Metal Boxes - Trapped Outside (13 page)

NINETEEN

Quicker than he thought possible, Tuttle was back. She’d recruited some suited marines to help and they’d yanked the whole tree out of the ground. She dropped it so close both drascos could reach mouthfuls of leaves without more than swiveling their heads.

Stone grimaced as he grabbed a handful of leaves. His fingers were tingling worse than earlier. In fact, his whole arm prickled and itched. He would have the doctor check the bandage as soon as he could, maybe she had it wrapped too tight. Still, he didn’t think the needle-like pins on the leaves could hurt him any worse than he already hurt. He crushed and rolled the leaves into a ball. They had a pungent odor like fried mushrooms.

“Corporal, do you have any water?”

Tuttle stepped closer to him. A stream of clear water sprouted out of the clear air, just about where her belly button would be, that is if he judged it correctly from the shimmering edge of her suit. She waved an arm and her suited helpers bounded away, their combat suits in gilley mode shimmering in the bright noon sun.

Stone held the ball of leaves under the stream of water, working the leaves into a mushy paste. He had to fight both drascos as they attempted to slurp the falling water before he could get to it. He smelled the leaves changing to a clean fragrance, soft and sweet. He patted the mush into the gash on Peebee’s leg. The red puffiness started to change color turning greener and greener.

A roll of tape dropped into his lap. He looked up.

Tuttle grinned back. “Maybe space tape will hold the goop on her for a while. I don’t think anything else we have will stick to her skin.”

“You carry duct tape with you?”

She laughed. “There ain’t a marine out here who’d be caught dead without a roll. We use it for everything from taping down loose equipment so it doesn’t rattle, to handcuffing prisoners. The stuff holds up in a vacuum so it’s even good if we get a hole in our suit in space.”

Stone wound it around Peebee’s leg, handed the roll back to Tuttle and levered himself to his feet. He still felt strange, wobbly, and fuzzy headed at the same time he also felt oddly fine. His eyes were alternately watering and clearing. His sinuses were syncopating in rhythm with his eyes. Just as his eyes cleared, his nose would plug up and clear just as his eyes watered again. His head still hurt, nevertheless he had to go talk to the civilians if only to shut them up. Their continued shouting hurt his ears.

He slipped under the camouflage tarp where the civilians were huddled. He recognized it as the first tarp he had been under when he entered the meadow. His dataport display still hovered in the air where he had left it. Since the explosion, the night stalker attacks and the male drasco had kept him so busy he’d forgotten he’d left it on. The screen was blanked as the last view was from a camera inside of the compound, a camera that was little more than a blob of plastic, glass and fused metal. He tapped on the dataport, it would still be working no matter what abuse he had suffered. The tough little unit was designed to survive situations he couldn’t. He ordered up the playback and rewound the view to just before the explosion. He unlocked the widgets and icons on the screen so anyone who wanted to review the data could. A six-pack of scientists jumped at the chance to get up close videos of the invading Hyrocanians.

Stone asked, “Where is Doctor Mohamed?”

Dr. Triplett’s voice was thin and wavered. “No one has seen him. He didn’t leave the compound. Nevertheless, that isn’t why we need to talk to you. Your pet drascos are dangerous and will kill us all.”

“Corporal Tuttle?” He looked over his shoulder at her shimmering outline.

She popped her faceplate open. “Sir?” Triplett looked startled, she hadn’t seen the marine.

Stone said, “You have my express orders to kill Jay or Peebee at any time if you perceive they are a danger to any humans. I don’t mean some scared maybe thing, but—um, you know?”

“Imminent and immediate threat. Yes, sir.”

Stone looked back at Triplett. “There. Feel better?”

“Better?” Triplett sputtered. “No. You can’t leave a decision like that to a common grunt, no offense, marine.”

Tuttle snorted, “How do you figure that ain’t offensive?”

“Ladies,” Stone said, “enough. I will not have Jay and Peebee put down on your say so. They are domesticated and not a danger to me and my friends.” He shook his head as he tried to clear a sour odor from his nose. It brought tears to his eyes. He hadn’t particularly been friendly with Triplett so far, yet something about her just pissed him off. He imagined it had something to do with wanting to kill his pets for no reason. She also had the most irritating habit of talking down to anyone who wasn’t a university trained professor or scientist, like everyone else didn’t matter in her grand scheme of things.

“Please, let me explain,” Triplett said. She’d used the word please, but her tone left no doubt she was speaking a commandment. Stone nodded and she continued. “I am an xeno-biologist. I studied at the—”

“Stop,” Stone interrupted. “I have a headache, so let’s get to the point, okay?”

Triplett said, “The point is I have done extensive study on fauna from Allie’s World. That is why the Emperor assigned me to this expedition.” She emphasized emperor as if that would lend credibility to her words. “I’m the foremost expert on drascos.”

“I doubt you are even half the expert I am since I’ve lived, eaten, and slept with them for a long time and I don’t think you’ve even been close enough to touch a live one.”

“Be that as it may, I know their biology, inside and out. Did you know they always come in threes?”

Stone nodded. He clearly remembered during his first visit to Allie’s World when three female drasco’s invaded his shuttle, quickly followed by Jay and Peebee’s birth and their stillborn sister.

“It’s my belief, and that of my colleagues, that drascos change upon the death of one of them. Your two are bigger than Commander Danielle Wright’s initial videos of their birth mother. They are definitely bigger than the trio of females that passed through here after the explosion.”

“So, they’re bigger. They’ve been hand fed and exercised regularly. So what?”

“The ‘so what’ is these two mass what their birth mother and her companion’s massed as a trio. Conversely, together your two pets mass what the big male massed. My conclusion is the loss of a trio member triggers a growth spurt so the two remaining drascos can grow to a survivable size. Losing both members of a drasco’s original trio triggers a massive growth spurt and the change to male.”

Stone nodded his head. Not that he agreed with her leap of logic. He’d have to think about it.

Triplett continued. “We have scanned the male. It has a womb and female genitalia. They’re shriveled and atrophied, but they’re there. The male was once a female. However, its brain hasn’t grown larger to match its new body size and its new male genitalia is designed to pump an extraordinary amount of hormones into its system. It basically has two goals in life: eat and breed.”

Stone nodded. That was old news. “So? Sounds like some humans I know.” He heard Tuttle chortle behind him.

“You have two drascos. One is injured. Should she die, the remaining one will change to male. You saw what the last male did rampaging through us. The marines barely got it stopped before it killed us all. They must be put down before they can change.”

“No.”

Triplett grew red in the face and said, “There is more. Both of your pet drascos are pregnant.”

“Um, what?”

“You heard me, young man. That rampaging male took time out from trying to kill us all to impregnate those—those—creatures. They are dangerous now, they’ll become more so when their bodies start changing and they start getting hormonal imbalances.”

“The male raped my girls?” Stone was flabbergasted.

Triplett shook her head. “Not in any sense we are familiar with. When he attacked them, he held them upside down and sprayed something from his oral cavity across their faces and into their mouths. They breathed it in and the chemical change triggered the fertilization of three eggs from previously unfertilized eggs causing them to begin gestation. Three eggs in each of the two drascos.”

Stone said, “I guess that’s why he didn’t kill them like he tried to do with all the other creatures in the meadow.”

Triplett drew herself up to her tallest, squared her shoulders and said, “We are in consensus that for our own safety, those creatures you call pets must be put down although we would like to do it one at a time so we can record the growth trigger and the male conversion.” Many of her fellow scientists, although not all, moved closer to her, standing shoulder to shoulder in a show of academic solidarity.

“Not going to happen.”

Triplett snorted in derision and looked at the men and women around her. A couple of men nodded, encouraging her to continue. “We don’t need the permission of a snot-nosed rich kid playing at being in the military to ensure our own safety. You only think you are in charge. The Emperor put you in as a figurehead to curry favor with your family and to curb the excesses usually perpetrated by the military on unsuspecting worlds. This planet’s pacification is a civilian operation, so since Doctor Mohamed is dead, that puts me in charge and I—”

Stone shook his head. “No.”

“Listen, you young fool. You aren’t old enough to even have your brain fully developed. The teenage hormones pumping through your body won’t allow you to develop a rational thought if you tried. We aren’t going to let you lead us around until we die off one by one on this savage planet. I have a way off this world and we are going to take it.”

A handgun at the end of an arm poked around Stone’s side. Its sights centered clearly in the middle of Triplett’s chest. The doctor’s hands flew up to protect herself. Stone wondered why people did that. The reflex was silly, any bullet from any gun would just go through both of her hands and into her chest anyway. Human hands were not designed to stop bullets.

He peeked over his shoulder. EMIS Agent Tammie Ryte was standing there. Her stare bore holes into Triplett, looking as dangerous as the gun she held in her hand.

Ryte said, “Doctor Triplett, I’m old enough to be this boy’s mother, well maybe his older sister or a slightly older cousin, but my brain is fully developed. So, believe me when I tell you to stop talking.”

Triplett sputtered. “You can’t point a gun at me. You don’t have the right to point a gun at me.” She jabbed a finger at Ryte, gathering courage from her fellow scientists. “The military has no jurisdiction over civilians. Having some lowly communications clerk point a weapon at a civilian is a clear violation of my civil rights and I order Ensign Stone to have you arrested.”

Stone said, “Oh, Doctor Triplett, you must not have heard the news. Our Petty Officer Ryte is really an EMIS agent.”

“A what?”

Ryte shook her head, “I’ll answer that, Ensign Stone. I get this all of the time since most civilians have never heard of us. I am an agent of the Empire Military Investigative Service.”

Triplett screeched, “Stupid frakking squid! How many times to I have to tell you? I am a civilian.”

Ryte stepped around Stone with a shrug. “So am I. That is the point, having civilian investigators watching the military. That way Ensign Stone couldn’t order me to do or not do something my investigations required. I’m an agent of the Emperor and as such I’m tasked with looking into any criminal activity involving the military or the security of the Empire.”

Triplett turned purple as she shouted, “Has everyone lost their minds? I—am—not—military!”

Ryte shrugged. “You’re a full-rights citizen of the Empire. Yes, I’ve studied your file. You know your rights.”

“Even looking at my file is a violation of my privacy rights, you goon.” Her fellow scientists nodded in concert with Triplett. Allowing the military access to civilian files was a hotly contested issue on most educational campuses, second only to their anti-war protests on campuses across human space. “You have no right to even ask for my file without a judicial order and without a notification, in writing, to me.”

Ryte didn’t lower the gun. She smiled. “I did have a judicial order. You were notified in writing when you signed up to come to Allie’s World.”

“I only signed those papers because the Emperor personally asked me to become a part of this team. He recognized my expertise—”

“No.” Ryte actually laughed. “He recognized you were the target of an investigation by EMIS and he wanted you here where I could watch you. Hell, you weren’t even in the top one hundred xeno-biologists in line for this assignment.”

Stone interrupted, “Excuse me. Did you say you had a way off this planet?”

Ryte shook her head, “Yes, she does. And I will shoot her if she even attempts it.”

Triplett shouted, “You’re all blood-thirsty savages and you’re going to get us all killed.”

Ryte looked at Stone, “Doctor Triplett has been passing information, possibly through an intermediary, to the Hyrocanians. She has been using her connections to the military during this deployment to pass military data and I have proof she sent Allie’s World coordinates to the Empire’s enemies.”

Wyznewski and Emmons looked at each other. In unison, they took two steps away from Triplett and her supporters. A few other scientists backed away from Triplett. Most scattered when Triplett suddenly rose three feet off the ground, hovering in mid-air, hands clawing at something.