“The guy defending the monsters gets killed by one. That’d turn even the most level- headed,” Bernie says, and under his disgust I hear disappointment. “You should know me better. I’ve never said word one.”
Ned looks away but his voice lashes out. “You expect me to believe you weren’t just waiting for the best time?” He sneers.
The daughters circle again, closing on Ned. All but Catherine shift back to full wolf, growls rumbling. I gape when Dean pushes into the circle, standing in front of Ned. “Whoa, you’re just going to kill him?” Dean says.
Catherine’s cold eyes settle on Dean and he quails. Without hesitation I wade in and position myself in front of him. Still, protection doesn’t mean agreement. “He tried to kill their dad, Dean.”
Without warning, one of the wolves darts forward, catching Ned’s pant leg, sinking teeth through denim into the boot and leg beneath. Ned’s howl of pain and Bernie’s shout of “Jennifer!” doesn’t cover the sound of denim and leather rending. A second wolf flings herself bodily at Ned, knocking him flat.
“Heather, don’t!”
Despite agreeing, I don’t want to be this close. Short women still make for big wolves. Grabbing Dean’s arm I haul him out of the circle, stumbling when he digs in.
“No! Think! What happens when he disappears after these attacks, after yeti were mentioned?”
The wolves hesitate.
“He’s right,” Ned snarls, holding his torn boot together over his bleeding leg. “If I disappear, you just bring it on.” He shoots Bernie a dark look, but I can see it’s nervous bravado.
The wolves look at each other. “Have him arrested for dealing dragons?” one snarls. I recognize Karen in the cool logic.
“No arresting, no killing,” Bernie limps forward, grips Ned’s arm, yanks him to his feet. “Me and the yeti are going to chat with Ned.” The yeti drifts forward at Bernie’s words, reaches out, catches the back of Ned’s neck in one large hand, and drags him across the yard to the barn.
“Dad,” Karen starts, but Bernie shakes his head.
“No. I promised your mother.”
“She didn’t mean—”
“It doesn’t matter. I promised. No more.” He follows the yeti, leaving his daughters simmering with suppressed violence. Dean keeps me between him and them.
I stare at the dragon, wondering what the hell to do with it. Wondering if I’m the only one who noticed, through Ned’s torn and sagging boot, the flash of cloven hoof.
Grinning at the armload of yeti- hair, I offer an unconvincing protest. “They don’t have to—”
“They want to. You got rid of a dragon.” Bernie’s eyes twinkle. “Let them. It’s important to them.”
“They realize as soon as I start spinning this, there’ll be an explosion of interest.”
“They trust you to guard your business secrets.”
I don’t need to be told what that means from a species as paranoid as the yeti. I can’t wait to start spinning, the silky feel against my hands intoxicating. Weaving the net was sublime. “I didn’t do—” I begin.
“You did good.” His proud smile is even better than the yeti-hair. “Knew you were special.”
Embarrassed, I change subjects. “So. Ned.” Bernie hasn’t brought it up but I have to ask.
He digs out his pipe, staring at it. “Satyr,” he finally says. “Half, anyway. Boy’s all kinds of screwed up.” He squints past my left shoulder. “You know . . . not many human/satyr pregnancies go to term,” he says carefully. “Usually the woman’s . . . too traumatized. Understandable. Ned’s mother—” He stops, unable to continue, tears collecting at the corners of his eyes.
I suck in a breath as the last pieces fall into place. The product of an Uncanny sexual assault would certainly have some identity issues. He must hate that side of himself. I can’t imagine how it happened that Ned’s mother chose to carry to term. My heart aches for the unknown woman. “You’re the only one who knows?”
“Was. Now there’s two of us.”
“Great.” Not a comforting thought. “Think he intended to kill you?”
“Yep.” Bernie shrugs. “Odd man. Not bad, really.”
“Bernie. He tried to kill you. That’s bad. Really.”
“Desperate people. He wanted his monster war. Probably thought he could push secession through, too, if it looked like dragons were invading. The yeti was just a happy accident.”
I remember the yeti dragging Ned like a broken doll. I doubt he considers that accident so happy anymore. “You keep your daughters from killing him because he’s a desperate, unhappy man, or because he’s Uncanny?”
Bernie chews on his pipe stem. “Don’t know.”
“You’re an odd man yourself, Bernie.”
“You’ll get odd too, spending time with yeti.”
“Think I’ll be spending time with them?”
“Let’s put it this way. You know how they call me the Vermont Shaman. None of my girls can inherit the position. Needs a human.”
I blink. “Are you saying—”
He puts a hand on my shoulder and meets my eyes, smiling. “I’m saying I’m damn glad you moved to Vermont.”
INVASIVE SPECIES
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
My name is Random Delaney. I’m a vermin hunter, but I’m not allowed to use real bullets. Bullets and lasers are a little hard on spaceships, and that’s where I generally ply my trade. I have a lot of other cool ordnance, though, some of which I don’t understand. I was trained by a Skikka, and you know how those guys are, all about the mystery, you can never see behind the veil, yada yada ping pong. Some of the stuff I use, he didn’t even tell me what it was called, which makes it hard to reorder.
There’s a bunch of different ways to squik a ship. The best and easiest is the Total Body Squik. If the ship is between trips, you can do the job outside of atmosphere. If everyone’s cleared out and took all their junk with them, you gas the whole thing, sonic it to kill all the gas-resistant pests, wander through in your suit and shoot anything else that moves, then open up the doors and vent the atmosphere and everything else not tied down. After that, you scrub every surface with all-purpose pest-end and blast every crack and nook and do it all again.
This is my favorite method, because it’s sweet and simple and you get to totally explore a ship—systemworks and living areas and everything in between—at your leisure. I love alone time when I can snoop. People think they’ve taken everything, but there are stashes that maybe they forgot about, under panels, alongside cables, in conduits, tucked into workings and waste space. I find things. Sometimes not even solid things, but records and memories. It’s all treasure. I can swoof the solids out of the ship with a little beacon attached and pick them up later, if it’s worth the trip. The memories I store with my own.
Second easiest is to squik the ship while it’s in port, though atmosphere complicates things. So many things can survive in atmosphere, we constantly need new bug-stompers. And you have to watch the pesticides harder after you’re done with them.
Almost nobody wants the Total Body Squik. Often people discover they have pests while they can’t stop what they’re doing long enough for a decent all- wash. Most of my jobs involve pest hunting while people are in residence. Cuts down on the poison options a bunch, and requires more finesse, not one of my strong suits.
The Evander job looked simple. An in-system run, like most of my jobs—I’m planet-based for now, and maybe forever. I’d need hella big jobs to be able to afford my own runabout so I could go to where the work is, and a fortune would have to fall out of the sky before I could afford to system jump. While I’m waiting for that ship to come in, I get enough routine work to keep the four-year-old daughter in nutriblocks.
The only thing different about Evander was it was a luxury run. Big old cruise liner, ferrying rich people around the solar system while they gorge on great food and enjoy the zero-G pleasure rooms, low-G gyms, and all kinds of other entertain
ments. Never traveled on one of those before; most of my clients were small-time freighters and haulers and the cold- sleep ships that took workers from Terra to Luna, Mars, Titan, other local colonies, and the asteroid belt.
Evander’s chief engineer thought the ship had metal mites, so I geared up for that, but I also packed the rest of my armaments, and the most important equipment I own, my suit. Armor, personal climate, propulsion unit, weapons nest, yeah, I feel safer in my suit than anywhere else, and it’s got a collapsible carry compartment for Fern, the kid, too.
Usually, when I take away-from-home-port jobs, my side-gran and her partners look after Fern for me, but this time the job came when Gran was on a business retreat. Fern and I live in a room in Gran’s enclave. We live in SubTerra, but we have a pipe up to sunlight, and get a spot on the floor most days. Fern’s got mirror blocks, and she sets them up sometimes to throw light all over our room.
I didn’t have babysitting backup this time, and metal mites didn’t sound Fern-endangering, so I loaded the kid on calmers and brought her with me. Goes to show you should never let clients diagnose, and also that I should never have been a mother, but I knew that before Fern was born.
The Skikka had taught me pretty good how to collapse everything into a manageable parcel. They’re always surprised at the shuttle port how much mass and how little room my luggage takes. My Skikka taught me how to hide things from scans, too. They didn’t stop me at customs.
My ticket didn’t authorize Fern, so I had to pay half for a second one. Maybe I’d get lucky on Evander and find pests plus loot.
Fern and me made it up to the orbital station without too much trouble (I put more calmers on her snack stix). I collected my luggage and went to the Evander’s dock.
“My stars,” said the doorman when he opened the servants’ entrance of Evander to my buzz. “You’re Delaney’s Pest Control?”
“Yeah. This is my dwarf assistant.”
I showed him my I.D., and he did scans to verify it, then scanned Fern into the system and took a copy of her I.D. bracelet. He frowned. “We didn’t budget supplies for two of you.”
“Hey, we can eat leftovers. You get those, right?”
“We recycle them.”
“She doesn’t eat much,” I said. “Is there day care on the ship?”
He allowed that there was.
“Come on, Stall-boy, I can’t just dump her in the station. She’s all the way up here, she might as well come.”
He muttered some more about highly irregular and caved, handing me the crew badge that would let me into areas passengers couldn’t go.
Our cabin was on the inside, against the core, along with all the other staff and servicepeople cabins. The passengers’ cabins were all against the outer walls of the ship; some had TruGlas portholes so the inhabitants could look out and see the actual starfield. The less expensive ones had screens they could program to show what was going on outside, or anything else they liked. (I’d read the brochure.) Even the service cabins had little screens flanked by curtains so we could pretend we weren’t locked up in small windowless compartments like machines.
I unfolded Fern’s care cage and set her in it with food and water dispensers and the omnigame. She dialed right past all the interactivities, piggybacked the ship’s net, and started snooping around. I guess she’s seen me do that too many times.
“You okay?” I said.
She frowned at the omnigame and waved a hand at me, like she couldn’t be bothered. She’s probably seen me do that too many times, too.
I had researched the ship’s layout before I left Terra. I geared up, including my suit, in case explorations took me to the outer hull or some of the non-atmosphere parts of the inner workings, though I kept the helmet retracted until needed. I headed down to report for duty.
A lot of things were happening in the engine room. The chief engineer was a human woman named Skeeter Johanson. She had hired me over a comm line; we hadn’t met, but she had checked my references. “Delaney. Did I just see you come out of one of the passenger lifts?” was the first thing she said to me, and, “What’s with the outerwear? Are you trying to alarm our guests?” was the second. She tapped the “Delaney Pest Control” logo on my chest, her face twisted into a huge frown.
“Uh,” I said, “Yes, I didn’t know there was a different lift for crew, and no, I’m not trying to scare anyone. Just want to do my job.”
“You need a suit to deal with metal mites? Never mind, we’re about to cast off. Get out of my engine room and back to your cabin, and take the crew lift this time. Someone will call you when we need you.”
“The crew lift is—?”
She turned her back to me. “Smik! Show this ground-hog where the crew lift is!”
One of the people rushing around checking telltales and doing engineering stuff broke off and dashed up to me. He had four arms and blue skin, an alien type I couldn’t place. I thought we only had contact with Skikka and two other alien races, but I’m not always up on the news. He had kind of a lump for a head, with eye spots all the way around it. “Come,” he said in a mushy voice—his mouth was in the center of his naked blue chest—and he trundled out of the engine room, using his lower two arms along with his two legs to locomote. He was hard to keep up with.
He rolled right through a hidden door that led to narrow gray halls toward the ship’s core. What do you know, there were three lifts back there. He tapped a button to summon one and didn’t wait around to see me get into it.
I played with Fern in the cabin until we were underway, and then Johanson called down and said she was sending someone to take me to the damage sites for inspection, and would I please take off my damned suit?
Since she put it in the form of a question, I decided not to, but I didn’t tell her that. Someone else was going to show me around. Maybe Johanson would never find out.
I hung my sampling case off my shoulder and slapped a cloth patch across my Delaney Pest Control logo. Sometimes you want to advertise, and sometimes anonymity is better. The door guard pinged, and I opened it to discover Smik. He looked past me at Fern. “You brought your young?” he asked.
Fern stared at him and screamed. The calmers had worn off, for sure. “That’s not the way I raised you, young lady. You be quiet now,” I said. It didn’t work. She hid her head against the hardshell over my chest and screamed and sobbed.
“Mr. Smik, could you wait outside? I’ll be with you in a minute,” I said.
“She is perfect,” he said.
I couldn’t disagree with him more.
The door snicked shut and Fern stopped crying. She pushed away from me and stared into my eyes.
“I have to go to work now,” I told her, “and you have to do your job, which is being a little kid. In the care cage.”
“Okay,” she said. I locked her in and she rolled around on the floor of the cage, smashing into the bars, which were cushioned and gave. “You should get a cage, Mama,” she said.
“I’ve got one that walks.” I tapped my chest and went out to Smik.
“We must go to passenger territory,” Smik said. He had more liquid in his mouth than humans usually did. Some of his words bubbled. “The suit is disturbing.”
“We can just tell ’em it’s a costume for the ball tomorrow night.” Fern had accessed the ship schedule of passenger activities, which had amused both of us. Now I knew what kinds of things rich folks did for fun. “How do they react to you?” I asked Smik.
Smik shook his head lump, and parts of his anatomy between his eyes and mouth swelled up a little. I sure didn’t know how to read that.
We took a crew elevator up to the promenade deck. Smik stopped at a storage space and took out a pale robe, which he dropped over himself. It had a maintenance crew patch on the front. It covered the extra arms, and the high collar concealed the fact that he had no neck. The ring of eyes and the smooth blue surface of his headbump were quite odd- looking. He pulled something else out of storage
and dropped it on his headbump, and I shuddered. He’d just put what looked like a human head on top of his, complete with short, dark hair. He tapped the collar of the robe, and the new head adhered to it.
“How can you see?” I asked.
“Eye holes,” he mushed. The words came from his chest. All right, nobody wanted him talking to the passengers. The upside was that his blue hands looked like gloves, if you didn’t look too close and realize his fingers were thin and stick- like and there were a lot of them, kind of clustered.
“Lead on,” said I, and followed this spooky-looking dude out into the sacred passenger space.
The decor was like, so two hundred years ago. Furniture was pointy and speckled with spider-like stars, a theme that echoed in the carpet and the light fixtures. The deck was a doughnut shape around the central core of the ship, which had function rooms, like kitchens and laundry, circling the drive shaft.
TruGlas ringed the entire deck so you could look out at the stars, and very occasionally other traffic. Some parts of the glass had magnification insets. A whole section was polarized to block sunlight, and Terra was a huge floating ball, with an edge of Luna beyond.
Where we came out, a lounge bled into a restaurant that bled into a dancefloor, with a couple stages around the edges, and three bars. One of the bars was dark. The other two looked open and ready to get you drunk.
A cluster of passenger lifts opened onto a greeting area between the restaurant and the lounge. A uniformed crew member stood behind a podium there, smiling at passengers as they got off the lift, and pointing out places they could go. At each area, staff members waited to serve. Other than them, it was pretty quiet.
“Come,” Smik said, and toddled off. With the robe on, he couldn’t use his lower arms to walk, so he looked pretty wobbly.
I followed him over to the dark bar.
Smik lifted a plastic cover and showed me how the bar’s pewter-colored edge had deteriorated: it looked like something had chewed off pieces. No metal mites did that.
A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters Page 25