Purity (Pure and Tainted) (18 page)

She wasn’t far off in that assumption, K thought with some
satisfaction as she strapped the weaponry on. The gauntlets covered her entire
forearms from the base of her thumb to the crook of her elbow. Just feeling
them
against her skin gave K a thrill.

Then their needles dug into her arms and she felt a rush of fear
at the stabbing pain.
Be calm, K
commanded
herself.
Feel nothing.
The gauntlets
didn’t inject anything as the skinsuit did—they simply needed a neural
connection to her in order to work properly. But
could
she work them properly, now that she was contaminated? Only a
fourth class Paladin could manage the delicate and dangerous weapons and the
black around her eyes had receded considerably, putting her back years in her
training.

K felt a stab of self doubt, sharper than the needles piercing her
forearms, as she reached for the once-familiar link she’d had to her weapons.
Before when she’d worn the gauntlets she had controlled them from a state of
absolute peace and calm. Now her mind was in chaos and the semi-sentient weapons
seemed to sense that.
I will control
them. I
must,
she told herself
grimly. She looked at Mom. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”

The other woman didn’t have to be asked twice. “Come on!” She led
the way out to the Rough Terrain
Vehicle,
a small four
wheeler kept for exploring alien planets, which was stored near the hatch of
the ship. Grabbing the controls, she slung herself into the driver’s seat with
surprising agility.

K took the passenger’s seat, relieved that Mom was driving. She
didn’t think she could have trusted herself to steer straight with the chaos
going on inside her brain at the moment. She still felt dizzy and weak but she
forced herself to sit up straight as Mom started the small but tough vehicle
and they roared down the landing plank and into the arid Minotaur climate.

K only hoped they were on time. Now that they were outside the
ship, she could hear the angry roaring of the hungry saurian first hand,
unfiltered by the viewscreen and Sweetie sounded very,
very
angry.

Chapter Twelve

So this is how it ends,
Boone thought as Sweetie took her
first snap at them. He dodged quickly to one side and Loki squealed and dodged
to the other, both of them barely avoiding the glistening dagger-like teeth.
The teeth in question clicked loudly on empty air and Sweetie snorted angrily.
Boone had a feeling she was just playing with them at this point—like a hungry
cat with a couple of luckless mice. In a minute she was going to tire of her
little pastime and then it was going to be all over with.

He cast a glance over his shoulder, wondering if there was any way
to escape. Abrahams and a few other townsfolk from the settlement were watching
avidly from behind the thirty-foot electrified perimeter fence but no one was
rushing to their aid or opening the door in the fence, for that matter.
Apparently they weren’t taking any risks that Sweetie might want seconds after
she finished Boone and Loki off.

“Abrahams?” he shouted, trying to back slowly away from the angry
saurian as he spoke. “Trigger’s jammed on your damn stunner. Little help here?”

The geneticist shouted something that Boone didn’t catch.

“What?”

“He said, ‘reason with her.’” Loki looked positively green with
fear. They’d been in some tight spots together but Boone had never seen his
friend so panicked.

“Reason with her. Great,” Boone muttered. He wished he could think
of words that might soothe the savage saurian but his thoughts were still
occupied with erotic images, a by-product of the crazy pheromones Sweetie was
giving off. The effect was that one half of his mind was screaming,
We’re
going to die!
while
the other half was thinking he was so hard he could fuck a hole through a
concrete wall.

“Goddess, this is
insane,”
Loki
moaned as they both backed slowly away from the angry Sweetie. “I’m about to
bite it and all I can think about is the last time I went to the baths in
Rigillian. There were these two guys there—no, three, there were three—and they
had this super sized bottle of passion lube. Anyway, they turned me over and—”

“Stop it, Loki, I’m trying to think!” Boone snapped. “Sweetie,” he
said, turning his attention to the huge saurian and trying to make his voice
calm. “Come on now, darlin’, you don’t want to do this,” he told her.

Sweetie snorted and lowered her head again so that one
dinner-plate sized eye was staring directly into Boone’s face. He stared back
at her, trying not to lose the blinking contest. Looking at her immense face,
he wondered absently if this was how some of the smaller littles felt when they
first encountered one of his kind.

Then the corner of Sweetie’s immense mouth turned up and Boone
could have sworn she was
smiling.
But not a happy, nice-to-meet-you kind of smile.
No, the
expression on her reptilian face seemed much more menacing than that. Boone
wished that Abrahams had given her the power of speech but he was pretty sure
he knew what she was thinking even though she couldn’t say it out loud—
Oh yes, I
do
want to do this and you’re about to be lunch.

“Sweetie,” he said again but she only snorted and took another
snap at them. Boone gasped and barely jumped back in time to avoid her
foot-long teeth.

“Fuck this reasoning shit,” he heard Loki say in a trembling
voice.

“Loki, n—!” he started to say but the coughing echo of his pulse
pistol being discharged drowned his words.

There was a blast of energy and Sweetie lifted her head and
bellowed in pain. Boone saw a streak of black appear on her scaly,
purplish-blue hide but it was clear no real damage had been done. Loki might as
well have tried to take down a tank with a handgun.

“Loki,” he growled. “That was fucking
stupid
. You’re only making her angrier!”

“Well what am I supposed to do?” Loki demanded. “Talk sweetly to
her and sing her a damn lullaby?”

“Better than pissing her off.”
Boone worked at the trigger of the
stunner again but it was still frozen in place.
Piece of shit!
He would be better off throwing the heavy weapon at
Sweetie and making a run for it. Except for the fact that she could outpace him
in two steps and cut him in half with one
bite, that
was.

Sweetie roared again and then lowered her head. There was a
murderous glint in her eyes and Boone had the feeling she was through playing
cat and mouse. Now it was supper time.

“Run, Loki,” he muttered, his mouth dry with fear. “Get away while
you can—I’m the bigger target. She’ll go for me.”

“I can’t—” Loki began and then Sweetie charged forward, her mouth
open for the killing bite.

One chance,
Boone thought as that hot, gaping
maw came for him. Abandoning all attempts to work the trigger, he shoved the
stunner between Sweetie’s razor sharp teeth, wedging it as far back as he could
between her molars. His arm scraped against the jagged edges of her fangs but
he barely felt the pain in the adrenaline rush of fear.

She bellowed angrily and raised her head, shaking it from side to
side, trying to dislodge the obstruction. Boone couldn’t help thinking that the
big, bulky stunner looked like a toothpick in her immense mouth. For a moment
he hoped it would hold her until he and Loki could get away…then there was a
metallic crunching sound and shards of metal mixed with bloody drool came
raining down to the ground at their feet.

So
much for that.
We’re going to die,
Boone thought, looking up as the
giant saurian lowered its head and charged at him.
I’m sorry, Shayla, sorry I didn’t get to you.
But it wasn’t his
little sister’s face that came to his mind now that his last moments were at
hand—strangely enough, it was K’s. He wished he had kissed her, kissed those
soft, lush lips before he left. Before he said goodbye for the last—

A hollow roar as loud as Sweetie’s bellow suddenly split the air.
Boone glanced over his shoulder to see that a large smoking hole had suddenly
appeared in the electrified perimeter fence. And coming through it at full tilt
were Mom and K, riding the RTV they kept for exploration on hostile planets.

“Get back!” K’s voice rang out and she stood up in the vehicle,
her legs spread wide for balance as it bumped and swayed over the rocky ground.
“Get back, Boone, I’m going to blast it!”

“No!” Abrahams was suddenly through the fence as well, running to
catch up with the RTV. “No, don’t kill her! She’s just confused.”

Looking at the angry saurian again, Boone didn’t see a bit of
confusion in those huge, rage-filled eyes. Sweetie knew
exactly
what she was doing, he was sure of it. She was a killer by
nature and just because Abrahams had given her intelligence, it didn’t mean she
wanted to be anything else. She
wanted
to kill—wanted to render them all into so many quivering chunks of meat and
gulp them, wet and steaming, down her gullet.

Then K stretched out her arms and the roar filled the air again as
pulsing jets of pure green energy arrowed over his head and struck the angry
saurian.

For a moment Boone thought that the glowing green plasma which had
jetted from K’s weapons was only going to make Sweetie even angrier. It coated
her scaly hide like greenish slime, not appearing to have any effect.

Then the plasma began to eat its way inward.

Sweetie bellowed again and this time Boone heard a note of pain in
her deep voice. Her seemingly invulnerable, purple-blue scales began to show
small reddish-black pits under the iridescent slime. Sweetie turned her head to
the wounded side, snapping angrily at the pain, trying to make it stop.

But there was no stopping the flowing plasma—it had an appetite
every bit as voracious as the rampaging saurian’s. The green substance ate
inward relentlessly until the small pits became gaping wounds, showing Boone a
lot more of the inside of saurian anatomy than he’d ever wanted to see. Glistening
muscles and organs and gleaming white bones were revealed as the plasma worked
deeper, spreading destruction as it went.

With a crash like a huge tree falling, Sweetie sank to her knees.
Her cries of pain were deafening as she tossed her head, bloody slaver spraying
from her snapping jaws.

“Shoot her again, K!” Boone heard himself shouting. “She’s in too
much pain. Put her out of her misery!”

K was still swaying as she stood, though Mom had brought the RTV
to a screeching halt right in front of the fallen creature. “I’ll try.” Her
face was paper-pale and her eyes looked huge with fatigue or shock—he couldn’t
tell which. “I’ll
try,
Boone, but I don’t know how
much longer I can…can control them.”

“Control who? What are you talking about?” Boone ran toward her as
she took aim again.

“No! No, wait!”
Abrahams
voice, coming
from behind, sounded panicked. “I can help her, I know I can. If you’ll just—”

With a coughing roar, K fired the strange weapons strapped to her
wrists, cutting him off. Another blast of green plasma jetted from her wrists,
this time coating Sweetie’s massive head and face.

The saurian shrieked—an ear-splitting screech that made Boone feel
like his eardrums were going to shatter. She tossed her head but the plasma
clung to her like glue, eating its way into her eyes, stripping the skin from
her bony, oversized skull. Boone jumped back as she thrashed, her massive tail
barely missing him.

“Out of the way!” he shouted, motioning frantically for Mom to
back up the RTV. “Get out of the way!”

Mom nodded once and threw the small vehicle into reverse. K lost
her balance and fell, slumping into the passenger seat in a way that worried
Boone. But he was too busy getting out of the way of the saurian death throes
to do anything about it at the moment. Gods, would it never end?

Sweetie shrieked and writhed as the plasma ate into her. Her
earsplitting moans filled the air, broadcasting her agony to the entire
settlement. Finally, just when he thought her suffering would never end, Boone
saw one of her huge eyes collapse in on itself. The plasma poured into the
empty socket and found her genetically altered brain. With one final shudder
and a last, hissing shriek, the mountainous reptile lay still.

Boone let out a shaky sigh of relief. Sweetie had been intent on
eating him but watching her die in such a horrible way made him feel sick. Nothing
remained of the sentient saurian now but a steaming pile of once-living meat
and the thick, pheromone reek which still hung heavy in the air despite
Sweetie’s death.

“Oh my God—what have you done?
What
have you done?”
Abrahams rushed past Boone, his normally serene face a mask
of grief.
“My daughter!
My
baby!”

“Abrahams, I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “That stuff is lethal. It’ll
eat through anyth—”

“Boone!” The fear in Mom’s voice made him whirl around to see what
was wrong. “It’s K.” She was leaning over the Paladin, still slumped in the
passenger seat, unmoving. “Help me, Boone—she won’t wake up!”

Boone’s heart was suddenly in his throat.
Not K! Oh, God, please, no!
Though he had known her less than a
solar month and they were sworn enemies—or at least, she had sworn to be
his—the thought of losing K was suddenly more than he could bear.

He raced to the RTV where Mom was still bent over the slim,
unmoving figure. “Are there any injuries? Did she hurt herself somehow? Get any
of that green stuff on her?” Rapidly he examined her, taking her pulse, leaning
down to listen to her breathing. It was quick and shallow and her heart was
pounding hard, as though she’d just accomplished some incredibly strenuous
physical task.

“I don’t know. I don’t
think
so.” Mom sounded like she was on the verge of tears. “She said something
about her gauntlets being harder to control but that’s all.”

“These things?”
Boone touched the black leather
strapped to K’s slender arms gingerly.

Mom nodded.
“Yes, those.
She made me go
get them for her. Said it was the only way. I guess…guess she was right.”

“I guess so.” Boone frowned. “But if they’re anything like the
rest of that damn suit of hers, they could be hurting her right now.”
Carefully, he unstrapped the gauntlets, being very, very cautious not to touch
the firing mechanisms embedded near the wrists. As he pulled them off, he
noticed bloody puncture wounds on the insides of her delicate forearms. Damn
the Purists, couldn’t they make
anything
that
didn’t damage the user?

As he laid the lethal black leather on the seat beside K, her eyes
finally fluttered open and focused on him. “Boone?” she whispered. “What?
Where…?”

“K!” Unable to stop himself, he crushed her to him, holding her
slender body tight and breathing in the warm feminine scent of her hair.

“Boone…” She seemed uncertain of what to do at first and then her
arms crept around his neck and she hugged him back, as tightly as he was
hugging her. “I saw you on the viewscreen and I was so afraid,” she whispered,
pressing her cheek to his. “Fear is a terrible feeling—I don’t like it at all!”