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  If I could only eat one of them myself.

  It wasn’t disgust at their appearance that prevented it. Rather, the newt squirming in my hand triggered atavistic cravings I hardly realized existed in my makeup. My taa gland, sensing the coming moment of the kill, was going into pre-orgasmic spasms. A side effect of taa usage other than super power and strength during crisis was the “zombie” switch, which activated a form of lintatai that brought on a condition less spectacular than the lintatai that caused self-combustion or explosions, but no less deadly. It was not an unpleasureable experience. In fact, it could be incredibly seductive. The young Zentadon taa addicts induced the orgasmic “zombie” condition by watching violent shows or simulating violent behavior. Playing chicken with their systems. Wrestling with the taa gland was to wrestle for life itself. Many lost and went into a mindless semi-stupor from which they never recovered. Like Cauri Tan at Mishal’s safe house.

  The ultimate reason for the taa gland was to aid predator Zentadon ancestors in killing and eating quivering prey. However, circumstances following the Indowy taa camps had made of the Zentadon frustrated predators conditioned away from violence. It was violence itself that could now destroy.

  I studied the newt clasped in my hand. I had to eat, had to chance the “zombie” in order to survive. If I failed and “zombie” overcame me, I might well sit here happily by the stream until the sniper came along, finished me off, and took the box. I would neither eat nor drink or perform any other function without specific orders. It was similar to the subservient condition the Indowy Hell Box had induced in its soldier subjects under Indowy control.

  My hands shook around the water newt-thing and I drew a deep calming breath. I was half-Human; Humans killed without compunction and serious side effects. I shot the giant snake, hadn’t I? I attempted to do Blade. But those were in self-defense and different than this; I didn’t intend to kill and then eat them.

  I concentrated on my Human side. The mind is a mirror of the soul, the soul a mirror of the mind. The mirror has the stillness of a pond …

  My mind went blank. Breathing returned to normal. I twisted my hands, killing the little animal. And I ate it. I was becoming more and more Human.

  C·H·A·P·T·E·R

  THIRTY SIX

  The country opened up some, although the sky continued to gush water. Open country allowed me to lead Blade even further away from the pod. The forest turned into numerous meadows where purple-black grass grew taller than my head. Herds of the strange, lumbering beetle-like creatures foraged in the meadows and paid little attention as I skirted the edges, keeping to the trees to remain in cover and concealment. I was more the hunted than they.

  At one of these glades I encountered an astonishing and frightful transaction, which underscored how vulnerable to my environment I truly was. As though I needed the underscoring. From my vantage point on a slight wooded incline on the far side of a little park, I spotted a pack of animals the likes of which I had so far only glimpsed from a distance. I immediately hid and watched the lizard-like predators stalk a pod of large gray pill bugs.

  I was both intrigued and appalled. With incredible swiftness, slinking low like fanger cats, the lizard-appearing predators broke into three separate groups. One group of three individuals scurried through the edge of the forest to the far side of the clearing and slunk into hiding as a blocking force. A second group of four, the attack element, all but invisible but for their rippling trails in tall grass, silently surrounded the beetles on the near side. Once the two forces were in place, everything went still.

  The third group — two lizards larger and more powerful-looking than the others — appeared to be in charge. These two hid in the trees, but in such a manner that they commanded the field of impending carnage. Snake-like tongues tested the air, slithering in and out between sharpened rows of teeth as long as my hand. The tips of long black-green tails twitched with anticipation. Clawed feet dug into the earth as muscles bunched.

  The leader of the attack element looked back toward the commanders, as though seeking instructions. These creatures were thinking, reasoning organisms, more than simple bundles of instinct tied to stomachs! I tested my senses on theirs and received such a powerful impression of blood and gore and torn flesh that I withdrew immediately in fear of triggering lintatai.

  The leader lizard reared up on its hind legs and gave a roaring dog-like bark that echoed across the meadow. The pill bugs were agile themselves for beasts of their amazing size, but they were no match at such close range for the intelligence and prowess of the carnivores. The lizards streaked through the grass. The earth trembled. Blood-thirsty cries filled the air. Attackers leapt upon the backs of individual beetles and began ripping and tearing with tooth and claw as the terrified insects bolted, dying on their multi-legs even as they fled.

  It was a well-thought-out operation. The main bug herd broke directly into the blocking force, which sprang from hiding and began taking down more quarry. The two big lizards joined the process of finishing off the wounded. They slaughtered more than they could ever eat. They apparently killed as much for pleasure as for food. Dead and dying creatures lay in carnage all over the glade and the grass was trampled almost flat.

  The king reptile paused with an enormous chunk of flesh in its jaws. Its triangular head jerked as it looked around. It seemed to peer directly at me through the raveling skeins of rain. My ears twitched. Shivers skittered across my breast like cold raindrops blown by an icy wind. I averted my eyes to avoid looking into his and giving away my position. It occurred to me that the king was sensing me as completely as I sensed him.

  “Fu-uck!” snarled an all-too-familiar voice. I gave a start that almost exposed me to the lizards. I felt a surge of taa, but not yet enough to save me from the round that was certain to blow out the back of my skull. I steeled myself for it.

  “Fu-uck!”

  The epithet came from my battle harness. I crouched and withdrew the small watch-like squad radio.

  “Elf?” inquired the voice from the RT receiver I had left stashed in my battle harness. “I know you’re over there. Why didn’t you leave on the pod?”

  He gave that crazy Presence laugh, tormenting me.

  “You might as well give it up now,” he proposed. “You should be convinced that you can’t get away. I can track you wherever you go, and in the end I’ll get the case anyhow.”

  Along with the arrogance, however, I detected a trace of concern in his voice. He might get the case all right, but by then he’d never be able to make it back to the pod before it took off. Keep on tracking me, big boy.

  “Elf, I’ve activated your RT because I want you to hear me. Look, there’s enough credits for both of us. We’ll share. What did you owe the others anyhow? None of them trusted you any more than I did. Why do you think the Captain failed to include you in the rankings for the pod? I did us both a favor by killing them. Hell, I did them a favor. I could have left them out here to be finished off by these monsters.”

  I had nothing to say to him. Not yet.

  “Aren’t these fu-ucking lizards magnificent? Perfect killing machines. Now, catch this, elf. Watch! Isn’t it beautiful?”

  I heard the shot echo from a distance. One of the feeding lizards executed a complete forced somersault off the corpse of the beetle upon which it was feeding. It thrashed about in its terrible death throes while Blade picked off yet another target. Brain shots, both of them. He killed a third as the band raced for the cover of the forest.

  “Which of us is the more efficient killing machine?” Blade’s radio voice asked. “Elf, look at them. That’s what I intend to do to you.”

  C·H·A·P·T·E·R

  THIRTY SEVEN

  I had been moving in a straight line for the past few hours. The country was now reasonably flat but rising toward the south. The trees were thinning out into purple-grass meadows. Shimmering rain swept across marshes like the surreal landscapes of a dream. Blade would be deli
ghted. From his point of view, I was moving into good open sniper country in which he could continue to track me until he got a clear shot.

  There would, however, be no extreme long-distance shooting because of the rain. Without wind to hurry it along, rain fell as plumb-straight as the strands of a beaded curtain. Its purling streams blurred trees no more than five hundred meters away.

  Blade would not want to come within the short range of my Punch Gun. Or within range where I could use taa in order to propel me to his throat.

  I felt stronger after eating the newt-thing. Zentadon possess remarkable recuperative powers. I stopped at a pool to fish and eat again. I accepted that I would not be leaving Aldenia, but I still needed to recover as much strength as I could to make sure Blade and the Hell Box did not leave either. The trick was to keep him following me until even a forced march would not return him to the pod. I had to keep enticing his greed with the possibility that he would soon win. Just a little bit further. A little longer.

  Squatting by the pool, I sucked on a newt bone. The killing and eating of the little creature hadn’t affected me at all this time. I looked into the pool, contemplating snagging another for dessert.

  “You realize you are one dead Zentadon?” Blade said from my radio.

  He wasn’t concerned about attracting the Blobs. First of all, there were no Blobs. Well, maybe one, and that trickster wanted us to return to the Republic with news of the “advance base,” which meant he would continue to lay low and not interfere with this duel of wits between Blade and me. Second, communications between the little voice boxes were OPSEC untraceable, another Indowy state-of-the-art development.

  I decided to talk to him. Maybe I could use the radio to my advantage for a little psyops, psychological operations.

  “Perhaps I will die and perhaps I will not,” I responded. “Either way, you will also die.”

  My senses told me he was somewhere in the vicinity of the higher country to the west.

  A shriek of mechanical laughter over the radio, again as much the Presence’s as Blade’s. If for everything in nature there was an antithesis, where was the Good Presence when I needed it?

  “A Zentadon can’t kill,” Blade taunted. “It’s against your carrot-cruncher religion.”

  I took out my knife and cut off the head of a second newt. I stripped off the flesh and ate it raw in bites. The state of so-called “Zen,” what the Humans called it, actually worked.

  “Perhaps I am willing to make an exception in your case,” I said. “It would not be killing. It would be extermination of a virus.”

  I felt the hot rise of his rage. It allowed me to pinpoint him. My head snapped toward the source. In the low foothills to my right. Although I was not an outdoors-man, I knew enough to question how he could possibly track me from up there. Even the LF was almost useless at such ranges.

  Then he slammed his mind door.

  “You are as useless in the woods as tits on a boar hog,” Blade mocked, disciplined once again.

  “An old, old Earth expression?”

  “You’re making a track clear enough that I could follow it blind.”

  He was lying. He wasn’t following my track at all. He was tracing me. How?

  Puzzled, I put what was left of the Newt meat into a combat pocket for a later snack and continued to the south, this time making sure I kept forest between me and Blade in the foothills. The route rose steadily out of marshes and grew more dangerously open. Lightning splintered a boulder into pebbles. Ozone filled the wet air.

  Our verbal sniping continued over the radio. Psychological warfare worked both ways. Whenever he betrayed strong emotion, I was able to get a fix on his location.

  “Zentadon are not Humans,” I said. “No Human, even an enhanced one, is as strong as a Zentadon, or as fast.”

  He laughed. “A Human is if the Zentadon is crippled.”

  “Aye? I am permitting you to live at the moment because it satisfies my needs.”

  “Fu-uck. Zentadon are cowards. They have always been, always will be. The Indowy gave you balls when they had you, but now you’re eunuchs again.”

  “Tell yourself that, Human, when I rip your still-beating heart from your chest and eat it while you watch.”

  That set him aback even as the thought sent a ripple of taa to my brain, a not unpleasant experience. I fought to control it as I climbed into rolling, lightly forested hills. Giant dragonflies darted in and out of the lowering dark clouds, but they ignored me.

  “What do you intend doing with the box, elf?” Blade asked.

  “Return it to proper authorities. Better yet, destroy it in space where it’ll never be recovered.”

  “Fu-uck.” Like he didn’t believe anyone could be that foolish. “You want all the credits for yourself, that’s what you think you’re doing. You can’t leave Aldenia without me, elf. I can leave, but I won’t without the case. Where does that put us, huh? Fu-uck. You aren’t that stupid. We’re at a standoff here, boy. It’s time to make a deal.”

  “I do not make deals with killers and thieves.”

  Again, I picked up his fleeting anger. He was keeping a parallel pace with me, drawing near.

  “We can get a billion credits for that box on the black market,” he proposed. “I even know a good fence.”

  “The Homeland terrorists?”

  “If they have the funds.”

  “You have done this before, killed your friends for money?”

  “I have no friends. I never liked them much any how. Besides, a billion credits … Elf, do you have any idea of how you could live with a third of that?”

  “A third?”

  “I found it, didn’t I? Okay. Okay. Fu-uck. Half then.”

  Rain drummed straight down on me.

  “And if I do not ‘make a deal?’”

  “You think you’re just going to turn it in? No reward or anything? What kind of a Zentadon does that make you?”

  “The good guy kind?”

  I felt his anger and frustration.

  “The landing pod takes off without both of us in four more days,” he argued. “All right. You drive a hard bargain. Why don’t you hide the box or destroy it? Then we can both leave.”

  I halted in my tracks. It suddenly dawned on me. I sat down on the ground and examined the lindal, running my hands across both sides and the slim ends. I detected a slight bubble at one end where someone, apparently Captain Amalfi, suspicious and cautious, had attached an electronic tracer bug. Blade possessed its monitor. So that was how he managed to stay on my trail so tenaciously.

  I beat at the bubble with a stone. I took out my knife and broke off the blade tip prying at it. No use.

  I now had some insight into Blade’s OpPlan. He was hoping to press me hard enough that I would get rid of the case, and then all he had to do was follow the bug to it. He wouldn’t even need the Presence. Now that I knew, I thought I might be able to use it to my advantage. Exactly how, I wasn’t sure yet.

  Blade snorted over the radio. “Elf? We know how this is going to end. But I got to hand it to you. You’re giving me a fine run for my money. You’d make a good Human.”

  “Bite your tongue.”

  C·H·A·P·T·E·R

  THIRTY EIGHT

  DAY SEVEN

  The voice came back to me in my sleep. I thought it came from my dreams; the Presence tormenting me while I slept.

  Kadar San …? Help me, Kadar San … Kadar San, I’m dying …

  The thought voice was weak, but not as weak as last time. It was almost recognizable. I snapped immediately awake. I had crawled down among the roots of a forest giant where they made sort of a cave. It was relatively dry there, if cramped, and I felt safe from any insomniac monster that might come wandering by. I sat there in complete darkness with the rich odor of wet soil in my nostrils and the flash of lightning outside playing silhouette shadow tricks with the entangled roots of my overnight lodging.

  I dispatched a thought message of
my own: I am listening. Talk to me. Who are you? Where are you?

  There was no response now that I was alert and listening. The military sent its ground grunts and SpecOps warriors to various survival schools. We rear echelon types, what the Human soldiers called REMFs, for rear echelon motherfuckers, endured minimal combat training. However, I had heard Designated Hitters in the infantry talk about how hallucinations set in after you had been deprived of food and sleep for a few days. One soldier had a conversation with his mother who had died years before. Another sat down to a full three-course meal and started eating his socks and boots and gloves. I wasn’t that bad yet.

  The rain had slacked to little more than a drizzle pattering gently in the foliage. I crawled out from the roots and stood outside in the forest and gazed toward the distant rocky hills to the southwest. I saw nothing, of course, but the blackness of an Aldenia night.

  Pia died in the rocks when Blade’s neural grenade went off. I saw her dead, along with the others. The Presence was playing its own little cruel mind games with me, trying to drive me crazy by sending me voices that sounded like hers. But they were so real.

  So were my other dreams of being chased by the dead.

  I concentrated, listening inside my head. I probed the vicinity of the old campsite where death came for six of my fellow DRT soldiers, including Pia. I silently longed for a whisper of friendly sentient life. I picked up waves from the bloody lizards, quiet now in slumber. Somewhere closer I found Blade, also quiet and less threatening while he slept. But all I received of Pia were the hollow echoes of empty hopes.

  I turned, feeling more alone than before, and crawled back among my roots like a beast somewhere quite low on the evolutionary scale.