Enemy Games (2 page)

They’d come to Chemmoxin in response to a flesh-necrotizing illness afflicting the humanoid colonists. The
Sen Ekir
’s crew had traced the infection to the fluffy, arboreal kuorls, which meant observing the creatures and sampling out tissue and blood.

“Signals read green across the board,” Pietre replied over the open com line. Sympathy mingled with amusement in his voice. “Your last booster install did the trick. We’re recording.”

“Get to your blind, Jay, and send me a physical scan,” her cousin, Raj, ordered. “You sound squashed.”

“Imagine,” she retorted, shaking her head. He was right, of course. Most humanoid biology simply hadn’t been designed to work for long periods in this combination of excessive heat and humidity. Add a few parasites sucking blood and things turned dangerous fast as the body struggled to maintain a safe internal temperature.

Deep in the bowels of the biggest gnarled, moss-draped, and lichen-deformed qwarfoi tree in the stand, a kuorl coughed and then growled.

Jayleia started. The final trap she’d been setting snapped shut on her hand. “What the Three Hells was that?” she breathed. “Temp reading?”

“Thirty-nine-point-eight.”

“Report,” their boss, Dr. Linnaeus Idylle, demanded.

Fumbling to free her scraped-up hand from the trap’s force fields, she said, “I heard something. Or thought I did.”

“Confirm Pietre’s temperature reading,” he said.

The trap let go. She grabbed her handheld and backed a step away from the moss-shrouded branch holding the kuorl trap.

“Thirty-nine-point-seven,” she said, her voice shaking.

“Return to your blind,” Dr. Idylle suggested. “Let’s get that physical scan. You’ve been out there in miserable conditions for several hours.”

Miserable conditions? He didn’t know the half of it. She was drenched with sweat, smeared with stinking mud, kuorl scat, lichen, moss, and assorted creepy, crawly life-forms she doubted anyone had identified, much less quantified the risks of. Jayleia sighed. “My last trap . . .”

“Leave it,” Dr. Idylle interrupted. “We’ll have plenty of kuorls to study without it.”

“You’re okay, Jay,” Pietre said. “Confirm thirty-nine-point-seven, your location. The kuorls will hibernate until the temperature hits thirty-eight. Even then, you’ll have a half an hour or more . . .”

She wouldn’t.

Once again, in the primary nest tree, something stirred. She gasped, tabbed her handheld to read bio-signs, and backpedaled. The screen showed knots of bright heat signatures all around her indicative of hibernating kuorls.

Except that the knots were shifting. Moving. Breaking apart. She was in the center of a nest site filled with newly awakened, hungry, cranky, potentially infected kuorls who shouldn’t have stirred for another hour at least.

“They’re waking,” she said.

“What? They can’t be!” Pietre protested. “It’s too hot!”

“If kuorls can run a fever, would it impact their perception of atmospheric temperatures and thus their hibernation cycle?” she asked, staggering away.

“Aren’t circadian rhythms typically independent of internal temperature?” Raj asked.

“No speculation,” Dr. Idylle snapped. “We have evidence that these kuorls are either infected or are carriers for the disease impacting the colonists. I want you out of there, Jayleia. Now.”

“Acknowledged,” she replied, her heart laboring and her lungs burning as she splashed through shallow, slimy, green water to the observation blind Pietre had helped her build. “Entering the blind. Door closed and locked. I am secure.”

Unless she counted the new crop of bloodworms crawling up her ankles looking for a relatively clean spot to bite.

“Medical scan, if you please,” her boss prompted. “Pietre . . .”

Jay glanced out the leaf-shaded window of her makeshift blind and yelped. “Are we recording? Here they come.”

“Got it!” Pietre answered. “Would you look at that? I’ll be damned. Their scout’s checking the lay of the land. Unbelievable. Temperature thirty-nine-point-seven and holding.”

Her blind allowed her to look into the heart of the nest site. The traps were visible where she’d scraped dark lichens from lighter bark so as to firmly seat the equipment. Condensation dotted the window, reducing visibility slightly, but she could still see the opening to the nest through the distortion and the silhouette of the sentry kuorl.

She squinted. There. Movement in the cavity of the largest tree caught her eye. The scout had plucked one of the ubiquitous beetles from the tree bark and stuffed it in his mouth for a truly repulsive breakfast. The rest of the colony was stirring. It would take another half hour for them to emerge.

The kuorls didn’t emerge. They erupted, screaming. And began ripping one another to shreds.

Jayleia gaped in horror.

The damned rodents were bad-tempered at the best of times, but these creatures were a roiling mass of flashing claws and bloody teeth. Their soft, ticked, gray pelts were slashed and smeared with gore. Blood spattered the moss- and lichen-encrusted branches. They shrieked and growled in what sounded like rage. She heard her crewmates swearing above the din.

As if the kuorls sensed her equipment didn’t belong, they attacked the traps. One kuorl got caught. It would be restrained harmlessly within the confines of the force and containment fields of the device. Anesthesia dosed for the animal’s mass would be delivered automatically and the kuorl would never know what had happened. It would go to sleep, she’d take blood and tissue samples, deliver a wake-up drug, and then release the kuorl none the wiser.

Except that it wasn’t working. The trap bucked. Either the anesthesia delivery trigger had broken or the drug was having no effect.

The gory mass of enraged kuorls froze for a split second, staring at the moving trap.

Jayleia reeled, deafened in the abrupt quiet.

Then their cries redoubled. The rodents turned on the occupied trap in a seething, self-destructing riot. She clamped a hand over her mouth when the first twitching corpse dropped to the ground. They couldn’t have gotten through metal and force fields to the trapped animal. Could they?

That’s when she noticed that the ravaged, muddy kuorl on the ground wasn’t a corpse. The mangled creature dragged itself back to the tree and up the trunk, then launched from the lowest branch straight at her.

She staggered back against her tiny worktable and croaked. “Twelve Gods, they’re attacking the blind!”

It hit the window with a damp-sounding
thunk
, leaving a smear of rotting flesh and fresh blood in its wake as it slid into the brush below.

“Infection status verified,” she choked. “They’re necrotic.”

“Teleport!” Dr. Idylle bellowed. “Now!”

“We’re not online!” Pietre cried.

The rest of the kuorls, lathered, lost in bloodlust, flung their bodies, bloodied fangs and claws first, at Jayleia’s hideaway.

She flinched, sucking in a sobbing breath at each impact.

The door rattled. Claws scraped and scrabbled at the metal. The scent of putrid, decaying flesh seeped into the blind.

They uttered none of the short, high-pitched barks she’d come to associate with the once-fluffy arboreal omnivores. The creatures wheezed and moaned.

The noise of kuorls trying to peel away her alloy shell jabbed icy terror through her bones.

A pinprick of daylight shone in one corner.

“They’re breaking through,” she said, sounding as if she hadn’t realized these animals would tear her to shreds once they’d ripped through the structure.

The door creaked and bowed.

She threw her back against it.

Mistake.

The door frame had bent. Through the scant crack, claws raked her right deltoid. She yelped, bolted away from the door, shoved the table against it, and realized her body weight and strength wouldn’t keep the animals at bay for long.

“Emergency reactor online!” Pietre hollered. “Sixty seconds to teleport, Jay! Hold on!”

She shuddered. The kuorls would break through any second. The hole at the corner of the roofline had grown. The sickly sweet miasma of decay choked her.

Bloodworms, scenting the fresh blood on her arm, hastened up her body to fasten their suckers to the wound.

She could no longer say whether it was sweat, or tears, or both running so freely down her face.

“Belay that,
Sen Ekir
!” a masculine voice ordered via the open channel.

Jayleia’s heart jumped. Hope burned through her chest, burgeoning, squeezing out room for breath.

He sounded familiar.

“Firing on the front of the blind, Jayleia. Stand clear,” he said.

She heard it then. An atmospheric engine directly overhead. A shuttle? Whose? The colonists didn’t have a shuttle. An order. She’d been ordered to stand clear.

“Acknowledged!” she rasped, turned her back, and ducked her head.

She heard the shuttle guns fire. Metal and kuorls shrieked. Heat and the smell of burning, rotted flesh hit her like a fist. Jayleia lost the field ration she’d choked down for breakfast.

Something clattered behind her.

She spun.

The entire front half of the observation blind had been blown away. A rescue harness dangled in the smoldering remains. She dove for it and shoved her feet in the straps. Force fields activated around her chest and hips, holding her to the rescue cables. The invisible harness would keep her in place even if she lost consciousness.

“Go! Go!” It felt like she’d burst her throat shouting.

The line lifted her straight into the air.

The kuorls had been thrown from the building when the wave of weapons’ fire had hit. A solitary snarling animal leaped for her as she passed.

She backhanded the thing. It fell out of sight. Relief eased the flood of adrenaline from her body. The shaking began.

“Hang on!” her rescuer ordered. “I’m bringing you up.”

How she wanted to do as he said, let him haul her aboard and enclose her safely inside the airborne vehicle. The rescue line wobbled and began reeling her in.

“Negative!” Jayleia yelled, looking up at the belly of the shuttle. “I’m infected!”

The line jerked to a halt.

“Make for the
Sen Ekir
,” she directed.

“Jayleia,” Dr. Idylle countered, his voice raw and thready. “Get aboard that ship so your cousin can restart my heart. Unless you plan to begin biting people, you aren’t contagious.”

It surprised her to find that dehydrated, dizzy, and exhausted as she was, she could still smile. “Yes, sir.”

The rescue harness lurched into motion again. Her right arm burned. She glanced at the wound on her arm, then looked hastily away from the writhing mass of bloodworms attached to her skin, gorging themselves at her expense. Where a worm couldn’t reach her bloody flesh, it bit into one of its own, using its companion as a filter for her blood.

Save for the sharp stabs of pain radiating from the bloodworm-encrusted cuts on her arm, she might have fallen asleep in the sway of the rescue halter. As it was, she’d become light-headed before the shuttle’s open doorway blocked out the view of the heat-bleached sky. Hands reached out to haul her aboard.

Jayleia caught a glimpse of a khaki uniform. Her internal alarms fired. What was the Claugh nib Dovvyth military doing inside TFC space? She glanced at the man pulling her to safety.

Damen Sindrivik was taller than she remembered. He’d filled out, broadened, and let his gold-red hair grow since last she’d seen him nearly a year ago.

Beside him, hand steadying the cables, Jay recognized V’kyrri’s copper skin, light brown hair, and his easy smile, though the last was noticeably short-lived. Not that she blamed him. Her own good humor had taken a near-fatal hit in that swamp.

As she neared the craft, she realized that fat, gorged bloodworms were detaching from her arm and dropping into the swamp below.

They looked wrong.

She glanced at her arm. Six of the bloodsuckers remained. The pallid creatures should turn first pink, then bright red as they filled with blood. The few still attached were in various stages of feeding. Two were pale, barely pinking up. One, bulging and bloated with blood, looked nearly black.

The winch arm retracted, drawing her into the ship. V’kyrri leaned out, grabbed both cables, and swung her aboard.

Damen spun and entered the release codes to free her from the force fields.

She spilled to the deck, along with a few stiff, black bloodworms that had fallen into the harness rather than into the swamps.

V’kyrri swore and backed away. “Whoa! What the Three Hells are those things? They’re all over you!”

“
L
EAVE them!” Jayleia croaked, cupping her left hand over the last six live bloodworm specimens clinging to her arm.