Wings of Retribution (57 page)

“More.  Please, more.”

The thing flopped away from her and slid back into the ocean.

When it returned the second time, she was awake.  She heard it crawling up the beach toward her, a scuff-sliding sound in the darkness.  Athenais held absolutely still, willing to do anything for another sip of water.

Despite her resolve, however, her heart began to pound as it crawled over her.  The thing was
big
.  The long, streamlined silhouette it cast against the dawn sky was at least four times her own body mass.  Its huge eyes were bigger than her head, ringed with silver, and its wide, toothy mouth was easily big enough to swallow her upper torso.  She tried not to flinch as it reached out and held her head steady with one massive clawed limb.  Then it leaned down and pressed its stiff, salty lips to hers.

Athenais wasn’t sure if it was regurgitating or simply holding the water in its mouth, but as soon as the second flow started, she drank.  When creature had passed her everything it had, it pulled back.  Then, as if she were made of paper, it flipped her onto her stomach and she felt hard, clawed fingers fumble clumsily with the knots.

“You’ll have to cut them,” Athenais said, finally breaking the silence.

Her rescuer jerked and moved away, its mass making the beach shiver under her.  For an instant, Athenais thought it would flee.  She was surprised when, after a tentative moment, it crawled back, dragging its long, sharklike tail behind it.  They watched each other, alien-to-alien, as the thing reached out with a big, timid arm and one-handedly started fiddling with her bonds.  Athenais felt something grind against the ropes.  She twisted to look back, then gave a chuckle of despair. 

“Her ropes are made of synthetic silk.  You’re not going to be able to cut it with a seashell.”

The thing said nothing and continued to saw at the ropes.

“My name’s Athenais,” she tried again.

It ignored her.

“Odd that you can understand me, but not speak.  How’d you learn?”

Her rescuer grabbed the rope it was sawing at and pulled.  To her surprise, it snapped.  Must have been a weak strand.  She tried to move her hands from behind her back and realized patronizingly that the creature had not chosen the best rope to free her.  Probably a lower-intellect.  Barely above primate.  Her amusement faded when the thing dropped its shell and flopped away and back into the ocean.

“Aw,
damn
it!” Athenais cried, flailing.  “Come back here and finish the job!  You damned chicken.  I’m not gonna do anything to you!  Jesus, Allah, and Buddha!”

It did not return.

Athenais struggled.  The ropes were looser, but she hadn’t eaten in over a day.  She flailed until she exhausted herself, then lay with her forehead in the damp sand.  Why did these things happen to her?  It was almost as if Karma was giving her one great big kick in the nuts after another, yet she was pretty sure her Karma was clean.  After all, she didn’t count stealing from the government or putting immature little twits back in their place bad Karma.  She’d have to ask Rabbit about that someday.  Maybe she needed to take up meditation or something.

When the alien came back the next night, Athenais didn’t wake until it started jerking on the rope it was trying to break.

“Please,” Athenais said, “I can’t even sit up.  I’m too weak to do anything to you.  Please, just finish the job.”

The creature was silent.  Finally, in a grating voice, it said, “You’ll survive, human.”

Athenais gave a hysterical laugh.  “Oh, I know.  Believe me, I know.”

Another rope snapped, despite all probabilities.  Athenais realized one of her hands was free.  As the creature started to slide away, she threw out her arm and grabbed what felt like a wrist.  A huge, slippery, scaly wrist.

The alien froze.

“Thanks,” Athenais said.  Then she released it and let her hand fall into the sand.

The alien grunted and flopped away, taking his clamshell with him.

Athenais sat up and tried to tug the rest of her bonds loose, but when the waterlogged silk refused to budge, she simply fell back to the ground with a laugh of despair and stared at the sky, too exhausted to try and drag herself across the beach, looking for another shell.

She must have fallen asleep, because when something slimy dropped into her hand, hours later, it startled her awake.  Athenais struggled to sit up, dizzy from hunger and exposure.  It was midday, the sun beating down upon her from a cerulean sky.  When she glanced down at her limp hand, she was surprised to see a salmon pressed into her palm, its body ripped in half, its orange flesh still twitching.  Numbly, she lifted her head and looked down the beach.

A few yards away, the creature watched her, tense.  Ten feet long, with huge, powerful arms and a thick, massive neck, the creature gleamed in the sunlight.  Bright silver, it had big, half-moon scales covering its entire body, with short arms that ended in six long, webbed fingers tipped in sharp silver claws.  The body looked vaguely seal-like, but the tail was as powerful and as distinctive as a shark’s, with minor flippers on either side of the underbelly, keeping it upright.  Its eyes were located on the front of its head, indicating it was a meat-eater.

The alien watched her, poised to flip back into the ocean at her slightest movement.

“Nice to meet you,” Athenais said.  Then she stuffed the bloody chunk of fish into her mouth and started chewing.

The creature continued to watch her.  While blocky and powerful in the upper body, it was sleek, perfectly hydrodynamic.  Its most distinguishing feature was the powerful tail.  Almost six feet long, it made up most of the alien’s body.  She guessed that it could probably kill much larger predators with a single blow from its tail.

When she finished, she said, “So what are you, exactly?”

The creature watched her a long moment, obviously in some sort of internal debate.  Finally, it said, “Taal.”

She was so stunned it spoke Utopian that she just blinked at it and said, “Taal?”

“Yes.  My name.”

“Uh.  Okay.  What are you, Taal?”

It bared long white fangs in an expression that was definitely not a smile.  “I am People.”

“You haven’t been categorized?  What species index are you?  Obviously oxygen-breather, since you aren’t dying as we speak.  Are you carbon or sulphur-based?”

The alien’s face contorted.  Even with the stiff, fishlike lips, it was very expressive, in a lupine way.  “Your words mean nothing to me, human.”

“You male or female, Taal?”

The creature scowled at her.  “What does it matter?”

Athenais shrugged.  “You’re hanging around.  I thought you wanted to make conversation.”

“We do not conform to your rules of sex.”  But it continued to watch her, almost with the morbid curiosity of a kid watching a worm roast on a sidewalk.

“Fair enough,” Athenais said.  “But for simplicity’s sake, I’ll think of you as a male.  I hate conversing with aliens without having a mental image of their gender.”

It bared its teeth in another smile-that-was-not-a-smile.  “I’m not ‘male.’”

“Are there many of you out there, Taal?” Athenais asked, firmly classifying the creature as a ‘he’ in her mind.  “I’ve never heard of an intelligent marine life-form, and I’ve been around awhile.  Intelligence seems to favor land-dwellers for some reason.”

Taal scowled at her with gigantic white fish-eyes and changed the subject.  “The Intruders set you afloat.  Usually they kill their enemies.”

“So I’ve heard,” Athenais said.  She flopped back to the sand and sighed.  Her mouth tasted slimy and fishy, and when she tried to swallow, her tongue just slid around in the slime, no saliva to wash it down.  “You gonna untie me now?” she said to the sky. 

Taal didn’t respond.

“I’m unarmed, obviously,” Athenais said.  “You can check my underwear if you want, but you probably don’t want to go anywhere near that canister.  It’s due to explode any minute now.”

Taal pulled himself closer with his stubby forearms, dragging his ten-foot-length awkwardly.  Athenais shifted and he froze, looking like a panicked space-rat.

“Lay still, human,” he growled, and it sounded like a rumble from a redcat.

“You got it,” Athenais said.

The alien grunted and closed the distance.  Holding up his weight with one stubby forearm, he awkwardly began sawing at the ropes with a broken clamshell with the other.  Now that she had a better look at him, she could see a large, bulbous growth protruding from the back of his neck.  With the sun on the other side of the alien, she could almost see through it.  The tumor was one big pustule, filled to bursting with a clear liquid.

Athenais reached out to touch the growth.  “You sick?”

Taal jerked back, cutting her fingers on his scales.

“Ow!  Damn it!  What the hell?”  Athenais closed her bleeding hand into a fist.  “You’re one jumpy bastard.  Damn!”

Taal scowled at her, his huge pupils wide and dangerous.

Athenais reached down and took the clamshell he had been using.  She started sawing through the ropes on her own, then gave a triumphant laugh as they fell away.  Soggy silk seemed to lose its integrity.  She wondered if Juno had planned on that.  Probably.  Better for digestion.

Elated, Athenais stood up—and immediately toppled back to the ground as her vision dimmed to a dark tunnel. 
Dehydration,
she guessed.  She took several deep breaths, then sat up again and glanced at the island behind her.  There was no question it was an island, and a small one, at that.  She could see the shoreline on the other side through the thin patch of trees.

When she looked back, the Taal was again poised to flop back into the ocean.  Seeing the tenseness in his alien body, she had the sudden feeling she had to calm him down or she’d never see her mysterious benefactor ever again.

“Where’d you find that water, Taal?  Is there a spring on the island?”

“No.  It’s a long swim from here.”

“Think you could take me there?”

“No.”

“Then you want me to starve here?”

Taal moved closer to the water.

“Wait!” Athenais cried.  “Why save me just to strand me on an island?”

Taal slapped the ground with his tail twice and disappeared in the surf.  Athenais realized disgustedly that her boat was gone.

“Great!” she shouted, throwing the clamshell at the water.  “Just great!  Damn fickle alien bastards!  I hate the whole lot of you!”

Athenais got up and stumbled around the island, but found no food.  She waded out into the water during low tide and pried some bright red shellfish from the rocks, then broke them open and ate them.  They were surprisingly good.  She just hoped they weren’t laced with a neural toxin.  A narcotic might be nice, but poison was a pain in the ass. 

When Athenais finished eating and moved to the edge of her boulder, she came to the unpleasant realization that the nice, dry rock she had chosen as her living-room table was now surrounded by water several feet deep.  While she had been busy with the shellfish, the tide had come in, and fast.

Grimacing, Athenais crawled from the rock and reluctantly began to wade back through the cold, awkward wetness.  She hated water.  Such an unnatural substance, especially when cold.  Humans were never meant to flounder around in cold, contaminant-ridden H
₂
0.  If they’d meant to be wet, they would’ve been born with fins.  At best, water should be sterilized, hot, and preferably laced with antibacterials.  In fact, whenever Athenais found herself in situations like this, wading through some unknown creek or seabed after a crash or a marooning, she always caught herself wondering what kind of weird parasites and viruses could be crawling into her various pores and orifices whenever she fully immersed herself in the bacterial soup that was a planet’s natural water bodies. 

Stupid water.  She hated the stuff.  The worst possible way she could imagine to die was to drown, with nothing but cold, amoeba-ridden liquid seeping into her eyes and nose and mouth…  Athenais was grimacing at that thought, already having waded most of the way back to shore, the cool water already up to her breasts as she moved along on her tiptoes, when her feet slipped and went under. 

Despite her long life, Athenais did not know how to swim.  In fact, being a spacer who detested the stuff, it had never even occurred to her that there was a trick to it.  Thrashing, panicking, she began gulping saltwater.  In moments, she was choking, gasping, completely forgetting about the beach, mindlessly trying to flail her way back to her rock.

Something grabbed her leg under the surface and at first Athenais thought it was Taal trying to help her.  Then the light nudge became razor-sharp teeth puncturing her flesh and pulling her under.  Her lungs burned and she tried to kick at whatever it was with her other leg, but the thing held fast and began to shake her.

Athenais breathed in water and lost consciousness.