Hunted (5 page)

9

RETURNING TO SOLID GROUND

Venom on my face and in my mouth. It didn’t burn or sting, but it terrified me. How long till I started shivering again? How long before I went frothing crazy-sick with poison?

Maybe this time it’d be better; maybe I’d built up resistance. But it could just as easily go the other way, with me all weakened and sensitized from the last dose. The effect could hit me ten times harder than before.

You can never be sure with venom.

Out loud I said, “If I get sick, I get sick; there’s nothing I can do.” Which sounded noble and stoic and all, but didn’t untie the knot of fear in my stomach. My mouth was still puckered with the pickly aftertaste of poison…and that was more real than any brave words.

I went to the exit hatch and hiked up the
OPEN lever. That got me into the airlock, which had a peep-monitor showing the world outside the pod. I could see a stretch of water so muddy it looked like creamed coffee…but the shore was only a stone’s throw away, a low dirt bank supporting a scraggly line of trees. The trees looked shining wet, as if they’d just got doused with rain. Considering how blue clear the sky was, I figured all that drip-off had actually come from my module smacking the water. Escape pods make relatively gentle landings—they don’t come in like fireballs, and they always aim for water to avoid smushing houses or people—but even a soft landing splashes down like a kid doing a cannonball. A good slap. Much spillage.

Too bad I missed seeing it. I bet it would have been great.

When I looked again at those trees on shore, I noticed their leaves weren’t the nice chlorophyll green of New Earth and Troyen. Their colors ran a lot more funereal. Purply black. Bluish black. Orangey black. Yellow with black spottles. Gloss black on matte black with ebony accents.

But it’d take more than dark leaves to make me feel gloomy. After twenty years of living inside a lunar dome, never seeing a tree except in VR sims, I was kiss-the-ground happy to be this close to the real thing. I pushed the
EXIT button; the interior airlock door closed, the door to the outside opened…and I jumped into the muddy water, doing a cannonball of my own.

Okay. Maybe the water was bone-shaking cold. And I’d swum halfway to shore before it occurred to me Celestia might have its own types of piranha or anacondas, not to mention swarms of alien germs. But nothing sank its teeth into my leg, and a short swim was exactly what I needed to wash the venom off my face. I even considered taking a glug of water to rinse the venom out of my mouth; but there was all that mud, and maybe the water did have germs, and anyway, some of the venom must have already gone down my throat. Keeping my eyes and mouth closed, treading water, I ducked my head under a few times, then wiped off my face with my hands. At least that rinsed the venom from my skin…and it made me feel cleaner in general, even if I could still taste the stuff I’d swallowed.

When I clambered onto the bank, I was muddy, wet, and cold. It felt good. I found a spot where the sun shone through a gap in the trees and sat down to wring the damp from my uniform. While I squeezed out water, I looked around to take stock of my situation.

Escape pods try not to put you down in a desert or an icecap or the middle of an ocean. They pick a spot with nice weather and plenty of plant life, preferably with signs of intelligent civilization.

Me, I’d landed in a thirty-meter-wide canal. You could tell it wasn’t a natural river by how straight it ran, a perfect line in both directions. The water showed almost no current: the escape pod was floating free, but it’d barely budged since I’d left it. I wouldn’t have to worry about it drifting out of sight downstream anytime soon.

If need be, I could swim back out and ask the pod’s computer for food rations when I got hungry—I hadn’t noticed any storage bins, but it’d be a pathetic excuse for an evac module if it didn’t carry basic supplies. On the other hand, I didn’t think I’d have to settle for bland protein bars and squeeze tubes of fiber paste…because behind me were fields full of vegetables as far as the eye could see.

The canal ran along one edge of a valley whose soil was almost jet-black. That meant the dirt was as rich as gravy…and it was covered with crops planted in neat rows forming neat squares—a checkerboard in shades of green stretching from the canal all the way to some distant hills. The plants looked young, like this was only late spring or early summer, but I could already recognize onions and lettuce and carrots in the fields closest to me. Honest-to-goodness Earth food growing in a big gorgeous garden that smelled of humus and greenery.

A paved road ran close in front of me, parallel to the canal and separated from the water by the scrawny trees growing on the bank. Here and there along the road stood little environment domes in clusters of two or three—living spaces for the families who worked these farms. At the moment, I couldn’t see anyone out in the fields…but the strong orange sun was straight overhead, and toasty hot even with my clothes soaked to the skin, so I guessed everybody had gone inside for siesta.

I got up, brushed the worst-caked mud off my uniform, and started down the road toward the nearest domes. No one would want me showing up unannounced in the middle of lunch; but I’d wait till people went back out to work, and I’d say hello then. On a day like this, there was no need to hurry. It was heaven just to breathe real air, away from the nanites and the black ship and Troyen…

A doorway dilated in the side of the closest dome. Out stepped a Mandasar—warrior caste, big and red. The instant he caught sight of me, he screamed a battle
cry and charged.

Mandasar warriors are only half as big as queens, but they’re still the size of Brahma bulls. They’ve got the basic lobsterish look, but bulked-up and stocky, from their flat wide faces to their strong blunt tails. If a warrior props his tail good and solid on the ground behind him, you can hit him with a truck and he won’t be knocked backward; in fact, once he gets his eight legs on solid footing, he can push that truck back the other way, over rough terrain, for hour after hour. Put a bunch of warriors together and you get a line of foot soldiers who can steamroll over anything in their path…except another line of Mandasars driving the opposite way.

Don’t get the idea warriors are slow-moving hulks; they can storm forward on those eight strong legs as fast as horse cavalry. When they’re running they look like old Greek centaurs, because the front part of their body is angled up vertically as tall as a human. Upright front, lobstery behind.

Like queens, every warrior has pincer claws, but only two of them, on stubby arms down at the waist. The claws are sharp and nasty enough to lop clean through a human’s leg, bones and all, if you’re careless enough to let your ankle come within reach. At shoulder level, warriors have another set of arms, called the
Cheejreth
or “clever twigs”: spindly six-fingered things used for fine manipulation.
Cheejreth
are nearly as long as human arms, but skinny and fragile—so weak, a human five-year-old could wrist-wrestle a warrior ten wins out of ten. During a serious fight, the
Cheejreth
stay folded against the chest, tucked into arm-sized niches in the warrior’s carapace; those niches evolved to keep
Cheejreth
safely out of the way, rather than flopping around and getting snapped off.

Topping the body is a head like a cannonball, its carapace armor twice as thick as any other part of the warrior’s shell. The head has a few delicate parts—huge feathery ears like moth antennas, and cat-style whiskers around the snout to serve as extra scent receptors, waving about to catch odor molecules from the air—but the flimsy bits aren’t at all vital. If they break or get mangled during a fight, it scarcely hurts a bit. The warrior just can’t hear or smell as well for a few days, until the damaged part grows back.

The one indispensable part of a warrior’s face is the spike on his pointy snout. It’s sharp and bony, only as big as a human thumb, but perfect for use as a bayonet—in an emergency, the warrior can use his spike to stab an enemy in the eye. Of course, it has to be a
big
emergency. All Mandasar castes have a finicky sense of smell, and they absolutely hate the stink of someone’s blood gucking up the tip of their noses.

The warrior charging toward me had a shell so fiery red, I knew he had to be young, in his twenties—the color fades as warriors get older, not to mention that they learn not to attack people at first sight. You never know when you’ll meet someone who spent years on the Mandasar home-world, learning all kinds of tricks to show overeager youngsters that humans aren’t as soft as they look.

All the same, I didn’t want to hurt an impetuous kid just because he was short on common sense. Fast as I could, I crossed my hands over my chest in the high-court submission posture and hollered, “
Naizó!
”…short for
Nai halabad tajjef su rellid puzó,
which means
I yield to your queen and her rightful hegemony over these, her duly apportioned lands.
(A thousand years ago, old-time Mandasar warriors got their kicks by trying to recite the long form of the phrase before they got a pincer rammed through their guts. They did it as a test of nerve—to show how cool-headed they could be, speaking calm and slow while an opponent raced straight at them. The flowery words got collapsed to
Naizó
about the time firearms were invented, when it suddenly became important for surrenders to be short and snappy.)

Of course, if someone barrels down on you, either with guns or with pincers, there’s always a chance he won’t stop, even when you yell uncle. The warrior charging toward me didn’t slow a bit when I
Naizó’d
him—he pounded on like a thoroughbred stallion, intending to gallop down my throat at trampling speed.

I’d have been pee-in-the-pants scared if he were a real horse; horses have hammer-hard hooves, and real good instincts when it comes to kicking. Lucky for me, Mandasar warriors are built all wrong for horsy maneuvers like rearing up, and they can’t kick worth a darn unless they practice for years. Nature designed them for using their waist pincers and nose spikes; get around those, and they don’t have much left to throw at you.

I kept shouting,
“Naizó!”
as long as I could, in case the warrior was just putting on a show to impress the rest of his family—four other Mandasars, three workers and a gentle, had come out of the dome behind him and were watching his every move, all excited and worshipful. But when the warrior got so close I could see he really planned to run me over, I dropped the submission stance and faked a move to my left, as if I were dodging out of the way. The warrior swerved in the same direction…which showed he had zero training in actual fights. He spread his waist arms wide to prevent me from going around, and opened his claws to catch me; but I was already slipping back to the right, outside the reach of his pincers.

The warrior charged straight past me, with way too much momentum to stop. If he’d had any experience fighting humans, he would have kept going; but he dropped his lobstery tail as a brake, dragging it along the ground like Mandasars always do when they want to slow down fast. For sure, he intended to swing around and take another grab at me…but I was right behind him now and his tail was close in front of my feet.

So I ran up his tail and threw myself flat onto his back.

Mandasar warriors can jump, but not nearly as much as a bucking bronco. Like I said, they’re built wrong for horse tricks—eight legs just can’t hop as wildly as four. I held on just fine by wrapping my arm around his throat in a neck-bar…not tight enough to crash his windpipe, but every time he bounced, my arm dragged across the little sections of carapace that covered his neck. My combat instructors on Troyen said that applying pressure there made the plates of the outer shell grind into the soft flesh beneath, smushing it and pinching it. Apparently you dig into three nerves at once: major nerves that feel fierce stabbing pain but don’t suffer any real damage.

So I kept my hold jammed in strong while the rest of my body flopped about on the warrior’s back. I got bruises and bumps galore, but from the sound of it, I wasn’t suffering half as much as the kid I was squeezing. He screamed blue murder and scrabbled with his
Cheejreth
arms trying to pull me off, while his waist pincers clacked sharp and angry, not able to reach any part of me.

I could smell the battle musk rising thick off his skin: Battle Musk C, the one that smells like strong sweet caramel. It meant he was scared and starting to lose his head. The scent glands for Musk C only kick in when a warrior is feeling desperate—a signal telling his comrades-in-arms he needs help, even if he’s too stubborn to admit it. Lucky for me, there weren’t other warriors around…and the Mandasars back at the dome, the workers and the gentle, would never dream of joining the fight. It would be a horrible insult to this warrior’s honor, the tiniest suggestion that he’d need help from other castes in dealing with an unarmed human.

After ten seconds of trying to toss me off, the warrior settled down a bit: either trying to think of new tactics, or just not keen on scrunching up his throat anymore. While he considered his next move, I left my one arm in place around his neck, but reached out with the other hand and wrapped it around the end of his snout.

A Mandasar’s muscles for opening his mouth aren’t very strong—if you hook your thumb on his nose spike and your fingers under his jaw, you can easily hold his mouth shut. Work it right, and you can even press your palm up against his nostrils. You never get a perfect seal, but he still has serious trouble taking in air…especially when he’s panting from trying to buck you off. It’s a good way to impress a sparring partner that you’re in control, but not so life-threatening that he thinks you want to smother him dead.

Another few seconds of that and the kid under me stopped struggling. He said something out the side of his mouth, but with his jaw held shut, the words were too muffled to understand. I loosened my grip and let him try again.

“Give,” he said.