Bounty hunter academy 2, p.18
Bounty Hunter Academy 2, page 18
“I’m afraid the Vexaryx has failed us,” said the hologram of a Lucath. His lone black eye bulged out of his hairless, triangular-shaped head, while his stick-like body stood to attention in that irritable, servile way Lucaths often did. The Lucath wore an ITU over his mouth, and his words were translated into Unumatan for the benefit of his overseer. Mato couldn’t speak Unumatan, but the auto-translating engine built into his surveillance equipment helpfully translated the thunder-like speech into Skeetraxian.
“The girl is still alive?” said the Unumata, his voice betraying no emotion.
The Lucath nodded.
“The scar-faced human woman protected her?”
The Lucath shook its head. “The bounty hunter supreme was off-colony when the Vexaryx made its move.”
“Then other bounty hunters were involved?”
“It looks that way, but my information also says that the girl was able to hold out on her own for quite some time.”
A thick, slimy eyebrow rose up the Unumata’s face. No matter how many times Mato saw those eyebrows, they always reminded him of the same thing: the so-called ‘slug’ creatures that crawled around the dankest corners of human settlements.
“She held her own against a Vexaryx?” asked the Unumata.
“That’s what it looks like.”
“Didn’t our agent make use of the nocturnlium serum we provided?”
“He did.”
“And the girl held out without using any of her latent powers?”
“It would certainly seem that way. And what’s more, if my source is to be believed - and I see no reason why she shouldn’t be - the girl actually managed to shatter the Vexaryx’s cranial fontanelle.”
The Unumata was suddenly silent. The Lucath shifted around on his stick-like body in mild agitation, perhaps fearing that some of the blame for the failure of whatever mission they were talking about would be parcelled out onto his triangular head. But instead of ordering any ritual suicides (something the Unumata in question was well known for doing), he simply gave a deep, mountainous grunt.
“This isn’t about the widow,” croaked Yathul. “We should switch it off.”
“Wait!” Mato held out a hand to stop his frog-like AMIGO from powering off the display screen. “I want to hear what they say.”
“Don’t Skeetraxians have a moral objection against listening in on other people’s conversations without good reason?”
“Maybe, but we also have a moral objection against not dismantling any irritating droids that are supposed to keep their robotic mouths shut unless someone actually asks them for their opinion.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I’m going to petition the Skeetraxian council about it at the next available opportunity.”
Yathul made another one of his patented, irritated throaty sounds, then hopped over to the other side of the room where he had set up his wireless charging bank. There was a hum of energy as Yathul positioned himself above the charging bank’s rectangular charging pad, then the AMIGO’s eyes began to pulsate softly.
Mato turned his attention back to the surveillance screen.
“…not surprising,” the Unumata was saying. “The scar-faced human woman will have gone to great pains to protect the Nyalinth. After all, this particular Nyalinth is - or was - their leader.”
“Should I despatch another agent?” said the Lucath, his lone black eye blinking with uncertainty.
The Unumata shook his giant head. “A waste of resources.”
“But I thought you said the Nyalinth must be destroyed before the next tri-solar eclipse, and if we have to wait until after the girl has graduated from the academy—”
“We will not have to wait that long.”
The Unumata said nothing to explain his statement, and the Lucath’s limbs began to shuffle about in that familiar display of uncertainty.
“Lord Loth, I don’t under—”
“The Bounty Hunter Academy will soon cease to be,” the Unumata interrupted, and he gazed off into the distance as if imagining some glorious triumph.
The Lucath’s head cocked with uncertainty. “We are to attack it?”
“We don’t need to. There are others who, for their own reasons, want to see that decrepit hive of humanity destroyed. I don’t know when they will make their move, but it will be before our deadline. And once they have acted, there will be no one around to protect the girl. Then, the last of the Nyalinth will be slain, and the Unumata will rise up to reclaim their rightful place as the eternal rulers of the universe.”
“May it be forever so,” said the Lucath.
The Unumata studied the Lucath as if examining a particularly revolting stinkbug, but he said nothing and instead merely watched the Lucath’s squirming a little while longer.
“Yathul!” Mato yelled, tearing his gaze away from the surveillance equipment. His AMIGO was still recharging its power banks, its eyes pulsating dimly in the near-total darkness.
“Yathul!” Mato repeated when the droid showed no signs of responding. Was she still angry with him for making that little joke? Hell, this wasn’t the time for petty grudges. The future of the BHA was at stake.
Yathul’s eyes flickered, then went steady blue. She turned her head in Mato’s direction.
“If you’re going to apologise—”
“Just shut up and open a comm channel with the BHA central office.”
“Why? So you can ask them to issue you with a new AMIGO who laughs at your bad jokes?”
“Just hurry up already!” Mato snapped. He glanced down at the surveillance equipment. The Unumata was gone, and the holo of the Lucath had disappeared.
Where was that slippery, slug-eyebrowed—
“Looking for someone?”
Mato whirled around.
Lord Loth was standing over him, glaring down at him with an unreadable expression. His shiny brown scalp, made of the same slimy material that made up his eyebrows, glimmered gently in the lighting from the surveillance equipment. Below the scalp, opposing rows of symmetrical purple horns ran down the sides of his head, their colour contrasting sharply with the ochre hue of his rock-like face. In the centre of that face were two tiny holes, right about where humans had their noses, and below the holes was a solid gold ITU - something Mato had seen Loth whip out a few times in the past when visitors had arrived at his temple. The rest of the Unumata’s enormous body was covered by long, flowing robes full of blazing oranges, piercing reds and golden yellows. In the centre of the robes, just below Loth’s neck, was a large golden circle wrought with fine ornamentation - the symbol of Xarn’s largest (and primary) sun. Below that disc were two smaller discs (the second and third of the planet’s solar contingent).
Mato stared at the robes - the robes of an Unumatan sun lord - and panic flared in the assorted brain regions Skeetraxians had for just about every type of danger imaginable.
“Yathul!” he cried, tearing his gaze from the dread-inducing figure long enough to flash all sixteen urgency-filled eyes at his AMIGO. “Inform the BHA that—”
Yathul froze, and for a moment, Mato thought she had blown a fuse, but then her casing began to shake, and wisps of grey smoke broke through the cracks in her exterior. Soon, the casing itself began to melt, and then, with a death crackle of electricity, the droid deflated like a popped balloon as gooey residues of smelted wiring and circuitry poured out of the now-numerous gaps in her casing before pooling on the floor. Only her blue eyes survived the invisible onslaught, rolling across the floor where they came to a rest at Mato’s webbed feet.
Mato picked them up, feeling an inexplicable sadness - a sadness he never should have felt for a droid he despised so fiercely. He turned back towards Lord Loth just in time to see the Unumata lower his outstretched hand.
“I suppose you already knew,” he said, his voice as grave and serious as it had been in the holocomm room, “bounty hunters aren’t the only people in the universe with hidden powers.”
Mato inched deftly away from the Unumata. If he was going to spring his dazzle, he would have to be quick about it, but at close range, it might be ineffective. He would have to put a bit more distance between himself and the towering sun lord if he was going to have any chance of—
“That’s quite far enough,” said the Unumata.
Mato stopped in his tracks.
“I know quite enough about your skills, Mato Tarkaxar,” Lord Loth continued. “After all, you have been staying in my house for quite some time now.”
Mato opened his mouth to ask the obvious question.
“Since the moment you first got here,” Loth interjected before Mato could utter an opening syllable. “Did you really think you could enter the Tower of Divine Light without my noticing?”
“But the sensors,” Mato insisted, momentarily forgetting his perilous position in his desire to know just how it was that he had been so easily discovered.
“The sensors are for show. I had them deactivated the moment they were installed. I don’t want them sucking precious energy away from my power supply. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but there are no power lines connecting the Tower of Divine Light to any nearby cities. The sandstalkers have an unpleasant habit of eating through any power cables we take the trouble to lay out. They’re also good at disposing of corpses - at least, what remain of them, anyway.”
Mato stumbled backwards over one of the screens laid out on the floor. He fell to the warm stone tiles, his three-fingered hands breaking his fall. Quickly, he scrambled back to his feet as the Unumata continued his ominous advance. Overhead, the shadowy interior of the dome that covered the sunroom beckoned invitingly. Built into that dome was a hatch that led to the outside. If Mato could just get through the hatch, maybe he could steal a dunedrifter and hightail it back to Arulitret, one of those nearby cities Loth was talking about. From there, he could hitch a ride on the next off-world shuttle and travel back to Cometbreaker Colony to inform the bounty hunter supreme personally about the impending danger that was about to befall the BHA.
If he could just get through that trapdoor…
Deftly, with as much subtlety as he could manage, Mato unclipped the protective coverings on his wings. That done, he pointed his proboscis directly at Loth and tightened the muscles around his spit sacs.
Let’s see how you like being covered with paralysing saliva, sun lord, Mato thought.
It had been several weeks since he had last used his dazzle. If Mato had known he would be needing to make use of his species’ special paralysing ability, he would have flushed out his spit sacs in advance. Freshly generated stasis saliva was far more potent than stasis saliva that had been swilling around in his spit sacs for weeks. But it would still be effective enough to take down a pack of stampeding Altrusian stone rhinoceroses. It should be more than enough to deal with one Unumata, even if he was the size of a small mountain.
“What do you know about an attack on the BHA?” asked Mato. He was stalling for time, waiting for the moment when the sun lord’s concentration lapsed, at which point Mato would give him a face full of sticky white goo. He didn’t really expect the Unumata to answer, and was mildly surprised when he did.
“They are called the Hunterfall Faction,” said Loth, his brown scalp glimmering in the dim light from Mato’s equipment.
“Hunterfall?” Mato repeated, curiosity threatening to derail his attention. He directed his focus back to his spit sacs and watched calmly for his moment, just like they had taught him all those years ago at the BHA.
“Who are they?” Mato asked. His breathing slowed automatically - another well-drilled trait born from the rigours of training at the BHA.
The Unumata took another step closer. “They are,” he said, “the harbingers of the end of the Bounty Hunter Aca—”
Now!
Mato squeezed the muscles around his spit sacs, and hot white gunk flew out of the tip of his proboscis. At that range, there was no way he would miss, and, sure enough, the paralysing sputum struck the Unumata full on in his stony face.
Mato didn’t stick around to watch Lord Loth fall to the floor in time-frozen paralysis. Instead, he leapt up into the air, engaged his wings and buzzed his way towards the faint, moonlit outline of the tiny hatch in the underside of the dome.
He was going to make it.
He was going to survive.
He was going to—
Hot, stinging pain rang out through Mato’s wings.
What had just happened? Had someone else entered the sunroom and fired a blaster? If they had, the pain would have been localised, but Mato felt it all over his wings.
Fighting back tears, the Skeetraxian gritted his teeth and redoubled his effort to reach the hatch. He was surprised, to say the least, when, instead of climbing higher and higher towards the darkened ceiling, he began to plummet back towards the floor, helpless to arrest his fall, no matter how hard he flapped his wings.
Landing on the stone floor with a crash, Mato rose quickly to his knees. Instinctively, his hands went to his wings, and there they found…
Mato looked at the green goop on his three-fingered hands.
It was blood - his blood. And speckling it like tiny motes of ash on the snow were flecks of charred chitin.
His chitin.
“I’m afraid I can’t allow you to leave,” said Lord Loth. “At least, not until after I’ve cooked your body just short of the point of total organ failure. Then, I’ll see to it personally that you are set free onto the sands of Blood Desert, where I’m sure the sandstalkers will be most happy to see you.”
Angry realisation dawning, Mato held out his blood-soaked hand.
“You did this!” he cried. “You burnt off my wings!”
“Only as a matter of necessity.” Lord Loth’s nose twitched, as if he took it as a personal insult that he would harm another creature just for the fun of it. “Your wings were about to take you somewhere I couldn’t allow you to go. That was why I had to get rid of them, you see?”
Mato considered the strange logic, then he shouted, “You bastard!”
The Unumata gave Mato a displeased frown. “That is merely a matter of opinion.”
He raised his hand, pointing its palm at Mato’s thorax.
“And now,” he continued, “I must act out another matter of necessity.”
Mato drew in a sharp breath as he felt the heat grow steadily inside his body. Without needing to consider the best course of action, his legs exploded to life, desperate to carry him away from what promised to be a hot, painful death. But instead of moving forwards, Mato collapsed backwards, landing on the floor in a huddle.
His legs…
Mato glanced down…
His legs were gone, and in their place were two smouldering sticks of charred chitin.
With fear multiplying at the same rate at which his physical pain was increasing, Mato tried to roll himself onto his front, from where he might be able to use his arms to crawl away. He didn’t know how far he could get, and he knew that the Unumata would have no difficulty following, but his survival instinct compelled him to flee all the same.
But as before, Mato found himself unable to move. His body, wracked with agonising heat, had stopped responding to his orders. With a final, formidable effort, he lifted his hands in front of his face just in time to see them break apart into ash…
Then, all of a sudden, the pain was gone, and as his vision finally failed him as he drew near the cusp of death, a singular, strangely calming thought entered his brain, soothing his worries and setting his mind at ease.
Wingburn…
He would never have to worry about wingburn ever again.
END OF BOOK TWO
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