Heat by R. Lee Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

slipping away. He held out his empty hands and began guardedly to rise. “All is well,” he said, picking his words carefully and with great difficulty. “I mean you no harm.”
    “Stay where you are!” The human’s voice was tight, frightened but admirably determined to face off. Humans were like that. It made them, for all their foibles, very dangerous. “Don’t you move a step or I’ll shoot you where you stand!”
    “I mean you no harm,” Tagen said again. His palms were itching, wanting the weight of his gun. The human’s eyes were wild with fear. “I am come to Earth seeking—”
    That was as far as Tagen got. The human dropped its papers and reached for its belt.
    Tagen didn’t think. He scarcely felt himself move. He dove and snatched his plasma gun from the belt beneath his cast-off jacket. He had it aimed and fired before the human even drew its weapon.
    The plasma hit the human square in the chest and ate rapidly through its target, stealing the breath the human drew to scream as it burned out the human’s lungs. Its heart was gone, but the body took three brutal seconds to die while the plasma finished neutralizing itself on tissue. A small wind chose that moment to come down off the slopes, setting the high branches to muttering. It also blew away the smoke that filled the human’s chest cavity, bringing Tagen the scent of charred meat as well as the sight of trees through the human’s torso. The human staggered, spitting foam in silence, and then dropped facedown, lifeless. It landed in a thorn bush. Vines buckled up through the hole Tagen had put in it, catching in the shirt on the human’s back. He could still hear sizzling.
    Tagen stood up slowly, his gun still aimed, tracking the corpse mechanically. His heart was racing, his mouth was dry. He could not take his eyes from that blackened ring that he had made of the human’s torso.
    What had come over him? The humans had only the most basic melee weapons, and Tagen had shot the dumb beast with superheated plasma. He could have just reached out and knocked the human unconscious. He could probably have disarmed the thing before it had even finished pulling the weapon. If nothing else, he could have drawn his neural stunner. He could have done a hundred things, and what he’d done instead was burn a hole right through its body nearly large enough to put his own head through.
    He had never killed a human before. He had seen them die, yes. Of illness, of malnourishment, of old wounds and infection, even of the stillness and exhaustion that was no more than their own grief.
    He had seen them killed. Not half a year past, he had been in on a raid to a Kevrian breeding facility, a fortress of rank rooms and half-dead humans hidden away on a small moon orbiting a lifeless world. The Kevrian operating the facility had taken the not-so unique step of allowing the male humans to control the population and had even armed them. When the Fleet invaded, a staggering number of those males had willingly come swarming out to fight them off while their masters escaped. Tagen could remember fighting them, working his way grimly through a thick knot of the naked, shouting beasts, dodging blades and blaster fire, and he knew that he’d done considerable injury to many of them, but he had eventually brought them under control. As he was wrestling the last of them into shackles, a Jotan cry of alarm had sounded, and he had answered, running down the fetid corridor toward the sounds of battle.
    He had come into a slaughter. A breeder male, easily the largest Tagen had ever seen, had retreated to this holding room and had been systemically butchering every female within.
    The male had been naked, made perfectly hairless by his master, with a breeder’s brand burned down its left side from its shoulder to its knee. Its tsesac, external and grotesquely swollen, had been cinched and fitted with a stimulator; its penis protruded angry and rodlike, still emitting jets