The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [167]
The blow, had it been aimed at any of the others, would have been either disfiguring or lethal, but Emilio Sandoz had known from earliest childhood the look of someone who wanted to obliterate him, to make him simply cease to be. Without thinking, he dropped under the sweep of the heavy arm, which passed harmlessly over his head, and using all the power in his legs, drove his shoulder upward into the belly, knowing from the explosive grunt above him that he’d emptied the lungs of air. He followed the body as it came crashing down, pinning the arms with his knees, and took up a position with his forearm like an iron bar over the newcomer’s throat. Emilio’s eyes made the threat plain even to someone who had never before seen such eyes: he could, if he shifted his position a fraction, use his weight to crush the fragile windpipe, and make the present airlessness permanent.
There was a sudden silence—Anne had made a dash for the lander and turned the music off, to decrease the noise and craziness of the situation—and then Emilio heard the metallic click of the Winchester being cocked but he kept his eyes on the person he was choking. "I stopped taking crap like that when I was fourteen," he said quietly in Spanish, for his own satisfaction. He continued in the soft lilt of Ruanja, "Someone regrets your discomfort. Even so, harm is not permitted. If someone lets you up, will your heart be quiet?"
There was a slight movement upward of the chin, body language indicating assent or agreement. Slowly, Emilio eased back, watching for any sign that the stranger would take advantage of size and strength and attack again. Once somebody this size had a grip on him, Emilio knew from painful experience, he would have his own ass handed to him unceremoniously, and so his strategy from earliest adolescence had been to fight quick and fight dirty, to take the other guy out before he knew what hit him. He hadn’t had much practice lately, but the skills were still there.
For his part, Supaari VaGayjur, speechless with shock, eyes watering and breath coming back raggedly, simply stared at the ... thing crouching over him. Finally, when he collected enough breath and nerve to speak, Supaari asked, "What are you?"
"Foreigners," the monster said peaceably, moving off Supaari’s chest.
"That," Supaari said, rubbing his throat judiciously, "must be the understatement of all time." To his utter astonishment, the monster laughed.
"This is true," it said, lips pulling back from white and strangely even teeth. "May someone offer you coffee?"
"Kafay! The very thing one came to inquire after," Supaari said with almost equal amiability, recovering a shard of his urbanity from the shambles surprise and horror had made of it.
The impossible being stood and offered him a bizarre hand, evidently meaning to help him up. Supaari extended his own hand. There was a momentary pause and the foreigner’s half-bare face changed color abruptly in a way Supaari had no words to describe but before he could analyze that, his attention was swept away by the realization that the monster had no tail. He was so startled by the alarming precariousness of an unassisted two-legged stance that Supaari was hardly aware of it when the being grasped his wrist with a fairly strong two-handed grip and helped him to his feet. And then he was freshly amazed, this time by the monster’s size, which made its demonstrated ability to render a fully grown male Jana’ata helpless all the more confounding.
He had no way of knowing that the monster, neck craned upward, was at that moment equally dumbfounded by the same occurrence. In fact, Emilio Sandoz had almost passed out cold for the second time in his life, having just gotten a look at the three-inch-long claws that would have sliced through his neck like butter if he’d hesitated even a moment before ducking.
Supaari, meantime, was trying desperately to adjust to a far deeper shock than Emilio Sandoz was dealing with. Sandoz, at least, had traveled to Rakhat expecting to