The Prize: Book One (17 page)

He slowly slithered into a slight depression probing every shadow and bush, finding the first guard hunkered down by a tree wearing a bulky looking IR helmet.  As he waited, a snake slithered across his back, but he didn't move.  If he didn't bother the snake, he doubted snake would bother him.  He wondered if the snake even noticed it was crawling over a living body.  Penn backed off and worked his way around the perimeter to look for the rest of the guards.  In all, he counted five on the first stick, or watch, betting they'd change them every two hours or so before torpor set in.  Settling into a shallow depression some distance between two guards, Penn waited patiently to see what happened.  Soon, a sleepy second stick took over, and checking his crono, he found he was right on the money.  Settling to the ground, Penn made himself comfortable, listening to the idle chatter of the guards as the shift changed, their attention elsewhere.  He'd already picked his entry point, so all he needed now was wait until the camp free of movement, or anyone stumbling around for a late night piss or a drink of water once he'd left his hiding place.  That meant keeping still until the rhythm felt right, despite the insects crawling over him.  Half an hour later, the night felt right, and he started to move, keeping a wary eye on one wandering guard who seemed more asleep than awake, it looked as if he was just going through the motions of walking the perimeter than actually paying attention to his surroundings.  That was perfect from Penn's point of view, and he waited until the Thrakee was on the opposite side of the camp before worming his way toward his first objective, a cast off blanket near the edge of the sleeping area.  By this time, the fire had started too died, and hopefully the wandering guard wouldn't come over to put more wood on it.

Once he reached the blanket, he carefully pulled it over his body, finding, much to his surprise, the underside of the blanket was hot.  Feeling around the edge, he located the temperature control and switched it off.  He still had to egress the camp, and didn't want his body showing up like a solar flare as he exited.  Settling under the cooling blanket, he now becoming invisible, just one more sleeping form around the fire.  Thankfully, the mud he'd wallowed in acted as a deodorant as well as camouflage and it helped mitigate the strong lizard smell.  Peeking out from under the blanket, Penn wormed his way between the sleeping bodies, at one point coming face to face with a Thrakee as he rolled over in his sleep, his face no more than six inches from Penn's.  He froze.  Had the Thrakee opened his eyes, even for an instant it would be all over.  Penn reached down to his chest for his blade and waited.  Thankfully the Thrakee sleep more deeply than mammals and didn't open his eyes.  The Commander was easy to spot as the comm unit stood by his sleeping mat, but it took Penn almost an hour to reach him.  As he expected, another Thrakee slept nearby, probably his lieutenant, and the key to his plan.  Inch by inch, Penn maneuvered his way through the sleeping lizards, once having to freeze in place as a Thrakee tossing in his sleep rolled over and nudged him.  Penn held his breath, hearing the lizard muttered something, most likely an apology for disturbing his neighbor.  Slowly, Penn closed with his sleeping target until he could feel the Thrakee's warm, night breath on his face.  He was definitely in need of a breath mint.  The distance was perfect, and Penn carefully rolled onto his back, checking to see the position of the wandering guard.

He was on the other side of the clearing, talking to another Thrakee.  Penn lay there, holding the edge of the blanket in one hand, the Tanto in the other, rehearsing his movements in his head, waiting patiently for the moment his victim to roll onto his back or stomach.  The moment the Thrakee turned onto his stomach, Penn rolled on top of him, driving the knife down through the back of his skull, the blanket covering both of their bodies.  Penn let go of the blanket, and pushed the Thrakee face into the sleeping mat just in case.  There was a slight struggle and a wheezing gasp as the lizard died but nothing to attract attention.  Penn had come not just to scout the Thrakee position, but also to deliver a message.  He wanted to scare the piss out of them, and he knew the perfect way to do it.  It was a nasty trick used by certain mountain people on Earth during the second of Earth's world wars.  Penn knew the idea that death had come into their camp and taken someone's life sleeping next to their Commander without anyone seeing, or hearing a thing would have a devastating physiological effect.  Especially on the leader.  Ever cautious, Penn left the camp by a entirely different path than the one he entered.  Come morning, with all of the activity in camp, it was doubtful they'd even find where he'd entered.  He noted, wryly that getting back into his own camp was almost as easy as getting into the Thrakee camp.  Still, he didn't want to risk getting shot by the troopers on guard, so he took as much care crawling inside their perimeter as he has into the Thrakee camp.

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The next morning, Ellis found Penn fast asleep under a strange looking blanket.  And carefully nudged him with her foot.  Penn rolled over and looked up at her with those sleepy golden eyes that seemed to look into her soul.

"Morning Princess.  How are we today?”  He sat up, yawning and stretching, blinking several times.

"I take it your scouting trip was a success?”  Ellis clamped down on any thoughts about what Penn's eyes did to her, also irritated by his lack of respect of her rank.

"It was delightful.”  He answered.  In the mood to jerk her chain a little.

"Just tell me what you found."  She replied.  It was too early in the morning to play this cat and mouse word game before she'd had her Kaf.

"Oh, nothing much.  Just that one of them died in his sleep last night.  Very tragic.”  He shook his head in mock sorrow.

"One of those we hit in the firefight?  Perfect!”  Ellis knew her troops would be happy to hear that.  They'd been able to get some payback for their fallen comrade.

"No, not exactly.”  Penn scratched flakes of dried mud from his chest. “He sort of lost his head.”

"Penn!  Get to the point.  What did you find out, how many troops, weapons?”  She wished she could grab him, and shake the answers out of him, but putting her hands on him might not be such a good idea.

"Don't worry.  I brought you a souvenir.”  Penn picked up a large, cloth bundle by his bed.  Unwrapping the blood stained fabric he lifted the Thrakee's head by the crest.

"Oh God!”  Ellis stumbled backward, gasping for breath, revolted by the sight.

"Told you,” Penn yawned, looking into the lizard's vacant, dead eyes.  ”Poor guy just lost his head.”

"You...  you...”  She couldn't even frame the words, her hand automatically moving to protect her throat.

"Welcome to the jungle Princess,” he laughed, “as promise.  That bunch of lizards is rethinking their commitment to the cause right now.”  He looked off to the side for a moment and spat.  His mouth tasting as if a gang of monkeys had slept there.  ”Is the Kaf ready?"

"It's on the boil I think," she answered absently, her mind on the scene in the lizard camp.  She tried to imagine how she'd feel waking up to find the person sleeping next to her headless, someone she knew, someone she spoken to the night before.

Giving her a slight smile, Penn picked up his short sword and cut a five-foot pole from the surrounding brush.  He sharpened both ends, and with a wink walked to the middle of the camp and stuck the pole in the ground.  After that, he took the clothes wrapped bundle and stuck it on the top of the pole.  Once securely impaled he pulled the clothes off, and simply walked away without a word.  Within moments, troopers started gathering around, muttering between themselves, looking at the grisly trophy, then at Penn and Ellis.

“Penn...”  Ellis started to say, and then stopped. 

In one way, she was angry at Penn's obvious display of bravado, and for a moment thought to tell him to go take it down.  She stopped, because it sent a clear uncompromising message.  She knew that not one of this mixed bag of troops the General assigned to this mission had the nerve to do what Penn had just done.  No matter how 'bad ass' they thought they were, they now knew what 'bad ass' meant.  Fishing a towel and soap out of his pack, Penn ignored the commotion, other than shooting a quick look at the troopers surveying his trophy before turning to Ellis.

"I think that should take care of any more 'alpha dog' question, don't you?”  Ellis nodded, for a moment at a loss for words.  “Good, I'm off to take a bath, because, between you and, I stink.”

She watched Penn walk away toward a small stream near the camp, whistling as if he didn't have a care in the world.  She wasn't sure what she felt about this man.  In one way, he horrified her, and in another, he fascinated her.  She did feel safer with him around, but also somehow threatened.  She was beginning to understand why her superiors seemed uneasy around humans.  Ellis had seen, and heard the stories of the brutality humans had demonstrated during the war.  She knew it was why the Empire looked down on all humans, herself included, with deep suspicion.  Sometimes she'd catch someone looking at her out the corner of their eye, and she'd wonder what they were thinking, beside wanting to screw her.  Were they as scared of her as they were of Penn?  Even with all their high-tech detection equipment, Penn had crept into the Thrakee camp and beheaded one of them.  Then, with the same precision, snuck back out and into their own camp without any of her troopers being the wiser.  In many ways, it mirrored the exploits of the Apaches or Gurkha she'd heard about.

"Kaf's up!”  The cook, trooper Gelbow called.

"Got a second one there?” she asked as she walked over, shooting a look over her shoulder in the direction of Penn and the river.

If Penn had shown the same ruthlessness on Earth, which she suspected he had, it was no wonder Tandy had looked at her so strangely.  Her mind flashed back to the scene in the hotel room, remembering the smell of fear as she walked in.  Now she understood why General Tandy smelled that way.  He knew this was the ruthless, almost casual violence humans were capable of.

"Coming right up, Major, sugar?"

Ellis nodded, taking the second cup.  She sipped the hot brew, hoping it would calm her stomach.  Fear can be just as potent a weapon as a blast rifle.  She'd served the Empire for many years, seen gruesome deaths before but never a beheading.  This was different.  She saw the change in her troopers' eyes as they came back from looking at Penn's grisly trophy.  He must have put the fear of God almighty into the Thrakee this morning, and, she realized, almost as much fear into her own troops.  In a way it gave her a strange sense of pride to see that a single Earthman could send calloused men and woman like these, used to all the horrors of war, into a state of near panic.  What Ellis failed to realize was that she had nearly the same effect on her troopers as Penn.  Even Trooper Class had second thoughts about tangling with her.  They'd all heard the stories of her exploits in combat, and regarded her warily.

Ellis carrying the second cup, down to the stream where Penn was washing himself off in a thermal pool issuing from the rocks.  He was naked and looked up as she walked toward him, unashamed.  He stood there, a slight smile on his face.  It wasn't disdain, or bravado, just a man looking at a woman.  Ells found herself breathing hard.  She saw him as a man then.  A man in his prime, handsome, strong, and sure of himself, feeling her body responding.  If anything, he was more slender than she first thought, exposing well-developed muscles as he washed the mud off.

"Come on in, the water's fine.”  Ellis shook her head.

She knew if she accepted it would lead to other things, complicated things to do with soap, water, and slippery skin.  She brushed the thought away.  She couldn't afford such distractions right now.  The mission came first.  His eyes traveled boldly over her lithe body, and she stood a little straighter.  She wanted him to see her as a woman.

'Damn it! I'm acting like some hormone-driven teenager.'

"Coffees up…  Kaf.”  She snapped placing the cup on a nearby rock, her face feeling hot.

"Thanks," he said, walking toward her, his stomach and lower waist slowly emerging from the water.

She quickly turned away, lest her eyes and body betray her.  It had been a long time since she'd been with a man, but Penn frightened her.  He was so primal.  All she could do was keep him at arm's length.  She turned and walked back to camp, hearing his soft laughter, not in scorn, but happiness.  She couldn't help smiling, but besides Ellis, other eyes watched and took an interest in Penn, cold black eyes with a cold black soul to match.  Those eyes noticed Sub Major Ellis's reaction to seeing Penn naked, making a metal to include that in his next comm report to General Tandy.

CHAPTER - SIXTEEN:                

Penn carried the grisly trophy through the jungle all morning, blood dripping behind him like a trail of red breadcrumbs.  He knew that wars were won primarily by destroying the enemy's will to fight, and in the afternoon, he found a suitable place to carry out his plan.  Penn planted the lizard’s head on a pole near a natural chokepoint at the bottom of a brush-filled gully, assuming the lizards were following the same track to the pyramid as they were.  He was betting the ghastly sight would make the leader reconsider his options, and maybe take a different path.  Later that day, much to Ellis's, and the rest of the trooper's surprise, Penn's assumption appeared to be correct.  They didn't see hide, hair, or scale of the Thrakee from then on, and progressed steadily toward the pyramid through the steamy green hell without incident.  Penn insisted on scouting their location nightly over Ellis’s objection as he needed to make sure their team wasn't being followed.  At night, the troopers began taking bets on whether or not they would be able to spot him leaving, or entering the camp.  They were impressed and a little disappointed to discover that they could not.  Even Sergeant Jaxx, who'd been stationed on Earth during the rebellion, started looking at Penn with a sort of grudging respect.  Instead of the unthinking, insane, killing machine, he'd come to expect, he found the human easy going, and careful about everything, he did.  It was an odd feeling to have one of those mad creatures fighting alongside him, instead of doing their best to kill him.

Between the heat, humidity and being on continuous alert, General Tandy's constant messages about moving faster stressed Ellis to the limit.  It did no good trying to tell him, they couldn't go any faster, no matter what he demanded.  His usual tirade about Penn deliberately dragging his feet didn't help.  As far as she could see, Penn was moving them toward the pyramid as fast as he possible.

By day ten, the jungle began to turn to mixed forest, and the going got easier.  Once the small group left the all-enveloping canopy of the rain forest, the colossal pyramid dominated the skyline.  The sheer size of it was mine boggling.  This wasn't a building in the ordinary sense, this was a mountain built by some long dead civilization.  How and why, you'd build something that immense was beyond comprehension. The towering structure loomed over everything now, but at least they could all see where they were going and had fairly firm ground under their feet.  Pushing steadily forward, they came to a cleared area at last, and saw Penn suddenly stop and sink to a squatting position as he raised his arm, fist clenched in a silent signal to halt.

"What do you see?”  Ellis asked, moving carefully up beside him.

"I'm not sure yet.  Something's different here," Penn murmured, scanning the forest ahead of them.  He felt uneasy, like hidden eyes were watching, but he couldn't say where.  His senses, usually so strong, couldn't find anything for him to lock onto.  In the end, all he could do was motion them forward.

“Tell the Girl Scouts to be careful," Ellis nodded, fading back to spread the word to the troops, leaving out the part about Girl Scouts.

They spread out into a classic skirmish line with her in the center, and Penn, half-crouched, out on the point.  Sunlight poked bright shafts between the trees, but underneath their feather like branches, an ever-present feeling of menace remained.  Again, Penn held up a clenched fist, sinking to the ground a second time as the troopers watched him and ducked into whatever cover they could find.  Moments later a group of about twenty soldiers dashed into view, their weapons firing at an unseen target behind them.  They definitely weren't Thrakee, and a quick view of them through her binoculars told her what she needed to know.  They were Silurian.  The group moved rapidly away in the direction of the pyramid, and Ellis cursed herself.

"We have to move faster, or they will get there ahead of us.”  If a third group was descending on the pyramid in search of the Prize, they were now in a three cornered race to see who could get there first.

"Make haste slowly,” Penn said, repeating the old phrase, “we don't know what we're dealing with, and I for one don't want to run into something I haven't had a chance to look at first.”  Ellis knew that Penn was right.  Rushing into unknown situations could get them all killed.

She reluctantly obeyed his command and motioned the troops forward in the classic leapfrog maneuver.  One group moving forward while the other covered them.  Twenty minutes later, she was glad she did.  Penn found the body one of the Silurians on the trail, and one look told the story.  From the neck down the Silurian's body was just jelly, completely crushed, eyes and tongue bulging from his contorted face.  A slow, agonizing death no matter which way you looked at it.  Whatever killed him was no longer around, and the troops didn't need much urging from Ellis, or the Sergeant to get them moving.  No one want to be here when whatever did this came back for its meal.

“God!  That's horrible,” Ellis shuddered, her eye darting into every bush and shadow.

“I've seen something like that before.” Penn remarked, seemingly less concerned than he should be.

“Where?”

“In the selva”

“Where?”

“Sorry, the jungle.  The locals there, the Alca call it the selva.  Meaning jungle.”

“What could have done something like that?”

“My guess is something like an anaconda.”

“An anaconda can't crush a full grown man, can it?”

“When I was a kid, I saw a forty-foot anaconda, maybe more.  If they get hold of you, you have a fight on your hands.  The Alca tell stories of anacondas eating crocs, large animals such as wild pig, and even careless children near a river.”

“You grew up in the Amazon jungle?” seeing Penn nod.  ”I thought I had it tough growing up in the ruins of Tucson.”  After that, they walked on in silence, each occupied with watching their back trail, and memories of childhood.  The death of the Silurian had a chilling effect on the troops.