Race memory.
Dave shuddered and tried to step back, but Heath was there with his hand on Dave’s shoulder now. It wasn’t a physical barrier, not really, but it was enough to block his retreat.
“What’s up, Dave?” he asked with surprising care. “Tell me what’s happening.”
Hooper felt sick and dizzy with hot flushes.
“I need to sit down,” he said.
A woman in a biohazard suit dropped what she was doing to the creature. She bustled her assistants aside and pushed a stool underneath Dave.
Dave dropped onto the stool, letting his head fall between his knees and trying to control his breathing. He took long, slow breaths, ignoring the foul miasma of rotten meat. A few more of the researchers gathered around him, and one fanned his face with a manila folder.
“Get him some water,” the woman in the biohaz suit said, perhaps a bit more loudly than she needed to. Her accent was very British. “Maybe a bucket as well. We do not need any additional contamination in here.”
“English,” Dave said, trying to distract himself from the nausea.
“Once upon a time,” she said. “Don’t make a mess.”
“Are you hungry?” Heath asked, ignoring the interchange. “Do you need to eat?”
“No,” Dave said, managing a grim chuckle. “For once I am completely off my feed, but thank you. Ma’am, I won’t need that bucket. Thank you.”
“ ‘Doctor,’ ” she said without turning to face Dave. She was really into her autopsy or whatever she was doing. “Or ‘Professor,’ not ‘ma’am.’ Professor Emmeline Ashbury, Office of Science and Technology Policy. You may call me Professor Ashbury.”
“Okay,” Dave said, a bit taken aback. “Ah, sorry.”
“Apologies are unnecessary, and they do grow tiresome. That’s why I left England,” she said, poking at something deep within the creature’s chest. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Ooh, this looks interesting.”
And with that she lost interest in Dave.
“Don’t know how anyone could think of eating after seeing that thing,” one of the techs said as he laid an unidentifiable green organ on an exam tray.
They were probably going to be skipping meals until they got the stench of death out of their nostrils and clothes. And skin. Dave drew in a deeper breath and rubbed his forehead, gratefully accepting the proffered bottle of water. It was cool and possibly the most delicious drink he’d ever tasted. Pure, clean spring water.
“Sorry,” he said in a cracked voice. “I just … It just got to be a bit much, is all.”
“Take your time,” Heath said.
“Perhaps a medic,” Professor Ashbury said over her shoulder, briefly taking her eyes off the body cavity. “He looks rather wobbly, don’t you think?”
“No,” Dave answered. “Seriously, I’ll be all right. I just need a minute.”
“Really?” Ashbury said. “That long? I heard you killed it a lot quicker than that.”
He closed his eyes and concentrated on his heartbeat, slowing it down. It had been pounding away like a trip-hammer in his chest. He imagined himself on a beach in Bali, a nice spliff in one hand, a disgracefully cheap cocktail in the other. A day of fishing leaving a nice patina of relaxed exhaustion over him after a fine meal. Perhaps a couple of adventurous Swedish backpackers with giant Nordic breasts and …
No, that was enough. He could feel the rebar coming back. He opened his eyes.
“I’m good. Let’s do it.”
And he was ready this time as he approached the remains of Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn.
You dare not do this!
“Slavaattun mal shastarr,” he said to the corpse with a sneering leer.
“What?” Heath frowned at him.
Whoa. Where the fuck did that come from?
Dave repeated the phrase to himself, but slowly.
“Roughly translated?” he said to Heath. “ ‘I guess I do dare, bitch.’ ”
The captain kept his expression neutral.
“Yeah, sometimes I surprise myself, too,” Dave said. He took his time circling the stainless steel trolley, and the researchers all moved aside for him. Apart from the killing stroke he had delivered to the Hunn, Heath’s people had been nickel-and-diming it to pieces as well. An incision sliced here. A plug taken there. And in the center of its massive chest an equally massive Y-cut scar where they’d opened old Urgon up, all the better to empty him out. Dave had no interest in what they found in there. Three stomachs, two hearts—a primary and a secondary—some really nasty digestive juices, and a long intestinal tract that pooped tiny little rock-hard marbles of demon guano when the monster was done digesting his meal.
A cloud passed over his face. The Hunn’s last meal had been a friend of his. He pushed the thought away. He was becoming practiced at that.
“This ugly-ass motherfucker,” Dave said, “is a Hunn.”
The simple declaration seemed to cast a spell over the room, suspending everything. He gathered his thoughts from wherever they came and pressed on.
“One of the six clans of the Horde. The Hunn are the largest, most savage of them. They are the shock troops of the Horde,” he said, looking directly at Heath. “The heavy infantry, I guess you’d call them. And this one here, he was a BattleMaster of Hunn. They’re born, not made. Your average vanilla-flavored Hunn will run to about seven foot tall and weigh in at maybe three hundred, three hundred fifty pounds. Most of it, as you’ve probably seen, is pretty densely packed muscle. They probably have the strength of about a dozen men. Or maybe half a dozen Sergeant Swindts,” he conceded. “I guess you’ve run your tape measure over this bad boy, so you already know that a Master of Hunn can top out at over eight foot and weigh another sixty or seventy pounds. Without armor.”
One of the researchers raised a hand and opened his mouth to speak, but Dave waved him off. “I’ll get back to the armor,” he promised.
“So. The really big, dumb bastards like to call themselves BattleMasters. They’re like you, Heath. Officers.” Dave tapped the side of his head. “Sorry. Can’t Google up a direct comparison, but if you want to imagine them being about eighteen, maybe nineteen times stronger than a grown man, you wouldn’t be far off. They’re pretty fast and nimble—given they’ve got all that mass to move around—and when they take a swing at you, holy shit, they do throw out the hurt bombs. Their bones are dense …”
He looked around at the white suits for confirmation. A couple of them nodded, including Ashbury, who had abandoned her autopsy to take in his lecture.
“That rhino hide they’re covered in is thick but strangely sensitive to UV damage. It picks up a lot of infections. The infections suppurate and rupture. It can make them vulnerable. Their hide is normally as tough as boiled leather, but when it ruptures … not so much. That’s why they wear armor. It’s also why they have tattoos in a dumb-ass sort of way. The ink our boy here got himself would have hurt like a bastard when it went on.”
He paused for a second, closing his eyes and searching for the knowledge.
“They use bone needles and the ink of this sort of squid. Urmin. Rhymes with vermin. But lives on land. And the suckers on its arms all have little razor teeth around them.”
He checked to see if everyone was still following him. They were with rapt, horrified attention.
“Anyway, a dude with a lot of tats, he has sucked up some real pain to get them. The design tells a story, but you know, blah blah blah. I’m a bad ass from a line of bad asses. We’re all considered very macho.” He grinned. “Anyway. Game stats. The fastest of them can run at about …” He closed his eyes again and did a quick calculation. “About forty miles an hour for short distances. But they get puffed quickly. Like I said, that’s a lot of weight to go hauling around at high speed. Mostly they like to jog around at a slow lope, accelerating when they close with an enemy, or prey. Which to a Hunn is pretty much the same thing anyway.”
He had circled around the top of the dissection table until he stood next to the
half-crushed head of the corpse. He wrinkled his nose in distaste.
“He’s no oil painting, is he? Anyway, more fascinating factoids: they have very poor eyesight, especially in bright sunshine, but their sense of smell is about as good as a hunting dog’s. They can sleep standing up. They can hold their breath for a loooong time. Can go four or five days without water. Ten if they can get some blood to drink. Yeah, I know. Gross. The hide can be up to two inches thick in places.”
He looked up at Heath again. Unlike the brainiacs who seemed happy to defer to his superior knowledge, Heath looked as if Dave had just dropped his pants and mooned the lot of them. Allen was right. He should have found the time to give Old Navy a heads-up about this.
“But the hide’s not impenetrable,” he said, pressing on regardless. “These things fight with edged weapons, up close and very personal. When they want to reach out and touch someone at a distance, they’ll throw a spear, or if you’re dealing with the Sliveen, they’ll notch an arrow.”
“The Sliveen?” Heath asked. “The scout?” His face was a mask of deep concern, but Dave didn’t care anymore. They had asked him here to do his party trick, and he was going to do it. It felt good to let go of this stuff. A blessed fucking relief. As though giving it up made it somebody else’s problem.
“One of the six clans,” he explained. “You ever watch those Lord of the Rings movies?”
“Fuck yeah!” said one of the younger male researchers before blushing with embarrassment.
“Well, just imagine that movie with orcs pretending to be ninjas.”
“Awesome,” the same guy said in a quiet voice.
“Yeah, the Sliveen think they are. The Hunn disagree. A Sliveen is what hit us on the road last night.”
“These things have already made it to the mainland?” someone asked.
“Not now,” Heath said. “Continue, please, Mr. Hooper.”
“The Sliveen also like to think of themselves as being very sophisticated,” Dave said, then stopped. “Hey. Did this asshole come packing a sword? A really big sucker?”
“It did,” a bald man said. He’d just come into the room with the air of someone who liked to make a big entrance. “I’ve done some preliminary investigations, but we lack the facilities for metallurgical or linguistic analysis. Aside from the basic facts we could ascertain here—it was made by a tool-using, tool-making culture, designed primarily for combat, with some symbology indicating that it may also demonstrate rank and achievement—we have not been able to learn much about the material culture of this or the other creatures.”
No one said a word. The bald man who sported a shocking red neck beard was a bit short and a bit wide. He looked less of a pirate than he did a pirate’s fat cook. He seemed to waddle when he shuffled about in his biohazard suit. The arms and legs had been taped up to take up some of the slack. A pair of wire-framed glasses sat over the paper mask; behind them lurked a pair of sharp small brown eyes. He could just as easily have been an accountant at BP rattling off numbers concerning dividend payments. Except for the beard, of course. The bean counters always looked about twelve years old to Dave.
“I think I understood some of that,” he said to the new guy.
“Dr. Raymond Compton,” Heath said. “Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy. Also, academic resources and special projects chief.”
“Or to put it another way,” Dr. Compton said, “I’m in charge.”
Dave didn’t buy it. The little man didn’t look like he could manage a classroom of frat boys, let alone the military types answering to Heath.
“No, I take it back,” Dave said, biting down on a number of possible retorts. “I’m confused again. Anyway, it’s a pity the sword was sent away. The swords have stories on them, too.” He looked directly at Heath. “Good intel.”
“I believe I told you that, did I not, Captain?” Dr. Compton said with a look on his face that Dave recognized. The look of a man whom no one ever listened to and who resented the hell out of it. Of course, Dave had his own experience in that area. Without a Ph.D. he’d made do with boyish charm and bullshitting. Compton, having a Ph.D. and that big important title, looked as if he hadn’t learned the trick. Oh, yeah. Dave knew this sort. He had to be right, and he had to have the last word.
Always.
The less I have to deal with this asshole, Dave thought, the better.
A few steps carried him down the table to where the Hunn’s massive arm lay. He picked it up. It had three … fingers, he guessed you could call them. And a thumb. He remembered opposable thumbs from school. They were important. “What do you call those animals with these kind of fingers and toes, like horns?” he asked nobody in particular, assuming that a roomful of pointy heads would be able to provide the answer.
“Ungulates,” Ashbury said. She looked to be in her late thirties with a look that used to be described as handsome on the ladies of a bygone age. She was pretty, he supposed, but strong-featured. Dave could see two spots of high color on her cheeks over the top of the paper mask.
“So what are you guys, the monster squad or something?”
“I’m an MD with supplementary degrees in anthropology and forensics,” Professor Ashbury said. “I have also published several papers on exobiology. Dr. Compton’s speciality is—”
“Anthropology,” he said, as if that trumped exobiology with maximum prejudice. “During the war I did a lot of work on the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System. Before that I had some passing contact with the exobiologist community and their love of imaginary xenomorphs.”
He said that as if it should mean something to Dave.
“Xenu the alien? Like Tom Cruise worships?” Dave said, genuinely confused.
“No,” Ashbury said, not amused. “Exobiologists study extreme habitats and the life-forms that occupy them here on earth, and we make educated guesses about the way xenomorphs—aliens—might evolve on other planets.”
“These things aren’t aliens,” Dave said, flicking Urgon on the side of the skull. “Well, I guess they’re not from this world, strictly speaking. But they’re definitely not from Klingon, either. Although, looking at him …”
Heath stepped in to bring him back on topic.
“Professor Ashbury and her staff are all security cleared for government work at the highest level,” he said. “Nobody thinks these things arrived here from outer space.”
“But unless you want to bring in Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a consultant,” Ashbury said, “then exobiology is your go-to reference group.”
Compton had traded his poker face for a much more dissatisfied expression. He was a barrel-shaped man who didn’t seem to have much actual strength to him. Dave wondered what his hands were like, probably smooth, soft, without a day’s worth of honest work on them. All his achievements came through teaching instead of doing.
“How is it you came into possession of this knowledge, Mr.… Cooper?” he asked, stumbling slightly over Dave’s last name.
“That’s Hooper to you, Grizzly Adams.”
“How, Mr. Hooper, did you come to know all this?” Compton repeated. “It seems a preposterous suggestion that you have taken it in by osmosis.”
“I’d like to know that, too, Dave,” Heath said quietly. “You said you knew a bit about these things, but nothing like that.”
“Better explain yourself, Hooper,” Ashbury said with a twinkle in her eye. “These guys are such uptight arses at the best of times that I don’t even notice it. But I’m sensing a lot of extra pucker in the room right now.”
Some of the scientists tensed. The Lord of the Rings kid, who looked to be in his early twenties and way too young to be doing secret government experiments on alien life-forms, looked like he might wet himself.
Dave folded his arms and fought the old familiar urge to lie and distract.
“Look. I’ll be fucked if I know,” he said to Heath. “A couple of days ago I couldn’t have told you any of this stuff. But a couple of days
ago this ugly motherfucker—” He smacked the Hunn with the back of his hand. “—hadn’t crawled onto my rig and bitten the head off one of my best friends. There’s a fuckin’ preposterous suggestion for you right there, Doc. I hadn’t discovered my previously unknown ability to juggle refrigerators and small cars at the same time. Another preposterous suggestion. And I hadn’t put a hammer through old Urgon’s skull here and apparently downloaded all of his nasty fucking hopes and dreams.”
His voice grew louder as his temper got the better of him, and he finished by slapping an open palm down on the chest of the dead demon. It sounded like a rifle shot and brought the two marine guards running in from outside with their weapons up. It also collapsed the monster’s chest cavity like an old paper light shade.
Ashbury jumped back a little in fright. Somebody swore.
“Easy, Marine,” Heath said, calm and cool, without raising his voice. He put his hand on the top of the marine’s rifle and lowered it back to the floor. “We’re fine. Stand down.”
Everyone was looking at the body and at Dave.
“Sorry,” he said at last. “Still don’t know my own strength.”
“Okay,” Heath said in a soothing tone. “Let’s get back on track, shall we? And, you remind me, Mr. Hooper, I want to talk to you about that hammer later.”
He sounded like Dave’s old man right then, making an appointment to take him out to the woodshed.
14
The impromptu lecture wrapped up after two hours. Once Dave started talking, there seemed to be no obvious place to stop. Heath’s expression went from surprised to incredulous to angry before settling back into his usual blank mask. As much as Heath and the scientists were unbalanced by the performance, their surprise and incredulity were mild next to his own. In the end he kept talking because it was easier than stopping to consider the implications of what he’d already said.
“The Horde are like an army,” he explained as his voice grew hoarse. “No, scratch that. They are an army. But we’re not their enemy. We’re their food. Their rations. There are other armies. Real enemies. More like them.” He frowned.
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