Hunted (10 page)

14

TAKING ON THE LARRY

The dead woman had come back, wrapped in thick midnight blackness—as if the only thing I could see was that smudge on her cheek. Terror jolted through me, and I hurled myself off the warrior onto the ground…anything to get away from some withered-up corpse who wanted to kiss me.

“What’s wrong?” the woman whispered.

I couldn’t answer—my whole body had clenched tight with fear. I might have just lain there, gibbering and quivering, if the warrior hadn’t given his pincers an angry clack. He heaved himself up to full height, giving the woman a sneer before turning toward me. I was the one who’d hurt him. The look in his eye said he wanted to hurt me back.

“Hold on,” the woman told the warrior. “Stop fighting and let’s talk.”

The warrior ignored her. “Bleed you, recruiter,” he growled at me in English. “Suffer you, as our people have suffered.”

One second I was sprawled on the ground, still trembling at the thought of ghosts; the next, I was on my feet, with my hands wrapped around the warrior’s nose-spike. The move wasn’t my doing—something had taken charge of my body again, making my legs leap forward without orders from my brain. My arms had gone all strong too, strong enough to drag the warrior’s nose toward me the way I’d dragged Zeeleepull…except that I pulled him toward my chest instead of my face.

That was crazy. I’d never got venom on my chest. There was just my shirt, wet from my swim across the canal and sweaty from the hours of fever.

“You know who I am,” my mouth said in Mandasar. “You know
what
I am. You know.”

The warrior’s eyes narrowed, as if he was about to ram his snout forward—stab his nose-spike through my ribs. Then his whole face changed, opening wide with wonderment.
“Teelu,”
he whispered.

Your Majesty.

If I’d had control over my body, I would have blurted out, “No, no, no.” You never use the word
Teelu
for anyone but a Mandasar queen—
Teelu
is way too worshipful to waste on a mere consort. But the poor kid was so ignorant about his own culture, he didn’t know better.

The moment I let go of him, he dropped his body to the ground, pressing his nose into the dirt. “
Teelu…Teelu…Teelu…”

Which was a whole lot better than trying to kill me. Maybe it wasn’t the best time to correct his vocabulary.

“I’m impressed,” the admiral woman said.

Fright chilled me again, and I retreated a step—I was back in command of my body, and feeling a strong urge to bolt into the dark. But I swallowed hard and made myself say something half-intelligible. “Who are you?”

“Lieutenant Admiral Festina Ramos,” she said. The same name she’d used before we crossed the line. “What’s your name?”

“Edward.” Talking to an admiral, I should have been way more military:
Explorer Second Class Edward York, reporting for duty!
But my mouth was too dry with fear. “I saw you die,” I said. “On the
Willow.”

The admiral shook her head. “I’ve never been on the
Willow.
And I’ve never died—I’d remember something like that.” She stared at me a moment. “Was that your ship then? The
Willow?”

I nodded.

“Why did you have to evacuate?”

“Someone was stealing it,” I said. “I hated just to run, but Explorer Tobit told me—”

“Tobit?” the admiral interrupted “Phylar Tobit?”

“Yes.”

“Which means
Jacaranda
is in this system?”

“It was for a while,” I answered. “It might have gone chasing the black ship.”

“Bloody hell,” the admiral muttered, “I hate it when Prope’s in the neighborhood. She takes her orders from Admiral Vincence; and Vincence is the slipperiest schemer on the whole High Council.”

Even in the dark, I could see the admiral make a face like she’d bitten into an apple and found a worm. Or maybe just the back half of a worm.

“You’ll have to tell me everything,” she said, “like why Prope is chasing a black ship, and why you thought I was dead. But for now, let’s just get out of here. Give me a second to grab my Bumbler…”

She started across the clearing toward a shadowy blob lying in the grass. Bumblers were small machines with all kinds of data sensors—standard equipment for Explorers, though no one ever gave me one. Halfway to the Bumbler, the admiral stopped. “I’d better turn off my emergency signal,” she muttered. “It just tells Prope where to find me.” She lifted her wrist and told the implant, “Terminate Mayday.” Lowering her wrist, she added, “For all I know, it might have told recruiters where to find me too.”

“You know about the recruiters?” I asked.

“That’s why I’m on Celestia,” she replied. ‘Trying to shut down the bastards. I was watching their main offices on the other side of the planet when I picked up your escape pod’s homing signal. Considering how tedious stakeouts are, I decided it would be more interesting to make sure you were okay.”

“Well,” I said, feeling all awkward, “thanks for coming. I’m sorry to drag an admiral so far from her…”

“Don’t apologize.” She smiled, her teeth white in the dark. “And don’t think of me as an admiral. I may wear the gray, but I’m an Explorer, first, last, and always. So you have to call me Festina, all right? I don’t want to hear any more…”

She never finished her sentence. In the darkness, something started to laugh.

The sound was like a pack of hyenas, but breathier: piercing and whistly, echoing off the hillside. The noise seemed intentionally designed to carry long distances…and to scare the heebie-jeebies out of anyone who heard it. The crazy cackle never stopped for air, on and on, digging its fingernails into my nerves; and it was coming toward us.

“Holy shit,” the admiral, Festina, whispered. “It’s a Laughing Larry.”

She looked across at me, seeing if I knew what she meant. I nodded. In my years as a bodyguard, I worked real hard to read up on every weapon in human space not to use the weapons myself, but to know how to defend against them if Sam or Verity ever came under attack.

The best way to defend against a Laughing Larry was to surround yourself with steel-plast walls. Not very likely in the middle of a forest.

I was trying to think of other defenses when something spun into the far side of the clearing. It was a golden metal ball, a meter wide: hovering a little way off the ground and rotating fast like a kid’s top. All around its outside, the thing had little slit openings that caught the air, making that whistle-ish laughing sound. Inside, I knew it had electric amplifiers to make the whistles louder—the person who invented this thing thought the cackly hyena laugh would be great for intimidation.

Absolutely right. I was shaking in my boots, hearing that sound chuckling in the darkness—and it didn’t help that I knew how Laughing Larries worked. Each of those whistly slit openings could shoot a hundred razor-sharp fléchettes, tiny boomerang-shaped darts that could slice through skin like an ax through jelly. They could even pierce a Mandasar warrior’s carapace, spiking through the shell and deep into the flesh beneath. If this Larry opened fire, it would spray out a full 360 degrees of shrapnel, cutting us open like a hail of knives.

The golden ball whirled to the Bumbler where the little machine still lay in the grass. More hyena laughing. The Larry circled the Bumbler like a cat that’s found a dying mouse and wants to poke at it a bit. Or maybe it was more like a dog: a bloodhound that’s been following a trail and has sniffed out something that smells like prey.

Around and around the Larry hummed, prowling near the Bumbler as if trying to pick up someone’s scent.

“What is it?” a voice whispered. The warrior had lifted his head off the dirt and was staring at the spinning ball. His ear antennas had flattened straight back against his skull; he didn’t like the hyena cackle either.

“It’s a weapon,” I answered softly. “It shoots sharp things that can hurt even you.”

“Run,
Teelu,”
he said immediately. “Hold it I, whilst you escape.”

“Stay still!” Festina snapped “Maybe it’s looking for someone else.”

At that moment, the thin whistly sound coming from the ball shaped itself into a single word.

“Ramoss…osss…osss…osss.”

“Okay,” Admiral Ramos muttered, “maybe it’s
not
looking for someone else.”

“Ramoss…osss…osss…osss…”

The whispery sound whistled through the clearing as the ball continued to spin. Fifty revolutions a second…I remembered that was their top speed. Then again, that was twenty years ago; they were probably better now.

I held my breath for almost a minute…and still the

Larry didn’t attack. “Maybe it’s just trying to scare you,” I whispered to the admiral.

“Or maybe it isn’t sure who I am,” she whispered back. “I’ll bet it was tracking my Mayday. Now that I’ve shut down the signal, it can’t identify me.”

“I thought Laughing Larrys had visual sensors too.”

“They do,” the admiral replied, “but Larries aren’t smart, and it’s hard to recognize people in the dark. In the normal visual range we’re just black blobs; on IR, we’re still blobs, only brighter. So it’s straining its tiny computer brain, hying to figure out who we are. It doesn’t want to waste a thousand rounds of ammunition killing us if we. aren’t its programmed target.”

“Ramosss…osss…osss…”

The ghostly voice was getting on my nerves. “Why is it after you?” I whispered. There was no harm talking—when a Larry’s making noise, it can’t hear anything else.

“It must have been sent by the recruiters,” Festina said. The warrior’s ears perked up and he turned, as if seeing her for the first time. “They know I’m investigating them,” Festina continued, “and I’ve already had threats to stay out of their business. One of them must have followed me here…and decided this was the perfect time to take me out of the picture. All alone on Mandasar territory. If people find my body sliced to ribbons, they’ll blame it on local warriors, not the recruiters.”

“Villains they,” the warrior growled. “Black black villains…”

The smell of burning wood poured off his hide.

“Stay still,” Festina warned. “It looks like Friend Larry is stuck in a decision loop. Let confused dogs lie.”

“But if it’s confused,” I said, “won’t it radio its controller for further instructions?”

Suddenly, the laughter increased to deafening volume and the Larry whizzed toward us.

All three of us jumped. Festina and I leapt toward the woods, hoping we could get behind a good solid tree trunk before the Larry opened fire. The only reason we succeeded was because the warrior jumped the other direction—straight on top of the golden ball, like throwing himself on a grenade.

The next two seconds weren’t pretty. It took that long for the barrage of fléchettes to flense the carapace off him and slash his insides to pulp. The Larry’s laughter was overridden with a scream, then a gooey slurp of organs getting splattered in every direction. When I looked back, I couldn’t see the gold ball at all; just the warrior’s shell lying over the ball like a fid, and underneath, the whirling butcher-thing was still as loud as hyenas, spinning inside the warrior’s husk. The Larry had completely cored its way into the warrior’s belly…and soon enough, the occasional fléchette was able to pierce out the warrior’s side, blowing away little chips of armor. I ducked my head behind my tree trunk just as the Larry giggled into view again, carving out through the last bits of shell like a buzz saw.

My heart was pounding as I listened to the Larry laughing just a few paces away. If it wanted to come after us, there was nothing to stop it from chopping the admiral and me to gobbets; Larries could fly upward of eighty kilometers an hour, way faster than a human could run. I decided if it started toward us, I’d hit my Mayday implant and take to my heels, hoping the signal would draw the Larry after me. It might give the admiral a chance to get away.

But when I looked over at Festina, propped up behind another tree, she had her fingers resting lightly on her own wrist implant. Planning exactly the same thing, to sacrifice herself for
me.

I didn’t want to think what my dad would say if I let an admiral die in my place. When I was little, Dad called me “Jetsam,” saying I’d be the first thing he threw out if he ever had to lighten his ship. It made me mad, how something like that flashed through my mind at a time like this. But I really had no choice—given the trade-off between Admiral Ramos and me, I had to trigger my Mayday first.

So I did.

A high-pitched squeal filled the air: my Mayday sounding on the admiral’s implant. Except that my implant was squealing too—Festina must have set off her own Mayday at the same instant.

Both of us playing the self-sacrifice sweepstakes. It would have made me smile…if I wasn’t sure I was going to be sliced to ribbons.

But the Larry wasn’t moving. Maydays or not, it remained out in the clearing, spinning in place on top of the warrior’s pureed carcass. Why wasn’t it coming after our signals? Had it used all its ammunition digging out through the poor warrior’s body? Or was it confused because it had two separate Maydays, and didn’t know whether to come after Festina or me?

I held my breath and started to count the seconds. As I reached twenty-three, the Larry suddenly lifted into the air and swooshed away above the trees, heading back toward the canal. A trick to draw us out? I counted another thirty as the hyena laughter receded…and then only let myself move because the admiral called, “Edward, are you all right?”

“Sure.”

We both turned off our Maydays and eased out of our hiding places—where we’d cowered while a brave warrior gave his life for people he didn’t know. Looking at the blood-spattered grass, I told myself the poor kid might have died happy, knowing it was a warrior’s most honorable death: killed in righteous battle, protecting others. In the last millisecond before he was shredded, he might have felt…what, fulfilled? Validated? Triumphant?

But he was still dead. And I’d never even learned his name.

Admiral Ramos walked stiffly into the clearing. She paused over the remains of her Bumbler…but the little machine looked like it had been whacked a thousand times with a meat cleaver. Another casualty of the fléchette barrage. Festina nudged the mechanical remains with her toe, then ground the debris angrily under her heel.