The Druid Gene (25 page)

D
arcy woke
at first light on the fourth day with a leaden feeling in the pit of her stomach. Raub had either started after her last night when the three full days had technically passed, or he’d given her an additional grace period and was under way this morning. She couldn’t know for sure.

What she did know was that he had more stamina, a longer stride, and more muscle mass than she did. He always caught up with her quickly during their VR scenarios. She knew from sparring with him in the dark that his senses were more extensive, and he might have traveled all night without stopping for sleep. He could easily be halfway to her location by now. He might catch up to her at any point today or tomorrow, and she’d be forced to fight him wherever she was.

She worried her chapped upper lip with her teeth. It might be wisest to seek a better place to have that confrontation, rather than to push on fruitlessly toward the mining colony. It could be advantageous to learn the lay of the land and leave some things in place to give her a tactical advantage, since he had the upper hand, physically, between the two of them.

Except that she couldn’t stand the thought of biding her time and waiting for him. It felt like giving up hope that she’d possibly find sanctuary with the belastoise. If he stopped to rest she might have time to reach the mining colony.

At any rate, hiding, even with her camouflaging ability, wouldn’t help her. Not with him. His sense of smell was far more acute than a human’s. She didn’t know how to get around that fundamental fact.

She decided to move on and keep on the lookout for someplace that would be more advantageous for a fight. Here on the narrow trail it was too closed in. He could trap her too easily. She wanted to face him in a place where she had somewhere to go if she needed to run, but close enough to the forest that she could melt away and regroup using her camouflage if necessary.

She crawled out from the nest she’d made under a dense, thorny bush with the impervious blanket wrapped around her, the same way she’d crawled into the tight space the night before. It hadn’t kept the thorns from poking her, but it had kept them from making direct contact. The night had been long and uncomfortable. She hadn’t slept nearly as much as she’d wanted to. Worry had a tendency to do that to her.

She sat down on the trail to quickly devour an entire nutrition bar, following it with a swig of water. She was so hungry it seemed to taste much better this time. She had to remember to eat more.

Her failure to eat enough might have slowed her down some and led to some loss of muscle mass. That was going to change, starting now. If she felt the slightest hunger pang, she would eat an entire bar. When he caught up to her, she needed to be in the best shape possible.

The pack wasn’t appreciably lighter because she hadn’t eaten much during the first three days. She shoved the blanket into it along with a sharp-edged flat rock she’d found that she was planning to use today if she found a good place.

She couldn’t see much of the sky but it must have been cloudy. The forest seemed darker, more sinister, and the light filtering in cast long, bluish shadows. She felt very alone.

Several hours later she came upon a rotting log lying across the trail. The middle was worn down to bare, shiny wood, probably from the spiders crawling over it. She decided to stop and make a second trap.

She’d gathered an armful of straight, stout sticks as she trotted along. Now she sat down on the far side of the log and carved both ends of every one of them down to sharp points with her knife. She laid them in a pile nearby and took the rock that she’d found the day before out of her pack. It was rounded and had one thin, curved end with a hint of concavity. The other end was a bit thicker. She hoped it would work well as a shovel.

She experimented with stepping over the log to see where her foot would naturally hit on the far side. She decided on the most likely spot, got down on her knees with the stone, and began to pound, scrape, and scoop. It took longer than she’d hoped. The topmost layers of soil were dry and friable, but underneath they were hard packed and dense like clay. Soon she was coated in dirt from head to toe but had managed to create a hole roughly ten inches in diameter and well over a foot deep.

Some of the soil she pushed up underneath the log, where it wouldn’t be visible. The rest she scooped onto her blanket and carried away to dump farther down the trail, where Raub wouldn’t see it until after he’d gone past this spot. The hardest part was shoving the sharpened sticks firmly into the walls of the pit in two concentric circles so that they angled slightly down, leaving only a small opening in the center. The soil was hard and each stick was a struggle. She finished up with bloody hands.

She took her sharp stone and carefully scraped sheets of fuzzy orange moss off of trees nearby, layered them over the hole, then covered them with loose dirt to camouflage the trap further. She walked back down the path the way she’d come, smoothing out all of the footprints and other disturbances she’d made. She put her feet in two steps left in the dust from her approach and took off.

When she got back to the log she carefully avoided her trap, which she couldn’t see from that side. She cleaned up the rest of the area until it was pristine and took off at a run.

This time she didn’t feel nearly as guilty.

T
he Lovek emerged
from the tern and breathed deeply. A slow smile curled his lip. This world’s atmosphere was atypically oxygen rich, which would enhance his performance as well as the gildrut’s and was already imbuing him with a mild sense of euphoria. It also meant that the planet harbored megafauna in the form of insects and arthropods which, despite what one might expect if exposed only to the effete hymenoptera, could be quite ferocious.

It was a fantasy made reality, everything he’d ever desired.

He locked his prisoners inside. He could have disposed of them, but he might yet need them to motivate the girl, and at any rate the sauria and baryana were both still valuable and the hymenoptera was half dead.

When Hain brought the
Vermachten
into orbit, he’d have the two prisoners put back in the general population, separated from each other now that he knew of their filial affection. He might have to punish the baryana for poisoning one of his best trading partners. Or perhaps he’d just eat the slug if he could find someone to prepare it properly. Their flesh was considered a gourmand’s delight. That would be adequate compensation for the loss of income. The druska should have known he’d overhear it prattling about the murder.

He began the movements of the Sahventahl as the sun lightened the sky. He was in no rush. He was going to savor every moment of this undertaking. There was no better way to begin than with a limber body and a quiet mind. He reached out with all his senses, letting his subconscious drift while he gathered information with his body.

When he finished he had already picked up her scent, still lightly lingering in the environment. This world was very different from his homeworld. It was damp and green, brightly lit, and rife with a variety of odors, but he could filter them adequately and isolate the ones he wanted. He had developed that discipline over years of hunting. Now he would prove his worth and earn his place among his ancestors as a true kappyr, a predator of the highest order among the lovek.

She had followed the path the tern had taken in the crash landing, but in reverse. It was no coincidence that it led in the direction of the mining colony. So she didn’t necessarily believe the baryana’s warning. Savvy little bitch.

An excellent start.

He found her scent clinging to a primitive shelter and at the base of a tree some distance away. She’d crashed around without any care for hiding her trail. That disappointed him, but if she’d climbed the tree to scout the terrain, that was a good sign. If he happened to step on her tracks, his sensate feet could taste her signature, mixed with humus and rot and minerals.

And then he lost her trail, briefly. She’d tried to deceive him. He chuckled when he found her path again upon retracing his steps and circling a tree delicately laced with her scent. Here she’d felt some fear. It lingered in places, heavier and more cloying than the rest of her trail had been. Did she really think that tactics like this would throw him off? She’d have to do better than that.

Her efforts in the stream were more effective. It did take him some time to relocate her trail, but it was far from impossible and he was soon under way again, not stopping to eat or sleep. He carried only a self-regenerating water flask and a small communication device with which to signal Hain when this was finished. He could go weeks without food or more than minimal rest. That was what fat storage was for, after all.

He snarled with glee as he felt a trip wire against his shin, even as he dived for cover and one of her wooden spikes penetrated his shoulder, shoving itself still deeper as he hit the ground. He picked himself up and roared as he pulled it free, thin blue blood running in rivulets down his arm and torso.

He held the piece of wood in his hand and inspected her handiwork with the tree. Not bad. He had not anticipated this kind of cunning from her. It was a delightful surprise. He roared a laugh that made insects flee from the trees around him.

He tucked the bloody spike into a deep pocket on his thigh and moved on, a little more wary, shrugging his shoulder to keep his range of motion intact, relishing the pain. It would take far worse than this to stop him.

He was forced to reduce the speed of his pursuit when rain began to fall, adding to the complexity of the aromatic environment, but not by much. She’d picked a very dangerous route by following this spider trail. It was narrow and would offer her no shelter. It was practically a killing chute. Not to mention the hordes of venomous arthropods who used it frequently to forage and return with food for the spider queen and to tend the egg sacs upon her immense back.

In addition to the rain, the secondary sun was eclipsing the primary, which would dim daylight for several spins. It would also hinder communication due to solar flares and coronal mass ejections, common during eclipses because of gravitational fluctuations around the twin stars. This tended to wreak havoc on technology and bathed the planet in deadly ionizing radiation. The local flora and fauna had adapted to this level of radiation but the miners would have elaborate shielding against it, which was only feasible on a small scale, and even then only because of the rare and valuable ore they harvested. It was one of many reasons why this planet, in a galaxy with need of colonizable worlds, could never be a viable place to permanently settle.

By the time he felt his foot sink into her pit trap, his other leg was already raised to stride over the fallen log. He compensated by throwing his weight back to try to prevent his leg from being caught. He landed with his hip on top of the log, flailing as her spikes carved deeply into his calf despite his efforts. The wind was knocked out of him, and multiple tendons in his knee tore in the struggle.

He grunted, reached down and grasped the spikes that impaled his leg, and with considerable effort shoved them deeper into the walls of the pit so he could ease his leg out. He kept a wary eye on his surroundings. She could be lying in wait to ambush him here, or something else might be attracted to the scent of his blood and come looking for an easy meal. He was ready to fight if need be.

He couldn’t reach one of the spikes that impaled his calf near the ankle on the far side, so he pierced the soil with the stake that he’d kept in his pocket from her previous trap to dig it out, the whole time snarling curses. She was definitely more clever than he’d reckoned.

She wasn’t just a doe-eyed prey animal. She was wily and scheming in fascinating ways. She’d come from a cushy world without want, with plenty of fat rounding out her flesh, and yet she was driven to best him.

An arthropod scuttled out from the tree line. It stopped when it saw him. He continued to work at the soil with the stake. Another appeared and did the same. Then several more. He worked harder at digging his leg out.

Then there were dozens. They encircled him. He removed the knife from his pack, though he knew it would do little good.

They jumped on him all at once, biting and attempting to bind his limbs with sticky silk strings to prevent him from fighting back. He flung them off, tore them to pieces as he wrenched his leg free and rolled away, crushing a few of them with his body weight.

He roared. Blue blood and arthropod guts littered the soil all around him.

The bitch was better than he’d thought.

D
arcy was on edge
. Days had passed. She tried to stay calm but alert, to remain focused on her goal while maintaining vigilance, but inside she was panicking. The forest was closing in. She felt an urgency to get off the trail, and find, at minimum, something a little more open like the area where the tern had landed, but she had no idea where something like that was or how to find it.

She climbed another tree to see if the view from above would help and found that she was a lot closer to the mining colony than she’d realized. She’d covered two-thirds of the distance there or more.

The super spider was still nearby. It was chomping on treetops, and the evidence that it had been feeding in the general area for a while was readily apparent. The tops of many of the trees in its vicinity had clearly been cropped, and some even showed signs of regrowth. That answered the question of whether or not it was animal or mechanical in nature. The white fluffy stuff on its back was still a mystery, though now that she was closer she thought it resembled mounds of glistening, transparent eggs. She’d never heard of anything like that, but that didn’t mean that wasn’t what she was seeing.

The canopy was too dense to determine anything about the understory or which direction she should go in to seek more-open woodland. So she climbed back down and kept going.

Sometimes she felt something she couldn’t put her finger on, a kind of presence, tingling just behind her eyes, coming and going. She instinctively thought it must be Raub closing in on her, remembering what Hain’s video had said about the druids having the ability to detect the unique electromagnetic brain signatures of different individuals. It made her feel even more paranoid than she already was.

She heard ominous sounds everywhere she turned, and she was sure they were Raub ambushing her to punish her for daring to set the traps she’d left for him. Sometimes she found herself running flat out, blindly, until her shins ached, her leg muscles burned, and the stitch in her side wouldn’t let her go any farther. She would then fall to her knees, panting so hard that she couldn’t hear anything but blood rushing in her ears and her own ragged breathing.

She didn’t want this, any of this. She wanted it all to stop.

She practiced calling up her power and tamping it back down. It crackled like blue fire in her fingertips instantly and made every insect in the neighborhood flit away in panic. She felt full of energy, like it was all around her, soaking into her.

That was somewhat reassuring. It would be there when she needed it. Although she still didn’t know the full extent of what she could do with it.

In the back of her mind the memory of Raub saying he wasn’t as susceptible to her power as the hymenoptera echoed. What if he had some way of negating that power? What if
he
had some kind of power that he hadn’t revealed yet?

What little of the sky she could see darkened and occasionally lit up with flashes of lightning. She’d always hated the way lightning made her feel, but now the sensation was stronger than ever—a weird itchiness, tinged with an inexplicable longing. And now, perhaps, she knew the reason.

Rain started to fall. She could hear it pattering high in the canopy, but it took a long time for large, cold drops to coalesce among the leaves and find their way down to her. She thought that the rainfall was probably good. It would obfuscate any traces of her activity around the traps she’d set, and she hoped it would reduce the lingering scent of her humanity in those places, camouflaging them even further.

The trail was now veering off in the wrong direction, and she decided to leave it behind. It had served its purpose, allowing her to travel faster for some time and funneling Raub into a couple of traps, but she couldn’t let it steer her too far off course.

She found a break in the brambles and headed into the dense understory, meandering around thickets wherever possible, sometimes crawling underneath the prickly shrubs next to the damp, spongy, leaf-littered soil. That was where she rested when night fell, wrapped in the blanket in an attempt to stay drier, though it just overheated her due to the warmth of the climate. Sleep was difficult to find. She wanted to start a fire but didn’t dare. It would help him find her, and it would be impossible to control in a high-oxygen environment.

The rain didn’t let up. It kept on at a steady rate, slowly soaking everything. It was difficult to stay dry. She modified the jumpsuit so that she had a deep hood that came up over her hair, shedding water. That helped.

Her feet were constantly wet. Some kind of fungus or bacteria took hold on her feet, starting between her toes. Every night her immune system would fight it and reduce its coverage, but every day it crept back a bit more until her feet were itchy and painful and covered with a sickly yellow-brown fuzz that she could rub off, but still see traces of under her skin. Eventually she fiddled with the jumpsuit until she discovered a way to modify it so that it fit like tight stockings over her feet. It helped but didn’t eliminate the problem. And it stretched the garment so much it became sheer and filmy. She didn’t care about modesty as long as it kept her drier.

She ignored the discomfort and kept going.

The humidity was so high the water flask no longer had any trouble keeping up with her needs. She was able to stay hydrated and moving, though she was now slowed significantly by the crowded vegetation. The pack got lighter as she gnawed on the nutrition bars to keep her energy up.

She constantly wondered when Raub was finally going to catch up. It frayed her nerves, which were already in shreds.

Her heart never stopped pounding. Her nerves thrummed under her skin, and every sense was on alert. She felt more desperate by the day, sometimes traveling well into the night because she wasn’t sleeping well anyway. She experimented with holding out a hand and pushing a small amount of energy into it until she created a soft glow that illuminated her immediate surroundings. She maintained the light until her hand got too hot, then used the other hand. It was enough to walk by, but not to let her run. She couldn’t decide whether it made her feel safer or more at risk of being targeted by a hungry bug. It did seem like all of them were generally avoiding her, though. She frequently noted insects of all sizes and types taking flight when she came near, even before she’d noticed them.

Gradually the forest changed in character yet again. She started seeing trees with long, drooping, feathery blue-green needles that were soft to the touch. The ground underneath them was more comfortable for the catnaps that she stole between marathon sessions of running and jogging.

Still Raub didn’t come.

He was toying with her, wearing her down.

It was working.