Guardsmen of Tomorrow (26 page)

The creature caught Kell by surprise, closing its mouth over him, leaving his legs kicking and arms waving as it raised its maw and tried to choke him down.

Sara’s carbine came up instantly and she emptied a clip at the beast. She sprayed her fire over the water, aiming at its midsection, churning the water into froth, but not stop-ping the monster from sliding back beneath the surface. Her empty clip hit the ground and another had been slapped home in an eye blink, which was just enough time for her to realize gunfire wasn’t going to stop the thing.

Before she could cast her weapon aside, Bragb came on a sprint and hurled himself into the lake. With a glittering silver, crook-bladed knife in one hand and freed of his cannon and its bulky ammo pack, the hulking alien splashed down noisily, spraying water everywhere. He sank from sight for a second, then his right hand rose with the dagger and fell. Once, twice, then too many times for her to count. A black stain filled the water. The creature’s flat tail lashed, breaking the surface, then Bragb came up, gasping. Water cascaded from him, then he went down again.

A heartbeat later he came up and coughed, once, hard, then struggled to the shore.

He had the creature’s tail in one hand and dragged the thing from the lake. Ragged gashes had been opened along its twelve-meter-long spine-not all of them made by the knife-and the rhythmic little gnashing of its teeth indicated it wasn’t quite dead yet.

That didn’t stop the Bouganshi, who contemptuously spat out a hunk of green meat.

Bragb flipped the creature onto its back, then stabbed his knife in near the hindmost of the three pairs of legs and cut along up toward the middle. The wound gaped and verdant guts came pouring out, along with the distended gray sack that was the monster’s stomach. Another slash opened it. The Bouganshi reached in and dragged Kell from the stomach, sliding his slime-covered body onto the golden grasses.

Sara dropped to her knees and swiped a hand across Kell’s lips, then opened his mouth, cleared it with a finger, and lifted up on his neck to open his airway. She pinched his nose shut, then covered his mouth with hers and breathed.

One breath, two, and a third. She shook off a glove and felt his throat for a pulse.

He had one, good and strong. She started to breathe for him again, but he pushed her away, rolled onto his side and puked. He sucked in a loud noisy breath, then coughed and vomited again. He tried to come up on all fours, but abandoned the effort and stayed down on his right side.

“You okay, sir? Anything broken? Bragb?”

Kell weakly waved a hand.

The Bouganshi, sitting with his knees drawn up against his chest, shook his head.

“Fine.” He stared at the dark stains on his knife, then glanced at the dead monster, and nodded to himself. “Tastes foul.”

Sara swallowed a comment about how she would have thought it would have tasted like chicken, uncertain if Bragb’s command of Terran would have let him follow the joke. She retreated to her carbine, picked it up and turned to face back toward the woods. “Nothing from the jungle.”

“Good. Last thing I’m wanting to be hearing is Zsytzü laughter.” Kell rolled onto his belly and came up on his elbows. “My helmet must still be in there. Be a good lad and fetch it for me, will you, Bragb?”

“Fetched you. On your own for equipment.”

Kell sighed. “Guess I won’t smell any worse for digging around in there, eh?” He heaved himself up and knelt for a moment, swaying slightly. “And thanks to the both of you for saving me. When it bit, it crushed my armor down, costing me my wind.

Not that there was much to breathe in there anyway.”

He crawled over to the creature and reached a hand into the slit through which he had emerged. He felt around, then smiled and pulled out a thirty-centimeter-long, finned thing. “See, they do have trout here.”

Bragb snorted a laugh, then leaned away as Kell flung the fish out into the lake.

“Bolts food whole, lets it digest. Such creatures exist on Bougan.”

“On Terra they’re known as crocodiles.” Sara smiled as one of the butterflies landed by the barrel of her weapon. “Stories tell of their stomachs being full of undigested junk.”

“I’m thinking I’ll ignore that insult, thank you.” Kell winked at her, then pulled his helmet free with a wet sucking sound. He turned it over and a slime soup of fish, his combat glasses, and a tangled clump of fibers drained down into a puddle. He looked down at it and his smile abruptly died. “This isn’t good, not at all.”

She frowned. “What’s the matter?”

“I’ll be able to tell for sure, back at camp, but I’m thinking this knot of wires here, it’s Zsytzü in nature.” He spat to the side. “Seems I wasn’t the only Xeno this beastie welcomed to Lyrptod. Unless I miss my guess, the last was the Primary leading our little team of Zeez.”

The hike back to their base camp was remarkable in only one way. While Bragb and Sara were both quite content to have Kell at the back of their formation because of his stench, the butterflies must have thought the crocslime was pure ambrosia. They fluttered and flickered at him, trailing in his wake like ion exhaust from a fighter. With each fern frond that brushed him, a few of the insects would stop and feast on the transferred slime. Kell wiped off as much of it as he could, casting leaves aside to distract them. Even so, by the time they had reached the camp, two dozen still orbited him like little moons.

Their base camp was nothing worthy of holoing home about. They’d established it on a little wooded knoll, stringing a tarp between trees to make a shelter. They’d set up a couple of small camp tables, their perimeter warning gear, a radio and some simple scientific gear. All of it was very compact, and any serious analysis would require liaising with the scientific teams to the north. Still, the camp was dry and had access to a nearby stream for water, so it suited their needs very well.

While Kell stripped naked and cleaned himself up as best he could, Bragb studied the wire harness taken from the beast, as well as the device sliced from the Zsytzü junior they’d killed. As best he could determine, the two devices seemed to be of similar manufacture, apparently confirming Kell’s guess as to the source of the wire from the monster’s gullet.

Sara established contact with the xenobiological survey team to see if they’d had any more Zsytzü sightings in their area. She passed on the story of their encounter with the lake croc, as well as the attraction of the butterflies to the slime. The person at the other end of the radio link seemed less than impressed with the reportage, noted they’d seen no Zeez, and that they’d taken enough samples of the lake monsters and butterflies to last scholars several lifetimes.

Sara switched off the radio as Kell emerged from the camp shower they’d set up.

“The Nobel Committee says it didn’t see anything z-ish today, They weren’t interested by our adventures either.”

He shrugged and pulled a dark jumpsuit from his rucksack, then tossed his towel at the flock of butterflies on his armor. “I’m thinking it’s a pity the Primary didn’t make it out of the belly of the beast. We’d just have to follow the butterflies to the Zeez lair.”

“Yeah, well, about that, to hear the scientists talk, the ‘bluewings’ are not true butterflies, but just gaudy maggot-flies. If we go back to the Zee body or the lake monster, it’ll be flyblown and alive with larvae.” Sitting back, she wove a flechette end over end from index finger to pinkie and back again easily. “I could hear the disgust pouring through the airwaves when I called them butterflies. They have to think we’re just ambulatory laser-artillery.”

“They’re assuming ignorance because of our calling.”

“I know, and I don’t like it. Don’t like being judged because of what folks assume I am.”

“Being a graft, you get a fair amount of that, do you?” Kell pulled on the fresh jumpsuit, then batted at one persistent bluewing. “Look at this one, would you? Go on with you. I’m not dead.”

With a fluid economy Sara came up and out of the chair. She stabbed out with the flechette, piercing the bluewing through the thorax. The insect’s wings,flapped a couple more times, slowing down, then froze in place. Its feet clutched at the needle and its antennae curled in.

Kell had jerked back, but well after she’d stabbed the bug. “Damn, you are fast.”

“Part of being a graft.” She smiled slightly and returned to her seat, holding the bluewing up to study. “When I was a little girl, I used to collect bugs. Always dreamed about discovering some new species or something and having it named after me. All of us in the Rota program knew what we were being made into, but we all had other interests. The company tolerated it and even encouraged it in case war wasn’t a ‘growth market sector.’ ‘

Kell laughed and the Bouganshi smiled. “Little chance of that, I’m thinking. If you’re wanting to add that one to your collection, we might be able to smuggle it off-world for you.”

She frowned. “If I still had the collection, it would be very tempting. It would be interesting to have something unique in my collection. Problem is I’d have to Mona Lisa it.”

Bragb scratched the side of his domed head. “That expression is unknown.”

Kell raked fingers back through his brown hair. “Famous painting on Earth. It was stolen back a century ago, never recovered. It’s assumed to be in the hands of a private collector. He can’t be showing it to anyone, or letting anyone know he has it, since the reward for its recovery is huge now.”

Sara nodded. “Worse yet, and you know it will happen since the skulls are pulling samples from here, a black market for these things will grow among collectors.

There will be bluewing poachers coming down. Next time we come back, we’ll be fighting folks who did what I just did.”

“Reflexes like yours applied to the problem, and I’m thinking Bragb and I will just sit back and keep score.”

The Bouganshi smiled coldly. “Might hunt lake monsters. Know the bait they like.”

Kell arched an eyebrow at him. “And I’d be thinking, were I you, about what eat them beasts, since you’re just a pair of legs shy of being taken as one.”

Bragb paled slightly. He frowned and narrowed his dark eyes. “Worth consideration.”

“It is, but I’m thinking we’d all be better served if we turn our minds loose on the problem of finding the Zeez.” Kell folded his arms across his chest. “We did okay today, but they could get lucky in a series of running ambushes.”

The Bouganshi pressed fingers together deliberately. “They are not protecting the Primary. What else do they need to hide? Their camp? A recovery craft?”

“Could be one and the same, it could.” Kell smiled slowly. “And recovering one of them would put us in possession of something as unique as your bluewing. I think, tomorrow, we head out on the same patrol, starting at the lake and working backward. See where we run into them, and see if our contact points can let us triangulate back to their base.”

“Sounds like a plan, sir.” Sara stabbed the flechette into the tree to which they’d tied the tarp. “Plots on the other sightings don’t have a pattern, but the Primary probably saw to that. If they’ll come out and play, we can probably follow them home.”

“Good enough.” Kell picked up his towel again and shooed bluewings away from his armor. “I’ll take first watch so I can clean up this armor and patch it. Bragb, you’ll go next, and you’re the anchor, Sara. We’ll see sunrise over that lake.”

The Bouganshi smiled. “You just wish to see if trout will be hitting at insects.”

“She has her hobby, I have mine.” The man laughed. “Rack out now, morning will come much too soon.”

Dawn broke over the lake, and Kell’s trout were hitting the surface hard. Bluewings, in swiftly diminishing numbers, lay on the water and were scattered around in the marsh. Sara knelt on one knee to get a closer look and found dozens of them mashed into the mud by little feet. A few discarded flechettes likewise had been worked into the mud. Of the lake croc there was no clear sign, though lots of crushed grasses and more footprints suggested it had been dragged off into the jungle.

Sara frowned. “Wonder what the bluewings did to offend the juniors?”

Kell, crouched well away from the shore, shook his head as he scanned the Zsytzü backtrail. “No lasers used. Wasn’t war against them, I’m thinking. Something else.”

“Captain, take a look at this.” Bragb stood next to the dead tree and pointed at a splash of blue. Sara and Kell both approached. Two bluewings had been stabbed through the thorax, one on top of the other, then pinned to the tree with a flechette.

“The junior had to be moving that needle very fast.”

Kell tipped his helmet back on his head. “Faster than even Sara here. Don’t be jealous, lass.”

She glanced over at him, but before she could snap off a retort, a throbbing pulsed from the rain forest. The three of them came around, weapons raised, and watched a small, disk-shaped ship rise from the jungle. The rate of climb could best be described as slow, but the ship remained stable in flight and moved upward at a steady pace.

Kell immediately keyed his radio. “Ground Lead to
Chzrin
, we have a Zsytzü craft coming up.”

“
Chzrin
copies ground report. Zsytzü warship has just appeared in the solar system, headed this way. Tschai Mriap says we can burn your upcoming ship, but then will be destroyed by the warship.” The Qian communications officer delivered the information flatly, with no inflection and no indication of personal involvement in the unfolding events. “He says five minutes go/no-go on the burn. Your mission, your choice.”

Kell closed his eyes. “Stand by,
Chzrin
.” He pointed his carbine at the Zeez ship and triggered the laser. The red beam tagged the ship, but did nothing to it. “They’re leaving, so do we assume they are retreating and let them go, saving the Qian ship, or have they accomplished their mission, in which case we can’t let them go? Input?”

The Bouganshi growled for a second or two. “Have to assume they accomplished their mission, whatever it was. The Zeez will burn
Chzrin
, then come down. Has to be done.”

“Sara?”