Aftermath - Ann Aguirre [79]
Vel’s not fighting at my back anymore since he broke to cut me loose, but they hunt in pairs, so his flora-beasts take no notice of me. But I still have mine to contend with, and though I’ve injured the first one, it doesn’t show signs of slowing down. But more blood drizzles from its mouth from where Vel severed its tendrils, and it moans as it moves to try to pin me.
Once more, they coordinate a leap; I knock the second one back with a swing of the shockstick. It is not sinking those long, curved teeth into my flesh again. Frag that. Focus, Jax. I concentrate on the wounded one, aiming a powerful roundhouse kick at what would be its ribs in a normal mammalian creature. Surely this thing has inner organs I can damage. It shrieks then, so high-pitched that I can’t hear all the notes, but I can tell by Vel’s reaction that it’s a horrendous noise.
The scream distracts his opponents, and he disembowels one with a scissor-sweep of his blades. Gray entrails spill out onto the foliage, but it’s nothing I’ve ever seen before—and I’ve killed some monsters in my day. Instead, it looks like coils of lichens, swimming in that awful black blood, and it stinks of rotting vegetation. His remaining enemy goes mad then, flinging itself at him in a fury and rendering it vulnerable to the grace of his knives.
Mine don’t cut and run, though. It’s as though these creatures form a family, and they will stand and fall together. I find that oddly touching even as I crush one’s throat with a final, lethal kick. That leaves only one, and it becomes quiescent, acknowledging its fate. I almost feel bad as I break its skull wide open with a two-handed swing of the shockstick. More mossy guts splatter everywhere.
“What the hell do you make of that?” I ask, palm to my side.
Red trickles between my fingers. Mary, I need medical attention. I hope Vel has some Nu-Skin. I don’t think that has any circuits to be fried in transit, so it should work, even here. My excitement at the adventure dims a bit; when I set out to chart new beacons with Kai, I was generally more prepared than this, and we have precious few resources.
“Cohesive unit, hunting as one. We merely had skills and weapons unfamiliar to them. Our next encounters may not go so smoothly.”
“Smoothly?” I show him my wound, and he moves at once for his pack, hurdling the corpses.
You wouldn’t expect Vel to be gentle, but his claws are remarkably dexterous as he cleans the wound and then seals it with a fresh pack of Nu-Skin. It bonds at once, relieving my fear. Hopefully, our antiseptic will kill the foreign microbes. The idea of growing that gray moss inside my body nearly makes me throw up—and the smell isn’t helping.
“We need to make you some knives.”
There’s no question cutting worked better on these creatures than blunt-force trauma. I’m not experienced with knives, but I don’t want to be eaten, either. I’ll work it out, somehow, no matter how steep the learning curve. And the really fun part? We don’t know this jungle at all, so those creatures might be the nicest things here.
“Do you know how?”
He inclines his head. “Trapper taught me.”
Ah, part of his bounty-hunter training.
“We need to move before their friends come looking for them.”
“I will look for usable supplies and a defensible place to spend the night.”
Now that he’s mentioned it, I can see the light is going. This definitely is not Marakeq, with its dreamy twilight. No, this world offers black velvet darkness unbroken by artificial light.
The long night is coming, and only Mary knows whether we’ll survive it.
[Vid-mail from Dina, sent on the four-day bounce]
Nola forwarded your message to the ship as soon as she got it, but we’d already put down on Marakeq by then. It sucks like hell to be the one to tell you this, but Jax isn’t here. Twelve hours after our arrival, her comm went dark. Hit and I hiked out to the settlement to investigate, but neither of us can understand