Xora 2 - Dangerous Game
by Brandy Dewinter
Chapter 7 - "Boo!"
"You didn't complain," Titania said as soon as we were away from
Darius.
"Complain?" I asked. "About what?"
"Oh, about my 'forcing' you to kiss him, or playing with your
hormones, or about how your 'call-girl' reflexes are to blame for the
way you move, or, well, things like that."
"Oh, 'things like that'," I repeated stupidly.
Ti left me alone with my thoughts for a few minutes as we moved along
Sstton's trail.
Finally I said, "No, I didn't complain."
Another long pause while we both digested that revelation, then Ti
said, "Not that complaining is really required, of course."
Was it? A part of me felt like I had to complain. Like it was
expected of me. Certainly I had complained before, when I felt myself
responding in ways that weren't consistent with my self-image. I
complained about Titania's meddling, or the call-girl training, or just
about anything that I thought offered an excuse.
How much of it was just that, an 'excuse'? Ti had said that we were
one, now. How much of me was Ti, and how much the old Xora, and how much
none of the above?
I knew that I was not the same person I had been. More than that, I
knew that I liked the new me a whole lot better than I liked the old one.
The thought of going back to the fat, placid me was as horrifying as the
thought of being caught by Sstton's goons.
And the thought of kissing Darius? Of doing even more with Darius?
That was horrifying too, right?
Even phrasing that question answered it. The thought, the experience
of kissing Darius was many things, but horrifying was not any part of any
one of them.
"Heads up," Titania ordered, interrupting my train of thought.
Our rapid trot, coupled with the clear, easy-to-follow trail that
Sstton had left, had allowed us to catch up with him already. Or at
least, catch up well enough that Titania had heard him crashing through
the brush ahead. I slowed to a more careful pace and still managed to
close the gap until we saw movement ahead.
*Can you tell anything about what he's doing?* I asked my symbiont
partner.
"Not really, except that from the spoor he's leaving behind, he's
frightened. There are all sorts of sweat and adrenaline and fear scents
on this brush we're passing."
*Afraid, you say?* I mused.
"Don't go hard of hearing on me now," Titania said.
*What? Um, oh, never mind,* I said. I was going to have to talk
with her about human speech patterns, one of these days. In the
meantime, an interesting idea was forming in my mind.
We could hear Sstton now, panting hoarsely. His headlong flight
through the brush was apparently more than his own conditioning could
sustain. Moving ever more carefully, we caught up just as he collapsed
against a rock. His shirt was torn from the brush that had pulled at it
and there was mud on the knees of his breeches, but he was still wearing
some sort of weapon at his belt.
"Do your thing, Ti. I want to be as close to invisible as you can
make me," I said.
It was nearing sundown which made the shadows quite dark. In
addition it's actually easier to disappear against a confused backdrop
than against a simple one. Here in the woods, with Ti almost printing a
picture of what was behind us on the front of us, we did nearly disappear.
I waited until Sstton lifted his head, regaining at least a little of his
composure.
*Can you put out a sound you've heard, almost like a recording?* I
asked Titania.
"Yes," she said. "What sound?"
*Oh, how about something like what Sstton himself said when we
first caught up with him today. What was it? Something about the
prey always heading for the ridge?*
"'I'm telling you she had to come this way. All the prey always end
up coming this way.'" Ti quoted.
*That's the one, can you do it first in his voice, then in mine, um,
ours? Only the second time, make it, 'he' had to come this way.*
"Right now?"
I nodded at her mentally. I didn't know what to expect, actually.
I guess I figured it was possible that she would somehow take over my
own vocal apparatus or something, but she never had used my muscles in
any sort of active way. She could freeze me so that I couldn't move
at all, but not make me move. In the end, that was unnecessary, of
course. It should have been obvious. She just extruded a tube with
a membrane at the end and it vibrated as a speaker.
"I'm telling you she had to come this way. All the prey always end
up coming this way." The sound of Sstton's own voice filled the space
around him.
"Who's there?" he yelled, drawing his weapon.
This time it was my voice. "I'm telling you he had to come this way.
All the prey always end up coming this way."
Sstton jumped up, peering into the gathering gloom.
"Who's there?!" he screamed.
I slipped carefully back even further into the shadows. Once I was
sure we were out of sight, I moved quickly but silently around Sstton to
provide another source for the sound.
*Play me back another one, in my voice, what he said about the fair
head start when he turned me loose.*
Ti complied, putting a throaty tone into the sound that made it seem
like an invitation. "After a fair head start I'll come after you. When I
catch you, you'll take this woman's place."
"Xora?" he asked into the darkness.
The next quote I remembered on my own. In order to make sure Ti
didn't turn it into another invitation, I put my own spin on the words,
this time nasty and harsh. "I wonder how long it will be before it is
you screaming your lungs out."
Sstton raised his cannon-thing and sprayed toward the sound of my
voice. Of course, I had ducked down and moved behind a tree as soon as
I saw his hand move. And he wasn't very close to us anyway. Our comments
from the darkness did get him to start running down the trail again, now
free of the brush as he moved lower on the mountain.
It was getting fairly dark, but the light of the moons that were up
still provided enough illumination that I didn't think we could follow
very closely on the more open trail.
*We can't let him get away,* I thought grimly, considering the risk
of exposure.
"We can go straight down the side of the mountain," Titania said.
*I can't climb that,* I protested. "It's almost straight down in
places, and there is still enough brush to cut us to ribbons if we can't
see to avoid it.*
"Do you trust me?" Titania asked.
*Uh, oh,* I thought. For some reason it was funny. How many ways
could she kill me if she chose? Trust? We were so far beyond ordinary
trust that the very question was sort of silly.
"Not when I have to take you somewhere you haven't been before,"
Titania said, picking up on my thought as usual.
But she also picked up on my agreement. "Pull your arms and legs in,
like a sort of ball," she said.
I did as she directed, crouching down and wrapping my arms around my
boots. My jumpsuit started to swell, like it was inflating, and in a
moment I could hardly move as we truly became a ball, mostly rounded with
no protruding limbs. I couldn't really see with my head tucked down,
but I could feel Titania push us off the edge of the trail with a bit of
excess inflation at my suddenly-huge derriere.
'Trust' indeed.
We careened down the hillside like a runaway boulder, caroming off
trees and real boulders, cushioned inside my partner's pliable, air-filled
form. At one point we launched into the air for a long second, and I
caught Ti's worry through the linkage we shared. If we landed too hard,
all the external padding in the world wouldn't prevent my liver from
puddling in my left knee. But we landed on a downslope and continued to
race along.
Somehow, Titania started to slow us down. I felt asymmetric tugs
that made me think she had extended pseudo-pods to drag on the growth we
were crashing through. Eventually, we slowed enough for her to grab a
tree or something firmly, pulling us sharply to a stop.
The bladder things all around me deflated and I found myself lying
on my side, my arms still wrapped around my legs. Stretching carefully,
I checked for damage, and found nothing more than skin deep, which meant
nothing at all. Unless.
"Ti, are you all right?"
"Yes," she assured me. "That's not something I want to do all the
time . . . "
"You can say that again," I blurted.
"That's not something I want to do all the time," she repeated with
a sigh, "but the only danger is when I try to slow down. If a part of me
gets snagged in something, it can be lost."
"Let's agree not to do that again, then," I offered.
"Not a problem," she said.
Our crashing progress down the mountain had hardly been silent. On
the other hand, it had certainly been quick. We were well ahead of Sstton
and I tried to decide how best to continue his harassment. The trail he
was following was little more than a path, really, so he would pass very
close to several hiding places.
The options expanded when we saw Sstton stumbling down the path. His
voice was a painful thing to hear, raspy and desperate. Good. More
importantly, despite the gloom he was paying little attention to his path.
Instead, he looked wildly at the trees around him, starting at every
breeze-initiated whisper through what had again become jungle more than
tamer forest.
I grabbed up a handy branch and squatted by the side of the trail.
When Sstton passed I stuck my branch in front of his foot, tripping him
heavily to the trampled ground.
As he sprawled I laughed and said, "So, tell me about winning that
race on Machovia against the famous Palomino."
"You stupid wench," Sstton growled. "I'll kill you."
"My, my, how the mighty have fallen. Such an unimaginative threat."
I said from the shadows. Actually, Ti said it, from a voice tube that
allowed us to be a meter or so from the apparent source of the sound.
That precaution turned out to be unneeded as Sstton fired blindly into
the darkness, never once near our position.
"We might be better off if you spoke from your real location,"
Titania said with a snicker. "The way he sprays those projectiles
around, no place seems any safer than the real target."
We moved silently parallel to Sstton for a few minutes. Then I
realized what I really wanted to do with this predatory beast. Just
ahead was the place where the side trail led down to the swamp.
Silently asking Ti to give me the hard club-fist again, I slipped
quickly ahead of Sstton to just past the side path. Ti did her
disappearing act and we waited just beside the narrow path.
When Sstton got to our position, I reached out and rapped sharply
on the hand holding the weapon with my armored fist. I don't know
whether I broke his hand or not, but he certainly dropped the cannon.
It never even hit the ground. With a little help from Ti on seeing
in the darkness, I caught it with my other hand just as it left his
numbed fingers.
*Show us, Ti, normal dark blue colors,* I ordered abruptly. It
was enough, in the gloom, to change from ghost to real.
Sstton saw me standing there, his own weapon in my hand. With
my own voice, or our own voice at least, I said, ". . . failure is fatal
only for the prey."
Then I pointed the cannon-thing at him. As I expected, he dodged
down the trail toward the swamp. To make sure he stayed on the path,
I fired on either side of him, well clear since I wasn't sure how to
work the manual sites on that old-fashioned weapon. After a cursing,
noisy stumble, Sstton found himself at the edge of the slough. I fired
once again, over his head, and almost in reflex he jumped out into the
water, becoming quickly mired in the sticky muck.
Ti gave one last recorded message, still in Sstton's voice, "I have
been quite successful over the years, don't you see? And as a result,
quite skilled. Animal prey is no longer much of a challenge at all."
He jerked at the sound, then looked back over his shoulder at
where I stood on the bank of the scummy water.
"Stupid Federation technology. That's the only reason you escaped,"
he snarled.
"Actually, Kommissar, I have not used any Federation technology at
all, except to call with my communicator for some men to help Darius
with the men we captured. And that was after you had abandoned it.
You forgot, somewhere among all your 'successes', that the only truly
dangerous weapon is the human mind."
"You felt yourself so superior to the poor, defenseless women you
pursued with all your men and your dogs and your 'skill'," I said
disdainfully. "Yet once all your 'advantages' were taken from you,
you ended up stuck in the swamp, just another frightened animal."
As God is my witness I didn't intend for him to die there, at that
time. I was waiting for some other comment from him, something to use
to complete his journey toward an understanding of the fear and
helplessness he had inflicted on who knows how many women when he saw a
ripple disturb the trail of moonlight reflected in the stagnant water
of the swamp.
It energized him to frantic, energy-wasting panic. He struggled to
get back to the bank where I stood, heedless of the weapon I held.
Something in his manner suggested true, desperate danger, and I stepped
down into the shallow water to offer him a hand.
He never reached me. The water around him began to froth up as
though rapidly stirred. He screamed, a high-pitched outburst of pure
terror and then I saw something jabbing at him, over and over, almost
too rapidly to resolve into distinct motions. Around his waist at the
level of the water, dark spots of blood appeared, and the glints of
reflection from the moons showed feathers of drifting blood carried
away as much by the motion of the attacking snake-thing as by any
inherent current.
It was enough, though, and more than enough. A heavier ripple
followed the dark swirls from the wider spot where we had once hidden back
to their source, sending waves through the fetid water. With a massive
roar something huge erupted from the slough and fastened itself to
Sstton's shoulder. It knocked him off his feet, and with the snake still
jabbing and biting at his midsection, Sstton disappeared beneath the
water.
"Sstton!" I screamed, wanting those last few seconds to have been
somehow false, somehow a horrid nightmare.
All that answered were silent ripples that trailed off toward the
deeper water.
"I didn't want him to be killed!" I insisted.
"I know," Titania answered.
"I just wanted to scare him," I said, "to make him understand how
evil his little game had been."
Titania just repeated softly, "I know."
I stood there for several minutes, wishing somehow that he would
appear again, hurt perhaps, but not taken to a horrible, dark death in
the maw of some mindless beast. No one, not even a creature like
Sstton, deserved that. I'd rather have seen him publicly tried, and if
that were within the provisions of the local law, executed cleanly, then
have him vanish into the mud.
After a time long enough to ensure that he would have drowned, even
if somehow the beast had released him, Titania softly said, "We need to
go, Xora. There's nothing that we can do here."
"No, we've done quite enough," I said bitterly.
"We did nothing more than what Sstton had planned for us," Titania
quietly declared.
"Not even Sstton planned this for us," I said.
"Only because he had other, more cruel plans."
"You think his plans were more cruel than that?" I asked in
shock.
"His plans, yes," Titania insisted. "Nature is not actively
cruel, only ruthless. Sstton wanted his victims to suffer for
the perverse joy of inflicting that suffering. That beast, the
snake thing, they were only doing what they had to do to survive."
"But it was so, so, . . . "
"Yes it was," Titania said, understanding what couldn't be put into
words.
"Let's go, my friend," Ti said.
I let her urge me with a gentle pressure that might almost have been
the touch of a hand on my shoulder. We turned and made our way back up
the path to the main trail. Once there, it seemed only natural to turn
upward, toward Darius. We passed the small, clear-flowing stream that had
served before to wash us clean of the muck of the swamp, and I roused
enough to step down into it. No matter how much I scrubbed though, the
stain of what had happened would not go away.
"You need to rest," Titania said, urging me with more gentle
pressures from the water to the grass beside the stream. "You haven't
slept in three days, haven't eaten in almost that long. Even my abilities
are not without limits. Rest now, and we'll wait for Darius."
"Darius?" I repeated dully.
She just sent me a silent sense of assurance as I lay down on the
soft turf.
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