Heat by R. Lee Smith Read Free Book Online

shackles.
    And these were just the obstacles of the earth itself. Then there was the heat. The dryness of the air. The sweat and the dust that turned to mud and baked hard in the cracks of his body. The sound of his breath rattling and the slow, spreading soreness of his throat. The ache of his over-used muscles. The throb of his bruising feet. Tagen was a soldier and he was accustomed to rough living, but there was such a thing as too much.
    When he had at last succumbed to his body’s demand for rest, it had been full-on night and still hot as hell. He had made his camp in the first flat patch of ground he saw, scraping all the organic debris into a pile and igniting it with a shot of plasma. The gods knew he didn’t need the extra heat, but it got rid of the thorns and fallen branches and it was soothing to his strained nerves to see something so familiar as a fire here on this alien world. Then he had stripped out of his uniform, all the way down to his regulation loin-guard with the Fleet insignia on front, and sprawled out flat and exhausted, offering his body freely to the biting insects in exchange for the occasional blessed kiss of a breeze.
    It hadn’t been the best night’s sleep, but it surely hadn’t deserved to end so suddenly. Now this human had gotten the drop on him, which was embarrassing as much as it was perilous. And here Tagen was, still in his loin-guard.
    The human wasn’t paying any overt attention to him, although it had clearly seen him and was coming down the sloping hill toward him. It was dressed in a uniform of some sort, brown as mud, with short sleeves that showed off grotesquely-haired arms. The human’s gaze was occupied by a pad of papers in its hand. It was scratching at them with a stylus, writing as it approached, and speaking in a relaxed, easy-going manner.
    “S’far as I know, it’s still legal to run around the woods in your underoos, but there will be a fairly hefty price for your campfire, which you cannot help but have noticed is illegal and has been illegal since the drought laid on. Son, I hate like hell to have you start your hangover on a low note like this, but you are going to have to pack up and come with me back to the ranger station. If you don’t, you are going to be under arrest.”
    Tagen peered closely at the human’s lips, as though he could see the meaning of the words better if he saw how they were made. It was N’Glish, that much he recognized. But apart from a very few individual words, he had no idea what was being said and no way to form context enough to guess.
    “You have the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney, if it comes to that, since it’s your right to take this citation to court, but with the fire danger recently, I should warn you that the local judges have been known to slap a few asses in jail. So be a sport, pay up, and don’t make a hassle. You can’t win. Just grab your gear and we’ll make this as painless as possible.”
    “Hail,” Tagen said tentatively.
    The human looked up for the first time, one eyebrow raised. “Hail?”
    Something in the human’s tone told Tagen that he hadn’t used the right word. He tried to think what other greeting might suffice. The slaves he’d encountered in the past…well, there was very little in the way of niceties. The language discs he’d studied on the way to Earth had surely told him one or two, but he’d been paying far greater attention to translating more important phrases, like ‘Take me to your planet’s security array’, and ‘Have you seen the prisoner I am seeking’? or even ‘Where is the privy’?
    The human was frowning at him. Tagen switched to Panyol, with which he had greater confidence. “
Hola. Mi nombre Tagen Pahnee. Soy un oficial de la ley
.”
    “
No habla espanyol
, Paco,” the human said, still frowning. “This here’s—What the hell?” Its gaze had dropped to Tagen’s feet.
    Tagen was beginning to feel control of this situation