Reunion (17 page)

As he made the suggestion, he concentrated as hard as he could. You
have
to let me go, he thought. You
need
to let me go. There are a thousand reasons why you
should
let me go. So—let me go
now.
He had never tried projecting persuasion on a nonhuman. Whether his talent was functioning or not, he had no way of telling. The response from the AAnn, at least, was unequivocal. His mental straining had no effect on them whatsoever. Perhaps, he mused wryly, he would have had better luck if one of them had been searching for love.

More teeth-clicking as the female replied. “We may not be ssoldierss, but we know our duty. You thoughtfully reminded uss of it when we gave you water. You will remain here until the appropriate military repressentativess come to remove you from our pressence.”

“And you will do sso quietly.” The male brushed a clawed finger across the face of the unit that monitored the explosive collar. Flinx tried to hide his unease. The AAnn was elderly. If its hand accidentally stroked the wrong control the wrong way . . .

“I have no weapons,” he lied. “I won’t make any trouble.”

“No.” The male spoke with confidence as he turned to leave. “You will not.”

They continued to give him water from what was evidently either a distiller or abundant storage, simultaneously curious about and repelled by his ability to process such copious amounts of the liquid. Following an exchange of questions and answers, food that was suitable for human ingestion was also found and provided. Though palatable, it was something less than tasty. The alien nutrients did serve to rapidly restore his physical strength, however. With renewed energy came renewed confidence.

He knew that he had to leave before the military arrived to claim him. Once in their custody his opportunities for maintaining his independence would be considerably diminished. Furthermore, someone might recognize the Alaspinian minidrag riding on his shoulder as something other than a thoroughly benign pet.

He would wait until they slept, free himself, appropriate the largest container of water he could easily carry together with some food, and go. The chaotic maze that was the anomalous surface of the ancient transmitter provided plenty of places in which to hide. While avoiding the attentions of a curious military, he could continue to seek the presumably well-camouflaged landing party from the
Crotase.

Meanwhile, the blistering Pyrassisian sun was still high, and the two scientists were intent upon their daily tasks. Secured to a heavy supply container, unable to move, with the ever-present threat of the explosive collar rubbing against the back of his neck, he crossed his arms over his chest, closed his eyes, and tried to get some sleep.

Chapter 11

When he finally awoke, it was dark save for the light from Pyrassis’s two sizable moons. The wan, ethereal glow spilled into the room through a pair of slitted, ground-level observation ports. Neither the darkness nor the moonlight was what had awakened him, however. It was Pip. She was astir and fully alert, triangular emerald-green head held high, wings half unfurled ready to carry her aloft. Her small, bright eyes were focused on shadowed movement. Not AAnn, but something else with legs. Lots of legs. Too many legs.

No, they weren’t legs, an unmoving Flinx decided as their serpentine owner continued to emerge from beneath the floor. More like fins, stiff paddlelike appendages that had evolved to propel the creature through sand instead of across it. Its long, narrow snout had no visible teeth. In their place writhed a quartet of questing, exploring tongues. Each slim protuberance was about a meter in length, or at least the portion that the creature chose to expose was that long. Every one of the four appendages tapered to a point. In contrast to the invader’s mottled yellow-and-black epidermis, the internal appendages were tinted a striking crimson. They flicked rapidly in and out of the eyeless snout, sampling their surroundings. The hole or burrow from which it continued to emerge, he noted, had been bored through sand, avoiding the hard black ribbed material of which the suspect transmitter was composed.

Flinx remained calm, telling himself that this visitor from the cooler subterranean regions was only curious. Other than its size, it did not appear threatening. As he watched it slither across the floor, its multiple tongues nuzzling containers and packages, furniture and scientific supplies, his attention was drawn back to the hole in the ground. A low ridge of sandy soil had formed a ring around the opening from which the visitor was emerging. And emerging, and continuing to emerge.

How long
was
the creature, anyway?

The languidly rising cable of blood and flesh continued to issue from its eruptive burrow until the seated and much smaller inhabitant of the storage chamber decided that it might be time to put his carefully considered plans aside and get the hell out of there. Concentrating his thoughts, focusing his emotions, he launched Pip from his shoulder. Taking to the air, she hovered expectantly in front of him. Flinx was both relieved and pleased to note that the steady thrum of her wings did not distract the intruder from its ongoing inspection of the room’s contents.

Caressing his explosive collar with the fingers of one hand, he gestured expressively with the other. As a child on Moth, he had often amused himself by teaching his slender winged companion to perform a number of simple tricks. What he was striving to have her do now might not be classed by others as a trick, and was not particularly simple. It was also potentially dangerous.

Pip recognized the tell-tale gesture as well as the position of her companion’s fingers. Darting forward, she positioned herself carefully, took precise aim, and from the single forward-facing fleshy ridge that formed a narrowing tube on the underside of her upper jaw, dribbled a few drops of minidrag venom on the indicated place on the band that encircled Flinx’s throat. Instantly the flexible, machine-woven alien material began to sizzle. Turning his head away from the rising wisp of toxic fumes, Flinx waited for several minutes. No stranger to the potent effects of the flying snake’s poison, experience allowed him to estimate the speed of the advancing decay. Still, when he reached up to take hold of opposite sides of the collar with both hands, he was careful to keep his fingers away from the spot where Pip had drooled.

He did not have to pull very hard. In addition to being a powerful neurotoxin, the minidrag’s venom was also highly corrosive. The collar broke apart easily in his fingers. Inspecting the remains, he saw that it had been eaten almost completely through. There had been some risk of the caustic liquid activating the powdered explosive that was integrated into the material, but he felt the odds to be in his favor. In order to render it safe and easy to handle, such lethal material was usually quite stable until precisely ignited—in this case by a remote electronic signal. Had he guessed wrong, he would not have had time to realize his mistake.

Shorn of the deadly neckpiece, he was free to leave. Or would be, as soon as the sinuous visitor from the Pyrassisian underworld finished its inspection of the storage room and returned to its hole. Trying to keep as much distance between himself and the probing, multitongued head as possible, and having finally freed himself, he rose and began to work his way around the back of the room. Bulky intruder notwithstanding, he would soon have a clear path to the doorway.

That portal promptly and unexpectedly popped open wide. Light poured into the room, silhouetting a pair of AAnn figures. The opening of the door was punctuated by a florid hissing of syllables immediately recognizable as an AAnn curse of first-degree consternation.

The invading echinoderm’s front end whipped around in response to the infringing illumination. A fifth appendage, narrow and tubular, emerged from the midst of the multiple tongues as the creature’s entire upper length suddenly inflated. The pistol that flared in the intermittent darkness missed its target. The now frightened visitor did not.

From the central protuberance there issued a stream of gut-polished, fine-grained quartz sand no bigger in diameter than a pin. Sprayed at murderous velocity by air that was highly compressed within the whole of the intruder’s unseen length, the slender stream of sand cut through polymer containers, a metal tank, and eventually, the right leg of Tenukac LLBYYLL. The AAnn xenologist hissed sharply at the searing pain. As he fell, he managed to fire his weapon again. His aim was no better the second time, and the shot struck only the ground, penetrating the ancient hard black material of the transmitter. As he struck the unyielding surface he lost his grip on the pistol. It flew from his fingers to bounce once before skidding out of sight beneath a massive ceramic container.

Faltering in the doorway, his mate Nennasu BDESSLL struggled to train her own gun on the writhing, convulsing intruder. A muscular coil whipped around her waist and knocked the weapon from her clawed fingers. While Tenukac struggled to stanch the flow of blood from the hole that went all the way through his leg, his now helpless mate was elevated into the air and brought slowly toward the head of the curious creature. A second set of tongues appeared inside the first layer. Smaller than the others, they were black instead of bright red, lined with tiny, backward-facing hooks, and framed a dark, efficient-looking gullet.

Between the agitated, frantic hisses of the two AAnn, the thrashing of the visitor’s coils, and the hum of Pip’s wings, the noise in the enclosed space was terrific. The female xenologist’s weapon lay on the floor where she had dropped it. Hoping that the invader, its truly terrifying nature now fully revealed, could concentrate on only one potential prey at a time, Flinx dove forward, snatched up the fallen gun, rolled, took aim in the light pouring through the now vacant doorway, and fired. It was a very unpretentious weapon, and he was concerned even as he activated the firing mechanism if it would have much effect on so substantial an adversary. He needn’t have worried.

Tongues and hook-lined tendrils flew in all directions as the head blew apart, splattering the floor, the stacked supplies, a good part of the room, and its remaining intact occupants with greenish red blood, Pyrassisian flesh, and bits of fractionated organs. A convulsing coil caught Flinx and knocked him to the ground, but he held onto the weapon. It would be another ten minutes before the rest of the attenuated organism would give a final, last twitch.

The female rushed to attend to her mate’s injury. Neither of them paid much attention to their former prisoner, being wholly engaged in trying to stanch the flow of blood from the puncture in his leg. Flinx took the opportunity to examine the nearby metal container that had been pierced as cleanly as if with a laser by the fine stream of sand ejected by the now expired trespasser. Some kind of highly developed giant nematode or land-based echinoderm, he decided as he turned to examine the motionless carcass. Evolved into an efficient killer capable of slicing apart any enemy or prey by employing the most common component of its environment—common, everyday, ordinarily harmless sand.

By now the two AAnn had had enough time to realize that the human had not only saved their lives, but that the collar that had heretofore restrained his movements no longer hung around his neck. The female straightened.

“Truly, we are prepared to die. More than mosst, I believe, having sspent sso much time in thiss place. Allow uss if you will a few momentss to exchange our death chantss. We have been complementary for an honorable time, and our ancesstral liness require implementation of the formality before we die.”

Offended as well as tired, Flinx gestured absently with the weapon. The AAnn were alien in more than shape—truly. “No death chants. I didn’t shoot this thing just to end up killing you myself.”

“You killed it to ssave yoursself.” The female watched him intently out of slitted, reptilian eyes.

“That too,” Flinx readily admitted. “If your conditioned natures simply can’t countenance an act of altruism on the part of a human, then accept instead the excuse that I need your help.”

His face contorted in pain, the male used his tail to lift himself into a shaky squatting position. “That we can believe. You have obvioussly sstrayed much too far from your camp, and it iss only through our good gracess that you are sstill alive.” It was a pithy summation of the AAnn xenologist’s perceived reality, coupled with an indirect plea for the human who was now in control of the situation to spare their lives. It also conveniently ignored the fact that they were in the process of turning him over to the local military authorities and had threatened to shoot him dead if he made the slightest wrong move.

Though their reasonable assumption that he had come from a camp was entirely wrong, Flinx chose not to enlighten them. Let them think that he had a real base of operations, shared perhaps with companions who were searching for him even now. As he considered how best to proceed, he noticed that the female’s tail was probing beneath the edge of a massive container—where her mate’s weapon had slid. The corners of his mouth turning up ever so slightly, he gestured with the gun he held and hissed a caution. The full length of the xenologist’s tail immediately snapped back into view.

“It iss eassy to ssee why you were chossen to come and study here.” Unable to divert the human’s attention long enough to retrieve the second gun, the elderly female knelt to examine the new skin that was forming atop her mate’s wound. “You sspeak the language of Empire almosst as if you had a proper tongue in your head.” By way of emphasis, her own flicked in his direction. Pip reacted with a fluttering of wings, and Flinx had to calm her with several strokes of his free hand.

The AAnn lingua, so important in speech for lengthening syllables, was at once narrower and five times longer than that of any human, rendering Flinx’s articulate approximation of the reptiloids’ speech even more admirable. Over the years, he had learned to compensate for his shorter tongue by employing excellent breath control.

Glancing up from her work, the female gestured with third-degree interest at where the two halves of the bisected collar lay on the floor. “How did you get out of that?” Unaware that the explanation she sought was presently examining the dead body of the intruder worm, neither of his former captors paid any but cursory attention to Pip.

“Bit through it,” Flinx responded without hesitation.

The AAnn exchanged a glance before the female replied. “Not with thosse pitiful calcified chipss you call teeth.” She hissed disparagingly. The AAnn, Flinx knew, were famed for their skill at organization, their technical expertise, and their rigid, tightly knit society based on the structure of the extended family and a contemporary derivative of ancient reptilian nobility. They most assuredly were not noted for their tactfulness.

“I’ll need water and a suitable container in which to carry it, some food, and new clothing. Then I’ll leave you.”

The female rendered a gesture of third-degree animosity. “We have little enough here to provide for oursselvess, and need all that we have to facilitate our work. We have toiled too long and too hard on thiss project to turn over our preciouss ssuppliess to a roving human!”

Flinx knew that such words and gestures were for show, part of the elaborate ritual of which the AAnn were so fond. The two scientists were in no position to bargain—or to object. But so long as it would facilitate his departure, he was content to play the role. He waved the gun, deliberately exaggerating the gesture.

“If you don’t give me what I need, I’ll shoot you both and take it anyway.”

“Then as you are in possession of the only weapon, we have no choice but to acquiessce to your demandss.” Both AAnn bowed and gestured ceremoniously.

They would have given him the supplies anyway, he knew, but having formally registered a semblance of defiance, they felt better about having to do so. The male abruptly straightened to his full height, causing Flinx’s fingers to tighten on the pistol’s double trigger. Between his injured leg and his age Tenukac did not pose much of a threat to the human and the flying snake, but Flinx was wary all the same.

The AAnn was not even looking at the liberated prisoner, however. His gaze had been caught by something on the floor behind Flinx. Realizing it might be a simple ruse, Flinx chanced only a quick glance back and down. What he saw nearly made him forget about the two AAnn.

A small section of sand-flecked black flooring where the male’s second shot had gone astray was alive with flickering light. The white sparks raced through the material in utter silence, providing enough subdued illumination to read by.

“What’s this?” he heard himself murmuring as he stared at the shifting fragment of entombed dazzle.