Hunter

by Mercedes Lackey

  I was chewing furiously on my lower lip, my stomach in a complete knot, as the nets slowly formed up, one on top of the other. I carefully curled the edges of mine over the edges of Dazzle’s, praying the whole time that the Gazers wouldn’t look up and figure out something was going on. When I had Dazzle’s net secure, I tapped the armorer’s elbow. He glanced over at me and I nodded.

  He aimed the grenade gun at the nest and counted down in the barest hint of a whisper. “Three…two…”

  On one, he fired, and I slammed the net down on the Gazer nest and sealed the edges down to the rock all the way around. The flash hit them at the same time the net did.

  Then Dazzle let loose with her flash-magic, and I saw why she had gotten her nickname. My flashes were pretty good, but hers…If we weren’t Hunters, people would pay her to put on shows of light. It was amazing. She was throwing off light-flowers and showers of sparks and eye-watering, noiseless explosions that were exactly like the flash grenades except there was no bang. And they were coming every few seconds. There was no point in me wasting any manna in adding to all that; I just hung on to the nets like grim death and tried to feel where they were weakening or stretching.

  Meanwhile the rest of the Hunting party, having gotten the flash-bang signal, came pouring in through the doors, spells and weapons hot. Almost immediately the flying Hounds began knocking escapees to the ground, just as I had showed them. The fledglings and the Jackals were both small enough to slip through spots in the net. Of the two, it was those red-eared, bloody-eyed devils that were the most immediate danger. They were wicked, wicked fast, and I heard someone’s high-pitch shrieking as some of the Jackals got through the heavy cross fire.

  The armorer had scrambled down the wall on the inside to join the rest of the Hunting party on the ground, so it was just me, Mark and Dazzle, and the Hounds. Mark was methodically picking off fledgling Gazers in midair with the sniper’s rifle. My Hounds were studiously looking away from the melee and staring into my face. That was smart—no Gazer was going to get a lock on them if they were looking away.

  Sweat was pouring down my back, and I dug my fingers into the crumbling brick at the edge of the window. I didn’t dare close my aching eyes, because I needed to see the net through the flashing lights. My arms burned, muscles clamping down hard, as if I was physically holding that giant net full of surging, struggling Gazers and Jackals and fledglings.

  And some were getting out. We knew they were going to; just like when Mark and I had gone after those Goblins, some were going to stretch the invisible fabric of the net and get loose. Dazzle and I had to keep that to a trickle. Gazers were harder to kill than Goblins, just shooting them once wasn’t going to take one out. Half the party concentrated on the Gazers and fledglings getting loose, half on the Jackals. There was a lot of screaming down there, but so far I hadn’t felt that horrible, gut-wrenching surge of manna followed by emptiness that meant someone had died.

  The barrage of flash grenades was getting ragged, but Dazzle was more than making up for it. I have never been so glad to have someone on my side than I was to have her in that fight.

  And I could feel the steady drain of manna out of me that it took to keep the net strong.

  Which told me that pretty much everyone was in the same shape as me or worse. Certainly the ones who had gotten needle teeth embedded in their legs were worse off. But none of us were dead, and the Gazers and Jackals and Gazer young were thinning.

  Now the net was tight enough that not even the gross little eyebulbs were getting out. I was about to let myself have a deep breath when I spotted something coming in like an angry hornet over the wall opposite to us.

  A Gazer. A big one. Probably the bull of the nest. I let out a wordless, high-pitched scream; Mark followed where I was looking and immediately flung the rifle up and began sighting in.

  But Ace’s brother had already seen it. And he and his Hounds were heading for it.

  Without backup.

  I tried to throw a light-flash at it, but I was spent, and all I got was a little poof of sparks. I didn’t dare distract Dazzle.

  Hadn’t Ace ever taught him better? The stupid kid was looking right at the thing, firing a pistol wildly at it—like he was going to be able to hit it while running, and in seconds, the Gazer had him. He suddenly froze like a statue. His Hounds froze. The Gazer never stopped coming. Blood started pouring out of the kid’s ears, looking from where I lay like macabre and festive ribbons of scarlet, and even though I couldn’t see his face from here, I knew his mouth must be open in a silent scream of agony.

  That was when some of the others finally noticed there was something wrong, that the kid wasn’t with them, and spotted him.

  By then, of course, it was too late.

  He dropped dead to the ground before the first of their bullets or spells touched the damn thing.

  Ace went insane.

  He unloaded both his pistols into it, and arcing bolts of electricity, like miniature lightning, followed the trajectory of the bullets. Even a Gazer didn’t have time to recover or counter, or survive a barrage like that. It collapsed like a punctured balloon, and Ace tossed away his guns and ran for his fallen brother, screaming at the top of his lungs.

  The armorer stood over him, protecting him, while he cradled his brother’s body, oblivious to the mayhem still raging around him. The rest of us had no choice. Half the Gazers and a couple dozen of their Jackals were still alive and needed all of our attention. And I had to hold those nets, if I didn’t want to see a repetition of the tragedy. I held, and held, until I didn’t think I could hold any longer, then I held some more.

  Finally it was over. The last little nestling popped. The last Jackal died running, but not fast enough to escape a bullet. I let go of the nets with a gasp, and they faded into nothingness. Dazzle looked at me, her eyes rolled up into her head, and she passed clean out. Mark caught her as she fell over sideways.

  “I’ll take care of her,” he said. “You go down to the others ahead of us.”

  I didn’t want to. I felt like a wrung-out dishrag, and I didn’t want to look at poor Ace right now. But one of us had to rejoin the group to report, and one of us had to take care of Dazzle, and Mark was probably better at carrying her down that metal ladder than I was. So I climbed down and made my way to the closer of the doors.

  I walked pretty slowly—thinking hard the whole time—because what the hell was I going to say to Ace? “I’m sorry” didn’t sound like nearly enough. On the other hand, the other thing that I wanted to say, which was that his brother had been an idiot and nearly gotten more of us killed, was not exactly…kind. But the decision was taken right out of my hands when Ace charged me as soon as I cleared the door, shouting about how it was all my fault and I had somehow let the Gazer out of the net on purpose.

  I don’t know what anyone else was thinking, or even if they were thinking at all, but he was giving me plenty of time to get ready as he ran at me like a maniac, and I traded swift glances with the armorer—who nodded, ever so slightly, and just as slightly stepped back.

  So when Ace closed with me, I didn’t try to placate him and I didn’t try to run away. I stood my ground, and as he got within a couple of steps of me, I moved smoothly off the line of attack, closed one hand on the wrist that was nearest me as he swung, and flipped him over my shoulder, sending him face-first onto the ground and getting his hand and thumb stretched out behind his back in the most painful possible hanari hold I could manage. He was not going to get up from that position without breaking his wrist. And I wasn’t going to let him go until I was sure he wasn’t going to attack me again, or the armorer ordered me to, whichever came first.

  It all happened in an instant, so far as everyone else was concerned. They all looked dumbstruck.

  “I didn’t let that Gazer go,” I said slowly and patiently as Ace gasped with pain and tried to get back the breath that had gotten knocked out of him. “That was the nest bull, and he came over the e
ast side of the building nearest your brother. I didn’t see him until it was too late, and your poor brother started charging him.”

  I looked over at the armorer then and said, out loud and boldly, “Hunter Ace is understandably upset and not himself, sir. Requesting permission for the last five minutes to be erased from the public record.”

  There were a couple of gasps at that, though I couldn’t tell whether people were gasping because I actually said out loud that I knew the vids were tampered with, or because no one expected me to give Ace this easy out—at least as far as the public would be concerned. But the armorer just nodded and said quite loudly, “Erase the last five minutes. Freeze and hold.”

  I took that as my cue to let go of Ace’s hand and step quickly away from him. At that point, before he could get up and renew his assault on me, all my Hounds quickly surrounded me, practically glowing with manna. One of his friends helped him up. He brushed them aside, and stumbled off outside the nest building.

  “Resume public vidding,” the armorer said. “Send the choppers.”

  I was rather glad that the choppers could only hold four at a time. I sent my Hounds back, and Mark, Dazzle, the armorer, and I all crowded into one; I didn’t see how the others sorted themselves out.

  We were the first chopper on the ground, so to avoid any chance of further contact with Ace, I got Dazzle’s elbow and ran her inside, taking her straight to the docs. They already knew she’d passed out, of course, so they hustled her off for a thorough checkout, gave me a cursory once-over, and sent me off to debrief.

  That was easier than I’d thought; since I hadn’t passed out at all, and since my part of the fight was considered relatively “easy” and I hadn’t gotten wounded, it was just a quick review of the vid—which, of course, showed quite clearly that I hadn’t let the bull Gazer out. It also revealed something that I hadn’t heard at the time; that Ace’s brother made no attempt to alert any of the Hunters nearest him when he spotted the thing. He just went charging straight at the monster, shouting something.

  I didn’t say anything about that, and they didn’t say anything to me, except, “Could you have sent out a second net spell, Hunter Joyeaux?”

  “No, sir, I could not, sir, and I did explain that at the planning, sir,” I replied. Which I had; it was on the vid. “One net spell at a time is all I can manage.”

  “Very good,” was the reply.

  Early bed sounded very good indeed, and I was just glad that the Gazer takedown had been a group effort, and that my part in it was very small.

  But I hadn’t even gotten two steps into the hall when my Perscom pinged me.

  It was the armorer. “Hunter Joyeaux. Main lounge, now,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I said, and made for the room on the trot.

  When I got there…it was full. All the regular crew, plus everyone who’d been on the Gazer Hunt, including the ones who had needed medical and debriefing (except Ace and his girlfriend). And in addition, some other Hunters who I only knew from the channels. At a quick count, there were about fifty people here…so all the ones who just came off duty, plus some from the other two shifts?

  The armorer was standing next to the vid screen, waiting. A couple more people, including Trev, came in after me. They must have been the ones he was waiting for, because as I found an unobtrusive place to stand, he spoke, and everyone got instantly quiet. Not only was the crowd subdued, there was a sense that most of them were in a state of shock and disbelief. Paules might not have been exactly popular, but he was one of us. Heck, there was a kind of cold emptiness in me, that life out of balance thing again, and I didn’t even know Paules.

  “What’s the rule?” he demanded.

  “Make sure the Cits feel safe,” several of us murmured.

  “I can’t hear you.” He glared.

  “Make sure the Cits feel safe, sir!” we all shouted raggedly.

  “And it’s only the ’casters doing some fancy dancing on the channels to concentrate them on the tragic sacrifice young, handsome Paules made for the sake of the mission that is keeping them from feeling very unsafe right now.” He didn’t lose an atom of his stern expression. “There’s also some fancy work on the part of the editors, pulling out anything that identifies how close we were to the Barriers.”

  The room was so quiet I could hear everyone breathing now.

  “We very nearly had an unmitigated disaster,” he said. “And I’m at least partly at fault for that. I should have silenced that young fool Ace as soon as he started spouting about getting all of you out there. I should have overridden the ’casters when they started agitating for a big Hunt. I did neither, because it was out in Spillover, so I reckoned there was no harm. Give the Cits a big Hunt. Show them how the Hunters work together even on the spur of the moment. That was a job for a full squad of the Elite, and it should have been done at night when Gazers are at their most vulnerable, and my own judgment was faulty. But I am going to make damn sure that no one else’s was before we leave this room.” He tapped his Perscom and the vid started.

  I guess the reason why I was there was just so that it was clear I wasn’t being excluded from the possibility of having messed up, because he stopped the vid of our attack every minute or so and took everything we were doing apart, including barking, “Joy. Dazzle. Why did that eyebulb get out?” or something like that as he pointed to an escapee. We’d always answer that it got out through the mesh, or squirmed under the net, or something reasonable—I was actually really glad to see, with all the vid angles, that we’d done a good job of holding those nets. Better than I’d thought.

  When the vid was over, I was sweating, and so was everyone else in the room, I think. The armorer turned the vid off. “New rule,” he said. “No one jumps in on the main frequency and suggests a mass Hunt. Ever. You get a situation like we just had, you report it, and let us handle it.

  “Officially, this was a tragedy. Paules was a fine Hunter with years of protecting the city ahead of him. No, you don’t know if he had ever encountered a Gazer before, and don’t let anyone lead you into answering anything except how sorry you are for his brother and family and how, thanks to his sacrifice, the Hunt was completely successful and the Cits can rely on us to keep them safe. No speculation. No elaboration. Got that?”

  There were nodding heads all over the room and some murmured “yes, sirs.”

  “Good. You’re all dismissed.” He stalked out of the room before any of us could get up or otherwise move, and we all obeyed him, drifting toward the mess hall or our rooms. Everybody was pretty somber. I ate without really tasting anything, and went to bed without watching any vid.

  We’d been successful, wildly successful, in fact. We’d protected the Cits from a danger on their very doorstep that no one had been aware was there. Despite losing Ace’s brother—it should have felt like a victory.

  Instead, it felt like I needed to watch my back, and like no good was going to come of this.

  THE NEXT DAY, people were still rattled. There wasn’t much talking going on at breakfast. But no one was really grieving, either. Paules was the first fatality they’d had (not counting Elites) in a while, and they couldn’t figure out how to feel about it. A gut-wrenching could that have been me? Then the certainty that no one else would have been that criminally stupid…then the relief that it wasn’t them or anyone they really knew well. It’d make for an unsettling mix of emotions.

  I learned that the group effort was deemed my final test, and I was given my own territory. Not Spillover, but not one of the easy ones in the City Center, either. I got another industrial territory, another one of blocks of windowless buildings centered on an equally windowless residential building. Not a prison this time, I was told, but what was called “public” housing, where the people who were brought in from Spillover for permanent, but tedious and low-paying, jobs could live.

  They could try to find a place to live elsewhere, of course, but then there would be the lengthy travel time
to and from the job. Some did anyway; they had family or friends in nicer parts of the city, farther from the Barrier, who were willing to share space and rent. But most opted to have their earnings siphoned away for the privilege of living in a box and never seeing the sun, in order to be close to a job that would make me open a vein.

  Of course, to an extent, I lived in a box. There were no windows in headquarters. And instead of half of what I earned, everything I might have been paid to Hunt belonged to the Hunter Corps…so, I suppose I was just as much an indentured servant as they were. I got much better food, and got waited on like a wealthy Cit, and by any standard I knew my life was ultra-plush, but with the exception of what I had brought with me, I didn’t actually own anything, and none of my time was really my own.

  But I had this much freedom still, in that I could elect to walk out with my Hounds and never come back, and if I did, there would not be one damn thing they could do about it.

  One of the writers from before the Diseray who I liked said in one of his books, “Freedom is just a cage where the bars are farther away than you care to fly.” I guess for the Spillover folks lucky enough to get a job in the city, their little boxes were as luxurious as my fancy suite was to me. It makes sense that when you’re living in a wrecked building with a leaky roof and nothing but a fire for warmth—and where at any moment you can find yourself sharing your space with an Othersider—one of those living-cubes was downright heavenly.

  I reported to the armory for my new assignment, and Karly was there at the same time. We grinned at each other and fist-bumped, then Armorer Kent came in with a piece of paper in each hand. “Originally you were supposed to get Karly’s territory, and she was supposed to go to F-22,” he said. “In fact those are your assignments, but we’ve overridden the computer assignment and switched you.”