Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [24]
‘Yes.’
‘Pity. Will you be all right, then, if I leave you and go and look for some more wood?’
‘It’s too dark,’ she said. ‘Anything could happen. You might get lost.’
Pertanor was elated. For a moment all he could think was that she was concerned for him. She did care. She wasn’t teasing. ‘I’m not going far,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep the fire in sight.’
‘We don’t know what’s out there,’ she worried. ‘You could get attacked. You could get eaten.’
He was about to reassure her with a witticism along the lines that getting eaten was the last thing he intended to do, when he heard the stealthy sounds of something approaching in the darkness, out beyond the reach of the light from the fire.
Chapter Four
The three lizards had attacked the defensive position running on all fours. They were slower than when they first landed and the trees seemed to confuse them. It was not until afterwards that Kley realised they were probably cold-blooded, and rapid cooling off in the temperate conditions might have had an effect. They were still fearsomely aggressive and gruesomely spattered with Monly’s blood and body tissue.
At the first sight of them Sozerdor had panicked and wasted a full handgun charge and all the power in his auxiliary clip on the lead animal without hitting anything vital.
It was lucky for him that as it opened its jaws for the kill Fermindor got it with a brain shot through the roof of its mouth.
It was lucky for everyone that the other two lizards immediately turned their attention to the corpse and tore into it with starving ferocity, ripping away ragged lumps of pale flesh and struggling with each other for possession of them.
In these circumstances Kley, Fermindor and Belay had time to coordinate their shooting so that the kills were certain.
After that, they waited in the gathering darkness for the next attack. When that didn’t come, they finished preparing their overnight camp, staying deep in the cover of the trees.
They lit a fire, but decided against Fermindor’s suggestion that they cook meat from the dead lizards; Sozerdor protested that Monly’s guts were all over the place and they could end up eating bits of him.
‘When we get back and I draw my twenty-five,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to remember that I got there by snacking on my friends.’
Kley realised two things at that moment that she should have understood from the outset. Sozerdor had contract fever, and though he was a toody, with all the resentments against firsters that entailed, he thought of the dead second-in-command as a friend. Why didn’t she know that? Why hadn’t she been briefed? It was the sort of routine personality profiling that any team leader was given. She could have spotted the organisational weakness earlier, would have spotted it earlier and compensated for it, if they’d prepared her properly. In fact, she would have asked for a replacement before the mission lift-off. Was that why they didn’t tell her? In case she asked for a replacement and there was none available? No, that wasn’t it. All they had to do was refuse her request, they didn’t have to leave her to find out for herself when she was up to her arse in carnivorous lizards.
There was something behind it, something she wasn’t getting. Or was she being paranoid?
Later when the four of them sat close to the fire eating their field rations Fermindor said, ‘Since when was Monly a friend?’
‘I was speaking generally.’
‘I see.’ Fermindor’s voice was expressionless.
Sozerdor bristled. ‘What do you mean by that?’
Fermindor shrugged slightly and continued to eat his rations in silence.
‘I said what does that mean?’
‘You were talking about superior officers generally, were you? I never thought of them as friends, that’s all. Especially not him.’
‘You wouldn’t want to eat bits of them, though,’ Belay mused aloud, apparently trying to head off a quarrel.
She was supposed to do that, Kley thought. She was meant to keep them from fighting among themselves, but simply didn’t have the