The Hunters of Vermin

by H. Paul Honsinger

  When the meat was barely charred, the Vaaach removed it from the flames and dined by cutting off long slices and eating them whole. The piece of meat had to weigh at least three or four kilograms, but the Vaaach ate every morsel in less than five minutes with a great deal of evident relish. Apparently, all that ferocity consumed a lot of calories.

  Along with the meat, the Vaaach ate several dark, red cubes which, from his expressions and body language, Max concluded he did not find as tasty. Max wished he could ask the Vaaach what they were.

  The cubes can’t be sweets, because refined sugar comes from plants and this guy is not only carnivorous by virtue of his evolutionary heritage, but also as a matter of pride.

  Max spent a few minutes running through his mind what his biology lessons had taught him about oblate and facultative carnivores (the Vaaach were very definitely of the oblate variety) and their nutritional requirements, assuming that these things worked much the same for the Vaaach as for Earth organisms. As it is virtually impossible for a large, complex creature like a Vaaach to live only on muscle meat, which does not supply adequate nutrition, Max came to the conclusion that the cubes would have to be some kind of compressed, processed organ meat (or some kind of synthetic substitute) to supply the nutrients that are found in livers, hearts, and entrails but not in steak, roast, and ham. The Vaaach ate the cubes rather than the real thing because organ meat spoils more rapidly than muscle meat and is harder to store and transport.

  While surreptitiously watching the Vaaach’s meal preparations, Max pulled out his own rations and made himself a complete meal consisting of Meatballs (or, more likely “meat” balls) and Marinara sauce, garlic mashed potatoes, breadsticks, a vaguely greenish yellow mush called “chopped garden vegetable medley,” and three “chocolate” chip cookies. While Max regarded the meatballs in this particular ration to be only passable, he was a long-time fan of ration pack garlic mashed potatoes. There was also electrolyte-rich drink powder, some peanut butter crackers, and a candy bar.

  Max inhaled them all. Stalking apparently consumed a lot of calories, too.

  Max had hoped that there might be some low-key conversation around the camp fire after supper where he could learn more about the Vaaach, what they expected of him, how there happened to be Krag on this planet, whether the Vaaach had been trying to kill him during his atmosphere entry and landing or whether it had just been an extremely difficult test that he almost failed, and a few of the other half million questions careening through his fertile, teenaged mind.

  No such luck. The Trainer confined his after-dinner remarks to telling Max where to put his sleeping bag and advising him to bed soon because he would be awakened before first light.

  There was one bright note, however. Immediately after Max was done brushing his teeth and was using one of his pre-moistened cleaning towels to wipe the worst of the sweat and grime off of his face and hands before bed, the Vaaach set up what was clearly a highly sophisticated perimeter alarm and said in tones that sounded almost gentle: “Young primate. I urge you to take your rest with neither eye nor ear nor nose alert to any danger. You sleep under my protection. Any being who comes here seeking to do you harm shall find only his own swift death.”

  Vllgrhmrr extended his wickedly long, sharp claws and bared his dagger-like teeth, thereby quietly but convincingly displaying the deadliness of the weapons with which evolution had equipped his species. Briefly, Max theorized about the ecosystem in which the Vaaach evolved. For teeth and claws as well as the strength and speed and the Vaaach’s other fighting qualities to have been natural adaptations to their environment, that environment must have been singularly lethal. Any world that produced sentient beings so equipped would also be so dangerous that their mindset would give them a natural aptitude for combat. Certainly, Max wouldn’t attempt to fight the Vaaach with any weapon less formidable than a shoulder-fired anti-tank missile launcher or maybe a nitrox-boosted flame thrower. Or both.

  Both. Definitely, both.

  Max thought of the last few lines of Ogden Nash’s poem, “The Wombat.”

  “His distant habit precludes

  Conclusive knowledge of his moods.

  But, I would not engage the wombat

  In any form of mortal combat.”

  Max crawled into his sleeping bag. Notwithstanding the Vaaach’s most convincing warning, he held true to years of habit by placing his boarding cutlass at his right hand and his dirk, inside its scabbard, in the sleeping bag at his side.

  NOW, I’m supposed to go to sleep. How the flying fuck and I supposed to do that? In a strange forest, with the various ways I have almost died in the last few weeks ricocheting around inside my head, BING . . . BANG . . . BOING . . . BING . . . BANG . . . BOING!! There’s no way I’m going to fall asleep. I’ll, just try to get comfortable and relax. Maybe if I look at the stars for a few minutes. Crap. Some kind of funny cloud cover so I can’t see the constellations but only a few of the brightest stars.

  There. I’ll focus on that star--the one with the reddish tint. Probably a red giant, like Betelgeuse. “Betelgeuse.” What a ridiculous name for a star. Over here is Betelgeuse and over there is Antares. Beetle juice and Ant ares! The sky is full of bugs. I was a midshipman first class before I figured out that “Beatle Juice” and “Betelgeuse” were the same star. It’s like old Paw Paw Arceneaux’s story about how it wasn’t until he joined the navy and shipped out on his first cruise that he learned that “bob wahr” and “barbed wire” were the same thing. Before that, he thought that “bob wahr” was used to fence in cattle while barbed wire was for military and security use.

  I wonder what happened to old Paw Paw. The navy was so desperate for experienced personnel that they let him re-enlist at age 57, just before the Gynophage attack . . . the last we heard of him he was a machinists’ mate on a transport. What was its name? Oh, yeah, the USS General M. L. Hersey. Disappeared without a trace returning from dropping off a load of combat materiel for the 424th Marine Division in a dirtfight with the Krag on Brewster VI. A lot of things could have happened to her. Her last transmission contained a garbled set of coordinates that I’ve never been able to make sense of. Maybe if I swap around the digits for the third coordinate, and then bump the second and third digits of the first coordinate down one integer . . . .

  “Do you hear me, human? Are you deaf as well as weak, dim-witted, and lazy?” Trainer’s roars thundered in the forest as the translator module streamed his angry words into Max’s mind. He sat up quickly and looked around. The Vaaach’s fire had burned down and the barest hint of pre-dawn light was filtering through the trees.

  So much for not being able to sleep.

  “On your feet, pink puny monkeyspawn.” Max scrambled to attention. Vllgrhmrr gave him a quick look up and down and shuddered in apparent disgust. “Hydrate. Wash. Eliminate. Eat. Prepare for the day. We start in one hour. Beforeday, was the stretch before the run. Thisday will call for the heart of a hunter, perhaps too much for a puny fruit eater. So, hydrate and eat as well as you are able.”

  Just a stretch before the run? Crap, crap, CRAP. If today is much worse than yesterday, you can call me Lieutenant (JG) Maxime Tindall Toast.

  Max didn’t need to be told twice to devote his time to fortifying himself for what would certainly be an extremely difficult day ahead. He took the Vaaach’s advice, drinking a liter and a half of water mixed with black cherry flavored electrolyte drink mix, and half a liter of caffeine-boosted instant coffee made in a self-heating “insta pot,” as well as downing a hot breakfast consisting of an egg, bacon, and cheese breakfast burrito, hash brown potato disk (known to generations of spacers as a “spud puck”), two “Southern style fluffy buttermilk biscuits” (which were about as “fluffy” as a doorknob) with “butter flavored vegetable spread” and “home-style apple flavored jelly,” of which the less said about the “flavor” and the “style,” the better.

  The meal might not have been particularly tasty, but it had about 160
0 calories, was loaded to the gunwales with carbs for energy and protein to keep Max going, packed enough sugar and caffeine to spur him into motion by giving him a hard boot in the butt, and contained enough substantial, solid, stick-to-your-ribs food weight to keep him from feeling hungry for several hours. The navy might not be too swift when it came to providing field rations the measured up to even the most mediocre civilian food in terms of flavor and variety, but it knew how to provide its personnel with a meal containing the kind of solid nourishment that, for five or six hours, would keep them on their feet and in the fight.

  Max finished his breakfast, disposed of his food packaging in a receptacle as indicated by the Trainer (where he also disposed of his trash from the last few days), donned his frmmthrr and brbrr, and presented himself for inspection. As it was a new day, he saluted his Trainer in the Vaaach fashion, and received the return salute.

  “Greetings, young primate. Are you prepared to receive further training thisday?”

  “Greetings, Trainer. Yes, I am prepared.”

  “Very well. Beforeday you learned to walk. Thisday you will learn to make yourself invisible.”

  If Max was going to learn to make himself invisible “thisday,” he was going to have to expend a great deal of sweat to do it. For the first two days after Max was evicted from the medical facility, a weak easterly wind had puffed moderately cool air through the forest, providing weather that reminded Max of late spring or early fall on his home world. But, overnight, the wind had shifted. Now, a strong south wind exhaled its humid breath across the landscape, making the forest feel more like jungle than woods. The temperature had to be crowding 38 degrees Celsius or, as some of the old folks on Nouvelle Acadiana still insisted on saying, cent chaud, meaning “100 [degrees Fahrenheit] hot.”

  In the task of making Max sweat as he trained, the heat had the able assistance of the humidity which went far beyond the dampness Max had felt while a child on Nouvelle Acadiana and was more in the range of Earth’s Louisiana Gulf Coast, where most of Nouvelle Acadiana’s original settlers came from. Just the exertion involved in boiling water for his coffee and cleaning up after himself upon completing his breakfast left Max dripping wet.

  This is gonna be fun!

  It was under these sweltering conditions that Max did, indeed, learn to make himself invisible. Well, if not truly invisible, then he mastered the art of being so hard to see in the forest that true invisibility wouldn’t have been much of an improvement. Max learned to find shadows of the right size and shape and darkness to conceal his presence, how to stand or crouch or kneel or lie or huddle near trees and shrubs while twisting his body and limbs like a circus side show contortionist so that his contours blended in with the natural bends and shadows of the flora, how to spot visual “dead areas” and how to slip from one to another when the motion of the trees caused by the wind masked his own movement, how to move slowly while altering the shape and direction of each movement to prevent his adversary’s brain pattern recognition capabilities from classifying the motion as something to which the conscious mind needs to pay attention, and which parts of the body must never be oriented toward where you believe your adversary might be (face, and believe it or not, the part of the body running from the navel to the upper thighs). The Trainer showed him how to vary the speed of his movements so that he would never be crossing an enemy’s field of view at a steady rate, something that the mind automatically recognizes as the movement of a possible threat.

  He learned to use the “artificial claws” that the Vaaach gave him to climb trees and, once high aloft, to stand on large branches close to the trunk or lie flat on limbs, using shadows and leaves to break up his outlines. He also learned to make himself even harder to see by finding the right kind of pattern and density of limbs to make it almost impossible for the brain/eye combination to pick out a thin-ish Union naval Lieutenant clinging to a tree branch like some sort of gigantic but emaciated tree sloth.

  Some of the Vaaach’s teachings seemed peculiar and were things that no human or, at least, that Max himself would never have guessed or figured out without the Trainer’s instruction in a thousand years, such as the occasions when, instead of clinging to a branch or trunk trying to make himself small and difficult to see, it was necessary to extend an arm or a leg or sometimes even fingers and hold them almost endlessly at an angle that mimicked the other branches to prevent the brain from interpreting that lump in the branch as a sentient being instead of as an abnormal but natural part of the tree’s growth. Or, how concealment sometimes meant not remaining still, but moving the body along with the rustle of the underbrush or the sway of a tree and its branches in the breeze.

  And, he practiced putting this knowledge into use, while also moving silently as he learned the day before, seemingly without end, until every muscle screamed for rest and his very mind rebelled against the close attention to the detail of every movement and stance required to implement the Vaaach’s techniques. Finally, as the light was failing, the Vaaach directed Max to climb down from the tree in which he was practicing mimicking the slow waving of tree branches in the breeze and, by gesturing toward Max’s canteen, indicated that he should drink some water and rest for a moment.

  “Now we return to camp. You will need rest. Nextday will be a harder trail than was thisday, but perhaps not too hard for you. You have not done as poorly as expected.”

  No one spoke during the short walk back to camp. With a significant look at Max’s gear, the Vllgrhmrr communicated to Max that he was to feed and hydrate himself, and then go to sleep. Wanting to get to sleep as soon as possible, Max wolfed down his supper which consisted of “Thirza IV style roast chicken,” with creamed corn, New Hawaiian dinner roll, and a chocolate-chip brownie. When Max was finishing off a “dessert” ration bar, he saw the Vaaach jerk his head and then touch his left ear. Max guessed that there has been some kind of alert signal from a device in the Vaaach’s ear canal. Vllgrhmrr moved quickly but without haste to a small but powerful-looking comms module and put on a headset. There was a brief spoken exchange, none of which Max’s implant translated. He suspected that the Vaaach disabled it so that he could talk in private.

  The conversation lasted no more than half a minute. When it was over, the Trainer shut down the module, folded up the antenna grid, stowed the device in its case, and turned to Max. Max did not consider himself any judge of Vaaach body language but, if he were, he would think that the Vaaach was agitated.

  “Young Human, the river of war floods many days sooner than we thought. The current is now very swift. Pack your things. We break camp now.” Max stared at the Trainer for a few seconds, taken aback both by the Trainer’s demeanor and by the unexpected development. Max hoped for further explanation.

  And received none.

  The Vaaach simply turned toward his area of the camp and went to work packing up his gear quickly and efficiently. It took Max less than three minutes to gather what few items he had while Vllgrhmrr packed his considerably greater quantity of gear in even less time. He had assembled a small cart just large enough for his gear along with Max’s and gestured toward it, indicating that Max should put his pack on it with the Vaaach’s equipment. That done, the Vaaach quickly donned a harness, connected it to the cart, and took off through the forest pulling the cart behind him, heedless of noise and disturbing the vegetation, moving so rapidly that Max had to run to keep up.

  In a few minutes, they reached a large clearing on top of a small hill. The Trainer stood at the tree line and looked skyward. Within a minute, Max could see that something was silently blotting out the stars. As the void in the sky became rapidly larger, Max could make out the object’s shape: a long, sharp spear point, just like the immense ship that had swallowed up Max’s fighter and transported him far across the galaxy.

  The void in the sky continued to grow, and then settled to the ground. As far as Max could tell, it reflected not so much as a single photon of light. It just sat there, a twenty-five me
ter long hole in reality. The Vaaach barked in his own language. Even without the translation from his implant, there was no doubting what he said.

  “Command. Hatch open.”

  A large rectangle opened in the side of the vessel from which Max could discern a dim, red light. As soon as the hatch was fully open, an accommodation ladder deployed itself from inside the dark hull immediately beneath the opening. Small but clearly visible red lights illuminated the steps in the darkness. As soon as the lowest step touched the ground, the Vaaach bounded into the vehicle. Max followed as best he could, having difficulty negotiating the steps which, made for Vaaach legs, were just shy of a meter high. Before Max could wonder whether they were going to leave their gear behind, Vllgrhmrr touched a control pad just to the left of the inside of the hatch. A small crane deployed from behind a sliding panel in the hull, hooked onto a matching hook on top of the cart, and pulled it inside what appeared to be a hold beneath the ship’s main deck where Max now found himself.

  As soon as the cart landed inside the hold, the alien hit a few more keys on the same pad and swiftly moved to the front of the ship, dropped into what was clearly the pilot’s seat, pulled up a large combination display and control input screen on the console in front of him, and--without so much as a glance at Max--got to work entering what appeared to be a complex series of commands.

  The cabin was about three meters long and two meters wide, coming to a point in the front just in front of the pilot’s station. There were two other stations behind and on either side of the pilot. Max couldn’t read a word of the language in which the controls and displays were labeled, but there was something about the way the two stations were laid out that made Max think “weapons” when he looked at the one on the port side and “sensors” when he looked at the one to starboard. There were also eight seats, four running from fore to aft along each side of the ship. There were no consoles for these seats, merely small displays set in the arms. Max surmised that these seats were for passengers, and that the screens were merely for communications or entertainment--if the Vaaach ever sought entertainment.