by Sara King
After ten minutes of no movement, Slade gestured for the others to follow him deeper into the town, then out into the wooded hillside on the far side. Once he was sure he was well out of earshot, Slade lowered the speaker volume and switched on his walkie-talkie again.
“—want to see her again, you’ll give up the experiments. That’s all we want. Just a few vaghi that nobody cares about anyway. A good trade for a Human war hero, no? Or maybe I should start sending you body parts, let you know I’m serious…”
Slade stiffened. He had wondered when the threats would start. Depressing the receiver button, he said, “No need for that. I wouldn’t believe they were hers even if you did. How do I know she’s still alive? Get her to tell me something that only she knows.”
The Huouyt on the other end hesitated. “I don’t trust you two to not give out code words. My friends are already headed west, seeking out the others. If they find them, I’ll have no need of your two rejects and I’ll just kill her.”
Which meant Rat was dead. A Huouyt had to have genetic material to take a pattern. Which meant they needed her corpse. Or her blood.
She can’t be dead, Slade thought stubbornly. I just met her. Granted, the creepy-psychic-lady-with-corny-fake-pirate-eyepatch hadn’t given him an amount of time that Slade would spend with his lady love, just that he would meet her.
Deciding to go with the benefit of the doubt, Slade raised the walkie-talkie back to his face and said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” Silently looking at Mickey, who was frowning, Slade mouthed, No we won’t and shook his head, making a cutting motion with his free hand. Then he went on, “But I want proof she’s alive. Get me proof, then we can talk a trade.”
“Agreed,” the Huouyt said. “I’ll go back to camp and get her.” Which meant, of course, that he would start hunting Slade immediately.
“I’ll keep my radio on,” Slade said. “Ghost out.” He switched his radio off and sighed. Why did this kind of shit happen to him?
“So,” Mickey said reluctantly, “you aren’t giving us up?”
“Don’t be silly,” Slade said. “You’re much too valuable to—” Then he frowned. If the Huouyt didn’t want to kill Mickey, that made him excellent bait. He turned to look the wiry man up and down. Cocking his head at his companion, he said, “Mickey…what do you know about snares?”
Guerilla Warfare
“Make sure you get it tight,” Sam said over the walkie-talkie they had found behind the desk in the hardware store. “We can’t have the knot slip when it tugs him off his feet.”
“Okay, got it,” Mickey said into his end. Then he set it down and went back to work. He was squatting at a noose in front of the propped-open lid of an overturned dumpster, carefully attaching it to a line running to a light-pole out of sight in the alley behind him, when the Huouyt-in-Rat’s-body stepped out of the nearby grocery store, pointed a little penlike device at him, and shot him with it.
There was a thump against his chest, then Mickey’s legs went out from under him and he fell forward, his face lying against the half-tied knot. He let out a startled cry of warning to Twelve-B, but not before she, too, fell, the line she was wrapping around the trigger-stick still in her hands.
The Huouyt snorted and stepped closer. “This was it?” he demanded, nudging the unfinished noose with his foot. “By the halls of Va’ga, I thought this abomination Ghost would be more of a challenge.” Before Mickey could roll away, the Huouyt-in-Rat’s-body smoothly stepped forward and kicked him in the face. “That was for last time, pest.”
On the walkie-talkie, Sam said, “You holding in there, Mickey? Any problems?”
The Huouyt snorted and squatted in front of Mickey. Taking Mickey by the chin, he yanked his head up to peer into his face. “Where’s your friend?” the Huouyt demanded. “What’s he planning? Where does he sleep?”
Mickey whimpered and tried to turn his head away, but the Huouyt easily held him in place. Looking into the killer’s cold gray-green eyes, recognizing him as one of the three that Mickey thought he’d killed, Mickey whined in terror. Sam was right. They weren’t killed with just a few blows to the head. And now they had him. What if they took him back to that ship? What if they just decided to kill them both and get it over with? What if Sam was wrong and all they really wanted was his genetic material?
Mickey’s whine built into the beginnings of a scream.
The Huouyt simply smiled at him. “We made a slight adjustment to the tranquilizer drug. Instead of a few hours of unconsciousness, this time, the goal was incapacitated-but-aware. Easier to interrogate difficult subjects when they don’t have the ability to smash your skull into the side of a spaceship, wouldn’t you say?” Even though they were set in Rat’s face and carried Rat’s gray-green color, the assassin’s cold eyes were alien and inhuman.
Mickey whimpered and squeezed his hands into fists to try and control his terror. He could feel blood from where the Huouyt had kicked him running down his face and dribbling from his chin.
After scanning his face for a moment, his assailant said, “How do you disarm the security system on the lab? And where is the abomination that they call Ghost? The moron carries genetics that do not belong to him.” When Mickey didn’t answer, the Huouyt gave him a patronizing smile, caressed his cheek, then glanced over at Twelve-B. “Very well. I’m sure I could find more interesting topics of conversation. Do you think she needs all of her fingers? Humans have ten, after all.”
When Mickey could only stare back at the monster in horror, the Huouyt’s Human face twisted in a sneer. “Or maybe I’ll just kill you both and take your genetics. Save myself all this effort.” His words were utterly serious, completely without remorse. He pulled a wicked combat blade from his belt and smiled as he said, “How does that sound?” He placed the flat of the knife against Mickey’s neck, in the same place Twelve-B now carried a gruesome scar, and gave him a cruel, utterly merciless stare. Feeling the cold steel against his throat, Mickey started to shake.
“Hey, dumbass,” Sam said, shattering the silence.
In a startling instant, the Huouyt dropped Mickey and lunged up, twisting the knife in his hand to throw it. At the same time, a heavy concrete meridian divider suspended on cables slammed into the Huouyt from behind, knocking the Huouyt over Mickey’s head and into the dumpster, the force of which knocked the dumpster—which was braced from behind—back upright. The lid immediately slammed down and the two concrete concussion-guns affixed to the other side slammed barbed rebar sideways through the lid, pinning the lid shut to the frame of the dumpster. A moment later, the six huge jugs of kerosene, now tilted over from sudden shift in position, began pouring their contents through the carefully-made holes that Sam had bored into them the night before. Then the flares, which had abraded and lit from the closing of the lid, burned away the string holding them in place and fell into the mix.
A moment later, black smoke began churning up through the cracks in the lid and the Huouyt inside began screaming and slamming at the lid.
“Swinging log traps,” Sam said, sticking another piece of gum into his mouth and mashing it between his jaws. “Gotta love ‘em.” Mickey had found a pack of Big Red in the back of the sporting goods store, under the rope racks, and Sam had confiscated it and had been chewing it ever since. “You guys should probably get up,” the big man noted calmly. “Some of the kerosene’s leaking out.”
Both Mickey and Twelve-B, whom their friend had drilled for hours on what to do, sat up and crab-crawled away from the burning dumpster, which had become a pillar of smoke and fire.
“I take it the scale blocked the dart okay?” Sam asked, still watching the dumpster with arms crossed over his big chest, leaning against the wall of the alley.
Mickey nodded, his eyes wide. He had known what Sam planned, but actually seeing it in action left him speechless. For her part, Twelve-B was tugging the dart from her clothes and looking as if she were about to put it in her mouth.
Sam noticed it too,
and quickly went to intercept. “Hold on there, sister,” the big man said, yanking the dart out of her fingers before she could fit it between her lips. “Not food. Definitely not food.”
Twelve-B blinked up at him, then defiantly tugged off her shirt, allowing the kreenit scale to clatter to the ground, crossed her arms over her chest, and glared.
“Oh fine,” Sam said, rolling his creepy eyes. “You earned it.” He held out a stick of gum for her, which she took with a girly squeal—that ended in a gasp of pain. She dropped the gum to the pavement as she put her hand against her abdomen and whimpered.
“Right,” Sam said, giving Mickey a nervous look before hiding it again. In the dumpster, the Huouyt had stopped screaming. Clearing his throat, Sam said, “Well, I think Toasty is pretty much down for the count. What say you we get her to the lab?”
Mickey, who was still stunned at what his friend had done, just nodded. He reached up to touch the place where the Huouyt had kicked him in the face, and his gloved fingers came back with blood.
Sam saw the gesture, then eyed the trashcan with a frown. “On second thought. Let’s just wait here a few more minutes to make sure Mr. Krispy actually faces the prettypretty white light this time. I hear he’s got trouble with that. Smart fucker like him might be waiting for us to leave. Right, Krispy?”
Inside the dumpster, the Huouyt started screaming again. This time, when it started hitting the lid, the rebar bowed.
#
Upon realizing she was dealing with a contingent of Huouyt, most, if not all, of whom were Va’ga-trained, Rat recognized that her priorities had shifted.
She liked Sam. A lot.
She also realized that, to allow sociopathic ashsouls like the Huouyt to take creatures like Efrit-Boy and Stone-Girl and breed them on some unknown planet and train them in the mind-fucking goodness that was Huouyt society, Congress was going to come to a screeching halt a hell of a lot faster than Mekkval feared.
As in, within a couple decades, rather than a Sacred Turn. The Huouyt would pour all of their illicit family resources into collecting and reproducing and brainwashing their experimental Human army, and within the course of a few turns, Congress would crumble.
It was as Mekkval said. She needed to kill the experiments before the Huouyt got to them. If they managed to capture even one, everything could change. Everything.
The first thing she needed to do, though, was destroy the Huouyt ship. Level the playing field, take away their escape route, force them to fight on her terms.
…now she just needed to stay alive long enough to find it.
She had killed two of them, run out of charge, and, had she not brought the gun she’d left with Sam, she would’ve been defenseless when the third one came barreling out of the brush at her patterned as a massive, heavy-limbed Hebbut.
Rat knew there was at least one left, probably a lot more. The walkie-talkie she had dropped on the ground in her scuffle with the Huouyt was gone, and it wasn’t on any of the bodies. Which meant they were going to use it to try and get Sam. Which meant Sam was either going to go jungle-boy and kill a few Huouyt, or Sam was dead.
And, if Sam was dead, Rat needed to make sure that ship never took off. As it was, there was the chance they had discovered the lab itself, which was probably rife with genetic material. If that was the case, the group that had taken off after the mysterious ‘Twelve-A’ and the other experiments, using the Survivors’ Guild as food—Rat had discovered three other bodies on the path out of the valley, their nutrient-rich organs removed—wouldn’t even need the other experiments. She suspected all they really wanted was the telepath.
Telepaths were extremely rare, and could produce all three of the genetic expressions in his offspring. They were so rare, in fact, that they only showed up around three percent of the time if two makers had kids. Less than a quarter of a percent if it was two movers. And Sam had said some eye-opening things about Twelve-A. Not only was the twelve-series several magnitudes stronger than the Human geneticists had ever thought possible, Twelve-A was one of the only telepaths that the scientists of that particular lab had been able to create. The other one was a Ten-F, who had, even as a baby, been ‘touched.’ She had taken to clawing at her own eyes as a toddler, and would have managed to remove them had the scientists not restrained her in leather mittens. According to what Sam had told her, all the telepaths produced up to the eleven-series had experienced serious mental issues. In this particular lab, the eleven series hadn’t even produced a telepath, despite their best attempts. That Twelve-A was apparently completely stable had baffled even the scientists from other labs—and given them all little egghead scientist wet-dreams. He’d been so stable, in fact, that at first they had thought he wasn’t a telepath at all, but something else entirely.
Thus, if the Huouyt had penetrated the lab, which Rat was pretty sure they had, they would’ve known that the ‘minder’ they wanted was Twelve-A, not Ten-F. Which meant Twelve-A needed to die.
But not before she destroyed the ship that would take these bastards to the stars. Wherever it was, it was going to be underwater. Huouyt were ancestrally aquatic, and it would be the best way for them to avoid patrol bots. Which was annoying. Really annoying. Rat hated—hated—to swim. It reminded her too much of Eeloir.
The Huouyt, though, were not stupid. Which meant they would try to stay as inconspicuous as possible, considering they were breaking about ten Congressional laws just by being here. They would be out of sight.
Okay, you ashers, Rat thought, climbing the last few feet up what she guessed was a former recreational hiking-path to the highest peak in the vicinity. Where are you hiding?
The answer, of course, became pretty burning evident when her eyes caught the contours of the creek running up the valley, through the demolished population center, to the reservoir above the town, which was even then sparkling in the sun.
Merciful Ayhi, I hate to swim, Rat thought, grimacing at the clear blue waters of the lake. At least she had one thing working for her. Huouyt were lazy. Not only that, but they all considered themselves innately superior to every other species in Congress, and acted accordingly. They wouldn’t choose the deepest, darkest part of the lake because they would have to swim further to get to land, and because, with their big brains and malleable bodies, they had an invincibility complex.
Which meant they would choose a spot as close to the surface as possible, and probably no more than twenty feet offshore and thirty feet deep. Which made Rat’s job a hell of a lot easier.
Easier… But it was still going to suck.
The Problem with Scalpels
Slade squinted at the nameless coffee shop positioned on an obscure corner of a forgotten road, behind a rusty barbed-wire fence that had been long ago ripped apart by some monstrous force. The CLOSED FOR BUSINESS sign someone had hung across the ‘window’ was peeling in the sun. Behind the window, however, Slade saw no tables, no counters, no espresso machines. Just ominous blackness. Like the tinted black windshield of a government SUV.
“And that’s where you came out of?” Slade asked. He didn’t really need to ask—it was obvious—but Mickey hadn’t said anything in almost an hour and he wanted to set the little guy at ease.
When he turned, Mickey was pale and shaking behind the fancy black leather eye-patch he had taken from the hobby-shop that Twelve-B had insisted on entering on their way out of town. Slade, for his part, was probably similarly pale and shaking, since he’d been carrying the unconscious—and pink boa-wearing—Twelve-B for the better part of three hours, but the hunted look in Mickey’s amethyst eye was enough to make him feel a pang of empathy for the poor kid. He hesitated and looked again at the wide-open exit, trying to imagine what it would have been like to grow up a science experiment.
In a way, Slade had been his parents’ science experiment. Ever since the day he had arranged his building-blocks to spell out ‘Mickey Mouse Rocks’ at the age of sixteen months, he’d been constantly under the limelight
, his every action watched and analyzed, his next feat eagerly anticipated. The camera had always been trained on him at holidays and family get-togethers, and a constant train of strange, pinched-faced, clipboard-bearing visitors wanting to poke and prod and analyze him had forced Slade to learn to put on a smile, to charm and manipulate people he didn’t necessarily like.
He knew, though, that it could never be the same. Seeing Mickey’s face, Slade knew there was fear, there. Lots of buried fear.
Slade had never really feared anything. He knew that was one of his shortcomings, one of the things the criminal psychologists pointed to over and over again to illustrate this point or that, mostly that he was a poster-child for Antisocial Personality Disorder, which Slade objected to strenuously. It wasn’t that he didn’t have fear. It was that it turned him on. Because, by its very nature, fear came from something that was not understood, and Slade had so little that he didn’t understand. The idea that there was something he didn’t know delighted him, and he was so fucking bored most of the time that he delighted in the chance to terrify himself.
He’d tried to explain that to the multiple psychologists that had interviewed him throughout his life, but the small-brained imbeciles had simply added ‘denial’ to his impressive list of diagnoses and left him in his cell to rot.
Besides. Slade had empathy. That was one of the biggest marks of an antisocial prick—no empathy. He had plenty of empathy—just not for rich men, hardened criminals, box-bound scientists, or arrogant, undereducated psychologists. And that’s all the clipboard-toting government morons had really cared about.
