by Sara King
All while, the fifth Huouyt stood on the bank with a rifle, watching their backtrail. She could see another Huouyt in the forest, watching that one.
Damn, Rat thought, eying the steepness of the bank at their exit point. They were being more cautious than she’d expected, which meant the ship was probably deeper than she could handle on a single breath.
Damn, damn. Once two of the four Huouyt returned from delivering the bodies to their ship and rejoined the two Huouyt waiting for them at the edge of the lake, the four of them turned and departed back into the forest. Rat watched them go from her higher vantage until they disappeared into the trees, then sat there trying to figure out what the hell she was going to do next.
First off, she decided, she needed a better idea of what she was dealing with.
Rat carefully climbed down to the steep, tree-studded earthen dam and crept out along its crest until she was straddling the center of the dam closest to where the Huouyt had climbed out. She could still see their wet tracks across the jagged boulders heading into the woods. Leaning over the edge of the dam, looking straight down, she couldn’t even see the outline of the ship itself, the water was so deep.
Damn!
Rat knew the chances of finding reliable diving equipment in the town were pretty much nil, not to mention the fact that all Human underwater technologies were generally explosive and released massive clouds of bubbles that, gee, were sure to attract attention from the paranoid psychopaths with guns.
Think, Rat, think! she urged. If they had corpses, they had genetic material. If they had the material, they might have what they needed to make their army, and Twelve-A and his group were only icing on the cake. Which meant the ones on the ship could decide to ditch their friends and leave at any time to go claim their prize, in bigger portions due to the missing members. Huouyt were notorious for that.
She guessed, however, that whoever sent them here had given them explicit instructions to bring back a telepath. After all, from Mekkval’s reports on the labs and the eye-opening things Sam had told her, the telepaths were the Holy Grail of the scientists’ experiments. And Twelve-A…
Well, Twelve-A needed to die, and all trace of him wiped out before irreversible damage was done to the Human gene pool. She didn’t care what Sam said. Something that dangerous could not be allowed to pollute the surviving population.
Still, looking out over the wind-whipped, dark depths of the reservoir, under which her quarry even then had the corpses they’d come for, Rat realized she had other priorities. Like making sure the ones still on the ship didn’t take off.
Think! She had the irritating knowledge that, had Sam been there, he would have calmly told her how to painlessly and efficiently kill all the Huouyt with the most dramatic flair—keeping in mind his love for an audience—all while chewing gum and trying to light a fire with a stick.
Then it struck her. Chemicals. Huouyt were susceptible to chemicals. Household chemicals. Like bleach, ammonia, and oven cleaner. Rat eyed the surface of the lake, trying to decide whether or not she could cart enough chemicals up the hill to actually kill the Huouyt.
Maybe give them an eye-irritant, but not kill them. From the steep slopes of the mountains on either side, she was looking at probably a hundred to two hundred feet of water near the center. Multiply that by three hundred rods across and half a ferlii-length long… Though she wasn’t a math whiz, she knew that it took almost an eighth of a cup of bleach per gallon of water to kill a Huouyt. And she was looking at a lot of gallons. Damn. Besides, that would be no assurance against the Huouyt already on the ship.
Not for the first time, she missed her biosuit. She wouldn’t have to be crouched up here, raking through her brain like a furg if she could simply put on her suit, grab a gun, and go to war. That was what she was good at. Not sitting around trying to pull a miracle out of her ass.
She was so deeply involved in this train of thought that she completely missed the sound of scaly feet on boulders and dirt until a rock the size of her head tumbled over the edge of the earthen dam to splash into the water below, so close it seemed almost directly beneath her. Rat froze and turned as quickly as she dared.
A massive, fifty-rod male kreenit was standing at the edge of the dam only three rods away from where she huddled in the brush, its enormous, taloned feet gripping the boulder-strewn lip of the drop-off in a grinding of stone and monomolecular razors. Its iridescence caught and reflected the sun like it was covered in thousands of moving, swirling gems of every color. It was lifting its head to the wind, sniffing at the air.
Sniffing for her.
Swallowing hard, Rat reached for her rifle as unobtrusively as she could.
The kreenit—which was close enough to simply turn its head on its long neck and grab her—whuffed and shifted on the dam, knocking more torso-sized boulders into the water below.
Ash, Rat’s panicked mind thought, freezing. Ash, ash…
She thought about jumping off the dam and taking her chances with the Huouyt, trying to swim for safety, but then the kreenit saw a small bird in a nearby tree and snapped at it, tearing tree, earth, and rock off the dam, shaking it, and throwing it into the water below. Then it turned, and, swishing its tail in a move that came a hairsbreadth from slapping Rat off the edge of the dam, lazily started down the earth-and-boulder wall towards the opposite mountain slope, stopping every few rods to sniff at the air.
Looking at the huge divot that the kreenit had left in the top of the dam, watching the massive eucalyptus tree roll into the water below and start to sink, tugged downward by the rocks and stones clinging to its rootball, Rat had a sudden moment of clarity. She cocked her head at the kreenit, then at the stone under her feet. Then, frowning, she glanced up at the hilltop behind her, opposite the mountainside the kreenit was headed towards.
The first rule in the Planetary Operations manual, her instructor had barked at her a thousand times, is burn the manual. You always use the materials available to you, be they in the book or not. And kreenit, ancestrally, burrowed for their dinner.
Once she was sure the kreenit was out of earshot, Rat turned and started sprinting across the dam, up the hill.
Rat made it to the other side before the kreenit had left the dam. Settling into a firing stance, she took aim at the membranous tip of the kreenit’s tail and pulled the trigger.
A kreenit’s tail, while in no way a life-threatening place to injure, was very sensitive, more a sensory—and sexual—organ than a method of balance. Which made it the absolute best way to piss a kreenit off, should anyone ever be stupid enough to want to do so. The kreenit screamed and whirled, slicing its claws at the trees, the ground, the air, throwing debris in all directions. With the laser rifle she’d taken from the Huouyt, Rat tracked the kreenit a few rods along the dam—closer to the center—and fired again, setting one of the trees into a sizzling blaze ahead of it. The kreenit bellowed and rushed forward, thrashing at the brush and clawing the tree and stone to pieces, flinging boulders aside like pebbles. Then, switching guns to something with more flair, Rat fired at the ground in front of it, sending charge after charge to explode against the ground in front of the beast’s face.
And, like a fox digging for a mouse, the kreenit started an all-out demolition of the earthen dam, flinging dirt, boulders, rebar, trees, and concrete in all directions as it attempted to root out the cause of its pain. The first trickle of water passed between its gemlike legs as it continued tearing at the hole, obliterating in minutes what it had taken Human beings months to construct.
Fifteen minutes later, the kreenit crawled out of the hole it had made and, huffing and grunting angrily, clattered off along the lakeshore, toward Rat’s hideaway. The damage, however, had been done. What had started as a trickle was beginning to morph into an all-out flood. Water was picking up speed and force as it tore away more earth and stone, widening the hole, making even more of the dam crumble.
Twenty minutes after the kreenit walked away, the
water was rushing out of the dam with enough force that it was tearing away whole boulders, tumbling them out of the dam and down the valley in a roiling, churning brown flood. The roar of the water and rocks washing downstream was almost like a carrier engine, and even from this distance, Rat felt the ground shake. Below her, the water level had already dropped by a foot and the kreenit was stopped at the water’s edge, mud squishing between its scythelike talons as it sniffed at newly-exposed lake bottom.
One foot became six, then twelve, then thirty. The Huouyt ship slowly became visible through the water as more of the reservoir washed away, leaving sucking, brown, clay-like lakebed in its wake. Within two hours, sixty feet of lake had been exposed, and the four Huouyt had come running back, only to stall out when they saw the enormous kreenit snapping fish out of the mud in their path. As they huddled in the brush, quietly discussing what they were going to do, Rat lifted her gun, aimed at the closest Huouyt’s chest, and pulled the trigger.
The Huouyt gave a startled cry, which made the kreenit’s head come up, which made the other Huouyt start firing at it. Which made the kreenit bellow and charge.
Five minutes and four dead Huouyt later, the kreenit was back to digging flopping, suffocating fish out of the mud. Out in the lake, the first silvery curves of a Huouyt ultralight interstellar were beginning to emerge from the water surface. Nearby, a Huouyt surfaced, its big, electric-blue eyes locating the breach in the dam, its back to the kreenit. As Rat hunkered there and watched, it lifted a tiny radio receiver to its mouth as the water continued to recede down the edges of the ship, exposing several feet of gleaming metal. “Merciful dead. Yeah, the dam broke,” it said in Gha’Salaoian Huouyt, its musical voice carrying over the water and mud like she were standing right beside it. “Jenfurgling Humans can’t even build a proper dam. What? No, there’s nobody out here…”
A moment later, strips of Huouyt was being introduced to strips of ship as the kreenit tore them both apart, spraying water and curls of metal in all directions as it mindlessly attacked the vessel, burrowing into its innards and reaching the morsels inside.
Kreenit, Rat had learned on Eeloir, had what some would term as a crude genetic memory. If a beast’s dam or sire had once found food inside an ancient Congressional scouting vessel, for instance, any baby kreenit born afterwards to that line would know that food could be found inside ships. Hence their annoying propensity to gleefully destroy said ships whenever possible, part of why they were so desirable as a punitive measure on planets that Congress didn’t want to see regain its tech.
Once she had stayed long enough to be sure the Huouyt ship was disabled beyond all repair, Rat went looking for Sam.
Braving The Dark
By Slade’s estimates, it was getting close to two o’clock in the afternoon by the time they had two wheel-mounted ‘flashlights’ built. And, by ‘flashlights,’ Slade meant two multi-directional groupings of car-batteries and headlights that he had fastened on the frame of a bike. Mickey, being ninety pounds and scrawny, got to push the skateboard piled with extra batteries. Slade, being a beast, got to push the bike and carry the unconscious chick. Joy.
“How’s it working?” Slade demanded, Twelve-B once again slumped over his shoulders and drooling.
“She’s backing up,” Mickey replied, still sounding nervous about the whole idea. “Sam, are you sure—”
“No, I’m not sure!” Slade cried. “And stop calling me ‘Sam.’ My name is Slade.”
“The Congie called you Sam,” Mickey replied stubbornly.
Slade narrowed his eyes. “Congies aren’t known for their smarts.”
“Well, she sounded pretty sure of herself,” Mickey replied. “Hey, Sam, I think this might work. Ten-F is backing up.”
Fighting irritation, Slade said, “Then either she’s photophobic or she’s very smart and we’re both dead. What about the others?”
Mickey grimaced. “They’re just standing there.”
Slade hesitated. They’d already passed over the ghost’s ‘territory’ and were entering the shady area of the awning. “Uh… Are they hostile?”
“How the hell should I know?” Mickey demanded.
“Because you’re my personal ghost buster,” Slade snapped. “And because you can see them, you dumbass!”
“Yeah,” Mickey said, “I see them. So?”
It took everything Slade had not to beat his head against the handle-bars of his mobile ghost-repellant. Very carefully, he said, “All right, Mickey. Take a good look. Do they have smiles on their faces? Or are they, oh, I dunno, drawing scalpels across their fucking necks?!”
“She had a smile on her face when she was doing that.”
“That’s it.” Slade put out the kickstand on his flashlight, hitched Twelve-B more tightly over his shoulders, turned around, and walked back towards the town.
“Where are you going?!” Mickey cried.
“To the cemetery,” Slade snapped, not slowing.
He could feel Mickey peering at him. “Why?” he called.
“Because,” Slade snapped over his shoulder, “I want Twelve-B to be in a restful spot when she dies.”
An invisible wall sprang up in front of him so suddenly that Slade smashed into it with his nose.
“They’re not glaring,” Mickey said, sounding anxious and guilty. “They’re just watching. They were scared when they died, and they kind of starved to death. Nobody could get them to go outside. They’re all just kind of huddled there in the dark.”
Scowling, refusing to reach up and check his nose for blood, Slade turned and said, “Thank you. Is there anything else you would like to tell me before I take the three of us into a crypt with a scalpel-wielding poltergeist?” He hated being uninformed, and he hated having to rely on other people—stupid people—to give him details he should be able to discover for himself. The first thing he was going to do once this was all said and done, Slade decided, was invent some way to see ghosts, then follow that up with a handy little ectoplasmic vacuum cleaner.
Returning to his bike, Slade none-too-gently slapped back the kickstand and said, “Is she still gone?”
Mickey nodded. “She’s not getting anywhere near the light.”
“All right,” Slade muttered. “Let’s get this over with.” He took a deep breath, then braced himself and led Mickey up through the front door and into the building.
The first thing that his trusty ghost-repellant showed him was a guard booth to one side of what looked like a three-inch-thick bulletproof glass wall that had been shattered completely to hell. The first thing his nose showed him was, farther down the hall, across the scattered glass shards, were dozens of naked bodies. He frowned. “They just didn’t want to go outside?”
A sadness crossed Mickey’s face as he said, “Codgson reviewed the tapes and they were afraid to go outside with Twelve-A.”
“What about Twelve-A?” Slade demanded. “He just left them?”
“He was scared, too.”
“Scared of what?” Slade growled, irritated that he couldn’t see the threats around them.
“The dark,” Mickey said.
“Scared of the dark?!” Slade cried.
“They made them fight in the dark,” Mickey said.
Slade glanced at the open door, which was at most thirty feet from the collapsed bodies. “The exit was right there.”
“There was glass on the floor and they had bare feet.” At Slade’s narrow look, Mickey shrugged. “Most of them weren’t very smart.”
Grunting, Slade started to gingerly push the bike through the hall of bodies. As he did, he got the uncanny feeling he was being watched. His spine prickled. His arms burst out in goosebumps. His heart started to race.
It’s your imagination, Slade thought. Just your imagination.
Mickey, for his part, had gone utterly silent, eyes flickering to odd spots in the hall, his face growing pale and slick with sweat.
“Now would be an excellent time to assure your resid
ent surgeon that a horde of dead people are not about to stab him in the eyes with razor blades,” Slade reminded him.
“They’re not razor-blades,” Mickey said.
Slade’s heart came to a sudden, startled stop. “Scissors?”
“No, I mean, they’re not attacking you,” Mickey managed. “They’re just…looking.”
“How many are there?” Slade demanded, deciding the best way to get through this would be to go into scientist-mode and stop thinking about scalpels.
“Four,” Mickey whispered.
Slade did a quick mental tally of the corpses. Thirty-four experiments, just sprawled on the floor, dead, their bodies withered from starvation and dehydration. “So only some of them turn into ghosts,” Slade said, firmly tugging on his researcher hat.
“Yeah, those that have the balls.”
Those that have the balls… “Huh.” Slade had gone through a morbid fascination with ghosts and mummies and spontaneous combustion as a kid, and he considered all the reports of shades and poltergeists haunting the same lonely stretch of road or filthy alley where they were murdered and he wondered if perhaps there was some sort of mental energy that certain types of the more…gifted…Humans could project—embed??—into their surroundings at and around the time of death. It would make sense, as the ratio of Human deaths vs. ghost reportings had easily been in the 1:300,000 range, but here he was looking at five out of thirty-four. Almost a fifteen percent chance of becoming one of the walking undead…
Plus, there was also the fact that Rat seemed pretty insistent that the Ooreiki temple-world of Poen was chock-full of ancient ghosts that made themselves known to people who were invited to the Ooreiki’s most sacred planet. Which was like, no one. No one except Rat and Slade’s remarkably mediocre brother that some war-deity somewhere had to have taken a liking to because there was just no other way to explain Joe’s survival and subsequent rise to fame.
“You look constipated,” Mickey noted, utterly obliterating his train of thought. “You’ve never seen the balls?”
