Gateways 07_ What Lay Beyond - Diane Carey [31]
Her single eye fixed on Luntee.
Rain began to pummel the confused crowd. The hunters were nervous, glancing up. Pellets of ice were melting in the heat of the first few free dancers as they came down directly over the hunt plain, long strands of electrical floss snapping like a woman’s hair in the wind.
All the hunters were on the plain, with Keller, Braxan, and Lunteeat dead center. They had left their nonconducting mail shirts behind and thus would be unprotected from the savage tendrils of floss.
“Clear the plain!” Kymelis’s shout was carried dutifully through the throng, and the hunters raced for the perimeter to pull their mail shirts back on there to stand and watch as a great decision occurred on the Grid. For a woman who had trouble making a decision, she was done with this one.
“What happened?” Braxan called. With Luntee still standing on the plain, she didn’t understand the change. She was afraid that showed clearly enough through the tides of candleflies.
“Stay there!” Keller called. “It’s the three of us now!”
“Why!”
“Just stay put!”
Luntee had no choice but to stand his own ground as the first free dancer came down and the hunters flooded off the Grid. As far as anyone else knew, this was a fair fight. Only Keller and Luntee knew otherwise.
The shock floss moved toward Braxan, a maneuver which Keller had to battle in his own heart. He wanted to run and protect her, but he’d already done all he could, with his tricorder. Luntee never bothered to look at Braxan.
Of course he must assume Keller would already have immunized her.
Yes. Of course.
The tendrils snapped around Braxan, but quickly retracted at the “taste” of her.
Luntee knew, for sure now, that he was the only vulnerable person here. “I thought you were not so brutal,” he charged. “You know who is chosen now.”
Just between the two of them, Keller offered a nod of understanding. “Yes. But it’s your life against all these others. One person’s life one selfish person against a whole community of lost souls.”
“Then you sentence me?”
“One more death in this place?” Keller told him bitterly. “You know, it’s almost a joke. That’s the way it is. I’m sorry for it. I’m sorry!”
He was shouting. No choice now.
The free dancer came down, confused because a moment ago it had seen a herd of hunters and now it was searching for any at all. An easy target but this time there was no call to ready the arc spikes, nets, pulpers, reactor clamps, or other equipment to reap a harvest of candleflies or to transfer energy from the captured free dancers. All those had been left behind, on the perimeter of the Feast Grid. Today the free dancer would descend to feed and instead be the jury in a very strange case.
Keller summoned all his resolve to stand firm while everyone else was running off the Grid. The emotional suction was overwhelming! Despite a year in this place, despite the work of the tricorder, he had to fight hard against the pressure of self-preservation.
He drew power from Braxan’s determined face and narrow hunched shoulders as she stood her own ground thirty paces in front of him. His thoughts were lost under the scream of shock floss and the puffing of the giant over his head.
Several paces from him, Luntee squinted and raised his arms to shield his face, but he was doomed.
Floss snapped and sizzled around them, between them. Keller couldn’t see Braxan. In his mind he knew she was immunized and that he was too, that the free dancer would taste them and bully them, but probably leave them alone and snap up Luntee into its electrical processors. Even so, instinctive terror overrode what he knew in his mind. As he gritted his teeth and tried to see Braxan, perfect panic rose in his guts and he pushed up all his resolve to keep from bolting. If nothing else, these people needed to see him not running away.
He couldn’t see Braxan anymore. His only duty now was to move away from Luntee and let fate take its course. He had to live, to take these people home.
A step, another step