Xora 2 - "Dangerous Game"

by Brandy Dewinter

 

Chapter 7 - "Boo!"

"You didn’t complain," Titania said as soon as we were away from Darius.

"Complain?" I asked. "About what?"

"Oh, about my ‘forcing’ you to kiss him, or playing with your hormones, or about how your ‘call-girl’ reflexes are to blame for the way you move, or, well, things like that."

"Oh, ‘things like that’," I repeated stupidly.

Ti left me alone with my thoughts for a few minutes as we moved along Sstton’s trail.

Finally I said, "No, I didn’t complain."

Another long pause while we both digested that revelation, then Ti said, "Not that complaining is really required, of course."

Was it? A part of me felt like I had to complain. Like it was expected of me. Certainly I had complained before, when I felt myself responding in ways that weren’t consistent with my self-image. I complained about Titania’s meddling, or the call-girl training, or just about anything that I thought offered an excuse.

How much of it was just that, an ‘excuse’? Ti had said that we were one, now. How much of me was Ti, and how much the old Xora, and how much none of the above?

I knew that I was not the same person I had been. More than that, I knew that I liked the new me a whole lot better than I liked the old one. The thought of going back to the fat, placid me was as horrifying as the thought of being caught by Sstton’s goons.

And the thought of kissing Darius? Of doing even more with Darius?

That was horrifying too, right?

Even phrasing that question answered it. The thought, the experience of kissing Darius was many things, but horrifying was not any part of any one of them.

"Heads up," Titania ordered, interrupting my train of thought.

Our rapid trot, coupled with the clear, easy-to-follow trail that Sstton had left, had allowed us to catch up with him already. Or at least, catch up well enough that Titania had heard him crashing through the brush ahead. I slowed to a more careful pace and still managed to close the gap until we saw movement ahead.

Can you tell anything about what he’s doing? I asked my symbiont partner.

"Not really, except that from the spoor he’s leaving behind, he’s frightened. There are all sorts of sweat and adrenaline and fear scents on this brush we’re passing."

*Afraid, you say?* I mused.

"Don’t go hard of hearing on me now," Titania said.

*What? Um, oh, never mind,* I said. I was going to have to talk with her about human speech patterns, one of these days. In the meantime, an interesting idea was forming in my mind.

We could hear Sstton now, panting hoarsely. His headlong flight through the brush was apparently more than his own conditioning could sustain. Moving ever more carefully, we caught up just as he collapsed against a rock. His shirt was torn from the brush that had pulled at it and there was mud on the knees of his breeches, but he was still wearing some sort of weapon at his belt.

"Do your thing, Ti. I want to be as close to invisible as you can make me," I said.

It was nearing sundown which made the shadows quite dark. In addition it’s actually easier to disappear against a confused backdrop than against a simple one. Here in the woods, with Ti almost printing a picture of what was behind us on the front of us, we did nearly disappear. I waited until Sstton lifted his head, regaining at least a little of his composure.

Can you put out a sound you’ve heard, almost like a recording? I asked Titania.

"Yes," she said. "What sound?"

*Oh, how about something like what Sstton himself said when we first caught up with him today. What was it? Something about the prey always heading for the ridge?*

"’I’m telling you she had to come this way. All the prey always end up coming this way.’" Ti quoted.

*That’s the one, can you do it first in his voice, then in mine, um, ours? Only the second time, make it, ‘he’ had to come this way.*

"Right now?"

I nodded at her mentally. I didn’t know what to expect, actually. I guess I figured it was possible that she would somehow take over my own vocal apparatus or something, but she never had used my muscles in any sort of active way. She could freeze me so that I couldn’t move at all, but not make me move. In the end, that was unnecessary, of course. It should have been obvious. She just extruded a tube with a membrane at the end and it vibrated as a speaker.

"I’m telling you she had to come this way. All the prey always end up coming this way." The sound of Sstton’s own voice filled the space around him.

"Who’s there?" he yelled, drawing his weapon.

This time it was my voice. "I’m telling you he had to come this way.

All the prey always end up coming this way."

Sstton jumped up, peering into the gathering gloom.

"Who’s there?!" he screamed.

I slipped carefully back even further into the shadows. Once I was sure we were out of sight, I moved quickly but silently around Sstton to provide another source for the sound.

*Play me back another one, in my voice, what he said about the fair head start when he turned me loose.*

Ti complied, putting a throaty tone into the sound that made it seem like an invitation. "After a fair head start I’ll come after you. When I catch you, you’ll take this woman’s place."

"Xora?" he asked into the darkness.

The next quote I remembered on my own. In order to make sure Ti didn’t turn it into another invitation, I put my own spin on the words, this time nasty and harsh. "I wonder how long it will be before it is you screaming your lungs out."

Sstton raised his cannon-thing and sprayed toward the sound of my voice. Of course, I had ducked down and moved behind a tree as soon as I saw his hand move. And he wasn’t very close to us anyway. Our comments from the darkness did get him to start running down the trail again, now free of the brush as he moved lower on the mountain.

It was getting fairly dark, but the light of the moons that were up still provided enough illumination that I didn’t think we could follow very closely on the more open trail.

*We can’t let him get away,* I thought grimly, considering the risk of exposure.

"We can go straight down the side of the mountain," Titania said.

*I can’t climb that,* I protested. "It’s almost straight down in places, and there is still enough brush to cut us to ribbons if we can’t see to avoid it.*

"Do you trust me?" Titania asked.

*Uh, oh,* I thought. For some reason it was funny. How many ways could she kill me if she chose? Trust? We were so far beyond ordinary trust that the very question was sort of silly.

"Not when I have to take you somewhere you haven’t been before," Titania said, picking up on my thought as usual.

But she also picked up on my agreement. "Pull your arms and legs in, like a sort of ball," she said.

I did as she directed, crouching down and wrapping my arms around my boots. My jumpsuit started to swell, like it was inflating, and in a moment I could hardly move as we truly became a ball, mostly rounded with no protruding limbs. I couldn’t really see with my head tucked down, but I could feel Titania push us off the edge of the trail with a bit of excess inflation at my suddenly-huge derriere.

‘Trust’ indeed.

We careened down the hillside like a runaway boulder, caroming off trees and real boulders, cushioned inside my partner’s pliable, air-filled form. At one point we launched into the air for a long second, and I caught Ti’s worry through the linkage we shared. If we landed too hard, all the external padding in the world wouldn’t prevent my liver from puddling in my left knee. But we landed on a downslope and continued to race along.

Somehow, Titania started to slow us down. I felt asymmetric tugs that made me think she had extended pseudo-pods to drag on the growth we were crashing through. Eventually, we slowed enough for her to grab a tree or something firmly, pulling us sharply to a stop.

The bladder things all around me deflated and I found myself lying on my side, my arms still wrapped around my legs. Stretching carefully, I checked for damage, and found nothing more than skin deep, which meant nothing at all. Unless.

"Ti, are you all right?"

"Yes," she assured me. "That’s not something I want to do all the time . . . "

"You can say that again," I blurted.

"That’s not something I want to do all the time," she repeated with a sigh, "but the only danger is when I try to slow down. If a part of me gets snagged in something, it can be lost."

"Let’s agree not to do that again, then," I offered.

"Not a problem," she said.

Our crashing progress down the mountain had hardly been silent. On the other hand, it had certainly been quick. We were well ahead of Sstton and I tried to decide how best to continue his harassment. The trail he was following was little more than a path, really, so he would pass very close to several hiding places.

The options expanded when we saw Sstton stumbling down the path. His voice was a painful thing to hear, raspy and desperate. Good. More importantly, despite the gloom he was paying little attention to his path. Instead, he looked wildly at the trees around him, starting at every breeze-initiated whisper through what had again become jungle more than tamer forest.

I grabbed up a handy branch and squatted by the side of the trail. When Sstton passed I stuck my branch in front of his foot, tripping him heavily to the trampled ground.

As he sprawled I laughed and said, "So, tell me about winning that race on Machovia against the famous Palomino."

"You stupid wench," Sstton growled. "I’ll kill you."

"My, my, how the mighty have fallen. Such an unimaginative threat." I said from the shadows. Actually, Ti said it, from a voice tube that allowed us to be a meter or so from the apparent source of the sound. That precaution turned out to be unneeded as Sstton fired blindly into the darkness, never once near our position.

"We might be better off if you spoke from your real location," Titania said with a snicker. "The way he sprays those projectiles around, no place seems any safer than the real target."

We moved silently parallel to Sstton for a few minutes. Then I realized what I really wanted to do with this predatory beast. Just ahead was the place where the side trail led down to the swamp. Silently asking Ti to give me the hard club-fist again, I slipped quickly ahead of Sstton to just past the side path. Ti did her disappearing act and we waited just beside the narrow path.

When Sstton got to our position, I reached out and rapped sharply on the hand holding the weapon with my armored fist. I don’t know whether I broke his hand or not, but he certainly dropped the cannon. It never even hit the ground. With a little help from Ti on seeing in the darkness, I caught it with my other hand just as it left his numbed fingers.

*Show us, Ti, normal dark blue colors,* I ordered abruptly. It was enough, in the gloom, to change from ghost to real.

Sstton saw me standing there, his own weapon in my hand. With my own voice, or our own voice at least, I said, ". . . failure is fatal only for the prey."

Then I pointed the cannon-thing at him. As I expected, he dodged down the trail toward the swamp. To make sure he stayed on the path, I fired on either side of him, well clear since I wasn’t sure how to work the manual sites on that old-fashioned weapon. After a cursing, noisy stumble, Sstton found himself at the edge of the slough. I fired once again, over his head, and almost in reflex he jumped out into the water, becoming quickly mired in the sticky muck.

Ti gave one last recorded message, still in Sstton’s voice, "I have been quite successful over the years, don’t you see? And as a result, quite skilled. Animal prey is no longer much of a challenge at all."

He jerked at the sound, then looked back over his shoulder at where I stood on the bank of the scummy water.

"Stupid Federation technology. That’s the only reason you escaped," he snarled.

"Actually, Kommissar, I have not used any Federation technology at all, except to call with my communicator for some men to help Darius with the men we captured. And that was after you had abandoned it. You forgot, somewhere among all your ‘successes’, that the only truly dangerous weapon is the human mind."

"You felt yourself so superior to the poor, defenseless women you pursued with all your men and your dogs and your ‘skill’," I said disdainfully. "Yet once all your ‘advantages’ were taken from you, you ended up stuck in the swamp, just another frightened animal."

As God is my witness I didn’t intend for him to die there, at that time. I was waiting for some other comment from him, something to use to complete his journey toward an understanding of the fear and helplessness he had inflicted on who knows how many women when he saw a ripple disturb the trail of moonlight reflected in the stagnant water of the swamp.

It energized him to frantic, energy-wasting panic. He struggled to get back to the bank where I stood, heedless of the weapon I held. Something in his manner suggested true, desperate danger, and I stepped down into the shallow water to offer him a hand.

He never reached me. The water around him began to froth up as though rapidly stirred. He screamed, a high-pitched outburst of pure terror and then I saw something jabbing at him, over and over, almost too rapidly to resolve into distinct motions. Around his waist at the level of the water, dark spots of blood appeared, and the glints of reflection from the moons showed feathers of drifting blood carried away as much by the motion of the attacking snake-thing as by any inherent current.

It was enough, though, and more than enough. A heavier ripple followed the dark swirls from the wider spot where we had once hidden back to their source, sending waves through the fetid water. With a massive roar something huge erupted from the slough and fastened itself to Sstton’s shoulder. It knocked him off his feet, and with the snake still jabbing and biting at his midsection, Sstton disappeared beneath the water.

"Sstton!" I screamed, wanting those last few seconds to have been somehow false, somehow a horrid nightmare.

All that answered were silent ripples that trailed off toward the deeper water.

"I didn’t want him to be killed!" I insisted.

"I know," Titania answered.

"I just wanted to scare him," I said, "to make him understand how evil his little game had been."

Titania just repeated softly, "I know."

I stood there for several minutes, wishing somehow that he would appear again, hurt perhaps, but not taken to a horrible, dark death in the maw of some mindless beast. No one, not even a creature like Sstton, deserved that. I’d rather have seen him publicly tried, and if that were within the provisions of the local law, executed cleanly, then have him vanish into the mud.

After a time long enough to ensure that he would have drowned, even if somehow the beast had released him, Titania softly said, "We need to go, Xora. There’s nothing that we can do here."

"No, we’ve done quite enough," I said bitterly.

"We did nothing more than what Sstton had planned for us," Titania quietly declared.

"Not even Sstton planned this for us," I said.

"Only because he had other, more cruel plans."

"You think his plans were more cruel than that?" I asked in shock.

"His plans, yes," Titania insisted. "Nature is not actively cruel, only ruthless. Sstton wanted his victims to suffer for the perverse joy of inflicting that suffering. That beast, the snake thing, they were only doing what they had to do to survive."

"But it was so, so, . . . "

"Yes it was," Titania said, understanding what couldn’t be put into words.

"Let’s go, my friend," Ti said.

I let her urge me with a gentle pressure that might almost have been the touch of a hand on my shoulder. We turned and made our way back up the path to the main trail. Once there, it seemed only natural to turn upward, toward Darius. We passed the small, clear-flowing stream that had served before to wash us clean of the muck of the swamp, and I roused enough to step down into it. No matter how much I scrubbed though, the stain of what had happened would not go away.

"You need to rest," Titania said, urging me with more gentle pressures from the water to the grass beside the stream. "You haven’t slept in three days, haven’t eaten in almost that long. Even my abilities are not without limits. Rest now, and we’ll wait for Darius."

"Darius?" I repeated dully.

She just sent me a silent sense of assurance as I lay down on the soft turf.

 

(continued in part 2)

 

 

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© 1999 by Brandy Dewinter. All Rights Reserved. These documents (including, without limitation, all articles, text, images, logos, compilation design) may printed for personal use only. No portion of these documents may be stored electronically, distributed electronically, or otherwise made available without express written consent of the copyright holder.