The Last Colony Part 13

"We don't need to keep that part quiet," Jane said. "You can tell your people that part when you leave here. You need to keep quiet about the creatures that did this."

"I'm not going to pretend to my people that this was just some sort of random animal attack," Gutierrez said.

"No one's saying you should," I said. "Tell your people the truth: that there are predators following the fantie herd, they're dangerous and that until further notice no one goes for walks in the forest, or goes anywhere alone outside of Croatoan if they can help ii. You don't have to tell them anything more than that for now."

"Why not?" Gutierrez said. "These things represent a real danger to us. They've already killed one of us. Eaten Eaten one of us. We need to get our people prepared." one of us. We need to get our people prepared."

"The reason why not is that people act irrationally if they think they're being hunted by something with a brain," Jane said. "Just like you're acting now."

Gutierrez glared at Jane. "I don't appreciate the suggestion that I'm acting irrationally," he said.

"Then don't act irrationally," Jane said, "because there will be consequences. Remember that you're under the State Secrecy Act, Gutierrez." Gutierrez subsided, clearly not satisfied.

"Look," I said. "If these things are are intelligent, then among other things I think we have some responsibilities to them, primarily intelligent, then among other things I think we have some responsibilities to them, primarily not not wiping them out over what might have been a misunderstanding. And if they are intelligent, then maybe we can find a way to let them know they'd be best off avoiding wiping them out over what might have been a misunderstanding. And if they are intelligent, then maybe we can find a way to let them know they'd be best off avoiding us us." I motioned for the spearhead; Trujillo handed it over. "They're using these these, for Christ's sake"-waving the spear-"even with the dumb guns we have to use here, we could probably wipe them out a hundred times over. But I'd like to try not not doing that if we can manage it." doing that if we can manage it."

"Let me try to put it a different way," Trujillo said to Hiram Yoder. "You're asking us to withhold critical information from our people. I-and I think Paulo here as well-worry that holding back that information makes our people less safe, because our people don't know the full scope of what they're dealing with. Look where we are now now. We're all stuffed into a cargo container wrapped in cloaking fabric to keep us hidden, and that's because our government withheld critical information from us. The Colonial government played us us for fools, and that's why we live like we do now. No offense." for fools, and that's why we live like we do now. No offense."

"None taken," Yoder said.

"My point is, our government screwed us us with secrets," Trujillo said. "Why would we want to do the same to with secrets," Trujillo said. "Why would we want to do the same to our our people?" people?"

"I don't want to keep this a secret forever," I said. "But right now we lack information on whether these people are a genuine threat, and I'd like to be able to get it without people going a little crazy out of fear of Roanoke Neanderthals wandering in the brush."

"You're a.s.suming people will go a little crazy," Trujillo said.

"I'd be happy to be proven wrong," I said. "But for now let's err on the side of caution."

"Inasmuch as we don't have a choice in the matter, let's err indeed," Trujillo said.

"Christ," Jane said. I noted an unusual tone in her voice: exasperation. "Trujillo, Gutierrez, use your G.o.dd.a.m.n heads. We didn't have to tell you any of this We didn't have to tell you any of this. Marta didn't know what she was looking at when she found Loong; the only one of you who saw it for himself was Yoder, and only because he saw it here. If we hadn't told you everything right now, you'd never have known. I could have cleaned this all up and not one of you would be the wiser. But we didn't want that; we knew we had to tell all of you. We've trusted you enough to share something we didn't have to share. Trust us that we need time before you tell the colonists. It's not too much to ask."

"Everything I'm telling you is protected by the State Secrecy Act," I said.

"We have a state?" Jerry Bennett asked.

"Jerry," I said.

"Sorry," Jerry said. "What's up?"

I told Jerry about the creatures and an update about the Council meeting the night before. "That's pretty wild," Jerry said. "What do you want me to do?"

"Go through the files we were given about this planet," I said. "Tell me if you see anything there that gives any indication that the Colonial Union knew anything about these guys. I mean anything anything."

"There's nothing on them directly," Bennett said. "I know that much. I read the files as I was printing them out for you."

"I'm not looking for direct references. I mean anything in the files that suggests these guys were here," I said.

"You think the CU edited out the fact this planet has an intelligent species on it?" Bennett asked. "Why would they do that?"

"I don't know," I said. "It wouldn't make any sense. But sending us to a whole different planet than the one we were supposed to be on and then cutting us off entirely doesn't make any sense either, does it?"

"Brother, you have a point there," Bennett said, and thought for a moment. "How deep do you want me to go?" he asked.

"As deep as you can," I said. "Why?"

Bennett grabbed a PDA from his bench and pulled up a file. "The Colonial Union uses a standard file format for all its doc.u.ments," he said. "Text, images, audio, they all get poured into the same sort of file. One of the things you can do with the file format is get it to track editing changes. You write a draft of something, you send it to the boss, she makes changes, and the doc.u.ment comes back to you and you can see where and how your boss made the changes. It tracks however many changes get made-stores the deleted material in metadata. You don't see it unless you turn on version tracking."

"So any edits that were made would still be in the doc.u.ment," I said.

"They might be," Bennett said. "It's a CU rule that final doc.u.ments are supposed to have this sort of metadata stripped out. But it's one thing to mandate it, and another thing to get people to remember to do it."

"Do it, then," I said. "I want everything looked at. Sorry about becoming a pain in your a.s.s."

"Nah," Bennett said. "Batch commands make life easy. After that it's a matter of the right search parameters. This is what I do."

"I owe you one, Jerry," I said.

"Yeah?" Bennett said. "If you mean it you'll get me an a.s.sistant. Being the tech guy for an entire colony is a lot of work. And I spend my entire day in a box. It'd be nice to have some company."

"I'll get on it," I said. "You get on this."

"On it," Bennett said, and waved me out of the Box.

Jane and Hiram Yoder were walking up as I came outside. "We have a problem," Jane said. "A big one."

"What?" I said.

Jane nodded to Hiram. "Paulo Gutierrez and four other men came past my farm today," Hiram said. "Carrying rifles and heading toward the woods. I asked him what he was doing and he said that he and his friends were going on a hunting trip. I asked them what he was hunting for and he said that I should know full well what they were planning to hunt. He asked me if I wanted to come along. I told him that my religion forbade the taking of intelligent life, and I asked him to reconsider what he was doing, because he was going against your wishes, and planning to murder another creature. He laughed and walked off toward the tree line. They're out in the woods now, Administrator Perry. I think they mean to kill as many of the creatures as they can find."

Yoder walked us to where he saw the men enter the woods and told us he'd wait for us there. Jane and I went in and started looking for the trail of men.

"Here," Jane said, pointing to boot marks on the forest floor. Paulo and his boys were making no attempt to keep themselves hidden, or if they were, they were very bad at it. "Idiots," Jane said, and took off after them, unthinkingly moving at her new and improved high speed. I ran off after her, neither as fast nor as quietly.

I caught up with her about a klick later. "Don't do that again," I said. "I'm about to heave my lungs out."

"Quiet," Jane said. I shut up up. Jane's hearing had no doubt improved with her speed. I tried to suck oxygen into my lungs as quietly as I could. She began walking west when we heard a shot, followed by three more. Jane began running again, in the direction of the shots. I followed as quickly as I could.

Another klick later I entered a clearing. Jane was kneeling over a body that had blood pooling underneath it; another man sat nearby, propped up by the woody stump of a bush. I ran over to Jane and the body, whose front was spattered with blood. She barely glanced up. "Dead already," she said. "Shot between the rib and the sternum. Right through the heart, straight out the back. Probably dead before he hit the ground."

I looked up at the man's face. It took me a minute to recognize him: Marco Flores, one of Gutierrez's colonists from Khartoum. I left Flores to Jane and went over to the other man, who was staring blankly ahead. It was another Khartoum colonist, Galen DeLeon.

"Galen," I said, crouching down to get at his eye level. The salutation didn't register. I snapped my fingers a couple of times to get his attention. "Galen," I said again. "Tell me what happened."

"I shot Marco," DeLeon said, in a bland, conversational voice. He was looking past me, at nothing in particular. "I didn't mean to. They just came out of nowhere, and I shot one, and Marco got in the way. I shot him. He went down." DeLeon put his hands on his forehead and started grasping at his hair. "I didn't mean to," he said. "All of a sudden they were just there."

"Galen," I said. "You came out here with Paulo Gutierrez and a couple other men. Where did they go?"

DeLeon waved indistinctly in a westerly direction. "They ran off. Paulo and Juan and Deit went after them. I stayed. To see if I could help Marco. To see..." he trailed off again. I stood up.

"I didn't mean to shoot him," DeLeon said, still in that bland tone. "They were just there. And they moved so fast. You should have seen them. If you saw them, you know why I had to shoot. If you saw what they looked like."

"What do they look like?" I asked.

DeLeon smiled tragically and for the first time looked at me. "Like werewolves." He closed his eyes and put his head back in his hands.

I went back over to Jane. "DeLeon's in shock," I said. "One of us should take him back."

"What did he say happened?" Jane asked, "Said the things came out of nowhere and ran that way," I said, pointing west. "Gutierrez and the rest of them went chasing after them." It hit me. "They're running into an ambush," I said.

"Come on," Jane said, and pointed to Flores's rifle. "Take that," she said, and ran. I took Flores's rifle, checked the load and once again started after my wife.

There was another rifle shot, followed by the sound of men yelling. I put on a burst of speed and came up a rise to find Jane in a broken grove of Roanoke trees, kneeling on the back of one of the men, who was yelling in pain. Paulo Gutierrez was pointing his rifle at Jane and ordering her off the man. Jane wasn't budging. A third man stood to the side, looking like he was about to wet his pants.

I leveled my rifle at Gutierrez. "Drop your rifle, Paulo," I said. "Drop it or I'm going to drop you."

"Tell your wife to get off Deit," Gutierrez said.

"No," I said. "Now drop your weapon."

"She's breaking his G.o.dd.a.m.n arm!" Gutierrez said.

"If she wanted to break his arm, it'd be broken by now," I said. "And if she wanted to kill every one of you, you'd already be dead. Paulo, I'm not going to tell you again. Drop your rifle."

Paulo dropped his rifle. I glanced over at the third man, who would be Juan. He dropped his, too. "Down," I said to the both of them. "Knees and palms on the ground." They went down.

"Jane," I said.

"This one took a shot at me," Jane said.

"I didn't know it was you!" Diet said.

"Shut up," Jane said. He shut up.

I walked over to Juan and Gutierrez's rifles and picked them up. "Paulo, where are your other men?" I asked.

"They're behind us somewhere," Gutierrez said. "These things popped out of nowhere and started running this way, and we came after them. Marco and Galen probably went off in another direction."

"Marco is dead," I said.

"Those f.u.c.kers got him," Deit said.

"No," I said. "Galen shot him. Just like you almost shot her."

"Holy Christ," Gutierrez said. "Marco."

"This is exactly exactly why I wanted to keep this quiet," I said to Gutierrez. "To keep some idiot from doing this. You dumbf.u.c.ks haven't got the first clue what you're doing, and now one of you is dead, one of you killed him, and the rest of you are running into an ambush." why I wanted to keep this quiet," I said to Gutierrez. "To keep some idiot from doing this. You dumbf.u.c.ks haven't got the first clue what you're doing, and now one of you is dead, one of you killed him, and the rest of you are running into an ambush."

"Oh G.o.d," Gutierrez said. He tried to sit up from his four-on-the-floor position but lost his balance, and collapsed in a pile of grief.

"We're going to walk out of here now, all of us," I said, walking over to Gutierrez. "We're going to go back the way we came in, and along the way we're going to pick up Galen and Marco. Paulo, I'm sorry-" I caught movement out of the corner of my eye; it was Jane, telling me to cut it off. She was listening for something. I looked over at her. What is it What is it? I mouthed.

Jane looked down at Deit. "What direction did those things you were chasing run off in?"

Deit pointed west. "That way. We were chasing them, and then they disappeared, and then you came running up."

"What do you mean they disappeared?" Jane said.

"One minute we saw them and the next we didn't," Deit said. "Those f.u.c.kers are fast."

Jane got off Deit. "Get up. Now," she said. She looked over to me. "They weren't running into an ambush. This is is the ambush." the ambush."

Then I heard what Jane had been hearing: a soft ma.s.s of clicks, coming from the trees. Coming from directly above us.

"Oh, s.h.i.+t," I said.

"What the h.e.l.l is that?" Gutierrez said, and looked up as the spear came down, exposing his neck to its tip, which slid into that soft s.p.a.ce at the top of the sternum and drove itself into his viscera. I rolled, avoiding a spear of my own, and looked up as I did.

It was raining werewolves.

Two fell near me and Gutierrez, who was still alive, trying to pull out the spear. One grabbed the spear near the end and drove it down farther into Gutierrez's chest and shook it violently. Gutierrez spat up blood and died. The second slashed at me with claws as I rolled, ripping my jacket but missing flesh. I had kept my rifle and drew it up with one hand; the thing grabbed the barrel with both of its paws or claws or hands and prepared to pull it out of my grip. It didn't seem to know that a projectile could come out of the end; I educated it on the subject. The creature brutalizing Gutierrez uttered a sharp click of what I hoped was terror and sprinted east, getting a running start at a tree, which it scaled and then hurled itself from, landing on another tree. It disappeared into the foliage.

I looked around. They were gone. They were all all gone. gone.

Something moved; I trained the rifle on it. It was Jane. She was pulling a knife out of one of the werewolves. Another werewolf lay nearby. I looked for Juan and Deit and found them on the ground, lifeless.

"Okay?" Jane said to me. I nodded. Jane stood, holding her side; blood slipped between her fingers.

"You're hurt," I said.

"I'm fine," she said. "It looks worse than it is."

In the distance there was a very human scream.

"DeLeon," Jane said, and started running, still holding her side. I gave chase.

Most of DeLeon was missing. Some of him was left behind. Wherever the rest of him was, it was still alive and screaming. A blood trail went from where he had sat to one of the trees. There was another scream.

"They're taking him north," I said. "Come on."

"No," Jane said, and pointed. In the east, there was movement in the trees. "They're using DeLeon as bait to lead us away. Most of them are headed east. Back toward the colony."

"We can't leave DeLeon," I said. "He's still alive."

"I'll get him," Jane said. "You get back. Be careful. Watch the trees and the ground." She was off.

Fifteen minutes later I breached the border of the woods and came back to colony ground to find four werewolves in a semicircle and Hiram Yoder standing silently at their focus. I dropped to the ground.

The werewolves didn't notice me; they were entirely intent on Yoder, who continued to stand stock-still. Two of the werewolves had spears trained on him, ready to run him through if he moved. He didn't. All four of them clicked and hissed, the hisses falling in and out of my sonic range; this was why Jane heard them before the rest of us did.