Hunted (9 page)

13

RUNNING AROUND IN THE DARK

It had been twenty years since I’d heard that squeal: a personal Mayday from someone close by. A navyish someone. When you joined the fleet, you got a tiny beeper embedded under the skin of your wrist, so if you got caught in some terrible disaster, you could call for help. The beeper sent out a radio beam that activated everyone else’s beeper within a few kilometers—a shrieky shrill signal that said, “Come running, shipmate in trouble.”

The last time my beeper went off was on Troyen: Sam desperately trying to reach me.

I’d got there too late.

“Counselor!” I yelled into the darkness. “Sorry to disturb you, but this is important. Can you turn on the lights and open the door? Counselor? Counselor?”

No answer.

“Hey!” I shouted louder. “Hey!”

Nothing.

“Can anybody hear me? Anybody there?”

It was only a small dome: two rooms. And Mandasars are light sleepers. In fact, experts get into arguments whether Mandasars ever truly sleep, or just go into a resting doze where they’re always half-conscious. Either way, Counselor and the others would never snooze through me calling, let alone the squealing from my wrist.

That squeal was making me jumpy. I told the implant, “Shut off,” and the beeper stopped its noise, leaving behind a thick stuffy silence. No sound of moving or breathing anywhere close by; I was all alone in the dome.

Why did that worry me? There’d been two other domes beside this one. The kids probably ate here, and slept next door. Nothing strange about that…but it was surprising they’d left me alone, me being sick and all. Before I’d passed out, they were giving me the royal treatment. Did they change their minds once I went delirious? Or had they been watching over me, till something big and important drew everybody away?

I could imagine Counselor dozing on a pallet beside me when suddenly some crisis struck. Maybe one of her hive-mates yelled from outside. Counselor ran to help, knocking over the water bowl and not even stopping to clean up.

But what could cause such a fuss? Recruiters on a raid?

I thought about my wrist beeper again…and suddenly, it all made sense. Someone had come from the navy. A recovery team had picked up the escape pod’s homing beacon and followed the signal here. Maybe they’d decided to look around a bit, to see if anyone had been inside the pod.

What would the Mandasars think when they spotted humans wandering about in the dark? Every warrior in the valley would come howling for blood, believing recruiters were on the march.

No wonder the poor navy people fired off a Mayday.

I blundered across the room and banged my fist against the wall. The dome field didn’t budge. “House-soul, attend!” I yelled. “Can you open a door? Please.”

The house-soul ignored me. For all it knew, I could be a burglar trying to make a getaway. The computer would keep me locked in here, unable to help the navy folks till some recognized member of the hive came to let me out.

“House-soul!” I yelled again. “This is an emergency. The warriors might kill someone innocent.”

No response. I took a breath, then drove my heel into the wall with a hard side-kick. The impact knocked me backward, but it didn’t make any impression on the dome. A typical dome field is strong enough to withstand a hurricane or lightning bolt; my strongest kick just wasn’t an irresistible force of nature.

“House-soul, come on! Listen to me! It’s a matter of life and death. Don’t you have any overrides for when sentient lives are threatened?”

Still nothing. I could be speaking a foreign language for all this computer cared about me…

Oh.

Three seconds later, the house-soul had popped open a door right in front of my face. Counselor must have authorized the computer to take orders from me. All I had to do was ask in Mandasar.

The weather had turned spring-night cool, with a starry sky and three yellow moons the size of confetti. I lifted my wrist, and whispered to the implant, “Find Mayday source.” Then I held out my arm and turned in a slow circle till the implant gave a beep. At that second, my arm pointed up the road and along the canal, in the direction the escape pod had been floating when I left it.

That made sense. If file Mayday had come from a navy recovery team, the team would be close to the evac module.

I told my wrist implant to switch to silent mode, so it wouldn’t squeal no matter what. You don’t want your beeper going off when you’re trying to sneak around in the dark…especially not within earshot of Mandasar warriors, ready to gut any human they met.

For a second, I wondered if I was crazy to be out here at all. How did I think I could help? It was one thing to take on a single untrained warrior in full daylight; but if a navy recovery team was under attack by a whole militia of warriors, with every Mandasar believing the team was a desperate threat to their hives…it would take more than a few fighting tricks to get anyone out in one piece.

Including me.

On top of that, these navy folks likely came from the
Jacaranda.
They may have been sent to capture me and drag me off to some awful place halfway across the galaxy. If they were as nasty as Tobit said, they might even have set off a fake Mayday to flush me out of hiding.

But…it was stupid to worry over what-ifs when there was only one right filing to do.

Help the best I could. Hope the rest worked out.

I started running up the road beside the silent dark waters of the canal.

The first thing I found was an unconscious worker. It could have been Hib, Nib, or Pib…but it could also have been any other worker in the valley. Even with the moonlight, it was too dark to make out the teeny facial features that distinguish one worker from another.

As far as I could tell, the worker wasn’t hurt, just unconscious. Breathing peacefully. That made me think it’d been shot by a hypersonic stunner—a standard navy-issue weapon, mostly used by Explorers who encounter unknown alien lifeforms. It’s handy to have a little pistol that knocks out attackers without killing them…especially when you’re on an unexplored planet and don’t know whether you’re shooting at a big dumb predator or a sentient being who’s just mad at you for trampling its sweet potatoes.

If the navy team had stunners, they might not be in such trouble…as long as the guns’ batteries held out. Stun-pistols were good for twenty shots or so. That wasn’t nearly enough to take down every Mandasar in the marsh, but it was better than nothing. I’d have to be careful myself. If the team was looking to capture me, one shot from a stunner could lay me out cold for six hours.

I left the worker where it was and moved forward again, this time keeping under the shadow of the trees between the road and canal. Soon after, I found an unconscious gentle, then an unconscious warrior. During our discussions that afternoon, Counselor had said all three castes took turns at sentry duty…and if an alert came in, the whole community fanned out over the marsh to find the intruders. Lucky for me, the searchers in this area had already got stunned; otherwise, they might be shouting, “He’s here, he’s here,” and bringing the militia down on my head.

That would be very bad.

Half a kilometer and six more unconscious bodies later, I came to the escape pod. It was still floating in the middle of the canal, barely moving on the slow current. A scatter of Mandasar bodies lay flumped unconscious at the edge of the water, all of them warriors…as if there’d been a pitched battle here, not just sentries caught off guard in the dark.

No human bodies in sight. So far, the navy folks were holding their own.

I used my wrist implant to take another direction reading on the Mayday. Now, the signal was coming from the far side of the canal. The recovery team must have decided it was crazy to go farther into the marsh; instead, they’d headed across the water, where the land wasn’t cleared for crops. Nothing over there but scruffy black forest, and the ground sloping upward into low hills. The navy people were obviously running for cover and getting the heck out of Hollen valley.

Good,
I thought,
they’ll be okay now.
The recovery folks were retreating, and they didn’t have far to go till they’d be safe; Counselor had said there was no Mandasar population once you got to higher ground. I could go back the way I’d come, without having to worry about the navy team…and I’d better do that fast, before I ran into someone who wanted to slice first and ask questions later.

When I turned around, the starlit marsh was alive with warriors galloping in my direction.

The Mandasars hadn’t seen me yet: I was standing in dark shadows under trees. One of the unconscious warriors lying in the mud must have got off a signal before he was stunned—it only made sense that someone would be carrying a radio. Now the whole militia was charging toward the battle site…and I waited to be long gone before they arrived.

As quietly as I could, staying in shadow, I knelt and slipped into the canal. The water was just as cold as at lunchtime; just as muddy too, with the stagnant smell of algae right under my nose. I took a deep breath, then slipped beneath the surface, swimming with my eyes shut because I wouldn’t be able to see in the black muddiness anyway.

My plan was to reach the trees on the other bank and just hide in the woods. I wasn’t one of those stealthy stalker-types who could slip silently past a horde of warriors on the hunt. My only hope was that they wouldn’t bother to search the far side; none of their people lived over there, so the warriors would likely concentrate their efforts on patrolling the main valley rather than making forays across the canal.

I slid onto the opposite shore just before the first warriors arrived. When they saw the heaps of unconscious bodies, they broke into an angry chatter that covered any noise I made creeping into the woods. I kept going, crouched low and moving as fast as I could, trying to put distance between me and the Mandasars. Any second, I expected someone to shout, “Look over there!” But they were all too busy gabbling over their fallen comrades, and pointing toward the evac module bobbing quietly in the water.

As I moved, things squished softly under my feet. I didn’t know what they were: insects, or puffballs, or jellyish Celestian lifeforms, I couldn’t tell. Fleeing through the dark doesn’t give you much chance to appreciate alien ecologies. I just hoped I wouldn’t disturb any teeny critters with venomous bites. The Mandasars would’ve cleared out all larger predators—their race has no guilt about endangering species they don’t like—but they wouldn’t bother to deal with anything whose teeth were too small to go through carapace. Black widow spiders, for instance. The closest real black widow was surely forty light-years away, but I still managed to make myself nervous about them as I slunk through the pitch-dark forest.

Every now and then, a puff of breeze brought the burning-wood smell of Musk B. The warriors behind me were keyed up, just itching to fight something. If I were a worker or gentle, I’d be heading for home real fast—warriors would soon be swiping at trees just to work off their tension. It wouldn’t surprise me if they hauled the escape pod out of the canal and tin-snipped it to ribbons; with so much musk in the air, they’d be looking for
anything
to attack.

The land under my feet angled upward in fits and starts: a little slope, then a level patch, then another slanty climb. The sound of angry voices faded behind me. I was just thinking it might be safe to rest when I came across a heavy slash of damage to the forest’s undergrowth.

It looked like someone had driven a bulldozer through here, on a big swath leading backward to the canal and forward up the wooded hillslope. That could only mean one thing: a warrior had come to this side of the canal and was plowing his way after the navy team. He must have spotted them running away from the scene of the battle…and like a typical musk-mad lunatic, he’d charged after them on his own instead of waiting for reinforcements.

That was good news for the recovery team—if the warrior had stayed behind to tell the militia what was happening, the whole forest would be crawling with berserker Mandasars. As it was, the warrior probably got himself stunned cold as soon as he got close to the navy folks.

Still…I decided to follow the smashed-down trail. If nothing else, I could make better time taking the flattened path than trying to pick my way through the brush.

Three minutes later, I heard noises ahead of me. Crashing. Something going
WHUMP. Branches breaking.

I ran forward without thinking. The noises got louder: grunts and the clack of pincers closing on empty air. A warrior had just missed grabbing hold of somebody.

My eye caught a silvery glint on the trail in front of me: a stun-pistol tossed away. Usually, the guns have a green light telling when there’s enough juice in their batteries for another shot…but as I sprinted past, the light didn’t show the tiniest flicker. The stunner was completely tapped out, while up ahead some poor unarmed someone was trying to fight an angry warrior bare-handed.

The trail broke into a level clearing; and that was where the unarmed someone had decided to make a stand. It wasn’t a full navy recovery team—there was only one person, ducking away from a warrior even bigger than Zeeleepull. In the dark I could only see silhouettes, but that was enough to tell me the target under attack was a woman. She moved fast and dodgy, as if she’d done a fair bit of martial arts. Still, general combat training doesn’t teach you the specific ways to take down a Mandasar warrior…and a fight to the death isn’t the best time to start experimenting.

The warrior hadn’t noticed me yet. Even better, he had his back to me; and that meant his tail pointed in my direction. Since it worked so well before, I launched myself forward with a run and a dive, landing on the warrior’s shell and cinching my arm around his neck.

My move took both the warrior and the woman by surprise. She gasped, then dived to one side, out of my field of vision. I hoped she was going to put some distance between herself and the Mandasar’s feet, because he started to buck and bounce like crazy; if the woman didn’t get clear, she’d be trampled to paste.