I eased the Varangar down from full cock. At the sound of the click the offworlder rolled his head to look up at me. Base Enhancement, I was willing to bet. Average height, average looks, average ability. “You’re in big trouble,” I said softly. “You know that, don’t you? You’re going to be deported, and if the Commonwealth is feeling pissy—which it usually is—you’re going to be locked up for re-education.”
“Fuck you, fucking Pokey bitch.”
“He’s either a smuggler or a squatter,” I said. “And he’s got friends.” I shifted the Varangar to a one-handed grip and consulted my GPS palm. Goobies, yes; a swing of pseudo-tarsiers a quarter of a mile to the north, yes; a small herd of lesser axeheads half a mile to the south-east.
And humans. My jaw clenched.
Four specks on the glowing gray screen, and moving. Toward us.
“Bearce, get out of the Source and get P&R down on us. Now!” I shoved my GPS palm at Zhádāo. “General, take him out of here, take the prisoner back to camp.”
“Let Bearce—”
“No questions, just do it! Beast—”
“ETI?”
“Four minutes. Growth’s slowing them down.” Even as I spoke, a muffled cough radiated through the air; my eardrums bulged with pressure. A lash of heat whipped us, and hard on that, the stench of incineration. Somewhere a flight of yellow-throats erupted screaming into the sky.
Shit. Shit. No armor; they would have their own GPS system—we were as good as dead, and we would never see it coming.
“GPS only sees in two dimensions,” he said.
We ran for the tree line. Luck was on my side; a crook-limbed gordon stood right in my path. I jumped, caught a branch one-armed, and rocked until I could swing a leg over it and haul myself up. Stupid, to give Zhádāo the lanyard. I held onto the branch with my thighs and one hand, the butt of the rifle against my hip.
The Beast had clambered up into a castiglia, using the creepers and protruding knots to make his way up to a limb, a good two meters higher than I was.
“Can you climb higher?” he called.
With my knee? No time to slap in another pain-killer ampule. I gritted my teeth, crawled to a stand, and eased myself up to the next obliging branch.
“Higher, goddammit!”
I couldn’t waste my breath in curses. This time I pulled myself with one arm and one leg and lay draped on the branch like a basking reptile. The bark scored my cheek; I suspected it had torn my clothes.
To my left another burst of laser fire erupted. I whipped my face away, threw up my arm to protect the exposed skin on my face. Hot darts of pain needled my back, my buttocks, my thighs: splinters from an exploded tree. I heard the Beast grunt. Burning leaves drifted down like apocalyptic rain.
“You all right?” I bellowed.
“Got a visual, Commander. To your left. Dead noon on the horizontal.”
I squinted past my shoulder into the heat-wracked arboros. Nothing except the tumultuous green, cinders and bits of flame still drifting on the air. Gingerly I raised my upper body from the branch and brought the rifle to my shoulder. With my eye to the scope I saw what he did.
Four shapes stalked through a wreckage of blasted vegetation, bunched together. Tight offworlder clothes, patterned in green and brown, their necks and faces painted as our captive’s had been. Blackout visors masked their eyes. Three of them were armed with what looked like Bucha guns.
“Got a clear shot?” the Beast asked.
A clear shot for which? The Bucha guns were too small to hit—I wanted to take out that damn laser pack first. If only the son of a bitch would turn, give me a side view—
As if in answer to a prayer, he stopped and looked back to his buddies. A beautiful target right there, clear line of sight, nothing in the way save distance. If any antique slugthrower could do it, the Varangar could.
My finger eased into the trigger guard. It seemed an argument had broken out; the man with the laser gestured as if stabbing. I inhaled. All I saw was the bulky pack, almost a meter long and a third of a meter deep. Oh, my darling stay right there—right there. I exhaled . . . froze halfway. The pad of my finger squeezed.
The bullet blew through the pack and into the leg of the man standing behind the man wearing it. That one screamed and fell to the ground, clutching his thigh; one of his companions ran to him; the other dropped into a decent stiff-armed stance, sweeping their perimeter with his Bucha. Not firing yet, thank goodness.
The interloper wearing the laser pack turned in an impotent circle, stunned, while coolant dripped from both punctures. I swung the scope back to the one person who seemed to be paying attention—he looked from his downed companion up to the surrounding arboros. Up toward us.
“Blackout!” the Beast yelled. “He’s going to—”
I squeezed my eyes shut just in time.
Red pulsed through my eyelids. I snatched my hand to my eyes. Praying that Bearce and Zhádāo were under cover somewhere, in the tent, on the com to P&R, something that kept them out of the way.
The minutes crawled by, and still the light throbbed through my skin, my blood. I found myself gritting my teeth. Blowing his whole battery, was he? Protected from the Bucha effect by their blackout visors, his unwounded fellows could move forward, and what would he unlimber after he’d exhausted his energy source?
If only Zhádāo had caught P&R in time—I hated the waiting. My eyes closed, I angled the Varangar to a point ten meters ahead of my last shot. The rifle cracked; wood shattered. The horrific pulse of light ceased.
I dared to look now. Between us and the clearing a thickly leafed branch had fallen; ahead of it I saw no one. I hissed a query to the Beast.
Amusement tinged his response . . . “Bastard’s smacking his weapon—it’s out of juice. Guy you shot’s still on the ground.”
I reared up from my prone position and locked my legs around the thick branch. Right, left, I scoped our surroundings. “And the other two?”
“We can smell them,” the Beast said. I looked up at him. He nodded sharply toward the ground below us. Then he pulled his knife from his boot.
Furiously I drew my finger across my throat in a negating command and then jabbed at the knife. No killing.
He shrugged, sheathed the blade, and touched his lips in a shushing motion. In a gymnast’s move he fell back, swung by his knees, grabbed the branch below, and flipped himself down to it. He lowered himself to the next branch, thick enough for him to stand on, and crouched there, one steadying hand on the bole.
Vegetation crackled. Right below us the two remaining offworlders eased into view, Bucha guns at the ready. Oh, this could get ugly.
From three meters up the Beast dropped onto the closest man, feet first. Even as the other one called out in surprise, the Beast tucked into a roll and sprang up to seize the second man’s weapon hand. Before he could fire, the Beast grabbed the gun, threw it off into the brush, and yanked him forward. Even from my perch I heard the crunch when the Beast’s forehead met the other man’s nose. He collapsed to the ground. Beneath the palm cradling his face, blood ribboned down his chin and throat. The first man tried to get to his feet but the Beast stamped down. The man screamed and curled around his hand.
One interloper coiled like a dying crustacean, one slumped to his knees. I caught myself nodding in approval. Broken hand, broken nose and concussion, but alive.
“Not bad,” I called. “But before I get down there, get the other gun away.” Legs gripping the tree branch, rifle to my shoulder, I tracked the scene while the Beast located the gun his first target had dropped. He kicked it to the bole of my tree.
My target found me and shook his fist, streaked with blood. “Look what he did to my fucking hand! Wait’ll you hear from my agent, you bitch!”
“On the ground, hands behind your back,” I returned. “You bajam are in big trouble, so look good!”
Even from where I was, I could see how he shook. He carefully lowered himself, visor turned t
oward me. The Beast must have slacked a little on his friend’s arm, as his screams had dwindled to a hoarse whistling.
“Get down, bajami,” I said. To emphasize my point I squeezed off another round into the ground behind him. Soil and mould erupted; he flung himself forward and whipped his hands behind his back.
“Good,” I said. My heart galloped in my ribcage. I hoped I sounded as cool as I was supposed to. “I’m gonna tell you what’s going to happen now. You’re going to stay right there, I’m coming down, and we’re going to proceed like nice quiet human beings to our camp. We’re going to wait there until Patrol & Rescue pick you hamir up.”
“There’s more of us,” my captive said. He had to spit dirt from his mouth. “They’ll come after you.”
The Beast laughed. An awful sound, like boulders grinding. “We’d be so disappointed if they didn’t.”
We could only walk along the rocky beach in single file, as close as the arboros had grown on that side. First my captive, hands on his head; then me, with the rifle; the second intruder, also hands on his head—it had taken him some moments to lift his arms to that position, but we were patient, while he wept; and finally the Beast, a recovered Bucha gun snugged into the waistband of his pants. Their helmets we’d appropriated for ourselves, against another Bucha attack. With the visor down, the world turned smokey, the sun a chunk of brown quartz.
“They’re following us,” the Beast called to me. “We hear them.”
Was there movement down at the far end of the lake? I squinted, hoping to see Zhádāo, or even Bearce. This felt too much like how Wadjet had begun, a squatter bust gone so cosmically bad. I had broken down all aspects of what happened that day ceaselessly, until subjunctives blinded me. If, would, were, might. Nothing changed, except that we’d been too few against too many, too late. Nothing remained except a bloody shirt in a box.
This still had the potential to turn into something regrettable. I poked my captive in the small of his back. “What’s he carrying?”
“Not some fucking killstick, that’s for sure,” he said. “What kind of person are you, carrying around something like—”
I jabbed him again. “Do I care what kind of a person you think I am? What’s he got?”
“We know he’s got the wounded man’s Bucha,” the Beast rumbled. “He got any lethals?”
“We’re not savages,” my captive spat.
“Sure,” I said. “Savages don’t use blackspace to drop planetside, savages go through the correct apps. How about—”
“Stupid fucking laws,” the man behind me said. Pain and hate clogged his voice.
I fought the impulse to glance over my shoulder. “Those laws also prevent me from killing you.”
“No, goddammit,” he said. “Your decency as a properly Enhanced human being should prevent you.”
“Ah,” I said. My smile felt bitter.
It vanished in the next instant as the man in front of me stumbled. Jesus, these guys who’d never been off a ship before, their little criminal masters sent them down completely unprepared for actual terrain. Reflexively I reached out to steady him.
—And stumbled myself, yanked back by my shirt. Did I catch it on something? I heard fabric tear, felt the neck ride up, choking me, constricting tighter and tighter—I clawed at it with my left hand. Simultaneously someone screamed behind me and my captive whirled.
The son of a bitch reached for my rifle. Retching for air, I tried to swing it out of his grasp, my finger loose in the trigger-guard.
The Beast’s voice, right by my ear, though muffled, further unnerved me: “Let go or you’re dead.”
You fuck, I thought. One-handed I fired the rifle. The slug blew away most of my captive’s neck in a brilliant splash of gore; dead, he crashed to his knees and fell over, blood pumping out into the sand.
“Henner!” The other man’s voice sounded oddly clogged, adenoidal. But the grip on my shirt was gone; I could breathe, in great ragged whoops; and I spun around, as ready to kill as I’d been four years ago.
The Beast had jabbed two fingers right up the interloper’s nostrils, nearly lifting him. Oblivious to the awkward slaps and kicks the other man dealt him, he looked at me, the shield rendering him a cypher.
“See?” he said, and now he did lift the man, a little bounce that made him scream. “Dead like that.”
“You shit, look what you made me do!” The words hooked in my throat like barbs, and a spate of coughing seized me. Air—I had to have more air—I pushed up the shield of the helmet, gasping, readying myself to spit another pettish curse—and the morning disintegrated around me in a stutter of white—
White and black—
Like knives—
I flung up my hands. The earth heeled up and caught me, hard. Pain like a fang stabbed into my knee. The whole visor wrenched off of my head—but I cared about nothing—only the light, the blade, the white edge that split my eyes apart—
I rolled over onto my belly and pressed my face into the sand. Cool and wet on my eyelids; I wished I could pack it around the aching meat of my brain.
A shriek terminated in a crunch of bone. Rough hands dragged me up to a sitting position. Plastic settled around my head: the visor.
The Beast’s voice, hard and amused at once. “Don’t puke in your helmet. Doctor.”
“My rifle . . .” I was patting the ground for it, my eyes still screwed shut. The Varangar slid into my hands and I clutched at it as a wave of nausea roiled. I’m going to open my eyes, I thought. I’m going to open my eyes and then I’m going to go in there and take those sons of bitches apart.
With the shield blocking those staccato bursts of light, I could see. The man I’d shot lay crumpled, the sand around him sparkling red in the sunlight. Our other captive sprawled a little ways from him—his head turned completely around.
Even wearing the visor, I felt sick. As I tried to get to my feet, my lungs worked like a bellows. The Beast hooked his arm beneath mine and hoisted me up. I staggered, tried to pull away from him, and almost fell.
“You’re hurt?” he asked. His arm tightened.
I pushed at him. He ignored me. “They still firing?” I panted. “I can’t tell. Get the hell away from me.”
“You’re not in any condition to walk on your own.”
“The hell I’m—”
He twisted me around to face him. “Shut up, Doctor. You’re the Natch; for once you take orders from us. Trade us rifles.”
“Are they still firing?” I literally got up into his face, on my toes, my reflection nothing but a blank across his visor. Shield to shield, the plastic clacking, we bawled at each other like a pair of male axeheads ready to fight over a harem.
“Goddammit, do you hear that? Your Patrol & Rescue’s coming! They’re not firing, they’re fucking running away! Now give us your rifle!”
“You mean you can’t kill me with your bare hands too?”
“Jesus, you’re a bitch! You want your buddies to think you killed someone? You give us the rifle, they’ll think we did it, and they won’t send you off for re-education the way they did last time!”
The scream of a Skipjack pierced my fury. I pulled off the helmet, searching the sky. From the east it hurtled, an onyx thunderbolt against the soaring anvil clouds. As the craft grew larger, the very sky around it seemed to tremble.
If I was sent to the Psych Center again, they’d never let me out, Lasse’s widow or no. Who knew what Bearce might have been able to record, before the Bucha started firing?
I would never have a better time for destruction.
I leaned down and slapped my knee, activating what last coolant cells the brace possessed.
“Trade us rifles before it’s too late,” the Beast grated.
“It’s already too late.”
“Commander—”
I rolled up the power from my ankles, calves, thighs, hips, and slung it into his belly with the butt end of the Varangar.
The air came out of hi
m with a grunt and he dropped to the ground. I stepped up to him and kicked him in the kidneys.
“Fucking Beast,” I said. Now that it had started, all passion had leached from me. No more rage, no more fear. It would all end soon. Not the Buddhist’s Nirvana, but close enough.
I kicked him again, lower. “Get up. Get up.”
He curled into a defensive posture, head tucked down into his arms, hands laced over the back of his neck. The air, the earth shuddered with the advent of the Skipjack circling around us, trying to find a place to land. I pushed the Varangar’s muzzle along his neck and bawled above the noise of the massive engines.
“I’ve wanted to kill you ever since I laid eyes on you, you lab-assembled misbegotten monster—now I’m going to do it, or die trying. Get up!”
For answer he grabbed my arms, humped up into my torso, and tumbled me ass over teakettle. Sparks exploded in my vision. He loomed over me, his expression dark with the first signs of real anger I’d ever seen on his face. It was about time.
With the same speed he’d displayed during the varanid attack, he tore the Varangar out of my hands. “You’re always fucking trying to kill us!” he bellowed.
Memory inspired me. “Drop the weapons, O-389.” No better than Zhádāo.
“God damn you.” He paused, the muscles in his jaw working. “Is that an order, Commander?”
I climbed to my feet, my gaze locked on his. My knee was completely numb now from the reactivated coolant. “That’s an order, soldier.”
His face soured into the same horrible scowl I’d seen him give Zhádāo. He opened his hand, and the rifle dropped with a clatter onto the sand; he pulled the Bucha from his belt and let it follow.
The wind from the Skipjack’s descent whipped us, stung us with sand, blew away the lacustrine reptiles in a dappling shudder of wings. I pointed to the green mouth of the arboros, that swallowed all things. This savage place.
“Run,” I said. “I’m going to kill you.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
I could not remember what my thinking was in letting him get a head start. A half-coherent thought of escaping prying eyes, should something go . . . wrong. Deluded sportsmanship, perhaps. Roland refusing to wind his horn . . .
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