One meat animal she pursued was a native animal that she knew, from Ethan’s briefing of Chisholm, was what was called a bison here. It was almost the size of a Giant Longhorn, but had much shorter inward curved horns, and wore a shaggy dark brown to black coat. It wasn’t as fast as the cattle, but she decided that they would give her a good run over a long distance. These animals had once roamed this country by the tens of millions, but over hundreds of years, they had dropped greatly in numbers, mainly because they competed with cattle for forage. They were hunted for dog or cat food, and for limited human consumption, for those that liked the rangy wild tasting meat. Aware that the two animals she chased were relatively rare and endangered, she didn’t perform an actual takedown.
She had scented two types of large predatory animals, and thought several old tracks she came across could belong to Chisholm range wolves, which hunted in packs of six to twenty.
When she picked up a fresh scent, and saw tracks that entered a canyon leading towards some highlands, the imprints excited her. They appeared to be smaller versions of her own tracks, although the scent was so foreign that she had no idea what body type it might have.
She followed it at a trot for a mile before she suddenly realized, with a combination of admiration for the creature, and annoyance with her carelessness, that it was up on the canyon rim to her right, following and stalking her. She had spotted movement of a couple of low limbs of scrub trees, which wasn’t caused by the light breeze, and knew she was being watched by the predator she followed, or in a flash of insight, knew it had to be a companion to the one she followed, since it couldn’t have doubled back that quickly. Rippers also specialized in distracting prey and letting a pride mate, normally a large male, attack the target from the flanks.
She was undecided. Should I let them spring the ambush, or disrupt it by going after the flanker?
She was confident she could handle whatever threat they offered, because they couldn’t possibly know what she was. Despite that, she decided a proactive counter move was called for, to disrupt their plans and prove she hadn’t blindly walked into their trap, although she nearly had.
The water eroded canyon floor was gradually rising as she proceeded, but its tops on either side were still about fifty feet above her, with a rocky ledge about twenty feet from the base on each side, formed by a layer of older and harder sedimentary rock. She knew what a careful watcher would do if she looked casually up in their direction. They would crouch down and draw back from the rim for a moment, losing sight of her for a vital second or two. She first looked casually up to her left, as a forewarning of what she would do next, and then swung her head to the right, and as she did, she turned back and raced for the base of the steep canyon wall.
She leaped towards the ledge in the reverse direction from which she had been trotting, confident that when the watcher moved forward to look down again, they would first peer at where they expected her to be. That would be at the center of the canyon floor and several body lengths ahead, and they wouldn’t be able to see her close to the wall as she pushed off the ledge, below and behind them.
She retracted her claws, to avoid a scratching or scrabbling sound as she pushed off from the ledge, up towards where she anticipated her target would be. She was so close to the rock wall that it blocked her view of them even as it concealed her.
The low gravity allowed her to clear not only the top of the rim, but even the four-foot high scrub that grew up there. From her height advantage as she soared over the rim, she spotted a brown elongated form under the branches, and noted it had a similar form to her own. This had to be one of the large cougars the nearby Cougar mountain range was named after. She would land slightly behind it and farther from the rim, cutting it off from retreat towards that flat terrain. If it fled down into the canyon, she would follow it to where it had wanted to stalk and pounce on her.
Unfortunately, she’d have to smash down through the dry and brittle branches above the animal, giving it a slight warning of her arrival. As it happened, she was giving it credit for the speed and reaction time of a desert panther of Koban, which it resembled in color and size.
Mere appearance didn’t give it her genetics, and although it might be fast and powerful compared to this world’s prey animals, it became obvious why they hunted in cooperative pairs. They clearly needed a numerical advantage over prey that Kit could handle alone.
She crushed her way down through the overlying branches and used her big left paw, claws retracted, to smack the cougar in the head. Hard! The smaller cat had reacted slowly, at least from Kit’s perspective, and it was bowled over and suddenly pinned under the massive weight of the ripper. She roughly shoved away the broken branches and pressed her frill to the side of the other cat’s neck. This one was a female, mate of the male she’d been following.
She was startled by the mindless raw nature of its thoughts. It was no more self-aware than were the prey animals she hunted. She and her mate didn’t have names for one another. Even Ethan’s horse, Beau, had a level of awareness higher than this pure instinct driven predator. Kit was unable to communicate to it that she wasn’t going to kill it for food. However, it conveyed an image of her mate, which she wanted to come help her escape.
The pinned female growled and screamed to attract her partner, struggling to get free. Kit stayed clear of its frantic attempts to scratch her, and she kept her paw pressed heavily on her head to prevent her from lifting it to try to bite. From down below, slightly farther up the canyon, she heard a deeper voice reply as the male roared.
Kit was utterly confident she could kill this one, as well as the larger male when he arrived. He would likely blindly attack her, in an effort to defend his mate. She could appreciate and even respect that instinct, but this wasn’t going to be a meeting of similar minds as she’d hoped. The prospect of mental contact with a similar being, sharing information, was largely what had prompted her to follow the first cat, and now that her goal had proven unrealistic. She didn’t need the meat, and besides, predator meat would not be as flavorful as a grazing animal would be anyway.
Therefore, she released her catch and backed away, watching the cougar scramble to its feet. Her mercy was rewarded with the smaller cat whirling around on her, as it backed away, and it tried a swift swat at Kit’s nose, a universally tender spot on any predator that tracked by scent.
Kit quickly lifted her head above what should have been a lighting fast strike, and then, faster than the cougar could react, delivered three parallel lines of mild scratches to the left side of the cougar’s equally tender nose. Then, to make certain the other female took the hint that she had better run for her life, Kit unlimbered the first powerful ripper roar ever heard on Chisholm.
She opened her jaws in a full gape, at least double the width the cougar could match, showing incisors three times the length of that female’s fangs, and roared her displeasure. It arrived with a blast of noise and hot breath that bent the cougar’s whiskers back along its muzzle, causing her to flutter her eyelids in the rush of air.
The terrified opponent finally demonstrated a bit more speed and common sense than before, as she backed away frantically, and whirled around and ran for her life.
That’s better, Kit thought. But I wish we could have talked.
She heard the male as it reversed its rush, when his mate passed him going the other direction. She caught a glimpse of him through the dry brush, and as she had assumed, he was perhaps a hundred pounds heavier than the female, which put him a bit over one third of Kit’s own mass.
It was ego gratifying to have confirmation she was the baddest assed predator on this planet. It was also disappointing that the other apex predator wasn’t intelligent enough to share rational thoughts with her. Horses, dogs, house cats, and pigs were most likely the closest she would come to communicating with anyone besides humans on Chisholm.
With this minor disappointment in a similar but mindless predator, she didn’t feel like a
ny further explorations today. She’d have several days farther away from habitation on the trip to Plains and Bison, and she would hunt something then, which she could terrify and eat, and share the meat with Ethan.
For now, she just wanted to return to town and get Ethan to join her for an early dinner. Assuming he was finished with his mating interlude with that local woman. She hoped he wouldn’t invite the woman to dinner. Her interest in Ethan seemed basic, and it could have as easily been directed towards any attractive male. There was no genuine warmth sensed from her for Ethan. Not that ripper mating normally involved a lifetime of commitment either. It was often merely a matter of obtaining the best genes for the offspring desired. Kit was certain there was no offspring expected from this paring, by either party. Simply another example of incessant human “practicing.”
Ripper mattings were brief, but she knew humans spent much more time with the process. She decided to Comtap him to start the process of terminating the liaison. The small meal of steaks on the train, and her activity today, had left her craving more to eat, before they started their trek to Plains, and another day to Bison.
She established a link. “Sorry to interrupt, stud boy, but I’m headed back to Trail’s End. I’ll be there in half an hour. I want to eat at that place we saw with mutton on the menu.”
She gave him a moment to reply, in the event his so-called-mind was preoccupied. For their thought processes, five seconds was an inordinately long time to wait. She made two more attempts, at shorter intervals without a response. She increased her easy lope to a full run when she failed to get a reply.
Kit’s experience with Comtaps wasn’t extensive, since rippers had only recently left Koban to engage in space travel and had found a real need for them. Although her device was apparently finding the address of the targeted device in Ethan’s head, she knew the different sensation of trying to contact a device that had been destroyed. When she first received her chip, later in that first day she secretly, and forlornly, attempted to contact the chip assigned to her lost human mother, who had reportedly died fighting the Krall many months earlier.
Her adopted mother’s ship was said to have disintegrated in a Jump intersect with an enemy clanship, where one or the other ship had exited Tachyon Space at the same coordinates shared by the other craft. The nearly nuclear explosive power of that detonation left nothing to be recovered. When she attempted that contact, it felt different, and after a moment, there was a recorded message from her own device that said her mother’s chip was unresponsive. She didn’t get that reply now, and it shouldn’t be an out-of-range situation, because she had used the untraceable tachyon modulated mode rather than the more detectable electromagnetic mode.
The technician that installed her device explained that a Comtap had two modes. Local mode, at the velocity of light and roughly twenty thousand miles in a line of sight link, and the more powerful tachyon mode with unlimited range through Tachyon Space, which was instantaneous when infinite velocity low energy tachyons were used to form the modulated signal carrier. Either type of link had seemed equivalent to her inexperienced and previously limited travel. However, she tried the local light-speed mode as well, with no better results.
Unlike for her mother, Ethan’s chip still existed but there was no reply. Even asleep, the mind of a Comtap user would be directly stimulated and aroused from slumber. They might elect to ignore the contact, or they could be unconscious and were unaware it had happened. The only other example Kit could consider was nearly unthinkable. The case if Ethan were dead.
She put on more speed, despite the unthinkable nature of that thought, and she was within sight of the town in ten minutes.
****
Maddi finally thought of a place where she could dispose of Ethan’s heavy to move dense body. She didn’t trust anyone to help her in this, and even her father didn’t need to know about her business, since he already disapproved of the bordello she ran. He wasn’t prudish about killing, she knew, and paid his share of money to support the CCA’s activities to halt the land grants and fencing the range. But he’d surely not like her choice of business partner in her contract deal to kill someone for money, or her having done it personally.
There was a side trail to a small spring fed creek in a little valley off the road to her father’s ranch. The banks of the creek had eroded a deep channel in places, where heavy green brush covered the steep slopes. There were range wolves and cougars that roamed this region, as well as smaller meat eaters, and carrion birds and insects. The exposed body would be reduced to bare bones in a few weeks she figured, and spring rains might spread the bones via the intermittent flash floods.
She had ridden through this valley with various teenaged boys years ago, seeking privacy, and knew the terrain well. She drove less than a mile off the main road, to a place with a sharp drop off to the creek, having heavy underbrush at water’s edge. She backed the armored truck close to the edge, forcing the AI to back to where the rear wheels were dangerously close to the crumbly edge of eroded ground. She was forced to use the handholds and footrests on the back bumper and of one door of the truck to open the other door, so she could step into the back, and then swing open both doors. She had clung fifteen feet over the undergrowth below her along the creek, and her plan to dump the body was working out as well as she could hope.
She pulled the sheet off the body, which lay as she’d left him. The robe wrapped around his head had a little more blood on it now, and she was grateful not to have to see his face. She didn’t feel regret at earning the bounty money for killing him, but that young eager face, as he looked at her from the shower, did provoke a bit of remorse. She wished she could have hit the sack with this impressive male specimen before killing him. His mind reading ability had doomed that thought as even a consideration.
She didn’t see an easy way to drag him off the pallet, not with the lip of the truck bed so close behind her. She untied his wrists from his ankles, and then straightened his limbs and struggled to roll him, one heavy leg or arm at a time, and shoving his heavier torso with her feet, pushing him closer to the back edge of the truck. She felt fortunate she had moved him before rigor mortise had established itself. Frozen into a near fetal position, he’d be much harder to roll over as a solid piece of incredibly heavy meat.
Brethard grumbled to herself as she worked. What in Hell do they eat on Koban? Rocks or lead ingots?
Finally, his body was at the rear of the truck, and she took one more look around both sides, to confirm there was no one in sight in this remote little valley. She was about to roll him the last few inches, to drop him over the lip, before she realized with horror that her monogrammed bloody robe was still wrapped around his head. She tugged to pull it free, and was grateful he was face down so she couldn’t see his face. When she saw blood was still slowly oozing from the wound on the back of his head, at least she knew it wasn’t going to smear on the truck bed.
There already were a few minor stains on the pallet and the truck bed, because Smart Fabric, although stain proof, wasn’t particularly absorbent. She’d use bleach or some cleaning agent at her father’s place to remove any of his DNA traces from the truck, and burn the pallet, robe, sheet, and Ethan’s clothes, using the ranch’s incinerator. That was also where, so many years ago, she had disposed of the body of the other boy she’d shot. Attempted rape or not, she didn’t want it known, or to have to answer questions about his shooting. Her loose ways with so many other boys might bring her claim of rape into question.
Sitting down, her butt against the pallet, she used her feet and legs to shove him over the edge, where his right arm slipped over first, then, when his leg dropped, that weight pulled the entire body along, as she shoved hard a final time.
His half-open eyes seemed to look right at her as his face rotated around, just before the corpse vanished, followed by the crackling sound as it hit the underbrush below. She was afraid she’d have that image of his face in her mind for quite some t
ime.
When she looked down, she was dismayed that he hadn’t fallen through to the shallow creek water, and only his right arm was in the water, his face downturned. She sure as hell wasn’t climbing down to kick him the rest of the way into the creek. She’d likely fall in with him. Besides, he was below the high water mark for past flash floods. In a few days or less, the smell of decay would draw the scavengers, and then his bones would fall into the stream.
She used one of the open doors as a support to climb around, and dropped onto the high bank of the creek. One final glance at the naked body, and she smirked at her handy work, and got into the truck cab. When away from the drop off, she paused to shut the back doors, and told the AI to resume the drive to her dad’s ranch, while she decided what story she’d tell her father.
****
Kit paused at the corral and barn where Beau was stabled, just to verify the horse was still there. She then raced to Brethard House, frightening people along Main Street. Nearly everyone had heard about her, and some had seen her earlier in the day, but her amazing speed and high bounds frightened the hell out anyone that feared she was on the hunt. There wasn’t any possibility of getting away from that streak of teal, with legs becoming a blur each time she contacted the Smart Plastic street surface, tearing at the pliable roadway with her claws to gain traction to leap forwards again.
When she reached the front of the former bank, she paused to gain control of her heavy breathing, her fur sweaty, as she went up to the front doors and sniffed. There was a clear scent that Ethan had been here after they parted. He’d not gone up to the front door when they passed here earlier. The doors opened outward, via a rather fancy brass door pull. The “no thumbs” jokes Ethan used for her and other rippers came to her now. The handle was intended to have a thumb press down on a latch release of this apparently ancient style door. There was also a keypad to the side of the door if it was locked, to release it or to call for someone to gain entrance.
Koban Universe 2: Have Genes, Will Travel Page 19