Someone from the MAX team had survived. And if they knew anything about the download from the Trader, he was going to get it.
8
She was trapped in the dark with an alien queen.
The panic lasted less than a second and then Noguchi’s skills took over, natural and learned, honed from her year with the predatory race. Without a misstep, Noguchi veered away from the closed hatch, as sharply as she could without losing speed, ignoring the circle of watching masks outside. Some part of her saw that Shorty was at the center of the window, a part that apparently assumed she’d survive and might at some point care, but that awareness was gone a split second later; her animal brain was more concerned with saving her skin than with her need to save face.
The echo of the queen’s closing scream blasted through the heated dark, stealing the usual calm certainty Noguchi had so often achieved in battle—that she would survive and her enemy would not. She was scared, but a veteran of many scary places; her mind fed her what she needed to know as she sprinted, arms pumping, her face flushed with her own terrified breath reflected as heat by her mask. The suit’s shoul-
der burner was too small to do more than scratch the queen, there were no weapons to run for, hand-to-hand was less than possible. She had to get out, fast, and there was only the hatch—
—hatch and nothing hatch and where she’s supposed to be tied up—
The restraints. Near the back of the nest, the lowest dangling two meters off the floor—two chains and a rope, hanging just beneath the air shaft that blew humid heat across the nesting wall. They’d be looped around the queen’s comb and throat once the queen got hungry enough to investigate the carrion pile underneath, maneuvered by controls from outside.
It had taken her less than a half dozen running steps away from the front hatch to consider all of her options and decide. Only five or six meters to climb and a metal grate to burn through at the shaft’s opening, only seconds to do it—but with nearly a thousand kilos of screaming alien death bearing down on her from behind, even a stupid plan was better than no plan at all.
Noguchi didn’t look but could hear her over her own hot, sharp gasps and the rapid fire of her heart. The queen had turned to give chase, the floor trembling in time to the demonic echoes of pursuit that surrounded them.
Sweating but somehow cold, Noguchi struck out for the northeast corner of the chamber; she’d have to outmaneuver the queen again, feint right and go left before the mammoth creature could stop herself from slamming into the wall.
Her feelings of fear, of pain and of death, had no hold. Noguchi saw the heavy shadows of the corner, pounding closer, felt her muscles flex and pump, calculated distances and times. Behind her, the thunder of steps grew louder.
Another leap, another, the sharp lines of darkness a meter away, Noguchi shifted her weight and pivoted at once. For one sideways, running step, her left foot
was on the ground, her right angled against the back wall—
—and she’d sprinted only two steps when the crash came. The queen hit the wall close enough for a spatter of her flinging drool to hit the back of Noguchi’s neck. She found her second wind as the sliver of hot, viscous foam crawled down her spine, as close to panic as she could allow.
Fasterfaster!
To her right now, the seamless stretch of dark metal wall, ahead and to her right a shade of empty blackness, broken by slashes of filtered light from observation slits. Hunter masks had infrared capability although they rarely used it, the bugs didn’t radiate heat—but she’d long ago disabled hers, confused by the yautja symbols that flashed across the field of view; now, she wished she hadn’t, running blind. No more than twenty meters, surely, she had to be getting close—
—there! The dull glint of metal, motionless and slender, two meters up. Noguchi stretched her arms up and out, tensed as she took her final leaping step—
—and fuck that hurts, pulled, swinging herself around the thick and leaden chain by one aching arm, the other hand already reaching for the next hold. The heavy links barely swayed, Noguchi’s feet in the air, and the bam, bam of the queen’s pursuit too close.
Hand over hand, Noguchi flew up the chain, climbing so fast that she barely felt the rough metal brushing against her legs or the sheath of sweat that dripped beneath her armor. She could already feel the blast of moist air coming from the rounded tunnel to her left and above, running parallel to the ceiling. Two meters, one, and Noguchi was facing the mesh grate that blocked her escape.
Gripping the chain with her right hand, she leaned back and hooked her left arm, aiming for the center of the screen. The stream of brilliant blue light from the small shoulder weapon smashed through the holed
metal, twigs of the heated mesh hissing to the wet floor of the shaft. She was so close, both hands on the tunnel—
—and when the queen’s skeletal fingers slid into her hair, she didn’t hesitate, didn’t think about extending her right hand’s blades and reaching over her own shoulder to cut. The thin, impossibly hard knives that shot out from the forearm mechanism worked as claws, slicing as easily through braided, beaded hair as through the bony dusk of the queen’s talons—
—and even as the enraged, agonized shriek assaulted Noguchi’s ears, she had boosted herself into the tunnel before she realized that she was free. As quickly as it had begun, it was over. Below, the queen screamed on as Noguchi scrambled forward, elbowing through the warm, humid dark back toward the landing dock, the awareness of what had happened seeping in.
She had me. She touched me.
And yet Noguchi was alive, unharmed, while the alien breeder bled acid, at least three of her long digits slashed away. The rush of light and energy that swept through her as she crawled the last few meters of shaft was as exhilarating and beautiful as only victory could be.
Victory, narrow but true and well deserved. And with all of them watching …
With the alien’s hollow howls fading behind, she could consider the others. With only a few exceptions, everyone on Shell would have seen the incident, Blooded and novice alike, an infrared show of her prowess. They couldn’t continue to ignore her, the training group would have to cease their blatantly derisive treatment of her—they’d probably never like her, but there would at last be some bare minimum of respect.
Noguchi saw the curve ahead in the close air shaft, muted light shining up in thin lines around a floor hatch. She grinned, high from being alive and capable,
hearing the Hunters shifting restlessly below as she popped the edge of the hatch.
She touched me, you impassive bastards, you can’t pretend that there’s no honor in walking away from that. Can’t.
The drop was only four meters, the hatch directly over a high, sloping storage rack. Noguchi landed in a crouch, then hopped lightly to the floor, not ten meters from the front hatch of the nest chamber. Topknot and Minikui and Tress and Shorty, the wounded Scar, all of them stood and looked at her, silent, masks still in place. For a moment, there was no movement at all.
Noguchi grinned again, reaching up to pop the line that connected her mask to her armor. A tiny hiss of escaping air and the normal heat of the ship seemed like a cool breeze across the sweat on her skin, the dull light too bright for a few blinks.
The line of masks watched her, not speaking, Topknot in front. The others would look to their Leader for an appropriate response, and he couldn’t punish her after such a competent display . . .
Topknot didn’t. Noguchi gritted her teeth as he turned away instead, reaching up to take off his own mask as he growled an order to one of the unBlooded, to see to Slats. Randomly, one by one, the Hunters all turned away. They removed masks, moved to store them, shelved burners, and clattered to one another about those lost and how many they’d killed, their crablike faces shiny with musk, their beaded tresses slick with it. No one spoke to her and there was nothing spoken about her.
Noguchi didn’t, wouldn’t care. The mission was complete, she was alive, and they had all seen what she’d done, whether or not it was acknowledged. It wasn’t hard to feel nothing; she’d had so much practice, for so long . . .
. . . but it was a queen, she thought, a small and pitiful thought that she immediately buried. Instead, she hung her mask and peeled her gloves, her head