Tooth and Claw - Doranna Durgin [43]
“That’s my decision to make,” Akarr cried out as Riker walked away.
“Then make it!” Riker shouted back without even turning around.
That’s when it struck, a huge, long-bodied blur of
motion with big ears and plenty of teeth—the only glimpse Riker got as it bounced toward him, shouldering into his hip and knocking him flat, again, only to bound away again.
“Sculper!” Gavare called, apparently not so addled that he couldn’t keep track of the things that wanted to eat him.
Riker, already back to his hands and knees and peering suspiciously around, found that the Tsorans had fallen into defensive positions around their injured. “Where’d it go?” he said, wary and disgruntled, and not at all sure he wanted to get back on his feet. But climb up he did, easing back toward the Tsorans to take up a new position, his feet set in a wide and stable base. The jungle was silent; nothing moved.
“Sculpers,” Rakal said. “They prefer their prey dead, and if it lives, they play with—”
“There!” Takan shouted, pointing, taking aim; Riker got a better look this time, was able to spot the two happily whisking tails, to see that while the sculper’s interest was in the wounded men, it targeted those who protected them. Would try to intimidate them, according to what he’d read, disposing of them with hit-and-run.
Easily bigger than the Tsorans, it launched in to bounce off Regen, sent him flying, then bounded away and came from an entirely new direction—at Riker again. Huge, happy, overgrown hyenas with too many tails and too many teeth. And a thing or two to learn about the mettle of Starfleet’s officers.
Until now, the attack had been silent—only the rustle of leaves, the short cries of warning, the tension of waiting. Until now. Riker snarled a challenge and lifted the bat’leth to meet the creature as it sprang for him, lowering its head, presenting its shoulder He had no chance of staying on his feet. But he
slammed the bat’leth at the creature anyway, turning the collision into a head-on crash that sent him tumbling across the ground. Disoriented, he staggered back to his feet, trying to find the menace—hell, trying to find any of them in this dizzying assortment of greens and grays—and more than a little glad when he backed up against the support of a gnarled ball of tree roots. Something moved behind him and he jerked around, bat’leth at the ready’ Peace Rakal stopped short and held out his hands in the reasonably universal gesture of mean no harm. “The beast is gone, Riker.”p>
“Gone?” Riker repeated, looking out over the jungle.
“You drew blood. It is a scavenger, and for all its size prefers to avoid real confrontation. It merely sought to annoy us into leaving, so it could have our wounded.”
Riker shook his head, which didn’t do anything to clear it—it never does, when are you going to learn-and licked the blood from his lip, rubbing the shoulder he’d landed on. On second thought, why bother? Everywhere else felt just as battered. “It did a damn good job.”
“Ah?”
“Of being annoying.” Riker pushed himself away from the tree, discovered he was only on the other side of it from the Tsorans, and drew himself up to enter the fray again—this time with Akarr.
Except this time, Akarr didn’t seem interested. He conferred quickly with his guards—aside from Regen, who only slowly climbed to his feet on the outskirts of the group, hunched over his broken arm, clearly in agony. No one paid him any attention, and Riker’s swift anger fortunately turned to understanding before he acted on it; they were giving Regen the space to express his pain without losing face over it. Riker, too, turned away.
And then Regen’s sudden scream cut the air—not a scream of his pain, but of mortal terror—and they all whirled, crouching, ready for action Not that it did them any good. The guards released dart after dart, none of them close enough to penetrate, as a lumbering sholjagg—heavy-bodied, with huge, clawed front paws and a short, stiff tail riding the spine