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6
Amber was never able to put into words just why she brought the lizard back to camp. When asked (and they asked, many times, for days afterwards), she was always able to come up with something plausible-sounding about how useful he might be, but that first impulse remained indefinable. She only knew that she wanted him with them.
So now he was here and he was staring at her. And that was okay, because honestly, she was staring back at him.
She should have been prepared to see something like this. An alien, that was. From the moment she’d first seen the scaly deer if not sooner. But there was a big difference between knowing intellectually that there were forms of animal life on this world and seeing a six-foot tall lizardman come at you out of the bushes with a knife in his hand.
Lizardman was perhaps a derogatory term. It was also the only one that fit. There was nothing wholly recognizable about his features, nothing she could point at and say with authority that looked like a crocodile or a komodo dragon or an iguana, but lizard summed it all up nicely. It was the ‘man’ bit that bothered her.
She was pretty sure he was a man, anyway, or at least a male. Masculinity was a stamp over the whole of his body: his lean and muscular build, the craggy scars cut into his scales, even the predatory way he had of crouching down and holding perfectly still while he stared at her—none of it was any guarantee of gender on an alien, but all of it screamed male to Amber’s eye.
So he—if he was a he—was a biped and essentially humanoid, with two legs and two arms and no tail. His was a gladiator’s body: a long, V-shaped chest, heavily scarred and ridiculously muscle-wrapped, that tapered into a flat stomach and narrow hips. His skin was the smooth, scaled hide of a snake rather that the rough one of an alligator, but however you looked at them, they were scales, black and shiny. But his hands had only three fingers, and they were fingers, not claws. His legs looked like normal legs, and although he had a habit of walking forward on the balls of his feet, they weren’t all bent backwards and bestial. He was even wearing boots.
The fact that he wore clothes had a way of wanting to boggle in Amber’s mind, as if the toughness of his scales rendered further covering superfluous and never mind the man’s modesty. He had pants stitched out of dun-brown hides with a wide leather belt to hold it on, and a harness over his largely-naked chest that seemed to serve mostly as an anchor for his hammered metal shoulder-guards. Apart from that, and the boots, he wore only weapons: a pair of short knives strapped to his bulging biceps, a hook-shaped sword clipped to his belt so it hung over one equally-bulging thigh, one broad, highly-polished sword carried in a sheath across his back, and a leather cord around his neck from which hung yet another knife, a small one this time, with an ivory handle. It appeared to be his favorite; his hand had a way of straying there when he muttered to himself. He did a lot of that, although he didn’t look crazy when he did it.
Not that she would know crazy when she saw it on a lizard, she supposed, but she was convinced there was a quietness to his expression. Not a calm, maybe, but a quietness. And she would be the first to admit that this was an unreasonable assumption because there was next to nothing that was readable about his face. He had two eyes aimed forward just like hers (except for being too big and for the color, which was a deep red, flecked with gold), under a heavy brow-ridge lined with pebbly scales that became a tight double-row of flexible spines that swept over the top of his skull to about halfway down his neck. His nose and mouth were combined into a dragonish snout, which was broad, lipless, and immoveable except at the corners; she could see the point of his thick, rigid tongue when he opened his mouth to speak, but couldn’t figure how he was shaping his words at all. Like a parrot, he just spilled out sound, then closed his mouth again and looked at her. It was easy to imagine she saw frustration mounting in those reptilian eyes as she tried to repeat him, and eventually he quit talking at all.
He just stared at her.
“I’m telling you for the last time, that thing is not sleeping in this camp tonight,” Scott a
The lizard’s eyes shifted to him.
“Good,” said Amber. “If it’s the last time, maybe now you’ll shut up about it.”
The lizard’s eyes came back to her.
“Miss Bierce—”
Back to Scott.
“—that thing is carrying a dozen weapons. It’s dangerous.”
“Wow,” drawled Amber. “Good eye, Commander. I can only count five myself. Where are the rest?”
The lizard’s eyes stayed on Scott. That was weird enough that she glanced around, too.
Scott was glaring at her. She was getting that look out of him a lot these days.
“You may not care what happens to these people, Miss Bierce—”
The lizard reached back and pulled that long, shiny sword out of his back-sheath. He didn’t do it fast, but he did it so smoothly and silently that it still looked like magic (and at the same time, he managed to make it clear that he could have done it fast if he’d wanted to).
“Here’s a thought,” said Amber. “If you’re really all that concerned about how dangerous the lizardman is, why don’t you stop antagonizing him?”
Scott walked away.
The lizard’s eyes tracked him. The sword stayed in his hand.
Scott came back.
“I want you both out of this camp right now,” he a
Amber’s eyes went automatically to her sister, seeking support or at least surprise, but Nicci didn’t protest. She didn’t even stand up. Nicci just looked back at her with that same lost and unhappy vagueness she’d pretty much worn since the crash.
And for the first time since that day, Amber had to fight—really fight—the urge to slap that vacant stare right off her.
Instead, she made herself turn back to Scott, and with all the disgust she could not unleash on her baby sister, she said, “I have a reality check for you, Everly. You are not Commander-in-Chief of the entire planet or even this miserable little piece of it. You don’t get to say who stays and who goes.”
He muttered something, flushed and glaring.
“What did you just say?” she demanded, knowing damn well she’d heard him. “Oh no. No no. If you’re so goddamned sure of yourself, you say it right out loud!”
She didn’t think he would, and for a moment or two, she could see him waver, wanting to back down, find his supporters, regroup. Then, without warning, he changed his mind and stepped up.
“I said, things have changed. And whether you like it or not, I am in charge. And while I’m in charge, you better watch your fat fucking mouth or else.”
“Hey.” Eric stood up, his hands open and raised. “Everybody calm down.”
Scott took a step forward.
Amber hopped up to meet him and bumped into the lizard’s back. He really could be fast when he wanted to be; he’d been behind her just a second ago. She had to move around him to see why everyone else had suddenly gone so quiet.
For the moment, Scott’s head was still firmly attached to his neck. For the moment. The edge of the lizardman’s sword hovered motionless in the air just beyond the throbbing vein in Scott’s neck and the lizardman seemed content to leave it there. All day.
“Call him off,” Eric said.
Amber looked around, thunderstruck, and sure enough, he was talking to her. More astounding, everyone else was looking at her. “Hey, this is not my trained alligator!” she said crossly. “If he wants the sword out of his face, he needs to stop acting so fucking hostile!”
The alien punctuated this with a low, menacing hiss.
“You’re not helping,” Amber snapped. She started to take his wrist, but thought better of it and snapped her fingers a few times instead. “Hey! Meoraq!”
He looked at her. The sword stayed where it was.
“You’re not helping,” she said again, and just said it this time. “Ease up on him. We’re all friends here. Sit down. But while I have your attention,” she went on as the lizard grudgingly lowered his arm and hunkered down again, “I would like to point out that this is the only guy in camp who knows where the next nearest waterhole is. He might also know which plants are poisonous and which ones aren’t. Judging from his outfit, there’s even a good chance he knows how to take down some of those stupid deer-things and he maybe even could help us turn a few of them into clothes of our own. This is a godsend and you’d know that if you weren’t so worried about who’s in charge!”
“She’s right,” said Dag, looking at Scott. “If nothing else, we’re going to need to know what we’re up against, right? I mean…if there’s one, there must be more.”
“And I don’t believe for a second they’re all going to be happy to see us,” declared Scott. “Miss Bierce can believe what she wants—as loudly as she wants—but that doesn’t change the fact that, historically speaking, natives don’t take it too well when strangers show up.”
“Particularly when the strangers start acting like dicks!” Amber interjected.
“No,” said Eric, also moving around to Scott’s side. “I’m sorry, Bierce, but you are dead wrong on this one. Unfortunately,” he added, looking at a smirking Scott, “that’s the best reason I’ve heard yet to let the lizard stay. I’d rather have him where I can see him than let him go who knows where and say God knows what to who, you know?”
“Well,” said Scott after a moment, “I guess we could kill him.”
“Oh my God, seriously?” Amber stepped aside and flung both her hands at the lizard’s battle-scarred chest. “I want to see you try it,” she said as the lizard cocked his head at her. “Right now. Whip out your little knife, Space-Scout, and see what he does with his.”
The three of them stood close together and eyed the lizard with caution until the lizard glanced their way. Then Dag and Eric backed away and Scott turned pink and angrily said, “Have you even thought about the germs that thing could be carrying?”
“We all got the Vaccine,” she argued, but she didn’t like the way it came out, almost as a question.
“The Vaccine isn’t magic, Miss Bierce. We are all very much vulnerable to bacterial infection and other forms of contamination which I’m sure never occurred to you. No,” Scott said, frowning very seriously at the lizard, who stared expressionlessly right back at him. “Bringing that thing into our camp without consulting anyone was a stupid and reckless thing to do and we are all at risk because of it. He may turn out to be friendly, I don’t know, but his intentions aren’t the only things potentially endangering us. You’re on probation, Miss Bierce.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake.”
Scott stared her down with unbelievably effective dignity. “You may not think this a colony. But it is a community and that community ca