Migration (33 page)

It?
“What? The Ro?” Mac looked around her kitchen, seeing nothing out of the ordinary and certainly no slime. “There’s nothing here but us, Fourteen.”

“That Trisulian. THAT DEVIANT!” The shout brought on a spasm of painful coughs. Mac hurried to get Fourteen water, holding the cup to his lips and helping him drink.

“I’ve checked the cabin,” she assured him. “Every room. We’re alone. Tell me how to treat your injuries—”

“Then it’s . . .” His damaged hand lifted toward the boarded-up kitchen door, gave a weak gesture.

“Outside?” Mac took a steadying breath. “Then whatever it is can stay there. Right now, I’m concerned with you. Kay tried to crush your skull, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Not Kay.”

That wasn’t good news
. “Someone else was here?”

“No.”

He struggled to sit; Mac forced him down again. “You’re not making sense, Fourteen. Stay still. Please.”

The effort had cost him. Fourteen’s already pale skin looked more green than beige. “Mac?” His small eyes fixed on her and she thought they showed surprise. “I thought you were dead.”

“I thought you were.” Mac’s hands paused on the quilt she was settling around the alien’s shoulders. “I see. You thought Kay had attacked me, too?”

“He came back alone.” As if it was obvious.

She supposed it was and flushed. “I’m very sorry, Fourteen. This is my fault. I’d been warned about him—but not that he was dangerous. I didn’t see any harm in letting him come back first. I thought you were—” She hesitated.

“Friends?” He coughed and raised a hand to his head. “Irrelevant. We remain in terrible danger, Mac. Listen to me.”

Mac swallowed. “Kay’s still here?”

“No. Yes. Irrelevant. This structure will not keep us safe. We must—” Fourteen’s voice faded again. He waved urgently at the chiller. “In there.”

“You were hiding,” Mac realized.

“Like this.” He touched the black fly disk on her belt. “It hunts by heat. My species enters torpor—sleeps—in the cold.” A spasm of pain. “It couldn’t find me.”

“What hunts by—”

Rustle, rustle
.

Bleeding hands grabbed Mac, pushed her toward the chiller door with unexpected strength. “Hurry!”

“That?” She resisted, careful not to hurt him. “Calm down, Fourteen. What you’re hearing is local wildlife. A raccoon or squirrels in the rafters. They’re just a nuisance.”

He didn’t look convinced. “We must hide until daylight. Then take a canoe—”

“Yes, tomorrow I’ll paddle to the store and get some help. Meanwhile, let’s work on getting you into a bed.”

“No!” He pressed his lips together, then said: “If you won’t go in the chiller, then close the door and we’ll stay here. Leave on the lights. It doesn’t see well in light.”

Mac sighed. “What ‘it’?”

“Kay.”

“I thought you said he’d left.”

“Yes. Deviant!” Fourteen coughed again and closed his eyes. “Please, Mac.”

“Fine. We’ll stay here tonight.” By this point, she’d have done anything to calm him down. The head wound had reopened at one end of the gash. His breathing, never even, was more shallow than before. Mac closed the door to the common room. It didn’t lock, but a chair wedged under the knob did the trick. The windows were already closed, but she checked the back door, feeling self-conscious. Her patch job was holding up.

Fourteen had watched her. He appeared more at ease now that she was taking precautions against “it.”
Whatever “it” was, beyond his imagination
.

“Can I make you more comfortable?” she asked. “Is there anything I should do for your injuries?

“Irrelevant.” Somehow the word was both tired and kind. “I have a thick skull.”

Mac brought him a fresh cup of water anyway, and put it within reach. She went to a cupboard and pulled out the first self-heating meal she could find.

The sound of tiny claws on the outside of the kitchen door turned Mac’s head, but sent Fourteen into an arm-waving, heel-drumming frenzy as he tried to get up and couldn’t. Hurrying to him, Mac held him down until he stopped, then sniffed and sighed. “I’ll go see what it is,” she said, standing.

“No! No! Mac! No!”

She opened the door anyway.

Only to jump in fright as a lean raccoon scampered off the porch, equally startled.

“Damn aliens,” Mac muttered under her breath. Furious at herself for taking Fourteen’s babbling to heart, and quite thoroughly shaken, she stepped out on the landing.

Something heavy landed on the back of her head, grabbing her shoulders with what felt like teeth. Mac cried out and staggered, trying to pull it off. She felt hair come lose between her fingers. It wasn’t hers.

A muscular writhing, then a blow against the top of her skull like a branch falling from a tree. Through tears of pain and blood, driven to her knees and half falling down the steps, Mac fought for a hold, some way to pull the thing from her. She felt it convulse again, as if coiling to strike. Remembering the parallel wounds on Fourteen’s skull, Mac rolled and threw her head backward against the wood rail as hard as she could, trapping whatever it was.

One set of claws released her shoulder. Mac fumbled with her left hand, trying to grab the thing, and felt something bite and tear at her fingers. She only pushed harder, shoving those fingers deeper and deeper into what she devoutly hoped was a mouth. “Choke on that,” she yelled. It spat her hand out and Mac threw herself against the wood again.

The weight on her head was gone as abruptly as it had arrived.

Hot blood poured down her face. Holding the railing with both hands, Mac searched the darkness beyond the light spilling down from the kitchen door. When nothing moved, she slowly rose to her feet, backing into that light step by cautious step.

A gleaming spot of red, a reflection from a solitary eye no taller than a raccoon, stared back at her from the shadow, as if in promise.

Then was gone.

“What was that thing?” Mac balanced the pack of no-longer-quite-frozen vegetables on her head and popped another painkiller. There were advantages to being besieged in a kitchen.

Fourteen sat at the table across from her, elbows on a cushion. He’d tried to come to her aid, but had barely managed to stand before Mac had bled her way into the cabin, shutting the door behind her and ramming a chair beneath its handle.

Now she understood his hands. The surface of her prosthetic hand was deeply scored; the ring finger had been snapped off at the joint. If she’d made a mistake and used her flesh and bone to fight off the creature, Mac was quite sure she’d be lying outside.

As it was, she had a probable concussion—hopefully nothing worse. Its first blow had glanced, tearing loose an appalling amount of scalp, but sparing her the full force, a force which would likely have crushed her skull.

She’d used skin patches from the first-aid kit to hold the gash together and stop the bleeding, more on the pinprick-sized holes in her shoulders—at least the ones she could reach. Her shirt was still damp but now with mostly water; she hadn’t tried to get the blood out of her shorts.

“What was it? Kay.” Fourteen smiled faintly at her scowl. He’d taken a couple of Human painkillers over her caution and was certainly looking better than she’d expected.
In all likelihood,
Mac thought,
better than she did
. “Trisulians keep their sex with them—their sex partners, to be precise. Each mature female accepts as many males as she can afford. They attach themselves to her body for the rest of their lives. She feeds them, they mate with her as she requires it. You have organisms with similar biologies on this world, as do we. Symbiosis?”

“Symbiosis.” Mac used her damaged hand to pick up the artificial eyestalk. “They attach under the hair on his—her head,” she guessed.

“ ‘His’ head. Once a Trisulian possesses at least one male, the pronoun changes. Unless both are gone. Then he is a she again.”

Meaning she should avoid pronoun issues
. “So the eyestalks belong to the males?”

“Two are the females. One more for each male. Theirs are the eyes closed in daylight. Male Trisulians see only heat—infrared.” Fourteen made a rude noise. “Kay was a deviant—removing an attached male to do his bidding, replacing him with that thing so no one would notice. It is something desperate criminals do, not civilized beings.”

Mac did the math. “So there could be two of them out there?”

“No. Despite his greed, Kay was not willing to sacrifice both his symbionts.” He indicated his own head wound. “But even one unattached male is dangerous. They hunt for receptive females in the dark and use their external genitalia, a formidable armored club, to strike and kill rivals, defending the virtue of their prize. Males mature on Trisul Primus. Interested females let themselves be hunted through its jungles.” Fourteen gave her that sly look. “It’s all terribly romantic—if you’re Trisulian.”

He must be on the mend
. “I was clobbered by genitalia?” Mac almost wished she’d had a look at the thing. “You’re kidding.”

He laughed, though weakly. “You are safe with me, Mac. Remember, I have none!”

They both fell silent at the sounds from the closed back door. Sounds that had earlier tried the windows; once the door from the common room.

Mac cleared her throat and adjusted the cold pack on her head. “How intelligent are the males?”

“Idiots. Barely sentient. I believe a valid comparison to your Earth fauna would be a weasel. Something violent and persistent. And stupid. Luckily for me. Otherwise, it would have stayed to be sure I was dead, and not merely unconscious. But all it wants is to kill other males, attach, have sex forever.”

“Yet controllable, at least to the extent that Kay could make it leave—him—and attack us.”

He shrugged. “So it seems. Or maybe rejection has driven it mad and it blames us. All we can assume is that Kay knew his abandoned paramour would do its utmost to kill us both.”

Wonderful. Oversexed and overwrought
. Mac tried to think through the pain and the cloud of post-adrenaline fatigue. “But why? Why would Kay want us dead?”

The Myg covered his eyes with his hands. “Because I’d finished the translation, Mac. When he learned what it said, Kay grew agitated, insisted his government had to have it before any other. I told him he was an idiot and we struggled. Here. The other room. It was a great battle. When he realized he couldn’t win, he turned out the lights to allow his genitalia to find and kill me.” He lowered his hands to peer at her. “But I was too smart for it.”

“Yes, you were,” Mac said soothingly, mind racing.
Emily’s message
. Her own pain forgotten, she put down the cold pack and leaned forward eagerly, but carefully. “What was the translation?”

Fourteen rested his head in his hands. “Kay took my notes as well as your original,” he said miserably. “I would show my work but I’d already swept up my cipher.”

“You broke my frogs for nothing!” Mac punctuated this highly irrational statement by slamming her good hand on the table, an impulse she immediately regretted as the jolt made its way up her arm to pound between her ears.

Fourteen peered at her. “I could tell you what the message said,” he offered.

Mac composed herself. “Thank you, Fourteen. I’d very much like to hear Emily’s message.”

He began reciting a list of numbers in a monotone. Mac listened. The numbers kept coming. He paused for a drink of water. More numbers.

Finally, she had to interrupt. “Wasn’t there a message? Some words?” Mac asked.
Something she could imagine was Emily’s voice. “Hi Mac. Wish you were here. How’re the salmon.”

“There is no need for words.”

“I need words,” she begged.

“But . . . there are none.”

Mac dropped her face into her hands.
Gods, Emily,
she thought.
Couldn’t you have done this one thing for me?

“I understand, Mac. You want words from your friend. We are both idiots, are we not?”

She mumbled: “I can’t believe you tried to talk me into sex with that.”

“Good. Your sense of the absurd returns.”

Mac laid her cheek along her arm and peered at Fourteen. “What do the numbers mean?”

“To me? Very little.” His wide mouth stretched in a tired smile. “But to those who know how to build signaling devices they will mean a great deal. They are communication settings. Adjustments. How to call for help against the Dhryn.”

She lifted her head. “What are you saying?”

“Using this information, Mac, we can finally contact the Ro. The IU will be very pleased.”

Scritch, scritch,
THUD,
scritch, rustle.