IN NATURA: a science fiction novel (ARZAT SERIES Book 2) (6 page)

  I can take him,
he thought, carefully blocking so that the Arzat leader would not hear it. Baa glanced at the other hunters.
Perhaps I will have help. Great Creator, please let me have help.

  Za’at looked down at Baa and snatched the bone from his hand. He tossed it into the fire where Ack’s remains were still smoldering and glared at the defiant Arzat.

  “Did you not hear me, Baa? Go with Ata and . . .”

  Baa sprang from his crouching position and threw his entire body weight at Za’at, pushing the Arzat leader with all of his strength toward the fire. Za’at, despite his usual wariness, was caught off guard and struggled to hold his balance.

  Baa was slightly larger than Za’at and younger. He could feel Baa trying to get his hands completely around his neck as Baa pushed him toward the flames. But Za’at was highly skilled in hand-to-hand combat, and when he felt the force of Baa succeeding against him, he decided to use it to his advantage. Za’at broke Baa’s hold and ducked, sending Baa over his own body in an uncontrolled stumble toward the fire.

  Baa finally regained his footing just as he was about to step into the embers and leapt completely over them instead, landing easily on the other side with both feet firmly planted. He immediately spun and hissed, looking back across the fire at Za’at who stood on the other side laughing.

  The other hunters quietly moved far to the side, well away from the skirmish and out of harm’s way, anxiously watching the sudden conflict unfold.

  “Baa, you are just a child,” Za’at said, chiding him, furious with himself for even momentarily letting his guard down. “Give this up before you get hurt. Go with Ata as I have said.”

  Za’at’s blood was boiling and he wanted to kill Baa, but he still had enough sense to know that the others could turn on him as well at any moment and that Baa was well liked by all of them.
Better to talk Baa into submission,
he thought,
or force him into it.
If necessary, Za’at was ready to do the easier and probably far safer thing—to simply leap over the fire and kill him.

  “I am prepared to forget your indiscretion if you go now, Baa. But if you do not, I shall be forced to walk over there and put you down like the infant that you are.”

  Baa was livid, but there was a part of him that suddenly wished he had never begun this foolishness. 
Challenge Za’at? One of the strongest and most experienced hunters?
Now, it was too late. Baa knew he had fully committed himself, and his Arzat blood was boiling. Were he to submit to Za’at now, he would never live it down. The stories of how he had bowed like a female to Za’at’s authority would be told over and over in the Arzat caves. Why, he would have to banish himself from shame. Were Za’at to report him to the Elders, he would likely be banished or killed anyway.
I would rather die,
he thought.

  Across the flames, he could see the other hunters from the corner of his eyes. Obviously, they were going to be of no help. He had trapped himself. Baa knew he was on own. He looked at the firelight reflecting in Za’at’s eyes, snarled, and leapt back over, even more determined to put the more senior Arzat in his place and prove himself in front of his peers. Whatever happened in the next few moments, either he or Za’at would be dead.

  Za’at was ready this time. He took a quick step to the side and brought the back of his arm down forcefully over Baa’s neck as the younger Arzat passed him. Baa stumbled and hit the ground, barely breaking his own fall in the process, his neck and head throbbing from Za’at’s blow.

  Baa rolled up and charged, but again, Za’at managed to strike him with another severe blow as he easily sidestepped the younger Arzat, playing with him—the senior Arzat clearly far more skilled in combat.

  Baa slipped and fell to the ground, but this time, he felt the full weight of Za’at come down on his back. Before he knew what had happened, Za’at had him pinned to the ground, with one of Baa’s arms twisted painfully behind his back. Za’at used his free hand to force Baa’s face and neck into the dirt.

  “Submit or die, Baa,” Za’at said calmly, barely out of breath.

  Baa fought for air, his mouth and nose getting the full force of the dusty earth to which Za’at had him pinned.

  “Submit or die now, Baa,” Za’at said to him again, shoving Baa’s face harder into the earth. “The choice is yours.”

  Baa knew that Za’at would kill him if he did not surrender. Clearly, there was no help coming from the other hunters.
I should let him kill me for my foolishness,
he thought, completely defeated. Finally, as Baa felt the pressure on his neck increasing to the breaking point, he yielded.

  “Za’at, son of Qua. I submit! I submit!” he cried out.

  Za’at spoke back to Baa, using only his mind and blocking so the others could not hear. “Do you submit freely? Or will you attack me again the minute I let you up and turn my back?”

  “I submit freely, Za’at,” Baa said, struggling to answer even with his mind under the pressure of Za’at’s viscous hold.

  “If you ever challenge me again Baa, or resist my instruction, I will kill you instantly. Do you understand?” Za’at said, applying just a bit more pressure.

  “Yes, Za’at! Yes!”

  Za’at gradually let up on Baa’s neck and then stood over him, eyeballing the rest of the hunters, looking for any other potential traitors.

  “It is fortunate for you that I will need everyone’s hands to carry our kills back to the caves or I would be done with you now, Baa,” he said aloud for everyone’s benefit. “I will decide when we get back to the caves whether or not to report your behavior to the Elders. Now, get up and gather your things. We are going home.”

  Somewhere, very close by, one of the fanged beasts howled. The scales on the back of Za’at’s neck rose, and he suddenly remembered the female. He looked over to the area where
uman
had been sitting. She was gone.

CHAPTER 8

MIND READER

The four of them were loaded up with as much gear as they could reasonably carry. For the Arzats, that meant three times as much as their human counterparts. A first aid kit—the contents of which were highly in question—blankets, sleeping bags, some cooking utensils, and extra clothing had all been stuffed into four large backpacks. Additional bags contained two high-powered rifles, a shotgun, two handguns, some ammunition, and several knives.

  Tom was delighted. Unlike their food supplies, most of the equipment he had stashed in the second hermetic safe prior to their long sleep had miraculously survived. Anything metal, or a form of synthetic seemed to have remained mostly intact.
It was a stroke of luck that we used this safe for the guns and other supplies,
he thought.

  Most of all, he was happy about the guns. This would give them a distinct advantage in survival once they reached the outside, assuming there was anything alive that could threaten them, but the weapons and the ammunition were particularly heavy, so he had split his small arsenal into two bags and given the much heavier one to Mot to carry.

  It had taken them over an hour to find an exit, largely because the Arzats had been unclear about what exactly they had been looking for. A particular door of some sort, Tom the Pilot had explained, but there were many in the ARC that fit his description. Finally, in the near dark and working from his memory of the huge underground complex, Tom located one of the main elevator landing areas. Beside it was an emergency exit that he thought would never actually be used.
Hell,
he thought,
I never really thought that this
facility
would actually be used!

  “It won’t budge Alex,” Tom said, as he strained with Mot, pushing on the exit door.

  “Why won’t the damn thing open, Tom?” Alex asked.

  Tom backed off and spent some time examining it in the torchlight.

  “I forgot. This thing is designed to unlock electronically. It looks like it has a battery backup, but the power failure must have drained it,” Tom said, continuing to stare at the bulky door and the large striker bar that crossed the center of it. Tom and Mot had been able to get the bar to depress, but the lock wouldn’t move.

  “Tom,” Alex said, the hair rising on the back of her neck, “you mean to tell me you guys built these emergency exits with no manual override?”

  Since Tom had been the lead construction engineer for this entire ARC project, Alex couldn’t imagine that he would have made what was now such an obvious blunder.

  “Sorry Alex, but I didn’t design
every
component, and I don’t exactly think that anyone really expected these things to last for eight thousand years,” he answered a little too sarcastically. “Frankly, I’m amazed that the friggin door is still even here! But, yes, I am just as surprised as you.”

  He and Mot both gave the door another try together to no avail. Tom backed away and put his hands to his knees, breathing hard from the effort. The large Arzat was unfazed.

  “Some emergency exit, huh?” he said to Mot, still gasping. “Batter was obviously more concerned about keeping people
in
rather than letting them
out
.”

  “Well, I doubt Batter had anything to do with the design of these doors either, Tom,” Alex said defensively.

  Batter had been Tom’s governmental boss and had been in charge of overseeing the construction of all four ARCs. Just before the asteroid strike, he had allowed Tom, Alex, and the two Arzats to leave the Nevada ARC where he had essentially been holding them captive. Tom had flown them to Utah in a helicopter that Batter had provided and the four of them had made it only minutes before impact. Ironically, the asteroid’s track had been directly on course with the Nevada site—a fact known only to Batter at the time—and it was presumably destroyed.

  “That may be true, Alex, but I am telling you, he had a photographic memory and knew more about the project than I did, and
I’m
the one who built it! Let me just think for a minute.”

  Tom squatted, regaining his breath, and stared at the electronic keypad. The diodes that should have been lit stared blankly back at him.
It was really pretty simple,
he thought. Without power they were fucked. He started thinking about how long it might take to dig or cut their way through the four-inch-steel door.

  While Tom the Pilot was thinking, Mot used the opportunity to light a new torch from one that was almost spent.

  “What about the
com-pu-ter
?” Ara finally asked, aware from Tom’s thoughts that the human’s strange and baffling electrical power was the problem. “I saw lights there. Perhaps . . .”

  Tom and Alex looked at her, astonished.

  “Now, why in the hell didn’t I think of that?” Tom said, and gave Alex a look. “Come on Mot. Let’s go see if we can steal a battery from the cryo lab that still has some life left in it.” He grabbed one of the unlit torches, touched it to Mot’s, and handed it to Alex so she and Ara wouldn’t be left in the dark. “Ladies, we’ll be right back.”

  Tom began to head back to the cryogenic unit with Mot, but he suddenly turned and stopped. “And Alex . . . for Christ’s sake, please don’t wander off anywhere.”

* * *

“He needs to eat,” Ara said to Alex, referring to Mot, as they watched the light from Tom’s torch fade.

  “I know, I know—we
all
do Ara,” Alex replied, suddenly feeling hungry herself.

  Alex was fully aware of the Arzat’s almost insatiable appetites when active. If food was scarce, they could apparently place themselves into a kind of cold-blooded semi-hibernation and go for long periods without eating. When they were moving, however, the situation was reversed. She recalled again that Mot had even considered eating
her
when they had first encountered each other—so strong was his appetite when he had awoken from his original sixty-five-million-year nap.

  Yes, Mot was surely ravenous,
Alex thought,
but it might be even worse for Ara now that she was about to bear a child.

  “How are
you
doing Ara?”

  “It is not so bad for me,” the female Arzat said, trying to ignore the rather delicious smell coming from the human female who had asked the question.

  “What about your child? Can you tell if . . . ?”

  Alex was suddenly worried the cryo might have had some adverse effect on Ara’s pregnancy. She also thought she had become pregnant herself just before they had entered the cryogenic units—so she was asking as much for herself as Ara.

  “The child is still with me, Alex,” Ara said. “And yours is with you as well. Can you not hear it?”

  You’re reading my mind again Ara,
thought Alex.

  “Yes,” Ara said, her eyes dilating more open in the light of the failing torch. Ara bent down and picked up another fresh torch and lit it from the one Alex had been holding. “There . . . better . . . yes?”

  “Yes,” Alex replied—yes, yes, yes! Alex was really no longer bothered about Ara’s ability to read her own thoughts. At the moment, she was so delighted with Ara’s proclamation that she could barely think. Besides, the Arzat
had
taught her how to very effectively block if she chose to—so it was Alex’s problem now if Ara was trespassing in her head.

  “So, you can actually hear it, Ara?”

  “My child? Well, it is certainly not speaking yet, but yes, I am now aware of its mind becoming whole.”

  “That’s amazing,” Alex said. “How can you tell with me? Can you hear mine as well?”

  “That is a connection that only happens between the child and its mother until birth, Alex. With you, it is simply a matter of your scent. You smell . . . how can I say this? Very much with child.”

  “Huh,” Alex said, even more astonished, and wishing she could have the same sort of connection.

  “It is early, Alex. Perhaps you will.”

  Ara looked up. She sensed Tom and Mot returning.

  Tom flashed a smile at Alex and held up a battery pack and some tools.

  “Mot, can you hold the torch for me?” Tom asked, as he approached the exit.

  They all watched as he used a screwdriver to deftly remove the cover from the locking mechanism. He attached two wires to the battery and then connected them to two points on the exposed internals of the lock. Lights immediately began to flash.

  “Excellent,” Tom said, backing away. “That—just in itself—is a pure miracle,” he added, pointing at the lights.

  “Now all we need are the codes,” Alex said.

  Tom’s face fell. “Shit, Alex. I have no idea what I did with them! I remember Batter giving them to me, but . . .”

  “Tom, didn’t you build this friggin place?” Alex said, frustrated again.

  “Yes, Alex,” Tom replied, wearily, “but even I wasn’t privy to all of the codes. I doubt if I’d remember them if I were. Batter gave me a piece of paper when we left Nevada. That might have had the codes on it. Hell, now that I think about it, I probably left them in the helicopter.”

  “Pilot Tom?” Ara asked.

  “Yes, Ara?”

  “Did you look at these ‘codes’ that the human Batter gave you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m sorry. Did you look at the . . . paper? Did you . . . study it?

  Tom thought for a moment. “I think I probably glanced at them Ara—but I don’t remember what they were. I was more focused on getting that copter in the air. There were several. One was for the main doors. Some were probably for the exits. There were a bunch of them. Why?”

  Ara looked over at Alex. She knew how much Alex frowned upon mind reading.

  “With your permission, Tom, perhaps I can look into your mind for the answer.”

  “That’s fine Ara,” Tom said doubtfully, “but I swear, I really have no recollection of what was on that paper.”

  “Might as well let her try, Tom,” Alex said, looking into the female Arzat’s eyes.

  Alex was aware that anything Tom had ever done in his life—including the most intimate details of their relationship—would probably be on full display to the female Arzat, but they needed to get the codes. She was way past amazed at the Arzats’ capabilities when they put their minds to something. Clearly, telepathy aside, their intelligence level was a least as high as any human’s if not higher. Had the K-T asteroid not wiped out their world, she shuddered to think about how advanced the Arzat civilization might have eventually become.

  “Okay, let’s give it a shot,” Tom said, shrugging his shoulders. “I guess anything would be better than having to try to dig our way out of here. What do I need to do?”

  Ara slowly approached Tom and looked directly into his eyes. She raised her hand slowly, as if asking permission, and placed it on the side of his head.

  “This will make it easier for me,” she said to him, gently applying pressure.

  Tom felt a tingling sensation in his head that was not unpleasant in the least.

  “What is this—this ‘thing’ in your mind you seek?” Ara asked Tom.

  “It was a note Batter handed me just before we left, Ara.”

  “I am sorry. Can you please describe this thing you call a ‘note’?”

  “A piece of paper with writing,” Tom said, using his hands to indicate size. He could see that the Arzat still looked confused. “White,” he added, “with words and numbers written on it. Really, Ara, I remember looking at it, but I don’t remember anything specific other than that.”

  “Ah,” Ara said, “then it will be there, Tom Pilot. The mind is an amazing thing. It holds much more than one would think. Most of our entire Arzat culture and history is carried only in our heads.” She closed her eyes and concentrated, flashing through Tom’s most recent memories.

  Eventually, she could see Tom walking across the black man-made desert and having a conversation with the human Batter just before he climbed into the giant flying machine that had brought the four of them to the ARC. Suddenly, she found what she had been searching for—a small white sheet with the curious language markings of the humans. The Pilot had been looking at it right before they had left the ground. Ara froze on that memory, trying to hold it in place in her own mind so that Tom could clearly see it in his own. To her, the written symbols were gibberish.

  “Try now, Tom, son of Richard—try to see this thing you call a ‘note’.”

  Tom closed his eyes and concentrated. There, like a vivid dream—before him in his mind—was a clear recollection of the paper Batter had handed him. He could see it as plainly as if it were a picture. If he were to try, he thought he would be able to see Batter actually handing it to him.

  “Alex, go to the door,” Tom said, afraid to open his eyes.

  Alex moved to the keypad, concentrating on Tom and Ara—not knowing what to expect. The pad was set up exactly like a phone, with the letters corresponding to the numbers in the same way.