Heat

Tagen holstered his gun and went unsteadily toward the body. Its meat was soft under his hands, still damp with sweat. He turned it over, doing his best not to look at the shocked and staring eyes (there were tree needles stuck to them now), and studied the weapon in the human’s dead hand.

It looked like a primitive sort of gun.

Impossible. Humans had no such technology.

Badly shaken, Tagen rolled the corpse back onto its face. He backed up, retrieving the rest of his uniform when he stepped on it and quickly dressing. He strapped on his gunbelt, cinching it tighter than was required, to feel the pinch of its reality.

It was no weapon at all, just a device that any resembled one. A device for…something, dammit! Something any Human Studies scientist would recognize at once. It made no difference. It was a mistake, that was all.

He got his supply pack, and went rapidly up the slope on his way east. There, he stopped in his tracks.

There was a road at the top of the slope. There was a groundcar on the road.

Its design was alien and somehow sinister, but it was perfectly recognizable all the same. It was a groundcar, and it could be nothing else. The driver’s side window was open. Tagen could smell smoke and sweat inside. Human sweat. The human had driven this groundcar.

Tagen clutched at his brow as though he could pull his thoughts out and crush them in his hand. He could hear his blood pounding in his ears. It was not fear that had him now, but it was not too damned far from it. The gun and the groundcar. What did it mean?

A thought struck him suddenly, a wonderful thought. A thought to explain everything.

The human he had just killed was in league with the slavers who preyed on this world. The slavers had provided it with the gun and the groundcar both. The reason Tagen did not recognize the design of the gun was because it had been constructed here solely for human use, as the groundcar had been. With that technology, the human would be an unstoppable force, able to gather any number of its defenseless fellows and to hold them somewhere until the slavers returned. In exchange, he supposed the slavers provided it with special treatment—perhaps merely the promise of continued life, perhaps wealth or food or its pick of the females it helped to enslave.

Yes. That was it. That made perfect sense. That even explained the human’s strange uniform. Every piece fell into place.

And perhaps this road beneath Tagen’s feet led to the holding cells for the captured humans. Should he follow it, in the hopes that it was E’Var’s destination as well? Or should he continue east, trusting to his instincts?

A groundcar could cover a lot of terrain, and the woods may well be thick with roads. It wouldn’t take more than one or two forks before Tagen was hopelessly lost, and then not only would he never find the holding cells to which they led, but he would then have to backtrack to his original position. There was no guarantee that Tagen was directly on E’Var’s trail, but his gut told him he was at least going in the right direction. He would continue on. If he encountered the holding cells by chance, so much the better. In the meantime, he would go east.

Tagen moved around the groundcar and climbed the slope behind it, his eyes fixed ahead of him. He ignored the twisting of his guts, the anxious hammering of his heart. He left the dead human behind him, facedown in the dirt. He did not let himself think about it anymore.

He went east.

*

Kane moved through the woods, well back from the road in deference to the rare instances when light from a human groundcar splashed through the scenery. He had seen several, slightly more by day than by night, which meant that somewhere on this forsaken planet, there were humans. He had seen none since the yellow-haired female drowned her stupid self, and that had been five days past. Kane often found himself wondering idly, if he had it to do all over again, would he pay better attention to her and not let her wander off? Or would he take his time and kill her right? He had different answers for that at different times of the day, but it was cooler now, and he was inclined to have taken better care of her. Certainly, he would have done so had he known it would take so long to find another one.

Still, even Kane could be patient when circumstances demanded it, and although he was not in the habit of practicing moderation on a hunt, he did it now. It would be an easy thing to lay a trap across the stone roads the groundcars traveled on. Any humans that survived the crash could be pried from their smoking vehicles and culled for Vahst until Kane found himself another female. Oh yes, easy, and on some level, viscerally satisfying, but it would also be stupid. Even on Earth, something like that couldn’t go u

So Kane walked, within sight of the road but without putting himself in view of any human travelers. Sooner or later, he knew his patience would be rewarded. One of them would stop.

No sooner did the thought pass through Kane’s head but one of the groundcars did gear down and pull onto the soft gravel that bordered the road. Kane, five days gone with maddening Heat and once more on the verge of dehydration, kept walking for a step or three before that fact sunk in.

Kane stopped moving and looked back over his shoulder, all his senses keenly fixed on the groundcar. It idled there for several long minutes, blasting the forest ahead of it with light but not moving. Kane could see nothing inside it, could make out no sound beyond the grumbling of the thing’s engine.

Suddenly, the lights blinked out and silence fell. Three doors opened. Three humans emerged.

Kane turned all the way around and moved closer to the edge of the trees. He could hear voices, but could make out none of their speech. The three of them came to stand close together; there was no way Kane could approach without at least one of them seeing him. They might have food or water with them, yes, but they might also be armed. Kane hunkered down to consider his options.

The humans talked together for some time, and then one of them, the smallest, suddenly shoved at another one. A voice, u

High voice. A female? Perhaps. It was difficult to tell at this distance. She, if it was a she, was bargaining for something, but Kane didn’t know all of the words she used. The voice was cross but not desperate, wary but not afraid. Not the best qualities in a captive, but Kane was in no position to be choosy. He moved closer, but kept low.

One of the larger humans had gripped the defiant one by the arm. The other was speaking, not loudly, but furiously. “—cut your fucking throat and roll you down the mountain, whore, how would that be?” He struck, and the sound of the slap echoed on the empty road. “You knew the deal when you got in, so don’t go changing it now.”

The female (Kane was now a little more than half-sure of its sex) gave an exasperated groan and shook herself free of the human who held her. “Don’t get so fucking hostile. I said I’d do you, I just don’t like that backdoor shit. How ‘bout a compromise? I could ride you and suck off your friend at the same time, huh?”

Kane got maybe one word in ten, but the gist was clear. The bargaining was almost done, and that meant the humans would either return to their groundcar and clear off, or they’d soon be distracted by whatever exchange they’d negotiated. In case of the latter, Kane had a good chance of getting right up next to them while their attention was elsewhere. He was willing to try, at any rate.

Without warning, the small human suddenly stepped back and drove her foot ferociously into the largest one’s groin, which apparently hurt. He dropped like a rock and the small human spun and punched the other human square in the nose. Then she ran from the roadside. Ran to the woods.

Ran to Kane.

He gri

They did some shouting. Some words he knew, some he did not, but the important thing was, they weren’t ru

Kane rose and went to collect the prize for all his patience.

She was crouching in some scrubby bushes where she could see the road. She was laughing to herself, and it wasn’t frightened just-escaped-thank-the-gods laughter, but a fierce and victorious kind. Kane allowed himself another brief moment of misgivings before he closed in on her. Good slave or bad slave, made no difference. If the human was a female, it was coming with him.

Kane was a practiced hunter and he knew he made no sound, but prey have a way of sensing predators and this one sensed him. She stopped her laughing all at once, swinging around and leaping away at the same time, and forcing him to lunge for her.

He aborted her startled jump with one expert blow of his hard knuckles just below her breastbone, sending her crashing to the ground. He put his foot on her throat and shoved her flat, and then grabbed a handful of the flowy garment she wore around her waist and yanked it up. The scent of female musk wafted up, but after all this time, that just wasn’t enough. Kane got hold of the edge of her thin loin-cover and pulled it away enough to see the proof for himself.

Female. Kane found himself considering the possibility of gods in a somewhat more favorable light than he ever had in the past.

“I have it,” the female croaked savagely.

Kane leaned back and looked down at her. She was gripping his ankle in both hands, like an animal that knows it’s caught, yet still damned well means to bite. “Have what?” he asked finally.

“Everything. The clam, crabs, warts, herpes, HIV…” She seemed to founder there, but rallied back almost immediately, her eyes blazing out of her pale face. “Come on, sport!” she snarled. “Fuck me and die!”

Kane didn’t understand very much of that, but he knew the word ‘die’. Bemused, he flexed his talons against the human’s throat…the human he had pressed flat and completely helpless and who had just threatened to kill him. This was just about the worst human he could have possibly run across if he wanted to take one captive.

On the other plate, she was the first female he’d seen in five days, and if he had to wait another five days to find another one, he was going to die. If not from Heat, then because he had ripped himself open in a maddened frenzy and bled to death.