Boni pastoris est tondere pecus non deglubere
It took them another day to locate the kainde amedha nest, following the trail left by the hard meat as the entire hive had made its way to where the ship had been previously. They had traced the hive's origination back to a partially demolished building, she couldn't tell if it had been offices or apartments, the trail leading to a crumbling hole in one wall, leading to the basement level.
"What is it with hard meat and basements?" she mused aloud, and the Second clicked a laugh at her.
"They like the dark, it enhances their natural advantages. They are primarily nocturnal creatures, their evolution has adapted them to optimize their abilities in that respect" he noted in a semi-lecturing tone. They were all checking their equipment before entering the hole, not knowing what they'd find inside. She shook her head.
"That might explain why they don't radiate heat. Thermal eyesight would be one of the ways something adapted to the dark would see. But that means they evolved to avoid ..." She paused, looking at the Yautja speculatively. "Just how long have Yautja hunted kainde amedha?"
"Longer than the recorded histories of pyode amedha. Old histories speak of another species roaming the stars that used kainde amedha as living weapons, transporting the eggs in their thousands to the worlds they wished to destroy, seeding the planet." She stood, gaping at him.
"Someone deliberately wiped out planets with those things?" she asked, incredulously. He growled an affirmative, and she returned with a growl of disgust.
"We do not know if they had a method of controlling the kainde amedha after they infested the planet, or could halt the infestation. We only know that we do not have those abilities, and so we are cautious about those planets we introduce kainde amedha eggs on for hunting. That is why the Elder was willing at the beginning to take chances he would not normally have taken with honored prey, controlling the infestation took priority over everything else." She nodded, loosening the stars on her harness so they'd deploy faster.
When the hunter, the one she had worked with to keep the queen's guards from reaching the experienced hunters, had described her actions during the battle, she had refused to believe him, until his version of events was confirmed by the others. She had been so deeply into the headspace of a hunter that her reactions and instincts had driven her with confidence to use the throwing stars, yet she hadn't even noticed.
She had made the mistake of mentioning out loud that she wondered if she could do it again, and had been taken off the ship to find out, there and then. She had been terrified at first, but after nervously throwing a star, she had managed to catch it. After a few tries, her confidence built and she was soon throwing and catching them with familiarity, to the purrs of pleasure from the hunters.
"So what happened?" The Second cocked his head at her. "To the aliens that were using the hard meat as super soldiers", she elaborated, and the Second nodded in understanding.
"We do not know, the histories that record the hunts say they became hard, then eventually impossible, to find. Only a few derelict ships have been found over time to remind us of them. It was from one of those derelicts the first kainde amedha eggs were taken for the Yautja to hunt, and ever since then they have been a self-renewing source of prey. We do not know if the kainde amedha ever had a homeworld, but we have found many worlds they were seeded on that they have made their own, so perhaps it is unimportant."
She shook her head, trying to keep up with what she was being told. The Second was talking about an alien race that deliberately used kainde amedha in war so matter-of-factly that shivers ran up her spine. It was another highlight of the fundamental differences between her and the Yautja. At the same time, she understood why the Yautja had sought out the hard meat soldiers for prey - anything used for such a purpose would be (and was) a challenge worthy of the proud hunters.
Then they were cloaked, through the hole, and into the basement of the building, and she began to think she understood how that might be. This was her first foray into a nest, all her encounters with kainde amedha to this point had been out in the open, relatively speaking. The first thing she noticed was the efforts of the mesh undergarment she wore kicking up to insulate her from the oppressively higher heat and humidity that filled the rooms they walked through.
She wondered how the temperature could be so different from the chilly winter air outside, but in the heat sensitive mode of her mask's vision amplifiers she could see that the dark resinous material coating most every surface had a higher heat than she expected. Cautioned at the start of the descent into the building not to speak, she filed her curiosity to a corner of her mind and focused on the task at hand, switching her vision mode from the distorted green-outlined one kainde amedha would appear in to the heat sensitive one, sometimes using the visible light spectrum as well.
The beginning wasn't so bad, but as they penetrated deeper into the nest, she began to see the entombed corpses of hosts, coated in more of the resin the kainde amedha exuded so copiously and fastened securely to the wall. On the floor before each corpse, coated in alien mucous, sat rows on rows of leathery eggs, their tops opened up in the past to release the parasitic facehuggers inside. Close by most of them, the skeletal remains of the spindly eight-legged lay where they had fallen off to die, their grisly task completed.
She was surprised as they came across many dead humans that did not share the same characteristic outward explosion from their chest, the great craters in living tissue the kainde amedha young caused in their hosts at birth, as the rest, and eventually she touched the Second on the elbow, pointing to this with a silent question asked by cocking her head to one side. He stepped up close to the bodies she had indicated, and then pointed to her mask, tracing a shape with one clawed fingertip in the air. He repeated the gesture twice more before she realized what he was telling her, and she glanced at the display inside her mask until she located the icon that matched the symbol he was describing.
As she looked at the icon, her vision mode changed, and she almost gasped out loud as her mask began giving her images of inside the torsos of the hapless people forever locked into the walls of the alien nest. She could see the lifeless coiled snake-like forms of kainde amedha young in all whose chests were still intact, in various stages of growth. The juveniles had died before they could burst forth from their hosts. Briefly she considered the possible reasons, but she was no expert on alien physiology so gave up. The time for such questions, and perhaps even answers to them, would come later. She switched her vision modes one more and continued scanning.
They were all surprised when they started to come across the bodies of kainde amedha deeper inside the nest, though. For a time, she wondered if, when the queen had died, these other drones had died as a result, even miles away as they had been. But that theory was quickly discounted by the age of some of the dead black bodies, some already showing signs of decay. The entire nest, to her, seemed filled with the feeling of being ... wrong, somehow. She wasn't sure what she had expected, but even with no experience she could sense that the nest, the hive itself, had been in trouble. She could feel the unease of the hunters around her, they could feel it as well.
Moving quickly, wanting to be able to finish clearing the nest and get out of the foreboding atmosphere that pressed down on them like a palpable weight, they entered the center of the basement, the place the queen had made her own. To one side was the long egg sac that had once been attached to the queen's underbelly, looking like a discarded chrysalis, but there was no other sign of kainde amedha, eggs, facehuggers, or anything else. The nest was completely deserted, as dead as its ruler.
The Elder motioned to her to stand beside him, and as she did so he handed her a flat rectangle, screens set on one face that she saw were similar to the display on the Yautja computer buried underneath the armor and overlay on her right thigh. She looked at the Elder, who growled softly to her.
"No pyode amedha can be allowed to discover this place. The existence of the hard meat, and the Yautja, must remain secret. This is your homeworld, your hunting grounds. The final destruction of the kainde amedha threat here is yours to perform." She looked around, and a shiver went through her. He'd just handed her a bomb. If she set it off, she had no idea if any innocents might be caught in the blast, how far the blast might travel. But she also knew the Elder was correct – humans couldn't be allowed to find out how close they'd come to mass extinction at the hands of aliens.
She took one final look around the cold dark room, imagining how many lives had been lost because of the predations of its previous occupants, and with that thought, she triggered the timer on the bomb the Elder had handed her, before tossing the device towards the egg sac, the faint beeping emanating from it counting down the moments before cleansing fire would burn away the legacy of the queen and her offspring. As one, the five of them turned and started running back towards the exit, stepping over the litter and debris of the nest.
Once outside the basement, she paused to catch her breath, but realized her four companions weren't slowing down, continuing instead to run away from the building. Her mind flashed back to the destruct device mounted on the wall of her hidden closet and how she had wondered just how destructive it might be ... the one she'd just casually set to detonate in the nest was a large sized case. She caught up with the Yautja in moments, before beginning to accelerate past them.
Even with the longer delay on the charge, they were still perilously close to the blast radius, and the hot wind that traveled ahead of the blast knocked her to the ground. She rolled over onto her back and watched the red and blue ball of energy devour everything in its path, turning what had once been an alien nest, the building whose basement the nest had been in, and a few surrounding buildings for good measure into dust floating through the air.
Once the ground had stopped moving quite so much, she shakily got to her feet and looked around. She spotted the four Yautja crouched a little distance ahead, and jogged across to them. She grinned behind her mask.
"Urban renewal, Yautja style", she thought to herself, but didn't want to interrupt the healer, who was already speaking. She crouched down with them and listened as the healer continued.
"If they were affected from gestation by the drugs of this world, then the queen would have been flawed as well. That might account for the failure of some of the young to thrive." The Elder looked across, cocking his head.
"What of the kainde amedha inside the hive that had achieved adulthood?" The healer clicked the Yautja equivalent of a shrug.
"Given the state of some of them, I do not believe it was a result of the queen's death. That would leave the same answer as the probable cause – they were flawed by the state of the original hosts. In effect, they may have died of natural causes. The generations were flawed because their root progenitor was flawed, each subsequent generation may have been more damaged."
The healer's theory did have a lot going for it, and would explain why the size of the hive had been smaller than expected, given how the length of time it had to grow in numbers. She was oddly grateful to those anonymous junkies that had been the original hosts. Their imperfections had tainted the kainde amedha, and as a result the infestation had been brief, but controllable.
With a possible explanation to the anomalies that had plagued the hunt to date in hand, and the nest destroyed, the remainder of the cleanup, as the Elder explained, would be to ensure there were no eggs still out there. The presence of eggs outside the nest, which she had been part of destroying, was of concern, and he wanted to make sure there were no other caches of eggs that might be stumbled on by unwary humans..
With the details resolved, it was time for the hunting to begin. The Yautja listened eagerly as she recounted information about mob houses she knew of in the area.
-
-
They should have designed the mask better, she decided. It wasn't that it was inefficient - on the contrary it worked perfectly, providing her with sweet fresh air on the ship while she had her mask off. The difficulties began with such times mostly being when she was curled up underneath the furs of various alien creatures on her bed trying to sleep – she always ended up knocking the mask off as she tossed and turned.
The healer hadn't been able to come up with anything that was much use as a solution, so in the end, after her second night of waking to a hacking dry cough because she'd managed to dislodge the mask, she decided it might be time to go in search of a drugstore and throat lozenges. That however posed its own problems, not least of which was she only had her armor to wear. No matter how laid back people were, someone was likely to raise an eyebrow. There was also the matter of getting food she could eat – after many attempts with the various foods the ship was stocked with, the only thing that didn't make her retch violently was a thin emergency food wafer, not exactly appetizing.
But the solution to these things would mean returning to her nest ... her apartment, she corrected herself absently.
It wasn't that she'd have to face ... well, she wouldn't see anything. That was why her trainer had arrived at the ship later than she, he was ...
He'd told her that he'd treated her with respect due to the friend of a blooded hunter. She didn't ask him what that meant, but she knew at least her friend's head wasn't going to end up decorating someone's trophy vault. And Yautja were masters at concealing their presence, and the evidence of their hunts, so she knew that, when she got there, nothing would seem amiss.
But it was still where Marisa had died. She wondered how much responsibility she bore for that. What had started as regret her friend wasn't present to see her being blooded was rapidly turning into full blown guilt thinking that Marisa was dead purely because ...
She had to stop thinking like that. She'd warned her friend off, tried to tell her it was dangerous, but she'd been rebuffed each time. Marisa was ... had been ... a big girl, she made her choice. She debated asking her trainer where he had taken the body, so she could say goodbye to her friend properly, but he had left shortly after he had blooded her, heading offworld to take the beacon requesting replacement parts for the ship into a more traveled region of space. Even now she was blooded, she realized he would still simply come and go as he pleased, without warning.
As she stood in the doorway from the balcony, none of it made any difference. She breathed slowly, trying to keep everything under control, and entered. She avoided looking at the bathroom, its door wide open, instead trying to remain focused on what she was there to do. She reached the bedroom and started removing her armor, opening the hidden closet and allowing the security device on the wall to scan her. She looked at the weapons arrayed there, debating if she should take them back to the ship later, but in the end she decided not to, not until she'd made her decision.
"They invited me to leave with them", she thought to herself, still not quite believing it. Everything she thought she knew about Yautja culture was being tested to the edge. Her trainer had explained to her how Yautja would treat her, blooded or not – the majority of them would see her the same way Asshole had, as prey. She would be challenged almost constantly.
Then there was the question of the Elder's place and reputation. Yautja fought, in some cases literally, for places on board the ships of the best Elders, to be a part of that Elder's "clan", she'd been taught. That this one had attracted Yautja of the quality of the Second, and of Blade, showed he was well respected, probably having a high rank amongst the ships and clans of the Yautja. What would the presence of a pyode amedha, one who was considered a hunter, do to that reputation?
She had hunted with them, and earned their respect. The once unblooded hunter she had pushed aside as a kainde amedha had tried to ambush them during their fight with the queen had been the one to replace her mask. When she asked him why, he had simply raised a medallion from under his armor, a twin to the one Blade had given her. He had been apprenticed to the weaponsmaster, and as he explained it, replacing her mask was proving he was in his own way carrying forwards the legacy of the proud Yautja hunter that had taken her armor and helped her to make it her own. It was also an act of gratitude for her saving his life in the fight. And he hoped it would help her if he ever had the opportunity to hunt her.
For the young hunter, it had seemed obvious, and she saw in his explanation the complexity and simplicity that bound Yautja together in tradition. It was making more and more sense to her with each passing moment, and she felt at home and comfortable with it. It was short, brutal, violent. It was open, honest. She was making those traditions her own, as her trainer had intended, blending the two societies together in her own mind and behavior. Not completely human, not completely Yautja.
She looked at herself in the mirror, the first time she had looked at herself since the fight. She drew closer, her eyes wandering over the reflection of the scars she had obtained over the years, some of them fresh and still showing blue from the alien medicine. From just above her eyebrow on one side, down across her eye so close it had nicked her eyelid, ending on her cheekbone, the two sliver scars the kainde amedha had given her when it shattered her old mask still showed a faint taint of blue.
And in her reflection she understood the challenge she had trained so long to become – was she greater than the sum of her parts?
She sighed, deeply, before straightening up.
"I won't let you down, love. I won't let any of them down" she whispered quietly into the empty room. "I'm more than human, more than Yautja. I'll make you all proud, I swear."
She sorted through her clothes, selecting the ones she'd take back to the ship, to her quarters. She sighed as she realized that almost all of it would need laundering before she could wear it around the sensitive sense of smell the Yautja possessed. She left the bedroom, a basket full of clothes in her arms, but as she was about to leave to head to the laundry room, she glanced around the apartment and her eyes fell on the paper bags still on the countertop by the kitchen. Marisa had left them there after putting the groceries away, before taking her shower. Before she had died.
"I swear, love" she whispered again, then braced herself and headed to do mundane things in a real world she didn't really belong to any more. In the back of her mind, she began to seriously consider the possibilities ahead of her and the chance to leave all of this behind that had been offered to her.
-
After she had packed the clothes she had brought with her into the storage compartments in her quarters and chewed on one of the cough drops she had purchased from the local pharmacy, she removed most of her armor and weapons before heading to the chamber she had met the other hunters in before. As she had guessed, it was a place for the crew to eat, and since it had cold storage available she had brought some food from her fridge as well. She hadn't figured out a way to bring her coffee machine with her, however - there was no way to plug it into anything - and the Yautja didn't have anything analogous.
She was surprised to find all four hunters there, she had arrived after dark and had expected them to all be out hunting again tonight. She'd planned on joining them once she'd had a chance to experience the marvelous massaging shower feature again. She quickly stowed her food in the appropriate place and took her place at the table, looking at each of them before speaking up.
"What's wrong?" The Elder looked over at her.
"We do not know. All of the places you told us of have been deserted tonight, some appear to have been abandoned sooner." She cocked her head to one side, as she thought quickly. Why would ... oh!
"Before you invited me to hunt kainde amedha, I had heard from one of the human bad bloods that they were reacting to my hunting, and were moving a lot of their operations to somewhere else. Perhaps they have finished that move and closed the other locations as no longer necessary?" The Elder considered this for several minutes before looking at her seriously.
"You must always take steps to ensure you do not over-hunt an area, young blood. Too much prey taken from one place always results in the prey moving, making it harder to find them." She was about to ask him what he meant when she realized that he was simply teaching her another facet of hunting. To him, that the prey was the human equivalent of bad bloods, those Yautja that were dishonored, meant nothing. It was simply a reaction of prey to an area becoming too lethal for them. She growled an affirmative in response, as she had been doing the past few days instead of using human language if she knew the correct sounds to make, and they were ones her human physiology could produce.
"I know where the new location is supposed to be, Elder" He looked at her in surprise, then clicked in approval.
"We should go scout it to find why the prey believe it safer for them, first. Then we can hunt."
-
"Well that's why they decided to move here, I guess" she sighed. The five hunters were on top of a roof a few blocks away from the new building, and it was obvious to all of them why the humans believed themselves safer here. The building was the modern day equivalent of a fortress.
When Ito had suggested the bait house, his original intention had been to select a building that would work as a trap. Now that they were using it as a bunker out of fear, the advantages that had been designed into the disused data center for protection against disasters, natural or man made, were now exploited for protection against another sort of disaster – the Yautja.
Several stories tall, the building was completely windowless, and scans with her mask showed the walls to be heavily reinforced concrete with only two heavy steel-reinforced doors for entry. The building had been meant to house computers, not people, so the lack of exits wasn't a priority for the designers, it seemed. As they crouched on the roof top watching the building, they were able to detect a large number of guards, all heavily armed and patrolling the building at irregular intervals. She counted at least fifteen guards on the outside alone, and the heavy construction meant that the inside was too shielded for scanning with the limited abilities of Yautja facemask technology – there was no way of determining how many more were housed inside.
"I get the distinct impression I managed to really piss them off, I think. There's no way I could have hunted in there" she muttered. The Elder growled a laugh.
"Do you always give up your hunts so easily, young blood?" She bristled, but she could hear the tone of amusement in his voice and that prevented her from retorting hotly to the perceived insult. The Elder looked over the building once more, then gestured to all of them to return to the ship.
"You have something in mind?" she asked him as they were descending to street level. He clicked a laugh at her in reply.
"Tomorrow we shall hunt there." She blinked under her mask, but he made no effort to expand on his plan, so she paced along with the others, frustrated but with excitement building inside her. The Elder seemed too amused by the situation to not have something spectacular in mind.
