Текст книги "Heat"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 54 страниц)

She continued to ignore him.

Kane considered her, tapping his claws idly against his knee. “What’s your preference?” he asked at last, bluntly. “Arm or leg? No reason to let your male go to waste.”

It was a bluff. After half a day in the sun, the human’s meat was soured, but the threat had the desired effect. A trickle of water appeared at the corner of one eye. Humans did that, he knew, even when their eyes weren’t damaged. Finally, she looked at him.

“Food,” he said firmly.

She sat up, moving as though her bones had become brittle as straw, and slid onto her feet. She looked at him again, her face crumpling in on itself, and began to stagger toward the groundcar.

The computer chimed, its screen filling the results of the human’s scan. Kane read, well-aware that he’d been very lucky. Apart from a congenital sugar imbalance, some toxic residue (probably related to the canisters floating in the cold-storage crate), and a nasty bone-thinning disorder lurking in her future, the female was clean. She had nothing that could be passed along to Kane, but he thought he’d ought to fix her up anyway. That sugar imbalance could get to be a problem if he didn’t.

The female was returning, weeping openly now. She had a bag of dried meat in one hand and a package of biscuits or something in the other. She put these on the table before Kane and lowered herself shakily into one of the chairs, covering her face with her hands and rocking back and forth.

Well, at least she was moving. Kane chewed on the meat, which was very tough but extremely tasty, and began to construct a program to purify her of her detrimental conditions. After a while, the female rose from her chair and went to kneel by the male’s body. Kane let her; he was an old hand at designing nanozyme codes, but this was the first he’d ever done without Urak looking on. Besides, if it made the female happy to grieve, who was he to argue? At least she was doing it quietly.

Kane double-checked his program, ran a quick cross-filter reaction check, and when the gold light turned green, he loaded in the blank nanozymes and initiated them. It would take fourteen hours before the human’s problems were completely solved, but there was nothing wrong with her that he could catch, so he didn’t care. He had only to make sure she got enough water while the filters were working, and in the meantime, he could fuck her all he wanted. He filled his dermisprayer with the prepared nanozymes and turned to get his female.

She was gone.

So much for a gentle hand. When he found the bitch, he was going to hobble her.

Dermisprayer in hand, Kane started walking, his eyes picking out her tracks easily in the dry earth. He followed her away from the corpse of her mate, down onto the path he’d come by earlier, and into the forest. He didn’t hurry. The distance between the human’s footprints showed she wasn’t running, and anyway, there was nowhere for her to go. In a way, the fact that she was fit enough to wander off was almost encouraging. And even if it wasn’t, if Kane knew that if he had to run in this heat, he was likely to shear her damned head off when he caught up to her.

He hadn’t gone far before he realized that he could hear water, and after another hundred paces, he could smell it as well. When the path opened out, it had brought Kane to the bank of a little river. It was mostly dried up, if the steep sides of the empty bank were any indication, but still deep enough at its center for his female to be standing in it up to her waist. She was looking at him, her hands still cupped to her half-cleaned face.

‘Patience,’ Kane reminded himself, his hand flexing on the dermisprayer. ‘She just wanted to wash up. So do you, so be patient. She’s got days to find out how badly she can be hurt.’ He smiled at her.

She did not respond in any way.

“Come here,” Kane said, and snapped his fingers at the same time. It was never too early to start training.

She didn’t move.

Kane’s smile faded on one side. “Human, I don’t want to kill you, but you are making me want very much to hurt you. Come here.” He snapped again.

She lowered her hands, water spilling through her fingers and from her eyes. She took a step toward him and looked down at the dermisprayer in his grip.

Kane’s temper was starting to scratch at him again. He took a deep breath and held the instrument up for her to see. “This is for you,” he said. “There was a problem with your blood. I’m sure you knew that.”

She dropped her eyes, looked around at the water, and then met his gaze again.

“I can fix it,” Kane continued. “Come with me. We’re going to travel for a few days and then I’ll let you go, and you’ll never be sick again.” He gave her another smile, this one showing quite a few fangs, and told himself that Heat was coming…Heat was coming and she was the only game around.

She spoke for the first time, in a voice that was despairing, yet strong. “Fuck you,” she said. He had no time to wonder what that meant. She dropped beneath the water’s surface.

“You bitch!” Kane snarled. He leapt into the river, pushing against the weight of the current to grab her back, but he could see her chest working and he knew it was too late. Her body was heavy when he reached it.

She had escaped him after all.

Kane looked in disgust at the dermisprayer in his hand and then expelled its contents into the river in a silver jet. “Bitch,” he said again, and dropped her with a splash.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Three

“Rise and shine, camper! Up ‘n at ‘em!”

Tagen jerked awake at once, his hand flying for his gunbelt and striking a tree instead. His first fractured thought was that his father had dumped him in the woods again. He was hot and hungry and thirsty and sore; this had to be some sadistic new brand of training. He could smell smoke. He had lit a fire the night before, and he could smell it still, mixed with the sweat that pooled on his skin. Every other scent that came to him was horribly unfamiliar. It wasn’t until he saw the human that he remembered he was on Earth.

Earth. Gods. How could a planet look so inviting and peaceful from orbit and yet be so dry and miserable once one had landed? Tagen had made his hundred kilometers hiking up a slope of crumbling stone, surrounded on all sides by towering trees. Everything was out to get him. Insects bit him, raising itchy welts wherever they could get at him. The roots of the trees protruded in crafty knobs and toe-catching loops, and Tagen had twice fallen. Even if he was lucky enough to grab a tree for balance, the bark of the things was rough enough to abrade his hands, and often was coated with a rancid-smelling sticky sap that never, never came off. The bushes here were nothing but thorns or burrs or grasping vines, which in their dried-out death-throes had become quite effective shackles.

And these were just the obstacles of the earth itself. Then there was the heat. The dryness of the air. The sweat and the dust that turned to mud and baked hard in the cracks of his body. The sound of his breath rattling and the slow, spreading soreness of his throat. The ache of his over-used muscles. The throb of his bruising feet. Tagen was a soldier and he was accustomed to rough living, but there was such a thing as too much.

When he had at last succumbed to his body’s demand for rest, it had been full-on night and still hot as hell. He had made his camp in the first flat patch of ground he saw, scraping all the organic debris into a pile and igniting it with a shot of plasma. The gods knew he didn’t need the extra heat, but it got rid of the thorns and fallen branches and it was soothing to his strained nerves to see something so familiar as a fire here on this alien world. Then he had stripped out of his uniform, all the way down to his regulation loin-guard with the Fleet insignia on front, and sprawled out flat and exhausted, offering his body freely to the biting insects in exchange for the occasional blessed kiss of a breeze.

It hadn’t been the best night’s sleep, but it surely hadn’t deserved to end so suddenly. Now this human had gotten the drop on him, which was embarrassing as much as it was perilous. And here Tagen was, still in his loin-guard.

The human wasn’t paying any overt attention to him, although it had clearly seen him and was coming down the sloping hill toward him. It was dressed in a uniform of some sort, brown as mud, with short sleeves that showed off grotesquely-haired arms. The human’s gaze was occupied by a pad of papers in its hand. It was scratching at them with a stylus, writing as it approached, and speaking in a relaxed, easy-going manner.

“S’far as I know, it’s still legal to run around the woods in your underoos, but there will be a fairly hefty price for your campfire, which you cannot help but have noticed is illegal and has been illegal since the drought laid on. Son, I hate like hell to have you start your hangover on a low note like this, but you are going to have to pack up and come with me back to the ranger station. If you don’t, you are going to be under arrest.”

Tagen peered closely at the human’s lips, as though he could see the meaning of the words better if he saw how they were made. It was N’Glish, that much he recognized. But apart from a very few individual words, he had no idea what was being said and no way to form context enough to guess.

“You have the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney, if it comes to that, since it’s your right to take this citation to court, but with the fire danger recently, I should warn you that the local judges have been known to slap a few asses in jail. So be a sport, pay up, and don’t make a hassle. You can’t win. Just grab your gear and we’ll make this as painless as possible.”

“Hail,” Tagen said tentatively.

The human looked up for the first time, one eyebrow raised. “Hail?”

Something in the human’s tone told Tagen that he hadn’t used the right word. He tried to think what other greeting might suffice. The slaves he’d encountered in the past…well, there was very little in the way of niceties. The language discs he’d studied on the way to Earth had surely told him one or two, but he’d been paying far greater attention to translating more important phrases, like ‘Take me to your planet’s security array’, and ‘Have you seen the prisoner I am seeking’? or even ‘Where is the privy’?

The human was frowning at him. Tagen switched to Panyol, with which he had greater confidence. “Hola. Mi nombre Tagen Pahnee. Soy un oficial de la ley.”

“No habla espanyol, Paco,” the human said, still frowning. “This here’s—What the hell?” Its gaze had dropped to Tagen’s feet.

Tagen was beginning to feel control of this situation slipping away. He held out his empty hands and began guardedly to rise. “All is well,” he said, picking his words carefully and with great difficulty. “I mean you no harm.”

“Stay where you are!” The human’s voice was tight, frightened but admirably determined to face off. Humans were like that. It made them, for all their foibles, very dangerous. “Don’t you move a step or I’ll shoot you where you stand!”

“I mean you no harm,” Tagen said again. His palms were itching, wanting the weight of his gun. The human’s eyes were wild with fear. “I am come to Earth seeking—”

That was as far as Tagen got. The human dropped its papers and reached for its belt.

Tagen didn’t think. He scarcely felt himself move. He dove and snatched his plasma gun from the belt beneath his cast-off jacket. He had it aimed and fired before the human even drew its weapon.

The plasma hit the human square in the chest and ate rapidly through its target, stealing the breath the human drew to scream as it burned out the human’s lungs. Its heart was gone, but the body took three brutal seconds to die while the plasma finished neutralizing itself on tissue. A small wind chose that moment to come down off the slopes, setting the high branches to muttering. It also blew away the smoke that filled the human’s chest cavity, bringing Tagen the scent of charred meat as well as the sight of trees through the human’s torso. The human staggered, spitting foam in silence, and then dropped facedown, lifeless. It landed in a thorn bush. Vines buckled up through the hole Tagen had put in it, catching in the shirt on the human’s back. He could still hear sizzling.

Tagen stood up slowly, his gun still aimed, tracking the corpse mechanically. His heart was racing, his mouth was dry. He could not take his eyes from that blackened ring that he had made of the human’s torso.

What had come over him? The humans had only the most basic melee weapons, and Tagen had shot the dumb beast with superheated plasma. He could have just reached out and knocked the human unconscious. He could probably have disarmed the thing before it had even finished pulling the weapon. If nothing else, he could have drawn his neural stunner. He could have done a hundred things, and what he’d done instead was burn a hole right through its body nearly large enough to put his own head through.

He had never killed a human before. He had seen them die, yes. Of illness, of malnourishment, of old wounds and infection, even of the stillness and exhaustion that was no more than their own grief.

He had seen them killed. Not half a year past, he had been in on a raid to a Kevrian breeding facility, a fortress of rank rooms and half-dead humans hidden away on a small moon orbiting a lifeless world. The Kevrian operating the facility had taken the not-so unique step of allowing the male humans to control the population and had even armed them. When the Fleet invaded, a staggering number of those males had willingly come swarming out to fight them off while their masters escaped. Tagen could remember fighting them, working his way grimly through a thick knot of the naked, shouting beasts, dodging blades and blaster fire, and he knew that he’d done considerable injury to many of them, but he had eventually brought them under control. As he was wrestling the last of them into shackles, a Jotan cry of alarm had sounded, and he had answered, running down the fetid corridor toward the sounds of battle.

He had come into a slaughter. A breeder male, easily the largest Tagen had ever seen, had retreated to this holding room and had been systemically butchering every female within.

The male had been naked, made perfectly hairless by his master, with a breeder’s brand burned down its left side from its shoulder to its knee. Its tsesac, external and grotesquely swollen, had been cinched and fitted with a stimulator; its penis protruded angry and rodlike, still emitting jets of soapy cum as the human killed. It had a blaster for the Fleet, but a knife for the females, and both its arms worked furiously, swinging and slashing and firing all at once. The females were screaming, struggling, dying all around him.

There was no closing in on it. Tagen remembered seizing a female’s leg and yanking her under cover with him, containing her frantic struggles as he tried to think what to do. He could feel the blaster fire peppering the upended breeding table he was hiding behind, could feel the metal warming slowly to the melting point.

And then Commander Cura had ended it all, and much the same way Tagen would someday do himself. He’d drawn his plasma gun and let the human catch it right in the heart. It had been just as swift, just as brutal and reeking a death, but Tagen had never questioned the need. Some outcomes could not be avoided. But had this really been one of those?

The human Tagen had killed was still smoking, but the sounds of plasma eating flesh had finally stopped. Its right hand was twisted under itself, still reaching for its belt. Fat swelled out the sides of its uniform. Its hair stirred in the little breeze that trickled down the slope before him. It didn’t look much like a threat. Certainly it had not been raving or psychotic. Frightened, yes. Perhaps dangerous. But not savagely so.

Worse, its uniform gave Tagen the distinct impression that the human had been an officer of some sort, one of Earth’s On-World Security force. An officer, in other words, who was perfectly justified in treating Tagen as a threat. Humans didn’t know any better. It was Tagen’s responsibility to take control of the situation, with force if necessary, but without gratuitous violence. He represented the Fleet. He represented all of Jota. He couldn’t just blast away at everything that took an unexpected move.

Tagen holstered his gun and went unsteadily toward the body. Its meat was soft under his hands, still damp with sweat. He turned it over, doing his best not to look at the shocked and staring eyes (there were tree needles stuck to them now), and studied the weapon in the human’s dead hand.

It looked like a primitive sort of gun.

Impossible. Humans had no such technology.

Badly shaken, Tagen rolled the corpse back onto its face. He backed up, retrieving the rest of his uniform when he stepped on it and quickly dressing. He strapped on his gunbelt, cinching it tighter than was required, to feel the pinch of its reality.

It was no weapon at all, just a device that any resembled one. A device for…something, dammit! Something any Human Studies scientist would recognize at once. It made no difference. It was a mistake, that was all.

He got his supply pack, and went rapidly up the slope on his way east. There, he stopped in his tracks.

There was a road at the top of the slope. There was a groundcar on the road.

Its design was alien and somehow sinister, but it was perfectly recognizable all the same. It was a groundcar, and it could be nothing else. The driver’s side window was open. Tagen could smell smoke and sweat inside. Human sweat. The human had driven this groundcar.

Tagen clutched at his brow as though he could pull his thoughts out and crush them in his hand. He could hear his blood pounding in his ears. It was not fear that had him now, but it was not too damned far from it. The gun and the groundcar. What did it mean?

A thought struck him suddenly, a wonderful thought. A thought to explain everything.

The human he had just killed was in league with the slavers who preyed on this world. The slavers had provided it with the gun and the groundcar both. The reason Tagen did not recognize the design of the gun was because it had been constructed here solely for human use, as the groundcar had been. With that technology, the human would be an unstoppable force, able to gather any number of its defenseless fellows and to hold them somewhere until the slavers returned. In exchange, he supposed the slavers provided it with special treatment—perhaps merely the promise of continued life, perhaps wealth or food or its pick of the females it helped to enslave.

Yes. That was it. That made perfect sense. That even explained the human’s strange uniform. Every piece fell into place.

And perhaps this road beneath Tagen’s feet led to the holding cells for the captured humans. Should he follow it, in the hopes that it was E’Var’s destination as well? Or should he continue east, trusting to his instincts?

A groundcar could cover a lot of terrain, and the woods may well be thick with roads. It wouldn’t take more than one or two forks before Tagen was hopelessly lost, and then not only would he never find the holding cells to which they led, but he would then have to backtrack to his original position. There was no guarantee that Tagen was directly on E’Var’s trail, but his gut told him he was at least going in the right direction. He would continue on. If he encountered the holding cells by chance, so much the better. In the meantime, he would go east.

Tagen moved around the groundcar and climbed the slope behind it, his eyes fixed ahead of him. He ignored the twisting of his guts, the anxious hammering of his heart. He left the dead human behind him, facedown in the dirt. He did not let himself think about it anymore.

He went east.

*

Kane moved through the woods, well back from the road in deference to the rare instances when light from a human groundcar splashed through the scenery. He had seen several, slightly more by day than by night, which meant that somewhere on this forsaken planet, there were humans. He had seen none since the yellow-haired female drowned her stupid self, and that had been five days past. Kane often found himself wondering idly, if he had it to do all over again, would he pay better attention to her and not let her wander off? Or would he take his time and kill her right? He had different answers for that at different times of the day, but it was cooler now, and he was inclined to have taken better care of her. Certainly, he would have done so had he known it would take so long to find another one.

Still, even Kane could be patient when circumstances demanded it, and although he was not in the habit of practicing moderation on a hunt, he did it now. It would be an easy thing to lay a trap across the stone roads the groundcars traveled on. Any humans that survived the crash could be pried from their smoking vehicles and culled for Vahst until Kane found himself another female. Oh yes, easy, and on some level, viscerally satisfying, but it would also be stupid. Even on Earth, something like that couldn’t go unnoticed for long, and there was such a thing as having too many humans underfoot. As crude as their pellet-projectile weapons might be, they were still extremely capable of putting holes in Jotan heads. He’d seen it happen, and as old Urak had remarked at the time, you only had to see something like that once before you learned to respect it.

So Kane walked, within sight of the road but without putting himself in view of any human travelers. Sooner or later, he knew his patience would be rewarded. One of them would stop.

No sooner did the thought pass through Kane’s head but one of the groundcars did gear down and pull onto the soft gravel that bordered the road. Kane, five days gone with maddening Heat and once more on the verge of dehydration, kept walking for a step or three before that fact sunk in.

Kane stopped moving and looked back over his shoulder, all his senses keenly fixed on the groundcar. It idled there for several long minutes, blasting the forest ahead of it with light but not moving. Kane could see nothing inside it, could make out no sound beyond the grumbling of the thing’s engine.

Suddenly, the lights blinked out and silence fell. Three doors opened. Three humans emerged.

Kane turned all the way around and moved closer to the edge of the trees. He could hear voices, but could make out none of their speech. The three of them came to stand close together; there was no way Kane could approach without at least one of them seeing him. They might have food or water with them, yes, but they might also be armed. Kane hunkered down to consider his options.

The humans talked together for some time, and then one of them, the smallest, suddenly shoved at another one. A voice, unnaturally vibrant in the muggy air, snarled, “I said no, dammit! I told you I don’t do that sandwich crap! You want a blowjob, fine. He wants a blowjob, fine. But I don’t take you in twos!”

High voice. A female? Perhaps. It was difficult to tell at this distance. She, if it was a she, was bargaining for something, but Kane didn’t know all of the words she used. The voice was cross but not desperate, wary but not afraid. Not the best qualities in a captive, but Kane was in no position to be choosy. He moved closer, but kept low.

One of the larger humans had gripped the defiant one by the arm. The other was speaking, not loudly, but furiously. “—cut your fucking throat and roll you down the mountain, whore, how would that be?” He struck, and the sound of the slap echoed on the empty road. “You knew the deal when you got in, so don’t go changing it now.”

The female (Kane was now a little more than half-sure of its sex) gave an exasperated groan and shook herself free of the human who held her. “Don’t get so fucking hostile. I said I’d do you, I just don’t like that backdoor shit. How ‘bout a compromise? I could ride you and suck off your friend at the same time, huh?”

Kane got maybe one word in ten, but the gist was clear. The bargaining was almost done, and that meant the humans would either return to their groundcar and clear off, or they’d soon be distracted by whatever exchange they’d negotiated. In case of the latter, Kane had a good chance of getting right up next to them while their attention was elsewhere. He was willing to try, at any rate.

Without warning, the small human suddenly stepped back and drove her foot ferociously into the largest one’s groin, which apparently hurt. He dropped like a rock and the small human spun and punched the other human square in the nose. Then she ran from the roadside. Ran to the woods.

Ran to Kane.

He grinned at her in the dark as she came to him, and then slipped aside and let her pass him and vanish into the trees. He stayed low to the ground, watching the injured humans right themselves, and waited to see if there would be pursuit.

They did some shouting. Some words he knew, some he did not, but the important thing was, they weren’t running after her. They came up to the edge of the road, but no further, and eventually they got back into their groundcar. Soon, even the red lights of their leaving were gone.

Kane rose and went to collect the prize for all his patience.

She was crouching in some scrubby bushes where she could see the road. She was laughing to herself, and it wasn’t frightened just-escaped-thank-the-gods laughter, but a fierce and victorious kind. Kane allowed himself another brief moment of misgivings before he closed in on her. Good slave or bad slave, made no difference. If the human was a female, it was coming with him.

Kane was a practiced hunter and he knew he made no sound, but prey have a way of sensing predators and this one sensed him. She stopped her laughing all at once, swinging around and leaping away at the same time, and forcing him to lunge for her.

He aborted her startled jump with one expert blow of his hard knuckles just below her breastbone, sending her crashing to the ground. He put his foot on her throat and shoved her flat, and then grabbed a handful of the flowy garment she wore around her waist and yanked it up. The scent of female musk wafted up, but after all this time, that just wasn’t enough. Kane got hold of the edge of her thin loin-cover and pulled it away enough to see the proof for himself.

Female. Kane found himself considering the possibility of gods in a somewhat more favorable light than he ever had in the past.

“I have it,” the female croaked savagely.

Kane leaned back and looked down at her. She was gripping his ankle in both hands, like an animal that knows it’s caught, yet still damned well means to bite. “Have what?” he asked finally.

“Everything. The clam, crabs, warts, herpes, HIV…” She seemed to founder there, but rallied back almost immediately, her eyes blazing out of her pale face. “Come on, sport!” she snarled. “Fuck me and die!”

Kane didn’t understand very much of that, but he knew the word ‘die’. Bemused, he flexed his talons against the human’s throat…the human he had pressed flat and completely helpless and who had just threatened to kill him. This was just about the worst human he could have possibly run across if he wanted to take one captive.

On the other plate, she was the first female he’d seen in five days, and if he had to wait another five days to find another one, he was going to die. If not from Heat, then because he had ripped himself open in a maddened frenzy and bled to death.

Kane let her clothing fall back in place. He took his foot off her and seized her by the hair before she could do more than scramble into a half-seated position. He hauled her to her feet and said, “We need to have an understanding.”

He would have said more, but just then, two white lights streamed into the woods. A groundcar was coming.

The human slapped at his arm, and then at his chest, and finally twisted around and kicked him in the groin.

The groundcar slowed and stopped, exactly where it had stopped before. That was no coincidence. The humans had returned for the female.

The female kicked him in the groin again, harder this time. He thought he might bruise. Distractedly, he said, “I am going to break your arm if you keep provoking me like that. Behave yourself.”

“Motherfucker!” she snarled, and bit his hand.

Kane hissed and slapped her across the face with very nearly all his strength. She banged back into a tree and he got her by the hair again and dragged her forward. He shook her once, just to get her attention, and then showed her his claws. “I need every part of you but your face,” he said, and then slashed the bark from the tree behind her.

She had gone limp, her eyes huge. She stared at him, really seeing him, and he glared back at her and let her see everything he was. Shock became eclipsed by fear in a thunderstrike of recognition.

It was about fucking time.

There were voices coming from the road. The humans, calling for their escaped prey. “Hey, Raven! Come on! You’ll die out here! Don’t be stupid!”

Kane understood every word, save one. “Raven,” he murmured, and the female in his grip eyed him warily. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

She didn’t answer immediately, but at last, she nodded.

Kane watched the humans pace around the edge of the road. The lights of the groundcar were still on; they searched slowly, but they were coming this way. He glanced back at his female, considering his options.

“If you try to run from me, I will kill you,” he said finally. “If you warn them that I am here, I will kill you. Now. I’m going to let go of you, and you are going to want to run.” He leaned close to her, close enough for her to see the points on his teeth, if she were so inclined. “And you are going to want to fight that urge, Raven, because I’m much faster than you are. And I’m in a really rotten mood.”