by Sara King
“I’ve seen a lot of men die,” she said distractedly, pinpointing the scream as it echoed again across the lowlands. “Down in that gulley.” She hefted her rifle. “Let’s go. We’ll get a better vantage on it while it’s distracted.”
“And not save the damsel in distress?” Sam asked, looking appalled. “Our brave new non-slaving society could always use another damsel in distress.”
Rat frowned at him. “The damsel in distress is going to be dead long before we get there.”
“I say we go help her,” Sam argued. “And it’s Tuesday.”
Rat felt one of her first real pangs of annoyance since she’d taken him up on his crazy interpretation of ka-par. “Since when did you start caring about strangers?”
“Since one stole my heart at the wrong end of a laser rifle,” Sam said.
Rat felt her face redden and she looked up at him, biting her lip. He just grinned back.
“Life is like a top-secret government file,” he said, grinning at her. “You never know what you’re going to get. Hell, she might be one of those experiments you’re looking for.”
Rat grimaced. If Sam hadn’t figured out why she was looking for the experiments yet, he would soon. Which meant that he would know it was also her job to kill him. Which would make things…complicated. “Fine,” she muttered, turning away from the path farther up the mountain. She yanked her gun from her shoulder. “Let’s do this. But you keep quiet and stay behind me.”
Sam, who hadn’t even brought a gun, grinned and bowed. “Of course, milady. By your booted lead, I follow. Even on a Tuesday.”
He can be a charming Jahul when he isn’t crazy, Rat thought, almost wistful. She didn’t want to kill him. She really didn’t want to kill him. In his brain alone, he probably had enough information stored up to re-build all the technology that Humans had lost—and then some.
But there was that damned oath, and her conscience would never let her rest if she betrayed her prince.
Sam grinned, strange electric-blue eyes flashing with amusement. “Why, my lady, I believe you might be having second thoughts about killing me.”
Rat stumbled. Behind her, Sam gestured impatiently. “Go on! Our damsel-in-distress-who-might-actually-be-a-man awaits. We can bargain for my miserable life later.” He gave her a gentle shove to propel her forward.
Reluctantly, casting him a nervous look, Rat led them down into the gulley, following the sound of screaming. The scene they stumbled upon, stepping into the dry creekbed at the bottom, made both Rat and Sam stop in their tracks and stare.
A huge, forty-rod kreenit with an odd limp was repeatedly rushing at a very short, skinny young man in jeans and a T-shirt, who was crouched over a motionless, completely-unclothed young woman. Each time the deformed kreenit got close, however, the animal was picked up and thrown backwards twenty rods—only to start the process over again. The female scream, it turned out, was, indeed, coming from the small, waif-thin lungs of the man—more a dwarf than a man—who was holding one gloved hand up between himself and the kreenit, the other glove-covered hand holding his head…
“I’ll be damned,” Sam said, staring at the man in fascination. “It was a man.”
“Shhh,” Rat hissed, as the kreenit made another assault. The invisible force grabbed it and started slamming its head into the ground, over and over, which only made the kreenit shriek and tear up the riverbed with more fervor.
Seeing the inexplicable force blithely throwing an older kreenit around like a doll, Rat started to get a cold feeling in her gut. Mekkval was right. These…creatures…could not be allowed to exist.
“I knew I should’ve gone for the telekinetics!” Sam cried, watching the kreenit get slammed into a stand of willow, knocking them over in a swath of snapping wood and flashing scales. “That is cool! So much better than blind and impotent!”
“Goddamn it, shut up!” Rat hissed, dragging him down behind a water-rounded boulder with her before he could attract the beast’s attention. “He looks like he’s got things under control. We should get the hell outta here.”
In actuality, the small, wiry man in jeans was trembling all over, covered in sweat, and he looked on the verge of collapse. And kreenit, when worked up into a killing rage, would not stop until their quarry was dead—or they died of exertion. Which would make things easier on her. Less to explain when the two experiments ended up missing.
Sam, however, gave her a flat look. “Go help the poor little guinea-pigs. We can talk about your loyalties to Mekkval later.”
Rat felt icewater enter her veins. Her hands tightened on her gun of their own accord, and her heart started to pound as she looked up at him. For a moment, she just met his eyes, heart thundering like a malfunctioning engine. Finally, she heard herself whisper, “How long have you known?”
“Since Thong Day,” Sam said. “Only reason you’d want to go looking for them over having great sex with me. Now save them, please. We can talk about killing them on Wednesday.”
Glaring at her ka-par slave, Rat turned and watched the scene play out a few more minutes. She watched the wiry man tire, then slump after throwing the kreenit backwards in yet another charge. Promising herself she would, indeed, kill them later, she raised her rifle to follow the kreenit as it pulled itself from the torn and massacred shrubbery. Rat followed its head in her scope, then, when the beast opened its mouth to roar, she hit it in the back of the throat with laser fire. As the kreenit shrieked and started shredding the willow grove, she calmly unhooked a plasma cannon from her belt, leveled it on the thrashing behemoth, and, when it twisted around to annihilate the grove opposite her, fired three shots at the back of its head.
The creature went down in a twitching mass.
Rat stood up and, pulling her combat knife free of its belt-sheath, scowled at Sam. She had a thousand things run through her head, not the least of which was that Sam had just become dangerous, and as such, the smartest thing for her to do would be to ram the knife through his throat and end the conversation. Yet Sam, who undoubtedly knew she was thinking exactly that, just returned her glare with a placid expression.
“We’ll talk about this later,” she finally promised him. Then, leaving her Fearless Leader ensconced safely behind his boulder, Rat jogged up to the twitching behemoth and began cutting away chest-scales.
She needn’t have bothered. The kreenit was dead. She’d always been lucky in that respect. She still peeled the scales away and shot it a couple times in the chest, just to be sure, but then got on the walkie-talkie with Tyson. “We just killed a kreenit,” Rat said, “how you guys holding up there?”
“Haven’t seen anything,” Tyson replied. “Scout teams found a house with some sacks of powdered grain and some canned vegetables in the basement. Joyce has some leftover yeast from that last town. We’re gonna try to craft bread.”
“Sounds good,” Rat said, her mouth watering at the idea. So far, all the ‘bread’ they had found had been moldy, rock-hard and dry, mouse-eaten, or so filled with preservatives that it tasted like cardboard. “We’ll see you soon.” She shoved the walkie-talkie back to the clip on her belt.
“My combat-clad heroine,” Sam said, grinning as he came up to stand beside her. “Nice shot, as always. I take it there’s a sweet spot at the back of their skull?”
Rat grunted.
Sam picked up one of the iridescent, torso-sized chest scales and grunted at its weight. “I still think this would make some wicked armor plating, if we could figure out how to adhere it to—” He hesitated, frowning at one of the kreenit’s legs. Rat, who had noticed it at the same time, froze. From the elbow down, one of the kreenit’s massive front legs appeared to be made out of a grayish stone. It was perfectly formed, right down to each individual scale, and there was no distinguishable spot where the flesh ended and the stone began. The front claws and toes had all busted off in the kreenit’s attack on the foliage, and it appeared to be etched in tooth-marks where the kreenit had tried to chew it off
.
“That,” Sam said, cocking his head at the leg with a frown, “is interesting.”
Rat swallowed and glanced at the two unconscious abominations, even then baking in the direct sunlight. “We should kill them.”
“Are you insane?” Sam demanded, gesturing at the leg. “If they can turn a kreenit’s leg into this, then they can make food.”
Rat, who had been making a completely different mental leap, calculating how many Guild members they could kill if she left them alive, actually had to stop and frown at him. The idea of weapons being able to create sustenance was so completely beyond her realm of thinking that she was once again stunned by how easily Sam could think outside the box.
She glanced at the experiments nervously. Flesh to stone, stone to flesh…it wasn’t, after all, that much of a stretch. Rat, who hadn’t had much to eat in the last couple weeks because, on Wednesdays through Mondays, all four hundred and twelve members of the Survivors’ Guild shared equally what little their advance troops managed to scavenge, felt her stomach twinge in response. Before she could think about it, she blurted, “You think so? Food?”
As soon as she said it, she knew it was a mistake. Sam just crossed his arms over his chest and raised an eyebrow.
“Never mind,” she muttered, face heating again. “We can’t allow them to live.”
“Why the fuck not?”
Because I swore an oath to Mekkval… She remembered the Dhasha, covered in his own shit, replaying the images of his dying nephew over and over again. “Because I have to.”
“Uh-huh,” Sam said. “And once you kill them all, Mekkval’s going to come get you? Take you back to the stars?”
Rat hesitated.
Her reluctance was all the furg needed. “So he plans to leave you here, after you’ve run around doing his errands like a good little monkey.”
She scowled at him. “I swore an oath of fealty to my prince. His nephew was killed by experiments like those.”
“Okay,” Sam said, “let’s just assume that’s true. Why would it matter?”
“My prince wants them dead because even a handful of those abominations could destroy society as we know it.”
Sam gave her a flat look over his crossed arms. His fingers started to tap against his biceps. “Gee.”
A rush of anger made her wipe her blade clean of purple kreenit blood on her pantleg and disgustedly slam it back into its sheath. “An honorless furg like you wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh?” he demanded. “So I haven’t been living up to my word on Wednesdays through Mondays?”
Which only made her madder, because he had. “Listen,” she growled. “We can’t leave them alive to breed because they could take over Congress.”
“So you’re telling me Humans could take over Congress.”
“Yes!” she cried, before she realized his intent.
Sam raised his fuzzy white brow.
“Some of them can control people’s minds,” she blurted, hating the way she felt like she was losing a one-sided argument.
Sam continued to return her gaze with a single, raised eyebrow.
“There would be no freedom!” Rat said, losing her calm. “No rights to choose. They would know everything about you, and would be able to dance you to their tunes like puppets on strings.”
Casually, Sam said, “You realize that one of the times I hacked into the Congressional databases, I found files on experimental mind control?”
Rat froze. She had heard as much in furtive whispers over drinks and had noticed some soldiers behaving…oddly…but she had never managed to confirm its existence before she had begun working for Mekkval.
“It’s now standard equipment for all incoming draftees—in addition to their behavioral modifiers,” Sam said. “If someone misbehaves or speaks out against Congress nowadays, they don’t bother reprimanding them a third time. They just switch on the mind-control chip and have them go insult a Dhasha.”
When Rat couldn’t form an argument against that, Sam shrugged and said, “It’s well-known that Aliphei has a thing against free choice in the citizenry, and Congress tries it once every few thousand years, usually when a Dhasha makes the Tribunal. Your benevolent Prince Mekkval voted for it.”
Fighting a rush of fury that made her want to relieve him of his powder-puff head, Rat said, “You’re lying.”
Sam gave her a long look. “And I’ve also got daisies growing out of my forehead.”
Rat glanced at his forehead, wondering what a ‘daisy’ was.
Sam sighed. “Never mind. I’m not lying, and you know it.” He cocked his head at her. “Besides. Can you imagine how useful they’d be?”
Glancing again at the two unconscious experiments, who had been fighting off a kreenit for at least half an hour, Rat said, “Okay, sure, but what about when we run across a telepath? It’s all the same gene, just varying degrees of recessivity, and the mutated gene doesn’t behave like any gene they’ve ever seen. It is alternatively dominant over normal Humans, alternatively not. Completely unpredictable. Even clones don’t display the same characteristics. We save just one and we’ll be introducing telepathy into the populace, completely untraceable, just like the Ooreiki vkala.”
Sam raised both eyebrows at her in a way that clearly stated she had just shocked the crap out of him.
“What?” she muttered, giving him a wary look.
“Since when does a Congie use a word like ‘recessivity?’”
Flushing, because she hadn’t known the word until she’d gotten on a ship for Earth and been forced to pore over Mekkval’s reports, Rat growled, “Congies aren’t stupid.”
“They aren’t educated, either,” Sam commented.
Face burning, Rat muttered, “I studied the reports on my way here. Something about the gene always being there, and it being a dice-toss as to which one will be expressed, if any at all. About three percent for the minders, twenty percent for the makers, and the rest movers. And it’s dominant over ‘normal’ genes, but no control. No predictability. Which worried the scientists the most. They couldn’t figure out what was happening.”
Sam nodded and said, “Meaning if our dear telekinetic over there survives to have sex with females of the Guild, his progeny still have an excellent chance of becoming a minder or a maker. Yes, I read that. I find it fascinating.”
Rat grimaced. “I don’t. Means that their kids could read my mind.”
“Yes,” Sam said. “And?”
“Nobody’s going to read my mind,” Rat said stubbornly.
Sam glanced at the two unconscious experiments, then turned back to look at her over his crossed arms. “Tell you what. You promise to me, on your honor, that you won’t go shooting yonder meal ticket, and I promise you that, once we find a telepath, if you don’t like him, I’ll help you kill him.”
Rat snorted, thinking of the thought-scrambling necklace that Mekkval had given her. “I don’t need help killing him.”
Sam’s eyes dropped to her necklace. “I took a look at it while you were sleeping. It’s a neat idea, but it’s not going to work. I read the experiment logs, and I’m pretty sure that these guys somehow sense sentience, not just thought-energy. I’m actually shocked Mekkval gave it to you—I’m sure he had access to the same reports. He must’ve been desperate.”
Rat froze, her heart giving a startled thump. She was so stunned by the revelation of just how much Sam had deduced about her and her mission that all she could say was, “Oh?”
“Yeah,” Sam went on, “The test results were very interesting. They can sense a person in another room, but not a machine projecting the same recorded thought waves. Further, brainwashing using projected thought-waves only drives them nuts, whereas it’ll turn most people into mindless slave-zombies. They’ve got something different working in their brains, and the scientists weren’t able to figure it out. None of the experiments responded to brainwashing as expected. It’s almost as if they have a door they can step into and jus
t wait it out.”
Rat was uncomfortably aware of how, over the course of more than two rotations of starvation and loneliness, she was beginning to question the validity of her oath to Mekkval. She had come to understand, first-hand, the fear the Jreet had for both Rakun, the Jreet hell of Solitude, and Morbu, the Jreet hell of Hunger. She knew the pain of Nalum—of being abandoned, lost. With Sam and Tyson and their Guild, she almost felt as if she had a place again. Within their ragged, hungry band, she almost felt as if she had a home.
Rat glanced at the two survivors, then took a deep breath. She would never get a better chance to kill them both, and Sam wouldn’t be able to stop her. Yet his words were disturbing. Had she really been a Congie so long that she forgot to associate herself with Humans? Had she really been abroad for so many turns that she heard that Humans had a chance to win their freedom and she balked?
Then she remembered the eight men who had staked her out to rape her in a lonely grove of oak and her face hardened. Humans, compared to the whole of Congress, were unevolved monsters. Only the Huouyt were as casually cruel.
“I’ll accept, slave,” Rat said. “On your word that, if we come across a telepath and I ever give you the command to kill them all, you will help me do it without question. Even if it’s on a Tuesday.”
Something akin to amusement flickered across Sam’s eyes. He gave her a small nod of acquiescence. “As you wish, Mistress,” he said quietly.
Rat narrowed her eyes at him. Since the very first day, he’d shown absolutely no qualms with calling her Mistress, which meant he was casually lying to her, or he had surrendered to his fate completely, the very first day. She found it impossible to believe it could be the latter, considering his Dobbs genetics and established criminal nature. Deciding it was a good time to make it clear to him that his sly insolence would not be tolerated, she stepped up to him and drove a finger into his breastbone. “I won ka-par,” she growled.
Sam blinked down at her like her comment had come completely out of the blue, then proceeded to eye her as if he expected some sort of trick. “Yes…”
