Darkness hovered in the air ahead of her, as the rut suddenly dipped down. Rhianni felt dizzy, and wondered if the darkness were all illusion. Maybe some foul gas in the air, playing havoc with her senses?
When she reached out to lean against the side of the rut, the ground scorched her fingertips. She jerked her hand away. Her skin stung. She wiped her fingers on her pants. The feeling didn't go away until she rinsed her fingers in water from her canteen. Starfire waited patiently until she finished fussing.
"What do you want me to see?" she murmured.
For just a moment, looking into those glowing blue eyes, Rhianni wondered if the tales of the Shadows told by the fearful were the truth. Maybe the Taken were mental puppets and she had walked into a trap.
No. She shook her head. Her gut instinct had maintained the Shadows were friendly and the Taken were victims. It was the atmosphere of this darkening place that made her doubt.
Rhianni turned and looked back. The sun shone bright and warm behind her. Ahead, the darkness was real, not a figment of her imagination. The air seethed, subliminally hissing with something thick that swallowed up the light.
She pulled out her datapad to take a sample of the air. For all she knew, it was a microscopic life form swarming so thickly it seemed like a living shadow. The bio-computer gave no answer. That only meant the sample was beyond its limited diagnostic capabilities. Rhianni took another sample and preserved it to send back to Rover CQ after they caught the poachers.
To her relief, Starfire nudged her to turn around and leave, going back the way they had come. She had the itchy feeling that something watched from that darkness. Hundreds of eyes, a festering pool of utter blackness, the misty outer edges of which she had barely touched--and never wanted to touch again.
Night came quickly, once she settled down to keep an eye on the poacher camp. When Nureen's shuttle came in, it flew low over the treetops into the meadow, circling from the opposite direction of the poacher camp, with no running lights and only the hover jets gusting. Captain Solrak had sent the long, armored, forty-man stealth shuttle with the matte black finish.
Rhianni looked around for Starfire, who had been sitting next to her, a warm presence in the darkness. The Shadow had vanished into the night. She smiled and shrugged, tried not to miss him too much, and got up to meet the assault team.
Nureen hurtled down the folding steps from the hatch after the rest of the team had disembarked and tossed Rhianni a bag containing a skin-tight, matte black body suit and helmet with infra-red screen. The material of the suit deflected projectiles and muted energy blasts. Rhianni ducked into the shuttle and changed clothes in a few breaths. Nureen filled her in on the layout of the camp, the current state of the poachers and how they would conduct the raid as they and the twenty Rovers double-time marched through the forest. Rhianni told her what she had seen that day and entrusted the capsule with the air sample to her friend.
The poacher camp was as filthy and disordered as Rhianni had guessed from the odors reaching across the river. The stink of alcohol drifted through the air. A few men sat around the central fire. Snores and the humped shapes of bodies curled under blankets gave a good indication of the state of the camp.
The men around the fire never reacted with more than a twitch or a muffled curse when paralysis darts stung them in the neck or rump. Then they were out. The sleeping men went deeper into unconsciousness under a blanket of gas. The disruptor teams went to work, shorting out sleds, skimmers, storage lockers and communication equipment.
Rhianni was almost disappointed when the raid's basic action was over in less than twenty minutes, without an alarm raised or a weapon fired against them. She told herself not to complain. She had been in on the aftermath of too many routine missions that had turned ugly and bloody.
Nureen took her back to her sled before the shuttle returned to the Star Sword, which prepared to leave orbit and take jump gates to Rover CQ with their prisoners. The poachers had been too relaxed. They had either been at this so long they had no fear, or someone very powerful supported them and hid their tracks. Rhianni made a hasty verbal and written report and sent it with Nureen. They would be in General Day's hands within a week.
Sometimes, she acknowledged, it was good to have relatives in high places.
Rhianni dreamed of the black cloud that night. It reached out undulating, greasy, gaseous fingers to smother her and drag her into its maw. She woke to the sound of Starfire snarling outside the sled and scrabbling at the hatch. She opened the hatch and slammed the sled's lifter controls into life. The Shadow leaped into the sled as the green all-clear light came on. Shivering, Rhianni lifted and flew north.
She flew for half an hour. Three days of travel on foot. At that time of night, with the fear from her dream putting a nauseating taste in her mouth, Rhianni couldn't be sure about her calculations. She only landed when Starfire relaxed his stiff, watchful stance and finally sat down on the co-pilot's seat. She wouldn't have let the Shadow out at all when she landed, but Starfire nudged the door control with his nose and stepped over to the hatch when it opened.
It was a long time before she could curl up on the pad in the back of the sled and return to sleep. Rhianni knew what she had experienced wasn't just a reaction to the stress of the day; she was used to that. She could patch rotting wounds, sidestep death dozens of times in an hour, calmly direct the clean-up of a battle that had gone bad, and wait to fall to pieces after she gained some privacy. This wasn't that kind of after-battle reaction.
Something was out there, it wanted her, and she had become sensitive enough to know it.
"Uncle Choran would love that if he knew," she muttered into the shadows of the sled. She had left the control panel's lights on for a nightlight and wasn't ashamed to admit it. "Show him another talent he can use for the Rovers and I'll never get out."
That thought made her smile, and the tension drained away. Rhianni drifted into sleep, vaguely amazed and amused to discover that was what she wanted: to leave the Rover Corps.
At least she knew she wanted that much out of life. Discovering the rest of it could wait until after this mission was done.
"Well?" Gan asked, as Petroc opened his eyes and shook his head to clear away the last of the Merger fogginess.
"Guess who got within sight of the Black Pit today?" he growled as he sat up.
"Council Enforcers?" When Petroc shot a glare at him, he flinched. "No."
"Yes." Petroc reached for the pot of coffee sitting at the edge of the coals of their campfire.
They had finally settled down for the night, a good hour's walk away from Rhianni's sled, ready to wait for her return. It bothered Petroc that she was so sure of herself in this terrain that she would leave her sled for the entire day. Maybe even overnight.
The night had grown too quiet, with that waiting feeling that came through the night creatures, when even the wind refused to blow. Petroc had fought every urge to follow Rhianni's tracks and yank her out of whatever trouble she had gotten into. The plan was to keep track of her and wait in the wings, so to speak, until she needed help. He and Gan needed to see what she was up to. They wouldn't score any points with her if she knew they were spying on her, babysitting, so to speak.
Then an urgent call had come through the Merger. Strong enough to attract his attention while he was still wide awake. That required a dozen people joined together. The effort it took to gather that many people, coordinate their minds and combine their energy meant it was an emergency of the highest order. Gan had promised to get their sled ready while Petroc lay down and sent his mind into the Merger.
"When you think about it, better the Pit than the settlement. I thought every Shadow for twenty K kept people away from it." Gan pulled out the sled's remote and thumbed the button to power down. It whined softly as the systems started to shut off.
"They do." Petroc nearly slopped coffee over his hand as he slammed the pot back down into place. He gulped the first mouthful, neithe
r tasting it nor feeling the burning in his mouth. "A Shadow was with her."
"Why do I get the feeling they're keeping a lot of secrets from us? From you," his friend added after a pause. "Sometimes I envy you, but this ain't one of them."
"This is one of those times I envy you," he returned, and sipped his coffee. His hands still shook, but not as badly as they had when he first left the Merger. "She's lucky, I guess."
"Lucky!"
"Being a Rover, she probably saw it as an anomaly and went in to investigate. The Shadow probably stopped her, instead of taking her in there."
"So, why didn't she shoot the Shadow the moment it got close to her?"
"Rhianni's mother had a Shadow for a friend." Petroc smiled a little at the memory, but the expression didn't last long. "Rhianni isn't like other people. She trusts Shadows. Thank goodness. Anyone else would have probably run straight into the Black Pit when a Shadow tried to protect them." He sighed. Rhianni's little adventure was causing him more problems than he wanted to contemplate. "From now on, nobody gets closer than half a K. It's expanded again. That was the other news. I don't want to think what would have happened if she'd stayed near the leading edge." Petroc put down his cup before he spilled coffee all over his leg.
"Forget about being discreet. Just march on in come morning and demand some answers."
"Forget that. We should tie her up and drag her back to QSE. Maybe hanging outside the sled, to teach her a lesson." Petroc wasn't teasing.
He shuddered, imagining the corroding effects of the leading edges of the Black Pit, and what they could do to Rhianni's body. No matter how sturdy her survival clothes, they would melt away under the gaseous ravages of the leading edge, like colored sugar panes in a heavy rain. Petroc's stomach twisted as he imagined Rhianni's naked flesh melting, rotting off her bones while she was still alive.
"Fine. We'll march on over there at dawn and scare her into some straight talking before she's fully awake."
"And if she's not at the sled?" Petroc had to ask.
"We track her down and give her a good lecture on sleeping under the stars."
"She's a Rover. In a lot of ways, she's as good at this, fresh off the ship, as someone trained by Shadows."
Gan scowled at him, and Petroc wondered if his friend was looking for a chance to be a hero. Maybe he even wanted Rhianni afraid and grateful for a rescuer to sweep her off her feet. He probably wanted to impress her.
The idea of Rhianni and Gan as a couple made Petroc sicker than the image of Rhianni dead in the Black Pit. He wanted her. Was he the kind of man who, if he couldn't have the woman he wanted, would let no one else have her?
Those thoughts haunted him during his watch, and when he finally lay down to sleep. Rhianni skirted the edges of a cloud that churned blue and then green, shot with streaks of lightning and fire. It reached out gassy arms to enfold her. He knew the blue would protect her, but she evaded the blue phase just as adroitly as she did the green. He tried to tell her to throw herself into the blue, but he didn't have a mouth. As Petroc tried to move closer, with the intent of pushing her into the blue, he woke.
When morning came, they slung their gear into their sled and flew the short distance to Rhianni's sled.
Or rather, to where it had been the evening before.
Rhianni woke up tangled in her single sheet, the pad rucked up underneath her, to find the hatch hanging wide open. Starfire lay across the threshold.
She was positive she had closed the hatch and latched it when the Shadow left the sled a few hours before. Maybe she had hit the release with her foot in her sleep? She decided not to work herself into a headache over the question. Starfire was with her, so everything would be fine.
Evening again. Petroc caught a flash of white through the trees lining the riverbank. The sunset was back over his shoulder to the right, at the wrong angle to hit the water. He clutched the load of firewood under one arm and stepped closer to investigate.
More white showed through the shifting leaves. He pushed branches aside in time to see Rhianni submerge to her neck in the water. Petroc grinned, wondering about her reaction if he stepped out on the riverbank. He had no doubt she would attack him more fiercely than a pango.
And if he glimpsed more of her skin, he didn't doubt it would be the last thing he ever saw.
"Might be worth dying for," he murmured, even as his pulse sped up at the mental image of Rhianni, naked, dripping wet, glistening in the sunset's golden and scarlet light, and racing straight toward him. What would he give to have her smile and spread her arms to welcome him, rather than defend her honor?
He wanted to be the one to defend her, body and soul.
When they had lost Rhianni's trail two days before, he had been frightened and worried enough to calm his hungry dreams of her, especially since there were signs of poacher activity nearby.
They had done the only thing they could: cast about with the metal scanners in the sled, find her sled and stay close by. This evening when they chose their camp, they thought they were at least two hours away from her night's camp.
It seemed he and Gan were wrong yet again, when it came to predicting her movements.
Rhianni laughed and tossed her head, sending water spattering everywhere from her hair. She swam toward the riverbank, giving Petroc tantalizing glimpses of bare legs and arms. She paused and emerged from the water, her dark hair slicked to her skin and covering her breasts. He muffled a chuckle when he saw the dark green camisole and briefs that went halfway down her thigh. Petroc supposed he had been a fool to think Rhianni would strip down entirely, out here in the wilderness. She had too much common sense, too much training.
The presence of her underclothes removed some of the pressure to be a gentleman. Petroc dropped to one knee in the bushes, his mouth going dry as he watched the water slide down her lean, graceful form. Now the water only covered her from the waist down. He knew Rhianni would pound him black and blue if he stayed and stared--but he stuck around.
He considered stepping out onto the bank, finding her clothes--and either stealing them before she saw him, or throwing her a towel and delivering a lecture on being careless out in the wilderness. There were predators out here more deadly than pangos, and situations more deadly than walking barefoot into a patch of moriphus bushes.
Feet crashed through the underbrush behind him. Petroc moved back slowly, letting the branches fall back into place without undue noise. He retraced his steps and found Gan looking frustrated.
"Where've you been?" His load of firewood was only half the size of Petroc's bundle. He nodded toward the way Petroc had come. "Something keep you? What's over there?"
"Nothing." Petroc started down the trail, back to camp.
"Nothing, huh?" Gan headed for the river.
"Don't!" He winced at the volume of his voice. "Rhianni's at the river."
"Great." He turned to follow Petroc back to their camp.
"She's not camping there." His voice sounded as strained as he felt.
"What's she doing? Fishing?"
"Taking a bath."
"Is that all?" Gan grinned. "What's she look like?"
"Like herself. What kind of question is that?"
"Did you peek?" He turned toward the river again.
Petroc threw aside the wood and lunged. He caught Gan by his shoulder, nearly tearing his shirt. Gan twisted around, letting out a shout of surprise, and lost his balance. They both went down in tangled heap.
"What'd you do that for?" Gan grumbled as they separated their arms and legs and rolled apart.
"Sometimes you are really dense." He struggled to his feet. Petroc felt a few bruised spots.
"Sometimes you can't tell a joke from the real thing. I wouldn't do that to Rhianni. Besides." Gan groaned as he regained his feet. "She's interested in you, not me."
"She hasn't said or done anything."
"Give her a reason and I bet she will."
"That's the worst thing I could do to her."
Chapter 11
The afternoon was even more wet and sticky miserable than the morning had been, if that was possible. Rhianni shivered and looked through the trees toward the riverbank. During the morning downpour, she had huddled in her impromptu tent, silently grumbling as she tried to keep the wind from tugging the waterproof tarp out of her hands. What made her think it was safe to camp under the stars without checking the weather gauges in the sled? Now, she wished she hadn't started walking the moment the rain stopped. The air was chill, the dampness muffled all sound and she felt totally alone. Starfire had gone hunting, but knowing the Shadow would appear at the first whiff of trouble was no comfort. All her instincts trembled, sensing danger in every unexplained rustle and creak and snap.
A piece of rock shifted, the sound muffled by moss. She turned, drawing her knife.
Nothing. Rhianni wrapped her arms around herself, nearly slicing her jacket. She shook her head at her own foolishness and sheathed the knife. Then she drew her gun and checked the load. Just because she could blame her edginess on the weather and silence didn't mean she only imagined the creeping feeling of menace traveling up her back.
She listened to her heart and forced her lungs to work in time with the beats. Rhianni chanted a silent litany, counting her footsteps, paying attention to the swinging of her free arm, tallying the steps it took to get from one tree to another.
Behind her, something moved in the underbrush. She fought not to stop and look or break into a mad dash.
A grunting cough shattered the quiet. A heavy body crashed through the underbrush. Something squealed in mad fury.
Shadows of Mallachrom, Book 1: Blue Fire Page 11