Wings of Retribution (71 page)

“Athenais told me she stole
Retribution.”
  Regaining his breath, Stuart slumped against the wall, hanging his head in exhaustion.  His host was fine—it was Stuart himself who was tired.  One of the first times in his life that Stuart could barely keep his eyes open.  Just too much had happened, the psycho-emotional strain had been too great…

“She did?” Ragnar asked, oblivious.  “Good for her.  When did you talk to Athenais?  Where is she?”

“I’m not sure,” Stuart managed.  “She wants to meet us on the roof.  Thinks Dallas will meet us up there.”

“What about Rabbit?”

“I haven’t seen him,” Stuart admitted.  “If he’s been with Juno the whole time…  I think he might be in trouble.”

Ragnar glanced at the window.  “So what, we just climb to the top of the wall and wait for her to show up?”

“You have a better idea?”

“Better than standing in the sheeting rain trying not to get blown off the roof?”  Ragnar glanced at the lightning through the window as it was blurred by seventy feet of sea-green wave.  “Not really.”

“Then let’s go.  Do you think you can get a signal to Dallas?”

“I could, but every other ship in range would pick it up, too.”  Ragnar frowned at him.  “Are you feeling all right?”

“Not really,” Stuart whispered.  “Tired.  Am gonna need your help getting to the roof.”  Then he frowned, replaying what Ragnar had said in his mind.  “Wait.  You mean you guys don’t have your own special frequency?”

“What guys?”

“You know,” Stuart said, waving his hand weakly.  “Pirates.”

Ragnar snorted.  “Is my name ‘Squirrel?’  When you said ‘get a signal to her,’ I thought you meant light up a few firecrackers and wave our hands
really
high.  You saw the basic slapdash stuff I did upstairs.  I don’t know codes, man.”

“Me neither,” Stuart said, trying to stave off that hopeless feeling that was building with each new setback.  He
would
get out of here.  He
would
find Dallas again.  He
would
help them both get off this planet.  “I guess we’ll have to wave.  Come on.”

They left the room, turned down the first staircase they saw, and began to climb.  At the top story, a tiny escape hatch led to the roof, but as soon as they pushed the hatch open, it was ripped from their hands and slammed against the wall beside them.  Pellets of water as sharp as needles whipped through the opening, soaking them in moments.

“Ladies first,” Ragnar said.

His host’s arthritic hands trembling, Stuart climbed past the shifter and out onto the roof.  He had to bend down almost horizontally to keep his footing, the wind plastering his wet clothes to his host’s body.  Unfortunately, the body Athenais had chosen was less than ideal—well past middle age.  He stumbled backwards several paces, unable to hold up against the screeching wind.  Another blast of warm saltwater hit him full-on, throwing him backwards.  He immediately lost his balance and the screaming wind began shoving him across the roof like a runaway wind-sock.  He hit the waist-high safety wall at the edge of the precipice and was going over the edge when Ragnar grabbed him and pulled him back to the hatch.

Stuart fell through the opening and landed on the damp stone below, shivering and shocked.  Above him, Ragnar slammed the hatch shut and locked it.  Water dripped down the wet door, falling on them as they stood on the staircase, breathing hard.

“Any other bright ideas?” Ragnar said.

“That was it.”

“I’ve got one,” Ragnar said, clapping his hands together like a happy child.  “How about we go find you a better body!”  The L’kota’s face darkened and he dropped his hands.  “What’s the hell’s matter with you?!”

“No,” Stuart said, water dripping from his host’s graying hair.  “I don’t want to hurt anyone else.”

Ragnar grunted and glanced down the huge, empty hallway beneath them.  Most of the inhabitants of this place, it seemed, avoided the upper floors during a storm.  Either that or they were all off somewhere else.  They hadn’t seen a single soul since leaving Dallas’s room.

“You ask me, the Utopia should wipe all these bastards out,” Ragnar said, his eyes focused on the distant curve of the hallway.  “The whole place is sick.”

“They probably will,” Stuart said.

“Then let’s go get you something better,” Ragnar growled.  “If they’re all about to die, you might as well take your pick.”

Stuart shook his head.  “I can wait.”

“You’re not going to be much good in a fight, you know.”

“I don’t plan on getting into a fight.”

“Oh, I forgot.  That’s what your kind are good at.  Laying low.”

“War doesn’t interest us.”

“Everything’s fair game to you, right?”

“Everything except shifters.”

Ragnar snorted.  “You’d take us, too, if you could.”

“I wouldn’t take
anybody
if I could get away with it,” Stuart said, irritated.  Didn’t
anybody
understand?  Even the other
aliens
in the world thought he was doing this out of his own selfishness.

Then, that nagging little part of him said,
Well, you are, aren’t you?
  What other reason did he have to take a host, other than selfishness?  What was it going to hurt the universe,
really
, if a two-and-a-half inch parasite died on the bottom of somebody’s boot?  

Stuart stood on the steps, caught between irritation and that old self-loathing.  Irritation, because he shouldn’t
have
to feel bad for surviving, after his entire people and their way of life was utterly and purposefully destroyed by a petty, vindictive, small-minded race that happened to have opposable thumbs.  Self-loathing, because he couldn’t count the number of lives he had destroyed, to save his own.

Ragnar began climbing down the staircase, forcing Stuart to get out of his way.

“You know the difference between your kind and mine, Stuart?”

Stuart reached the floor and moved aside as Ragnar pushed past him.  “You’re a thousand times bigger than us?”

“No.  We’re not afraid to fight for ourselves.  If humans start exterminating us, we exterminate them.  We don’t run and hide.”

Stuart felt that bitterness rising up in his chest again and he gave the shifter a sour look.  Ragnar had his own built-in camouflage, his own
body
.  He wasn’t helpless on his own.  He would never understand.  “I’m helping
you
, aren’t I?” Stuart muttered.

“And I’m still surprised about that,” Ragnar said.  “You’ve had plenty of chances to disappear.”  Ragnar turned to raise a curious brow at him.  “Why
are
you here?”

Stuart grimaced.  “I told your father I’d help him.”

“Why?” Ragnar demanded.  “Seems to go against the nature of every parasite I’ve ever met.  Tell me as we walk.”  He started at a brisk pace down the hall, giving Stuart the choice of either following or being left behind.

“Where are we going?” Stuart demanded, catching up.

“I’m hungry.  I’m finding the kitchen in this blasted place.”  He gave Stuart an impatient look.  “So?  Why’d you say you’d help?”

Stuart looked at the floor.  Why
had
he decided to help?  After an entire lifetime of skulking in the shadows, he hadn’t even really thought about it when he’d offered his services.  He just knew he had to. 

But why?  Stuart was just as puzzled about why he had stepped from hiding to help the shifters.  He could have survived another five millennia unseen, unheard.  Yet something had pushed him to take that step, to go with them on their lunatic’s quest.

Maybe it was to make up for all the lives he’d destroyed, a way to try and right all the wrongs he had committed on innocent strangers, but if that was the case, the shifters’ mission was just as destructive, if not more so.  Instead of one person a decade or so, he would be killing billions, if not trillions.  He would be throwing an entire culture back into its dark ages.

Stuart had heard of others of his kind, ancients that had finally snapped under the pressure of having to use unwilling hosts.  It was their insanity that humanity’s nightmares were made of.  And, after a time, it seemed all the older ones got it.  It was a sickness that ate at the soul, devoured it in a slow inward putrefaction, and left a rotten husk in its place.  It was those
suzait
who started taking hosts as the humans had always feared they would, using them only as temporary housing before moving on, killing without need, taking at a whim.

…like Stuart was doing now.

“Well?” Ragnar demanded.  “I know you’ve got some sort of reason for all this.”

Finally, Stuart said, “I owed them.”  It was the best reason he could come up with, because logic was failing him, and he didn’t want to think about the alternative.

“Oh?” Ragnar asked, raising a brow.

Stuart nodded, remembering.  “Utopian S.O. officers found me on Roth last year.  They killed my host, forced me out, and put me in a holding container.  They were shipping me to Millennium when Morgan saw me in the terminal.  He and Paul overpowered the two guards and freed me.”

Ragnar smiled.  “Sounds like Dad.”  He glanced at him.  “Must be pretty interesting to be trapped in a glass jar.”

“Not very.”

Ragnar hesitated, raising his nose to take in a deep breath.  “Do you smell anything?  I was wandering in circles for days looking for the kitchens.  I can’t smell worth a damn.  Anatomy’s too difficult to replicate.”

Stuart took a deep breath.  Despite her nasal polyps, his host had a good sense of smell.  He shook his head.  “Not here.  But I’ll tell you if we get close.”

Ragnar grunted.  “So where are you from, Stuart?  Where were you born?”

“I hatched in a communal growing medium on Mitaan.”

Ragnar gave him a startled look.  “The
suzait
homeworld
?  I thought…”  His eyes narrowed with recognition.  “Mitaan was towed into its star millennia ago.”

“It was,” Stuart agreed.

Ragnar gave him long, a calculating look, but in the end simply nodded.  “You knew life before humans, then?”  He sounded almost wistful, his voice filled with longing.  “Before they colonized the Quads?”  He watched Stuart, waiting.

“It was nice,” Stuart agreed.  Then, seeing the sudden yearning in Ragnar’s face, he added quickly, “But I try not to dwell on the past.  It only makes the present harder to live with.”

Ragnar’s face hardened and he turned back to their path.  “They don’t belong here.”

Stuart had nothing to say to that.

“How many of your kind are left?” Ragnar demanded.

Stuart began to feel uncomfortable.  He shrugged.

With a bitter laugh filled with contempt, Ragnar said, “You don’t know, do you?”

“There’s others,” Stuart said.  Then, with less confidence, “There has to be.”

Ragnar snorted.  “You could be the very last of your kind and you
still
don’t hold it against them, do you?!”

“Of
course I do
!” Stuart snapped, despite himself.  “I just…”  He hesitated.  “I think we can work together.”  His alternative was…unthinkable.

Ragnar laughed, at that.  “They’ll never see you as anything other than a worm, Stuart.  Trust me on that.”

Stuart stubbornly refused to believe that.  He would have agreed, before he met Dallas, but now…