found Sam on his stomach on the ridge above camp, watching the Guild members with binoculars.
Before they’d even had a chance to sit down, he said, “Les and Daniel are Huouyt. Go get them. Now. Rat, you take one, Tyson, you take the other. Don’t kill them. Put them in the barrels, dunk ‘em good, then seal them in there.”
Rat frowned down at Sam, who was splayed out on the ground, still naked, his butt almost having something resembling definition as he peered out over the camp, oblivious to his state of undress. Then she realized what he had said, and she felt a lump of unhappiness rise in her throat, thinking of the guy with the baby.
“You just interviewed Les,” she said. “You said he wasn’t a Huouyt.”
“He is now,” Sam said. “Hurry, before he gets out of my sight.”
Frustrated, Rat said, “Fine, Sam, but if we put Les in a barrel and he’s not a Huouyt, you’re the next one to go in a goddamn barrel. For a week.”
“That’s fine,” Sam said, sounding distracted. “Hurry, please.”
Muttering, Rat gave Tyson a look, then went to recruit people to help her subdue a suspected Huouyt. She was generally taking the whole situation less-than-seriously, essentially counting down until it was her day to deal with the problem, when a scream sounded from the other side of camp. Tyson and a group of men were struggling with Daniel. One of Tyson’s men was on the ground, bleeding from a gash in his chest. Another one of them panicked and shot Daniel in the head.
Daniel, spurting blood from his wide-open cranium, didn’t go down, and instead slammed the knife into the neck of the man who had shot him.
Rat saw that, then she turned back to see Les slowly getting to his feet, eyes on Rat and her team.
Rat met his gaze and she knew. It was the fearless look of a psychopath, a predator. And then, almost as if Time itself slowed, Les removed the sling from his chest and tossed it carelessly aside. Rat’s heart felt like something had cut it as the baby within as it hit the ground with a horrifying thud, making a sickly, lifeless whimper before it went still. Then the Huouyt bolted.
“Get that asher!” Rat screamed, reflexively breaking into a run after him.
Though her men were more or less fit, the Huouyt had a decent command over its pattern’s biological processes—in this case, adrenaline—and the two of them quickly outpaced the rest. Even given her conditioning, Rat normally wouldn’t have been able to keep up. But remembering the broken sound the infant had made, that tiny whimper, she couldn’t bring herself to stop. Ahead of her, the Huouyt stumbled, just enough to give her the advantage. She hit him from behind, kneed the gun from his hand when he turned, and then proceeded to kick and stomp him until he stopped trying to stand up.
It took several minutes, but when she was finished, the entire camp was deathly silent around her. Rat wiped sweat and hair from her face, heart still hammering wildly, as she looked at the ring of bystanders that had accumulated around her.
“Get over here!” Rat snapped to her gawking men. “Get a rope around his hands and drag him to the barrels. And whatever you do, don’t touch him.”
Then, panting, she got back to her feet and stumbled back into camp to check on the tiny bundle the Huouyt had dropped.
The little girl was dead, her neck bent at a crooked angle, her big head twisted awkwardly backwards. Seeing that, the slice in Rat’s heart became a festering, open wound.
Rat’s hands were shaking as she pulled her body from its wrappings and held the girl’s still-warm corpse to her chest. She felt some strange agony bubbling up from within, some sense of loss that she had never known before. She closed her eyes against tears, but she saw the baby fall again, heard that horrible sound as it died, knew that if she had done things differently, it would still be alive…
Rat’s entire world had seemed to narrow to the agony within as she lowered the tiny corpse back to the ground. Rat could never have one of her own, and now she was partially responsible for the death of someone else’s. An innocent. A little girl who would never giggle again, never grab her dad’s pinkie and grin because a couple adults that didn’t even know her name had used her as a pawn in one of their violent games. Because of politics the child had nothing to do with, violence and ideas that were incomprehensible to her infant mind, conflicts of opinion that she had no control over, she now lay still and cold on the ground.
It felt like something within Rat died as she stood up over the tiny corpse. A hope she never knew she’d had, now replaced with hardened, crusted ashes. She realized, quite quickly, that she needed to cauterize the inside of that wound with the same balm of death and destruction that she had applied to her daily life for seventy turns. People died. So what if they were smaller than the rest? It felt good for a moment, gave her clarity of mind that allowed her to look down at the tiny form as yet another body in a universe of the dead.
But then the balm sloughed off, dribbling away to once more expose the raw and torn meat underneath, and Rat’s stomach curdled. Her gaze fell once again to the baby’s glassy, unseeing eyes, the way its head was crumpled in the back, the unnaturally twisted neck.
And then, so that the rest of the camp didn’t see her vomit, she hurried to the edge of the firelight, fell to her knees beside someone’s freshly-deposited crap, and puked until what little she’d eaten that day had joined the cold shit on the ground. Then she just stayed there, head down and trembling, fighting for control so, like the Dhasha she had come to serve, no one else would see her weakness.
#
Slade was prepping to make chicken when Rat came stalking up the hill towards him at a fast walk. She stopped just long enough to grab him by the hair and haul him to his feet before she walked him over to a nearby tree and slammed his spine up against its uncomfortably pricky surface.
“You used Les as bait.” Her face was red with rage, fury brightening her eyes until they shone. “He had a baby and you used him. They found his corpse in the woods, you sick flaker!”
Wincing and twisting to keep her from pulling his hair, Slade babbled, “I had to!”
“Tell me,” she snarled, tightening her gloved fist painfully, “why you had to get a man and his infant child killed.”
“Ow!” Slade cried. “It was either a couple guys with kids, today, or it was you, me, and potentially the rest of the camp tomorrow. You were on Eeloir! You know what it’s like. I had to make a decision!”
Rat released him with a disgusted sound. She looked away for a moment, shaking her head, then turned back with a scowl. “How did you know which ones?” she demanded. “You like your brother? You sense Huouyt or something?”
Slade snorted. “That’s bogus. Nobody can do that.”
Rat narrowed her eyes and leaned forward until their noses were almost touching. “Don’t you dare try to tell me what’s possible or not. I’m tired of wasting the impulses of my auditory nerves on a planetside scumbag being wrong.”
Slade quickly cleared his throat. “They ate the jerky,” he said.
Rat glared, but gave him space again. “They all ate the jerky.”
“True,” Slade said, “but not before they gave some to their kids. Daniel scarfed the jerky as soon as he saw it in the bottom of the sack and Les drank the milk we sent for his infant like his own life depended on it. They never even offered it to their
kids. I was watching.”
Rat watched him for a long time, then just looked away. Her gaze stopped on the barrels, which had been deathly silent for hours. “I want to interrogate them. See why they’re here.”
Slade, who thought it was obvious why they were here, humored her anyway because he’d watched her put down a Huouyt with her feet. “You’ve got…” He did a mental calculation. “Thirty-two minutes. But you can’t open the barrel and you can’t touch them.”
Rat scowled at him. “I’ll just interrogate them at my leisure on Wednesday.”
Slade winced, knowing how difficult that would be, but he didn’t try telling her because she might try to ruin his plans. “Okay, sure, that works.”
Rat gave him another long look, then shook her head and, grabbing her big rifle, said, “I’m going to go watch the camp. If there was one skimmer, there’s probably more somewhere.”
“Sounds like a great idea!” Slade called after her. “Can you send Tyson over here when you go?”
Rat said nothing, but she must have heard him, because Tyson came trotting up the hill a few minutes later. “What’s up, boss?” he said.
“I’m about to make chickens,” Slade said. “I need your help.”
Tyson’s face immediately scrunched. “No, man. I saw where those things came from and—”
“Quick, before Rat gets back, I’ll need you to use your second-favorite gun with essentially the precision of a laser scalpel, because I am without a laser scalpel and I’m not as strong as you nor as accurate as you. Do you understand?”
Tyson hesitated. “You need a rifle to make chicken?”
“Hopefully it’s going to be several chickens,” Slade said. “Though I may have to refine the technique over a few test cases.”
“With a rifle,” Tyson said.
“Yes, Tyson, with a rifle,” Slade said, getting frustrated. He was running out of time until Wednesday, and he knew Rat would try to grind her big booted foot all over his plans if she knew. She was…weird like that. “Now go get your gun and hurry!” He glanced down over the hill to locate Rat, who was sitting on a small rise amidst some bushes, using the tentative cover to observe the camp below. “Come on, come on. I’m hoping to get one, maybe two dozen out of this.”
