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Page 18.
 Lying face down, partially hidden among half-sunk boulders in sand, was part of a torso. From all appearances, it was the body of an adult human male.
Kion and Piri cautiously approached.
A shudder passed through the air, followed by silence.
Piri sniffed the air. Kion looked up, scanned around. He heard faint, distant noises, of whirring manways and crashing cargo platforms. "A merk skimmer must have landed."
The skimmer's faint, partially subaural engines were still. "What are they doing?" Piri asked with a look of fear.
"Unloading killjaeger to climb down after us," Kion guessed. He heard the clatter of falling rocks. "Yeah, you can hear them clanking along. They're not built for it. They're having a hard time on those boulders. That will slow them down a few minutes—give us time to think."
Piri nudged the corpse's left foot with his right boot. "Who is our friend here?"'
"Someone who didn't get away," Kion said.
Not only did the corpse raise a stench of putrescine and cadaverine, but its bloated sides were starting to tear and ooze. Insects swarmed every wet spot in an iridescent greenish, moving mass. The insects' buzzing was now audible. They sounded angry.
"Five million macabs fighting over rotten meat," Piri said ironically.
"I forgot you think like a cook."
"I learned to smell it from a thousand heads away. Mustn't poison the troops."
The upper half of the corpse was missing. The lower half was truncated at the waist, as if from a clean kill beam. The corpse had been a human—or a close to it humanian—light-skinned, robust, perhaps a trooper. Yes, judging by the fresh black boots, and the gray combat fatigue trousers tucked into them, he'd been some nation's air commando type. A broad web belt hung loosely around his waist, decorated with small pouches. Ammo, meds, rations, Kion thought as he eyeballed the 5mm needle ray gun in its black holster.
"What's he doing here?" Piri asked as he sat down and measured his boot soles against the dead man's.
"Probably escaped early on in his capture. They hunted him down." Kion gingerly lifted the darkly bloated and stinking half-corpse just enough to loosen the belt. "Didn't bother to strip him of weapons. I wonder why."
"Maybe they just took the upper half in for the reward money," Piri ventured.
"If you were telling me this, event unseen, I wouldn't believe you. Yeah, maybe they only take the top half in for their money, these days. Much easier."
"You think he crawled here to die?" Piri began unlacing the dead man's boots.
Kion pulled away the man's belt. He shook his head. "The lower half didn't crawl here by itself. He got blasted right here. " Kion sniffed the belt, which didn't stink too bad. He threw dust over it to absorb the faint odor of rot. He shook the belt dry, and tried it on. It rode gracefully on his starved, thin waist.
Kion watched dispassionately as Piri pulled at the boots. The dead man's rotten feet came off. A fervent stench arose, and the insects buzzed with renewed anger. Luckily, the insects made no effort to attack either Piri or Kion. Other breeds smelled fresh meat from afar, and tore a living man or animal apart in minutes. Luckily, not these. Thank gods for small favors.
Kion checked the pouches on his belt…full. The gun appeared to be loaded, charged, and functional. It might hold off one or two killjaeger for a few minutes, but it would not bring down even a small skimmer, nor would it penetrate Sekurita body armor. Presumably, the motley mercenary bounty hunters would be wearing old hand-me-down armor and packing two-generations-back heat.
"Now if I had a hat and some water…" Kion said.
Piri looked up with a wry expression. "…A knife, boss. Always a knife. Big hefty fucker with shark teeth on one edge and a shave razor on the other. The better to carve some merk meat off the bone if we catch one."
"Serve him right if we do." Kion spoke nonchalantly, but felt a chill, not just at the other man's words, but the steely hardness of his tone, the cynical self-assurance of his attitude. He got a new, ominous feeling about Piri. He could not place his finger on it, but it was a new sense about his companion. Had he changed? Was he revealing a true, deeper, harder self? Had the flabby old mess sergeant been an illusion?
He ignored the man's macabre banter, not wanting to up the rhetoric. They had plenty to worry about. Kion was, just now, more interested in the implications of the dead man than of his live companion. "If they blasted our friend here, that means the merks or the incoming cargo skims robots have mapped the terrain. Sekurita can't be far behind. The killjaeger may be slow, but they know exactly where we'd run, if that's who brought down this poor soul. In short, they've been here, they know this run, so they're just toying with us. Let's get the hell out of here."
The two men resumed their jog. They kept on the sandy old river bed that wound among huge, rounded boulders that the eons-ago flood must have bandied about like floating toys. Each boulder weighed tons, so it must have been quite a spectacle.
Piri pointed to a rack of white bones protruding from the sand."There's an old fish," he said as he sat down to change boots.
"Make sure you leave all the bugs behind," Kion said.
"And the stink," Piri acknowledged.
Kion ambled closer for a look. The prehistoric fish had a head as long as a man. Its snout had rows of deadly teeth. A boulder had partially smashed one side of its cranium. "That thing was swept away with the flood," Kion said. "Looks like it was trying to dodge car-size boulders."
Piri finished pulling out the dead man's soggy, lumpy socks stinking of decay and buzzing with macabs. The socks contained gory chunks of flesh from the feet. Swarms of insects flew out. Piri grimaced as he tossed the socks full of meat into a patch of vegetation. Some of the long blades of agave-like succulents swooped down to digest the ripe flesh. Piri meanwhile filled the boots with dusty, dry sand to absorb all blood and moisture. He did this several times, emptying the boots each time. When broken in to his foot form, the boots would meld nicely with his skin. Treaty Marches foot gear was famous for doing that.
Kion could hear the whirring of killjaeger wheel joints, socket balls, and long-bone pulley wires. He heard the clack and clang of rubber-shod steel feet descending stairsteps of boulders.
"Hurry," Kion said. He wasn't going to deny the man good boots for the run ahead. Maybe they'd get lucky and find another victim, with weapons and boots intact.
"I'll be right with you," Piri said as he pulled on first one boot, then the other.
Kion whirled. Behind him, there was silence.
All four killjaeger stood frozen.
"The merks shut them down."
"What does it mean?" Piri said, rising and testing his new boots.
"Not sure. Either they all malfunctioned, which is unlikely. Or they are being held back while the merks come down in person to finish us off." Privately, Kion thought: Or the world is holding its breath, waiting for something cataclysmic to happen.
The two escaped prisoners stood gaping at the four frozen robots—silvery and articulated, spidery caricatures of humans, almost silvery stick figures with gleaming, elegantly swollen joints. Each had four arms—two for balance, one for feeling ahead, and one for holding a weapon. One by one, in rapid succession, their baleful red eyes dimmed off to sleeping darkest red.
"I got a feeling," Piri said as he sat down with a resigned, fatalistic air. "Something's gonna happen, and it ain't gonna be pretty."
Kion reluctantly nodded in agreement. He nervously adjusted the holster on his belt. Probably something terrible, the way his luck was running today. He took out the gun for good measure, and waited.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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