TWENTY-FIVE

“Never fails to amaze me, looking at one of these monsters from the air,” Wink said.

It was a huge building, segmented-eplast construction with channels and drains, so if part of it collapsed, not all of it would, and with all the infrastructure you’d expect, just like Jo had said: roads, a monorail station, air- and hopperports, a spaceport over there.

Big money in big stores, and TotalMart was the largest shark in the galactic-shopping food chain by far, everybody else running a far distant second. Other sentient species would sometimes look at such a place and shake their heads: Can you believe what those humans do?

Jo said, “Security requires that customers leave their hardware at the door when they enter. We won’t, we have the proper licenses, courtesy of the Rajah, but that means they will be keeping a closer eye on us. At least for a while.”

Wink nodded to himself. Of course. Mercenaries who could carry, you bet you’d keep a careful watch on them. In the land of the unarmed, the man with a rock was king.

“We have Formentara’s toy,” Jo continued, “so that should give security something else to keep ’em occupied.”

“If it works,” Gramps said.

Formentara smiled sweetly at him but didn’t say anything.

Gramps smiled in return. Hard to ruffle hir feathers. Everything Formentara came up with always worked.

“We are in the landing slave’s grip,” Nancy said. “Fifteen minutes until they park us.”

Gunny said, “I knew a guy, ex-Army, worked security for the system-megastore grand opening on Zand, place was twice the size of this one. They had a doorbuster sale on agro-dins, and 90 percent of what they do on Zand is farming, so they were lined up for days, camping.

“Twenty-six people were killed, nine of them security, dozens seriously injured when they let shoppers enter. Guy I knew said it was the scariest engagement he’d ever been in. Security was limited to the use of LTL hardware only—zappers, puke spray, hand sonics, like that. Said once the crowd surged, it rolled over them like a tsunami, nothing slowed ’em down.”

“Sad way to go,” Gramps said, “in a store, stomped by some farmer shoving to get a cheap hay baler.”

“No Screamers installed?” That from Formentara. “No stupesonics? No seizure flashers?”

Gunny said, “My guy said they had Screamers, but elected not to use them. Bad PR to lay fifty thousand customers out in pools of their own urine.”

“And twenty-six people dead is good PR?” Wink said.

“All about the money,” Jo said. “Cheaper to pay off the survivors and families of that many than to alienate a few hundred thousand possible repeat customers. Cost of doing business.”

Kay said something Wink didn’t catch.

“Say what?” he said.

“I said ‘Humans.’” You could have etched diamond with her tone.

Yeah, that about summed it up.

“How would you have handled it on your world?” Wink asked.

“On Vast, we do not have these places. If we allowed them, there would be no such riot. Such things are not permitted.”

“You’d have used the Screamers?” That from Gunny.

“No. We would have used lethal weapons and continued doing so until the illegal activity ceased. The customers would have known that.”

“You’d have killed maybe thousands of Vastalimi, just like that?”

“If that is what it took. They would have been responsible for their own fates.”

Gunny shook her head. “Hard-asses on your world.”

“We value life differently than humans do.”

“No shit,” Wink said.

Jo looked at Kay. “You’ve heard some of our stories about our first killings. Would you care to share yours? We have a few minutes.”

Kay looked at Jo Captain.

“The first person I killed, or the first human?”

Kay saw the teeth revealed in smiles, indicating amusement.

Even after years, she still had to overcome her instinctive reaction to that—it didn’t mean the same thing as it did on her homeworld. Vastalimi smiles didn’t reveal the teeth.

Many things among the humans were that way. Such an odd mix of predator and prey, they were.

“Person will do,” Jo said.

Kay allowed the memory to surface:

“I was dijete. This does not translate exactly into Basic, it is a phase of late cubhood. A period older than babies, younger than fully grown, during which we were still called by our den-noms.

“We were twelve standard years, and on Seoba. This is a ritual trek of two months, undergone during dijete. You are taken to a reach and left with nothing save what you brought into the world at your birth.

“Our pack, comprised of three different family litters, roamed the South Reach of Travnjaka, the Great Grassland. Mostly, we hunted vepar, large, tusked rodents half again our size.

“By that day, there were still fifteen in my pack, down from twenty.”

“Down from twenty? Five dropped out?” Formentara asked.

Kay looked at the speaker.

“Five were dead on the trek. Two from wounds incurred hunting vepar, one from an attack by a div macka, something like a Terran liger. One stepped into a serpent burrow, broke her leg, and chose izvaditi utrobu—suicide.”

“Suicide? How?” Jo asked.

“Disembowelment by her own claws.”

“Nice. And the fifth?” From Wink.

“The fifth disappeared, and we did not know what happened to her. There are several large predator species who live in the grass. Probably killed and eaten by one.”

“Tough playground.” That from Gramps.

“It was a cold and gray evening, we smelled snow coming, and we were closing in on a pair of young vepar when Blue Eyes had a zrelost seizure.”

She saw that none of them knew this term, either.

She explained: “Blue Eyes was male, and the seizure was due to the sudden and unexpected onset of sexual maturity.

“Normally, the Vastalimi do not Blossom until their fourteenth season. The first rising in males is overwhelmingly powerful, and in society, he would have been restrained and given to a mature female trained in the ways of safe release. Because he was early, and we were far into the grass, this was not possible.

“Gripped by conjunction-lust, Blue Eyes attacked fem Tawny.

“None of the fems were mature enough to accept Blue Eyes that way. Males who have lost control drive to their climax without thought for their partner. Zrelost-driven intercourse can result in injury for even an incautious, mature female. In cubs, it can be fatal. The claws and teeth dig deep, the member thrusts to the hilt.

“Blue Eyes knew this intellectually, of course, but the Blossom is impossible to resist. He was crazed with hormones and not in his right mind.

“I was the first to reach him as he clawed and attempted to mount Tawny. I killed him.”

“Killed him? You didn’t try, I don’t know, restraints? Knocking him cold?” That from Wink.

Kay offered a slight turn of her head. “We were on Seoba. We were five hundred kilometers from the nearest settlement. We had no means of communication, no tools other than our own claws and fangs, no way to hold him. Blue Eyes’ zrelost Blossom might have lasted thirty hours. Trying to restrain a maddened male would have likely resulted in serious injury or death to some of the pack. We might have knocked him out, but an attempt that failed might result in a fatal injury to one of us. It was the safest way.”

No one said anything for a few seconds. Then Jo said, “And what happened to Tawny? Was she hurt by the attack?”

“Minor injuries, a few bruises, some scratches.”

“Something, at least.”

Kay looked at her. “It was the proper response.”

“And how did you feel about this?”

“Blue Eyes was my littermate. We had grown up together, with our three sibs.”

They all looked at her.

“He was your brother?” That from Formentara.

“It was unfortunate; but it was the proper response in the circumstances.”

None of them spoke to that.

There was another thing she might have said, but Kay withheld it. Humans indeed had a different life-view than Vastalimi, and she knew from her experiences with them that hearing that Tawny—her sister—had died the next day when they took down the two vepar they’d been hunting would bother them. As if killing Blue Eyes was somehow made less valid because Tawny died so soon afterward. They wouldn’t understand that such a thing did not matter. Death came, and when it left, it seldom did so with clean claws. That was the way of it.

Humans simply did not view this as did Vastalimi.

As she considered this, Jo looked at her. “I’m curious; how many of you made it to the end of your trek out there in the grasslands?”

Kay nodded. “Eleven of us.”

“Tawny?”

“She was not among the survivors.”

Nancy said, “Better strap in, folks, we are approaching the ground. These slave programs don’t always get it exactly right—I’ve been let go a meter up, and I don’t want anybody biting their tongue off if that happens.”