The Last Hour of Gann (36 page)

The corners of his hard mouth turned up. He grunted, pulled the meat off the blade of his knife and skewered it on a thin bit of branch instead. He propped that over the fire beside him and said a new word, pointing at it.

Cook? Fire? Whatever it was, she parroted it back obediently.

His mouth opened in a hissing grimace. He
took one of the gut-kabobs off the fire and held it up, steaming and dripping juices down its skewer, still partly raw and a little black around the edges, but enough to flood Amber’s mouth with eager water. He gestured at it, his spines flaring in what she could only hope was an encouraging manner.

She said the word she thought meant meat and
then strung it all together into what she hoped was almost a real sentence: “Meoraq cook saoq meat.”

He winced. Sighed. Pu
t the kabob back over the fire and looked at her.

“If you don’t like it, l
earn English. At least I’m making an effort here. Listen!” She reached out to pat the corpse. “Meat—oh yuck, it’s still warm. Oh God, and sticky!” She started to wipe her hand off on her pants, then changed her mind and dragged it over the ground instead. She only had so many clothes. “Meat! Say it with me! Meat!”

He frowned at her, silent.

“Any progress, Miss Bierce?”

Meoraq’s gaze shifted past her to watch
Scott join them. His spines flattened. He bent over the saoq, ripping it out of the rest of its hide and muttering under his breath.

“What do you want?” Amber asked.

“Nothing. I’m just not comfortable leaving the heavily-armed alien unsupervised.”

“I’m here.”

“Also unsupervised.”

Scott
probably had more to say, but whatever scathing insult he was cooking up turned into a gagging cry as Meoraq shoved a skinless, disemboweled, dead deer against his chest. He tried to back away, but Meoraq only shoved harder, more or less forcing Scott to embrace the corpse.

“W
hat does he want?” Scott demanded shrilly.

Meoraq spat out some suggestions, then looked at Amber and cocked his head.

She replayed his words and realized there were a few in there she knew. “He wants you to eat it.”

Meoraq gave the corpse a last push and pointed firmly back at the other fire. He hissed through his teeth, his flat spines scraping at the top of his scaly head.

“And he wants us to leave him alone,” Amber translated. She started to get up.

Meoraq’s hand slammed down on her shoulder and seated her with a squishy thump back on the ground. He hissed at her next, exactly the same way. On his throat, faint lines of yellow color were coming into his scales. He pivoted at the hip and pointed at the other fire,
spitting out lizard-words faster than she could follow. The message, however, was clear: Go back to your side of the camp and stay there.

Scott
backed up, holding the carcass clumsily before him like a shield. “If that thing attacks me again, I’m holding you responsible,” he warned.

“He’s not attacking you, he’s feeding you,” said Amber, rubbing her shoulder. “
Am I responsible for that? Seriously, Meoraq, that hurt.”

“Meoraq!” spat the lizardman, still glaring at
Scott. But then he leaned back on his heels and cupped the end of his snout, taking deep breaths and muttering to himself, and when he looked at her again, the scales on his throat were all black once more. “Meoraq,” he said, and gestured toward her, grudgingly inviting her own name.

“Meat,” she said, using his word and rubbing her shoulder some more.

He flung up his hands, took one stomping step toward the fire and the gut-kabobs roasting there, then pulled himself up with a jerk and really stared at her.

“Ye
ah. Amber-meat. And if you make some joke about bacon—” she began, rounding on Scott, but he had taken advantage of Meoraq’s distraction to retreat. She could see him at the other fire already, surrounded by worshipful Manifestors, rewarding their loyalty with someone else’s food. And they loved him for it.

Something nudged her arm. M
eoraq, impatiently trying to get her attention. He had another gut-kabob in his hand, this one a bit overcooked, and as soon as she was watching him, he plucked the chunk of liver off the top end of the skewer, said a word, and popped it into his mouth. He didn’t chew, but she could see the underside of his jaw moving as he worked his rigid tongue back and forth against the roof of his mouth. He swallowed, said the word again, and pointed at her with two fingers.

Her stomach growled. She clapped a hand over it stupidly, but it was too late. Meoraq looked at it and then at her, frowning.

“Meat,” she said in lizardish, stubbornly adding, “Meoraq’s meat,” just to let him know that she had no expectations.

His frown became a glare, so she knew she’d said it wrong, but he understood enough to pluck a second kabob off the coals and put it in her hand.

“You don’t get it. I don’t want you to take care of me,” she told him, trying to push it back at him. “I want you to show me how to take care of myself. Okay? Because I can’t be…” Her eyes wandered, seeking and finding the wisps of blonde hair flying above the crowd that could only be Nicci’s. “I have to take care of myself,” she said at last. “I have to take care of her.”

Meoraq rolled his eyes and scratched at the side of his snout,
scowling at her. He started to speak, and then suddenly leaned out and caught her by the chin again. The scaly pads of his fingers dug in and forced her to face him. Red eyes that could never even pretend to be human stared her down while he talked at her. The word for ‘eat’ was in there. He hissed at the end of it, just a little, like putting an extra-hard dot on an i, then let her go and pointed at her kabob.

She ate it.
It was tough as hell and overchewing it brought out all the wrong elements of its flavor, which was vaguely like beef, but darker, earthier, almost bitter with minerals. She was all too aware of how she looked as she struggled with it—the fat chick stuffing her face—but the first bite turned into the last one embarrassingly fast. When she looked up, sucking grease from her empty fingers, Meoraq was still holding on to most of his, his head slightly canted, watching her. So was the saoq’s head in the fire. Both of them with nearly the same expression.

“Thanks,” mumbled Amber, rubbing her mouth.

Meoraq grunted back at her. He took a piece of what might be kidney off his skewer, then paused, his gaze shifting beyond her, and popped it into his own mouth.

She looked back, already knowing she was going to see
Scott, and there he was, marching toward them. He wasn’t alone. Since the saoq was cooking and staring at it couldn’t help it roast faster, quite a few Manifestors were trickling over to Meoraq’s small fire, hungrily eyeing his gut-kabobs, his roasting severed head, even the bloody heap of hide. The lizardman watched them circle without expression, but the hand that did not keep an easy hold on his saoq-kebob drifted down to the hilt of one of his swords.

“You might want to give him some space,” Amber
remarked.

Scott
took a step back at once, then pinked and glanced behind him at the watching Manifestors. “I can’t believe you say that thing isn’t dangerous. It’s a textbook example of a hostile alien predator. Textbook. Even if we could disarm it, he could still bite someone’s hand off.”

“He’s not hostile and he doesn’t bite.”

Meoraq naturally chose that moment to take a huge bite of liver. His relatively few yet large and apparently very sharp teeth sheared through the tough meat so easily that they snapped audibly when his jaws met. He eyed Scott, contentedly eating in his lizardish way, and drew his hooked sword to tap against the toe of his boot.

“
Really?” said Amber, looking at him.

His spines flicked.

“The only reason for anything to have a mouth like that is for biting,” Scott announced in a knockout imitation of a man who knew what he was talking about.

“Olfaction,” said Mr. Yao.

They all looked at him—Amber, Scott, and the lizard.

Mr. Yao rolled one shoulder in a shrug (Meoraq’s spines swept forward; he rolled one of his shoulders too, just a little bit, as if testing its range of motion). “I’m not
a doctor of medicine,” he said. “I’m an evolutionary biologist.”

A short silence followed this statement. Mr. Yao seemed to be expecting it.

“Okay,” said Amber at last. “I have no idea what that means.”

“It means that I have studied the way animals evolve. I was assigned to this mission to assess whatever forms of life we might have encountered on Plymouth. T
here was always a chance, you see, that it might be inhabited, even though the probes never detected any higher signs of intelligent life.”

“Higher signs like what?” Amber asked as
Scott said, “This is probably classified and you shouldn’t be discussing it with civilians.”

Mr. Yao chose to answer Amber. “Signs such as city lights, roadways, radio or satellite transmissions. Anything, in other words, that could be detected by a probe. They never found anything, but Plymouth was an Earth-class planet with a wide range of eco-systems.
There were plants, it stood to reason there would be animals, and while they would surely be of some alien design, those designs must still serve some logical purpose, such as—” He glanced at Scott. “—the reason why certain animals have a snout-like mouth. Not to hold teeth, but to hold scent receptors.”

“Okay, that’s a great theory,”
Scott said dismissively, already waving one hand to try and cut Mr. Yao off. Meoraq’s head tipped; his eyes tracked each movement of that hand. “But you can’t possibly prove it. This is an alien.”

“
Nature follows necessity,” said Mr. Yao. “Generally speaking, the more pronounced the nasal area is, the more advanced the animal’s olfactory ability should be. Since our friend does not have many teeth, it can be assumed he uses that space for some other purpose, such as scent reception. In fact, if you look at him closely—”

They all did. Meoraq
returned their stares without obvious concern, except that the sword he was playing with lifted ever so slightly.

“—you will see several pit-like pores around his mouth, separate from his nasal openings. Certain animals—particularly reptiles—have two distinct olfactory systems, one of them used mainly to detect pheromones
. If I were to hypothesize further—”

“There’s nothing
to be gained by discussing any of this,” Scott interrupted. “Regardless of
Mr
. Yao’s ideas on alien physiology, just the fact that the lizard is armed to his extremely sharp teeth proves that it has the potential to be dangerous.”

“
He also has the potential to bring us food,” Amber pointed out. “And I noticed you took it before you started all this bullshit about how dangerous he is. Look, if he’d wanted to sneak out and come back with an army of raging lizardmen, he could have done that. If he’d wanted to slit our throats in the night, he could have done that too. Instead, he brought us breakfast and you’re bitching about it.”

“Thankfully, it’s not your job to concern yourself with the safety of others, Miss Bierce, because you appear to be as bad at that as you are at teaching English. I, on the other hand, can be objective about the benefits and detriments our native friend brings to the colony. So why don’t I do my job and you can try to do yours
and everybody will be much happier?”

“Fuck you,
Scott.”

Scott
nodded as if this were exactly the answer he’d expected. If he’d reached out to pat her on the head as his smirking expression indicated he might, she might have lost it, but he didn’t, so she didn’t. He walked away, taking his Manifestors with him and instructing these to gather wood and those to build more fires so they could all see how commanding he was.

Amber watched them go, confused and pissed off and mostly tired and cold and still hungry. She
had always been very good at dealing with life’s little shit-heaps, but she honestly couldn’t see any way out of this one. She could see it getting worse almost by the minute, but she couldn’t see how to stop it. All she could do was get the lizard talking as quickly as possible and hope that once the others saw that someone was with them who actually knew what he was doing, all this Commander crap would just…blow over.

‘
Never happen,’ she told herself in the voice of her dead mother. ‘If it all goes right, the lizardman will be Commander Scott’s friendly native guide. If it all turns to shit, he’ll be the mistake you brought into camp. Either way, Commander Scott is here to stay, so you can suck it up, little girl…’

“Or you can blow it out,” Amber finished, then
sighed and looked at Meoraq. When he looked back at her, she made herself smile. “We’re going to do this,” she told him. “We just have to start simple, right?”

He
frowned.

“Right.” Amber patted herself on the chest. “Human. Say it with me.
Human
.”

Meoraq’s gaze dropped to her hand. He grunted and handed her what was left of his
gut-kebob. He told her to eat it, then got up and went into his tent, leaving her alone with the saoq’s slowly roasting head and its silent, judgmental stare.