The Eyes of the Huntress

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘Multi-mode electron pistols. Stun and lethal settings. They’re allowed to protect guests with lethal force if necessary. Why?’

  ‘Because I never found out how Krotna managed to stuff Laric’s mouth with poisonous leaves, and he stole a security card to get into her room.’

  ‘Ah.’ Araven reached down to his thigh and lifted his own pistol free of its holster. He checked it was set to non-lethal mode and nodded to Shil. ‘Okay, let’s do this.’

  They moved silently into the cave and, as Shil had suggested, it narrowed fairly quickly into a narrow cut in the rock with the stream bubbling through it. Getting through meant turning side-on and side-stepping – and Shil cursed her chest a few times as she scraped through in places – but the tunnel widened again after a few metres. The problem was that it was now pitch-black and even Shil’s enhanced vision was having trouble making out much until Araven switched on a tactical light attached to his pistol.

  They were in a circular chamber with three exits: the one they had come through, and two at the back. Through one of those two, the stream was rushing down a fairly steep slope to then head out to the entrance. The other exit went upward too, but not so steeply and it was dry. Shil stepped over to that one, sniffed, and then nodded, pointing. Araven gave a nod and they started through to whatever was waiting further into the cave.

  About five minutes later, Shil reached back and covered the light on Araven’s gun. The light level dropped, but not by as much as might be expected. There was light coming from somewhere up ahead. Araven turned off his tactical light. It left him struggling a little in the near dark, but it meant they might manage to sneak up on the cook.

  Shil put a hand on Araven’s shoulder and leaned in close. ‘Stay behind me as we go in. I doubt he’s a combat veteran, but he might be ready for us. If he’s got a lethal blaster, I’m better able to handle it.’

  ‘In that outfit?’

  ‘Yes, in this outfit. Just take my word for it.’ She turned before he could make another comment and began moving through the tunnel of rock. She could now see that it opened out into a wider cavern, a fairly big one with a high ceiling, maybe twenty metres by fifteen and ten or twelve metres high. Krotna had set up a small camp toward the back of the cave. Maybe eighteen metres of relatively level cave floor between the entrance and the man, but he had a pistol close by. It did not seem like he had noticed anything wrong yet, but he would soon. Maybe three seconds to close the distance; Araven probably would not shoot the guy without giving a warning. Krotna was desperate enough to run like this, and he had already killed three people. Well…

  Shil bolted out of the entrance to the cave and started running for Krotna. She was fast, but he had all those seconds to spot her coming and, to his credit, it seemed like he had fair reflexes. He grabbed his pistol, held it out on straight arms, and fired off three pulses. The discharges flared in the air between them, striking Shil in the stomach as she ran. Except that they hit something before they hit bare skin, flashing into cascading streams of colour as they met her suit’s force screen and the energy was dispersed. Mostly. She felt a burn just under her left breast, and then she was on Krotna.

  He leaned sideways as the hilt of her sword swung at him, whistling past his ear, but he was not ready for her to skid to a stop, swing around, and slam her weapon down against his left arm. Krotna let out a shriek of pain as his arm broke, but the shriek was cut off sharply as the neurofield generator hit him and his voluntary nervous system stopped obeying commands. The chef and murderer slumped over, his pistol falling from his fingers, to lie quite still on the cavern floor.

  ‘Is he alive?’ Araven asked.

  ‘Possibly a broken arm, but he’s just paralysed,’ Shil replied. ‘He can still hear you, so you can do all that “I am arresting you” stuff if you like. He won’t be able to confirm he understands until the effect wears off though.’

  ‘I’ll wait.’ Araven took Krotna’s pistol by the muzzle and moved it out of reach, then he looked at Shil and frowned. ‘He burned you.’

  Shil looked down at the reddened skin visible through the vent in her suit. ‘That’s nothing. Be good as new in an hour.’

  ‘He fired three blaster pulses into your chest, and you have a small burn.’

  ‘More questions you don’t want answers to, Araven.’

  The StarCorps captain’s frown deepened, but then he shook his head. ‘You’re right, I don’t. If I know the answers, I might need to do something, and I’m supposed to be on holiday.’

  ‘Good point,’ Shil replied, smiling. ‘So, why don’t you go out to the beach, call your field office, and get some other corpsmen to deal with this pile of albino rat droppings, and then we can go back to the resort and take a long shower.’

  ‘A long shower?’

  ‘I don’t intend to allow you out until you’ve made a substantial payment on my fee. It’s going to take a while.’

  23.3.632.

  Shil smiled as she felt Araven’s hands on her hips. She was taking her last shower at the resort; this time around anyway since she had decided that she could stand another week in the place at some point. Of course, there were other planets she could visit, thousands of them which had the same sort of climate…

  She spread her legs as she felt his erection brush her behind. No talking: they were past talking when it came to desire. She knew he wanted her one last time before she left and she was not going to say no. Instead, she said ‘oh’ as he slid into her. Slowly. Taking his time over it and driving her half mad in the process. She pressed her face against the tiled wall and her hips back against him, and he began to move inside her, faster, more firmly. His pace quickened and she felt herself weakening, becoming liquid within as her body responded to the quickening pace of his thrusts, of the feel of his body sliding so deep inside her. And the end, when it came, was as explosive as every other time he had done this to her over the past several days. She did not want it to end, but it had to.

  ‘Time for me to go,’ she said with him still inside her and his arms wrapped around her waist.

  ‘I know. I’ll walk you to the teleport pad.’

  ‘Don’t. I don’t really want to say goodbye.’

  He felt his lips curl into a smile against her neck as he kissed her. ‘As you wish. We won’t say goodbye then. Just…’

  ‘Au revoir,’ she said. ‘I know you’ve no clue what that actually means, but it suggests we’ll meet again.’

  ‘Oh, Shil the Huntress, I will be very much surprised if we don’t.’

  Part Six: Home Is Where the Heart Is

  Back where I came from, people used to say ‘Home is where the heart is.’ My heart isn’t where I left it, apparently.

  – The Memoirs of Shil the Huntress.

  StarCorps Sector Base 423, Polydanth System, 207.5021 Local Calendar.

  Polydanth was a pleasant sort of world, in some ways. It was warm and moist; the general feel was of a tropical rainforest. People went there on holidays, but they tended to stay out of the jungles. For one thing, Polydanth had its own ecosystem, and that included some dangerous predators. For another, Polydanth’s jungles were even hotter, more humid, and generally less comfortable than the more civilised regions of the planet. Shil had been in Polydanth’s jungles for the last four days and felt as though a lot of the jungle had taken up residence in her skin.

  She walked into the reception area of the local StarCorps sector base dragging a man by his shirt. He looked as though he had spent longer in the jungle than she had – he had – and his hands were strapped together behind his back. He was wearing a survival suit, but it had seen better days. He was a local, a danthilli: he looked a little like a lurian, except that the shades were darker, adapted to hiding in the jungle. His ability to blend in had not helped him.

  ‘Corpsman,’ Shil said as she approached one of the four reception desks, ‘I found the bastard.’ She had picked that desk because the same corpsman had been on duty when she had arrived to
start the hunt.

  The corpsman, another danthilli, screwed up her face as she regarded the cowed figure Shil was thrusting at her. ‘Morthil Fut. Wanted for drug trafficking and murder. I’ll be honest, Shil, I didn’t think you could get him out of there.’

  ‘Four days in your lovely jungle, I’ll be honest and say that all I want right now is my money and a bath.’

  ‘I can understand that.’ The corpsman started typing. ‘Oh! I have an urgent-response notice. I’m to request that you wait here for a meeting.’

  Shil frowned. ‘A meeting? Then I’m not being detained.’

  ‘No, it’s a request, but it’s from a captain with Special Circumstances. He’s here on the station. It won’t take long.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ Shil said, figuring she knew who this officer was, ‘let’s get this guy processed. If your captain hasn’t turned up by then, I’ll be on my ship, getting your jungle out of my pores. I won’t leave the station until he’s talked to me. Deal made?’

  ‘That sounds like an amicable compromise. Deal made.’

  ~~~

  Araven was a little annoyed that he had missed Shil at the reception desk. Sector bases were just too big! By the time he had heard she was there, got himself together, and taken a transit tube from main habitation to reception, she had already gone. Still, he figured she had guessed who had asked her to stick around: he doubted she invited just any StarCorps Special Circumstances officer to her ship.

  The Cantarvey was in one of the guest docks, which meant another transit tube and a walk through a bulkhead hatch, and then finding the right dock. The vessel was visible on monitors in the lobby outside the docking tube, and Araven paused to look at it. There was something subtly wrong about the ship. It was the hull, he thought: there was something about the hull, but he could not put his finger on it. The ship was a custom build, not one of the regular freighter designs, but there was something beyond that…

  Shaking his head, Araven walked over to the intercom panel beside the airlock and tapped the call button. ‘Captain Araven Tovar, StarCorps, requesting entrance.’

  There was no detectable pause before a female voice answered him. ‘Of course, captain. You are expected. Please proceed to my outer hatch. Shil has requested that you come to her cabin as soon as you are aboard.’

  Araven tapped the button to cycle the inner airlock. ‘Uh, thank you…’

  ‘Cantarvey, captain. I am the ship’s AI.’

  ‘Right. Shil had you helping us with the Krotna case.’ The door opened, but Araven paused to wait for an answer.

  ‘She did. She utilises my search capabilities frequently when she is working a case. I find it interesting and it gives me a chance to contribute to the acquisition of my fuel.’

  Araven grinned; he had not met too many AIs with a real sense of humour, but this one sounded as though she had a really subtle one. ‘Yeah. I guess I’ll talk to you again across the bridge.’

  ‘You will indeed,’ Cantarvey replied, and Araven set out to do just that.

  There was no pressure differential to handle – the airlocks were more of a safety precaution than a necessity – so it took only a couple of minutes before Araven was stepping out of the airlock aboard the Cantarvey. He immediately found himself looking at the AI’s young-looking avatar. ‘Cantarvey?’

  Cantarvey smiled. ‘Yes, captain. Or, this is the image I project when interacting with physical people. The ship is rigged throughout for neural interaction. Please, let me direct you to Shil’s cabin. She’s waiting for you.’

  So, it was up a ladder and along a corridor, and then Araven was walking into quite a luxurious cabin space which had Shil in it. And Shil was floating about a metre off the deck, stark naked, with her arms and legs spread out languidly.

  ‘Hi, Araven,’ Shil said in Luris. ‘I realise that this looks like I’m utterly desperate to get laid, but I’ve got a swarm of nanobots working to remove Polydanth from my skin. I assume, since you’ve seen all this before, you’ll be okay with talking while I get clean.’

  ‘It’s nice to, uh, see you again, Shil,’ Araven replied. ‘You’re a distraction, but I expect I’ll manage.’

  ‘Great. If I start moaning uncontrollably, it’s just Cantarvey playing tricks. Now, I assume you didn’t track me down because you are desperate to get laid?’

  ‘No,’ Araven admitted, ‘though the thought is tempting right now. I have a job which you are relatively uniquely suited for. I need an escort to bring in three fugitives.’

  ‘I’m assuming that there’s actual pay on this one? You’re not trying to appeal to my desire for justice?’

  ‘Oh, this one is paid. Each warrant is a Special Circumstances one. A hundred thousand units.’

  ‘Each?’

  ‘Each.’

  ‘Okay, what’s with the dead-or-alive, high-priority warrants? And why am I uniquely suited for handling this?’

  ‘The answer to both is the location these three have chosen to set up shop. Your home world. Earth.’

  Shil shifted the gravity field in the bed to move her into a sitting position where she could look properly at Araven. ‘They’re on Earth? I didn’t think there were that many people who knew where it was.’

  ‘I think you’re right, but one of them has been there before. T’ney D’nova was broken out of Veldro prison on two one four, twelve oh five, local calendar. He’s back on Earth, Shil, and we’re not entirely sure what he’s doing there.’

  ~~~

  Shil stood in a conference room in the base, examining wall displays. It was possible, with the right data and the right tools, to calculate the expected exit point of a ship making a jump. Someone had been tracking the ship T’ney had left Dromeli on pretty carefully. They had data on the attitude of the ship and the electromagnetic pattern of the jump entry. With that, you could do the calculations, but it generally only put you within two or three light years of the intended exit point. In this case, that was good enough: the only system in the volume of space indicated was the one with Earth in.

  ‘Okay,’ Shil said, ‘so he’s probably on Earth, though Alpha Centauri is a possibility, if your data is a little off. Why would he go back there? Is it just a safe place to hide?’

  ‘We don’t think so, but we’re not sure,’ Araven replied. ‘Why was he there last time?’

  ‘Honestly, I’m not sure. He told me that he was after commodities. Minerals. At the time, I figured that made sense. In the movies, aliens are always coming to Earth to steal our mineral resources. Then I got out here and learned how things actually work… Economically, getting pretty much anything from Earth and selling it outside the system wouldn’t be cost-effective. Not to mention that you could mine our asteroid belt and get way more materials than can easily be taken from Earth itself.’

  ‘Generally true.’

  ‘But… He said commodities. He told me he dealt with commodities when he was pretending to be human, and he went on about various minerals, so I assumed the commodities he was talking about were rare elements. What other commodities would Earth have that would sell for a profit elsewhere?’

  ‘I have no idea.’ Araven was sitting at the table dressed in the standard grey tunic and slacks uniform of StarCorps, while Shil was standing, scanning the walls, and wearing her red suit and boots. His eyes strayed over the bare flesh of her torso as he continued. ‘We know relatively little about Earth. We classified it when it was discovered. We have some data on its inhabitants and social structure, but it boils down to “too primitive at this time to go near.”’

  ‘Huh, well, you’re not going to hear me arguing. If humans got their hands on some of the tech out here, they’d be extinct pretty soon after. Could he actually be planning to sell tech on Earth?’

  ‘Sell it to gain what? As you say, what does Earth have that someone from another world might want?’ His eyes drifted down across creamy skin to where the suit finally closed over again. Just a little too high for him to see anything, just low
enough to make it amazingly tantalising. Such pale skin… ‘Oh,’ he said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, there is one thing which might command a high price in the broader galaxy.’

  ‘Don’t keep me in suspense, Araven.’

  ‘Humans. Most species retain a desire for pale-skinned humanoids because of the veda. More than that, many species have something of an in-built desire to own a pale-skinned humanoid.’

  ‘Slavery,’ Shil almost spat. ‘It’s what he had planned for me. He was trying to sell me when the dromelans raided the place.’

  ‘I’m aware. Perhaps he had bigger plans than just a single sale. If so, he’s hooked up with the right people.’

  Shil turned her attention to the bank of photographs on the wall. They showed head-and-shoulder portraits of three men, one of them T’ney, from front and side angles. There was another navidad, a little less leonine and charismatic than T’ney, but clearly the same species. The third of them was a grenimal, large and thuggish, and with the same sort of skull details as Narad. He did not have the elaborate tattoos Narad had sported, however. ‘Tell me about them.’

  ‘Okay. T’ney D’nova you already know. Con man, small-scale smuggler, occasional slaver, and he’s murdered two people that we know of. The second navidad is P’taric D’vol. His primary business is smuggling. It’s his vessel they escaped on. He’ll smuggle anything, anywhere, and that includes sentients if the price is right. We have nothing indicating that he’s ever killed anyone, but we’re sure he’s ordered it, primarily because the grenimal here is his right-hand man. Thadic. He’s wanted on about seven worlds and a dozen stations for murder, though many of those involve bar fights getting out of hand.’

  Shil gave a thin smile. ‘Yeah, I can imagine that. Narad would go off the handle at the slightest provocation. He’d smack one person a week just to keep his reputation solid. If he was angry with you, you needed to leave the system.’