Tooth and Claw - Doranna Durgin [60]
Spitting something as nasty as it gets, and the trailing members of the flock drew up short and reversed course in what might have made a perfect hammerhead stall in an aircraft.
Coming back for another run. Riker started a run of his own, dashing for the giant rubbery leaves still intact at the edge of their clearing; the bat’leth sliced a handful of them in one stroke, and he grabbed them as they fell, sprinting for the men Gavare was now trying to haul to
the safety of the cave. “Here!” he bellowed, throwing the leaves—leaves almost as big as the average Tsoran torso, and thick enough Maybe they’d work. Maybe not.
“Tktktktktktktk!”
Gavare had to drop Takan in order to snatch the leaves, so Riker went for the fallen Tsoran, shoving the flexible shelter over him, trying to shield himself with another, crouched protectively over the writhing being-and here they came, shooting over the clearing in a flattening dive That noise again, the hairball noise; a gooey substance splashed to the earth beside him, and Riker grunted with surprise and shock as some landed on the back of his exposed arm. In an instant it turned to liquid fire, soaking through his uniform, eating at his skin; he jerked in reaction as a splatter worked into his shoulder blade. Beneath him, Takan’s struggles slackened; above him, the flock sounded off again, coming around for another run.
Riker grabbed the trank gun from its holster within Takan’s stiff hunting vest, and, digging his fingers into the leaf midvein to wield it before himself like a literal shield, he twisted around to meet them, firing the tranks point blank and close enough to see one of the creatures jerk back from the blow; several of them wheeled away from the flock.
And then the trank-gun chamber was empty and Riker was down to the bat’leth and a scored, floppy leaf, his arm burning so hot he thought he’d feel it forever-burning right through his skin and into his brain, scattering any useful thoughts far and wide. That the attack would return meant nothing to him—that was a concept, and agony was the only concept for which he had room.
He threw himself against the nearest tree like a bear
with an itch, mindlessly trying to rub the pain away; when two Fandreans grabbed him, one on either side, he didn’t know or care who they were or how they got there, he just fought them. When a Klingon roar filled the air, he didn’t care who’d made it; he’d already flung one Fandrean into a bush and was close to dislodging the other, all so he could throw himself back against that tree and rub the fire off, and keep rubbing even if he had to go all the way to the bone.
They shouted back and forth at one another, the first Fandrean charging back in to rejoin the second, and this time they pushed his back up against the massively wide trunk of the very tree he so savagely sought, trying to hold him there—why? wondered the still rational corner of mind, why and who and how had they gotten here-but it was a tiny spot indeed, and quickly chased away by the agony of the burning.
Still, for that moment, for that single instant, they kept him shoved tightly against the tree and in relative safety, even as the flock—no longer moving as one, but fractured and crisscrossing the clearing in random patterns —continued the attack. As several swooped past at Riker’s head level, dark blurs of leathery movement, the Klingon roar sounded again, followed instantly by the thunk of heavy metal sinking into wood.
The impaled flyer drooped around a Klingon knife next to his head—close enough to brush his cheek—was finally enough to get Riker’s attention, to create a break in his struggle. Enough of a break that the clever Fandreans somehow levered him around so his face pressed into smooth, lichen-covered wood as they took his very own shield, broke