Tooth and Claw Read online

  Just damned annoyed.

  Akarr did the only thing he could. He turned his back on Riker, pretending he hadn’t spoken those last, provocative words—no Tsoran did anything else, when faced with conflicting facts. Ignore the other person, even in midsentence, until things became clearer, that was the way of it. And Akarr fairly dove for the safety of those ways, pushing his pace to fall in ahead of Riker until he nearly trod on Takan’s heels.

  Above them came the first patter of rain in the upper leaves; soon enough those leaves would be drenched, and dripping their own rain down on the next level, and so on, until the kaphoora party was soaked. Not that it mattered in warmth like this, not with his thick, short fur to keep his skin dry. But come evening, the temperatures would fall, and if he were wet . . .

  Not even the bravest Tsoran foolishly left himself open to hypothermia. But Akarr waited until Takan pulled out his rain tarp before donning his own, not hesitating in his steady, marching progress.

  A glance behind showed that Riker had done the same, although Pavar’s tarp was too small for him; he hadn’t come with wet-weather gear—or gear of any sort. The only thing he’d contributed was the medical kit he carried.

  And that wicked blade.

  Akarr stumbled; he’d let his glance rest behind him too long, lured by the weapon. And they were running out of easy travel, though the crash path had taken them farther than he expected. Now they’d navigate with a primitive compass—standard issue for any kaphoora party—and push their way through an unfriendly jungle.

  Think of the daleura. Never mind the discomfort, the effort, the wearying state of vigilance . . . it was only a few days of inconvenience, compared to the daleura he’d earn. Even Tehra would acclaim him now, and quit looking at his younger sibling with such an attentive eye. Yes, he’d trained for his time here on Fandre . . . trained hard. And he was determined, and strong, as were all his guards—even the injured ones. Against all that, walking out to the portal would surely present no obstacle he could not overcome.

  * * *

  Riker slashed a clinging, thorn-covered vine out of his way and hoped that Worf never learned he’d used the bat’leth for such a purpose. The Tsorans had it somewhat easier, ducking obstacles that met Riker at chest level—but even so, their progress remained slow. At least the deluge of rain had eased, although he had the suspicion that he was likely to mold before he managed to dry off. In that, at least, the Tsorans had a disadvantage; their fur, despite use of the simple rain slickers, had turned damply dark, a baptism from the thick foliage at their level. The Tsorans trained and prepared for their time here, he knew . . . but they’d never come this deep into the preserve before.

  Apparently it made a difference.

  That difference hadn’t fazed Akarr, who forged ahead with unflagging determination—aside from his occasional covetous glance at the bat’leth. Riker would have preferred to move more slowly, take better stock of their surroundings. He’d already learned to spot the sticky vines at several meters, and the thorny vines had gotten his quick attention as well. There was also a certain broad-leafed bush he’d pegged as responsible for the stinging red welts across the back of his hand; that one was harder to see at a distance.

  But it wasn’t the plants that worried him, or the insects—which, so far, had all been of such a size that there was no subtlety to them at all, no chance of one landing unnoticed to take a chunk out of him. Even if he was bitten, he specifically remembered reading that none of the local insects were anything more than annoying; for all their size, they left no more sting than a mosquito.

  Although he didn’t imagine it would take as many of them to drain a man dry.

  No, the plants were so far only an annoyance. The insects were an annoyance. But the various hoots, calls, and chattering that he heard in the distance, he took as warning. And the one oft-repeated call—where it came from, he wasn’t sure, except that it seemed to bounce among the trees, swelling significantly before it finally faded away—that one, he found alarming. Damned alarming.

  It came again—to his ears, closer than ever. More than anything, it reminded him of the sound of a stick running across the boards of a snow fence . . . if amplified many times and imbued with an underlying tone of menace that no fence had ever produced.

  He stopped, engulfed in foliage, unconsciously lifting the bat’leth closer to a guard position as Ketan stumbled past him, followed by Rakal, their last man. Slowly, he turned a complete circle, searching the layers of green on green—dark greens, shadowed greens, green spreading to reveal glimpses of grayish tree trunks, green splashed with the vibrant color of arboreal flyers and flowers—hunting for the owner of the haunting cry.

  If he hadn’t viewed the reports, if he hadn’t paid close attention in the museum, he’d have been struck by the strong suspicion that the carnivores they sought to avoid were also green.

  The carnivores, he corrected himself, that most of them sought to avoid.

  And then there was Akarr.

  Some part of him couldn’t blame the Tsoran’s resistance to abandoning the kaphoora. He was a kid, after all, a kid trying to impress not only his parents and peers, but his entire society. A kid with too much authority in a dangerous situation, and none of the experience to wield it.

  Riker’s inspection of the area revealed nothing. If there was anything out there, anything close, he couldn’t spot it. And the Tsorans hadn’t waited, hadn’t even slowed down; there was no point in standing out here alone, exposed. He turned back to the trail—easy to follow, given all the foliage that had been hacked, broken, and otherwise disturbed—and instantly froze in place at the movement directly before his feet.

  He couldn’t even tell what it was, not at first—only that in the tangle of roots, leaves, and fallen branches at his feet, something moved. A gliding motion, with no beginning to it and no ending. Gray-green patterns meant to distract his eyes did just that, and he stared, baffled, not sure if he was about to die or if he was merely seeing things.

  And then the shapes and patterns snapped abruptly into place, and the primordial part of his brain, the part that still lived in caves and walked on all fours, bellowed snake!

  Damn big snake, bulky and stretching from here to there, neither end visible, its body muscular and lumpy . . . as if the last meal hadn’t quite settled down yet. He assessed the thing’s girth, looked down at himself . . . it’d be a tight fit.

  But it would be a fit.

  Had he seen anything on snakes in the museum? Were they poisonous, were they constrictors . . . would this one even care that it had crossed his path? Would it leave him alone if he simply waited for it to pass, or was it circling back? If he moved, would that draw its otherwise uncaring attention? He hadn’t seen the tail of it yet; it just seemed to go on forever. He could well believe that this end could be passing him by while the front end came by for a second look.

  For another moment, he hesitated, not sure of the best move. Then . . . what the hell. If he was going to be eaten by the biggest snake in the universe, he’d do it with flair. He leapt over the cumbrous girth of the creature, landing as far away as he could get—and as lightly as he could manage.

  Not far enough, not lightly enough—the snake whipped around, a lightning-fast motion he hadn’t begun to suspect it possessed, whacking him across the back of the legs even as he intended to put more distance between them. Shouldn’t have hesitated, shouldn’t have taken that one look back—Riker went down, breaking through the foliage with his face, landing with his arms outspread and his fingers splayed against the ground, the bat’leth under his open palm—little good it could do him while he sprawled so thoroughly across the fungus-filled ground. He tried to flip himself around, hindered by the leaves and branches that clung to him, nearly blinded by whatever had gotten into his eyes—and was stopped short by the thick muscular body suddenly clinging to his calves. Not only clinging to them, working its way up with a prickly, gripping oddness, pinning his thighs�
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  Riker twisted to discover that the snake had legs. Or hands. Small, three-fingered hands that had emerged from a protective groove along its side and now clung happily to his trousers while the tip of the tail—finally visible—curled around to possessively claim an ankle.

  And then he heard the rustling glide of the front half, coming back for its share.

  The shock of it, the hesitation, left him—and left him cold and grim and moving. With a growl, he snatched up the bat’leth and heaved himself up to his knees, whipping around to bisect the tail with the sap-sticky blade.

  Too thick—it was too thick, and he didn’t have the leverage—the blade sunk two-thirds of the way through and stuck there, and Riker clung grimly while the tail flailed against him, battering him, knowing he couldn’t afford to lose the weapon and hoping that—

  There! Slicked by the creature’s own blood, loosened by its own contortions, the bat’leth abruptly yanked loose; Riker fell back with the momentum of it and turned it into a roll, his legs free of the creepy, clinging hand fingers and his feet solidly under him—just in time to see the head of the monster shooting toward him, lancing through the air in a deadly swift strike.

  He let the bat’leth do the thinking for him.

  Slashing, striking, ducking, skipping out of reach . . . in the end, he didn’t know if the snake-thing was badly wounded or merely annoyed enough to leave. It left enough of its blood in evidence so he felt he’d at least ruined its day; already the insects were swarming. He stood, panting, looking at the evidence of the struggle—but only for a moment. Then he wiped his face against his shoulder, clearing it of sweat and . . . less pleasant things . . . and turned to walk briskly down the trail.

  It took him some moments to catch up with the Tsorans, who had made no attempt to wait for him. Even so, Rakal turned to give him a disgruntled look. “Best if you don’t slow us down,” he said, the Universal Translator faltering and barely comprehensible over the gruffness of his under-purr and his steady panting. Definitely affected by the tech damper, dammit.

  “Just taking a look around,” he told Rakal, wiping sweat from the side of his face; he merely smiled when Rakal caught a glimpse of the bloodied bat’leth, giving it an obvious double take. It distracted him enough, in fact, that when Ketan—whose short, slightly bowed but normally sturdy legs had gone distinctly wobbly in the moments since Riker’s arrival—folded neatly to the ground, Rakal almost walked right over him.

  “Ketan!” Rakal’s exclamation wavered between concern and annoyance. “On your feet, then, Ketan—we need to make more distance this day.”

  “I think it would be wiser to find a place to camp,” Riker said.

  “There is still plenty of day left,” Rakal said, although beneath the canopy, it was hard to judge the fading light. “We’ll move until Akarr says otherwise.”

  “And is Akarr going to carry your friend? Because maybe you can’t see it, but he’s gone just about as far as he’s going to go.” Riker doubted they had much of “this day” left. And if there was one thing he knew, it was that he wanted to have a good, defensible camp set up before twilight settled in.

  Most hunting, he recalled, took place in the twilight hours.

  “What delay has Riker caused now?” Akarr shouted back at them, already retracing his steps and bringing the others with him.

  “Just trying to save your hide,” Riker said between his teeth, feeling his remaining patience trickle away through the hole in his temper. More loudly, he said, “Your men are injured, Akarr. They’re beat. We need to find a good place to spend the night, and we need to do it while we’ve still got the energy to fight off whatever comes after us in the next few hours.”

  Akarr lifted his head slightly, his nostrils flaring as he sipped in a quick series of breaths. Scenting the air. More accurately, Riker knew, than any human could ever do the same—but not nearly with the accuracy of even the most overbred Earth dog. Nonetheless, Akarr spoke with assurance. “There’s nothing in the area.”

  “Is that what you thought a few moments ago, when you walked past this?” Riker lifted the bat’leth, holding it vertically; obligingly, the last drops of maroon blood slipped down the edge to splat dramatically against the leaves below.

  Silence fell over the group. Silence more or less, considering the increasing activity in the trees around them; the creature of the hollow, clacking cry loosed another series of calls.

  Well. He’d been hoping that one was gone, but on the other hand it hadn’t seemed likely that it was the defeated snake-thing, either.

  “It would be best,” Akarr said, struggling to maintain his grasp on a command presence, “to make more distance while we’re still fresh.”

  Gavare chose that moment to wander into the middle of them and slowly sink to his knees. As unobtrusively as possible, Rakal tugged him off to the side, next to Ketan.

  “Can’t get much fresher than that,” Riker said. He plucked a giant leaf and used it to wipe the worst of the snake-thing’s blood from the bat’leth. “Face it, Akarr. They’re not going anywhere. I’m going to look around for a better spot to spend the night. Someplace that doesn’t look so much like something else’s dinner table.” He turned away from the group, hoping for something resembling high ground.

  “That’s my decision to make,” Akarr cried out as Riker walked away.

  “Then make it!” Riker shouted back without even turning around.

  That’s when it struck, a huge, long-bodied blur of motion with big ears and plenty of teeth—the only glimpse Riker got as it bounced toward him, shouldering into his hip and knocking him flat, again, only to bound away again.

  “Sculper!” Gavare called, apparently not so addled that he couldn’t keep track of the things that wanted to eat him.

  Riker, already back to his hands and knees and peering suspiciously around, found that the Tsorans had fallen into defensive positions around their injured. “Where’d it go?” he said, wary and disgruntled, and not at all sure he wanted to get back on his feet. But climb up he did, easing back toward the Tsorans to take up a new position, his feet set in a wide and stable base. The jungle was silent; nothing moved.

  “Sculpers,” Rakal said. “They prefer their prey dead, and if it lives, they play with—”

  “There!” Takan shouted, pointing, taking aim; Riker got a better look this time, was able to spot the two happily whisking tails, to see that while the sculper’s interest was in the wounded men, it targeted those who protected them. Would try to intimidate them, according to what he’d read, disposing of them with hit-and-run.

  Easily bigger than the Tsorans, it launched in to bounce off Regen, sent him flying, then bounded away and came from an entirely new direction—at Riker again. Huge, happy, overgrown hyenas with too many tails and too many teeth. And a thing or two to learn about the mettle of Starfleet’s officers.

  Until now, the attack had been silent—only the rustle of leaves, the short cries of warning, the tension of waiting. Until now. Riker snarled a challenge and lifted the bat’leth to meet the creature as it sprang for him, lowering its head, presenting its shoulder—

  He had no chance of staying on his feet. But he slammed the bat’leth at the creature anyway, turning the collision into a head-on crash that sent him tumbling across the ground. Disoriented, he staggered back to his feet, trying to find the menace—hell, trying to find any of them in this dizzying assortment of greens and grays—and more than a little glad when he backed up against the support of a gnarled ball of tree roots. Something moved behind him and he jerked around, bat’leth at the ready—

  “Peace!” Rakal stopped short and held out his hands in the reasonably universal gesture of I mean no harm. “The beast is gone, Riker.”

  “Gone?” Riker repeated, looking out over the jungle.

  “You drew blood. It is a scavenger, and for all its size prefers to avoid real confrontation. It merely sought to annoy us into leaving, so it could have our wounded.”
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  Riker shook his head, which didn’t do anything to clear it— it never does, when are you going to learn— and licked the blood from his lip, rubbing the shoulder he’d landed on. On second thought, why bother? Everywhere else felt just as battered. “It did a damn good job.”

  “Ah?”

  “Of being annoying.” Riker pushed himself away from the tree, discovered he was only on the other side of it from the Tsorans, and drew himself up to enter the fray again—this time with Akarr.

  Except this time, Akarr didn’t seem interested. He conferred quickly with his guards—aside from Regen, who only slowly climbed to his feet on the outskirts of the group, hunched over his broken arm, clearly in agony. No one paid him any attention, and Riker’s swift anger fortunately turned to understanding before he acted on it; they were giving Regen the space to express his pain without losing face over it. Riker, too, turned away.

  And then Regen’s sudden scream cut the air—not a scream of his pain, but of mortal terror—and they all whirled, crouching, ready for action—

  Not that it did them any good. The guards released dart after dart, none of them close enough to penetrate, as a lumbering sholjagg—heavy-bodied, with huge, clawed front paws and a short, stiff tail riding the spine of the main tail—ambled in with amazing speed. Right up to Regen it went, clamped the scrambling guard in its massive jaws, and ambled away without breaking its rapid stride. Regen’s wild struggles ceased almost immediately; his scream gurgled out into a fading gasp.

  The kaphoora party stared after him in shock. Any number of trank darts dangled out of the retreating sholjagg’s thick fur; plenty of others had disappeared into the foliage. Riker doubted there was much left in the way of ammunition.

  No, the Tsorans had never hunted the Legacy this deeply before. And they clearly had no idea what they were up against.

  Finally, Akarr spoke, his words quick and decisive. “We will find a place to stop for the night,” he said. “We will gather wood, as a group. We will make clubs and spears as we can. No one of us will ever be out of sight of another.” And he looked up at Riker, as if defying him to find fault with any of it—to make note of the fact that he was effectively breaking all the rules the Fandreans had set for such expeditions.