Текст книги "Heat"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 54 страниц)

Chapter Two

Jota. That was what Kane thought of as he walked. Jota. Not Earth, not the planet he walked on, but Jota, his homeworld. In the blistering heat of this endless day, the image of that world seemed to shimmer in his mind’s eye-brown and white whirled together, with pools of green ocean breaking its surface. Cool Jota.

Ridiculous, really. Kane had been to Earth more often than he’d been to Jota. It was laughable to think of it as his ‘home’, but now he did. In particular, he thought that Jota’s Heat-season lasted, on average, nine days. In all of recorded history, the worst had been only twelve.

It must be the same here. It must be. He had only to endure for…

How many more days? He’d lost count already. He thought he’d been here three days, but maybe it was only two. It was hard to remember how many nights had passed, and the days just kind of melted together.

The long.

Hot.

Days.

He thought he might be losing his mind.

‘You haven’t lost anything yet but your sense of humor,’ Uraktus growled good-naturedly from the fathoms of Kane’s Heat-dulled brain. ‘Focus up, boy! I raised you better than this!’

Without expression, Kane raised his hand and slapped his own face hard enough to briefly grey his vision. Urak’s voice went silent. He was pricked almost at once with remorse. Urak’s voice…Kane’s memory was the only place he would ever hear it again. He shouldn’t be so quick to shut it up.

Focus, the voice had said, and so Kane made an effort. He pulled his gaze into the here and now and really looked at his surroundings for the first time since the day had grown hot.

At first, he saw only Earth. Earth’s trees, Earth’s soil, Earth’s sky (with its stinking open furnace of a sun). Just…Earth.

But then, with an ugly jolt, Kane realized that the only reason he could see Earth’s soil beneath his feet instead of the needley carpet of tree debris that covered the rest of the ground was because he was walking on a path. Had been, in fact, for some time. He looked again, with renewed clarity, and saw that between the brown trunks and green branches of Earth’s forest, he could see colors that had no business out in the wild. Bright red, bright blue, and crisp polar white—colors of human making.

Kane’s nostrils flared as he pulled in a lungful of air and tasted the wood-smoke that he had been stupidly breathing all this time.

Patience.

He didn’t need some ghost-mutter to tell him that, but Kane couldn’t quite make himself obey. Patience would be best, it would be, but Kane was parched, hungry, and in agony of Heat. The human encampment didn’t look too big, which meant the humans in it would be few and easily dealt with, and there would be food and water and, all the gods of this great universe will it, a female.

Humans were among the universe’s most useful commodity. They were strong and resilient enough to make good laborers, yet small and weak enough to be easily controlled. They caught every damned disease that blew their way, but their bodies could be repaired practically by a whisper and a whim. They were short-lived, but they bred like a virus and the children learned faster than the adults. They got cold too fast, hot too fast, hungry every few hours, but their amazing little bodies could adapt to any imaginable climate or condition. You could work them, train them, sell them, cultivate poisons or medicines from their bodies, and, as old Uraktus had been fond of adding, you could eat them and fuck them, if you were desperate.

Kane was desperate. Not enough to eat one, not yet, but he was easily desperate enough to fuck one. He couldn’t go on like this, anyway. He didn’t know if it was possible to die of Heat, but he was sure that if you could, he was close.

Kane made a token effort at stealth as he ran to the human encampment, but as soon as he stood beside the smoldering fire pit, even that little restraint fell away. He recognized most of these things—the groundcar, the shelter, a table, some chairs—and once his eyes fell on the blue crate-like object beside the table, he fell on it with a roar of relief. He ripped the lightweight lid away and plunged both hands into water thick with ice.

He hadn’t realized just how dehydrated he’d become until that first palmful of water poured frozen into his mouth. Kane could actually feel his skin soaking up the moisture as he drank, could feel strength returning to his body and clarity to his brain. He drank until his gut cramped and his fingers had turned red with cold. Then he poured a few handfuls of ice over his chest and shoulders and rubbed it in with near-delirium.

Sounds and whispers and frightened voices issued from the shelter behind him. Kane turned, half-melted ice spilling from his fingers, and saw the flaps of the flimsy shelter open. A face appeared.

Kane couldn’t imagine what the human had expected to see, but clearly, he wasn’t it. The human shrilled out a cry and retreated, but the opening of the shelter had brought out a billow of air rank with sex musk. Kane’s whole body throbbed once in primal agony, and he sprang up and lunged for the tent.

Screams blistered his ears in the tight space and one or both of the humans was slapping at him, but Kane was beyond caring. He caught one by the arm, the other by the hair, and dragged them both out into the light. The one he had by the hair he sent to the ground and stepped on it to keep it still. He pulled the other up and ripped its lower clothing off with one pass of his claws.

It was male. Kane’s frustrations boiled briefly over and he threw the human with all his considerable strength and fury into the nearest tree. There was a sound like a whole handful of dry branches cracking all at once, and the human tumbled facedown into a bush and lay still.

The human under his foot was screaming. Kane pulled it to its feet and tore its clothing away. This one was female.

He pushed her to the ground, fighting her the whole way down and reminding himself not to kill her, not to kill her. She must have known what was coming, because it took real effort to wedge his knee between her thighs and pry them open, but once that was done, he had only to open his own coverings and let his aching cock spring free. The human’s cries became a glass-shattering shriek when Kane shoved inside her, but that was easily ignored. The only thing that mattered now was this, this bliss. The human’s oils, fresh from her own mating, were already interacting with him, producing the first spurt of quick-cum and easing the hellish pressure that had built in his tsesac all day.

Exhaustion fell over Kane, leaden and dry. He put a hand over the human’s mouth to muffle the shrillness from her cries and let his head droop until it touched the ground above her shoulder. His mind went grey even as his body drove itself robotically to frenzy.

Kane dozed.

And overhead, unseen by him or his struggling captive, visible only as a streak of silver against the brilliant blue of Earth’s sky, a Jotan ship broke into the atmosphere and arced around to land.

*

The Human Studies scientist was right: The Far-Reacher’s records were painfully dry reading. When Tagen got back to Jota, the first thing he intended to do was go to the nearest jeweler and have a Crimson Sun discretely replicated. Then he would go home, give himself the medal in acknowledgment of the terrible injury he was doing to his brain by boring it to death, drink three or four bottles of ul, and see if he could catch a whole night’s sleep in his own bed without being promoted.

Tagen had interrogated several recovered humans in the course of his career, and he considered himself something of authority on them. This was to say that he knew if one hit them very hard, they’d break, and if one fed them perfectly good shar inu’u, they’d die. He knew how to tell the genders apart without stripping them completely naked, he knew the ratio of male-to-female was almost even, and he knew that they had an unnatural obsession with keeping their own offspring. He also knew that they could not be trusted, that even a young one would try to attack if it had the opportunity, and that they were incapable of understanding the difference between a slaver and an upstanding Fleet officer who was trying very damned hard to help them. In Tagen’s opinion, this was the only practical information one should learn regarding humans.

The Far-Reachers, on the other hand, had been far more concerned with Earth than with the creatures that evolved there. Indeed, when they had first discovered the world, it took several years before they even realized there was a sentient species occupying it. But of course, by the time the Gate was built, they’d already learned that ‘sentient’ was really a relative term. Back then, the humans were scattered, squabbling beasts without a common leader or even a common language. They warred over everything—over land, over food, over water, over trade routes, over politics, over religion, over nothing at all. Their capacity for destruction was astounding, even with what crude weapons they’d had.

Tagen could have told them that. He’d seen a human, one maybe ten years old, leap on a full-grown Fleet commander and do its level-best to knock him senseless with a rock no bigger than its own little fist. It had taken three officers to pry the beast off him, and another two to get the rock away. Funny as hell, really, but it had a way of being less funny the more humans (and the more rocks) happened to be in one’s line of sight.

The Far-Reachers came to the same conclusion. After a few years of study, the planet was officially declared hostile and the Gate abandoned. Only abandoned. It was far too expensive a thing to detonate, and anyway, in a few thousand years, the humans might be sufficiently advanced for a second chance at contact. Such was the thinking at the time.

Naturally, as soon as the scientists left, the slavers came. But the distance between Jotan space and Earth, not to mention the difficulty involved in sneaking through the Gate (abandoned didn’t mean necessarily ignored), was discouraging to most slavers. The humans were able to swarm around unmolested for the most part, breeding virally until now, centuries later, when there were gluts of them and it was discovered that for all their inferiority, the human brain made some damned good Vahst. So it was here that E’Var and others like him came for a little quick work and a lot of profit.

The console before him sounded an alert, advising Tagen in its uninflected tones that the Jota Prime Gate was approaching and first-rank codes were required before coordinates would be accepted. Almost as an afterthought, the computer reminded Tagen that all unauthorized ships would be terminated mid-Gate.

This raised an interesting point, Tagen thought as he complied. Where did the criminals who trafficked in Earth-caught humans get their Gate codes? They were changed nearly every day, and no one apart from first-rank Fleet commanders or council members ever had access to them. If technology existed that allowed a slaver to decode transmissions undetected, then the So-Quaal surely were providing it, for all their assurances of neutrality.

The codes were accepted, an ironic reminder that Tagen was neither first-rank nor sitting on the council, and yet here he was, watching the Jota Prime Gate power up to admit him. He felt the sickening lurch as the Gate gripped him, and then he was pulled forward and into the dizzying spray of stars that lit up all the fathoms of folded space between two worlds. The star cruiser, its engines sleeping for the jump, began to vibrate and then to buck. Tagen heard a low, anguished groan rattle its way through the whole hull, and he had just enough time to calmly think that he had solved the mystery of E’Var’s disappearance and was, in fact, about to be spread across the same corner of the galaxy, when he suddenly punched through the glowing Gate and into Earth-space.

Immediately, his audio channel erupted into an incomprehensible mass of noise. Voices, music, klaxons, static—all of it crashing senselessly together at a deafening volume. Tagen switched off the audio feed at once, and then leaned back in his chair and wondered just how the humans were transmitting at all.

The Far-Reacher’s records, which he had been reading as he listened to his N’Glish language discs, had been very clear on the point that humans were in their technological infancy. At the time of the quarantine, only a few of their hundreds of civilizations had even mastered the process of alloyed metals. To broadcast sound into space required transistors and electricity at the very least.

Tagen’s sense of unease only grew when his ship brought him close enough to see the garden of debris in orbit around the human homeworld. Logic tried to tell him these were the leavings of smugglers, but he could see nothing that looked to be of Jotan make. The So-Quaal, then. He was less familiar with their designs and he knew that human slaves had a way of contributing to the So-Quaal’s endless quest for what they called ‘research’.

Perhaps the smugglers who preyed on this planet were responsible for the radio noise as well. Some sort of monitoring system, perhaps. It had to be so. No one went from laboring to forge alloyed metals to launching satellites in five hundred years. All the same, Tagen found himself deeply unsettled and he did a thing any other Jotan might find unthinkable: He scanned for interceptors.

There were laser defense arrays and nuclear reactors in low orbit all around the planet, but none of them were scanning for him or even aimed outward. Incredible as it seemed, the weapons appeared to be solely for Earth’s own destruction, leading Tagen to conclude that the smugglers who had placed them there intended at some point to wipe out the supply from which they drew their captives. But the scan had turned up something even more surprising to Tagen’s way of thinking. Faintly traced beneath the thin corona of Earth’s upper atmosphere, his instruments had detected an ionic disturbance in a straight line. It was scarcely measurable, but it was there, and any ion trail at all had to be a recent one.

Tagen considered the matter, idly capturing a few images of the planet spinning below him (particularly of the synthetic glitter of what seemed to be very large cities in several places), and making records of some of the noise blasting across his audio channel. Let the Human Studies division sort it all out later. He only hoped it would be enough of a gesture to satisfy vey Venekus and his colleagues. The ion trail was his main concern now; he had no intention of turning this mission into a science-day field trip.

It could have been caused by a meteor, he knew, or be any falling chunk of rubble that decayed out of the orbiting mass of like wreckage, but (and he might as well admit the possibility), it could have been left in the wake of a stolen prison transport vessel.

Until now, Tagen had not really considered the possibility of E’Var’s survival. The prison ship had been a tremendously old one, and the Gates themselves were showing the evidence of time. Mid-Gate failures were becoming more common, much as the council might like to deny it. It was far easier to believe that E’Var had met with his well-deserved death in one fiery instant than to face the unpleasant prospect that a Fleet officer had, for whatever reason, aided him in his escape.

Looking at the dimly-etched ionic distortion, Tagen grimly realized that he was going to have to investigate Earth as though E’Var were really on it. Out of the hundreds of thousands of human life-forms walking around on Earth, Tagen was going to have to try and find one Jotan. On foot.

Damn it all, why had he ever joined the Fleet?

Oh yes. Because his father told him to. Well, as long as that was settled.

Tagen powered down for entry, tracking the faint smear of disrupted particles down through the layer of aurora and ozone, until it vanished under the sudden blast of Earth’s climate. He continued along the direction the trail had indicated, aiming for the surface and making his landing quick. It was broad daylight on this side of Earth, and even though the planet was not well-populated, that did not give him an open ticket to attract attention.

There was a vast forest below him, which in itself was significant. Most of Earth was covered with an eerie, blue ocean. That the ion trail seemed to lead to land was a coincidence that smacked heavily of deliberate steering. The forest was good cover for a predator like E’Var, too. It was spotted here and there with small outcroppings of human habitation, but not so much that one couldn’t travel undetected.

On foot, Tagen reminded himself sourly.

He found an empty place to touch down and then only sat there with the shift-shield on, invisible to the physical eye. He had never been alone in the field before and he hated the idea of leaving a Jotan vessel on an alien planet while he marched around the woods looking for a fugitive. From a purely mechanical standpoint, he knew it could be done. The ship’s power cells could support the prime computer systems and the shift-shield for up to five years, undisturbed. Provided his locator didn’t fail, or that he remembered where he parked if it did, Tagen had plenty of time in which to execute his investigation. There was nothing he could do but trust that no humans would come along and bump into it before he returned.

Hell, and that raised another problem. If E’Var was here, and if Tagen did take him into custody, how exactly was he supposed to find E’Var’s stolen ship and tow it back through the Gate to Jota? He couldn’t just leave the fool thing on Earth, if for no other reason than because it was Fleet property and they’d want it back. And there was no way Tagen’s star cruiser could drag a second ship up through Earth’s gravitational pull, even assuming that E’Var were amiable enough to simply tell him where it was. What did that leave? Well, he could blow it up. That would go over well back at Fleet Headquarters.

Ah, the glamorous life of a sek’ta. Just knowing that any decision he made would be the wrong one and everyone back home expected him to die anyway made his whole life worthwhile. He didn’t even need the extra sixty crona increase in pay. His work was its own reward.

Tagen strapped his pack to his waist, holstered his stunner and his plasma gun, took one last look around the ship’s interior, and then stepped out the airlock and onto an alien world.

He stopped right there, his hand still on the locking panel, and drew in a slow breath as though he could physically taste the temperature.

A cool planet, the Far-Reacher’s notes had said. Widely-divergent eco-systems, but generally quite cool.

Without moving from the airlock, Tagen pulled his pack off and looked closely at the contents. A full medical pack, vey Venekus had promised, and thank the gods, he had delivered. There were eighteen suppressants in a pouch strapped right to the lid of the pack. Eighteen. Surely the same overcompensation that had inspired the scientist to pack five doses of a sedative Tagen should not, in all likelihood, need to use. But it was nice to see it all the same. Tagen chewed one and then took a swallow from his canteen to wash the bitter taste from his mouth.

He hit the lock at last, and shut the ship away from any curious eyes. The sound of the door locking into place was the last indelible cue. He was on duty. It was time to represent.

A plan. That was what the name of Pahnee was famed for, after all, meticulous planning. And, gods knew, if Tagen could devise a plan to enable him to locate E’Var somewhere on all this Earth, he would earn a little of that reputation instead of borrowing it from his father. So. A plan.

First, the facts. A straight course along the ion trail would put whatever had left it somewhere in the area of Tagen’s own ship, give or take thirty kilometers. A Jotan could comfortably cross overland at a speed of eight kilometers an hour. Kanetus E’Var had a lead of five Jotan days, which translated roughly into three of Earth’s.

And now the assumptions. Tagen would assume first that E’Var was, in fact, on Earth. That would make his mission here slightly more bearable. Secondly, he would assume that Kane was on foot, and perhaps expecting pursuit. He would assume Kane could travel for an even hundred kilometers a day, forgoing sleep in favor of distance. It would be an extraordinary feat considering the current temperature, but it was remotely possible and so it gave Tagen a solid outside number on which to pin his expectations. So, beginning within thirty kilometers of Tagen’s position, and making phenomenal use of his three-day head start, the prisoner could be anywhere in a search area of two thousand seventy-two square kilometers.

Hm. All right, step back and try again.

At the outside, E’Var could be six hundred and sixty kilometers away, and he was probably not wandering aimlessly. In Tagen’s experience, men in the wild had a tendency to follow the sun. If E’Var had landed at night, he might be traveling east, pursuing the rising star he had first seen. If he had come during the later day, he might be headed west.

Tagen scowled as he hunkered down to sketch his figures in Earth’s dry soil. He’d hated math when he was a boy and he hated it now, but despite his great childhood conviction that he would never need to learn how to solve his schoolwork in the real world, here he was: A ship leaves High Court on Jota Prime at two of the bells traveling nine hundred kilometers an hour. If he maintains his speed and pilots the most direct course, what time will it be on Earth when he lands at these coordinates?

He was getting a headache. Already. Gods.

So, all right. It would be the middle of Earth’s night. So. In all likelihood, E’Var was aimed east and Tagen was three Earth days behind him. He would have to manage better than one hundred kilometers a day in order to overtake the prisoner, and he would have to do it on foot, on an alien world, in temperatures in excess of one hundred degrees.

As he moved into the woods under the blistering eye of Earth’s sun, Tagen found himself hoping he really did find E’Var somewhere on this miserable planet.

He’d hate to think he was having all this fun for nothing.

*

Kane woke to the sound of incessant screaming. Even before his eyes had opened, he reared up and balled a fist to knock whoever the fuck was responsible silent if not completely senseless. The movement brought out a flare of agony all down his back. He snarled out a curse and carefully sat up.

Earth’s sun had really done a number on his bare skin. His arms were stinging, red and shiny, and if the pain was any indication, so was his back and his face. It wasn’t a serious burn, he knew, but it was going to get that way soon if he didn’t find a better way of traveling than on foot.

He was inside the human’s shelter. Flimsy as it was, it was still protection from the brutal sun. He could even remember, very dimly, dragging the female in here with him. And there she was, lying on her back beside him and staring straight up into space. She wasn’t screaming.

But something sure as fuck was. Short, hoarse, relentless screaming, each one a spike straight to Kane’s brain. He crawled to the mouth of the shelter and looked out, shading his eyes against the brilliance of mid-day.

There was a bird on top of the table. A big, black bird, and it was shrieking like all hell.

There were no birds on Jota. Kane could remember a time when he’d thought that was a pity. One of Urak’s So-Quaal contacts kept a collection of birds, many of them from Earth, and as a young boy, Kane had been allowed to look at them while his father and the So-Quaal scientist talked. Some of them could even mimic speech. Over several of these visits, Kane had managed to teach one of them to say, “I’m going to kill you in your sleep,” in So-Quaal. He still thought that was pretty funny and, despite the beating that it had resulted in once the So-Quaal found out about it and complained to his father, he thought Urak had, too.

Moving slowly so as not to spook the shrieker facing him now, Kane reached out and found a nice palm-sized stone. The bird saw him well enough, and even cocked its head to acknowledge him, but kept right on ripping the woods up with noise.

Kane bared his teeth in a hard smile and threw, his arm producing a shriek of its own as it cut through the air. The stone struck, shattering the bird’s breast, and it flopped over with a final cry, slapping its wings against the ground futilely until it died.

Kane grunted and lay back down beside his human. He was awake now and he supposed he should get up, but it was too damned hot to think about travel. Still, he had the female, and that was something. Heat would be on him again in an hour, but once he’d fucked it out of his system, it would probably be well on to evening and cool enough that it would not return until tomorrow. He could travel tonight and take the human with him.

Kane raised himself up on one elbow and looked his female over, thinking. If she could pilot the groundcar he saw outside, so much the better. Although he’d never had trouble finding humans in the woods when Urak had brought him here before, the blistering weather seemed to have driven them all away. If he was going to fill forty vials with Vahst, he needed to find some in greater numbers.

“Hi,” Kane said. It had been a while since he’d last spoken N’Glish, or any of the human languages for that matter, but he spoke it pretty well, and he knew that was the right word.

The female closed her eyes.

Ah well. He wasn’t keeping her for company’s sake.

Kane got up and went out of the shelter, picking up the dead bird and tossing it on top of the dead human male as he passed. He had left the cold-storage crate open, and he cursed himself for a fool because now all the ice was melted and there was grit and tree-needles in the water. Kane drank it anyway, relishing the way it sluiced down his throat and throughout his body. The crate’s actual contents, metal canisters containing human beverages, glinted enticingly at him but Kane ignored them. Previous experience told him they were likeliest to hold either toxic fermentations or concentrated sugar syrups. Water was what he needed now.

As an afterthought, Kane sucked up an extra mouthful and went back into the shelter. He knelt, turning the female to face him, and then put his mouth over hers and poured water into her. She dribbled most of it out, but swallowed at the end. That was a good sign.

“I need to eat,” Kane said, mostly to re-accustom himself to the language. “Where are you keeping your food?”

The human did not reply. She lay motionless, her eyes still shut against him. She hadn’t even wiped her mouth where she’d drooled.

She wasn’t sleeping, Kane was fairly sure of that. She was choosing to ignore him, escaping him the only way she could. He had a choice now. He could let her lie there and hide from him, or he could bring her out of it.

His first thought was to stand her up and give her a good slap. In his not-inconsiderable experience, humans responded best to pain. But as he ran his eyes over her bruised body, he realized that he appeared to have been pretty harsh with her. Heaping abuse on top of that might only push her further into her own mind. If he wanted to keep her, and if he expected her to do any groundcar-piloting in particular, it was time to show a little restraint.

Kane slipped his hands under her sides and pulled her up and onto his shoulder. She did not resist.

“I really don’t care what you do when I’m gone,” he told her as he took her out into the light. “But I need you here with me now. Behave yourself—”

Sudden warmth flowed down his chest and the smell of ammonia pierced the air. Kane gave the female a sour look, but she only stared slackly into space.

“Behave yourself,” he repeated darkly. “And you’ll live to see the back of me. Piss on me again—” He set her on the table and tried to slap the wet from his body. “—and I’ll carve you a new face to see me off by. Bitch,” he added in his own language, and stomped over to the cold-storage box to clean up.

There was no point in punishing her. She probably couldn’t help it. Probably. He was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, at any rate. He needed to take care of her if she was going to get him through this rotten weather.

Would she come out of it on her own? He could whip up a stimulant if he had to, but he didn’t want to use it unless absolutely necessary. Humans were fragile.

A dark thought struck Kane suddenly. Humans were fragile. Maybe the female was sick. He hadn’t scanned her for anything, and there were all sorts of nasty things that could swap themselves between hasty Jotan and their humans.

Better late than never. Kane looked around for his pack, found it under one of the chairs, and took it over to his female. He had to calibrate it for human biology, and during that time, Kane studied her.

She was blonde, like him, but her hair was several shades lighter, an unnatural-looking yellow, and it was very short. She’d colored her face earlier, and her crying had made a smeared mask all across her eyes. Her blunt human claws were bright pink. She looked fit enough. She bruised easily, but then, so had every other human he’d ever known. Their skin was just too thin.

When the computer chimed, Kane brought out his scanner and gave her arm a pat. She didn’t open her eyes.

Patience.

“This is probably going to hurt,” he warned her, and shrewdly noted that her face puckered slightly. “I need to look at your blood.”

She made no response, not even when Kane pushed the sharp tip of the scanner into her arm. He drew out blood, rich and red, and fed it into the analyzer. The computer began to think.

“Where do you keep your food?” Kane asked, his eyes running over the screen. Not that there was anything to see until the timer finished counting down, but it made him feel useful.