About half an hour passed, with nothing but the wind disturbing our surroundings. But shortly after we crossed a small stream, my ear twitched and I stopped in my tracks. I couldn’t have said exactly what it was that caught my attention, but before I’d even thought about it, I’d darted forward, pulled my master to an urgent stop, and pressed a finger to my lips, even as his wide eyes flashed annoyance at me. Seeing my gesture, his mood changed instantly, and he held absolutely still as I listened. What I heard wasn’t really a sound. Or at least, not one I could have described. The trees around us were in a constant state of motion, errant breezes rustling leaves at all levels of the canopy. But something over to my left just sounded… different. Like the rustling moved with a different cadence. There was something there. I would have bet my life on it. I pointed in the direction of our soon-to-be assailants, keeping my hand close to my chest.
With a few simple gestures, my master motioned for us to get closer to the ground, and then to seek shelter behind an outcrop of rock. The towering boulders were a regular occurrence throughout the jungle and they were one of the reasons why this trek was so time consuming. The pathway was constantly blocked by rocks, or by vines, or by small chasms where rain had dug channels into the earth. In this case, though, the rocks were going to do us a favour.
“What is it?” my master asked, his voice barely a whisper as he surveyed the wall of greenery in front of us.
“There’s something there,” I told him, in the same low tones. “I don’t know how many, or which species. There's at least two of them, but maybe more.”
He listened intently for a long moment. “I don’t hear anything.”
Was Vangravian hearing more acute than a human’s? Without knowing much about his species, it was hard to make any sensible comparisons. I listened, trying to pull the threads of sound apart. I wished I could see into the infrared range, like the Eumadians could. Instead, I could pick out slivers of ultraviolet light, faint glimpses between the leaves, but nothing clear enough to make a solid picture.
But my master was fiddling with his comm again, and a small display popped up, using the rock as a makeshift screen. It displayed three heat signals – three clear, bipedal forms, huddled around the thick base of a tree. My master tapped a few more keys, then his mouth tightened. “Well, they’re not my team,” he said, when the results of his latest query flashed up. “They’re a good two kilometres from here. So my bet is that these are more Culrads. And given that they’ve had two goes at killing me already, I’d prefer to shoot first and ask questions later.”
It was an idiom I hadn’t heard before, but I immediately liked it. My master pulled his rifle from his shoulder, but before he could lift it and take aim, a hail of bullets sprayed into the boulder, sending up smatterings of dust and rock fragments. “Fuck these motherfucking assholes,” my master hissed, ducking for cover and scrabbling around for a better vantage point. “I am sick to death of this.” He returned fire, and I wished I had a gun on me. I hadn’t been given one when I’d been shipped out, though, and my master didn’t seem to have brought a spare for me.
I tracked the movements of the three people as well as I could through the brief glimpses between the trees, while at the same time assessing the ground and vegetation around us. There was a low rise to the left, growing thick with some type of fern-like plant, where I might be able to avoid detection and get closer to the Culrads.
But before I could come up with a solid plan, my heart jolted in my chest as I caught sight of a fourth assailant. This one was coming up on the left, and very soon, he would have a clear line of sight to my master, around the edge of the boulder. This wasn’t just a gunfight. It was an ambush.
But not if I could do anything about it. I tapped my master once on the leg, then gestured over to my left. It was as clear an explanation as I could give him under the circumstances, but I didn’t have time for anything more. I slipped silently into the undergrowth, an excellent and innate spatial awareness making it easy to keep track of exactly where I was in relation to the last spot I had seen the fourth assailant. He’d been heading south, so I compensated for his movements, edged around where he was going to end up, and came up behind him. A short knife slid soundlessly out of my boot, and then just as silently, it sliced through the man’s throat. He never knew what had killed him.
Well, that was all well and good, but there were still three men shooting at my master, and that was unacceptable. I backed up and traced a wayaround until I was behind the three men, having to spend a few extra cautious seconds making sure they couldn’t see me as I crossed the gap between one patch of ferns and the next. My master was still trading shots with them, but I was betting on the idea that these three were a mere diversion. The fourth man had been the true threat, and if the first three didn’t know he was dead, they would wait a while longer for him to complete his part of the attack.
One of the three men was already dead when I got within sight of them. My master had landed a perfect shot between the man’s eyes, and he was now staring sightlessly at the sky.
The second man was easy pickings. He was sheltered behind a tree, his attention fixed on my master’s location. It was a simple thing to creep soundlessly up behind him and slit his throat as well.
But that was where my luck ran out. The spray of blood from his throat splattered against the tree, and the sound of it got the attention of the third man. He looked around and spotted me instantly.
Acting on pure instinct, I flexed my scales, turning my entire body jet black. It wouldn’t help me hide in the jungle, not when he’d already seen me, but I’d learned from long experience that the colouring tended to scare the shit out of people, particularly if they didn’t know what I was. Sure enough, the man yelped, scuttling backwards until his back hit a tree. He reached for his gun, but I was already moving, crossing the distance between us in lithe, efficient movements.
Giving up on his gun, he grabbed a knife instead, and then it became clear that I wasn’t the only highly trained fighter here. He was on his feet before I arrived, and then it was a competition to see which of us was quicker, who could block a blow without getting stabbed in the process, who could anticipate their opponent’s moves and end up just a split second ahead of the other. My training fights had all been with wooden weapons. This was the first time I’d fought with metal, or against metal. It was exhilarating. It was terrifying. I gave ground, drawing him away from the tree, making sure to keep enough distance between us…
One single shot rang out, and the man’s head jerked to the side. He slumped to the ground a moment later, a gaping wound in his head where my master’s bullet had exited his skull.
I waited a moment, assessing the surrounding area, then I called out, “All clear.”
By the time my master arrived in the small clearing, I was back to my previous brown colour and wiping the blood off my knife on a handful of leaves. He pulled to a stop, gaping at me in shock. It was only then that it occurred to me that he hadn’t actually given me permission to take out our attackers. His comment to ‘shoot first and ask questions later’ could well have been a figurative statement, rather than a literal one.
“Are you all right?” he asked first, and I was rapidly learning to like that question. Having my master express concern about me made me feel… Well, I didn’t know, exactly, but it was a warm, squishy feeling, deep in my chest.
“I’m fine,” I assured him. “Not injured.”
He looked around at the downed men. “That was…” He grinned suddenly, shaking his head. “That was fucking amazing. Where the hell did you learn to do that?”
I frowned. “I am a combat specialist,” I said, my elation at the praise tempered by confusion. “A full report on my skills is in my operations manual.” It would also have been in the advertising brochure that my master would have viewed, before deciding which dimari to purchase.
My master blinked at me. “Well… Yeah, I mean, obviously,” he said, gesturing to me vaguely. “But… you just took out three men without even breaking a sweat. Or getting a drop of blood on you,” he added, giving me another once over. “I mean, I’ve got military training, but I couldn’t have gotten anywhere close to what you just did.”
I really needed to stop second guessing my master. He was praising me not because he didn’t know what I was capable of, but because he was just genuinely impressed by how well I’d done it. I needed to stop being so paranoid. A smile tugged at my lips, and I sheathed my knife, to avoid drawing attention to my sudden joy.
“I believe you took out the third one,” I reminded him.
“Because you created the perfect opening.”
“Shall we call it a team effort?” I asked playfully. I fully expected him to laugh, then tell me not to be so damn cocky. Masters did not like their slaves showing them up, regardless of the fact that no one was around to see it.
But instead, my master stepped closer to me, putting his hands on my shoulders, a stern expression on his face. “Seriously, Kade… You saved my life there. We were outnumbered and my ammunition wasn’t going to last forever. Thank you.”
