“You need bullets first.” Raven looked around and came up with a box of shiny metal tubes. “These,” she said. “You put them in the clip part…right here…I’m going to have to touch the gun to show you.”
Kane could see where she was trying to get at. He pried at the place she called a clip, and managed on his second try to get it out. He eyed the bullets loaded inside, fit the clip back in place, pulled it out again, and then smiled. Just like a Kevrian pulsor, really.
“Now if you want to shoot somebody, you make sure the safety…this thing…is in the off position. It’s on right now, so it won’t fire.”
Kane toggled the ‘safety’ and aimed the weapon at the wall. It had been designed for a smaller hand and more fingers, but he found he could hold it sideways easily enough, and his thumb claw fit neatly into the trigger guard. He tested the pull, drawing back by minute degrees until the gun jerked in his hand with a flat thunderclap of sound. A black hole opened as by magic on the wall, coughing out a tiny spew of dust.
Simple. Elegant. Very effective.
Kane toggled the safety back on and put the gun into the pocket of his new coat, and then slung that over his arm, along with his other acquisitions. “Anything else?” he said.
Raven bent and picked up the dead human’s clothes from the floor. She put her hands in its inner folds and removed a bundle of flat metal shapes, strung together into a jingling ring like a baby’s toy, and then a leather pocket, shiny with time and bulky with material. From this, she took several folded bits of greenish-grey paper which she held out to him. Kane took them, puzzled. “Money?” he guessed.
Raven nodded. She was wiping down the sides of the leather pocket on her new shirt before letting it drop to the floor.
At first, Kane couldn’t imagine what had compelled her to rob the corpse for human currency. Then he remembered losing the first groundcar because it had expended all its fuel. He gave Raven a long, considering glance. She hadn’t forgotten. Even here, face to face with hard death and hating it, she’d kept her wits around her.
“There’s food downstairs,” she said now. Raven looked one final time at the body on the bed, and then turned away and preceded him out into the hall.
‘Boy,’ said Urak’s voice, in tones of mild appreciation. ‘You could have done a lot worse.’
Silently, Kane agreed. He followed his female downstairs.
Chapter Five
East.
The sun rose hot and hateful every morning, and Tagen walked into it. It blinded him, it burned his face and robbed his lungs of breath. It fell behind him every afternoon and Tagen could feel it like the hand of a murderous god, pushing him relentlessly ahead. He took his suppressants, but the heat was there regardless, leadening his limbs and clogging his mind of thought and purpose. His clothing stank. He stank. Sweat was a fog that warded off even the biting insects of Earth. He was in hell.
The forests gave way to mountains after four days of battle with branches and roots. The mountains were cooler, just enough to mock him, not enough to supplant his need for suppressants. And the mountains were more treacherous footing than even the forests had been. The ground beneath his feet was loose, dry, and unstable. He climbed, he fell, he rose bruised and often bleeding to climb again.
There were streams in the mountains, often springing right from the rock itself in eruptive white falls that were beautiful even to Tagen’s increasingly bitter turn of mind. The water was itself a torture, a curse disguised as a blessing. Tagen drank his limit at each he passed just for the sense of fullness it gave him, but the thirst was always with him. He could wash, or at least he could wipe away the newest layer of sweat and grime and briefly cool his burning flesh, but the stink of him never faded. Tagen was coming to hate even the sound of the water, splashing and burbling happily to itself in defiance of him. It stung at him more and more that he had to be grateful for it.
When he thought at all—the heat had a way of stealing in and smothering his brain—he thought of home. Not Earth. Earth was hell. Not even the living quarters the Fleet provided him when he was back on Jota. Home for Tagen was a ship. His own room—he was not a fourth-rank officer for nothing—near the stern, away from the relentless pulse and grinding of the nacelles. A ship, any ship, where it was dark and always cool, and he was surrounded by officers who thought and behaved just like him. Males with whom he could share some camaraderie. Females who would notice his rank and reputation, and make their overtures when the urge was on them to mate. A ship well-heeled with provisions, meat for the taking, iced ul by the bottle. A ship where there was no east.
After three days, the mountains fell again into forest, and Tagen descended its untrustworthy slopes (sometimes on foot, sometimes on his ass, and once, a good fifty meters on his damn face). The forest rose up and swallowed him again, this one thinner and even drier than before. The soil here was red, gritty and volcanic, and stained his talons the color of old blood. The trees were tall and branchless until they reached the sky; there, they grew arms bristling with needles, the same needles that carpeted the ground in slippery brown drifts. There were no more vines and thorns, but there were spiky bushes just shoulder-height, all to ready to slap and scratch at travelers.
The streams died out, but there was food, in the form of small hopping creatures in some abundance. They were tricky game. Unless he managed a head shot, the plasma bolt left nothing but a charred leg or two. Tagen considered himself a good shot to begin with, but three days of having his dinner depend on his aim made him a much better one in a very short span of time. The meat cooked up tough and tasteless, sustaining his physical needs while eroding his spirit.
He hated Earth. Never since reaching his majority had Tagen believed he hated anything or anyone. Hate was, in the words of that dour old soldier who had adopted him, nothing but the decay of discipline. It was pointless at the best of times, reckless at the worst. It was contrary to every fiber of his being. But no matter how much he may wish to be a better man, Tagen could not deny that he hated Earth.
How easy it would be to turn around right now, follow his locater back to his ship, and just go home. He could make out his report from the comfort of space. He could honestly say his investigations had turned up no sign of E’Var or the prison transport vessel. The prisoner had met his end in a mid-Gate termination and let that be an end to bad business.
That would work…right up until E’Var emerged from the abyss and this time, with his own Gate to Earth. And Tagen, lucky Tagen, would get to shoulder the sole responsibility for allowing him to slip through the fingers of the Fleet.
No. Best to stay. Thirty days was the Fleet standard for a fruitless investigation, and off records, sixty days was encouraged. Tagen didn’t have the supplies (nor Earth the resources, apparently) for such a lengthy search, but in five more days, if he had still found no water, no real food, and no trace of his prisoner, he’d return to his ship and wait in orbit around this miserable planet. He hated to do it that way, giving E’Var free reign to harvest humans, but at least he could not fail to see a ship as it left Earth. It would be an ugly confrontation, but prison transports had only minimal weapons. Even though he was confidant the cruiser he’d been given for this mission would prevail in a firefight, it remained a tactic of last resort.
Tagen was lost in these thoughts, unaware of how circular and locked they had become. It was no longer a debate but only a distraction from his body’s complaints. It was a dangerous frame of mind in any circumstances. Here, alone on Earth, it was a killing trap.