“It’s alive. What is it?”
“Open it and see,” her father said.
“Or, open it and don’t see,” her mother added. Inside the wrapping was a carry cage. Zenn peered in through the wire door and saw… nothing.
“It’s empty!” she said, on the verge of being severely disappointed. If this was a parental joke, it was a very poor one.
“Oh? Is it?” Her mother said. “Open the door.”
Zenn unlatched the cage door, and watched. Still nothing. Then, a section of the floor at her feet began to go strangely out of focus. A small, oblong area began to shimmer with colors – violet and cream. And the next second, an animal appeared. The little marsupial was about the size of a housecat, with pale, violet tiger stripes set against thick, cream-colored body fur. The head was round, with a double spray of long cheek whiskers on a fox-like muzzle, topped by comically large, lynx-tufted ears. It waved its long, ringed tail and looked up at Zenn with two large, golden-amber eyes.
“A rikkaset!” Zenn squealed so loudly it made the animal fluff up its fur… and promptly disappear again.
“You scared it, honey,” her mother said. “Just give her a moment or two, and she’ll unblend again.”
“Come back.” Zenn tried to speak to the invisible animal calmly. “Please.”
“I’m afraid she can’t hear you, Zenn,” her mother said. “She’s deaf. Has been since birth. The original owners didn’t think they wanted a deaf rikkaset. So they traded her to the ferry captain who traded her to us.”
Zenn waited. A few seconds later, the animal reappeared. She bent and picked it up, holding it close, but not so close she’d scare it again.
“I love it!” she said, her words muffled because she’d buried her face in the creature’s soft, delicately scented fur. “I mean, her. I love her.”
She looked up to see her mother and father stealing a quick kiss… and sharing a look between them that, it seemed to Zenn, almost generated a sort of physical warmth out into the room.
“What’s her name?” Zenn asked.
“The captain didn’t say,” her mother said.
“Guess that means it’s up to you,” her father said.
“Katie,” she said then. “Her name will be Katie.” She held the rikkaset up in front of her. “Is that alright with you, Katie?”
The big, golden eyes blinked at her.
“Oh, sorry, you can’t hear me.” She turned to her parents again. “She’s beautiful. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“Well, she was your father’s idea,” her mother said, beaming at him. “He was the one who convinced me you were old enough to take care of a young rikkaset.”
“Me?” her father protested. “Mai Scarlett, you wanted that animal from the moment you set eyes on her.” He turned to Zenn. “She really got it for herself as much as you, you know,” he said. “She has no willpower when it comes to any infant creature of whatever variety. She’s totally helpless.”
“Helpless? Oh yeah?” her mother said, pretending outrage and giving her father a swat across the shoulder. He retaliated by grabbing her around the waist and tickling her until they both collapsed backwards onto the couch, where they laughed and tussled briefly like a pair of teenagers.
“Well, in any case,” her father said, catching his breath, “it’s a fact that your mother’s the one who bartered with the ferry captain for her.” He hugged Mai to him again. “She’s a woman of many talents, your mom. We’re a lucky family to have her.” And he kissed his wife again. Longer this time, despite the fact that there were three other people right there in the room watching them.
Growing up, Zenn had always shared her father’s sentiment. That to have someone like her mother, someone you could love so much, and who loved you back that way, was a remarkable and fortunate thing. At least, she’d felt that way until her mother was suddenly no longer with them. At that point, it became clear that to love someone that much, to love that selflessly… that was a frightening thing. So much for luck.
Later, after her mother was gone, when she’d insisted she was old enough to start her exovet novitiate, her father had argued with her. Just like Otha, he said she was too young, it was too dangerous. But he’d already accepted the position with the colonial administration out on Enchara. They’d argued some more. And, just like Otha, she convinced him in the end, made him see what the training meant to her. The truth was, she didn’t really think he’d actually do it. But he did. He left. And she had stayed to begin her novice year; stayed and watched him board a ferry that disappeared into the Martian sky as she stood and watched him go. She’d actually managed not to cry until the ship was out of sight.
Sometimes, she thought she understood what made him go, that he had no choice, that he couldn’t survive both his own pain and hers. At other times, she simply lost sight of this sort of understanding; as if a heavy fog had rolled in, obscuring the landmarks that had guided her at first. Then, she failed completely to see how he could have gone. And during those times, the hurt and anger would flow in with the fog that clouded her thoughts. It was then she reminded herself of the Rule: no attachments, no friends, no letting anyone in where they could maneuver close enough to deliver the blow they were certain, at some point, to deliver.
Pretending not to notice the awkward silence that had grown between her and Otha, Zenn stooped to loop a harness strap over her shoulder and gave her uncle a look.
“Ah, right,” Otha said, his cheerfulness now ever so slightly strained. “That hound’s eye won’t mend itself, will it? Let’s see if he’s forgiven you.”
He helped Zenn heft the tank rig up onto her back. She winced silently as she pulled the straps tight on her bruised flesh and followed her uncle out into the sunlight. As they came to the holding pen, though, he stopped so abruptly she almost ran into him.
“Nine Hells!” her uncle swore, whirled around and ran heavily past Zenn, back toward the infirmary. “I’ll get the tranq bow,” he shouted as he went by. “Tell Hamish. Now, girl.”
Zenn had no idea what he was so agitated about – until she turned and saw the hound’s holding pen. It was vacant. That was bad enough. What she saw next was worse. Fifty yards beyond the pen, disappearing over the top of the compound’s east wall, was the chocolate-brown tip of the whalehound’s tail.
THREE
Zenn found Brother Hamish by himself in the garden, working manure into the soil. She was so out of breath she could hardly speak.
“Whalehound…” she croaked, bent over, hands on knees, her aching leg forgotten. “Got loose! Went over the wall!”
Hamish pivoted to face her, each of his four upper arm-claws clutching a hoe or rake.
“What are my instructions?” he said, antennae twitching forward from the top of his head like a pair of black ostrich plumes.
Instructions? He wants instructions?
“Um… help catch him!”
Hamish put down the tools he held before scuttling past her toward the garden gate. Despite his great bulk and solid appearance, the coleopt could move with startling speed for what was essentially an eight-foot-tall, thousand-pound beetle.
“In which direction did the mammal-hound go?”
“East. He was going east.” Zenn said, following him.
“How long ago?”
“Just now.”
“Is anyone damaged?”
“No, no one hurt. He just… got out of the pen.” She had turned the energy fence back on before she and Otha left the hound’s pen. Hadn’t she?
“And the director-abbot?”
“Went for the tranq bow.”
The seda-field generator could only sedate animals at close quarters. To stop the whalehound, they would need to get a full dose of powerful, fast-acting liquid tranquilizer into his blood system.
Once they’d cleared the garden gate and were well out in the courtyard, Hamish stopped. Zenn saw him lower his body, flexing his two big, hind legs and turning his great he
ad to look down at his back. In the sunlight, his compound eyes blazed like mirror-balls.
“You should stand away, novice Zenn,” he told her as he shucked off his metal vest and dropped it to the ground. “I’m out of practice. In honesty, I’m unsure if I can perform this act. Or if I should.”
Zenn backed off a few steps. She watched as the chitin covering of Hamish’s back split itself down the middle. She knew coleopts had wings tucked beneath their exoskeleton shell. But in the several weeks he’d been at cloister, she’d never seen Hamish’s wings, let alone seen them put to use. Hamish stopped then, seeming suddenly unsure of himself.
“The Queen Spawn-Mother forbids me doing this thing here on this world, with the exception of it being a dire emergency. I must have approval.” He turned his mirror-ball eyes to her. “Would you classify this event as dire and urgent?”
“Yes,” Zenn practically shouted at him. “It’s urgent.”
“And I herewith have your approval?”
“Yes.”
“You are my witness?”
“Yes. Yes. Go.” She thrust both arms into the air.
“Very well…”
The two shiny, blue-black shell pieces covering his back pulled apart and moved up and out of the way, exposing the wings hidden underneath. With a crackling, dry-paper sound, the wings unfolded. They were a translucent, robin’s-egg blue, veined like a dragonfly’s, and extended at least ten feet on either side of his body. Bringing his four upper arms in against his thorax, and rotating his two antennae to lie flat against his broad back, Hamish squatted low and set his wings to beating, slowly, then faster, then too fast to see. The vibration created a loud, low buzz, and the airflow raised a cloud of dust from the courtyard. Then, with a single push from the hind legs, he was airborne. He hovered uncertainly for a second, dropped almost to the ground, then lifted into the air, slewed left, right, seemed to gain more control and rose five feet, ten feet, twenty. Hamish was flying. The sight was almost enough to make Zenn forget why.
Suspended beneath the blurring wings, his half-ton body now tilted through the air toward the east wall. Somehow, his straw hat remained on his head despite the wind storm his wings raised around him. Running hard, Zenn followed until she’d cleared the side of the infirmary. She reached the main gate in time to see Otha pull into sight on the Yakk. The little four-wheel-drive vehicle bounced to a stop just inside the two heavy, metal doors of the now-open gate.
“Close the gate behind me,” he shouted to her over the engine’s noise, then drove the Yakk out onto the dirt road that ran close by the cloister wall. Zenn started to push the doors shut.
“No. Out here. Get in,” he shouted, pointing to the small, railed platform on the back of the Yakk. Momentarily confused, Zenn realized Otha wanted her to go with him. She stepped through the gate, pulled the doors shut behind her and made sure they locked into place.
When she’d climbed into the back of the vehicle, Otha twisted the hand-throttle. With a throaty roar, they were accelerating down the road, heading east. East… it dawned on Zenn with a sick, sinking feeling in her stomach. Toward town, toward people. What if the hound made it that far? He wasn’t sedated now. He was awake. Excited. What would he do if the towners attacked him? She gripped the railing as the Yakk careened ahead and tried not to think of an eighty-foot carnivore loose on the streets of Arsia.
Otha swerved the Yakk off the road, and they careened across a short stretch of bumpy terrain and into the dry streambed that ran down the center of the valley. The tracks of the hound were clearly visible in the sand, and the dust raised by his passage still drifted in the air.
“Here,” Otha shouted, pulling the tranq bow out of its holder on the side of the Yakk and handing it back over his shoulder. Zenn took the crossbow from him.
He can’t be serious.
“Otha.” She hefted the bow doubtfully. “I’m not sure I can.”
“He’s your patient, novice,” he growled at her.
He is serious.
“I’ve never shot a moving animal,” she yelled.
“Would you rather drive?” It wasn’t a real question. “I didn’t think so. Two-hundred cc’s of avosyn, already loaded, in the bag.”
There was no point in arguing. And no time. She opened Otha’s duffle bag field kit on the platform next to her and found the foot-long, feather-fletched metal shaft of the tranquilizer dart. She slotted it into the barrel of the bow and, after a brief struggle, managed to pull the bowstring back far enough to engage the trigger.
“There he is!” Otha shouted. A hundred yards in front of them, the elongated shape of the galloping hound was just visible through a wall of billowing dust. They couldn’t be more than a half-mile from the outskirts of town.
This is insane. What if I miss?
Otha gunned the engine and they shot forward. Flying sand stung her face, and the Yakk fishtailed back and forth alarmingly as they tried to gain on the fleeing animal.
“Look!” Zenn pointed into the air above them. “It’s Hamish.”
The coleopt arced high over the whalehound, then dropped down to fly alongside the Yakk.
“I could attempt to reduce the animal’s speed,” his Transvox voice shouted at them. “Do I have your approval for this act?”
“Sexton! Slow that damn beast down!” Otha yelled.
“I will accept that as approval.”
The coleopt banked hard left and lifted up and away from them, then began flying erratically to and fro in front of the hound, all four upper arms thrashing the air. The hound’s pace slackened, his attention drawn to the giant insect fluttering back and forth above his head.
“Now’s your chance,” Otha called back. They were close enough for Zenn to hear the animal’s rapid, rhythmic breathing as he bounded along. “You’ll only get one shot. Aim for the superficial gluteal, just above the femur.”
Half-remembered anatomy charts ran though her mind as Zenn shouldered the stock of the bow and tried to sight down the length of the bouncing weapon. Her target, the hound’s haunch, was literally big as a house. But at this speed, over this terrain? It would be sheer luck if she hit anything at all.
“Now, Zenn!” Otha shouted. She took a breath, held it in like he’d taught her, squinted against the flying sand and pulled the trigger. The dart leapt away, vanishing into the dusty air. A snort of surprise came from the hound, and he bent back to bite at his flank, the massive body dropping hard into the sand and skidding sideways, blocking the streambed and churning up a huge cloudbank of dust and sand. Otha turned the Yakk sharply, the force throwing Zenn to one side. She dropped the bow, grabbed hold of the side railing and held on with both hands.
By the time they’d come to a halt and hopped out of the Yakk, Hamish had landed in front of the whalehound. The tranquilizer had already taken effect, and the animal was stretched out flat on the ground, its sides heaving like a giant blacksmith’s bellows, a foot or two of pink tongue protruding over the top of a picket-fence-sized row of teeth.
“Excellent bow-shooting accuracy, novice Zenn,” Hamish said, raising one arm to point at the hound’s back end. “The mammal-hound is sleeping, safe and ship-shape.” The tranq dart hung from the center of the hound’s haunch. To Zenn’s amazement, she’d hit the muscle more or less where she’d intended.
“Here,” Otha said, handing her a plastic squeeze-tube from his duffle. “Get some of this into his eyes, keep them lubricated.”
No praise from Otha. Standard behavior. Zenn went to the hound’s head and, reaching up as high as she could, applied the solution to one eye, then went to the hound’s other side and did that eye.
“Good job distracting him when you did, Hamish,” Otha said. “We’re almost into town. If he’d got up out of this gully, we could’ve had a real disaster on our hands.”
“You got that right.” The voice came from behind them.
They all turned to see Ren Jakstra, Arsia Valley constable, standing on a slight rise in the river
bank. On the road behind him squatted his tan-and-black half-track truck.
“Ren,” Otha said, shading his eyes to look up at him. “You got here quick.”
“In the area. Saw the dust.” He whipped the broad-brimmed hat from his head, whacked it against his leg to clean it off. The constable was short, compactly built, with close-cropped brown hair and a thick bird’s-nest of a mustache that he had a habit of sucking on. He didn’t wear a uniform; the town didn’t see the point of that kind of luxury. An antique, bullet-firing revolver hung in a tooled leather holster from his hip. This, Zenn had heard him say, was all the uniform he needed.
“So, Scarlett,” he said, glaring at Otha and gesturing at the hound. “You wanna tell me what the Nine Hells this thing is doing here?”
“Just taking our whalehound for a little stroll, Ren,” Otha said, attempting some dry humor to diffuse what Zenn knew was not a humorous situation.
“Yeah, that’s funny,” Ren said, smiling a mock smile. “Might not be so funny if people got hurt though, huh? Might be more along the lines of serious trouble, wouldn’t it?”
“Ren, I understand your concern,” Otha said. “But this is the first time this sort of thing has happened. Nobody got hurt. And it won’t happen again.” Otha gave Zenn a quick, baleful glance.
“Damn straight it won’t,” Ren said. “You know how things are in town.” He paused to make sure Otha knew what he was getting at. “People are feeling the pinch. They’re looking for someone to take it out on. Well, this,” he jutted his chin at the hound. “This could set the whole council against you. You don’t want that right now.”
“Like I said, Ren, won’t happen again.”
“Yeah, but it happened this time.” Ren stuck his hands in his pockets and came down off the bank. “People in Arsia are getting by on potatoes and porridge. Maybe a little goat stew now and then. It’s makin’ em prickly. And they’re already less than cheerful about living next to you and your creatures. They talk about the crops you dump into feeding that bunch of things you keep out there and, truth be told, it’s starting to make folks a little… resentful.”
Zenn Scarlett Page 4