Koban Universe 2: Have Genes, Will Travel

by Stephen W Bennett

  “Kit! This is Cardwell Brethard.” He shouted. “I own this ranch. What do you want here? I’ve never done you or anyone you know harm.” He hadn’t, not personally anyway, or at least not recently. Money could get that done for you, so it was as close to the truth as he needed here.

  The deep human sounding voice startled them, louder than expected, apparently amplified by some sort of a speech synthesizer. “Brethard, I need to read the mind of Madigan Brethard, your daughter. I think she knows where my brother is located. I know he’s been seriously hurt and I’ll kill everyone in this house if I don’t get that information in time to save him. I’ll return to hunt you all down and kill everyone anyway, if I discover he’s dead. The safest course of action for you is to help me find him alive, which means you need to act quickly. I know he was bleeding because I found traces, and unless he was incapacitated, he couldn’t be held captive.”

  Brethard swore under his breath. Maddi had said he was dead, therefore even if he was irrational enough to let this savage alien read his daughter’s mind, that act would certainly lead to her death. This creature might be smart, but it was lousy at negotiating with humans. It had inadvertently revealed that its only course of action would have to be its killing everyone here, because the man she wanted to protect was beyond help. There was room to maneuver, however, so long as the beast didn’t know its companion was dead.

  “I want to protect my daughter, and you want to rescue your friend. Perhaps we can make a trade that’s good enough for both of us for now. If you guarantee my safety, I’ll lead you to where you can speak with my daughter, but not touch her for mind reading. She’s already safe in a place where you can’t reach her, but a conversation with her is possible. If she can tell you where your brother is, you can leave to go find him. If he’s alive, then she stays alive. If not, then you’ll just have to try to find her again, and I’ll fight to stop you.”

  The cat answered quickly. “I can accept your proposal, although normal humans, those that are not Kobani, often lie. My people use frilling, what humans call mind reading, to confirm others words and to establish a level of trust. Yet, I have to trust you, to allow you close enough to me before I can read your mind. How will we jointly share the risk of mutual trust?”

  “I’ll give you some information that I don’t have to share with you. I know you are in the kitchen, yet I have not ordered you attacked there, even though there are only two ways in or out. Isn’t that showing a level of trust from me?”

  “Some, but not a great deal.”

  “If I come closer to the kitchen door, the one at the rear of the house, exposed in the open hallway, isn’t that a greater sign of trust?”

  “Will you lay down your guns?”

  “Will you lay down your claws and fangs?”

  “That’s a fair point. I promise not to attack you if you don’t attack me.”

  Brethard quietly opened the infrared screen folded to the side of his weapon. This was an optional feature for a weapon normally used by soldiers wearing body armor, with IR sensors built into their helmets. He spoke low to the men with him.

  “Cover me. I’ll stay as far from that door as I can, over by the unbroken windows, behind the planters. That gives you a field of fire on the left side of the corridor if I flush it out. I’ll see it move on this screen, even through a wall. I heard on the news that these creatures have a high body temperature because of their metabolism, so I should see it easily. The plasma bolts from this gun will burn through wood, walls, normal metal doors, and furniture, as if they’re paper. I’ll try to kill it that way, but if I only wound it, you had damn well better get down there to add your firepower to mine.”

  Then loudly he said, “I’m going to come closer, and just so you know, I have a rifle and I know how to us it. The Safe Room entry is in the basement and it is two stories tall. My daughter is already locked inside, so all you can do is talk to her. I’ll guide you there to speak with her through the intercom, and then I want you gone from my house.”

  He started down the hallway, intending to go quietly, but the millions of small plazsteel fragments, and larger shards that hadn’t embedded into the walls made crunching sounds as he tried to tiptoe between pieces.

  Kit spoke up, with a chuff of amusement. “I could hear you coming Brethard, even if there was no debris on the floor. Knowing how close you are is reassuring to me, since trying to sneak up on me doesn’t make you seem true to your word, of coming only to talk.”

  The man quit trying to pick his way quietly for the twenty-five feet he had to travel to the kitchen door. “I’m not going to simply push through that door like some idiot, Kit. I’ll stay here in the hall, where my men can cover me while we start to talk. I’ll send them away if I can trust you more.”

  “I appreciate that. I’ll stay behind my cover as well. I saw some stray bullet holes through the front walls of this room, from all the shooting a few minutes ago. I don't want some excitable fool shooting blindly at me before we can reach an agreement.”

  Brethard thought hard. What sort of body cover could there be in the kitchen? He remembered two metal stoves, a brick oven, wood cabinets, metal-topped tables, a refrigerator, and a large meat cooler.

  As he came closer, he could see shapes of objects through the wall on his IR screen, outlines of items that looked blue, green, yellow, and orange tinged to red of residual heat from the brick oven. That oven was too small to hold or even conceal the big animal behind it. Although, there was one large block of deeper blue for the big cooler.

  It came to him suddenly, when there was no large red area that could be from the body heat of the tiger. It’s inside that cold, metal-sided meat locker. Clever animal, but it doesn’t know I have an IR scanner, and an illegal plasma rifle that can punch right through those walls.

  In familiarization training with the weapon, he’d shot up some old trucks and cars, and had seen bolts pass easily through heavier metal than that big cooler. The armored fusion bottles that once powered those vehicles had to be deactivated and the plasma vented, because the bolts would penetrate even their failsafe armor.

  He positioned himself, standing behind a knee-high planter with decorative foliage growing to waist height. To his right was the wall where the wide corridor narrowed, and the veranda window view ended. The wall of the kitchen was in front of him, and he’d gone a bit past the door, with the blue blob of the cooler’s side visible through the wall in front of him on his scanner.

  “I’m outside in the hall, how do you propose we move together to the steps to go down to the lower level and the Safe Room intercom? It’s only a short distance away. If I walk next to you, nobody would risk shooting the boss, since I’m the man that pays them.”

  He didn’t intend to walk anywhere with the beast, but he wanted to hear it speak again. He switched the on the audio mode of the multispectral scanner.

  Kit answered. “I heard you go a little past the doorway. I told you I had sensitive hearing. Rippers are sometimes night hunters, so we also see well in the dark.”

  The scanner’s audio sensor showed what he suspected. The source of the sound was reverberating from behind the wall, at nearly the center of where the rectangle of cool blue was marked on the overlaid IR scan.

  There you are, you bastard. On full automatic mode, he pulled the trigger, and started letting some light into the kitchen and cooler, making inch wide openings for the streaming light from the windows behind him. The actinic blue-white flare of the plasma bolts shamed those mild sunbeams, with their incandescent glare, spatters of sparks flying from the points of penetration. The impacts of the magnetically accelerated bolts were far louder than the sounds made as they launched out of the heavy muzzle.

  Beneath the sounds of the bolt impacts, was an inarticulate scream of rage, and one word. “Liar.” Followed by a primal but weak scream of pain that suddenly cut off as Brethard swept the plasma bolts back and forth, shredding the wall, and setting it ablaze.

&n
bsp; The man, sweat glistening on his hate-filled face from the heat, could now see the stainless steel sides of the cooler through the smoke and flames, as the hallway wall disintegrated. There were dozens of holes punched through both sides of the meat locker. He fired until the first power pack was drained. With bolt energy set to maximum, it had limited him to less than the optimum one hundred weaker powered bolts normally provided. He clumsily removed the power pack, inserted the spare he’d carried, dialed back the power to the recommended level, and resumed firing, burning through every square foot of the metal side several times, which he could now see almost in its entirety, because of the ruined outer wall. Bolts were bouncing around inside the cooler at the lower power setting, most of them unable to burn their way out through the opposite side. He could see the kitchen sprinkler system spraying, and heard the water hiss as it hit the intensely hot sides of the cooler. The house AI, knowing that the human occupants were aware of what was happening, swiftly silenced the fire alarm, and shut off individual sprinklers away from the flames.

  I’ll have to remodel after this, he thought, grimly determined to cauterize the carcass of the alien monster that had dared threaten his daughter.

  He stepped from around the planter, and motioned to his men at both ends of the hall to join him. “Let’s go see what’s left of that charcoaled tiger. I wonder if there’s enough for a barbeque.”

  As Carl arrived, his rifle pointed at the ruined wall, he lowered it slightly and added, “I think it’s overcooked, Sir.” The four men arriving with him laughed nervously, relieved to see the utter destruction of the animal’s hiding place.

  Carl pushed through the still intact kitchen door, avoiding the smoldering fire at the edges of the wall to its right. Despite the ruined nature of the entire cooler, riddled with scorched holes in the sides, he aimed his rifle at the door as he pulled on the handle and swung it open. The smell of burned meat, scorched metal, and flash cooked vegetable matter followed along with the door, and billowing smoke obscured their vision for a few nervous seconds.

  As the warm air and smoke found an outlet, it rose in the cooler outer air to reveal the internal ruin of the cooler’s contents. Most of it now on the floor, because the shelf supports and meat hooks had been shot away.

  “I guess that’s what’s left of the sucker.” Carl said. Gesturing to badly burned and partly shredded and smoking meat on the floor near the back of the cooler. “It must have tried to take cover back there when you started turning the walls into Swiss cheese.” The other men chuckled at the comment, making certain they paid proper recognition to the boss’s handiwork.

  Brethard, now that his men had entered ahead of him, finally accepted that he really had accomplished what he intended. The tiger was a shattered pile of dead meat. His hands trembled now, in aftershock of the fear that had clutched at his intestines and had left his heart pounding. He leaned his rifle against the wall, and crouched near the revolting pile of meat and burned tissue. The floor was too fouled with runoff from that partially cooked meat to take a knee, so he used a fallen shelf and its support to brace himself as he examined the carcass. He frowned.

  “Damn, all that beautiful blue fur was burned away. I wanted a piece to save as a souvenir, perhaps have it made into a hunting cap.”

  “The parts against the floor won’t have burned boss,” offered one of the hired hands. “Let me lift it up for you.” As he grabbed a remnant of what might have been a leg bone and lifted, the underside of the large piece of burned meat was revealed in its original color.

  Hairless red meat, with fat marbling running throughout.

  Carl stated the obvious. “That looks like a dressed rear leg of a Longhorn.”

  “Hope it isn’t over cooked, I like it raw,” a deep loud voice said, from a point directly above them.

  All six men, startled, looked up and saw only a black fabric strip around a light fixture, a dark fob attached. Five of the men stared up at it confused, the sixth man, to his intellectual credit, screamed and lunged for his plasma rifle.

  A deafening roar, from the open cooler door behind them caused the standing men to push away from the terrifying blast of sound. They fell over Brethard and one another, shoving him face first into the floor as he reached for his rifle. The floor was covered in the bloody residue and melted beef fat from the flash cooked Longhorn quarters. Meat that Brethard had managed to “kill” in his surprise ambush.

  The first man died without understanding what was happening or seeing his killer. His head was simply torn from his shoulders by a flash of blue, on a paw larger than his head, which passed by so blindingly swift the skull was crushed by the impact.

  Massive jaws crushed the life of another man, with a sickening crunch of long fangs punching through the top and back of his skull. With a twist of her neck, Kit threw that lifeless body aside, where it smacked against a perforated wall.

  She used claws and jaws to tear at two more men swiftly, who never even managed to raise their rifles or draw a pistol, achieving only screams of terror that ended in mid-note, before their pain could truly register.

  Carl, having fallen over Brethard’s torso, wasn’t remotely defending his boss with his own body. He was in pure survival mode, and in his prone position, his pistol was the only weapon he could reach. He rolled to his side onto the small of Brethard’s back, and got his pistol out of the holster as the fourth man’s screams cut off, and something warm and wet splattered across his face. He had an automatic, and in his panic, he tried to pull the trigger before he chambered a round. That was something he should have done earlier today, but he had relied too much on the firepower of the heavy, and in close quarters cumbersome, assault rifle he’d been handed.

  A blue-eyed sinister presence, catching beams of smoky sunlight that made them glow in the dimness, bore down on him, as a single claw on a huge paw made an almost dainty motion, flicking his pistol into the dim recesses of the cooler. The weight of the ripper was pressed on his hips and stomach, making it hard to breathe, and he was in turn holding down a squalling Brethard. The latter, pinned to the slimy floor, couldn’t quite reach the butt of the plasma rifle that he so desperately wanted.

  The voice from the light fixture’s fob said, “Do you know where my human brother, Ethan Greeves, is located?” Carl gasped and tried to scream, as even greater weight pressed on him when the ripper’s big head lowered to push its neck against the side of his face.

  “Unfortunately, you don’t know that answer. Another question then. Have you killed people for Cardwell Brethard?”

  “No!” Carl grunted out, as some of the weigh lifted, and he pushed at the huge cat.

  “Not only are you lying to me, but I detect through your physical contact with Brethard, that he knows what he’s sent you to do for him. Not often, but I doubt the murdered sheepherders you hung appreciated his restraint. Had you been innocent of murder, I would face a dilemma. Instead, you are an object lesson that deserves what I must do to intimidate your master.”

  She opened her massive jaws and crunched into his left shoulder as he screamed in pain and terror, the top incisors plunging deep into the back of his shoulder, as the lower ones tore into his upper left chest. A slight shake of her head, and blood flowed freely from the torn flesh when she released.

  Kit snarled into his face, a deadly and bloody toothy grin revealed, as she frilled his thoughts. “Your terror is nearly as delicious as rhinolo flesh. You laughed when the men pleaded for their lives, and you hung them and watched them kick and struggle as they slowly choked to death. I too will taste and relish your last thoughts, and your fear as you bleed out. You are my prey today.”

  She sent images through his mind that made his final moments even more terrifying, creating the evolutionary mental feedback that had helped drive her species to greater hunting success, assuring more food for their cubs even as it forced them to understand the pain and fear of their prey. They didn’t kill for pleasure, but could for revenge. The sheep me
n were now avenged. Mostly.

  Kit, with one swipe of her left paw, flung the foreman’s body off Brethard, who shoved forward with his legs to grasp at the plasma rifle. He had sensed, at a reduced level, the terrible thoughts sent into the dead man’s mind. He knew those images were also intended for him to experience. The image of her claws tearing open a man’s abdominal cavity had been directed at Brethard, because that was the face on the victim in the thought flashed to Carl.

  As he desperately grasped the butt of the rifle, Kit casually pressed her left paw against the middle of the weapon, leaned as it was against the side of the cooler, bending it into a forty-five degree angle of metallic and ceramic junk.

  “Let’s talk, shall we Cardwell?” After the actions of the last few moments, the pleasant sounding invitation didn’t seem at all comforting to Brethard, who was now coated with Carl’s blood on his back, and partially broiled Longhorn juices smeared on his face and chest.

  Resigned to his fate, he faced his killer, putting on a brave front. “I thought I had you trapped. Instead I walked into yours.”

  “Yes. I knew you would lie to me, and would never keep any agreement we made. I assumed you would follow my voice, and I only found one place large enough to hide me in the kitchen. I placed my speech synthesizer here.” She rose up and snagged the tough but elastic strap, and pulled it down. She spread it apart with claws and slipped her head through the loop.

  Brethard wanted to delay what came next, so he asked a question. “How did you know I had an IR scanner, and would suspect you were in the refrigeration unit when I couldn’t see your heat signature anywhere?”

  “Really? I never thought of that.” She glanced at the broken plasma rifle. “I see some sort of scanner is part of that weapon, which I also didn’t know you had. I didn’t think the PU let those guns reach the public after the war. I was less than a meter from you, in a supply closet across from the kitchen when I heard you firing. I was prepared to tear through the wall and attack if I was detected. Instead, you focused on my voice. I’m lucky you didn’t scan that wall for my body heat.”