Eid visibly shivered. “And what is that?”
“Run through the bait zone.”
Nasr turned, eyed the winding path she had indicated. “I am not sure if—”
“Nasr, have the Slaasriithi biomarkings ever failed to work? And you got a special dose from Unsymaajh, so you are perfectly safe. So what I want you to do is run down that path”—she took his arm, both leading him in that direction and blending the tracks she was leaving with his—“and keep running. As far and as fast as you can.” That’s probably what you’re best at, from what I’ve seen.
“But what good does—?”
“Just do it.” He looked uncertain. Time to change the incentive. “Nasr, if you do this, it’s a near-certainty that you’ll survive this battle.”
Eid’s eyes widened. He turned and raced down the path, flinching as he traversed the bait ground. Which of course, elicited no response, thanks to Unsymaajh’s marking.
Dora retraced her progress, backed up by stepping into each of the tracks she had made just before. When she drew alongside a thick patch of foliage, she took a wide sideways step off the path, ensuring that the first footprint she made in leaving her prior tracks was obscured behind a sizable frond. She moved carefully into the taller growth, checking to make sure she left no obvious trace of her exit from the main trail. Paralleling it, she crept to a position seven meters back from the bait ground. Once there, she lowered herself into a sprinter’s crouch, calmed her breathing, and listened.
She didn’t have long to wait. Macmillan, thrashing his way through the closely spaced bushes and fronds, was audible fifty meters away. At thirty he slowed, then stopped. Probably sees the clearing up ahead. Figuring out how he wants to approach it. Which prompted Dora to review what she knew of her adversary: a career soldier, tough, smart, a little past his prime, probably chosen for the legation because despite a few extra pounds, he had absolute determination. And, they had probably thought, absolute integrity. But whatever his fitness or ethical flaws might be, he was a dangerous opponent: quick reflexes, even if he wasn’t a particularly fast runner, and daunting upper body strength coupled with some kind of martial arts training. But, looking at his build, she eliminated a variety of styles of self-defense: anything that required extreme flexibility of the torso, or relied heavily on kicking, was unlikely. He was too heavily built for the first, and didn’t have the leg snap for the latter. Which, together with his exhaustion, determined her tactics.
Pandora Veriden was not accustomed to being surprised; indeed, she prided herself on not being subject to that reaction. Consequently, she was not only alarmed but annoyed when she heard a dried frond snap very nearby. Rather than turn her head, she moved her eyes in that direction.
Keith Macmillan had clearly seen her path, but had been cautious in following it; he was paralleling it four meters to the right. Which would bring him within three meters of where she was crouching. Damn it; can I take him here? In this thicket? Can’t tell. Just gotta wait and see what he does.
Macmillan, surprisingly stealthy, was unable to fully conceal his labored breathing as he approached and passed within two meters of where Dora was crouched behind a fan-shaped fern. He stopped a meter further on. Dora could see his feet under the lowest leaf covering her: he was still facing further along the trail she had made—well, the one Nasr Eid had made at her behest. Which meant he was looking at the tight foliage hemming in the bait ground.
She waited, ignored the sweat running down from her brow, her armpits. Okay, Macmillan, so you’re trying to calculate if that brush is so thick that it would obstruct a surprise attack, prevent an ambush. And you’re balancing that against your tactical training and instincts: to never take an apparently unavoidable path. But the clock is ticking, you’re exhausted, and if you don’t have my head on a stake when you meet your masters—
Macmillan slipped out of the undergrowth and back on to the trail, glancing at the scattered leaves and bent fronds that marked Nasr’s passage. Decided, he hefted his combitool and moved forward quickly, entering the bait ground.
Macmillan got three meters further along the path before a thin, shrill keening rose around him. Surprised, puzzled, he stopped, lifted the axe—
And was suddenly at the center of a cloud of what looked like flying, fanged salamanders with far too many eyes. Landing in his hair, on his florid face and arms, they began biting, darting off, flying back in for another mouthful. Macmillan swung the axe fruitlessly—
Despite the uneven ground and obtruding foliage, Dora sprinted the twelve yards separating them in just over four seconds. He clearly heard something behind him; he’d half turned when her flying kick hit him like a jackhammer, dropping him. She rolled up, backed away—and was surprised at how fast Macmillan recovered. But he was being swarmed by flying, biting salamanders, and Dora was not. A few ventured near her but, upon coming closer—particularly where she’d rubbed up against the water-strider—they shied away with an annoyed snap of their translucent wings. Macmillan feinted with the axe; she backed up a step, but did not watch his eyes, or even his elbows. Peripherally, her attention was riveted on his feet: where and when he commited to an attack with an axe would be decisively signaled by his stance.
Macmillan was sly; he shuffle-stepped. But Dora had been in far too many melees to be taken in; the arch of his first foot remained high when his toes hit the ground, a physical sign that this was not to be his last step.
He swung, missed, planted his feet as he pulled back the axe to swing again.
Gotcha.
With Macmillan’s body twisted away, the axe still cocking back for a lethal blow, Dora jumped in with a side-kick that punched directly into her opponent’s kneecap. He yowled, faltered; she let split-second instinct inform her that there was no ruse in either, and followed with the hardest spinning roundhouse she could deliver. An idiot attack, really, unless you know—know—you have the time to deliver it. At which point, it was like hitting your adversary with a sledgehammer.
Which was the result. With his knee already buckling at an unnatural angle, the kick caught Macmillan in the ribs. Two snaps—one small and reedy, the other heavier—accompanied the impact. Dora both grimaced and grinned: lost my little toe; he lost his ribs. I’ll take the trade.
Macmillan had also lost the grip on his weapon; Veriden kicked it away. When he brought his head up—eyes desperate, pleading—she gauged his probable reach, danced to the outside of his left arm and front-kicked him square in the face. He went back with a grunt, his eyes unsteady. Good, she thought, pushing away some of her sweaty hair. Now, to get permanent control of the situation—
* * *
The howl of pain with which Macmillan came back to his senses was sure to call down his employers, so Dora made her speech quickly. “So how’s it feel having a freshly broken leg, bitch?”
Macmillan’s face was a rictus of pain; his left tibia was not merely broken, but splintered. A tooth of bone peeked through the savage wound.
“So here’s what I want to know, loving father: when your leash-holders come and find their dog laid out, immovable, what do you think they’re going to do? Take you back so you can lick your wounds in their kennel?”
“Don’t care,” Macmillan groaned. “Did this. For. Katie.”
“Yeah, well, I hope it was worth it. You’ve killed a lot of good people. Well, I’ve got to get going; don’t want to be here when your owners show up and find I’ve lamed their bitch.” She turned and darted out the other side of the bait ground, his curses following her. She ran until he was completely out of sight, then doubled back and padded toward her first ambush point, but further into the woods, virtually invisible behind the canopy of a small cone-tree.
Dora only had to wait two minutes before she saw the first signs of the attackers; movement in the brush on the eastern side of the glade. Meaning they had probably not found Riordan; if they had stumbled across that first clearing, they would have seen and followed the trail th
at she and Macmillan had left. Which means they would have entered this glade from the north.
It was another minute before two clones emerged, sweeping the tree line with their weapons, then staring at the occasional winged newt-gators that landed on Macmillan, took a savage tear at his flesh, and flew off again. The Scotsman, between swatting them away and occasional groans, produced and choked down a mix of pills that looked like painkillers and the amphetamines that Riodan had been popping.
After walking the perimeter of the clearing, and detecting where Dora’s and Macmillan’s tracks had entered it, the clones waved an all-clear. Four more figures entered the open space.
Dora did not even have to think about identifying their leader. His weapon, a liquimix Jufeng, marked his status as clearly as his height and distinctive facial features: angular, with prominent cheekbones and a high forehead. Not only taller than the clones, he had the tigerlike build of a decathlete on steroids. The clones hung at his heels, alert to his commands, like a pack of hounds following a hunter.
The leader approached Macmillan, gestured for him to be pulled beyond the ready reach of his winged tormentors, looked down at the broken man.
“You are Macmillan.” It was a statement that bordered on a question as he assessed the man’s shattered leg. “You have been bested in a fight. And you have failed in your mission.”
Macmillan gasped out responses through his pain. “I performed the instructions I decrypted from the file that your people added to my palmtop, the one that was in my coldcell. I got rid of the first saboteur after he crippled the Slaasriithi ship. I sabotaged the group as best I could down here, made their leader sick—”
“Not so sick that he couldn’t mount a disappointingly effective defense. Well, let us call it a delaying action. The automated weapons platform we found: it was of Slaasriithi manufacture?”
“Yes. They brought it up about an hour before you arrived. There was no way for me to—”
“Failure is failure,” the leader decreed. “I understand what you attempted to do: cripple them, yet keep them together so we could easily locate and exterminate them.”
“Yes, after you failed to take care of them in orbit and the legation split up. After that, I had no way of getting the job done myself. There were too many survivors planet-side, and Riordan and Veriden were both dangerous enough on their own. No opportunity arose where I could be sure of killing one without the other being aware that I had done it. And then I would have had to kill the second one and finish off all the other survivors. So I did the one thing that ensured they would all be destroyed: I remained with them. So I could be your beacon.”
“You mean, so we could do your job. Typical low breed.”
“No, damn it. Think it through: you had the necessary force to do the entire job with no chance of failure. I was one against many and not well-armed. Besides, the longer we were here, the more the wildlife seemed to—well, adopt Riordan. I think he may be—”
“Silence. I am even less interested in your hypotheses than I am in your excuses. I agree that your concept was reasonable, but it did not succeed. There is nothing more to be said. The agreement you made was a favor for a favor. You have failed to deliver your favor to us. We shall now fail to deliver ours to you.”
Despite the pain, Macmillan heard the floating, generalized tone in the leader’s voice. “You already have delivered my favor.”
“Have we? Our factotum was overly generous, or careless, then. We shall correct this.”
Macmillan stared at the tall man. “You have no idea what deal I made, do you?” When the man’s decisiveness faltered for one crucial second, Macmillan jumped in.: “You’re not even connected to the people who hired me.”
The leader shrugged. “You are relatively insightful, for an Aboriginal. No, I ‘stole’ you from the factors who originally suborned you. But I assure you that the favor was not complete. That is not how we operate.”
“You’re lying. I saw it myself. My daughter was cured of cancer.” The certainty of Macmillan’s words were undercut by the tense, desperate uncertainty in his voice.
“Oh, I’m sure she was cured—for a while. But upon returning to Earth, you would have discovered that without further service to us, she would have sickened again. And so we would own you permanently. This is our way. It has been so for many thous—for a very long time.”
Macmillan tried to lunge at the leader from his hopeless position on the ground; he didn’t even reach the toe of the other man’s boot. “You bastards. You right fucking bastards.”
The leader shouldered his weapon, waved a clone over to him. “For us family is strength. For you, it is a weakness. We recognize family—indeed, all affiliation—for what it is: an enabler of dominion, a path to power. But you confuse family bonds with love, sacrifice, and desperate tears of hope and joy.” He held out his hand for the waiting clone’s Pindad assault rifle, leveled it at Macmillan. “And so you are, inevitably, the architects of your own misguided miseries.”
Macmillan could not physically reach the leader, but now, his spittle did. “I should have killed the sniveling bastard who offered me the deal a year ago.”
The leader stared at the saliva on the leg of his duty suit. “Yes, I suppose you should have.” With strange—inhuman—speed, he raised the Pindad and fired once. A small hole appeared in Macmillan’s forehead; the big man slumped over.
Despite herself, despite the many horrors she had seen in many parts of the world, Dora sucked in her breath sharply at the calm barbarity of the scene just concluded.
The leader paused, chin raising—then turned in her general direction.
She was too well-trained to flinch back; if any part of her was exposed, he was more likely to detect movement than discriminate her shape from the surrounding foliage. She remained frozen, felt sweat run down her back.
The leader turned back to the clones, gave hasty orders: they arranged themselves into an open formation and headed toward the trail that would lead them back to the first clearing.
Back to Caine.
Chapter Fifty
Southern extents of the Third Silver Tower and Far orbit; BD +02 4076 Two (“Disparity”)
Caine Riordan awakened with a gasp, struggling for air, couldn’t get his lungs to expand enough. Frantic, he grasped about, hitting the two fallen logs on either side with his elbows. And then the sun went away. Alarmed, he looked up.
The water-strider that had entered the glade a minute—an hour?—ago was standing over him, crouching down. Having become accustomed to the creatures during the days of travel down the river, Riordan felt a strange sensation of relief, almost as if a friendly dog had trotted over to check on his well being. Strange, the bonds we forge—
Then the sun was back; the water-strider had risen abruptly, rotated towards the west side of the clearing. Something was coming from that direction; Caine could hear it too, albeit faintly.
The water-strider spread its legs in a stance Riordan had observed during their occasional dominance tests; a kind of four-legged sumo come-and-get-me posture. Oh Christ, no, you poor beast; you can’t hope to—
The water-strider turned slightly. The two full eyes on its right side, both the one above and below the jaw, gazed steadily at him. The creature emitted a low, mewling grunt—a sound of affection between water-striders—and backed up a step, its rear legs just clearing the far side of the two thick logs between which Riordan was coffined. Then it turned to face the west again.
A babble of voices speaking in a mishmash of English and Javanese-accented behasa grew, then quickly stilled as they entered the clearing. Caine rose up high on one elbow, a broad leaf concealing everything but his eye.
Five clones and one other person had entered the treeless expanse—and the hair on the nape of Riordan’s neck rose: that other person was not a human. Not a terrestrial human; that was a Ktor. The angular features, the build, the strange, almost archaic habits of speech, and above all, the aura of im
perious disdain for his soldiers, made his identity as clear as if he had been wearing a sign on his back. But what the hell are you doing out here, with Optigene clones—?
The six spread out into a broad arc, the leader at the center, keeping slightly greater distance from the water-strider. Overhead, Caine could not only smell, but almost feel, a strong release of musk from the creature. Was it fear? Aggression? Dismay?
It peaked when the humans approached to twenty meters. The water-strider swiftly raised its long, graceful back-sails. Suddenly limned in orange bioluminescence, they shuddered as the creature released a long ululating hoot, both from its spine-paralleling respiratory ducts and its steam-shovel mouth. The humans stopped and raised their weapons.
God, no—
The water-strider stamped one wide foot, made to move forward—
The clones unleashed a stream of automatic fire into the body of the creature, which ducked, writhed, bucked—but neither charged nor fled. Nor did it fall; the Pindads, while effective weapons, were not elephant guns. The wounds they were inflicting would no doubt eventually prove mortal, but “eventually” might mean hours or even days.
The Ktor stepped forward, adjusted the Jufeng dustmix battle rifle, raised it, fired a single shot. Riordan knew from the sound what settings he’d chosen: semiautomatic fire, maximum propellant per shot, and expanding warheads.
The water-strider shuddered under the extraordinary impact of that round, which did approximate that of an elephant gun. As the stricken creature tried to right itself, the Ktor fired the Jufeng as steadily as the relentless pulse of a metronome.
After the fifth shot, the swaying water-strider exhaled heavily; its knees unlocked, bent, and the huge body started falling—directly toward Caine.
Who thought, better this way than at the hands of that bastard Ktor. The falling trunk of the water-strider rushed down, growing along with blackness of its widening shadow.
Which swallowed him.
* * *
Jesel checked his weapon after waving two of the clones over to inspect the body of the ungainly beast he had just slain. Perhaps a tooth would make a good trophy? No; there wasn’t the time—
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