Tooth and Claw - Doranna Durgin [59]
Not, Riker noted, vine with thorns or sticky sap, though he had to wonder what this particular plant might have in store for them. “I know enough.” He tried to keep his voice neutral, to dampen his naturally assertive manner —a manner this environment had done nothing but reinforce. “I can read. Do you really think I’d be a party to this expedition, even just as pilot, without knowing some details? I’ve seen enough data to know that fatalities are unheard of, and serious injuries are rare—your minimal med kit speaks to those facts. It seems everyone else has had better luck using the tranks than we have.”
“There is always one,” Akarr said in a low voice, words which didn’t quite make sense on their own.
Riker didn’t try to clarify them. He waited.
“One person that historians remember, one person whose deeds can’t be surpassed. We had one such on Tsora, before we hunted out our kaphoora species there. An ancestor of mine. My father, Atann, is named for him. There are others—those who excelled in dueling before it was outlawed, those in the past who led their warriors to victory against the face of great odds. They made their names stand out against all the others … they secured their places in society. And in history.”
“I’ve got news for you,” Riker said, still of the feeling
that something had gone unsaid. “Plenty of times, the historians write history how it suits them.”
Akarr looked away from his men to give Riker a hard stare. “You mock us again.”
“No.” Riker drew his tired frame up, an emphasis for his words as he looked into the cave; Takan shifted restlessly, the dark purple of his blood seeping to the surface of the bandages around the sculper bites. “I think you hunt for impossible honors, and your men are paying the price. In my world’s history, we do not honor leaders who earn their…”—well, why not use the word—”daleura this way.”
“Words that might matter to me if you had any true concept of what daleura is.” Akarr gave a dismissive sniff. Through talking to the outcast, apparently.
Didn’t matter. Riker walked away from the cave with more information than he’d had a moment earlier. He knew that something drove Akarr beyond normal expectations for a kaphoora, and he knew it probably had something to do with a Tsoran named Takarr, whoever that was. He knew—Akarr’s own men knew—that it was affecting Akarr’s judgment, and that it would continue to do so.
And that they had no true recourse. They wanted to survive —but they had to do so in a way that allowed them to live afterward, as well, and Tsoran discipline for mutiny and insurgence was harsher than any Federation penalty.
“Tktktktktktktk!”
So close that Riker instinctively ducked this time, though he saw nothing. It was overhead… that meant not a , not a sculper… presumably not the snake-thing he’d run into earlier. And fast-moving, too fast—looking up, he snapped his head around to follow the sound. Still seeing nothing.
And then there they were. Black, darting between the
trees, coming down for a quick strafing run on the newly created miniature clearing. Akarr stood in the cave mouth, staring … squinting up at them with no sign of recognition on his face. Riker took a step forward and then stopped, having no idea what to do in response to the flock. It moved like a school offish, changing direction as one entity, swift and agile and hard to follow as it flashed behind high leaves at one altitude and reappeared only a short distance later at a totally different altitude. “What… ?” Riker said, confusion finding its way out of his mouth, and his grip tightened on the bat’leth—almost a part of his hand at this point—but he didn’t know what it could do against anything so small and quick as the members of this flock. Reptilian? Avian? They reminded him of streamlined miniature pterodactyls.
And then the flock was upon them, in a rush of air over leathery wings, no longer tk-tk-tk’ing, but making horrible hacking sounds that immediately brought Spot’s unfortunate hairball incident