Heat (5 page)

Would she come out of it on her own? He could whip up a stimulant if he had to, but he didn’t want to use it unless absolutely necessary. Humans were fragile.

A dark thought struck Kane suddenly. Humans
were
fragile. Maybe the female was sick. He hadn’t scanned her for anything, and there were all sorts of nasty things that could swap themselves between hasty Jotan and their humans.

Better late than never. Kane looked around for his pack, found it under one of the chairs, and took it over to his female. He had to calibrate it for human biology, and during that time, Kane studied her.

She was blonde, like him, but her hair was several shades lighter, an unnatural-looking yellow, and it was very short. She’d colored her face earlier, and her crying had made a smeared mask all across her eyes. Her blunt human claws were bright pink. She looked fit enough. She bruised easily, but then, so had every other human he’d ever known. Their skin was just too thin.

When the computer chimed, Kane brought out his scanner and gave her arm a pat. She didn’t open her eyes.

Patience.

“This is probably going to hurt,” he warned her, and shrewdly noted that her face puckered slightly. “I need to look at your blood.”

She made no response, not even when Kane pushed the sharp tip of the scanner into her arm. He drew out blood, rich and red, and fed it into the analyzer. The computer began to think.

“Where do you keep your food?” Kane asked, his eyes running over the screen. Not that there was anything to see until the timer finished counting down, but it made him feel useful.

She continued to ignore him.

Kane considered her, tapping his claws idly against his knee. “What’s your preference?” he asked at last, bluntly. “Arm or leg? No reason to let your male go to waste.”

It was a bluff. After half a day in the sun, the human’s meat was soured, but the threat had the desired effect. A trickle of water appeared at the corner of one eye. Humans did that, he knew, even when their eyes weren’t damaged. Finally, she looked at him.

“Food,” he said firmly.

She sat up, moving as though her bones had become brittle as straw, and slid onto her feet. She looked at him again, her face crumpling in on itself, and began to stagger toward the groundcar.

The computer chimed, its screen filling the results of the human’s scan. Kane read, well-aware that he’d been very lucky. Apart from a congenital sugar imbalance, some toxic residue (probably related to the canisters floating in the cold-storage crate), and a nasty bone-thinning disorder lurking in her future, the female was clean. She had nothing that could be passed along to Kane, but he thought he’d ought to fix her up anyway. That sugar imbalance could get to be a problem if he didn’t.

The female was returning, weeping openly now. She had a bag of dried meat in one hand and a package of biscuits or something in the other. She put these on the table before Kane and lowered herself shakily into one of the chairs, covering her face with her hands and rocking back and forth.

Well, at least she was moving. Kane chewed on the meat, which was very tough but extremely tasty, and began to construct a program to purify her of her detrimental conditions. After a while, the female rose from her chair and went to kneel by the male’s body. Kane let her; he was an old hand at designing nanozyme codes, but this was the first he’d ever done without Urak looking on. Besides, if it made the female happy to grieve, who was he to argue? At least she was doing it quietly.

Kane double-checked his program, ran a quick cross-filter reaction check, and when the gold light turned green, he loaded in the blank nanozymes and initiated them. It would take fourteen hours before the human’s problems were completely solved, but there was nothing wrong with her that he could catch, so he didn’t care. He had only to make sure she got enough water while the filters were working, and in the meantime, he could fuck her all he wanted. He filled his dermisprayer with the prepared nanozymes and turned to get his female.

She was gone.

So much for a gentle hand. When he found the bitch, he was going to hobble her.

Dermisprayer in hand, Kane started walking, his eyes picking out her tracks easily in the dry earth. He followed her away from the corpse of her mate, down onto the path he’d come by earlier, and into the forest. He didn’t hurry. The distance between the human’s footprints showed she wasn’t running, and anyway, there was nowhere for her to go. In a way, the fact that she was fit enough to wander off was almost encouraging. And even if it wasn’t, if Kane knew that if he had to run in this heat, he was likely to shear her damned head off when he caught up to her.

He hadn’t gone far before he realized that he could hear water, and after another hundred paces, he could smell it as well. When the path opened out, it had brought Kane to the bank of a little river. It was mostly dried up, if the steep sides of the empty bank were any indication, but still deep enough at its center for his female to be standing in it up to her waist. She was looking at him, her hands still cupped to her half-cleaned face.

‘Patience,’ Kane reminded himself, his hand flexing on the dermisprayer. ‘She just wanted to wash up. So do you, so be patient. She’s got days to find out how badly she can be hurt.’ He smiled at her.

She did not respond in any way.

“Come here,” Kane said, and snapped his fingers at the same time. It was never too early to start training.

She didn’t move.

Kane’s smile faded on one side. “Human, I don’t want to kill you, but you are making me want very much to hurt you. Come here.” He snapped again.

She lowered her hands, water spilling through her fingers and from her eyes. She took a step toward him and looked down at the dermisprayer in his grip.

Kane’s temper was starting to scratch at him again. He took a deep breath and held the instrument up for her to see. “This is for you,” he said. “There was a problem with your blood. I’m sure you knew that.”

She dropped her eyes, looked around at the water, and then met his gaze again.

“I can fix it,” Kane continued. “Come with me. We’re going to travel for a few days and then I’ll let you go, and you’ll never be sick again.” He gave her another smile, this one showing quite a few fangs, and told himself that Heat was coming…Heat was coming and she was the only game around.

She spoke for the first time, in a voice that was despairing, yet strong. “Fuck you,” she said. He had no time to wonder what that meant. She dropped beneath the water’s surface.

“You
bitch
!” Kane snarled. He leapt into the river, pushing against the weight of the current to grab her back, but he could see her chest working and he knew it was too late. Her body was heavy when he reached it.

She had escaped him after all.

Kane looked in disgust at the dermisprayer in his hand and then expelled its contents into the river in a silver jet. “Bitch,” he said again, and dropped her with a splash.

“R
ise and shine, camper! Up ‘n at ‘em!”

Tagen jerked awake at once, his hand flying for his gunbelt and striking a tree instead. His first fractured thought was that his father had dumped him in the woods again. He was hot and hungry and thirsty and sore; this had to be some sadistic new brand of training. He could smell smoke. He had lit a fire the night before, and he could smell it still, mixed with the sweat that pooled on his skin. Every other scent that came to him was horribly unfamiliar. It wasn’t until he saw the human that he remembered he was on Earth.

Earth. Gods. How could a planet look so inviting and peaceful from orbit and yet be so dry and miserable once one had landed? Tagen had made his hundred kilometers hiking up a slope of crumbling stone, surrounded on all sides by towering trees. Everything was out to get him. Insects bit him, raising itchy welts wherever they could get at him. The roots of the trees protruded in crafty knobs and toe-catching loops, and Tagen had twice fallen. Even if he was lucky enough to grab a tree for balance, the bark of the things was rough enough to abrade his hands, and often was coated with a rancid-smelling sticky sap that never,
never
came off. The bushes here were nothing but thorns or burrs or grasping vines, which in their dried-out death-throes had become quite effective shackles.

And these were just the obstacles of the earth itself. Then there was the heat. The dryness of the air. The sweat and the dust that turned to mud and baked hard in the cracks of his body. The sound of his breath rattling and the slow, spreading soreness of his throat. The ache of his over-used muscles. The throb of his bruising feet. Tagen was a soldier and he was accustomed to rough living, but there was such a thing as too much.

When he had at last succumbed to his body’s demand for rest, it had been full-on night and still hot as hell. He had made his camp in the first flat patch of ground he saw, scraping all the organic debris into a pile and igniting it with a shot of plasma. The gods knew he didn’t need the extra heat, but it got rid of the thorns and fallen branches and it was soothing to his strained nerves to see something so familiar as a fire here on this alien world. Then he had stripped out of his uniform, all the way down to his regulation loin-guard with the Fleet insignia on front, and sprawled out flat and exhausted, offering his body freely to the biting insects in exchange for the occasional blessed kiss of a breeze.

It hadn’t been the best night’s sleep, but it surely hadn’t deserved to end so suddenly. Now this human had gotten the drop on him, which was embarrassing as much as it was perilous. And here Tagen was, still in his loin-guard.

The human wasn’t paying any overt attention to him, although it had clearly seen him and was coming down the sloping hill toward him. It was dressed in a uniform of some sort, brown as mud, with short sleeves that showed off grotesquely-haired arms. The human’s gaze was occupied by a pad of papers in its hand. It was scratching at them with a stylus, writing as it approached, and speaking in a relaxed, easy-going manner.

“S’far as I know, it’s still legal to run around the woods in your underoos, but there will be a fairly hefty price for your campfire, which you cannot help but have noticed is illegal and has been illegal since the drought laid on. Son, I hate like hell to have you start your hangover on a low note like this, but you are going to have to pack up and come with me back to the ranger station. If you don’t, you are going to be under arrest.”

Tagen peered closely at the human’s lips, as though he could see the meaning of the words better if he saw how they were made. It was N’Glish, that much he recognized. But apart from a very few individual words, he had no idea what was being said and no way to form context enough to guess.

“You have the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney, if it comes to that, since it’s your right to take this citation to court, but with the fire danger recently, I should warn you that the local judges have been known to slap a few asses in jail. So be a sport, pay up, and don’t make a hassle. You can’t win. Just grab your gear and we’ll make this as painless as possible.”

“Hail,” Tagen said tentatively.

The human looked up for the first time, one eyebrow raised. “Hail?”

Something in the human’s tone told Tagen that he hadn’t used the right word. He tried to think what other greeting might suffice. The slaves he’d encountered in the past…well, there was very little in the way of niceties. The language discs he’d studied on the way to Earth had surely told him one or two, but he’d been paying far greater attention to translating more important phrases, like ‘Take me to your planet’s security array’, and ‘Have you seen the prisoner I am seeking’? or even ‘Where is the privy’?

The human was frowning at him. Tagen switched to Panyol, with which he had greater confidence. “
Hola. Mi nombre Tagen Pahnee. Soy un oficial de la ley
.”

“
No habla espanyol
, Paco,” the human said, still frowning. “This here’s—What the hell?” Its gaze had dropped to Tagen’s feet.

Tagen was beginning to feel control of this situation slipping away. He held out his empty hands and began guardedly to rise. “All is well,” he said, picking his words carefully and with great difficulty. “I mean you no harm.”

“Stay where you are!” The human’s voice was tight, frightened but admirably determined to face off. Humans were like that. It made them, for all their foibles, very dangerous. “Don’t you move a step or I’ll shoot you where you stand!”

“I mean you no harm,” Tagen said again. His palms were itching, wanting the weight of his gun. The human’s eyes were wild with fear. “I am come to Earth seeking—”

That was as far as Tagen got. The human dropped its papers and reached for its belt.

Tagen didn’t think. He scarcely felt himself move. He dove and snatched his plasma gun from the belt beneath his cast-off jacket. He had it aimed and fired before the human even drew its weapon.

The plasma hit the human square in the chest and ate rapidly through its target, stealing the breath the human drew to scream as it burned out the human’s lungs. Its heart was gone, but the body took three brutal seconds to die while the plasma finished neutralizing itself on tissue. A small wind chose that moment to come down off the slopes, setting the high branches to muttering. It also blew away the smoke that filled the human’s chest cavity, bringing Tagen the scent of charred meat as well as the sight of trees through the human’s torso. The human staggered, spitting foam in silence, and then dropped facedown, lifeless. It landed in a thorn bush. Vines buckled up through the hole Tagen had put in it, catching in the shirt on the human’s back. He could still hear sizzling.

Tagen stood up slowly, his gun still aimed, tracking the corpse mechanically. His heart was racing, his mouth was dry. He could not take his eyes from that blackened ring that he had made of the human’s torso.