Heat (3 page)

J
ota. 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.