Tooth and Claw - Doranna Durgin [42]
He let the bat’leth do the thinking for him.
Slashing, striking, ducking, skipping out of reach … in the end^ he didn’t know if the snake-thing was badly wounded or merely annoyed enough to leave. It left enough of its blood in evidence so he felt he’d at least ruined its day; already the insects were swarming. He stood, panting, looking at the evidence of the struggle—but only for a moment. Then he wiped his face against his shoulder, clearing it of sweat and… less pleasant things … and turned to walk briskly down the trail.
It took him some moments to catch up with the Tsorans, who had made no attempt to wait for him. Even so, Rakal turned to give him a disgruntled look. “Best if you don’t slow us down,” he said, the Universal Translator faltering and barely comprehensible over the gruffness of his under-purr and his steady panting. Definitely affected by the tech damper, dammit.
“Just taking a look around,” he told Rakal, wiping sweat from the side of his face; he merely smiled when Rakal caught a glimpse of the bloodied bat’leth, giving
it an obvious double take. It distracted him enough, in fact, that when Ketan—whose short, slightly bowed but normally sturdy legs had gone distinctly wobbly in the moments since Riker’s arrival—folded neatly to the ground, Rakal almost walked right over him.
“Ketan!” Rakal’s exclamation wavered between concern and annoyance. “On your feet, then, Ketan—we need to make more distance this day.”
“I think it would be wiser to find a place to camp,” Riker said.
“There is still plenty of day left,” Rakal said, although beneath the canopy, it was hard to judge the fading light. “We’ll move until Akarr says otherwise.”
“And is Akarr going to carry your friend? Because maybe you can’t see it, but he’s gone just about as far as he’s going to go.” Riker doubted they had much of “this day” left. And if there was one thing he knew, it was that he wanted to have a good, defensible camp set up before twilight settled in.
Most hunting, he recalled, took place in the twilight hours.
“What delay has Riker caused now?” Akarr shouted back at them, already retracing his steps and bringing the others with him.
“Just trying to save your hide,” Riker said between his teeth, feeling his remaining patience trickle away through the hole in his temper. More loudly, he said, “Your men are injured, Akarr. They’re beat. We need to find a good place to spend the night, and we need to do it while we’ve still got the energy to fight off whatever comes after us in the next few hours.”
Akarr lifted his head slightly, his nostrils flaring as he sipped in a quick series of breaths. Scenting the air. More accurately, Riker knew, than any human could
ever do the same—but not nearly with the accuracy of even the most over bred Earth dog. Nonetheless, Akarr spoke with assurance. “There’s nothing in the area.”
“Is that what you thought a few moments ago, when you walked past this?” Riker lifted the bat’leth, holding it vertically; obligingly, the last drops of maroon blood slipped down the edge to splat dramatically against the leaves below.
Silence fell over the group. Silence more or less, considering the increasing activity in the trees around them; the creature of the hollow, clacking cry loosed another series of calls.
Well. He’d been hoping that one was gone, but on the other hand it hadn’t seemed likely that it was the defeated snake-thing, either.
“It would be best,” Akarr said, struggling to maintain his grasp on a command presence, “to make more distance while we’re still fresh.”
Gavare chose that moment to wander into the middle of them and slowly sink to his knees. As unobtrusively as possible, Rakal tugged him off to the side, next to Ketan.
“Can’t get much fresher than that,” Riker said. He plucked a giant leaf and used it to wipe the worst of the snake-thing’s blood from the bat’leth. “Face it, Akarr. They’re not going anywhere. I’m going to look around for a better spot to spend the night. Someplace that doesn’t look so much like something else