Tooth and Claw - Doranna Durgin [32]
Fresh air flooded the shuttle—or what passed for fresh air on Legacy. Hot and humid—thickly humid—it was ripe with humus, the odors of rich foliage and exotic flowers, even a strange musk. A large, bold insect flew in, bounced stupidly off the back wall, and came to rest, unfazed, on the dead navigation console. The first of many, no doubt. Riker left it there and stepped out of the shuttle onto a ground spongy with thick mosses and fallen leaves. Big ones—for the brush here at ground level consisted of huge leaves to catch the heavily filtered light, some of them rubbery, all of them gleaming with dampness that spoke of recent rain. Daily thunderstorms, Riker recalled suddenly, and unimpeded by the forcefields in any way.
In the humid air, he smelled again the blood on his lip, and that which had trickled into his beard; he swiped
a hand across the damp foliage and scrubbed it across his face several times. “You might want to do the same,” he told Akarr, who was gazing about himself as if he’d just entered the largest of cathedrals.
“Blood is honorably worn,” Akarr told him, barely taking his attention from the preserve. He crouched and ran his claws through the ground matter down to the dirt, and stood even as he contemplated the substance on his fingertips, rolling it between fingers and thumbs. “Ah,” he said. “Deep-jungle scent—the promise of rich hunting. There is no other smell like this.”
“There’s blood,” Riker suggested. “Which, if you don’t wash it off, will make you all the more tempting to any number of the creatures who live here.”
“I’m not concerned about that. I want them to come to me.”
“Then think about Gavare—right now, he probably doesn’t even know where he is, or the danger he’s in. Even if we wash him off”—no small effort, the way that head wound had bled–-“he’ll still be with you, and you “II still be drawing them in.”
“ReynTa,” Rakal said, steadfastly looking away from Akarr and tilting his head to expose the side of his throat, “maybe you should pick and choose your own time for the hunt, and maintain control over it—not bring it here where our honorably wounded have no ability to protect themselves,” Maintain control over it. There was no controlling this place, or anything in it. But Riker stayed silent, suspecting that any single thing he could say at this point would cause trouble—especially given the glare that Akarr had tossed his way as Rakal spoke.
“It is true that a leader must protect his men,” Takan said, in the most offhand of manners, also looking away
from Akarr. He, like Rakal, looked some years older than Akarr, and seemed to have a relationship of long standing with the ReynTa.
Akarr stared hard at them both, examining their postures, mulling their words. Finally he said, “Then you two may see to cleaning up Gavare. When you’re done, scout for a place for Pavar.”
The two guards briefly tilted their heads aside, and then set about then-task with alacrity that poor addled Gavare couldn’t understand or appreciate.
Rather than take any part of a chance that Akarr would interpret his watching as gloating, Riker set off to walk around the shuttle, wincing at the damage-who would have thought that duranium would twist and bend like that—and more grateful than ever that his aches and pains were only that. They were lucky to have lost only one.
But that didn’t mean the others were capable of walking out through this. The ground foliage grabbed at his ankles, and hidden roots snagged his toes. Within a short distance, the damp leaves had soaked his pants from the knees down; he squinted up at the all-enveloping treetop canopy and considered the strength of the rain that could get past it. An image of the steaming, heavily puddled landing pad outside the museum hangar came to mind. At this rate of going, even if