The Tejano Conflict (6 page)

Despite Kay's offhand attitude, Em's death cast a shadow over the camp. The body was cremated, the ashes scattered, and business went on. When you worked in a profession whose tools included guns and bombs, death was always on the menu; only a matter of time until the order you placed arrived . . .

Jo worried about Kay's mental state. Em had been with them only a short while, there weren't any long-standing bonds, but still; save for the recent discovery that there was a male Vastalimi working with the opposition, Kay and Em had been the only two of their kind on this part of the planet as far as anyone here knew. Surely that had to resonate somehow.

Jo broached it carefully. “Is there anything you need?”

“Need? No. I wouldn't mind having a chance to hunt, but that is not a need, only a desire. And there is no prey worth chasing in this area, save for humans.”

“Probably not a good idea to bag any of those, except maybe for the opposition. And I suspect the colonel would frown upon that, given the extra scrutiny we are under.”

“Agreed.”

Jo was still thinking about Kay's mind-set when she went to see Formentara for a tune-up.

All of her augs were functioning properly, as far as Jo could tell, nothing bothering her, but Formentara required frequent checks. Much easier to prevent a problem than to repair one, zhe said, and given the number of augmented systems Jo was running, problems could crop up. Anybody of lesser talent and skill than Formentara would be hard-pressed to keep Jo's system in balance. Most people with anywhere close to as many augs as Jo had were looking at short lives. Generally, each major aug would cut ten years or so from one's life span unless precisely tuned and balanced, and until she'd met Formentara, Jo had expected to die young. A price she had been willing to pay . . .

“On the table,” Formentara said.

Jo obeyed, lying there naked as Formentara waved hir magic hands over the reader fields to observe and adjust. The room was warm enough so Jo didn't need to worry about her temperature.

“Anything bothering you?” zhe asked.

“Not really.”

“Yeah, something is—your hormones are off. What?”

“Well, Em's death.”

“That was a bitch.”

“I'm more worried about how it affected Kay. She says she's fine, but I'm not sure that's so.”

“Too bad she won't let me work on her.”

“She's faster and stronger than a human, even augmented ones.”

“Yeah, but I could turn her into a super-Vastalimi. She'd be a blur.”

“Not in the cards.”

“A parochial prejudice, that attitude toward simple augmentation.”

“What can I tell you? They are aliens.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Not much I can. She'd like a chance to go hunting, but there's nothing around that would offer her any kind of challenge. This is Earth, which as you point out endlessly, is the cradle of human civilization. Not many critters running loose that would give one of The People much of a workout.”

“Hmm.”

“‘Hmm'? What does that mean?”

“How busy are you in the field? How much time could you give Kay to play?”

Jo thought about it. The main part of the ranger work was done even though there would be forays to tweak the intel already gathered. They didn't really need Kay until things heated up. “Four or five days, maybe. Why?”

“Just because there's nothing to give a predator of Kay's ability any challenge around here doesn't mean there isn't anything on the planet that might. I know some people. Let me talk to them.”

“Okay.”

“Meanwhile, shut off your beta-blockers and give me an epinephrine spike, half-strength.”

Jo obeyed.

“Good. Three-quarters . . . good. Two seconds at full . . . fine . . . reboot to carrier levels . . .”

Jo went through the tests. Everything seemed to be in optimum condition. After she was done here, she was going to go and find Kay, see if she could come up with something to keep her busy and not thinking too much.

– – – – – –

Wink came around the corner and found Jo lying on her belly, staring intently at something on the ground.

“What
are
you doing?”

“Tracking. Be careful, don't step on the grass.”

“What? Why? Who are you tracking?”

“Kay.”

“Uh-huh . . . ?”

“She's been teaching me how to cut sign. It's an important skill for a hunter.”

He looked at the ground, which, like most of it around here, was a mix of dirt and dust, with frequent patches of scraggly grass and a few ratty-looking shrubs.

There was nothing he could see that offered any clue to Kay's whereabouts.

“Sign?”

“Any physical evidence left behind by somebody or something's passage.”

“I don't see anything.”

“Can't from that angle. Come down here.”

“On my belly in the dirt?”

“Suddenly you are Doctor Fastidious?”

He grinned. He squatted, then stretched out.

“See that little tuft of grass?”

“Yeah. It looks like a little tuft of grass.”

“Look closer.”

“I don't have your optical augmentation, I can't look any closer.”

“Yes, you can. I'm not using any of my augs. That's part of the game. No opthalmic, no olfactory, no enhanced otics, just basic biological issue.”

He stared at the grass. “I still don't see anything. It's
grass
. No, wait, there's a bug of some kind. That Kay, in disguise?”

She ignored the last. “Now, look over there, next to it, at that patch.”

He looked. “Okay. And . . . ?”

“That patch is undisturbed. See how the stalks stand, the angles?”

“Okay.”

“Now, look at this one again.”

He did. “Some of the grass here is bent down.”

“That's it.”

“That's what?”

“Somebody stepped on it.”

“Whoopee. How does this help you find Kay?”

She came up to her feet in a smooth, easy motion. Wink also stood, albeit not quite as smooth and relaxed. He looked down at his tunic and trousers. He shook his head.

“Damp or wet ground takes tracks. Look behind you, at where you and I walked.”

“Yep, I can see that, we're sublime, we've left footprints in the sands of time.”

“But Kay came this way, and she didn't leave obvious footprints. You see any?”

“I do not. How did she do that? She float?”

“Sort of. She hopped from one bit of vegetation to the next. Plus the odd rock here and there.”

“Ah.”

“If I examine the grass within a Vastalimi's jumping range around this one, I should be able to find two places where Kay came down. One getting here, another leading away. The closer the distance, the harder it will be to see.”

He thought about that for a moment. “Because she can step lightly from this to that, but if she has to jump farther, the impression will be deeper. Or if she lands on a stone that doesn't leave any sign.”

“See, already you are learning. Since I know I'm tracking a Vastalimi and not a human, I know she can jump farther. I can look at the closest grass first, and if I find something, recalculate where her next step or leap might be. If I don't find anything close, I range longer.”

“Makes sense. Doesn't even sound that hard, once you explain it this way.”

“Yeah, except that Kay knows I'm tracking her.”

“So . . . what?”

“She might backtrack.”

“Um . . . ?”

“She knows what I'm doing because she taught me how to do it. I'm looking for a flattened bit of vegetation, maybe a partial print slopping over onto the bare ground. Maybe a squashed insect.”

“Yeah . . . and . . . ?”

“Think about it.”

He did. Didn't come up with anything. He gave her an offhand shrug. “I'm just a doctor. I can follow a blood trail.”

“Okay, so we have this sign we just saw. And back to my left, there's another sign. Past that, a couple of meters away, another one. That's how she got here.”

“I got that part.”

“What if Kay came that way, then went back onto the same spots? She'd use them twice.”

He considered that. “Ah. So if you can't find any other sign past this one except the one that led you here, you work on that assumption.”

“Yep. And if that's right, somewhere back along the way, I should find
two
disturbed bits of vegetation, where she backtracked to leave a false trail, then went off in another direction. Plus landing on the identical area twice should, in theory, make it a little deeper and messier than doing so only once.”

“Right. So, not as easy as it seems.”

“Nope. And slow. Hard to cover a lot of ground when you are spending a fair amount of time lying down and trying to see which way she went; it makes for painstaking work.”

“If you could use your enhanced vision, you could do it faster.”

“Sure. And if I com her and ask her where she is, I can do it really fast. If I were trying to track somebody for real instead of this game, I'd dial up the magnification, and it would be relatively easy. I could maybe use IR to see warmer patches, except that in this weather, it doesn't work so well. But the idea is to get good at doing it the hard way; after that, you can cheat.”

“Well, have fun out here broiling in the sunshine. I'm going to go change clothes and have myself a cold beer.”

“You don't want the thrill of victory when we find her?”

“You can tell me about it, I'll share your joy.”

– – – – – –

It took Jo nearly two hours to follow the winding trail Kay left, stops and starts and backtracks, but eventually, she came to where Kay sat on a tree stump, waiting.

“Very good, Jo Captain.”

“How long would it have taken you to follow that trail?”

Kay shrugged. “Thirty minutes.”

“Great.”

“Everyone starts off an ovum,” she said. “Formentara has called me.”

“Yeah?”

“Zhe has found a place where I can seek prey.”

“That's good.”

“It is. If I have a few days.”

“Nothing going on here you need to stick around for, go.”

“Thank you, Jo. It will be a good thing to do.”

– – – – – –

Overall, Earth was not a good place for a Vastalimi to hunt. Prey animals had been domesticated here for thousands of years, and there was no joy to be found in catching a lumbering bovine and killing it. Most humans no longer ate meat, fowl, even fish; they consumed ersatz versions of these made from plants, designed to look and smell and taste like the real thing. Of course, with their poor senses, humans were easy to fool.

The cattle and sheep and llamas and assorted mammals that were once on the menu now produced milk or cheese or eggs or whatever, and under strict rules. Eating such creatures or their produce was expensive and even frowned upon.

Predators who ate mostly plants. It was hard to comprehend.

Walking up to a creature bred for docility and opening its throat with a claw as it stared stupidly at you, too inbred to be afraid?

Pah.
Maybe even less satisfying than eating plants made to taste like the real thing. One expected a plant to be still . . .

There were game preserves, of course, places where tourists could go and see creatures that would be extinct otherwise. Big felines, wild canines, ursas, and the like. They frowned on having those creatures poached.

There were apparently secret hunting clubs, wherein armed humans could go and shoot “wild” animals, using computer-controlled rifles that needed no guidance to speak of; dial in the target parameters, point it in a general direction, squeeze the trigger, the gun would do the rest.

Pah.

Not many places on this world where one of The People could get her claws righteously bloody without running afoul of the local laws.

There were, however, exceptions. And through the grace of Formentara, Kay had access to one of those exceptions . . .

The area was called Alaska, and much of it was still forested. The local region, Denali, surrounded a snowcapped mountain of some size, and most of it was a park, sans development, and rugged.

Animals were allowed to run loose here, kept in the park with electronic fences, and some of them were predators, including brown bears, the largest of which were nearly seven hundred kilos in weight and three meters tall when rearing upright on two legs. Most of the adult animals were tagged and easy to locate, via Planetary Position Satellites

Visitors to the park carried transducers that repelled the tagged predators, so it was generally safer for humans.

Generally. However, now and again, there were births that escaped the game wardens. And some of these unregistered births resulted in adult animals that did not sport electronic devices. Which, to a tourist expecting a beast twice his height and nine times his weight to turn and pad off, could be a nasty surprise when it decided he was prey.

Apparently, at least one such creature was running loose, surprising tourists; thus far, it had killed and eaten parts of three visitors to the park, and apparently once a bear developed a taste for human flesh, nothing else would be as satisfactory.

Kay didn't think human was that tasty herself.

– – – – – –

Kay looked at the warden. The human fem was trying not to stare but was obviously intrigued by her contact with a Vastalimi.

“So, that's the situation,” the warden said. “It's a bear, grown, and we're guessing six hundred kilos, from the tracks. We typed his DNA from scat and shed hair, and know his parents. The mother sow had what we thought was a single-cub birth five years ago; apparently there were two. We seldom saw her and never laid a cam on him, and it's a big forest, so he was able to thrive unseen. Rare, a perfect storm, but it happens.