And when he went back, she toppled too. They landed in a heap, Lily laughing and Sybutu on top. The look of shock on his face was priceless.
“Hey!” someone shouted.
Lily had pushed Sybutu too far. He had her pinned beneath his weight and had his arm back to strike. Unlike Lily, he wasn’t playing.
Two pairs of hands grabbed the legionary’s arm before he could bring it down. They belonged to Green Fish and Bronze.
“That’s not going to help matters, Sergeant,” advised the sapper. “Chimera Company. The beacon of hope that Legion and Militia can work together. Remember that? You’re the one who signed us up to it.”
Sybutu shifted his weight and Lily scrambled free. He seemed to notice Lily’s face for the first time. Her rose tattoo had grown fresh blood drips, and these ones were not black but a vivid crimson.
Lily stood and crossed her arms. “Do you have a problem with women, Osu?”
Still staring, Sybutu replied, “No. I have a problem with you.”
Lily’s face softened into a pretty smile. “Good. So fight me.”
“Gladly.”
OSU SYBUTU
That damned Militia woman was infuriating.
Worse than that, Hjon was dangerous. It had taken Osu a while to figure out, but Hjon was still torturing him, still jerking him around by his chains, just more subtle ones now.
And Green Fish – the pretty one who was stirring Zavage’s head fronds – had said this was all because Hjon felt a perverse form of attraction to him.
Osu believed it. Anything was possible with the deviant Militia scum he’d been forced to ally with. And that was putting the mission at risk. The whole reason Osu had engineered this detour to the island was to carry out his agenda of murder. As foul as that prospect was, his duty to the Legion said he needed to find a way to get rid of Meatbolt fast, before whatever was taking him over endangered the mission.
But it was Lily who was taking things over, shifting the evening onto her own agenda.
A cowardly part of him wanted to thank her for that.
“I got this, Lil’,” said Meatbolt stepping in front of her. “I know you can hold your own, but you shouldn’t have to sully yourself scrapping with a jack. Besides, I’m more his size.”
“No.” Osu stroked his chin as he considered the young trooper. Bronze was certain Meatbolt had been infected by these Invaders. If he was wrong, then they were contemplating a terrible crime, but Bronze hadn’t been wrong about anything so far.
Osu made the call. He backed his own man.
“Hjon’s beneath my notice,” said Osu. “Both sergeants will stay out of it today. Arunsen and I will have our chance when his leg wound heals.”
His decision made, he squared up to Meatbolt. “We have two sappers waiting to take on anyone who impugns the Legion’s honor.”
“I’ll take on this one.”
Osu heard Lily challenge the slighter figure of Sapper Vol Zavage to a fight, but that was not a matter of importance. It was all about Meatbolt from this point.
Meatbolt’s death.
BRONZE
Bronze settled into a low fighting stance: subtle, responsive, and able to deliver the fatal blow.
His opponent preferred to whip up the crowd as he strutted along the far side of the ring marked out by loose rocks and the detritus left by previous visitors to the cave. The ring made no sense to Bronze. It wasn’t as if there were any rules in this brawl. Beat the hell out of the other guy; that was about the extent of it.
A roar went up from the fight on the other side of the heap of glowing rocks where Hjon and Zavage were the main attraction. Only Green Fish, Enthree, and Osu were on this side of the cave, but only Osu realized that this was where the main event was about to take place.
A light squeeze of his right palm reassured Bronze that the poison tab was in place. A slap against Meatbolt’s skin and in a few hours, he would suffer massive hemorrhaging and die.
His opponent was ready to fight now, rubbing his hands in glee.
Clearly, he still thought of himself as Meatbolt.
But he wasn’t. Meatbolt had died before Bronze had even met him.
Shock and confusion suddenly wrote themselves across the face of the man who had been Meatbolt.
It’s starting.
The last veneer of Meatbolt’s essence was being erased in front of Bronze’s eyes. His DNA had been infiltrated and rewritten in service to...
Invaders. That’s what Bronze called them, but it was just an empty name. He still had no idea who they were facing, what their purpose might be.
A roar of excitement came from Green Fish; she’d probably mistaken his hidden weapon check as a sign of fear.
Meatbolt made the same mistake and stormed toward him. Head down like a charging animal, and swaying drunkenly, Bronze judged him an easy take down.
Waiting in a loose stance until the last moment, Bronze jabbed at Meatbolt’s face with his poisoned hand.
Meatbolt’s face had vanished... along with his drunkenness. Suddenly he was impressively nimble on his feet for such a bear of a man. The infected trooper skipped away, sidestepping past Bronze’s attack and getting behind him.
Bronze threw his weight forward trying to roll out of danger, but he was too late. Meatbolt was wise to him and had leaned with him from behind, pinning Bronze’s arms behind him.
Come on, Zy Pel! he screamed inwardly. You picked a bad time to get suckered. Sort him!
He bucked and wriggled, trying to win his hand free to deploy the poison.
No joy.
Not only had Meatbolt pinned his arms too securely, but he lifted Bronze off his feet.
Bronze smacked his head backward.
Meatbolt dodged his head away to the side and rammed his forehead against the side of Bronze’s skull.
“You lose, jack.” The joy of victory infused the trooper’s words.
You haven’t won yet, oaf!
His head still ringing in pain, Bronze first went limp, and was about to hurl himself forward and then throw his head back once more, hoping desperately to smack into a nose or eye and loosen the hold on his arms.
Before he could, Meatbolt surprised him again by releasing his bearhug.
Stumbling on the ground, and jarring his ankle painfully against a ringside stone, Bronze expected a stunning blow at any moment as he wasted precious moments he didn’t have to regain his balance and ready himself to counter the attack he was sure was incoming.
But it never came.
Confusion and guilt wiped away Meatbolt’s fighting snarl. He began lolling about the ring like unsecured gear on an ocean freighter, and Bronze didn’t think he was faking this time.
He squeezed his right palm, but the poison tab was still there: undeployed.
“You...” Meatbolt pointed at Bronze, shaking his head in disbelief. “You...” He reversed his finger. “Me!”
The trooper sank to his knees. “Forgive me. Forgive me, please... elder.”
The last word didn’t come easily to Meatbolt. Poor skragg. When the last remnants of your mind realized your body had been taken over by something else, it couldn’t be easy. That had so nearly been Bronze’s fate, but he’d had access to nano-meds.
There were none for Meatbolt.
The best Bronze could offer him was a quick release.
He lifted the trooper up by his greasy dark hair. “Do you yield?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“Are you drunk, Meatbolt?” called one of the troopers.
“Thought you were doin’ this for Lil’.”
The audience had shifted across the cave to take in Meatbolt’s fight. And his submission.
That’s what this was. Whatever manner of creature had bitten Bronze two years ago was much higher up the hierarchy than whoever had passed the infection onto Meatbolt. Maybe it had been one of the Invaders themselves he’d encountered at Azoth Zol. Whatever it was, its seniority had transferred to Bronze.
Bronze’s heart melted a little to see the astonishment and shame in Meatbolt’s face, but he readied his poison hand to strike.
Then the man inside his flesh rallied and the young trooper thought he was back in control of himself.
“What’s the matter, Meaty? Going soft?”
Bronze took a step back. He couldn’t hit Meatbolt now. With all his friends watching, they would jump to their comrade’s defense. And when Meatbolt died a few hours later, they would know who to blame.
Meatbolt rose to his feet and crossed his arms. “Lucky escape for you this time, jack. Must be something I ate. Expect a rematch next chance we get.”
“I’ll be waiting,” Bronze replied. Helplessly, he watched as his opponent merged into the crowd of Militia spectators who shifted their attention back to the other fight.
Only Osu and the Muryani trooper remained with Bronze.
Bronze stared at the alien. He had no idea what was going through Enthree’s head, but his gut told him the big insect knew a lot more than she was letting on.
LILY HJON
The Kurlei glanced across at the commotion on the other side of the cave. Whatever the hell was going on with Meatbolt worried at Lily’s mind, but she put that aside; she had a job to do first. After dancing a couple of steps toward the cave wall, she swung a left hook at the distracted Kurlei’s face.
It was as if he had read her thoughts.
Funny, that.
Hands around her wrist, he yanked her down. She could feel her center of balance go, so she threw all she had into kicking into the gap between his knees, tangling their legs.
They went down together, landing with a bone-punishing impact onto the unforgiving stone floor.
When her head cleared of the spinning suns, Lily found herself on her back with Zavage on top of her, their hands locking together like lovers and their faces inches apart.
She’d never seen one of his species so close up before. His angular face – with a pointed chin that could pierce armor – had such hard planes that he looked like a sheet-metal sculpture. But if Zavage was sculptured, then the artist had finished off the stone with a coating of fish scales and powdered riverbed mud. And as for the plump appendages on top of his head pulsing obscenely in her face. What was that all about?
And what would they feel like to touch?
She decided to recategorize. Osu was cute and hateful. Bronze was dangerous. But Zavage... he was worthy of further investigation.
“You can touch them if you like.” Zavage grinned inhumanly.
Could he read her mind, or did he just want her to think that?
“Of course,” he added, “you’ll have to concede first.”
“Don’t get ideas, fish-jack. I was just getting started battering you.” Lily tried rolling free, but he had her pinned.
“You flatter yourself.”
“I think we’ve given them enough of a show.” She tried flicking her hands free. She failed. “Seriously, I can hand your fishy ass to you if you prefer. You do realize I was holding back?”
Zavage lowered himself until his... fronds? What are they called? Until his fronds brushed her hair.
“You held back a lot,” he admitted. “I could sense it in your mind. But I held back more.”
Lily found she could no longer give a damn. Electricity arced between them, her head filled with hiss and swash. She couldn’t actually see sparks flying through the air, but it felt like nothing she’d experienced before. Actually... that wasn’t quite true. On a dare, she’d once shoved her head inside the shunt conduit of an active hyperjump engine. Being near Zavage felt like that.
“Psychic feedback,” he explained.
That smug jack! He’s loving my reaction.
Lily had to admit, though. So was she. “And Kurlei girls? Do they have the same equipment up top?”
He nodded.
Lily blew out a breath, imagining Kurlei lovemaking. “That must be wild.”
Subconsciously, her mind had secured an easygoing flirtatious connection to Zavage. The alien snapped it abruptly, leaving her in silent isolation so complete it was wounding. The Kurlei was now remote and alien beyond comprehension.
“Wild?” he said, “the word you’re looking for is fatal.”
Now, that, Lily told herself as Zavage rolled off, is a story I’m going to enjoy worming out of you, pal.
She watched him walk over to the crowd around Meatbolt, liking the fact that he could sense her attention in ways another human never could.
She had no doubt that this Chimera Company business was going to get them all killed, but the journey was shaping up to be a lot more fun than she’d thought.
OSU SYBUTU
On a surface level, the brawl in the cave had been a great success because the bubble of tension had popped for the time being. With the troopers bewildered by the way Meatbolt had conceded, the heated pile of rocks had transformed into a timeless campfire around which stories had been told, tasteless jokes made, and some probing questions asked.
The Militia had poked fun at the Legion for separating the two most common genders into different battalions. The Legionaries had mocked the troopers for mixing them up.
Zavage had asked without rancor how the troopers felt about their officers when so many were without honor or competence. Lily responded by wondering aloud how it felt to learn that your commander-in-chief was in the pay of a foreign power.
The scandal of Legion First General Clarke had broken a decade before, but the mere mention of the traitor’s name hit all the legionaries with a stunning blow of shame.
After that, the banter subsided for a long while, yet it eased back slowly. Simply being able to remove glacier goggles and scarves and see each other’s faces had gone a long way to make the unwilling allies feel like people.
Osu knew all of that was important, but there was another level on which the night in the cave had been a disaster.
Meatbolt still lived.
The only positive Osu could draw from the cave brawl was that he’d seen Meatbolt’s humanity slip away to leave behind a confused creature inhabiting his flesh. There was no doubt in Osu’s mind anymore: Meatbolt was morphing into something else, and the transformation seemed almost complete.
Meatbolt sounded as if he’d been a real character, a young man with a lot to offer the galaxy whose story had been tragically cut short. Osu had already seen far too much death, but the loss of this one trooper twisted his guts nonetheless.
In the morning, they had set off on the last leg of their journey to the capital, and whatever fate awaited them there. Cultivated trees, fish farms, religious icons mounted on high poles, farmsteads, ice roads – the signs of Littorane habitation were all around, and as the klicks to Bresca-Brevae ticked down, so the land grew more firmly inhabited.
They passed other convoys of travelers and vehicles driven by citizens going about their daily lives. Only once did they see evidence of the invasion: rebel aircraft appearing beneath the clouds had aligned their flight path to the road they were traveling. Every member of Chimera Company felt a strong temptation to break for cover in the trees lining the ice road, but the two sergeants decided that the best defense was to look as if they had no reason to run.
The aircraft could easily have been lining up for a strafing run, but not on this occasion. The rebels flew overhead with weapons silent and followed the road to the east.
There had been a nuclear strike just days before, and presumably a battle for orbital supremacy that must have been hidden by the clouds. None of that seemed to touch the people of the coastal plain. It felt so surreal to Osu that sometimes he had to remind himself of Sanderson, of De Ketele and Yergin, and all the others who hadn’t made it this far.
A day out from Bresca-Brevae, they stopped for the night at a small town. Little more than a few homes huddled around an inn and a trading post, Pattex-Nio was a much more modest place than Raemy-Ela, where hopefully Urdizine was holding out for their
return. It was time to stop spending the nights in trees and ditches. On the following day, they planned to pass through Bresca-Brevae safely and locate their contact. By comparison, it should be easy to book rooms for the night in Pattex-Nio without getting shot. Plus, any intel they picked up here could be vital to the success of their mission.
Osu agreed with Arunsen that the three surviving legionaries would play the part of mining wildcatters and land traders, while Militia would be the escorting mercenaries, laborers, and caravan managers.
In a jovial mood, the Chimera Company caravan tramped into the stable yard of the town’s only inn. Osu looked bemused at the inn’s brightly colored sign showing a beaming human face underneath the name Terra Infirma written in human script.
“It’s a human-themed bar,” said Lily. “Get used to the idea. Last time I was here, humans were fashionable among the coastal Littoranes. Better that than the reception we got in the interior.”
With Green Fish organizing stabling of the Saruswine with the Littorane staff, the others pushed into the main bar, splitting up to avoid overwhelming the few patrons inside.
And the drinkers! It wasn’t just a human-themed bar; there were several actual humans drinking here.
The ambience was warm and welcoming. The floor was carpeted, and the drinking lounges divided by polished wooden posts that ended in glow globes without ever reaching the matching wooden beams that traversed the ceiling. Fabric partitions divided the rooms further into drinking pods consisting of a large table surrounded by benches and stools.
Pictures were hung on the walls, mostly of humans as, presumably, the Littoranes saw them: androgynous with horizontal slits for eyes, extra-long spindly legs and hair in vivid shades of blue and purple.
For one evening, at least, it felt possible to forget for a while the mind-controlled legions, rebel aircraft, endless cold, and all the other threats straining to end his life.
With Arunsen, Enthree, and Rynter, Osu approached a table occupied by a lone, reclining Littorane and gestured whether it would be all right to join it.
Chimera Company - Rho-Torkis Box Set Page 25