The razorarm staggered slightly, its balance temporarily thrown off. Before it could recover, Merrick leaped forward and slammed the thorny end of the stick squarely across its face.
The predator howled in rage and pain, its quills snapping all the way out. Merrick continued his lunge forward, shifting the angle of his stick and slapping it across the predator’s right foreleg. The impact flattened a section of the quills back against the leg. Before they could bounce out again he threw himself chest-first against the leg, his body pushing the quills the rest of the way down. At the same time he snaked his right arm up under the predator’s head and around the back of its neck, squeezing his upper arm against its throat.
And as the angry howling abruptly turned into a labored snarl, he pressed the little finger of his left hand deep into the fur over one of the animal’s kill points and fired his laser.
The razorarm went limp. Still holding its neck, he shifted his left hand to another kill point and fired again, just to be sure. Then, careful of the still protruding quills, he released his grip and pushed himself away.
Only then did he notice that the sounds from behind him had stopped.
He spun around, fearing the worst. To his relief, Anya and the two men were still standing, still apparently in good shape, though Ville had a shredded jumpsuit sleeve and a long cut beneath it. Scattered around them were the fafirs: lean, hairy animals that seemed to be some strange combination of wolf and ape. A couple of them were sprawled unmoving on the road, but most of the handful still in sight were limping or loping rapidly away.
Apparently, the defenders’ focus had been more on driving the attackers away than actually killing them. Merrick took a quick look at the downed fafirs, wondering if any of them might still be a danger, then raised his eyes to Anya.
She was staring back at him, her face suddenly carved from stone.
Ville was staring, too. So was Dyre. So were all three of the Streamjumper family.
Merrick hissed out a sigh. So much for his attempt to keep a low profile.
It was Gina who finally broke the silence. “Wow!” she said, leaning against her father’s grip, straining to get a better view of the carnage. “What’s that?”
Merrick felt a sudden surge of hope. So it wasn’t his killing of the razorarm that had them all so awestruck. Or at least not just the killing. It was the razorarm itself.
Which, now that he thought about it, made perfect sense. Razorarms hadn’t existed on Muninn until the Drims started hauling them here a few weeks ago. There was no reason why any of the others would ever have seen one before.
Anya apparently reached that conclusion the same time he did. “They’re called razorarms,” she told the others. “Merrick was trained to kill them in my master’s version of the Games.”
“Was he, now,” Ville said, striding toward Merrick and the dead predator, his now-battered thorn stick swinging idly in his hand. “Impressive.”
“I don’t believe it,” Dyre said flatly. “It’s some kind of trick. Look at that thing—look at the muscles around its throat. He couldn’t possibly have choked it to death.”
“Maybe he beat it to death,” Ville suggested, pointing at Merrick’s stick and wiggling his fingers in silent request. Frowning, Merrick handed it over.
“Not a chance,” Dyre said insisted. “Look at him. He hasn’t got the strength for it.”
“Your truth is lacking,” Ville said. “He has strength aplenty.” He lifted up the stick. “See for yourself—he didn’t twist this off. He tore it off the trunk. Just tore it straight off.”
Merrick winced. So that was how the other’s had done it. No superhuman strength, just a trick that probably everyone on this part of the planet knew.
Only he hadn’t known it. And now, he’d exposed his genuine superhuman strength.
Or maybe not. Where there was one trick, why couldn’t there be a second?
He looked back at Anya. Her face had gone rigid again. Forcing an awkward smile, Merrick gave a little shrug.
Once again, she caught on instantly. “Please—he’s not that strong,” she said scornfully. “It’s simply a different technique.”
“I don’t know,” Ville said, running his fingers across the torn end. “It looks pretty solid to me.”
“Trust me,” Anya said. “And as we speak of solid, the solid dark of night is soon approaching. We need to gain further distance before we settle for the night.”
“She speaks truth,” Leif spoke up. “The scavengers will soon be coming for their feasting. I don’t wish to be here when they do.”
“As do none of us,” Ville agreed. Tossing aside both his stick and Merrick’s, he headed back to the road. “I’ll again take lead.”
Merrick frowned at the discarded sticks, then looked at Anya and raised his eyebrows. She shook her head and beckoned to him. “Another hour, I think, and we’ll find a spot for our overnight rest,” she said. “We don’t wish to weary the young one overmuch.”
“If she tires, I’m certain our overstrong Merrick can carry her,” Dyre muttered as he took his place at the end of the line.
“Enough talking,” Ville called back from the front. “The fafirs are become active. We must now listen closely for their presence.” He threw a small smile back at Merrick. “Perhaps Merrick will later show us his technique for obtaining thorn maces.”
Merrick made a face as he fell into step beside Anya. Inventing a magic trick for them, right on the spot. He could hardly wait.
#
Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. They saw a few stray fafirs along the way, but there were no more large packs and no further attacks.
They walked the hour that Anya had recommended, plus half an hour more, before Ville called the evening’s halt at a small clearing that had been carved from the edge of the forest by a pair of fallen trees. Leaving Merrick and the Streamjumpers to gather dead wood, Anya, Ville, and Dyre went off to hunt for dinner.
Even listening with his audio enhancers as much as he could, Merrick never heard any sounds other than normal movement through the grass, bushes, and flat-leafed ferns. Nevertheless, by the time Leif had a fire going and he and Katla were collecting fuzzy bamboo spikes to build into a shelter the others returned with a pair of rabbit-sized animals.
Briefly, he considered taking Anya aside and asking how they’d caught and killed their prey so quietly. But as he watched Ville and Dyre set about skinning the animals with fist-sized chunks of some kind of rock, he decided he probably didn’t want to know.
And as the dinner cooked over the open fire, and he helped Leif and Katla weave the bamboo spikes into an elegant and deceptively strong set of walls for their shelter, another thought slowly occurred to him. A thought that, like the details of the hunt, he wasn’t sure he wanted an answer to.
But in this case, he needed that answer. And he needed it tonight.
His first concern was how to sneak out past whatever sentry the group ended up posting. That problem disappeared when it was decided that no guard would, in fact, be posted. All of them apparently agreed with Anya that none of the nocturnal predators was a threat to them, especially once they were inside the woven-spike A-frame structure they’d constructed.
That didn’t take the razorarms and their unpredictable hunting schedules into account, of course. But the A-frame was reasonably sturdy, and as long as they stayed inside they should be all right.
Especially if what Merrick suspected turned out to be true.
He waited until the rest of the group was asleep. Then, moving silently, he left the shelter and headed out into the night.
An hour later, he returned to find Anya sitting beside a tree a dozen meters from the shelter, waiting quietly for him.
“I saw you were gone,” she murmured as he sat down beside her. “I wondered if you’d decided to go to Runatyr instead.”
Merrick winced. That thought had occurred to him. Several times, in fact, during the day’s journey. “Why wo
uld I do that?” he asked.
“You didn’t come here to settle down in a distant and unlively village,” she reminded him. “Runatyr is more likely to be the center of the Drim’hco’plai plot among us.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Merrick agreed. “But in this case, Commander Ukuthi was right on target.”
Anya’s eyes were steady on him. “The razorarms?”
“Yes,” Merrick said, nodding. “Ukuthi wondered why the Drims were still taking them off Qasama. A better question might have been why they were taking them from the populated areas, where the villagers could take pot shots at them, instead of harvesting them from more distant parts of the planet.”
“And you’ve solved this puzzle?”
“I think so,” Merrick said. “Tell me, are there other villages near Gangari? And do your people and theirs typically go back and forth a lot?”
“Yes, to both questions,” Anya said, nodding. “We trade frequently with five other villages, and have occasional contact with seven or eight more.” She hesitated, just noticeably. “There are also small family groups in the forests and at some of the river crossings who we deal with. Are the Drim’hco’plai trying to stop that trade by planting razorarms around us?”
“That may be part of it,” Merrick said. “I’m thinking they’re trying for a strange sort of balance here: they want to isolate the villages, but at the same time don’t want a mass slaughter of the people. That would explain why they picked razorarms from the inhabited areas, where they had some experience with humans. They figured those would be good at discouraging people from traveling the roads, but would be leery enough of actually attacking anyone.”
“Even without the mojo birds to make that decision for them?”
“Apparently so,” Merrick said. “Actually, that makes a certain amount of sense. However the neural or telepathic link worked, the razorarms clearly got enough from the mojos to influence their actions.”
“Yet the razorarm today did attack,” Anya pointed out. “So did the ones in the Games back on Qasama.”
“The ones in the Games definitely did,” Merrick agreed. “But remember that those weren’t Drim razorarms, but ones that Commander Ukuthi brought in specially for the purpose. I’m guessing he had his people grab them from areas a long ways from the Great Arc, where humans are few and far between.”
He felt his stomach tighten. “And as for the one today, I may have jumped the gun. It didn’t attack—in fact, I’m not convinced it was even thinking about attacking. It was looking us over, certainly, and it might have been nervous or agitated by the fafirs gathered across the road. But it didn’t made a move until I hit it with that thorn stick—”
“Mace,” Anya corrected. “It’s called a thorn mace.”
“Right,” Merrick said, feeling his face warming. A stupid mistake. “The bottom line is that it didn’t attack until I attacked first.” He hissed out a sigh. “Which meant I killed it for nothing.”
Anya was silent a moment. “You had no way of knowing,” she reminded him. “But you know now?”
Merrick nodded. “I ran across two more razorarms while I was out just now. Both saw me. Neither attacked.”
“I see,” Anya said slowly. “So. They want us alive, but kept apart. Why?
“That’s the big question, isn’t it?” Merrick agreed. “Hopefully, we’ll find out when we reach Gangari.” He reached out to touch her arm, then changed his mind and pointed to the shelter instead. “We’d better get back before someone misses us.”
He started to get up, but stopped as she put a hand on his arm. “One more thing,” she said.
Merrick braced himself. If this was going to be about Dyre, he really didn’t want to hear it. “Yes?”
“It’s still twenty-five or more kilometers to Gangari,” she said. “If the masters wish to isolate our group of villages, why are there razorarms here? Shouldn’t they be closer to us?”
Merrick frowned. That was a damn good question. Even knowing how razorarms could sense open territory, they still shouldn’t have made it this far from Gangari in the short time since the Drims started collecting and dumping them.
Unless he’d been wrong about Gangari being the center of the Trofts’ attention. Maybe it was something closer to their current position. “Are there any other villages or towns in this area?” he asked.
“None that I know of,” Anya said. “But it’s been twelve years since I was taken from my home. Something could have been built in that time.”
A shiver ran up Merrick’s back. Anya couldn’t be more than twenty-three or twenty-four years old. To have spent half of her life as a slave… “We need to find out for sure,” he said, forcing away the image of a twelve-year-old child being forcibly taken from her home. “Do people from Gangari get out this way at all?”
“A few of them do,” Anya said. “Mostly hunters and trappers. Some of the smaller family groups may also know this area.” She considered. “Though with new predators in the area, they may be staying closer to their homes. I’ll ask when we reach the village.”
“Okay,” Merrick said. “Was there anything else?”
Her forehead wrinkled. “No. Should there be?”
“No, no,” he assured her. So there would be no discussion of her relationship with Dyre, at least not tonight. Briefly, he wondered whether he was relieved or sorry. “I was just wondering. Come on, let’s get back inside.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The strangest thing about being back on Caelian, Jody thought as she left the Hoibie merchant ship, was that it felt like coming home.
Which on the face of it was faintly ridiculous. She’d spent less than two months here, hardly even twice the length of the semester breaks she’d taken back in college. In fact, her family had once had a vacation longer than that, back when she was in seventh grade and Great Uncle Corwin had taken them on a tour of the fledgling Cobra Worlds of Viminal and Esquiline.
But then, strict passage of time wasn’t necessarily the best measure of a life. In her two months here Jody had squeezed in a good fraction of a lifetime, first pressed on all sides by deadly plants and animals, then hammered and crushed together with the Caelians in the swirling tidepool of war. She’d seen death and destruction, heroism and chaos, and had come within a splintered hair of losing everything she held dear. She’d aged tremendously, far more than a simple count of sunrises would indicate.
Still, the homecoming feeling was still just plain weird.
The capital city—or, more properly, the small, compact town—of Stronghold was pretty much the way it had been when she left, with a few significant changes. Part of the sterile zone outside the city had been reestablished, though it didn’t stretch as far from the wall as it had before the invasion. The section of the wall itself where the Troft ship had fallen on it was still gone, but there was now a somewhat slapdash-looking barrier of wood and cloth that had been erected in the gap. Above the barrier, she could just see the tops of the two wrecked Troft ships, one lying on top of the other where they’d both been knocked over on their sides.
Just before she’d left to head back to Aventine, Governor Romulo Uy had been talking to the Tlossies about getting the ships upright again and seeing if either could still fly. Obviously, those plans hadn’t gotten very far.
The Hoibie car that had taken her from the landing area had dropped her off just inside the main gate, then turned and headed immediately back toward the ship. She’d made it maybe another hundred meters in when she turned a corner and nearly ran into one of the people she’d met during that brief eternity she’d spent here.
And suddenly she realized why it felt like coming home.
“Jody!” Kemp exclaimed, covering the ten meters between them in three long servo-powered steps and wrapping her in a bear hug that would have crushed her to death if he’d put his full Cobra strength behind it. As it was, it just felt very, very comfortable.
“This is a surprise,” he murmured
into the side of her head. “When did you get back in town?”
“About fifteen minutes ago,” Jody said into the side of his, frowning as she replayed the image of him bounding toward her. His face had been badly burned during their climactic battle with the Troft invaders, and when she’d left three weeks ago that raw flesh had been well on its way to becoming a an impressive collection of scar tissue.
But while his face didn’t exactly look baby-smooth, it was a long way from the leathery mask she’d been fearing. In fact, aside from a few small indention lines, it hardly looked marked at all. “You’re looking good,” she added.
“Aren’t I?” Kemp agreed, pulling back from the hug and giving her a closer look. “Qasaman medicine is about as close to miraculous as we’re ever likely to see. Harli’s looking good, too. Of course, with Harli that’s a much trickier bar to reach. You said you just got here?”
Jody nodded. “On the Hoibie merchant ship that just came in.”
“You mean the Hoibie merchant ship that’s just leaving?”
She turned to look. He was right—the ship was already in the air, its grav lifts glowing. “Huh,” she said as she watched it rotate a few degrees and pull for the sky. “I kind of assumed they’d at least check around and see if they could do some business here before they took off.”
“They didn’t have any business already set up?” Kemp asked, frowning. “So, what, the only reason they came here was to give you a ride?”
“Well…yes, mostly,” Jody admitted.
“Uh-huh,” Kemp said, his voice gone suddenly wary. “You in trouble at home or something?”
Jody hesitated. But the last thing she would ever do was lie to any of the people here. “A little,” she admitted.
“Uh-huh,” he said again, eyeing her closely. “You got time to talk about it?”
“I’ve got all the time in the world,” Jody said. “Is there somewhere quiet we can go?”
“Sure,” Kemp said, glancing down at her tunic and slacks, the outfit she’d been wearing when she made her hasty departure from Aventine. “I’d start with a clothing shop, though—you’re already starting to turn green.”