WARP world (21 page)

She reached back to untie her nove but the laces wouldn’t let go. Air, she needed air, and she needed to know where the beast was lurking.

Eyes darting in every direction, she kicked her legs and reached up with the knife to cut the leather free. Her nove fell away with surprising ease; Seg’s knife was exceptionally sharp. At last the collar was off and she could breathe. Severed nove clutched in one hand, knife in the other, she sounded the water for her foe.

Ama saw the outline of the serpentine body, coiled and ready to attack. After the lunge, she would have time to get to her destination, while the drexla turned and composed itself for the next strike. If she survived.

Every instinct told her to flee but she held steady, sculling the water to hold her position, her dathe emitting the low vibration that came whenever she felt threatened. Then the drexla struck, uncoiling and jetting right at her.

Ama ducked, kicked her legs, and slashed with the knife. A glancing blow that left not even a scratch on the drexla. But now she had an opportunity and kicked hard to the ladder.

She tucked the knife in her waistband, clamped the nove between her teeth, leapt up, grabbed a rung and climbed frantically as the drexla swooped by again, lashing out with its spine-covered tail.

Alive, she was alive. She climbed over the stern and collapsed onto the deck. Her body shook, her exposed dathe flared. She was only vaguely aware of Seg staring down at her.

Seg slumped down to the deck and curled around his stomach, which had decided to empty itself moments earlier. He felt sick, wrung out, and pained, but Storm only knew what mischief she would get up to next. Throwing him over was an act he could respect–in fact, it would have been exactly his response to that sort of ultimatum. But saving him? That was a mystery.

He lay there, shivering, and stared at her gills. Across the dimensions, the basic human genotype occasionally exhibited strange alterations. He had seen many but this was his first exposure in the wild. The neckbands seemed common among the Kenda, though many were no more than fancy pieces of string–decorative, not functional. He wondered how many Kenda might have the adaptation.

He scuttled sideways and wrapped his hand around the weapon she had used against him. Holding it, he stared directly in her eyes a long moment before he reversed it, handle held out toward her. “I’d sooner have my weapon. More familiar.”

Ama looked up, now gasping for air, and waved off the weapon. She rolled to the side; three long tears in her trousers showed red scratches where the beast had opened her skin.

“Poison,” she gurgled, her mouth filling with foamy saliva.

“Karg,” Seg muttered. He lifted himself up by the rail and scrambled to the hatch. “Stay there!” he called over his shoulder.

Was anything on this world
not
poisonous? He remembered trooper Herma’s sudden and violent end, and sped his weary legs.

Below, he tore through his kit and extracted the auto-med, powering it up as he climbed back up and ran to her side. She was convulsing and it was an effort to hold her arm steady. After a few failed attempts, he wrapped the sleeve around and cinched it down. As soon as the sleeve was in place, he hit the button. Hopefully her anatomy was not too far from baseline human stock, (as defined by the People, of course), to operate.

A filmy second set of eyelids, were half way up. A reaction to injury? He watched as her body jerked and she clawed at her neck, struggling to breathe. There was nothing else he could do; her salvation rested in the hands of technology now.

A moment later, she sucked in a deep breath and her eyes closed. Strangely, he felt himself inhale with her, unaware that he had been holding his breath.

For several minutes, she laid there, face pressed to the deck.

“Okay,” she gasped, after her strength returned.

Seg stared, speechless, for a moment, then laughed and coughed as he fell back against the rail. “That was a great deal of drama for an agreement. Is there some token ‘imperil the life of your business partner’ tradition among your people?”

He watched the readouts from the auto-med scroll by. She would live, though she was fortunate that a more complex antivenom was not called for. The machine was not magic, no matter what her primitive mind might think.

He coughed, his throat still burned and his voice was rough and gravelly. “Don’t make threats you’re not willing to follow through on.” He pointed to the seft, “You’re no cold killer.”

She raised herself into a sitting position, studied the cuff on her arm, then looked at Seg. “I know,” she said, wiping her mouth, “but my family…” her voice trailed off. “Don’t hurt them, that’s all I ask.”

“Between us, we can make sure they’re in a safe place. A safe place that I do not have to know about.”

He checked the auto-med once more to make sure she was out of danger, then removed the sleeve from her arm and wrapped it on his own.

First order of business was a fresh stim dose. He still had the manual stims in his kit, but the auto-med was just that much closer and more convenient at this exhausted moment. As the cold drugs washed into his system, he shook his head to clear it. Next, the machine delivered antiseptic agents, anesthetic and antibiotics for the cut on his shoulder–he would seal the skin later.

Medical needs seen to, and refreshed by the stim dose, he pulled himself up. “Now, let’s get back to work.”

Ama nodded, and rose on wobbly legs. The sun was high, a steady wind was blowing. “We should make good time to T’ueve, if I can stay awake,” she said, then tucked the weapon into a hiding spot at the stern. “Kenda weapons, like this seft, are forbidden,” she explained. Then she pulled the knife from her waistband and held it out to him, hilt first. “This is yours.”

“In the future, use caution around this,” he said, holding the knife up for her inspection. “The blade contains huchack toxin, the slightest cut will kill the surrounding flesh and, without treatment, lead to blood poisoning.”

“Full of surprises, aren’t you?”

Seg slid the blade back into its sheathe, without response, then unwrapped the auto-med as he looked out at the water. Something lurked beneath the surface, something that desperately hungered to consume him.

Judicia Serval pressed his index fingers to his temples; the morning had been a long one. Being stationed in Alisir was bad enough without being dragged from his bed before sunrise to deal with a brawl on the docks. Bloody Kenda, always causing problems. He had a good mind to keep all of the troublemakers locked up but after sorting through the many conflicting stories from the suspects and the constables he came to the conclusion that the skirmish on the docks the previous evening was simply another case of excess of alcohol and lack of sound judgment. Some water rat likely insulted another water rat and it had escalated from there.

He would have to give all of the parties a fine and put them on notice but he had no intention of clogging his jail with a dozen loud-mouthed mariners, whose various employers would shortly be petitioning for their release.

“Issue fines and notices,” he said to the constable standing in front of his desk, waiting for his orders, “then release them. Be quick about it.”

“Yes Judicia,” the man bowed and exited.

“Now, Constable Dagga,” he turned his well weathered face to the large man in front of him, “what brings you to Alisir?”

Dagga passed over a folded piece of paper, “This.”

More paperwork, this day got more annoying by the moment. Judicia Serval pushed his glasses back up on the bridge of his nose and read. His brow furrowed into deep rows with each line of text. “A Shasir’threa? Kidnapped?”

“Or worse. In the Ymira Valley. Got word yesterday. None of the dirt lickers saw nothin’, or so they say. Found his guards dead, not a mark on ’em.”

“And Judicia Corrus thinks the culprits might be in Alisir?” Judicia Serval read the missive again, his headache pounding even more ferociously.

“Got someone we been watching for awhile. Water rat captain, name of Kalder. Brother’s a Dua, supposed to ascend next moon; but the family has a bad history. Whole thing smells foul. She was on her way here. Judicia Corrus sent me to…keep an eye on her.”

“Well,” Judicia Serval refolded the paper and passed it back to Dagga, “I’ll send a runner to the Port Captain and—”

“Judicia!” A constable burst through the door, shouldering a man of considerable size.

“What is this?” Judicia Serval asked, waving his arm, palm upward, at the man being supported. The unknown man was wet and tracking a good deal of mud in with him.

“Sir,” the constable began, huffing from the strain of helping the man leaning on him to walk, “a Damiar Lord’s been murdered. This man was among his guards, he was found washed up on the river bank.”

Judicia Serval straightened up, cast a glance to Dagga, then focused his attention on the muddy Welf, “You were a witness?”

The man nodded, though the motion elicited a wince of pain, “I saw everything.”

J
arin watched the young woman, on the monitor. He masked his displeasure at the sight of the prostrate primitive, who begged the forgiveness of her deity and prayed for deliverance from this terrifying afterlife her imagined transgressions had doomed her to. As usual, the wheels of bureaucracy turned slowly, as he waited for his former pupil’s caj to be delivered into his care.

His first caj; Segkel had wasted no time. Jarin shook his head and turned his eyes away from the pathos he had witnessed too often for his liking.

Had he gone too far with the boy?

Segkel’s comm haunted him; that fiery intensity in his eyes.
An intensity you encouraged
, he chided himself silently, as he wandered to the other side of the small office of the Caj Processing Officer and pulled up a screen displaying the list of caj currently awaiting claim. All of the others had been grafted and processed, he noted, as was to be expected. Only Segkel had specified to keep his property untouched.

Well, perhaps the boy was not beyond all hope.

How clearly he remembered the first day he had taught Segkel–transferred to his student unit because of his ratings of ‘sufficient’ in courses such as Fundamentals of World Affairs and others that held no interest for his sharp mind. Jarin’s willingness to take on the more troublesome Guild students was one more quirk of character he knew his peers joked about behind his back.

His first thought, at the sight of young Eraranat, was that he needed several good meals to fill him out. The boy was quiet, almost sullen, as he surveyed the room, finally choosing a seat away from the other students. As with all student uniforms, Segkel’s was recycled, but the frayed cuffs and sagging collar marked it as sixth or seventh generation–those worn only by the few students from the lowest ranks of the social strata. The other students also noticed these details; after all, class and caste recognition was an important aspect of their studies.

It would have been easy to feel sorry for him—a skinny loner from a poor family—but what happened in that first class quickly changed Jarin’s mind on the matter.

For the last half of his lesson, Jarin presented a question to the class, to be answered in essay format. The assignment concerned the nature of vita assessment without the use of equipment, using their own World as a model. It was also a ruse. A test beneath a test.

As always, the students were nose-to-digipad for the remaining time allotted for the class, many frantically typing as the chime sounded, indicating that they must now send their feed to their instructor. Except for Segkel. He had sat back in his chair in contemplation, typed for a few moments, then spent the rest of the time staring down his new instructor.

After the cadets filed out, Jarin scrolled through the answers, rolling his eyes at the calculations and hypotheses. Then he arrived at Segkel’s answer.

The World is a barren wasteland with little to no natural vita worth harvesting.

A smile creased Jarin’s face as he read the sentence over and over again. Truth, such a rare commodity on the World. Traitorous, most would call the young man’s answer, a fact Eraranat had to be aware of, which made the act that much more impressive. At last, his search was done; he had found the student he was looking for.