eyes. “Hey. You’ll be okay, but you gotta calm down!” For a moment, he considered planting a big, sloppy kiss on those thick lips. As if the woman read minds, she snapped into focus. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
Her eyebrows, elegant honey-tinted arches, lowered. “You know what.” She tried turning her head, but it still wasn’t free to move, so she slid her eyes over toward Marve. Between gasps of breath, she said: “If you two can get me out of here… I’ll make it worth your trouble. But if you let this ape feel me up… I’m cutting the payment in half.”
“Okay, then,” muttered Turlock as he clambered off the hood. “I guess you’re back in control of your faculties.”
The woman sighed, and turned her eyes back to the human. “Don’t be a baby about it. Please, help your friend here. I’m kinda freakin’ out right now.”
Turlock hopped back onto the wreckage, trying to keep the petulance out of his voice as he began pulling chunks of foam from around her head. “I’ll just work above your shoulders, then.”
As each of them held one of the woman’s hands and helped her slither out of the wreck, Turlock could see why she might have been concerned about the placement of his hands. She definitely was human, but not Earth-human, and a form-fitting, leathery long-sleeve shirt revealed a sylphlike torso tapered so narrow that he wondered if he could put a hand on each side of her waist and be able to touch fingers. Her neckline drooped to just above a bosom ill-suited to planetary gravity.
“Were you alone?” asked Marve.
“Yeah,” she said, still looking warily at the human and not the bug-man. “Alone.” She sat for a moment, legs dangling over the side of the hood, before lowering herself gingerly onto her feet. It elicited a grimace of discomfort. “Ugh. I hate the gravity here.”
Turlock turned to look at the furrow the wreckage had gashed into the sandy ground. It kept him from staring at the wrong places. “Everything still working okay?”
“I guess so—on me, anyway. Didn’t know the car had a foam-collision system; I guess I’m pretty lucky that it did. Even luckier you two were here to dig me out.”
“Yeah, foam-collision isn’t meant for tooling around the outback.” Turlock concluded she’d either borrowed or stolen the car. Only the most airheaded renters or consumers would neglect to know whether or not their car had a Foamer. And she didn’t look like an airhead to him.
“I was doing fine when all of a sudden, all the displays flashed and then blacked out. How’d the foam still work?”
“I think it’s the only system on the vehicle that isn’t electronic.”
“Pressurized gas canisters and mechanical triggering system,” concurred Marve.
The woman came up alongside Turlock, joining him in studying the same impact streak. “Yeah. Luck’s my middle name.”
“What’s your first?”
“Zeena.”
“H. Martin Turlock,” he said, and extended a hand.
She eyed it for a moment before reaching out to shake it. “H? What’s that stand for? Martin is an unusual name as it is.”
“Nah. It’s a little archaic, but at least it still sounds male. My parents were huge fans of Glaston Hinover when I was born.”
“Oh.” She recoiled a bit at the mention of the name. “Who’s your friend over here?”
“This handsome gentleman is…” he glanced over his shoulder, where the bug-man continued to excavate foam from inside the wreckage. “Hey: you want me to try dropping your actual name on her, or do you think ‘Marve’ will be fine?”
“Please, do try. I have so little to laugh about these days.”
“Okay,” chuckled Turlock. “I believe it goes:” He tried his best at the throat-wattles, the buzzing hum-whistle combination, and the nasally end-grunt. “That okay, or did I just insult your grandmother again?”
“I think ‘Marve’ will work just fine for me.” The shadow of a smile flittered in Zeena’s lips but quickly passed. She took a deep breath and asked: “So, where are you two headed?”
Comprehending that their new companion might complicate the mission, Turlock said: “Uh… Ariagist, eventually, but first—”
She shook her head. “I can’t go back there. If you help me get to another city I’ll make certain you have enough for a flight back.”
“Where were you headed?” asked Marve, reminding the humans that his hearing was far superior to theirs.
When she said ‘Pendshelem’, Turlock couldn’t keep the pained expression off his face.
“What?”
Turlock turned to pick the trail back up. Walking by Marve, he said: “So, back on mission?”
“Back on mission,” echoed the Lotian.
“What?” repeated Zeena.
“Looks pretty quiet to me.”
Turlock lowered the binoculars and offered them to Marve. After five seconds passed and the bug-man didn’t take them, he shrugged and put them back into a leg pocket.
“Maybe I want a look.”
Turlock looked past his partner at Zeena, who stared right back with those shard-flecked eyes of hers, lip protruding in a mock pout.
“You’re staying up here. Tell you what: when we approach the shack, I’ll let you hang on to the glasses so you can watch.”
“How thoughtful. Do I get a weapon?”
“What in the hell do you need a weapon for?”
She stuck her lip out further and squinted at him. “You two have guns. So you think there’s something dangerous out here. You’re going to leave me alone on this ledge with no way to defend myself?”
“If anything bothers you, just annoy ‘em to death.” Turlock shifted his glance to his partner, still motionless between the bickering humans. “You mind telling her we don’t have an extra weapon to loan her?”
“There’s still your sidearm—”
Ignoring the woman’s offended tut-huff, Turlock growled: “The only thing I have that still has bullets in it, I’d remind you—thanks to her and her asshat driving.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Zeena.
“Exactly what it’s supposed to mean,” Turlock countered, barely able to contain his frustration. “We would’ve been—”
“Movement,” said Marve, cutting off the argument.
Turlock retrieved his binoculars and peered through them. The door to the shed, nothing more than a pair of shipping containers connected end-to-end, hung open, and just outside of it a two-legged shape trudged alongside the makeshift facility. “Sentry duty of some sort?”
“You don’t see what’s wrong with his neck?”
After a grunt, Turlock adjusted his binoculars to maximum mag and looked again. After slowing his breathing like a sniper setting up a shot, he steadied the jiggling of the eyepieces enough to see what Marve was talking about.
“What? It’s just a—oh, shit.”
What he’d initially mistaken for a hickey or an ugly zit resolved itself in his wavery field of view long enough for Turlock to spot a hole below an ear large enough to stick a thumb in. Despite the wound, the lab worker managed to keep his head upright.
“Ugh. Is that what I think it is?”
“I didn’t think the species was viable on Andajhar.”
“What species?” asked Zeena, her eyes wide.
“Could be an import—a gift from someone with a really sick sense of humor,” said Turlock to Marve. Before the woman could repeat her question in a louder manner, he added: “Sandzypes.”
She blinked a couple of times. “Never heard of them.”
“Then count yourself lucky,” muttered Turlock as he peered once more through the binoculars.
The Lotian clarified for her. “Sandzypes are semi-sentient parasites native to Orono-six and seven.”
“I haven’t been to either planet,” she sniffed.
“Better hope you never have to go,” said Turlock, who once more lowered the binoculars
as the sentry disappeared behind the far end of the lab. “Sandzypes are horrid, but they’re not even in the top five for things that can kill you there.”
“Well, what do they do?”
“They’re weak, but hide well.” Marve scanned back and forth as he said this; no doubt the bug-man’s vision was so good he was looking for anomalies in the gritty soil around the containers. “They prefer to enter the brain via the spinal cord, and because it takes them a few minutes to burrow that deep into the flesh, they secrete an anesthetic powerful enough to give them time.”
“Eww. Do they do this while the victim’s asleep?”
“These ain’t mosquitoes,” said Turlock, forgetting that only Earth humans would have an image of that annoying species. “They pop out of the sand, able to jump about two meters in the air, land on your neck, bite, and within ten seconds you’re unconscious. Even if you can grab the damn thing and toss it away before you black out, it has at least half an hour to hop back to you and start the feast.” He shifted his glance to Marve. “So, is this job a writeoff?”
The Lotian chittered his mandibles in thought. “Can we actually afford to abort?”
“I was afraid you’d bring that up.”
Zeena, eyes still wide, said: “I told you two I’d pay—”
“It’s not the money we’re worried about,” said Turlock. “This is a job for the Ariagist Cartel. They have this whole ‘code of honor’ thing, and expect a contractor to complete the job or die trying. Walk away from a Cartel contract, and every blooded-in member is obligated to kill you on sight.”
“Do you have a way to protect yourself from the sandzypes?” asked Marve.
“Do you?”
The Lotian responded by retracting his head into his shoulders, changing his appearance to that of an ugly, oversized cockroach instead of an ugly, oversized mantis.
Turlock huffed out a frustrated breath. His field suit provided decent protection for his torso, but he needed an extra garment to tie around his head and neck.
He looked up at Zeena. “Um… you’re going to think I’m a creep, but…”
“I already do as it—oh.” Her wide-eyed stare turned into a squint as her lip curled in disgust. “Uh-uh. No friggin’ way.”
Marve glanced back and forth between the two humans. “Does this have to do with that ‘modesty’ concept you tried to explain to me?”
Turlock nodded, while Zeena crossed her arms in petulance.
“I should be down there,” muttered Turlock, binoculars in one hand and pistol in the other.
“Your partner looks pretty tough.” Zeena still kept her distance, but at least was talking to him. Not that he was all that interested; he’d never had a corset fetish and… yeah, she had that refined-gold hair and those crystalline eyes, but still…
He swallowed a bit too loudly, and his voice came out gruff to cover it. “I still think it’s stupid that I’m up here. My pistol’s useless at this range. You can get behind me, I promise I won’t look—”
“Ain’t happening. Might as well drop it.”
Turlock huffed and continued watching Marve cross the too-open hardscrabble between their hiding place and the drug-lab containers. The infested worker had once more passed behind the structures, and from his first circuit they guessed he had three minutes: plenty of time to travel the hundred meter expanse.
“Huh. Maybe we were wrong—”
A flash of movement behind his partner cut him off. Before Turlock could yell a warning, Marve whipped a carapace-armored limb up and around and seized something out of midair. In the binoculars it appeared to be a thrashing mouse with four grasshopper legs jittering in the grasp of the bug-man’s k-tiklit, the two-lobed clawlike appendage that passed for his hand.
Then the Lotian gave the sandzype a tilted-head look and shoved its head in between his mandibles to bite it off. “Urf,” grunted Turlock, as his partner spat the tidbit out and discarded the thing’s still-twitching body over his shoulder.
“What?” asked Zeena.
“You don’t want to know.”
Marve made it the rest of the way to the lab without incident, and just as quickly and stealthily as the sandzype had tried to jump him, he hopped up onto the top of the container, right above the doorway. Ten seconds later, the sentry—or whatever he was now—came around the corner, oblivious to what had just taken place.
“So what does he do now?”
“Um… you may want to look away. Just remember, that poor bastard’s brain is probably two-thirds eaten by now.”
When Marve reached down, seized the worker’s head in both arms, and wrenched it quickly to face completely backward, Turlock could tell from the gasp next to him that she hadn’t followed his advice.
“Now he has to see if the rest of ‘em are in the same state, or if this guy just killed them all when he got infected. Sandzypes’ll make you do weird stuff like murder your family and drag their bodies out of the house for an easy meal.”
“That’s—look out!”
Turlock spun around, unable to deflect the rock that clouted him near the temple with a head-jarring bowm. His vision crackled with red starbursts as scraps of stimuli still filtered, disjointed, into his injured head. Noises, sounds of struggle, grunting, wetness in his hair, a coppery taste in his throat.
Sandgrains fluttered into his nostrils as he pulled a breath in.
The girl…gotta save…
Light shifted in front of his eyes, alternating from too bright to horrifyingly excruciating. Footsteps thumped in the sand and scratched across the rocks near him.
Something hard in his palm...
Pistol.
Save the girl.
He blinked, forcing grit into his already-protesting eyes, and shoved hard against the ground. It yielded to him, giving a view of it from an arms-length away. Then it started spinning, and he lurched sideways, but managed to keep from pitching back over.
Like an awkward child, he turned and planted his butt on the ground, then tried to make sense of the scene in front of him.
Two men, droop-shouldered and bent-backed, swayed in a crouch-walk, closing in on Zeena from opposite directions. With a grunt of bloodlust, she ran toward one, and as the man lifted an arm in a wide attempt at a punch, she jumped, planted a foot on his thigh, and brought her opposite knee hard into his face, sending it back in a vicious snap. As he crumpled sideways, she landed, spun, and faced her other attacker.
Something wet stung at Turlock’s eyes, and he wiped it with the back of his hand.
Ooh. That’s my blood.
Zeena launched herself at the other man, executing a Spinning Crescent kick that would make Turlock’s storefront-sensei cousin Nelson hang his head in shame. It snapped the head of her assailant around, sending him pinwheeling face-first into the sand.
By this time, the other one had risen from his crouch and resumed his shambling forward walk. Though Turlock’s world still cartwheeled around his head, he couldn’t miss Zeena gasping for breath. She may have been well-trained in hand-to-hand fighting, but didn’t possess limitless endurance.
Still sitting, hand palsied at the end of his arm, Turlock held his pistol in the general direction of the attacker. He squeezed his fist as best he could, and when the gun went off it jumped in his hand, recoil spinning the trigger guard around his finger, and suddenly the barrel rested in the web of his fist and he was staring straight down the muzzle.
He reached up with a shaking left hand to correct his grip, giving the man he’d shot at time to close the distance between them and kick both gun and hands. A stab of broken-finger electric pain shot up his right arm, shocking him into something more closely resembling consciousness. As the man stooped, reaching toward his throat, Turlock scrabbled at a side-sheath with the hand that wasn’t screaming in agony, extracted a hunting knife, and thrust it through a couple of the assailant’s ribs.
The expected cry of pain never came, but T
urlock tried it again. The stranger’s hands found his throat and began to squeeze. Turlock tried kneeing the guy in the ribs, in the nads, anywhere, but nothing landed square.
His consciousness began to waver again, the red star-bursts massing at the edges of his vision…
He extracted the knife from the torso of his attacker and yanked its serrated edge across the wrist of one of the choking hands. Immediately, the pressure lessened and gushing warmth bloomed against his shirt . Repeating the exercise on the other side got the same results, as the attacker relentlessly tried to maintain his grip instead of protecting himself.
After drawing in a couple of whole breaths, Turlock forced the world to come back into focus. He kick-rolled the attacker off of him and compelled himself to roll up to his knees. The sandzype-infected man reached up with bloody arms toward Turlock’s neck, so the mercenary brought the knife down, left hand around the grip, right palm against the pommel, with as much force as he could into an eye.
The attacker’s arms dropped limply to the dirt. The pistol, still hung up on Turlock’s badly dislocated finger, clattered against the handle of the knife as he let go of it.
“Why…won’t…he… go down?” gasped Zeena, before delivering a fresh roundhouse kick into the already-pummeled head of the other assailant.
Turlock tilted his head to pop his neck and levered himself into a standing position. With a grunt he threaded the pistol’s trigger guard around his shattered finger and, holding the weapon in his left hand, said: “Sweep him.”
Zeena didn’t question, but feinted high and spun low, flaring a leg out at the last minute and catching the wretch behind the ankles, dropping him to the grit like a sack of Mergovian Bloodworms. Turlock stepped forward and put a round into his head.
Then he let his knees buckle as the excessive gravity of Andajhar took him to the ground. Looking up at Zeena with a new respect, he asked: “How good are you at straightening dislocated fingers?”
“Never done it before,” she huffed. Her face, sheened in sweat, still had a soft glow to it. The thought of what the rest of her looked like right now, under that body-hugging shirt she refused to give up, flared into his addled brain, but in deference to how well she’d fought—and how he’d probably be dead right now if she hadn’t been with him—he pushed it aside.
Turlock smiled and offered up his mangled hand. “It’s okay—no training required. Just pull really hard and ignore my hollering.”
Marve, head still retracted against his thorax, returned about twenty minutes later. “There was only one more inside, and he—oh. Apparently there were more left. That much blood loss is not good for your species, is it?”
Turlock remained on his back, knees up. It was a shame Zeena hadn’t offered to let him rest his head in her lap, but he was too concussed to enjoy it anyway.
“That blood isn’t all his,” she pointed out.
“I’m still in crappy shape. I popped a couple of nanotabs—I think my skull got fractured so it’s going to take a few hours for the bots to fix everything up.”
“Hmm. The sandzypes should leave us alone, but…”
The thought of the brain-eaten man who