by Steve Perry
The review flashed in his mind.
When facing Hard Meat with only a spear, the best course of action was a penetration into the thing’s inner defenses and then a quick upthrust through the bottom of the head, into a portion of the brain that would paralyze it At that point, one could carve the thing up at leisure. The challenge in this situation was to duel with it only awhile, perhaps slightly incapacitating it, so that the students would have an easier road to the final victory. A wound to the thorax perhaps, or a lopped-off limb.
Hiss.
The thing rose up and down, almost challenging.
Nat’ka’pu’s mandibles bristled. He could taste the blood of victory in his mouth, even against the harsh, fearful smell the thing was exuding.
He raised his spear and chanted that most Holy of Holies, the Warrior’s Song, that blast of wind and rain that terrified greater prey than this.
Then, pride and joy brimming in his veins, he advanced upon the next leg of the Path.
The kainde amedha suddenly stooped.
When it came back up, it was holding something in its limbs.
That was one of the things that was different about the thing, Nat’ka’pu realized. The limbs were different. At their ends were structures very like hands.
And in those hands now was a weapon.
No! Was this a dream? Hard Meat couldn’t hold weapons. But before he could think anymore, the weapon gave off a blast of fire that cut through Nat’ka’pu like a giant saber, and the Great Path suddenly dropped away like a trapdoor into pitiless darkness.
* * *
Lar’nix’va watched as the explosive bullets rammed through his commander’s armor, watched as they blew his head and chest apart like ripe naxa fruit.
He did not watch for long, however, for action in the life of the warrior was the stuff of survival. This was no longer an exercise, this was the real thing, and something incredibly unexpected had just happened.
Raising his burner, he ran forward, calling out a terse command for the other adjutant to do likewise. The moment he was within striking distance, he pressed the trigger. A stream of power and flame streaked out, attaching itself to the Hard Meat before the creature had the chance to swing its weapon around.
The thing screamed and fought against the power, but it was blown back, blazing, pieces of its chitinous body tearing off.
The blast of his fellow adjutant pushed it over, finishing the destruction. The Hard Meat was soon a pyre of death.
When the flames died down, the group walked through the gory ground, littered with the blood of their commander.
“I am Leader now,” stated Lar’nix’va matter-of-factly. “Is there any challenge?”
There was none. Astonishment hung heavy amid the stink of Death.
When the dead creature had cooled, one of the students stirred the remains with the end of his spear.
Lar’nix’va looked down, deeper astonishment filling him at the remains of the creature.
A guttural snarl tore from his lips.
“What is happening upon this planet?” he said.
None of the others had an answer.
Lar’nix’va swung back and walked to his ship through the splattered body of Nat’ka’pu.
The flotilla would need to be contacted.
This business bore evil portent, and from his life experience, the short yautja suspected who lay at the root of it all.
For whenever there were oomans on a planet, there was always trouble.
1
“Peace can kill.”
Machiko stared at the blocky letters she’d just written on her blotter for a moment, then with a red pen commenced to illuminate the P, like a dusty old monk at work on some Gothic Bible.
The cursor of her desk-bulb computer blinked blindly at her. A stack of input crystals lay inert atop her IN compartment. A mug of coffee with a dead multilegged, multieyed insect afloat on its turgid surface sat to one side, beside a half-finished piece of dunktoast. The gray, flat plains of Alistair Three stretched out from her window like nothing, squared.
The warrior was bored.
The memories of battle lived inside her like bloody monuments to a time when she’d been truly alive.
A time of danger, nobility—
And yes, honor.
She’d been a different person then.
Buddha, how she’d changed.
Ryushi had changed her. Her time with the yautja pack had changed her. Both to the better, she thought. At the core of her soul, before, there had been shame. Her father had brought shame upon her Japanese family in Kyoto, embezzling from his company and then taking a coward’s way out by killing himself before he could be jailed. “You are my flesh, Machiko,” he had said. “You must restore the family’s honor.”
And then his blood had spilled.
Machiko Noguchi had tasted honor when the bugs had been loosed upon her town of Prosperity Wells, fighting alongside Dachande and his warriors. When she had joined the Hunter Pack, she had literally become honor. But then, later, her humanity had called to her upon that miner’s world, and although honor demanded that she fight against the pack to save her ooman genetic kin, it had meant betraying her place in the pack. And now, stuck back in the muddle of humanity again, she had lost that sense of honor, become merely quotidian.
And oh, yes—a little snarly, a little bitter.
She stared morosely at her vague reflection in the computer screen. A few lines had formed beneath her dark Japanese eyes, and her short black hair was a little gray, but otherwise she was an attractive woman. Small-breasted, muscular, a compact beauty. It was lost on her, though. She longed for more.
She sighed.
You’d think the Company would at least let her bring Attila on shift. At least then she’d have someone to talk to. She wouldn’t have to resort to doodling. However, the last thing the Company was interested in was her mental health. As far as they were concerned, she could drool and doodle here, just as long as she got her job done. Just as long as she stayed out of trouble.
If only they didn’t have that contract hanging over her like the sword of Damocles. If only she had money, a ftl-ship—a business plan…!
If only…
A high-pitched voice from a grille molded into the framework of the desk beside the computer facet interrupted her reverie.
“Ms. Noguchi!”
She started, then immediately realized who it was.
How many times had she wished that she could yank this infernal radio-comm from its mooring and toss it into the garbage blaster? Freedom would break out. Peace from the incessant whine of the planet’s Company president… a man who made certified anal retentives seem relaxed and carefree.
“Yes, Mr. Darkins.”
“How’s that oversheet coming?”
“It’s going well.”
“Good. Glad to hear it. I need not remind you that it’s due in my office at the end of the week. Company heads are expecting a subspace transmission then, and a comprehensive one. I trust that it will be a better job than last time.”
“I think it will satisfy them.”
“Good. Glad to hear it. You’ve got an important job, Ms. Noguchi. An important job, on an important planet.”
The transmission ended, with a faint buzzing sound like the annoying song of a rat-fly.
Sure.
Important, her butt.
Alistair Three—also known as Doc’s World—was a planet with a perfect rotation, a perfect distance from the sun, a perfect atmosphere… perfect, that was, for a blandly uniform surface, with bland cattlelike grazers on its vast plains, few mountain ranges. Its weather was boring, its oceans were dull and lusterless; all its specifics were the epitome of monotony. One of these days humans from other planets would get around to fully populating this planet, but for right now there were far more appealing planets to go to, with much less distance between them and the rest of the human part of the galaxy.
What interest
ed the corporation enough to dip its tentacles down into Doc’s World (named after one of the men who’d discovered it, Doc Warden, an alcoholic ne’er-do-well whose ship had gotten lost, and whose comment on Alistair Three was “Makes me want another drink”) was simple.
The mining.
Not that Doc’s World had anything like rubies or diamonds or unusual precious gems.
No, what it had was narkon ore, a curious grade of ore created by Alistair Three’s unique mineral vulcanization process, which the corporation liked to use in its starship engines. Thus it had set up this Blakean “dark satanic mill” to mine and process said ore, then to transport it to satellites and moons where the shipbuilding was accomplished. Almost ten thousand people lived here in Solitaire City. Many were miners who took a daily troop train twenty miles south to a mountain range where they worked. Many were the miners’ companions who often as not went with them. A few were supervisors and managers. A few more were bureaucrats. Machiko was one of those few—albeit on a top echelon—and she loathed it.
And to think of what her past had been.
To think that she had once run with a Predator pack.
Oh, how the Mighty had fallen.
She sighed and tapped up the spreadsheet. She began to examine the data that had been entered by others, and to send the computer through its analytic paces so that the corporation would have the precious vital statistics it needed. She stared awhile at the screen, and then she put in another crystal, adding a new matrix of information.
Juggle, juggle.
Toil, trouble.
After a while, she saved her work. She sipped her coffee. And then she stared off into the plain plains of this nothing world, remembering what it had been like to fly with lightning in her wings.
2
Machiko, warrior, looked around and found herself surrounded by Death.
The bugs.
For a brief moment fear exploded inside her. Then she realized that fear was her friend. It helped limn the borders between life and death, light and dark. It plumbed the depths of her soul and biochemistry, bringing up the thunder of valor and the controlled explosion of adrenaline.
Up ahead Top Knot, running point, aimed a strafe of plasma. The fiery stuff raked across a line of the aliens, cracking their chitin into cinders. Lethal acid splashed back, boiling into acrid steam.
Others of the pack added to the fire, tearing a wide hole in the jumble of the bugs, the swelling ranks pouring forth through tunnels to protect their hive.
The pack had just landed on this planet in the majestic and silvery craft that was their starship. Their mission was simple: secure this hive’s Queen for their own purposes. Simple though their goal might be, the road there was not.
She was working with a pack of yautja on perhaps one of their most dangerous objectives—indeed, so dangerous that the Predator Hunter’s normal codes of conduct in the pursuit went right out the window.
For this expedition, anyway, the ritual laws of matching the quarry weapon for weapon were suspended.
The naginatas and scatterguns prescribed for hunting the kainde amedha, the Hard Meat, were replaced by plasma-casters and lasers.
This was no Hunting trip.
This was war.
Just as it had generally been in the history of her own ooman peoples, there are no rules in war.
Only objectives.
Machiko, warrior, was no longer Machiko Noguchi. No longer a streamlined ramrod for the corporation on a planet of alien cattle. She was Dahdtoudi, proud and brave warrior, who had proved herself on the planet called Ryushi and was Blooded by no less than the great Dachande, a great Predator Leader. Dahdtoudi. “Little Knife.” The lightning scar that he had etched on her forehead just before his death with the acid of a broken bug finger, partly neutralized by his bloody spittle, marked her glory for life. When the pack searching for Dachande and his ill-fated mission, headed by the valiant Vk’leita, had discovered Machiko, she was Dahdtoudi, and she bore Dachande’s mark and had a Queen’s skull hanging above the door of her home. She’d been one of the surviving oomans—humans—on Ryushi.
She had no particular reason to stay, seeing as she no longer felt committed to the Company, and every reason to go with the yautja. With the alien Hunters she found the core of honor, a state that eradicated the shame that had descended upon her family when her father, having been caught embezzling funds from his family, had committed a bloody seppuku. But a suicide without honor. Though she had excelled scholastically and then corporately, this was a pain and shame that had always hung over her, crippling her relations with other people. She had found it difficult to get close to people, but there was always the desire. Now there was no reason to get close to the yautja. Here, thus released, she could test herself, test her courage and skills, test all the things that would lead her into the state of grace shown her by Dachande.
As a Blooded One, she’d been entitled to come for Hunts.
She felt a real and profound need for that now, a vital desire to pursue honor and valor and the ways of the yautja.
A desire she needed to explore.
And so now, here she was—
They moved through the birthing chambers. Remains of ill-fated denizens of this foggy world—apelike creatures with four arms, big jaws, and elephantine ears—hung from the walls, their chests burst, their innards in various states of decomposition. The smell was beyond description, beyond bad—cloying and gagging. If not for the filters in the mask they’d given her, Machiko would not have been able to make it through that funk. Well, perhaps… After all, she was no longer Machiko, she was Dahdtoudi, and she had not yet fully tested what Dahdtoudi could take.
Whatever it was, she knew it was going to have to be a lot. She’d braced herself for this raid. She’d braced herself when she’d gone off with the pack. Her whole life now was one big Brace—
Payoff time now.
The big guns having paused momentarily for their metaphorical breaths, the Leaders stepped aside, staggered English-line style, for their backers to let loose their volleys.
Machiko and the youngers to the rear discharged their weapons, cutting into the throng of aliens, slicing, dicing, and generally churning up the Hard Meat into chunky-style puree, acid flavor.
Machiko wore the yautja armor, sleek and economical and oddly comfortable. The material worked well in the movements of her lithe muscles, and the air circulation was superb. The armor was blessed, and it felt almost like augmenting prosthetics, as though the lines converged into power that boosted her own. Her hair was worn now in the ceremonial ringlets, rather like neat dreadlocks bouncing energetically at the back of her head as she moved forward, her discharges blasting through the dying, spindly creatures.
They broke through.
As though this knowledge was as instinctual as it was empirical, the pack moved as one through the opening presented to it.
The wedge of the older, valor-hogging frontmost went first, and the others, including Machiko, allowed this. All were equal in honor, all were esteemed. However, Machiko had quickly glommed on to the fact that these Predators were pretty much like an Earthly predator pack. The members jostled for dominance, and the older, smarter, and more experienced members were generally either given deference or simply plowed past the more awkward younger members.
“Ha ha ha!” whooped one of the younger warriors, a snot-nosed kid about a head shorter than the others; a difference in height was almost made up for by the chip on his shoulder. This dude had bridled at Machiko’s presence in the pack from the word go and had been on her back ever since. He took guff from the others for his lack of stature, then handed it to her coated with a little shit for good measure.
“Ha ha ha!”
It was garbled laughter. He’d heard Machiko laugh once, and he would imitate her from time to time, out of spite. She jostled right back generally, jostled just short of a set-to: no reason to make unnecessary waves, when all she wanted was to sing in the ba
nd.
No, especially right now, smack in the middle of a den of the most vicious killers in the galaxy.
“Ha ha ha!”
The tide had let up under the slash and burn of their weapons. The elders were hurrying along, intent on their goal, the other youngers tagged along, just behind them.
She called her tormentor Shorty, though before she’d assumed he didn’t know English.
Now, though, she wondered.
He turned around and shoved her.
“Ha ha ha!”
She went back a few feet, surprised at the push. She’d already figured out that the very last man had the least honorable position in battle, albeit a necessary one. That must have been what Shorty intended: to make sure that she came up in the rear.
“Allright,” she said, “let’s just go,” hoping her tone was understandable, if not her words.
“Ha ha ha!”
Shorty fairly skipped ahead, waggling his locks at her in a defiant, teasing manner.
Oops.
She saw the thing way before he did. It was coming out of a tubing in the ceiling: a mean-looking bastard, its diseased banana head already dripping saliva, its claws outstretched and ready to jump.
“Watch out!” she cried, pulling up her plasma gun. Shorty may have been young and stupid, but he was quick.
He spun around, looking up immediately at the trouble.
She waited.
Not because she wanted to see Shorty killed.
Worse. She wanted to let him sweat a moment, until she did something much, much worse.
Fast as he was, the bug was faster.
It jumped down, leaping for the certain kill.
Machiko fired.
The blast caught the bug in midsection exactly at the point she had calculated, not only smashing the thing to fiery bits but blowing back those pieces and their acid blood against the wall, preventing them from falling on Shorty.
Shorty stepped back away from the devastation. He had stopped laughing. Through his mask Machiko could see the ice of his glare.