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“That’s the impression I got,”
Park replied. “The originals will return and the Earth
 
will be cleansed in atomic fire.”

“Atomic fire?” Tack asked.

“Generally that is supposed to
mean they will bombard us with some really powerful explosives that will kill
everyone on Earth,” Park replied.

“Does their prophecy really say
that the Earth will be cleansed in this atomic fire, or just that it will be
cleansed?” Tack asked. “The first seems very specific, especially considering
that their notion of just who are the original humans can be debated.” When
Park was unable to reply, Tack continued. “Most such prophecies leave a lot to
be interpreted. They are vague because the vision of a prophet is rarely clear.
You should try to find out for certain because I would not be surprised that
this part about atomic fire is an interpretation, not the actual prophecy and
if that is the case, then their prophecy and my vision may not be mutually
exclusive.”

Park invited Okactack to join him
and the others, but the mystic begged off. “I must leave soon. I have business
in a Geck village in a few days. We shall meet again, Parker Holman.” Tack made
a strange gesture and then added, “At least I think we shall.”

“How comforting,” Park remarked
after Tack was out of earshot. He sighed and then finally got to his feet and
continued on to the Mer trade delegation. As he approached, Merisea and Iris
came out of the door and hailed him.

“Park!” Marisea bounded toward
him with little Cousin in her arms, “My Dad’s friend, Garimore has invited us
to dinner. The others went on ahead, but we waited. What kept you?”

“Tack and I had a long
conversation,” Park replied. “I’ll tell you about it over dinner. Which way?”

“A few blocks,” Iris replied. “I
saw Tack briefly this morning. He didn’t seem predisposed toward chatting.”

“I don’t think we were chatting
in the relaxed and just passing the time of day sort of way,” Park replied as
they passed a Mer and an Attackack deep in conversation about some sort of
deal. “We were discussing the nature of visions of prophecies. It was
interesting and Tack had some insightful thoughts on the subject.”

“I imagine it is something Tack
has thought about frequently,” Iris remarked. She was only slightly distracted
by two Atackacks click-clacking back and forth in their language on a nearby
bench. “As a mystic, that sort of thing is his bread and butter, don’t you
think?”

“I suppose it is,” Park admitted,
noticing a human woman stepping out of a shop two doors ahead, “but we
discussed several subjects and… well, maybe I’m just showing my own cultural
prejudices. I was somewhat surprised than a neolithic shaman could embrace and
understand some of the concepts we…” He broke off suddenly when the woman in
front of them abruptly drew a knife with a long blade of shining white light.

The woman said nothing as she
leaped toward them with the long blade extended directly at Park’s chest, but
Cousin squealed and tried to jump out of Marisea’s arms. Park, wedged between
Iris and Marisea, jumped to his left and slammed into Marisea. The attacker
kept coming and the knife plunged into Park’s shirt sleeve and against his
skin.

Park grunted at the burning pain
as the knife touched him, but he was only vaguely aware that he slammed into
Marisea a second time, knocking them both to the ground. As they were going
down, Little Cousin flew out of Marisea’s arms but landed safely nearby. Iris
was already engaged in combat with the unknown woman.

The woman swung her blazing white
knife at Iris, but Iris stayed out of reach on the first few attacks, sizing up
her opponent. She had studied Krav Maga in school. She had not practiced it
since waking up in Pangaea, the training came back to her mind even if her reaction
time was not what it had once been. The basic idea behind Krav Maga was to finish
a fight as quickly as possible and it was with that in mind, that Iris studied
her attacker.

The woman with the knife was
clumsy, Iris noted. There was no style or finesse to the way the blade was
handled. The woman, Iris realized, had not been trained in knife fighting. That
was both good and bad news. It meant the woman had probably not been trained in
hand-to-hand combat at all. Otherwise, she would have been using a weapon she
was better acquainted with. The bad news was that untrained fighters were
unpredictable. Iris remembered her instructor cautioning her against
over-confidence when facing an untrained opponent.

Then there was the knife. If the woman
knew how to use a knife, her attacks would hardly have been so clumsy. Why a
knife and not a gun? It was an odd knife. The blade seemed to be made of light,
not entirely unlike the weapons from a number of science fiction stories. It
looked sort of like a knife blade and not a shaft or light however. It was flat
and leaf-bladed in shape although it also hummed with a high-pitched whine.

Iris chided herself for
over-thinking the situation and counter-moved on the woman’s third attack. The
light blade sliced the air between then even as Iris reached past the hilt and forced
the woman to drop her weapon with a deft strike. The knife clattered to the
ground, but woman instantly swung around with a powerful backhand blow just
below Iris’s jaw. Iris felt herself being lifted off her feet and thrown
through the air. She reacted well and rolled as she hit the ground in order to
come back fighting.

Meanwhile, Marisea found herself
trapped under Park who was groaning and only partially conscious. Nearby,
Cousin was making a worried sort of noise. Marisea rolled Park off of her and,
using her suspensor belt, got to an upright position just as Iris was being
thrown through the air. If anything, Marisea knew less about hand-to-hand
combat than the unknown woman, but she never had a chance to get close.

The woman reached into a pocket
and pulled out a small ball that she threw at Marisea. The ball started glowing
bright red as it sailed through the air. Then it struck Marisea and all she
knew was searing agony. Her suspensor belt held her in the air, but her tail
whipped hard and out of her control. It whipped against the pavement, leaving a
bloody smear. In reaction Marisea sailed upward, still screaming in pain. She
did not pass out until she was thirty feet above the ground and the little ball
stopped glowing. Cousin screamed in frightened sympathy, but then turned toward
the woman and yelped and squealed angry screams with her hair on end and
holding herself in an aggressive posture.

The strange woman did not know
how to respond to the small animal and Iris used Cousin’s distraction to her
advantage. She closed in on the strange woman and struck her with several blows
in fast succession, the last of which was a spin kick to her jaw. There was a
sickening crack as Iris’ foot made contact, and the woman fell dead.

“Taodore, Sartena, Dannet!” Iris
called quickly over her torc. “I need help.”

“What is it, Iris?” Taodore was
the first to respond.

“We’ve been attacked,” Iris
reported and gave her location. “Details later, but Park and Marisea are hurt.”

To Taodore’s credit he did not
demand details about his daughter’s condition. Instead he told her. “I’m coming
with Garimore directly. Dannet and Sartena will bring the buggy.”

By the time Taodore arrived with
a medical kit, Iris had laid Park and Marisea side-by-side on the ground and
was attempting to apply first aid even though Cousin was constantly in the way,
fussing worriedly over two of her favorite humans. Iris was not at all sure
what to do about Marisea’s tail. She had scraped a large patch of skin off one
side and it had been bleeding profusely, although the bleeding had slowed way
down in the last few minutes. Meanwhile Park’s wound looked both burned and
lacerated, but it was not bleeding.

Taodore looked first at his
daughter and then at Park and told Iris, “We need to get them to a hospital,
but let’s see what I can do before the buggy gets here.” He applied a salve to
Marisea’s wound and then carefully splinted the tail to immobilize it. “This
may not be necessary, but she might have broken bones. We won’t know that
without an x-ray. We can use this same salve on Park, it’s an antibiotic, and
cover it with the same bandaging I’ll put on Marisea’s tail for the trip. What
happened?”

Now that they done had what they
could for the wounded, Iris explained about the attack. “Park’s going to sorry
I didn’t manage to take her alive,” Iris concluded.

“I’m not,” Taodore assured her.
He had already started bandaging Marisea’s tail. Iris was doing the same for
Park’s wound. “Oh, I’ll admit that we might have gained some useful information
out of this one, but we don’t know that and your first responsibility was to protect
yourselves. Taking a prisoner is secondary. What caused Park’s wound? It looks
like he was hit with a burning hot knife.”

“Maybe he was,” Iris remarked. “I
knocked it out of her hand. It should be over there somewhere.”

Taodore looked up from his work
on Marisea’s tail. “That? It looks like a knife handle, but the blade is just a
rod of clear plastic.”

“It must have a dead man’s switch
and turns off when dropped,” Iris decided. “You should have seen it when it was
turned on.” She finished dressing Park’s wound and reached over to pick the odd
weapon up. “Oh good,” she remarked. “It doesn’t automatically reactivate when I
touch it.”

“That would have been very
dangerous,” Taodore replied as he finished working on the splint.”

“It’s a dangerous weapon,” Iris
retorted.

“The first law of weapons
design,” Taodore pointed out, “is that the device should be dangerous to the
victim, but not the user. Besides, if you drop it, your opponent can pick it up
and use it against you. Why make it even easier than it needs to be. Besides,
that thing might be genetically coded to the user. It might be useless to the
likes of you or me.”

Iris found an activator button on
the pommel of the hilt. Instantly the blade lit up and changed shape to form
the vicious leaf-shape it had when in use. “Apparently not,” Iris noted, “and
it vibrates too. Tickles my hand, but it must allow it to cut better.” She
turned it off. “Here comes the buggy. I think I’ll let Ronnie have a look at this
thing. She’s been studying the remains of dark ships. This might be related
technology and even better, it’s functional.”

“What about the body?” Garimore
asked as Park and Marisea were carried into the buggy.

“Have it shipped up to Van
Winkle,” Iris decided. “Perhaps an autopsy will tell us something about her we
don’t already know. Probably not, but…” she broke off when she heard Park
groaning inside the buggy. She rushed to his side.

“Thank you,” Taodore told
Garimore, “but we’d better rush to the nearest hospital,”

“That’s a toss-up then,” Garimore
told him. “Porgantis is on your way back to Van Winkletown, but Marta Lesto is
half an hour closer to us right here.”

“Marta Lesto it is, then,”
Taodore nodded.

Inside the ship, Park was awake,
but in pain. “What did she hit me with?” he groaned to Iris. She showed him the
weapon. “Funny, it looked more impressive the last time I saw it.” He groaned
again. “It felt like an electrocution. The shock went right through me.”

“Just try to relax,” Sartena
advised. “We’ll be in Marta Lesto in under an hour.”

“I’ll be fine,” Park replied, not
entirely convincingly. Then he noticed Cousin sitting on Marisea’s chest,
crooning piteously. “What happened to Marisea?” Iris described the rest of the
fight to him. “Did you pick up that ball too?” he asked when she was finished.

“I did,” Taodore told him. “It
seems inert now, though.”

“Whatever it is,” Iris commented,
“It probably only had enough charge for one use. Sartena, do either of these
weapons look familiar to you?”

“Not at all,” Sartena replied.
“They are as alien to me as they are to you, but Park, might be right about
electrocution. There are a number of ways that could work with either of those things.
Although, if you want to electrocute someone, there are ways to do it remotely.
You don’t have to use some strange knife or a little ball.”

“Good thing that one didn’t have
one of those ways today then,” Iris told her. “A knife I can dodge and parry. I
doubt I could block a plasma beam.”

“What’s a plasma beam?” Sartena
asked.

“Don’t know,” Iris replied, “but
come to think of it, I’m glad you don’t know either. How is Marisea doing? At
least she doesn’t seem to be in pain.”

“We don’t feel pain very often
from tail wounds,” Taodore told her. “Our bodies produce a natural endorphin
that blocks pain. It’s most effective in our tails, probably a genetic
heritage, but the endorphin helps a little in the rest of our bodies. We do not
suffer from shock as easily as most humans.”

“You also do not seem to bleed as
much,” Iris remarked. “If I had abraded as large a patch of my skin as Marisea
had, I would still be bleeding.”

“Another genetic trait, I
believe,” Taodore replied. “When our tails are wounded our bodies naturally
keep the blood from the surface of the wounded areas. It doesn’t work on our
upper bodies though.”

“You say you don’t go into
shock?” Sartena asked. “Then why isn’t Marisea awake?”

“That concerns me too,” Taodore
admitted. He held up the inert little ball. It was translucent now, looking
like frosted glass. “It has something to do with this, I am sure.”

Two hours later a Mer doctor
reported, “She’s just sleeping now. She was not badly wounded by the shock she
took, but our bodies are amazing things sometimes. It is a rare occurrence, but
sometimes we naturally go into a coma-like state while our nervous systems heal
at an accelerated rate. Her damage was minor, but wide-spread throughout her
body. So in a sense she shut down while all her energy was diverted toward
healing. We applied a layer of synthetic skin on the wound and she’ll be fine
in a few weeks. There may be some scarring, however.”