So caught up in his own frustration, S’samph didn’t notice the threat until his levibike had already been ambushed with a series of ravik cluster-bombs. Popping noises burst against his hearing auricles as the explosions rocked him. He spun off the road from the force of the collective impacts, slamming hard into a nearby rock formation.
Training from another lifetime kicked in as he managed to cover his soft spots and roll to relative safety. No doubt he was injured enough, but nothing so severe he wouldn’t be able to hold his own against a few miserable raviks. The creatures scuttled toward him, approaching in their typical swarming pattern. Something about their small, lithe bodies set him on edge. To him, there was little distinction between where one sharp-snouted face ended and the other began. Beady dark eyes trained on him; a chittering call chorused through the group.
S’samph gritted his teeth through the seep of blood where a chunk of his right shoulder had been blown off. It would regenerate in a few weeks, but it made mobility limited as he fumbled for his weapon.
With some painful twisting, he managed to unholster his own pulsar gun and send a shockwave out against the creeping mass of bodies. It had little effect aside from scattering them. The prime advantage of a ravik was their ability to swarm in great, incoherent numbers, yelling and babbling amongst themselves as they went. No, the only way to take out a ravik was to annihilate the whole klatch with deadly force, and he’d stopped carrying any weapons that lethal since he’d left Latilla. Not only had the war soured his stomach for violence, but it was part of the rules set out by the IA for all new colonists. Their belongings were searched for contraband before taking off from a spaceport. There were more ways to smuggle illegal weapons than stars overhead, but S’samph had no desire to shirkprotocol. At least he hadn’t until now.
His life in Laurus had been largely peaceful, save for the past few weeks. But standing here, shaking with fury at the squadron of creatures advancing on him, he wanted nothing more than a proper weapon to show them he was no weakling, no foolish civilian to be taken down by a klatch of sentientf’fret.
“What do you want?” He hissed sharply at the mass. A klatch of three unpinned themselves from the larger throng, pushing their way forward, smacking away the younger, more immature klatches as they went.
“We want. Want. Want. Packs.” The words came through in garbled universal although he couldn’t identify the specific speaker of the three. Their cognitive capacities formed slowly, which is why the younger ones kept to larger groups for safety. This task clearly wasn’t important enough to send a binary pair, they could at least hold something like a dialogue, but a klatch of three had the cognitive capabilities for rudimentary conversation unlike the other cacophonic masses.
“I have nothing you want in my packs.” S’samph limped over to his sputtering levibike. The engine groaned in confusion as it tried to propel forward without success. He killed the power and then tossed his pulsar gun aside. It was useless against this m ob anyhow. As they crept ever closer into his periphery, S’samph used his good arm to fish out the flower holder pot and the box he’d purchased to hold the mating bands. “Containers only.” He showed them to the crowd, eliciting a flurry of grumbled whispers spreading through the band of what he now counted to be about nine individual bodies.
“Food?” The same dissonant voice came through.
“Food? Is that what you scavengers want?” S’samph scoffed as he produced a sack of dried vela beans from deeper in his storage. He’d intended to use them to trade if his credits were insufficient, but if it was enough to placate the raviks to get them far away from the road back to Laurus, he would consider them well utilized.
“I’ll give you this, but you’ll leave this road alone. That’s your tribute.” He’d only then realized how lucky it was Eleri had rejected his invitation to join him on the journey back to Laurus. If she’d been on his bike with him, he would have been ill-equipped to protect her properly. Somehow, that thought filled him with an uncharacteristic spark of rage.
“Take. Take. Take. Food. Food. Food.” A chittering something reminiscent of laughter peppered its way through the group until the group of three turned their eyestalks back to examine the rest of the klatches with a horrible grating growl. “No tribute. Take food.”
“Then I’ll kill you. You can’t be here on the road.” His words weren’t a threat. It was merely a statement of fact. He wanted them far away from the road and if that meant resorting to more lethal means, so be it. S’samph holstered his pulsar gun and pulled a blade from his bike. It was a utility knife, meant to cut through any foliage if he ever drove off the established roads, but it would kill a ravik adolescent without too much trouble.
“No. No. No. No kill.” The creatures swarmed in an odd formation, sniffing in the direction of the bag of beans, even though vela beans were distinctly flavorless and bland. “Off road. Off road go. Tribute acceptable.” The word ‘road’ repeated itself in an echolalia amongst the nine of them. One of the braver of the klatch of three rushed forward to snatch the bag of dried beans before S’samph could change his mind. They held the bag in the center of their group and then scurried away in all directions before reconvening at a point in the distant haze of blue dust.
S’samph waited until they were well out of his sight before crouching to the ground beside his battered levibike. The engine sputtered unhelpfully, but with a few adjustments, it should still run.
He examined the hole in his shoulder. It would make it difficult to drive but not impossible. The first order of business was getting his bike up and running again. Now the road was clear, it should be safe for Eleri and the others to get back to Laurus without any trouble. He’d survived worse injuries and remained on his feet, so this would be little more than an inconvenience. With his good arm, he set to work on getting the bike’s magnetic tracks realigned and cleaning up the remains of his broken side mirror. The blood dripping from his shoulder was an annoyance, but he’d patch himself up after he could ensure his bike would have the ability to get him to safety. A slight wooziness overcame him, but he worked steadily, blinking away dark spots that formed behind his eyes.
CHAPTER 10
Eleri
Eleri wanted to melt into the walls or the floors or just evaporate into a haze of blue dust. The rest of the afternoon after S’samph’s departure had been even more excruciatingly uncomfortable than the first part of the shopping trip. Myla barraged her with questions about her relationship with S’samph and despite Eleri’s best protests that she had only a few chance encounters with him in town, the kyrot female wasn’t easily swayed.
However, despite her best efforts to wear down a more interesting answer, Eleri had nothing of interest to offer her besides the truth. She retreated from the conversations to the best of her ability, leaving Myla and Talin to talk about the upcoming flood season. When they’d exhausted that topic, they tried to rope Eleri into local gossip, but it was also a limited avenue given most of the recent gossip had to do with her, their unwilling participant.
She found herself strangely grateful when Minio returned from his errand and offered her a ride back to Laurus. It had been plenty exhausting for a shopping trip, and she could feel the effects of the midday sun begin to scorch through even her most vigilant skincare attempts. She gave her farewells to her shopping companions and was thrilled to finally be free of them. Despite her lack of credits, she found herself caught in a daydream of renting her own apartment just so she could get away from Myla’s constant presence. It was unrealistic on multiple counts. There weren’t apartments for rent in Laurus, and she couldn’t afford anything even if there were, but at some point, she would have to find an alternative living situation.
“Did you get everything you wanted?” Minio asked her as they walked over to the charging station where he’d left his levibike. “I know my sister can be a bit overbearing, but she means well.” He tucked a small white package into the compartment behind the passenger seat.
“What?” Eleri took a moment to register the question—she’d been so caught up in her own mental calculations. “Oh, yes! All the essentials.” She raised the cloth bags filled with her purchases as if to furtheremphasize her enthusiasm for the shopping trip and then clapped a hand over the new broad-brimmed hat on her head.
“That’s good. I heard S’samph showed up when you were shopping. Hopefully, he didn’t make too much trouble for you.” Minio offered her the spare helmet for the bike as he hopped into the driver’s seat. Eleri swapped her hat for the helmet and situated herself on the passenger seat behind him, grateful not for the first time the degree of separation provided by the levibike designed for two. Unlike when she’d ridden with S’samph the other day and it was clearly built for a single rider.
“Did you get all your errands done?” Eleri asked, more out of politeness than any real interest. She had little interest in talking about S’samph. The pale blue dress was still folded in the bottom of one of her bags. She wasn’t a heathen raised to discard perfectly good clothing, but she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to bring herself to wear it with all the connotations.
“Yes. It was more trouble than I expected, but what can you expect in a place like this? Look, if he’s bothering you again, just let me know and I’ll get him to back off.”
“Oh. I couldn’t ask that of you.” She’d been trying to avoid the pointless macho chest beating between the two of them. Minio barely knew her. S’samph barely knew her. Their relationships were hinged entirely on convenience and circumstance. Minio was kind enough, but there was something off-putting about the way he pressed his intentions toward her without any real effort to get to know her. The engine revved.
“There are many males interested in you, Eleri. You need to choose someone who can protect you from the rest of them. We would make a good match. Kyrot are much larger than most other species, and we have good protective instincts. My sister approves of you greatly. Besides we’d have…” Minio said something else, but it was lost in the roar of the engine and the billow of the wind. Eleri clutched tighter at the low-placed handles of the passenger seat on the bike trying to get her thoughts in order. She was getting awfully tired of people telling her what she should do for her own good. It was never really about her anyway. It was always about them and what they wanted.
The dreams about finding her own place were going to have to become more reality than dreams, she decided as they whipped down the main road to Laurus. Perhaps there was a spare cot at the clinic, or perhaps another single female looking for a housemate. If she continued to rely upon Pyo and Myla’s hospitality, it would only give them more fodder for pairing her up withMinio, a male she knew little about and who seemed interested only in the value of her as a potential mate and not a person.
They were speeding by a curved stretch of road when Eleri spotted a trail of skid marks on the paving track below. She followed them to a downed levibike beside an outcropping of scraggly trees.
