Wings of Retribution (19 page)

“So you’re in
his
body now, is that it?”  Koff’s voice was a little slurry, probably from the damage Stuart had done on entry.

Panic began to claw at Stuart’s chest.  Ever since having his host die on him because of his own carelessness, Stuart had taken great pains to make sure his hosts sustained as little damage as possible.  Now, confronted with his angry former host, Stuart was beginning to realize his mistake.  He tried to force his host’s arms free, fighting the bonds that had kept Earl helpless not moments before.

Koff walked up to Stuart and pushed his new host’s head to the floor with a booted foot.  Blood ran out of his nose onto the plastic.

“That’s what I thought.”  He squatted in front of Stuart and peered into his eyes.  “What, did you think I’d die after what you did?  You thought I’d be some lifeless blob?  No-sir.  Not Pete Koff.  I was fightin’ you the whole time.  I was awake and fightin’ it.  Finally forced you out, didn’t I?”  He reached forward and ripped the duct tape off of Stuart’s mouth, taking beard hair with it.

“Please,” Stuart said.  “I never wanted to hurt you.”  It came out as a slurry of half-formed words, but somehow Pete Koff understood it.

“You
burrowed
into my
brain.
  You got me blacklisted with the Utopia.  And I was about to make sergeant.”  Koff groaned and sat back onto his haunches, wincing and holding his side.  “Oh God.  I think something’s broken.”

Never before had Stuart been forced to confront those he had taken to host, and as he looked into Koff’s disgusted eyes, self-loathing embedded itself deeper into his soul.  “They’ve got vid, back on the ship,” Stuart babbled.  “They know it wasn’t you.  You won’t be held responsible.”

Pete scrunched his face in pained disgust.  “Then you don’t know the Utopia.”

In his cowardice, Stuart bit his lip, praying Rabbit would return.

Koff seemed to read his mind.  “Your friend should be back here soon.”  He languidly leaned forward and tugged the combat knife from its sheath on Earl’s belt and held it in his hands, frowning at the blade.

Stuart swallowed hard.

“How many people’s lives have you wrecked in your existence?” Pete Koff asked thoughtfully.  He twisted the blade so that its honed silver edge caught the light.  When Stuart didn’t answer, Koff shoved the knife against his host’s throat and waited.

“Hundreds,” Stuart whispered.

Koff withdrew the knife and grunted.  “That was a neat trick, zapping me like that.  Couldn’t move a damn muscle.”

Stuart lowered his host’s forehead to the plastic.

“I guess I’ve got an obligation to kill you, but I don’t really feel like it.”  Pete Koff pointed the blade at his face.  “That another one of your tricks?  Mess with my brain so I feel all chummy with you?”

“I don’t have the ability to alter emotions or memories.”

“Mmm.”  Koff frowned at the knife.  “I heard your apologies, you know.  You’re one genuinely remorseful little bastard, aren’t you?”

Stuart continued to stare at the floor.  He hoped Koff would do what he didn’t have the courage to do himself.

“Answer me,” Koff growled.

“Just kill me,” Stuart whispered to the plastic.  “I deserve it.”

Koff grunted again.  “Why do you bastards take human hosts, anyway, if you hate it so much?”

Stuart jerked.  “Because you killed the
harra
!” he screamed, outraged.  Then, his sudden fury subsiding with a surge of shame, he said, “Humans are the only things left.”

“What about dogs?” Koff asked.  “There’s a lot of dogs on the colonies.”

“Would
you
want to be trapped in a dog?!” Stuart demanded.

Koff’s face darkened and he turned to look at Stuart, his face a thunderhead.  “No, I was trapped in my
own damn head
, watching something else use my body like a puppet.”

Stuart had nothing to say to that.  He dropped his head back to the floor, closing his eyes against the shame.

“At least you didn’t make me kill anyone,” Koff said.  “I was real worried about that.  Good ol’ Pete here went all the way through bootcamp utterly terrified of blood.  Why I chose the Space Force.”  He paused and gave Stuart a long look.  “Not that that’s gonna save you, just sayin’.”

With his host’s wrists bound behind his back, Stuart let out an unsteady breath and tried to fight down the fear of once again being trapped in a dead body.  In the background, Earl was laughing at him. 
Two’s company, ain’t it, pal?
  Maybe the corporal would be merciful and would drive the knife a few times through Earl’s brain, to put Stuart out of his misery.

For a long time, Pete Koff said nothing.  Stuart could feel him watching him, the small hairs on the back of his host’s neck tingling under the pressure.  Then Pete sighed.  “I’m a wanted man, now.  I go back, they’ll put me in a decontamination room for a few centuries for observation, make sure you didn’t lay any eggs while you were in there.”  He gave Stuart a sharp glance.  “You didn’t, did you?”

“No,” Stuart whispered.  “There is no point.”  As Stuart well knew, to live like this was akin to spending an entire lifetime dying. 

Besides, he’d already failed the other
suzait
.  He couldn’t stand the Karmic burden of replicating himself, only to leave them behind; uneducated, unaware, innocent…

…to be promptly caught by S.O. and ruthlessly ripped from the host Stuart had given them, then dissected under a microscope while surrounded by cold, dispassionate alien faces.

Corporal Koff seemed to digest that a moment.  “So how long does it take you to die once you’re out of your host?”

Stuart stared at the floor.

“How
long
?” Koff snapped.  He slapped the flat of the knife against Stuart’s shoulder.

Miserable, Stuart said, “Ten minutes, sometimes less.”

“Sometimes?”

“Depends on temperature and humidity,” Stuart whispered.

Pete Koff grunted.  “Come out, then.  I wanna see you.  I wanna know what was in my head.”

Stuart cringed.  “You don’t want that.”

“Do it.”

He’s serious,
Stuart realized, in dismay.  He looked up at Koff, panic worming into his soul once more.  “Will you at least move back a bit?  I won’t feel safe if you—”

“You’re one to talk,” Corporal Koff interrupted in a growl, “taking people’s bodies away from them.  Get out here, or I’ll cut you out.”

“Completely?”  Stuart whimpered.  “But my host will—”

“This brute isn’t going anywhere.  You’ve got ten seconds.  I’ll hold his head still.”  Pete took hold of Earl’s hair in a tight, unyielding grip.  “You make me come get you, that’s the end of it.  You ain’t goin’ back in my head, and he’ll be dead.”  Then he started counting down.  “Ten, nine, eight…”

Stuart listened in agony. 

“Five, four—
now
,
worm
—three…”

At ‘two,’ Stuart reluctantly withdrew from his host’s brain.  More terrified than he had been in his entire life, he lingered in the nasal passage, fearful of the dark, blurry shape moving on the other side.  He had no sense of sound, no detailed sensory perception to tell him what Koff was doing or saying.  It was more terrifying than finding himself in a dead host.  All he wanted to do was burrow back into his host’s skull and embrace the warmth he found there, but he knew Koff would do as he threatened and dig him out, if he did.

Somehow, Stuart forced himself further out into the freezing air and searched blindly for a sign that Koff had seen enough.  Earl’s head was steady, so Koff was still holding it down.  What was the corporal doing?  Why did he want to see him so badly?

The air was sucking his moisture away, drying out his skin.  Above him, the huge blur moved and Stuart wondered if Koff was even then lowering the knife to slice him in half.  Stuart felt something touch him and he fought panic at the uncomfortable pressure.  Whatever it was, it was rough and salty, burning his skin where he was losing moisture to the unforgiving air.  He waited, the horrible sensation of drying out clawing at his mind, adding to his ever-increasing terror that something hard was scraping against his body.

The massive, salty object squeezed, and suddenly Stuart was being pulled the rest of the way out of his host’s nasal passage.  Panicking, he somehow forced himself not to squirm as the rest of his body was exposed to the brutal air, knowing that the sight of writhing tentacles would only alienate him further.  To the delicate minds of humans, it would create disgust, revulsion.  Right now, in his helpless state, those were two reactions he could not afford.

His skin continued to dry out, his body growing colder by the second.  Ten minutes had just been a guess.  It could be much less.

In fact, as Stuart grew numb from the loss of heat, he decided that he was badly mistaken.  He gave himself another minute before his skin started to crack open.

Gods,
Stuart thought,
what’s he doing to me?
  Never before had he been so helpless and terrified.  Against his good sense, he began to writhe, his delicate tendrils seeking out that moisture he needed to survive.  Horrible vibrations suddenly rocked him and the large, blurry object moved, but Stuart continued to dangle.  He could feel his appendages drying up, the delicate skin tightening, threatening to crack.

Yet the fingers that held him were as utterly unyielding as if he’d been put in a steel vice.  Stuart’s fear ratcheted into an insane babble in his mind as he swung there, helplessly dehydrating between the corporal’s fingers.

Then the vibrations increased again and Stuart felt his body jolt. 
Gods, gods, what’s he doing?
his terrified mind babbled. 

To Stuart’s surprise, Koff set him back down on ridged flesh that felt overwhelmingly like a nose. 

Insane with terror, Stuart scrabbled back into the nasal passage and burrowed inside.  He couldn’t restrain himself this time—he was sure he caused damage on his way back to the brain’s center.

Once he was securely embedded, Stuart wasted no time in reconnecting with the sensory areas of the brain.  He regained control of motor centers and stopped his host from thrashing.  Then he slid a tentacle down to the medulla oblongata to make sure the damage he caused would not result in his host forgetting how to breathe.

When Stuart opened his eyes, Koff was sitting on the floor a yard away, watching him.

“Ugly little thing, aren’t you?”

Stuart let out a sob of relief and lowered his host’s head back to the floor.  Crying—and all other human reactions—had been a natural, learned response that a
suzait
instinctively absorbed from his host as a bonding measure, not merely an effort to blend in, as the S.O. liked to claim.  He cried now, knowing Koff was watching, analyzing, judging, but he didn’t care.  The capture, the transfers, the S.O. personnel, Koff’s disdain, the dry air, all of it had been too much.

“Scared you, eh?”

Stuart could only whimper, nodding.

Koff grunted.  “Could you hear me talking to you?”

“No.”

“And those little black bulbs…  Those were your eyes?”

Stuart nodded.

“I’ll bet you couldn’t see much more than light and dark, could you?  I had the knife an inch away the entire time and you never even flinched.”

Stuart stared at the bloody plastic under his host’s nose.

“Could you have zapped me again when I was holding you?”