The Druid Gene

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  He snarled. “That’s naive. We’re out on the edge of nowhere. People don’t live out here unless they’re outlaws. Whoever wants this ship doesn’t have good intentions, Leebska. They’re pirates, even if they represent a local government. If we stay, conditions will only get worse for us—if we survive their assault on the ship.”

  “But Hain is a pirate. The Lovek is a pirate,” she protested.

  “Hain is a biologist. She’s a pet.”

  The deck vibrated under their feet. The sensation built in intensity. There was a loud sound like something large shuttling at high speed through a tube, accompanied by the whine of a giant bottle rocket shooting off. The vibration and sound ceased abruptly. Complete silence followed.

  She gulped. A wave of fear washed over her. Something really weird was going on.

  Raub’s eyes bored into her. “That was the sound of this ship releasing ordnance. The reprisal will be swift. Do you really want to have a conference right now? Or do you want to live?”

  She nodded and let his momentum carry her forward. Whatever this ship had just unleashed—someone else was probably going to shoot back. That wasn’t good. Not good at all. Ships with holes in them leaked air. People couldn’t breathe in vacuum. “Where are we going?”

  He released her arm and took off, not bothering to answer. She watched him lope ahead of her without looking back. She hesitated. She was following a man who had been very close to raping her once. But there was a chance for freedom. She ran after him.

  23

  Raub swiftly moved through the labyrinth of corridors with purpose and stealth, pausing momentarily at every intersection to check for traffic before barreling forward. He clearly knew where he was going. It all looked the same to Darcy. They could be running in circles for all she knew.

  He entered a small hexagonal room with six doors. It was the first place that seemed at all familiar to her. She’d been in a similar room the day that the hymenoptera called Tesserae71 had escorted her to her holding cell in the vast room full of prisoners, but she couldn’t be sure it was the same place. The only light in the room glowed from panels, alight with displays, keypads, and buttons, that bridged the gaps between the exits. Darcy was careful not to bump into anything.

  Raub moved to one of the panels and tapped screens and buttons so rapidly Darcy’s eye could barely follow his movements, much less make any sense of them. That didn’t stop her from trying to. “What are you doing?” she whispered.

  He didn’t reply or even deign to look her way. He was completely absorbed in his task. Was this how one got access to another part of the ship that was normally inaccessible? She furrowed her brow. Were they near the holds where the prisoners were kept? If that was the case, how would Raub have that kind of access? And where were the hymenoptera that normally kept Raub under surveillance?

  The ship rumbled ominously. She reached out an arm instinctively to Raub to steady herself through the quake and flinched away as soon as it stopped. His feet were planted wide in a stable stance. He’d been expecting that. “What was that?” she hissed.

  “A direct hit,” he gritted out in a low voice just as the door next to him slid open. “It’s a shooting match now.” He leaned forward to peer out the opening, then straightened and cursed under his breath. He slapped at a switch that made the door slide shut again.

  “What is it?” she whispered.

  “There’s only one route between here and the berth where the tern I intend to take is racked,” he said, through tight lips.

  A tern was a short-range vehicle, meant for going planetside, as he put it, from high orbit. It could go longer distances, if necessary, but would be insanely slow and inefficient for such tasks.

  He rubbed his hands over his hairy face and tapped some controls. One of the screens lit up, displaying the hallway just outside. He watched it intently.

  Darcy stepped closer so she could see what had him so frustrated. They were near the prisoner hold. The long corridor he wanted to traverse came to a T adjacent to where she’d been held for that brief time before…before the accident. It was also contiguous to the washrooms and toilets that the prisoners were cycled through on schedules. At the moment there were a bunch of prisoners milling around in that hallway with no hymenoptera in sight supervising them. Normally there would be dozens. She couldn’t stop herself from scanning for Adam’s profile among them.

  Standing some distance apart from the others, in the middle of the corridor, limbs loose in a relaxed pose, was Selpis. As Darcy watched, Nembrotha glided around Selpis and came to rest behind her. Nembrotha’s small body flexed and contorted around Selpis’s legs, the stalks on their head stretching out impossibly thin in front of them. Something about the slug’s body language told her they were anxious. Darcy heard shouting, but couldn’t make out words through the closed door.

  Selpis’s gaze swept appraisingly down the hallway toward the door the hid Darcy and Raub. Her large eyes seemed worried—or was that just Darcy’s imagination?

  Beyond Selpis and Nembrotha, at the top of the T, a blur of movement caught Darcy’s attention. A large, hairy creature and a hymenoptera tumbled in a tangle of limbs across the intersection at that end of the corridor.

  Nembrotha and Selpis inched closer to the closed door that she and Raub stood behind as more individuals piled into the fray and the fighting got wilder.

  Raub growled a colorful epithet that Darcy didn’t understand. Before she could ask what they were going to do next, a door behind them opened. Raub whirled and crouched into a fighting stance. A hymenoptera stood there clacking in surprise, a shock stick held loosely in one pincer.

  His mandibles worked. Then he moved around Raub and tapped the control that opened the door leading to the corridor they’d just been watching.

  Darcy gaped at the hymenoptera as he passed and belatedly noticed that he was fuzzy on the top of his head around the simple eyes just above his large compound eyes.

  “He just ignored us. Why would he do that?” Darcy asked.

  “He’s the first to arrive. His primary objective is to subdue the fight and get the prisoners back under control. He just communicated our location to the others who are on the way. They won’t ignore us. We have to move now.” Raub slipped out into the corridor like a coiled cat, ready to pounce.

  Darcy stood in the doorway. She was at a loss. The prisoners before her were doing exactly what she’d begged them to do when she’d tried to rally them around her months before. But the threat of explosive decompression as the ship that housed them went to war with some unseen entity had roused in them a desperation that mere words could never provoke. Maybe the number of guards had been reduced because of the threat outside. Maybe they’d tumbled outside their holding pens when the ship began to rock and vibrate. Whatever the reason, they were fighting for their lives inside while some unknown threat hammered the ship from the outside.

  What made her life more valuable than any of theirs? She was probably going to get away, just by virtue of being in the company of someone as wily and resourceful as Raub who had made this plan in advance. What was their fate going to be?

  Darcy watched as the hymenoptera she was fairly certain was Tesserae71 was overpowered. His shock stick tumbled to the decking and he was brutally pummeled. Her heart wrenched to see him treated so cruelly when he had been the only one to be kind to her. Raub was cutting his way through the mob, which seemed to be growing.

  She reached the edge of the crowd, and was starting to worry about losing sight of Raub, when Selpis nimbly darted in front of her into the throng and emerged with Tesserae71’s mislaid shock stick. Selpis was in the process of concealing the device in her garment when her eyes met Darcy’s.

  “Oh!” she said. She looked astonished to see Darcy there.

  “She’s not dead!” Nembrotha lisped.

  “Not yet,” Darcy said, and strained to see Raub halfway through the crowd, slamming people out of his path left and right as he made his wa
y. His gaze met hers briefly. He looked angry to see she wasn’t right behind him where he’d expected her to be. She needed to catch up to him quickly.

  There were hymenoptera filing into the corridor now from all three directions. She took a step forward, just as a body slid across the floor and slammed into her shins. Her arms shot out, reaching for support before she toppled over.

  Selpis grasped her arm and steadied her. “Are you with him?” she asked, nodding her head toward Raub.

  “I…yes. I am,” Darcy answered.

  Translucent membranes slid partway over Selpis’s eyes, making her look contemplative. “Then we are with you,” she said decisively, and stooped to sweep Nembrotha up in her arms like the hermaphroditic slug was simply a small child, bundled up.

  Darcy looked down. A hymenoptera lay at her feet on his back, all six of his limbs curled protectively toward his midline and around his head. She couldn’t tell how injured he was. She didn’t see any blood, but then she wasn’t sure if he had red blood or something else. “Tesserae71?” she said, leaning over to touch his chitinous shoulder joint.

  The head turned and one of his forelimbs slid down so he could see who was speaking to him. “Yes?” he clacked, so softly she barely heard it over the roars of anger and the sounds of hand-to-hand fighting.

  The deck trembled violently. Someone backed into Tesserae71. He curled up around himself again. Darcy shoved that person away from him before he or she stepped on the injured hymenoptera.

  She looked up. Raub had turned and was coming back for her, his eyes burning with displeasure. He clear-cut a path by battering anyone that got in his way. Beyond him, hymenoptera were beginning to corral the edges of the crowd toward them, shock sticks held out defensively. Angry prisoners were waiting to take them on. She saw a few more prisoners slipping into the hall from the holding room, joining the fray as something rattled the deck under their feet, shuttling through a long tunnel on its way to wreak destruction on the ship’s external foe.

  Darcy held out a hand to Tesserae71. “Let me help you,” she said.

  His jointed foreleg tentatively stretched out to her. She pulled him upright. He skittered a bit and ultimately steadied himself on only five legs, one of his midlegs held at a bad angle against his thorax.

  The crowd surged back into them, giving ground as the hymenoptera pressed from the other side. She would have liked to ask Tesserae71 if there was anything she could do to make him more comfortable, but there wasn’t time. More hymenoptera were coming up on their heels. She needed to get into the crowd before she was rendered unconscious by a shock stick from behind.

  Darcy tensed and found her center. She glanced over one shoulder at Selpis. Selpis had slung Nembrotha over her back and tucked them into her gown. The two tentacles that protruded from the front of Nembrotha’s single foot wrapped around Selpis’s slender neck, and their striated stalks peeked around her head. Selpis nodded.

  Darcy looked back at Tesserae71, expecting him to have distanced himself from her, to be waiting for his brothers to come to his rescue, to fight his tormentors and bring him aid. But he hadn’t. He was close, watching her, waiting, just like Selpis.

  “Leebska!” Raub roared over the noise.

  She pushed forward, ducking between people wherever possible, blocking blows coming from individuals so frenzied with the need for freedom they were fighting everyone in sight in the mad crush. She shoved some out of the way with side kicks, sending them sprawling into each other like bowling pins.

  She quickly realized Selpis was very capable and didn’t need help. Selpis sidestepped blows gracefully, parrying and blocking attacks with equanimity, even lashing out with her tail to sweep people out of the way.

  Tesserae71 was clearly in a lot of pain, and because he was perceived as the enemy, he was more vulnerable. Darcy wasn’t sure why she felt the need to protect him, when he had not done the same for her when she’d begged him to. It was probably foolish, an overcompensation for losing Adam. Or maybe the truth was she just didn’t want to be alone with Raub any longer than she had to be. It didn’t really matter. She had already committed herself to it.

  There wasn’t much room to maneuver. The crowd grew tighter as they were pushed back from both sides, as prisoners on each end of the long corridor began to fall to the wicked tips of shock sticks. A few individuals began to panic, scream, and wail, the futility of their situation sinking in. She knew how they felt. She remembered how painful it had been to just cross the threshold of her cell. To go through that and not make it any farther than the corridor just outside that room would be a bitter pill.

  Darcy thrust herself between two people, just a few feet from Raub, and glanced back to check on Selpis and Tesserae71. A heavy appendage landed hard on her shoulder, claws or talons raking down her back. The neckline of her jumpsuit came up to choke her. She grunted and whirled, raising a knee tight to her body and jackhammering it into her feathered opponent, who tumbled into several other people violently.

  She stood there for a moment, just trying to catch her breath, acutely aware of sweat dripping down the side of her face. Something wet was trickling down her back that she hoped was also sweat, but she knew realistically was probably blood. Everything seemed far away. She blinked and her vision unfocused. Her ears roared with white noise.

  Someone smacked her across the face and she came to with a start. It was Raub. His face hovered inches above hers. “Do not go into shock, Leebska,” he commanded.

  She nodded. It was looking grim. They had nearly waded through all the bodies to the other side of the mob, but that meant that they were closer to the tips of shock sticks as hymenoptera picked their way over the fallen to tap more people into submission. She turned to check on the others behind her.

  “Focus!” Raub bellowed. “Don’t waste your energy on this pless.”

  Darcy ignored him and lunged for Tesserae71. A many-armed beast had him in a choke hold and was attempting to twist his head off. Tesserae71 feebly plucked at the arms that held him, his mandibles working soundlessly. Selpis was watching Darcy closely, and when Darcy pulled at the arms stippled with suckers, Selpis moved to assist.

  “Leave it!” Raub yelled at her.

  “No!” she retorted. “I have an idea. We need him to get out of here!”

  “By Glendara, you will be the death of me, chit!” Raub punched someone in the face with the heel of his palm and slid behind the slippery creature to pry it off the hymenoptera. It was hard to get a grip on it. It did not want to let go.

  Nembrotha said something to Selpis that Darcy didn’t catch, then slid up and over her shoulder and into her outstretched hands. Selpis turned the slug’s body so that the ferny fronds on their hindquarters were close to one of the arms of Tesserae71’s captor. The fronds quivered and a ring of raised, opalescent dots appeared on one of the arms of the creature. Nembrotha scooted back over Selpis’s shoulder, letting out a wet cry, “Get back!”

  The creature let Tesserae71 go, piercing the air with a high-pitched shriek of pain. It writhed and whipped its arms around, thwacking anything in its path. Darcy pulled Tesserae71 to his feet and backed away, out of the creature’s reach. It had created a new level of chaos—one Darcy hoped they could use as a distraction.

  “Come on!” She motioned to the others, working her way to one wall near the edge of the crowd. Tesserae71 stooped but followed her closely. As they moved Darcy asked for the shock stick that Selpis had concealed on her person. Selpis handed it over without comment and Darcy pressed it into one of Tesserae71’s pincers. She looked into his faceted compound eyes. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but she’d just helped him twice, probably saved his life. She asked, “Will you help us?”

  His head dipped slightly. “I will do as you wish, my queen.”

  There wasn’t time to exchange any more information. The tentacled creature continued to flail wildly behind them. A circle had cleared in its vicinity. Any minute now someone was going to put
an end to the commotion it had created.

  “Fall into a heap and pretend to be shocked!” she said to Selpis and Raub. “Tesserae71, stand over us like you just shocked us!”

  “I do not lie down and pretend anything,” Raub ground out.

  “They’ll pass by us if they think we’re already down. We have nothing that will work against their weapons,” she pleaded.

  He frowned and studied her for a moment until someone crashed into him. He growled and shoved them away.

  She shot him a look that told him he better not suggest she use her power against them. He knew how it had ripped her up before. Fighting was one thing. People could be patched up, could recover from bruises and broken bones. But she didn’t want any part of killing anyone. He knew that.

  Selpis nodded. “It should work.”

  “If they see his broken leg, it won’t,” Raub said angrily.

  “I shall keep my body turned away,” Tesserae71 clacked.

  Darcy motioned to Tesserae71. “We’ll go down one at a time. Try to make it look realistic.”

  “I’ll go first,” Selpis volunteered, and slumped to the floor, arranging her body artfully so that Nembrotha was protected.

  Darcy rushed at Tesserae71 and just before she reached him, she flung herself back and slid down the wall. Through her lashes she could see his mandibles working, and she swore it was almost like applause for her performance. He turned to Raub, tilted his head, and extended the device to within inches of Raub’s shoulder. Raub blinked as if to say, “Really?” then crumpled to the floor, his arm flung over his face to hide his expression.

  24

  Darcy worried that the hymenoptera would notice her as they passed by and would freak out, possibly even poking her to make sure she was unconscious. They all seemed to know who she was, and there was a current of fear and dislike that ran through her every interaction with them. Her hair had conveniently fallen over her face as she fell, and now she peeped through the curls, careful to keep her face slack and her body immobile.