Cobra Slave-eARC (14 page)

“I was a slave,” Anya said, her voice chilling noticeably. “Slaves are not always permitted to do as they wish. We waste sunlight with this conversation.”

“She speaks truth, Dyre,” Ville said. “I’ll take lead. You take follow.”

Dyre muttered something vicious-sounding. “This isn’t ended,” he warned, resettling his bag violently over his shoulder. “Go.”

“Follow closely,” Ville said as he strode briskly off toward the blackstone road. “The fafirs will be especially active this time of year.”

Leif touched his wife’s shoulder and put a hand on his daughter’s back, silently nudging the two of them into line behind Ville. Anya gestured Merrick to follow them, then moved into a spot just behind Merrick and to his left. Glancing over his shoulder, Merrick saw a brooding Dyre fall into step a meter behind her.

He turned back again, his stomach churning with guilt.

Because Anya had had possessions. A whole bag of them, in fact, probably twice the size of the one Dyre had bouncing against his back. Commander Ukuthi had sent one of his soldiers to get it for her after the Drim captain had ordered her and Merrick to his own slaves’ quarters for the journey home.

But Anya had refused to accept the bag, asking the Troft instead to return it to Ukuthi for safekeeping. When Merrick had asked why, she’d pointed out that he had no such trinkets or treasures, and being the only unburdened slave might draw unwelcome attention. Two impoverished slaves would be less noticeable, especially when they were the two who’d supposedly been under the ownership of a Balin ship commander.

Merrick had accepted her logic, admiring her dedication to the mission all the while. Never had it occurred to him that something in the bag might hold a particular significance for her.

Never had it occurred to him to even ask.

And now the man whose gifts had been deliberately tossed away was walking directly behind him. Apparently convinced that Merrick was the one responsible for their loss.

In a way, he was right.

The road material turned out to be pretty much as Merrick had guessed: bits of black rock of various sizes embedded in a glassy-looking black substrate. The forest pressing in around them was filled with a variety of subtle sounds and aromas, similar yet markedly different from those of the forests of Aventine and Qasama.

Most of the scents were pleasant or at least exotically neutral. One, though, was distinctly different: acidic and nose-curlingly unpleasant when the breeze came just right. Apparently, Merrick had been right about the road’s shoulders being laced with some kind of powerful herbicide. Maybe it was just as well, he mused, that the Cobras’ designers hadn’t included olfactory enhancements.

The group traveled mostly in silence. Gina was the one exception, asking questions end to end, mostly about the various plants and small animals she spotted and the twittering bird calls she could hear. Her parents were far less inclined toward conversation, and their answers were short and perfunctory.

For an hour the girl kept at it, undeterred by the curtness of her parents’ answers or the silence of the others. But after that her excitement at her new surroundings began to wane. By the start of the third hour she either ran out of questions or the energy to ask them, and fell silent as she concentrated on her walking.

They’d been at it for a full three hours, and Merrick was idly trying to match the various songbird calls with the names Leif had given Gina, when the songs and other noises on the left-hand side of the road suddenly faded away.

He looked behind him. Anya’s face was turned toward the ominous silence, her eyes darting around. Behind her, Dyre was doing the same.

Merrick scowled. Terrific. Keying in his infrareds, he scanned the trees.

Most of his Cobra service had been in Capitalia, where the most vicious animal he was likely to run into was some obnoxious person’s obnoxious pet. But his training had included a unit on wildlife, and if he remembered those lessons correctly most predators were either ground attackers or liked to jump from trees.

This group had apparently skipped that part of the manual. There were eight large-animal infrared images lurking out of sight along the side of the road, and they were evenly distributed between the ground and the lower branches of the nearest trees.

Two entirely separate types of animals, perhaps? That was certainly possible. They could either be working together, like the mojos and razorarms on Qasama, or be rivals jockeying for first grab at the tasty-looking human travelers.

“Ville?” Dyre called softly.

“I hear them,” Ville said, glancing around. “There,” he said, pointing to the right and turning off onto the shoulder.

“Yes,” Dyre confirmed, heading that same direction. “Leif, get your family to cover.”

“Get one for me,” Anya called, giving Merrick a light but insistent shove toward a bush that seemed to be made entirely of fuzzy green bamboo-like spikes clustered together. The Streamjumper family was already moving in that direction, Leif pressing his palms against his wife’s and daughter’s backs as he hurried them along, his eyes on the quiet forest behind him. “Go with them,” Anya added quietly to Merrick. “Protect them, especially the child.”

Merrick started to object, remembered in time that he was supposed to be mute, and instead pointed toward the hidden predators.

“Yes; fafirs,” Anya said, giving him another push, a more forceful one this time. “They’re not too dangerous—we can easily drive them away. But you must protect those who cannot fight.”

“What, him?” Dyre growled. There was a sudden crack of breaking wood, and Merrick saw him pull a thick section of branch as long as his arm from beneath the flowing foliage of one of the trees. At one end the branch was studded with thorns the size of razorarm fangs.

“Dyre speaks truth,” Ville agreed. Two quick wood-breaking cracks, and he strode back onto the road, swinging a thorn stick in each hand. “If you want them safe, you’ll need to protect them yourself.”

“Merrick can do it,” Anya insisted. She gestured to Ville, and he tossed her one of the sticks, giving it a midair half turn so that she could catch the non-thorny end. Glaring at Merrick, she jabbed the stick toward Leif and his family. “Go!” she ordered.

Glowering, Merrick headed toward the Streamjumpers, throwing another look at the woods on the left side of the road. More infrared images had appeared, with the total now up to nearly twenty. They were spread out over a good ten meters, too. If they all attacked together, Anya, Dyre, and Ville would be quickly outflanked.

And unless the predators were a lot tamer than anything that size had any business being, one or more of the human defenders was going to get hurt or killed.

He looked back at Leif and his family, huddled together in front of the bamboo bush. On the other hand, Leif didn’t look like much of a fighter at all. If some of the predators got past Anya and made it over here, he and his family were even more likely to die. At least Anya and the others had weapons.

Which, come to think of it, would probably be a good idea all around. Stepping over to tree where Ville and Dyre had gotten their sticks, he eased his hands into the curtain of soft leaves and found another of the thorn branches. Getting a grip at its base, he gave it a pull.

Nothing happened.

He frowned. The same sort of branch had come off in Dyre’s hand like it was a dry piece of kindling. Ville had managed to get two of them without even working up a sweat. Locking his fingers around the branch, he tried again, this time putting servo strength into the effort.

For a moment the branch continued to resist. Then, with a protesting crunch, it broke free.

Merrick backed away from the tree, staring at the stick in uneasy wonderment. It had taken a fair level of his enhanced strength to break something that Ville and Dyre had done with unassisted muscle power.

Anya had told him that many of the human slaves were used in combat together for the amusement of their owners. Apparently, some of those owners had experimented with strength-breeding among their stock. Maybe they would do all right against the fafirs, after all.

He started back toward Leif and his family, again keying his infrareds as gave the situation a quick assessment. Anya and the two men were standing in a line down the center of the road, spaced about three meters apart where they would be far enough to have freedom of movement but close enough that they could quickly go back-to-back if they started becoming overwhelmed. The predators were still holding position, but as Merrick notched his auditory enhancers up he could hear restless-sounding movements in some of the closer trees. Someone up there was impatient to get started. From somewhere behind Merrick came the soft crunch of something moving through the underbrush—

There was a sudden squeal, startlingly loud in his enhanced hearing. “Look out!” Gina’s voice boomed.

Merrick spun around, his left hand curling automatically into fingertip laser firing position. There was an animal there, all right, barely three meters away, its body pressed close to the ground as it gazed at him.

But it wasn’t a fafir, whatever the hell a fafir was. It was something more familiar, and far more dangerous.

It was a razorarm.

And it was definitely the Qasaman version, not a spine leopard that had been taken from the expansion regions of Aventine. Merrick could see the scarred and toughened skin on its shoulders, evidence that it had once carried a mojo raptor bird there.

For that first instant Merrick gaped at the predator in sheer frozen surprise. A heartbeat later, his brain caught up with him. Back on Qasama, he and Commander Ukuthi had both noted the curious fact that Troft ships were still capturing razorarms from the local forests despite the fact that the attackers had apparently already moved on Aventine, where they should have a ready supply of the predators. Part of the impetus for this mission, in fact, had been Ukuthi’s curiosity as to what the Drim demesne was doing with all of those animals.

Apparently, Merrick had found one of the answers to that question. And with that answer had come a sudden huge problem.

Because he couldn’t simply target one of the predator’s kill points and fire a laser at it. It was absolutely vital that he keep his true identity a deep, dark secret. That was why Anya had spent all those hours trying to teach him how to fit in with her people. That was why he was still pretending to be mute, so that even after that coaching his foreign accent wouldn’t raise eyebrows and questions. His mission—hell, his life—depended on it. So did Anya’s.

But his mission also depended on him surviving the next thirty seconds. The razorarm’s forearm quills were already fanning outward, the first indication that it was preparing to attack. Without his lasers or arcthrower, he didn’t have a chance in hell.

From somewhere behind him, dimly heard through the thudding of his heart and his single-minded focus on the razorarm, came the violent rustling of vegetation and a chorus of whooping barks. Apparently, the fafir attack had begun.

And suddenly, he remembered the stick gripped in his hand.

It was an insane plan, really. But unless he wanted to simply give up and proclaim to the world that he was a Cobra it was the only plan he had. Turning to put his torso square-on to the razorarm, hoping the noise of the battle behind him would cover up any stray sound, he fired a burst from his sonic.

The razorarm staggered slightly, its balance temporarily thrown off. Before it could recover, Merrick leaped forward and slammed the thorny end of the stick squarely across its face.

The predator howled in rage and pain, its quills snapping all the way out. Merrick continued his lunge forward, shifting the angle of his stick and slapping it across the predator’s right foreleg. The impact flattened a section of the quills back against the leg. Before they could bounce out again he threw himself chest-first against the leg, his body pushing the quills the rest of the way down. At the same time he snaked his right arm up under the predator’s head and around the back of its neck, squeezing his upper arm against its throat.

And as the angry howling abruptly turned into a labored snarl, he pressed the little finger of his left hand deep into the fur over one of the animal’s kill points and fired his laser.

The razorarm went limp. Still holding its neck, he shifted his left hand to another kill point and fired again, just to be sure. Then, careful of the still protruding quills, he released his grip and pushed himself away.

Only then did he notice that the sounds from behind him had stopped.

He spun around, fearing the worst. To his relief, Anya and the two men were still standing, still apparently in good shape, though Ville had a shredded jumpsuit sleeve and a long cut beneath it. Scattered around them were the fafirs: lean, hairy animals that seemed to be some strange combination of wolf and ape. A couple of them were sprawled unmoving on the road, but most of the handful still in sight were limping or loping rapidly away.

Apparently, the defenders’ focus had been more on driving the attackers away than actually killing them. Merrick took a quick look at the downed fafirs, wondering if any of them might still be a danger, then raised his eyes to Anya.

She was staring back at him, her face suddenly carved from stone.

Ville was staring, too. So was Dyre. So were all three of the Streamjumper family.

Merrick hissed out a sigh. So much for his attempt to keep a low profile.

It was Gina who finally broke the silence. “Wow!” she said, leaning against her father’s grip, straining to get a better view of the carnage. “What’s that?”

Merrick felt a sudden surge of hope. So it wasn’t his killing of the razorarm that had them all so awestruck. Or at least not just the killing. It was the razorarm itself.

Which, now that he thought about it, made perfect sense. Razorarms hadn’t existed on Muninn until the Drims started hauling them here a few weeks ago. There was no reason why any of the others would ever have seen one before.

Anya apparently reached that conclusion the same time he did. “They’re called razorarms,” she told the others. “Merrick was trained to kill them in my master’s version of the Games.”