Elite: A Hunter novel (26 page)

“Gah!”
he spluttered. “Dog tongue!”

The rest of us laughed. “It’s cleaner than yours,” said Scarlet.

“Just hold still, you big baby,” I scolded. “Bya has healing spit, better than anything the medics can do for you.”

So he sat there until Bya decided he was satisfied. Then Kent helped him to his feet, while the rest of us stood around congratulating him for a little bit. Even Bull, who by this time had gotten himself bandaged up and had come back out for the end of the Trials.

“You look like five miles of bad road,” Mark said when Bull came up to him and shook his hand.

Bull snorted. “Go look in a mirror,” he retorted, and about that time, the guys took him off to the dressing room where I presume they stood him under a hot shower while feeding him protein and energy drinks, then took him off to the medics to get himself tended.

The rest of us went back to HQ, where a party had been set up in the lounge. It was a party I never got for myself, since Ace’s murder attempt had pretty much derailed any notion of celebrating for all of us.

All the Elite and a good couple dozen of the other Hunters gathered there, which was a nice, comfortable crowd for a shindig. We all settled back with drinks, waiting for the man of the moment to arrive.

When he did, we all stood up to cheer.

He looked around at all of us with surprise; from the look on his face, which was sheer, blank astonishment, he never expected this many of us to show up to congratulate him.

When the cheering died down and he was settled with a steak sandwich and tall mug of beer, someone started shouting for a speech. He held up his hand, the one with the sandwich in it.

“Whoa, I am no good at speeches,” he protested. “And it would be a crime to let this fine piece of meat get cold.” He looked around then and smiled—something I don’t think many people but me had ever seen him do. “But I will say this. Thank you. I reckon that’s all that needs to be said.”

And he looked straight at me when he said it. Which made me feel pretty darn good.

I HAD NEVER BEEN to a Christer wedding. I’d been to plenty of ours, which are wildly varied but always end in parties. I guessed Christer ones were more solemn.

All the lounge furniture had been pushed back, and Mark and Jessie were standing in front of the main vid-screen. Those of us who had come were standing behind them, all of us dressed much more formally than we usually were. Mind you, this was not the usual sort of wedding by Christer standards either. They both had been pretty insistent on being married by their own preacher man, and because there was no way Apex was going to let them leave to do that, Kent had arranged for a train to stop long enough to give their preacher the two-way vid link for the ceremony, seeing that nobody on or near the Mountain had the equipment for a two-way link that far.

I hadn’t actually even seen Jessie before this, since she’d kept much to herself; she was real pretty, though nothing like anything I’d thought. I figured she would be delicate and tiny, but she was almost as tall as Mark and had those lean muscles like Kei had that told
me
she could probably chop wood and haul water with the best of them. I should have expected that, actually—Mark’s people had it pretty hard where they lived, and no one was likely to be delicate.

She’d turned down the offer of a wedding dress, and she’d brought her gram’s, handed down to her. It was all hand crocheted, which was probably a revelation to our stylists, who likely hadn’t seen anything like it before—old enough for the cotton string it had been made from, and the cotton lining, to have turned a creamy color. Long sleeves, floor length, and made with a lot of love by an expert needlewoman. I wondered if it had been her grandmother, or
grandmother’s
mother, who had made it. And where she had gotten that much cotton string.

Mark insisted that as many of us as wanted to come should be there. That was about half of the Elite—not that the other half didn’t want to be there, but they were out on calls or sleeping after night calls—and some of the friends he’d made in the regular Hunters. We made a pretty respectable showing, and if Jessie was uneasy around us, she had the good manners not to show it.

The ceremony itself wasn’t anything surprising, and the preacher man was very mannered. He was quite solemn, and this was close enough to the “traditional” wedding ceremonies I knew—though back home, most of the time the bride and groom write their own. He didn’t get enough time to preach a sermon, though, which was probably all for the best. That train could only make up so much time, and it had a schedule to keep.

We could see Mark’s people piled up behind the preacher in what looked like the recreation car. They struck me as being awfully serious for something that was supposed to be joyful, but then…maybe to them the joyful part didn’t come until after the vows were said. I thought I could tell which set of parents belonged to Mark and which to Jessie, but truth to tell, there was strong resemblance among everyone I could see, so it was hard to be sure.

The business was over in about ten minutes. The preacher man said, “I now pronounce you husband and wife; you may kiss the bride,” and Mark planted a pretty chaste sort of kiss on her. Then the preacher said, “I present to you, Mr. and Mrs. Mark Knight,” and there was a spatter of applause on the train end, and then the screen blanked out as they turned to face the rest of us.

We applauded (a lot more vigorously), which seemed to be the right sort of thing to do. Mark beamed. Jessie smiled nervously. The staff brought in a big, fancy white cake they’d made specially for the two, all covered in sugar flowers, which made Jessie blush and smile a little more genuinely and look as if she was pleasantly surprised by the fact that we were all being nice to them.

Or maybe that was me being mean. She could have been pleasantly surprised by the fact that the wedding hadn’t gotten interrupted by a callout.

Anyway, it hadn’t escaped my attention that Jessie came from people like the Christers of Hope Harbor and Gilead and Nazareth-town. Like my own people, we were used to making do and using up; the whole “just go to the comp for it” business was hard to get your head wrapped around. And actually
using
the comp? Only the folks at Safehaven, Anston’s Well, and the Monastery used comps regularly. Everyone else did their learning and reading out of books, unless you were tech-gifted. So I’d had this notion to make something for Jessie, and every time I thought something mean about her, I’d go and work on it as penance. When it was my turn to come up and congratulate them, I chastely kissed Mark on the cheek, then handed her the book I’d made.

She took it and was clearly puzzled. “We’re both turnips,” I said as she opened it to glance through. “I know it was brain-twisting for me to figure out how to get stuff and find stuff around here, so that’s instructions on, well,
everything
.” I noticed she was sporting a brand-new Perscom on her left wrist. “Perscom and comp terminal,” I added. “Remember, Mark’s Elite, so you guys can ask for just about anything you need or want.” I had no fear she was likely to request gold and diamond tiaras or anything stupid like that. It was far more likely she’d do without rather than be thought greedy.

Her eyes just lit up. “Thankee!” she said, now looking genuinely happy. “I hate to keep askin’ Mark, and he’s off Huntin’ so much….”

I smiled at her. “Well, it’s pretty much laid out
for
a turnip
by
a turnip, so you should be able to navigate your way around it all right.”

Mark turned up the shine on his smile, so much I almost got blinded. I took my leave of both of them to make way for the armorer, and went and collected a piece of cake and some strawberries.

Eventually, Kent meandered back over to me. Scarlet was complimenting Jessie on her dress, with just enough envy that Jessie would know the compliments were genuine. “You’re our resident turnip expert,” he said, without preamble. “What do we do with her? I don’t want her sitting around with nothing to do all day and—” He shrugged.

“And brooding, or getting hysterical, or watching too much vid feed on the Hunter channels and getting her head who knows how twisted up,” I finished for him. “Or worse, doing nothing but reading that Book of theirs, and deciding we’re all ungodly. If she’s
anything
like the Christers back home, she’s been raised to think that doing house stuff and garden or farm stuff is all she’s fit for, and there’s not that much house stuff to do around here.”

Kent let out his breath as if he’d been holding it. “Bloody hell. This’s the first married Hunter we’ve had here since I became senior Elite, and all the ones before that had been Apex Cits. I honestly don’t know what to do with her to keep her out of mischief.”

“House stuff, garden stuff, cooking stuff,” I said truthfully. “That’s pretty much all they do, besides religious stuff. All my friends back home would be bringing you lists of what they were good at or plaguing you to put them in some lesson or other, but that’s not how Christer girls work. They wait to get told what to do, generally by a man.”

Kent cursed under his breath and ruffled his hand through the long hair on the top of his head. Then it looked like something occurred to him. “You know what? I’m going to make her Rik Severn’s problem. He’s the Personnel man, and
he
can figure out what to do with her.”

That sounded sensible to me, so I nodded. I didn’t want to stick my nose into this too far. It really wasn’t my place, and I didn’t want to make things uncomfortable for White Knight the Hunter
or
Mark, the transplanted Christer.

It looked like I’d got off on the right foot with Jessie, but there was no telling how she’d react if Knight and I started partnering up a lot. If
my own friends
back home were capable of thinking I’d gotten a swelled ego because of being a Hunter in Apex, there was no telling what a strange girl stuck in a strange place was likely to make up out of her head because I was working with her husband.

So, just to make sure she didn’t start making up things right off, I caught Mark’s eye, waved good-bye, and headed back to my room, putting myself on the night-duty roster while I was at it.

“Bya,” I said, looking down at the third dead Psimon, this one at my feet. “I am getting seriously sick of this.”

This time the discovery had come as more of a shock, since I’d literally stumbled over the body. I just hadn’t expected a
third
body in practically the same place as the first one had been.

The Hounds had been tracking
Nagas
that we’d flushed out of a side tunnel, and we’d been paying attention to them and not necessarily looking for anything else. This time the body was right at an intersection, and I didn’t see it until I had turned the corner.

Nagas
first. I’d already “contaminated” the scene, assuming that PsiCorps actually cared about that, so once we tracked the last of the snakes and killed it, this time I could come back and look the body over at close range.
And
vid while I was doing that. And get the ID. This time there was no point in staying so far back I couldn’t get a reading.

I have their scent,
said Myrrdhin.
Go the other way.

I left the body and turned down the opposite branch of the intersecting tunnel. We’d managed to intercept the
Nagas
just as they were magicking open the door into the service tunnel, and they’d turned and slithered off instead of fighting. Either they had just seen the size of my pack and figured fighting was not an option, or we were getting a reputation among Othersiders, since this was the first time, ever, that any Othersider had tried to escape instead of attacking us.

Myrrdhin and Shinje and Hold were the ones who’d found the scent after we’d lost it in a spot where someone, a street cleaner most likely, had dumped a big load of water down one of the sewer grates. That had effectively killed the trail, so we’d had to split up into four subteams. Now all of the others were streaming past me on the run to catch up with Myrrdhin’s group. I didn’t insult Myrrdhin’s intelligence by telling him not to start anything until we got there. I just chambered incendiary rounds as I ran.