CHAPTER 9 #3
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 shirk protocol. 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 sentient f’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.