Wings of Retribution (31 page)

“Whoa.”  She didn’t flinch back, argue, or otherwise get insulted, either, which was both surprising and refreshing.  Instead, she just reached up and tapped his host’s skull.  “So you’re like what, fifty of us, all balled up into one gray little blob?”

“Something like that,” Stuart admitted.  “Unfortunately, the rest of my capacity is limited to that of my host.  Humans, for instance, have very acute visual organs, as well as a large verbal command, but you have very little in the way of telepathy or other senses.”

She stared at him for a long time, then blurted, “That is
so
cool!”

Stuart glanced at Howlen, who represented the whole of human civilization.  “You’re the first one I’ve met to think so.”  With a sigh, he reclaimed his seat at the table.

Immediately, Dallas dragged over a chair and sat down with her arms crossed over the back, facing him.  For a long moment, she just sat there, looking.  After a few minutes had passed, Stuart eyed her warily.  He was about to ask her what she wanted when she spoke.

“So how old are you?” Dallas finally asked.

Feeling a bit leery, he said, “Little under five thousand.” 

“Whoa,” she whispered.  “That’s
old
.”  Again, no denial, disbelief, no outraged claims that he was lying.  Just…acceptance.

Stuart watched her carefully.  She was either very good at faking interest, or she was completely honest in her awe.  Considering her tactless remarks from earlier, he guessed it was probably the latter.  He was…humbled.

She squeaked her chair closer.  “So how long can you live?”

“Uh, well, indefinitely, as long as I’ve got a host.”

“Where were you born?”

“Mitaan.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Humans called it Arachni.  Apparently, they thought the
harra
looked like very large spiders, despite their similarities to mammals.”

“Huh,” Dallas said.  “Never heard of it.  So you had a mom and a dad or just a mom or what?”

Stuart peered at her, thoroughly perplexed that she seemed so thoroughly engrossed.  “My parent deposited me in a colony bed.  I grew up in a natural organic medium before a
harra
came to feed and we decided we’d make a good host-set.”

“
Harra
?” she asked.  He doubted she understood half of what he was saying, but it didn’t make her interest waver in the slightest.  “Those spider-thingies?  They were smart, too?”

“They’re dead,” Stuart said.  “They were killed off millennia ago, with the One Species charter.”

“So you went human?” Dallas asked, scooting even closer to him.  “I bet that was tough.”

Stuart remembered that horrible terror all over again and groaned.  “It was.  I didn’t know what I was doing.  He’d just killed my
harra
.  Big-game hunter.  Was gutting her out, gonna hang the head on his wall.  I shocked him, but he didn’t fall close enough, so I had to crawl over the
ground
—”  He broke off, shuddering.  He glanced at Dallas, who was watching him, blue eyes wide.  “Do you really care about all this?”

She nodded quickly, mouth open.

“Shouldn’t you be flying the ship?”

Dallas jerked, then glanced at her watch.  Seeing the time, she sighed.  “Yeah.  Come with me to the command room?”

Stuart wasn’t quite sure to make of the captain’s enthusiasm.  So used to S.O. plots and bounty-based backstabbing, he had to wonder if she was trying to get him alone so she could gas him or something.  “I suppose…”

“Great!  Let’s go.”  She got out of her seat and stretched.  “I’ve gotta get back before the autopilot timer runs out.”

“What happens when the timer runs out?”

Dallas shrugged.  “The mainframe overloads, stops searching out debris and we slam into a space-rock.”

“How much time we got?”

She glanced again at her watch.  “Two minutes.”

The tiny hairs on the back of Stuart’s neck lifted.  “You should get going.”

“Only if you’re coming with me.  I still wanna know how you…you know.”  She gestured at his host’s crotch.

“I already told you.  The parent leaves a pupae in its last host and it develops there.”

“But
how?
  Do you have males and females?  Can you
all
do it?  Do you have to be a certain age to do it, or can you just
decide
to do it?  Does there have to be two of you to do it properly?  Or four?  Or what?”

Stuart realized his mouth was hanging open.  He grabbed her arm and started walking toward the command room.  “First of all, while I detest Tommy’s approach, we do share a lot of similar attributes to a human earthworm.  Namely, we can replicate ourselves at will, or, if we’re feeling
really
frisky, we can dual-host to exchange memories and genetic material with another of our kind.”

“
Memories
?” she said, stopping abruptly.

In reply, Stuart thrust Dallas into the pilot’s seat and said, “How much time?”

Dallas glanced reluctantly at the controls, then yelped and yanked up on the stick so hard that the artificial gravity of the ship couldn’t compensate.  It knocked Stuart to the floor, where he lay for long minutes while the entire ship shook with seismic energy.  When Stuart got back to his feet, Dallas gave him a guilty look.

“Don’t even say it,” Stuart said, taking the navigator’s chair.

“Say what?”

“How close we came to dying.  I don’t wanna hear it.”

“Bah, it was only a couple of meters.”

Stuart paled.

“Anyway, you were telling me about getting frisky.”

“I told you already.  What more do you want?”

“I don’t know, just start talking?”  She gave him a pleading look.

“Watch the screen,” Stuart ordered.

“But…”

“I’ll keep talking, but only if it’s not gonna distract you.” 

She pouted, but turned back to face the screen.  Immediately, she made another course adjustment that left the hull creaking.

“Okay,” she said breathlessly, “You can talk now.”

Against his better judgment, Stuart said, “If we want to reproduce, we leave little parts of ourselves behind.  I guess you humans would call it an egg, but it’s not really an egg.  It takes part of our memories and stored knowledge with it.  Kind of like if I cut a piece off of a human brain and hooked it up to a robot.”

“That is
so cool
,” she said, turning to him.

“Screen,” Stuart warned.

“Okay, okay,” she said, scanning the field once more.  “So where are the rest of you?  How many are left?”

Stuart’s eyes narrowed.  Now
that
was a question he’d heard quite a few times, and never from friends.  “Why do you want to know?” he asked evenly.

“And if it’s that easy for you to make more of yourself, you must’ve made all sorts of little Stueys all over the galaxy.”  She grinned up at him.  “Right?”

Again, Stuart got that creepy sensation that the girl was either a masterful spy…or completely genuine.  “Watch the screen,” he muttered.

“So when this is over and we’ve dumped Athenais somewhere, you wanna go meet up with some of your friends?” she asked.  “Maybe they’d let me buy ‘em a drink.”

“Aside from that being the last thing a
suzait
would let a stranger do,” Stuart said, “I don’t have any friends.”

She frowned up at him.  “Why not?”

Completely innocent.  Completely oblivious.

Stuart’s gut twisted in shame as he said, “I’m one of the last of my kind.”

To his surprise, she slapped her hand against the control panel.  “So
that’s
why nobody’s claimed the thirty-five million in awhile.  You’re almost wiped out.”

Stuart gave her a narrow look.  “What do you know about thirty-five million?”

“I was surfing the infoscreen awhile ago and saw it.  Thought that was an awful lot for a four-inch-long wormy-lookin thing.”

“I’m not a worm,” he prickled.

“Didn’t say you were.  Said you
looked
like one.”

“You said I looked like an inside-out sucker-fish with puppydog eyes.”

“That too.”

They lapsed into silence for long minutes before Stuart said, “We can’t get into Marceau’s complex without the shifters, so Rabbit wants to go after them as soon as we have Athenais.”

She heaved a huge sigh.  “Figured as much.”

“He thought you’d be angry.”

“I’m not angry.  Why should I be?  I have no beef with them.  It was Athenais that dumped me on T-9 like a spacerat.”

Stuart said nothing.

“So you were around the Quads before the humans came?”

“The
harra
didn’t have the dexterity to build anything more than basic huts.”  Even saying that hurt.  “If they had, the war would have had a much different outcome, I assure you.”

“Oh,” she said.  “What war?”

Stuart stared at her. 
She’s too young to even know about the war.

And, jumping topics at an alarming pace, she added, “So you guys got to space by hopping a ride with us?”  She looked at him, grinning.  “That must’ve been cool.  What’d ya think, seeing a ship for the first time?”

“I thought it was an unnatural monstrosity that defied the very will of the gods, and watch the screen.”

“Okay.”  She looked at him again.  “So what was it like, before we showed up?”

“I lived in a hut.”

“Come on.”

“Why do I have to do all the talking?”

“Because there’s nothing interesting about me to talk about.  I’m only thirty-four.  Haven’t had enough time to do anything cool.”

“Before Marceau, most humans didn’t live past eighty.”

She peered at him.  “That’s baloney.”

He shrugged.  “Look it up, if you want.  If they even still have the documentation.”

She sniffed, obviously more irritated with his claim that humans had the life-cycles of bacteria, galactically speaking, than the fact that a
suzait’s
wormlike body held enough intellectual firepower to mow down a small town.

“Thirty-four years is a lot of time for interesting stuff to happen,” Stuart said, as a peace offering.

Dallas snorted, looking utterly depressed.  “I graduated Academy, flew for the Utopia in a ghost ship, and took up as Athenais’s copilot when I got dropped for disobedience.  Oh, and then Athenais dropped me for being a snitch and I was a waitress for a few months.  Yeah, real amazing stuff, right there.”

“A ghost ship?”  Stuart frowned at the term.  “Is that a warship?”

Dallas laughed.  “No.  It’s a ship.  Filled with ghosts.  The kind that sit up in bed and have their heads do a three-sixty on their shoulders while chanting, ‘get off my ship.’”