The Vixen War Bride
Page 17
The Mikorin then took the packaging and wadded it up in a ball. A moment later, she unwadded it, stretched it out and held it in front of her face again.
Alzoria’s eyes went wide.
Alzoria was holding a brown MRE bag, trying to see how far it would stretch. she agreed.
Alzoria mused quietly as she examined the MRE bag.
Alzoria looked back at the tent, her ears folding down and pressing against her head.
If they really can make such things, she thought, then we never stood a chance.
Ben finished his soup and stood up. Seeing the others were likewise finished with their meal, and still rattled by the memory he had relived earlier, he gestured to the tent flaps. “Let’s go for a walk,” he suggested.
Patricia raised a finger to make a note. “Shouldn’t we stay here in case the Aderen wants to talk to us?”
“I doubt we’ll be hard to find,” Ben told her. “I want to see what we’re working with.”
Ramirez clapped his hands off and hopped to his feet. “Sounds good to me.”
The interpreter relented and climbed to her feet as well. “Sure, let’s go.”
The trio exited the tent, and Alzoria tensed at their appearance. Ben gave her a respectful nod but made no move to ask permission to walk around, stepping past the huntress and starting down the row of tents. The huntress, under orders to watch the Dark Ones and nothing more, followed the group at a respectful, but watchful, distance.
“How long do you think they’ve been down here?” Patricia asked quietly as she moved carefully around two tents placed too close together.
“Weeks, maybe,” Ben ventured with a shrug. “You could ask them.”
“I would, but…” Patricia trailed off for a moment. “They just seem so scared of us.”
“What did you expect?” the Ranger captain asked as they turned down another row, moving toward the sound of people.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I just don’t know how to put them at ease long enough to convince them we’re not going to hurt them.”
“TV and movies have prepared generations of humans on what to expect from an invasion from outer space,” Ben told her, ducking under a pole on which hung some vixen’s laundry. “Not for the other way around.”
“They probably thought we were monsters,” Ramirez quipped. “That’s what I always imagined aliens would look like.”
“My grandmother said her grandmother used to tell her about life back when Korea was still cut in half,” Patricia told them. “How her part of Korea used to tell its people that Americans were werewolves that ate Korean children. Maybe they did some of that here, make their people hate us more.”
“Werewolves, huh?” Ramirez said. He turned to her and raised his hands over his head. Opening his mouth wide, he growled fiercely.
Just ahead of them, a young vixen cried out, dropping a basket of laundry and fleeing down the alley of tents in fear. Behind them, Alzoria raised her bow and nocked an arrow into it.
Ben and Patricia gave Ramirez pointed looks. Sheepish, the Ranger cleared his throat. “Sorry.”
“Just don’t eat anyone,” Ben warned him. They continued walking.
The human trio, plus their huntress escort, stepped into a much wider thoroughfare. Cook fires were set up in front of some of the tents. Looking up, Ben saw a hole in the cave’s ceiling that sucked the smoke into it.
“Main street,” he guessed.
He picked a direction at random and continued to stroll. Up ahead, hanging around a large gray tent, a group of tods in worn monpei saw them and started toward them. The one in front, a muscular tod with long and messy dull brown hair and tail jutted his angular chin at them and called out. Three of his buddies hung back behind him.
“Oh, this bodes well,” Ramirez said quietly. He raised his hand and waved good-naturedly, a wide, friendly smile on his face. “Hey, how ya do’in?!”
“We probably shouldn’t antagonize them,” Patricia told him.
The fox man stepped up to them, standing toe-to-toe with Ramirez, and sized up the young Ranger. He said something in Va’Shen, his tail waving lazily behind him. His buddies snorted in agreement.
“What he say?” Ramirez asked.
“He said you don’t look strong,” Patricia told him.
The tod spoke again, longer this time. Patricia nodded as she got the translation and turned to Ramirez again. “He said he heard we were strong, but he doesn’t think that’s right.”
“Oh, heck no!” Ramirez said with a bright smile. “I’m a god-fearing, peace-loving, man of the people!” he said.
Patricia spoke to the tod, who snorted in derision. He spoke again, and Patricia turned red.
“He said he thinks you’re insulting him.”
The tod spoke again before Ramirez could answer his accusation. Patricia cleared her throat and translated.
“He said he’d like to fight you.”
The tod said something, and his friends made snickering sounds, their tails twitching in mirth.
By now a crowd had started to form around them, and Ben’s hand drifted casually down to the butt of his sidearm. Alzoria seemed uninterested in intervening, and, quite the contrary, was curious to see how the Dark Ones would react to such a direct challenge.
“He said…”
“I know what he said,” Ramirez cut her off, scratching his head. “That’s pretty universal. Sir?”
“Don’t kill him, and don’t break any bones.” was all Ben would say.
“Wait!” Patricia said in panic. “Are you serious!? You’re going to fight this guy in the street, and you are actually okay with that?! I thought we weren’t trying to make enemies!”
“Shoot, LT,” Ramirez said with a grin, unzipping his camouflage uniform top and pulling it off. “Where I’m from, this is how you make friends.”
The group of tods made approving noises and backed up to give their leader some room. The crowd that just a moment before was threatening to suffocate them, backed up, not eager to get between the two men.
Patricia turned to Ben and tried again. “Sir, this is stupid! You can’t let this happen!”
It wasn’t that Ben didn’t see where Patricia was coming from, he just didn’t agree with her position and thought she was missing something very important. If honor was as big a deal here as their dealings with the Va’Shen so far indicated, then there was no way he could ask Ramirez to back down from a challenge made right in front of his company commander. Yasuren and Alacea might be the formal leaders of the community, but it was the young, fighting-age tods in the village that were the biggest source of potential problems for the Rangers, and if they got it into their heads that the human soldiers were pushovers, things would get a lot worse long before they got any better.
Besides that, there was something else Patricia didn’t know.
Since its inception as a fighting force, the U.S. Army had trained its soldiers on how to keep fighting once their ammunition was
depleted. In the beginning it was bayonet training. Later, other fighting forms and martial arts were introduced. In the mid-twentieth century, Air Force General Curtis LeMay had mandated that all his nuclear bomber crews be taught judo in case they were shot down over the Soviet Union. Late in that same century, the Department of Defense had come to realize that while nearly one hundred percent of hand-to-hand fights started with both combatants on their feet, nearly one hundred percent of those same fights ended with both fighters rolling around on the ground. To that end, the Army started training their soldiers to simply accelerate that process, to bring the fight to the ground quickly and dominate their opponents there through grappling. Every line unit was required to have an expert grappler who could train the other soldiers in the unit to dominate a hand-to-hand fight.
For Bravo Company, that guy was Ramirez.
Ramirez hopped on the balls of his feet like a boxer for a few moments, warming up. Raising his fists, he motioned for the tod to come at him.
The fox man crouched low, his hands out in front of him and his tail lashing back and forth behind him like a whip. His friends shouted words of encouragement, while the other Va’Shen remained nervously silent, utterly terrified by what this fight might bring to them.
The tod lunged at Ramirez!
A few seconds later, Ramirez had him on the ground, pinned in an armbar that made it impossible for him to push the human off. After a few moments, Ramirez hopped up and offered him a hand. The fox didn’t take it but leapt to his feet and entered another crouch.
Ramirez smiled. “All right,” he said. “Now, it’s a party.”
the tod who had insulted Alacea earlier concurred.
Bao Sen said.
Alacea sighed.
“Then we have been judged,” the tod told them. “This is our punishment.”
At that moment, Idriza came running into the Aderen, completely out of breath, her tail puffed out to three times its normal size in panic.
Chapter 9
Patricia was practically biting her nails as she watched Ramirez pin the tod for the third time, but this time there was something different. Instead of continuing to fight, the Va’Shen looked at Ramirez and jut out his chin. Ramirez stood up and offered a hand, and the tod took it, allowing himself to be pulled to his feet before taking another fighting stance.
The other tods continued to shout encouragement while the rest of the onlookers watched the proceedings nervously. Each time they fought, Ramirez had been careful to use the bare minimum of force necessary to end the fight without actually hurting the fox man. Somewhere along the way, the Va’Shen man must have realized that, because there was less heat in his later attacks. He seemed more interested in trying to figure out how Ramirez was pinning him than laying the Ranger out.
Standing next to the interpreter, Ben watched the fight, silently transfixed by it. His hand had never left the grip of his sidearm, and as the fight continued, he subconsciously gripped the weapon tighter and tighter. By the time the fourth round began, his knuckles were white.
Ramirez beckoned the tod to come at him again, and he did, coming at the Ranger low and fast. The Ranger met him head on, getting around the Va’Shen and his arms under the alien’s.
Ben watched, the cheers sounding further and further away as his troop put the alien man into a full nelson, incapacitating him from behind. The Ranger captain swallowed as somewhere in the back of his mind, he heard the sound of neck bones cracking.
The thumb on his right hand seemingly moved on its own volition, and the safety on his sidearm clicked off…
He snapped awake as several high-pitched, angry-sounding shouts smashed into the cheering, and the crowd practically scrambled to part, revealing a visibly angry Yasuren and Alacea storming toward them. The two stopped in front of the incapacitated tod, still in Ramirez’s full nelson, and began to hector him loudly in Va’Shen.
Ben shook his head, finally realizing that for the last few minutes he had been somewhere else. He felt like he was walking into a movie that had already started and it took him a moment for his mind to catch up.
Ramirez looked like he wasn’t sure what to do. It didn’t seem like the two Va’Shen women were addressing him. They were looking right at the young tod and angrily shouting at him, their hands waving spastically and their tails whipping left and right in fury. The Ranger released the tod, unsure if the alien would choose to run from the vixens or start shouting back. Instead, he stood there, his tail limp and his ears flattened against his head. The Ranger sheepishly inched his way back to where Ben and Patricia were standing, trying not to draw their attention.
Ben watched the two women berate the tod, fascinated by the display. The larger, more muscular male stood there and took the abuse. He leaned over to Patricia and whispered to her.
“I’m not even going to ask,” he assured her.
“Oh, thank you!” she whispered back. “They’re talking so fast, I can’t make anything of it.”
“It kinda sounds like a bunch of chickens falling down the stairs,” Ramirez whispered to them in awe.
While Yasuren continued to berate the farmhand, Alacea turned around and addressed the humans. Ramirez physically jumped, anticipating a similar tongue lashing. Instead the priestess dropped to her knees and bowed her head until it touched the cave floor.
she said.
For the first time since the yelling began, the tod spoke up.
Alacea jumped back up to her feet, and she and Yasuren began yelling at the tod all over again, who returned to looking down at his feet in shame.
“Okay,” Ramirez said, “I think they’re getting the wrong idea here. LT, throw the towel, would ya?! This guy is getting creamed!”
Patricia stepped forward hesitantly. “Um…” she began. Finally, after a moment, she held her hands up.
down, and the terp tried again, louder this time.
The two fox women finally stopped and looked at the humans. Yasuren and Alacea dropped to their knees, dragging the tod down between them and bowing low. The Va’Shen around them watched nervously as their leaders genuflected to the Dark Ones, wondering if they were about to see the three Va’Shen summarily executed as a warning to the others.
Patricia cleared her throat and half turned her head to Ben. “Um… What do I say?”
“Tell them we were just goofing around,” Ramirez hissed at her. “Showing each other some moves.”
“Yeah,” Ben agreed, still somewhat rattled from earlier. “Let’s try to avoid making this a thing.”
Patricia cleared her throat again and addressed the two vixens.
Yasuren didn’t raise her head as she tried to decipher the Dark One’s broken Va’Shen.
Alacea didn’t raise her head either. she whispered back. Finally, she raised her head and looked to Patricia.
For perhaps the hundredth time in the last few days, Alacea wished the Dark One woman was better at speaking their language, and vowed to teach her Tesho how to speak Va’Shen properly so she didn’t have to go through the woman to communicate. She cautiously rose to her feet and bowed to the Dark Ones again. Yasuren and the farm hand followed a moment later.