"You twit," I spit at the figure lying next to me in the sand. "You complete and utter pea-brained muppet."
Little mad Ghammarian eyes focus on me for an instant, and a wheezing laugh comes from behind the metal breath mask. "At least I ruined your deal with the Gorn!" Baz'Kervil says in a wild high-pitched voice. "At least I had that satisfaction!"
Oh, great. I wiggle a little way out of the hollow, trying to get a handle on the situation. The night is full of screams and snarls and the occasional disruptor shot. Some guy on one of the sentry platforms was trying to shine a searchlight around, earlier, but I think the Gorn shot it out.
"The Gorn were probably gonna kill me anyway," I hiss to the Master of Hounds.
"It is certain now!" Baz laughs wildly. "And if they do not, my warriguls will! They will tear your flesh and grind your bones!"
Warriguls. They're a caninoid species, tough, resilient, and adaptable. They've been introduced to any number of worlds, mostly to the detriment of the local ecology. Also, when you drop a whole bunch of them on a whole bunch of Gorn, things get awfully confusing, awfully quickly. I managed to skedaddle away from the Gorn when the first of the pack showed up, but since the pack was coming out of Paradise City's alleys, I figured making a break for the desert was the safest bet. Turns out I was right, kinda. Not very safe, but still safer than anything else.
I hear feet crunching on the sand, somewhere close. Whoever or whatever that is, I'm guessing they don't wish me well, so I scoot back into the hollow next to Baz. He's losing a lot of blood. At least, I hope it's blood. It's certainly some sort of body fluid, and it's getting all over me, so I figure blood is kinda the least worst option, there.
"Aw, yeebles," I say to him, "were you really that hacked off at me smashing up Shangdu?"
"I had a contract! I was the Master of Hounds! Then you came, and I spent three months in intensive therapy, and when I got out, the arena was closed and I had nothing!" He's gonna draw attention if he keeps this up. I mean, there's a lot of shouting and snarling out there, but someone's gonna hear him sooner or later.
"You had warriguls left," I mutter.
"Clone stock for hundreds of them!" Baz shrills. "And trained! I spent years training the first ones, then I spun them down for RNA transfer! I can field an army of obedient warriguls!"
Yeah, if he has his control device. The control device is lying on the sand about twenty metres away, next to Baz's Ferengi-style energy whip, and the big Gorn who ran into both of us. None of the three is going to be working again any time soon. The Gorn got his claws into Baz, and would've finished the job if I hadn't zapped him hard.
"How does that controller work?" I ask him.
"I will not divulge my secrets to you!"
"I mean," I say, as patiently as I can manage, "can I program any of its functions into a tricorder, or something, maybe get control of the pack back that way?" My tricorder is a pretty basic Talaxian commercial model, and I don't much fancy my chances with it, but anything's worth a shot.
"No!" says Baz. "My secrets! Mine alone! They die with me!"
Pretty soon, too, if he keeps this up. I pull the helmet off my belt, and fit it on my head. Baz laughs. "You will never pass like that! You look nothing like a Hirogen!"
All I want to do is see like a Hirogen. Behind my visor, the desert lights up in ghostly false colour, bright dots weaving about in the middle distance as the suit's motion detectors pick out potential targets. Hirogen hunting sensors are second to none. The detectors are highlighting a shape over to my left - where the footsteps were coming from -
The image blurs for an instant, then turns crisp and clear. Four legs, leathery hide with scutes over the vital organs, long jaw with excessive number of teeth. Warrigul. Big one. It's pacing back and forth, apparently uncertain. My guess is, it can smell me nearby, but it can also smell Baz, and he's programmed them not to attack his scent. Lucky for me I got his I-hope-it's-blood on me, I guess.
I could zap it with the wrist lance. Or I could stand up and shout to the Gorn "here I am, please shoot me," it'd have much the same effect.
The warrigul raises its head, sniffing the air.
Then the sand beneath it swells, and rises up in a dome, and explodes outwards, revealing the gaping segmented maw opening underneath. The aehallh worm lunges out of the ground, its jaws clamping around the warrigul's hind legs, dragging the creature into the air. The warrigul yelps and shrieks, scrabbling at its attacker with its forepaws, trying vainly to bite, while the sandworm gulps it relentlessly down. The warrigul raises its head and keens at the dim stars, then falls silent forever. One paw waves a brief goodbye, and then the maw closes and the worm slides back down into the sand.
"Well, that's just great," I say. Baz titters incoherently. I think he's a goner if he doesn't get medical help quick. Of course, now all the disturbance on the surface has roused the sandworms, I'm in even more trouble myself.
I check my belt. I still have the distress flare. I could fire it off, and hope my backup teams get to me before the Gorn do.
There is a terrible snarling and baying from somewhere, and it sounds like it's getting closer. I look around. The visor's sensors show a mass of enemy targets approaching. Oh, wonderful. Whole bunch of warriguls heard their pack-mate complaining about being eaten, they are heading in this direction, I am not going to be able to stop them with persuasion -
I give Baz a shake. "Wake up, damn you!" I snarl at him.
His little eyes flutter open. "Leave me be! Let me cherish my victory!"
"Half your damn pack is almost on top of us! How do we stop them? They'll eat you, too!"
Baz just giggles and closes his eyes again. To be fair, I've been on worse dates, but not often.
The howling and baying is getting too close for comfort. I think I'm out of options. I fiddle with the Risian gadget, then draw the wrist lance. I take aim at the leader of the approaching pack -
The fluidic antiproton wrist lance is wrapped round my hand, like a sort of wickerwork basket with glowsticks in the weave. It's salvaged Undine tech, not Starfleet, and its effects are - interesting. The secondary fire builds up a massive pulse that propagates over nearby solid surfaces, spitting out unstable antiprotons randomly at anything nearby. I hope it works on sand. I hope it synchs up properly with the Risian device. I think I'm about to find out.
The lance whines and shudders and discharges a long, wavering bolt of red-gold light, that explodes against the sand and sends out questing arms of spitting fire. And the air shimmers above it, and the baying turns to howls of pain and terror. Risa isn't noted for weaponry, but the terraforming technology that turned the planet into paradise - has other uses as well. Normally, the localised graviton spike is used as an ecologically sound alternative to explosives, for clearing ground or reshaping rock formations. Right now, though, it's picking up the pack of warriguls and pulling them towards the epicentre of my blast - hurling them onto the blazing sands.
The howling and screaming stops. The air is heavy with the smell of molten glass and burned doggoid. Something whines, fitfully, once, and falls silent.
So I'm not, immediately, going to get eaten by warriguls. Now for my next problem, because, really, it seems a safe bet I've drawn attention to myself. Might as well have shot off that distress flare.
The visor compensates automatically for the changing light as the molten sands cool. It picks out the big lumbering bipedal forms, too, now lumbering fast in my general direction. And the Gorn have personal shields and body armour, too, I'm not going to take them down anything like so easy -
Disruptor beams flash green through the dark. I hit the dirt, even though they're not aimed at me, yet. No sense making it easy for them.
"Talaxian!" One of the Gorn is approaching the warriguls' funeral pyre. A couple of others come up to join him. One of them is fiddling with something that must be a portable scanner. "Give yourself up!" the Gorn spokesman continues. Oh, yeah, that sounds like a good idea.
I could shoot at them... but that's the problem with beam weapons, they kinda give your position away. I hunker down in the sand and try to think invisible thoughts. OK, so it's not gonna work, but I can't think of anything else -
The lead Gorn is coming forward, over the blasted sand and the remains of the warrigul pack, more of his troops falling into line behind him.
And then the ground explodes.
The fused glass left by my weapon shatters into a myriad hot glittering fragments, and the aehallh worm erupts out of the ground. It's a huge one, two metres or more in diameter, towering up into the sky. The nearest Gorn falls as the sands shift beneath him. His companions fire their weapons, but hand-held disruptors don't do much more than irritate that monster.
The worm writhes, and flattens itself out, and suddenly spins around in a circle. Aehallh worms spend their lives moving through a resistant medium, they are darn near solid muscle, some of the longer ones can crack their bodies like whips. The Gorn, massive though some of them are, are knocked flying. The worm rears up, plunges its front end down to the sand, rears up again. There is a Gorn in its maw. I close my eyes. I don't want to see what happens next.
Jeepers, this is bad. Monster worms like this don't normally get so close to Paradise City, and when they do, there are heavy-duty disruptor turrets the citizens can use to kill them or drive them off. But with all the comms scrambling that's going on tonight, the city's defences can't possibly be coordinated. The damned worm can ravage at will. Of course, before it starts chowing down on the denizens of the city, it'll most likely finish off the tasty little morsels outside on the sands. Tasty little morsels like me.
I swallow. Yeah, I'm a morsel, but I'm a morsel with a gun. The wrist lance and the graviton spike are probably the most effective weapons around here right now. Time to get using them, Pex.
So I trigger the graviton spike again, and I raise the wrist lance, and aim at the worm.
The monster bellows as the beam burns into it, and the questing tendrils of flame wrap themselves around the beast. The graviton effect pulls another ten metres or so of the creature out of the sand, and it hangs writhing in the air for a moment, ululating and snapping at itself, trying to bite away the antiproton bursts. The fires die away. The worm's hide is scorched, a deep blackened scar showing where the beam hit first, but it's just surface damage, no way I've reached any vital organs.
The worm's blind head turns this way and that, the vast segmented maw opening and shutting.
Then another wavery line of fire strikes out across the desert, slamming into the worm and clinging to it in a shower of sparks. It's followed by a brilliant flash and an immense concussive blast. There are more beams too, the red of antiproton fire and the blue-green of heavy plasma guns. The worm roars as killing light burns into it. I fire at it again.
Cavalry's arrived. I glance at where the energy fire's coming from, and cut in the armour's vision amplifiers. My security teams have made it out of the city, and Heizis has arrived with her people. The Reman is there herself, a happy snarl on her face and a thing in her hands that looks like a killer wastepaper basket from hell. Vaadwaur assault debilitator, nasty thing. It sends out another blast of antiprotons even as I watch.
The worm roars and spins around, but there's no one close enough for it to hit. Then it plunges back into the sand. For a moment, its tail flicks in the air, and then it is gone, just a moving hump in the desert sand, moving away from the city.
So we won that one. But there's still Gorn out there, and they're still armed.
I reach for my belt with my free hand, pull out the distress flare, point it up and fire. A brief hiss, and then light bursts out above me. The visor flickers as it adjusts. People are moving in my direction, some of them on my side, some of them not.
A big Gorn seems likely to get to me first, and I point the wrist lance at him. Before I fry him, though, Hal Welti pops out from behind a convenient hummock and hits the Gorn with a textbook-perfect aikido kick. It'd take a human's head off, I think; it certainly drops the Gorn poleaxed in his tracks. Man Hal's age shouldn't be doing stuff like that, it'll put his back out.
He comes towards me, stumbling a little in the sand. "Pex! You OK?"
"I'm fine!" I bellow back. "Got a badly wounded Ghammarian here though, call sickbay, tell 'em to prep for that! And tell Heizis to use heavy stun, we want some Gorn alive for questioning!"
"Six impossible things before breakfast," I hear him mutter. But he relays my orders into his combadge anyway. Looks like we've broken through the Gorn comms jamming, at least.
Heizis comes loping towards me, moving easily over the sand, despite the heavy weapon in her hands. "I have instructed my teams to take prisoners," she says. "What of the worms and the warriguls? Do you want those for interrogation, also?"
She's in a good mood, I see. "Nah," I say, "just get rid of 'em. Also, we have got to stop meeting like this."
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