Hunted lop-4

by James Alan Gardner

  A navy quartermaster once told me those transmitters could keep drawing power from your tissues at least five minutes after you were dead.

  I took one step toward my sister’s body. Then hands grabbed me from behind: bright red hands, the sergeant on my right, one of his men on my left. They were only using their Cheejreth arms, but at that moment, they were strong enough to hold me.

  "Nothing we can do here," the sergeant said. His voice was muffled by his gas mask. "No one to save."

  "Wrong," I told him. "There’s still someone unaccounted for."

  Innocence. My sort-of daughter. The new high queen.

  She had a secret room in the palace, but not secret enough. When we got there, the door had been blown off its hinges by explosives. There was no sign of a struggle, no blood, no little yellow corpse; it looked like Innocence hadn’t been home when the assassin showed up.

  Where else might she go? Would she run and hide like a seven-year-old girl, or throw herself into action like a queen? My first thought was she might run for my sickroom, to rescue her beloved Daddy Edward; but she hadn’t shown up, had she? The guards would have seen her the second she came charging through the door…

  They’d had their stunners out, ready to fire. A single stun-shot wouldn’t take down a queen, not even a young one like Innocence. But five shots simultaneously would. And they were all wearing gas masks, so it wouldn’t matter if Innocence surrounded herself with a cloud of her own royal pheromone.

  Now the same guards were waiting for me to tell them where Innocence might hide. They wanted me to lead them straight to her.

  The sergeant had told me, "There’s been a mutiny." He hadn’t mentioned which side he was on.

  Now the sergeant asked, "Where should we go, sir? You said there was someone you wanted us to protect?"

  Yes — the sergeant definitely knew about Innocence. He shouldn’t have known, but he did. And he also knew I was so stupid, I wasn’t likely to see through their trick.

  "This way," I said. "I know where she’s gone."

  Unshummin palace is shaped like a Mandasar queen. Really. A long central body with eight legs sticking out at the sides — the legs are actually separate wings of the building, three stories tall — and up at the head, the queen’s "claws" are four more building wings stretched out on diagonals. The claw parts even end in crescent-shaped rotundas, so from the air they look like pincers.

  Much farther back, where the palace’s "tail" meets the wider part of the body, there are two big glass domes to represent venom sacs. The domes are actually huge greenhouse roofs; beneath them lies the Royal Conservatory, with tropical-zone plants under the right-hand dome and temperate-zone plants under the left.

  The right-hand part is the closest thing to a jungle you’ll find within a thousand kilometers of Unshummin. That’s where I led the five guards.

  "There’s this little girl," I whispered to them. "And she has this secret place where she goes when she’s really scared."

  They nodded and even smiled, like they understood. What I said wasn’t true — Innocence could never have gone from the infirmary to the conservatory without being seen by dozens of people — but the guards were willing to believe me. They didn’t suspect I suspected… till I led them into the middle of the dark trees and vines, then suddenly dashed away through a grove of Koshavese fire oaks.

  The trees grew too close together for the warriors to follow me; and I moved fast enough that I was out of sight before they could bring their stunners to bear. The guns whirred anyway, but I didn’t feel a tingle — what with the dark and the tree cover and the gas masks on the guards’ faces, I guess they weren’t aiming very well.

  Nice thing about those gas masks: the guards couldn’t sniff me out. A Mandasar warrior depends so much on his nose, he’s at a numb disadvantage when his smelling’s sealed off. Mandasar eyes are just as good as human, and their ears are sharp enough to hear a big guy like me blundering his way through the bush… but without their noses, they lose their edge: a fraction slower on everything they do. That was good — after a year of being sick, I was a fraction slower too, and I don’t mean a tiny fraction like one over a thousand.

  My plan was just to lose the soldiers in the conservatory, then duck out a door to find Innocence. Just one problem: there were three doors — one toward the head of the palace, one toward the tail, and one that led through a bunch of potting rooms to the other half of the conservatory. While I was still dodging through the undergrowth, the sergeant sent three of his men racing to cover those exits. That left two of them to search for one of me… and they had all the guns.

  I’ve already said I’m not one of those guys who can creep through the dark without making a sound. Lucky for me, most Mandasars are even worse at being stealthy than I am; there’s no such thing as a silent bulldozer. There’s also no such thing as a Mandasar who can climb trees — great big lobsters have no monkeys anywhere in their evolutionary past. Your average warrior never looks for trouble above head height… which is probably true for human soldiers too, but our species should know better.

  Up I went — into some kind of tree with easy-to-climb branches. Its bark felt like moldy cheese: hard underneath, but with an outer layer of mushy fuzz. It smelled like moldy cheese too… moldy something anyway, all pulpy and rotten. I wasn’t happy getting the stuff on the front of my uniform, but I had an easy time digging in my fingers for handholds. Without much noise, I pulled myself up a story and a half above the ground, then settled into the shadows between a big branch and the trunk.

  The sergeant passed cautiously below me. I considered dropping onto his head, but decided against it — considering how out of practice I was, I wouldn’t take him out instantly. Anyway, it would be sure to cause noise. The other warrior looking for me was only a short distance off; even if I managed to finish off the sergeant, I’d be shot unconscious before I escaped.

  Instead, I waited till the guards searching for me were down the far end of the place (it’s a big conservatory), then I carefully began to clamber from tree to tree. This was just an exhibit, not a real rain forest; all kinds of trees had been crammed in together, and the gardeners had done that pruning trick that makes the branches grow out instead of up. I could sneak from one tree to the next without much trouble, heading for the door that led back into the main part of the palace.

  My movement wasn’t completely silent, but neither was the conservatory. Birds lived in the place, the little flitty kind of birds you find all over Troyen. Sam once told me the feathers on Troyenese birds didn’t evolve the same way as on Earth — not as strong or aerodynamic or something, so local birds can’t fly if they get much bigger than a chickadee. The ones in the conservatory were all smaller than that, on the order of hummingbirds; and with us big people thrashing in the dark, the birds were zipping around like frantic wasps, making leaves rustle all over the place. Practically every step I took, I disturbed one of the little guys and sent it flying off to another tree… but the warriors were also scaring up flocks wherever they went, not to mention a bunch of birds with bad nerves who suddenly burst into a racket of cheeping for no apparent reason. The warriors couldn’t hear me over all that noise; so it only took me a few minutes to get within ten meters of the door.

  One guard between me and escape. With his gas mask on, he couldn’t smell me; with the darkness, he couldn’t see me; with the birds making racket all over the place, he couldn’t hear me. But everything would change if I jumped out of the tree and tried to cross the gap between us — I figured it was fifty-fifty whether I’d get to him before he fired his stunner, and even less likely that I’d be able to put him down before his friends showed up.

  So I stayed in the tree, hoping for a lucky break. Which I got, sort of.

  "This is taking too long," the sergeant growled from somewhere far behind me. He was speaking in Mandasar, of course, but I understood just fine. "Take your masks off, and let’s sniff this bastard out."

  "B
ut Sarge…" one of the other guards said.

  "The queen’s dead," the sergeant snapped, "and the brat obviously isn’t here. We’ll be all right. Do it."

  They did. As the guard in the doorway began to slip his gas mask off, I knew I’d never have a better time to move — within seconds, he’d smell a human within spitting distance. I hit the floor running, with only a tiny stumble; and the guard was slowed by taking off his mask. Even then, I nearly didn’t make it in time… but at the last second, the guard hesitated a teeny bit.

  I smashed him with a palm heel under the snout, snapping his head back hard. The strike was too weak to knock him out completely, but it dazed him long enough for me to rip the stunner out of his Cheejreth arms. Jumping back out of reach of his waist pincers, I shot him three times fast in the head. He slumped, his nose whupping down hard onto the floor.

  Behind me, the other guards were shouting — they must have heard the stunner’s whir. I raced through the door, knowing I’d never outrun four Mandasar warriors but not having a lot of other options. The most important thing was getting around a corner fast, so I wouldn’t be in the line of fire from the stunners. At the first side corridor I dived off to the right, just as guns whirred behind me. I rolled to my feet and was about to start running again when a voice whispered behind me, "Psst!"

  I turned. Directly across from me, where the side corridor continued, someone stood in the shadows. Even without lights, I could make out the buttercup yellow of her shell. The warriors raced up the main hall toward us. As they came level with Innocence and me, it was like the four of them were clotheslined by a wire running across their path at nose height; but there was no wire, just the smell of royal pheromone driving up their snouts and into their brains. The guards fell twitching. I stepped out of cover and drained the batteries of my stunner, making sure they wouldn’t get up.

  Old Queen Verity, ever the long-range planner, had left an escape route for her newly royal daughter. Outside in the royal gardens, a shed held one end of a Sperm-tail transport tube. The tube led off to parts unknown, maybe halfway around the world, to a secret safe house where Innocence could grow up in peace. I carried my daughter to the shed, all wrapped in black so her bright yellow body wouldn’t be seen by mutineers; and I personally fed her into that Sperm-tail, then smashed the anchor that held the Unshummin end of the tube in place. The tail slithered off, like a string yanked from the far end… and that was the last I saw of my little girl, my daughter, the high-queen-in-waiting.

  I dearly wanted to go with her — where else did I have to be, who else was left that I cared about? But someone had to smash the anchor. Besides, if I disappeared, the navy would search for me… and I didn’t want anyone snooping around, for fear the world would learn about Innocence. She was only seven years old; till she grew up, it was safer if nobody knew she existed.

  Me, I headed back to the queen’s royal chamber. I avoided the pockets of fighting; too tired to help the good guys. Anyway, how would I tell the good from the bad? And with everyone dead or gone, what was worth fighting for? So I slunk through the palace as if I were the only man left on Troyen — alone, with Samantha, Verity, and Innocence all taken from me.

  In the high queen’s chamber, the bodies had disappeared. I imagined them carried off by mutineers, so the corpses could be displayed as somebody’s trophies. Sickened by that thought, I fell to my knees in the sticky patch of blood where Sam had been lying… pressed my hands down on the dampness, and lifted my red-stained fingers to my nose…

  Then it was days later, and I was on the navy’s moon-base. No memory of how I’d gotten from one place to the other. They said some navy security guards found me and dragged me onto an escape shuttle — abandoning a planet gone mad, transporting me to the safe airless silence of space.

  With Verity dead, no one on the planet could maintain order. Everybody who could leave got out fast. Including the Fasskisters who started the whole mess.

  The Fasskisters had one last indignity to dump on poor old Troyen: what they called the Beneficent Swarm. Without telling anyone else, they’d left huge caches of nano in Fasskister warehouses all over the planet. At the very instant the last Fasskister left Troyen’s atmosphere, all those caches opened wide… spreading clouds of self-replicating nanites in every direction.

  According to the Fasskisters, the nanites were designed "to protect the Mandasars from themselves." In a way, that was even true — because of the Swarm, the Mandasars didn’t have a chance to nuke themselves to oblivion.

  The microscopic robots ate plastics, particularly those used to insulate electrical wires, to build circuit boards, and to act as glue or sealants. Within a week, much of Troyen’s technological base had literally fallen apart… including all computers, the power grid, and most communication systems. The nanites also shut down nuclear weapons, nerve-gas missiles, and a bunch of labs where clever Mandasar doctors were studying alien organisms for their germ-warfare potential; the Beneficent Swarm even wrecked important chunks of military planes, tanks, and submarines. The Fasskisters could honestly say they’d saved the Mandasars from a war of total extinction.

  On the other hand, you can kill a lot of people with spears and crossbows. For twenty years, that’s exactly what the Mandasars did.

  Laughter. People were laughing. I came to myself and realized I was at the captain’s table on Jacaranda, still possessed by the spirit that kept shoving me out of my body. Whatever the spirit just said must have been hysterically funny… the way Prope giggled into her hand and Festina’s eyes glistened. Even Kaisho, face hidden by hair, was chuckling. I guess higher organisms aren’t immune to being disarmed by the occasional joke.

  I wished I knew what’d just come out of my mouth. For the past little while — I don’t know how long — I’d fallen out of touch with what I’d been saying. Blanked out in my own thoughts, of Innocence, of Sam, of the night everybody died.

  Had I told about that? I didn’t know.

  Prope, Festina, and Kaisho just kept laughing… but when I glanced to my right, Lieutenant Harque didn’t look nearly so chuckly. Yes, he was smiling; but it was the strained sort of smile people wear when they don’t have a choice. I wondered whether I’d made a joke at his expense. I didn’t think so — if the others were laughing because I’d teased him, they’d glance his way from time to time, just to catch the look on his face. So far as I could see, all three women acted like he wasn’t even there. As if I was the only man at the table worth listening to.

  Which explained why Harque looked so sour.

  Slowly the laughter eased away. Prope’s eyes remained shiny — beaming straight at me, glimmery bright. I couldn’t mistake the look… and I was returning it, strong and clear, like electricity passing between us. Terrified, I fought the thing that wanted to lock me with the captain in that heart-pounding gaze. Sometime in the past hour, while I wasn’t paying attention, the spirit possessing me had built upon Prope’s light little flirtations and made them bloom into…

  Into…

  No, With a burst of willpower, I grabbed back control of my body and forced myself to lower my eyes. Maybe if I shied off, I could undo the effects of wooing the captain… and of wooing Festina and Kaisho too, by the look of them. All three women simmered with the same gush of attraction, as if my wit and my charm had dazzled them all.

  Scared and ashamed, I turned away from the table. Would it be so bad if I just muttered, "Excuse me," and ran to my cabin? Rude, yes, but would it be so bad?

  My eyes swept over the Mandasars at the next table. The five of them were shaking, shuddering like a group attack of epilepsy. Their nostrils had flared wide, inhaling to the very bottom of their lungs.

  Only one thing could make Mandasars react that way. Somehow, undetectable to human noses, the air must be filled with the pure piercing scent of royal pheromone.

  27

  WATCHING FESTINA PUNCH

  I was still staring at the Mandasars when someone at a nearby table gas
ped. "Are they sick?"

  "No," I said. "Not sick."

  More crew members were looking now: standing up to see over other people’s heads, and muttering, "What idiot brought diseased lobsters aboard a navy ship?" Things escalated to a general kerfuffle, with Veresian getting called, and nervous folks running out, and Prope glaring at Festina for exposing everyone to contagious aliens, and Festina asking me what could be wrong, and me saying I didn’t know when I knew full well, except where the pheromone was coming from. Eventually, the captain cleared the lounge "to give the doctor room to work." I wanted to stick around to make sure the Mandasars were okay; but Prope took me by the arm and walked me to my cabin, all of a sudden starting to talk in a giddy girlish voice you wouldn’t expect from a starship captain. Half the time, I couldn’t even follow what she said — I was getting sleepier by the minute thanks to space lag, being shifted off my body’s day/night cycle.

  Now, I had a giddy woman on my arm; and I suspected she’d be in my bed soon, unless I somehow cooled her off. I didn’t want to make her mad, considering we were stuck on Jacaranda the next few weeks… but I sure didn’t want to sleep with her either. Barely a day ago, Prope was ready to dump me somewhere awful — and she might still do it if she got orders from the High Council. Some people might like rumpling the sheets with a ruthless cut-your-throat woman, but me, I had more gentle standards.

  So I wasn’t in the mood to get lovey-dovey. It surprised me she was so keen for it: I mean, a lot of women like how I look, and Prope might have been thinking, "His father’s an admiral," but even so, the captain was acting awfully loose and loopy. As if she was drunk or something… except I couldn’t smell any alcohol on her. The way she was clinging right on my arm, I could smell a lot of other things — shampoo in her hair, soap behind her ears, chocolate mousse on her breath, sweat where her shoulder and hip pressed against me — but not a drop of booze.