Aliens vs. Predators, page 18
They wouldn’t be expecting a traitor in their ranks, though.
Rather than her back, Ca’toll should have been watching above her. She cursed herself for an unblooded as a Xenowing pulled her off her feet. It was the biggest one they’d encountered so far. With long front claws hooked under the armor on both shoulders, it lifted her as though she weighed no more than a jivening. Unexpected pain spiked through her shoulder muscles and Ca’toll hissed, but there was no time to dwell on it. If this creature took her up too far and she destroyed it, the fall might kill her—or worse, leave her to a fate like Ny’ytap’s.
If she was destined to die today, she would not go quietly. By all that she held holy, she would see to it that this monster never attacked another living soul. With her arms free, it took barely an instant to reach up with her wristblades and shear off the legs holding her captive. Her attacker screeched, and the fall was minimal, twenty noks at the most.
Ca’toll landed on her feet at the same time the Xenowing came after her again, apparently unfazed by the loss of its front appendages. So far she’d seen them only in the chaos of combat. One-on-one combat presented an entirely new set of challenges. She relished the prospect; the progeny of two savage creatures, the Xenowing was an ui’stbi—an abomination.
She threw herself backward as a mouth lunged out of its insectoid face. Pointed teeth splattered her facemask with the disgusting slime of a Xeno. Ca’toll arced one of wristblades at its head, but the Xenowing was quick and nimble. First it was on the ground, then it wasn’t, teeth out and ready every time. She whirled and there it was, behind her back while on the ground again.
Despite its size, the monstrosity was skipping around her so fast that each time the plasmacaster targeting system locked onto it, her transponder canceled out the signal. It leaped and bit at her again, this time giving her helmet a groove along one side.
Ca’toll’s back arched, and within the mask her mandibles spread.
She let out a deep snarl and turned again to face the Xenowing.
She was in for the fight of her life.
42
They’d come close to discovering him too many times for Fetch to count. He’d managed to stay beneath a thick bush with red and yellow flowers. It was lighter now, so the sun must have risen, but down here in the rift there were still dark shadows that might be hiding any sort of threat.
On two occasions a wind had shot through the bottom of the canyon and released a thick cloud of pollen from the brush surrounding him, but the mask he wore protected him from any possible effects. Who knew what it could cause? The Khatura gave him that special high, but perhaps these flowers did the opposite. This was the way his mind worked, he mused—especially when he wasn’t high.
Always trying to find connections.
Always needing to know the reasons for things.
It was why Fetch had been so good at gambling—he intrinsically knew the relationship between chance and attainment, and the law of attraction that bonded everything together. It was both a curse and a gift. He was capable of understanding events and ideas in ways others found confusing and, frankly, emotionally debilitating.
Fetch waited, and watched, and figured out what everyone else couldn’t. He had done it with the monsters. They came in all shapes and sizes, from the crazy long-tailed acid crabs to the human-sized clawed things that seemed capable of ripping him in half. Were they filled with acid, too?
Seemed that way.
Then there were the monster hunters.
He’d watched one hunter push another in front of their laser weapon, the kind that up top had cut in half the monster that was about to feed on him. The larger hunter, who appeared to be the leader, had almost seen it. While she thought she knew what was happening, she’d missed something in the guy who did the pushing. A tilt of the head that could only be cunning. From his hidey hole, ten meters away beneath the bush, Fetch had seen it. No mistake.
That guy looked familiar. It was the second time he’d done something that seemed out of place. The first time had been when he’d been harvesting. Shrapnel had been watching over them, but he wasn’t the best protector. He hadn’t paid attention to ninety percent of the things he should have. He probably would’ve been a better harvester than guard.
What Fetch had seen was that the hunters had the ability to appear and disappear. Not all of them. Not the small ones—at least so far—but the larger ones had some special technology that allowed them to be there and then—poof! Gone.
The murderer—the one who’d pushed the other in front of the laser—had been talking to a larger hunter who’d gone invisible, and then remained hidden from the others. It was weird. Fetch thought these guys were all on the same team.
Something was afoot.
Something the other hunters didn’t know about.
But what had the smaller hunter done to get killed? Had he seen something? Had he somehow discovered the invisible one? Since they had technology that made it possible to become invisible, it seemed logical that one of them might be able to override another’s equipment, if he became suspicious of something.
It occurred to Fetch that he might be able to curry favor with the large female, who definitely seemed to be the group’s leader, if he was able to parlay his information. That was predicated, however, on his ability to communicate with them.
Although he kept perfectly still, Fetch’s brow creased. Out of the corner of his eyes, he kept thinking he saw another hunter, but when he looked in that direction, there was nothing. Was he imagining things? Could that be the invisible one? Maybe it was because of his ability to see the connections between things. Things that, to someone else, wouldn’t be there.
Then it came to him.
The invisible hunter was hunting.
It was hunting the leader, and she had no idea she was being targeted. She was fully engaged in fighting the flying monsters—not the riftwings, but the others. Every time they killed one, they acted like it was a victory, like everything they did was for sport. A nasty, senseless sport that just got people killed.
Fetch never thought he’d be in the game again. He’d assumed the Khatura, and being trapped in servitude, would destroy his skill, his insight. When he’d been forced to go back into the rift and hide like an animal, he’d thought it was hopeless—that he’d never escape. Now he knew otherwise.
Escape was possible, if he did it right.
All he had to do was not look, and he would see.
Suddenly an enormous creature, one of the hybrids of the riftwings and the black monsters, swept down and grabbed the leader. Its wings beat as it lifted her, but then she made it let go. Cut off its fucking legs. She dropped but it came after her, hopping so quickly and in so many directions that the laser weapon kept missing.
The smaller hunter ducked and flung itself out of the creature’s range, making no effort to help his leader. She faced it alone as it hovered, placing herself between it and the laser weapon. Showing no fear, she pulled herself to her full height and gave a ferocious, ugly growl. The hair stood up on the back of Fetch’s neck.
Without disturbing the soil, the huge, mutated creature set down and time seemed to stop. It appeared to wait, evaluating her. She went into a crouch, leaning first to one side, then the other; her adversary followed her movements with its head but stayed where it was, watching. The hunter repeated the same back and forth motion, then again, and again, until it looked like she was trying to hypnotize the creature. Fetch felt himself being lulled.
Abruptly she sprang straight at it.
With impossible speed, a sort of second mouth shot out of its face, with blunt teeth that Fetch knew were still somehow deadly, dripping fluids as they tried to fasten on her head or body. When he thought she would run right into its maw, she dropped and slid feet-first under its massive head, like the players in that old Earth game, baseball. The bite missed and for a moment the creature fumbled, unable to figure out where she was.
That instant of hesitation cost the winged mutation its life.
The hunter twisted beneath it, bringing up a short weapon that suddenly extended into a long rod with a sharp-edged, hooked spear on the end. She thrust it upward through the center of the beast’s neck, then yanked sideways with both hands until the weapon came free.
The riftwing-creature’s shriek was so loud and piercing that it took everything Fetch had to stay still and not slam his hands over his ears. Its head wobbled then fell to one side, too many of the muscles severed to hold it up. Blood sprayed in all directions as its appendages spasmed wildly. Wherever the blood landed, there was a burst of smoke.
The leader dodged out of the way as the monster fell, twitched, and finally died. Rivulets of air moving in the rift caught the smoke of the burning brush and leaves around the corpse.
Swiping absently at the splatters along her arms, the female glanced at the other of its kind, where he still stood out of the circle of battle. She stepped toward him, then they both glanced upward as two more of the hunters descended on steel cables and landed beside her. They were talking and gesturing, but Fetch couldn’t understand anything.
They pointed, his gaze followed, and he understood.
They were preparing to gather their dead.
43
Enid was still shuddering from Shrapnel’s fate. He’d saved her, but his death had been too grisly to even think about. Climbing out of the riftwing chamber, she’d felt around in the utter darkness and discovered a tunnel larger than the one they’d entered.
That was how the monster made its way in.
Spurred by the knowledge that Shrapnel’s dead body was behind her, she made her way out of the cave, stumbling through the undergrowth until she came upon a grisly scene. A body—huge, more than twice her size. It had been wearing some sort of armor and a frightening helmet, but that hadn’t done it any good.
It had been cut in two.
There were burns all over the corpse, especially the creepy-looking top half. They looked as if they were caused by some kind of acid.
Like Shrapnel…
Had he really given his life for hers? She’d always thought he hated her and her kind—addicts. It had been pounded into her mind, that they were the worst kind of people, unable to control their own appetites, willing to beg, steal, betray or worse to get what they needed. She’d hated Shrapnel for everything he had done and said to her, all the while knowing that she secretly agreed with him—about her own failure as a human being.
Then, in the end, he had inexplicably been there for her in a way no other person in her life would have even considered.
The lower half of the body was large enough that she could crouch behind it, beneath it, and not be detected. Green blood pooled around it, and she hoped that in the eyes of the monsters she would appear to be part of the corpse—dead and unworthy of any attention.
Now that the sun was up, Enid had more options. For the first time since she’d arrived on LV-363, she had free will. The Khatura was all hers—the vacuum bag was still hanging from her side—but she could also be free of the drug. She could walk away, maybe even escape. People had talked about other harvesting colonies, but she didn’t know if they existed, or how far away they would be. Whether the monsters had destroyed them, as well.
Murray might still be there, although he could have taken off while she and Shrapnel had been holed up inside that cave. As long as there was a chance, that would be her best option. She just had to get out of the rift.
If she could walk away right now, if she could dig deep and go straight, pull the willpower from where it had retreated way down inside her brain, then she could finally be free of the parasite that was always on her back, whispering in her ears, lying to her about how everything was going to be okay.
Like it was right now.
Just a little.
She didn’t have to overdo it.
Just enough to tide her over.
No, she answered.
Enid ground her teeth together until her jaw ached, hoping the pain would be a diversion. She wouldn’t give in. Because of all the shit that had happened, it had been more than twelve hours since her last high. If she could just make it a while, it would be out of her system completely. Thirty hours, they said…
She almost laughed aloud.
Thirty hours.
So much time.
Thirty hours was eighteen hundred minutes. Eighteen hundred minutes was a hundred and eight thousand seconds. Each one would be a challenge, and it would get worse as each painful second crawled by. An eternity. It was impossible. One slip, one accidental inhalation, one teeny snort, and the clock would start all over.
Addict math.
Fucking addict math.
She hated the Khatura for it.
She hated herself for it.
Enid hated Murray and the cartel for bringing her to this godforsaken planet, a place where the only thing going for it was a plant that fed the greedy and enslaved the rest. She had had a family, back on the mining platform orbiting the Thuron Gate sun. A son and a daughter. Her husband had long ago disappeared into the bottoms, where he sold his body for Khatura. She’d been the solid one. She’d kept the family unit together, moving on without him.
Then he’d come home and tried to take her son—he’d actually wanted to sell the boy so he could get a bigger stash. Enid had said “Fuck no!” and a fight had ensued. He’d been bigger than she was and thought he could overwhelm her by sheer weight, but she’d be damned if she’d allow that druggie bastard to come between her love for her family and her responsibility to her children.
Enid had stabbed the sonofabitch as many times as she could before the police broke down the door and relieved her of her knife.
Dirty cops, always dirty cops.
She should’ve expected it.
They’d taken her into custody, and the captain decided he wanted a piece of her. All her protests and fight had evaporated in a cloud of Khatura, and then she was hooked. Used up, abandoned, kicked out and left to beg in the space ports.
Such was life lost.
But she could reclaim it.
Enid scrunched her eyes shut and ran her hands across her face as hard as she could, ignoring the greenish goo that was all over her, thanks to the half-body of the alien. It felt strange to feel the skin of her face against her palms, especially when there was so much Khatura pollen within reach. What, she wondered, did she look like now? She’d been pretty once, with shiny light brown hair and eyes that were a deeper, almost chocolate brown. With her mind clearer than it had been in too long to remember, she could almost recall what she looked like back in the day. And now?
She had to stop herself from braying laughter. Khatura was the greatest thief in the universe, and it sure as fuck hadn’t skipped her. Yeah, she still had hair. She fingered one of the thin, filthy strands that poked unevenly out in tufts across her skull. If they had a color, it would be called dirt. Her fingernails were split and discolored, and she didn’t want to think too much about the material caked under the edges.
There was movement, and guttural sounds.
Moving slowly, she inched upward until she could see over the ruined corpse. There, about ten meters away, more of the same. The largest—was it a female?—made the loudest sounds, and seemed like the leader. Different species or not, there was no mistaking the furious tones and sharp gestures as she faced off with a smaller one. When the leader pointed in a direction that included the half-body, Enid decided it was time to get out of there.
Taking a quick glance behind and overhead, she managed to ease backward a couple of meters. The rift floor was a mess—broken branches, smashed bushes, and shattered rocks were everywhere. To add to her misery there were splashes of acid blood from the black insect monsters. Each time she touched even the smallest amount, she had to bite her tongue to keep from whimpering.
Finally she slipped behind the wreckage of a spindly, twisted tree that had been uprooted, just a couple of meters from the bottom half of the corpse. The pain was hard to bear, and she fought to keep silent. She just had to hope that the aliens were too busy taking care of themselves to bother about her. After all, as far as she knew, she wasn’t on their list of prey or whatever it is they were after.
Licking her cracked lips with a too-dry tongue, Enid kept going.
44
His attention fixed on the hunters, Fetch watched them assess their casualties, including the upper and lower pieces—ugh—of the one cut down by their laser weapon. But where was the invisible one?
He looked by not looking, took several deep breaths and trusted his peripheral vision, and there it was. Behind a tree by the rift wall, only a couple of meters away. It stood, watching everything.
Fetch didn’t move a muscle, and neither did the watcher. There had to be a way to turn what he knew to his advantage. He’d love to sit back and let things take their course, but not here, not now. In this situation, it was better not to leave the vicissitudes of life—especially his life—to mere fate. He needed something better, something more realistic. Somehow he needed to introduce his uncanny luck into this game, and make it work for him.
Once before, he’d been in a similar position during a massive game of chance he’d come upon one evening in the bottoms of a station around New Ganymede. While everyone topside was down for the night, stomachs full, thirst quenched, and not even thinking about where their next meal might come from, those on the bottoms were always scrabbling over one another for the simple chance of survival.
Fetch had been on the edge of the ruckus when it broke out.
Thugs vied for the central position so that when the garbage filters rotated and emptied, the garbage would drop right on top of them. Everything spilled from above, from rotten food to half-eaten lunches discarded by the jet set. The largest bullies always claimed the best spots, and when they didn’t get what they wanted, they fought for it.
