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

of soapy cum as the human killed. It had a blaster for the Fleet, but a knife for the females, and both its arms worked furiously, swinging and slashing and firing all at once. The females were screaming, struggling, dying all around him.
    There was no closing in on it. Tagen remembered seizing a female’s leg and yanking her under cover with him, containing her frantic struggles as he tried to think what to do. He could feel the blaster fire peppering the upended breeding table he was hiding behind, could feel the metal warming slowly to the melting point.
    And then Commander Cura had ended it all, and much the same way Tagen would someday do himself. He’d drawn his plasma gun and let the human catch it right in the heart. It had been just as swift, just as brutal and reeking a death, but Tagen had never questioned the need. Some outcomes could not be avoided. But had this really been one of those?
    The human Tagen had killed was still smoking, but the sounds of plasma eating flesh had finally stopped. Its right hand was twisted under itself, still reaching for its belt. Fat swelled out the sides of its uniform. Its hair stirred in the little breeze that trickled down the slope before him. It didn’t look much like a threat. Certainly it had not been raving or psychotic. Frightened, yes. Perhaps dangerous. But not savagely so.
    Worse, its uniform gave Tagen the distinct impression that the human had been an officer of some sort, one of Earth’s On-World Security force. An officer, in other words, who was perfectly justified in treating Tagen as a threat. Humans didn’t know any better. It was Tagen’s responsibility to take control of the situation, with force if necessary, but without gratuitous violence. He represented the Fleet. He represented all of Jota. He couldn’t just blast away at everything that took an unexpected move.
    Tagen holstered his gun and went unsteadily toward the body. Its meat was soft under his hands, still damp with sweat. He turned it over, doing his best not to look at the shocked and staring eyes (there were tree needles stuck to them now), and studied the weapon in the human’s dead hand.
    It looked like a primitive sort of gun.
    Impossible. Humans had no such technology.
    Badly shaken, Tagen rolled the corpse back onto its face. He backed up, retrieving the rest of his uniform when he stepped on it and quickly dressing. He strapped on his gunbelt, cinching it tighter than was required, to feel the pinch of its reality.
    It was no weapon at all, just a device that any resembled one. A device for…something, dammit! Something any Human Studies scientist would recognize at once. It made no difference. It was a mistake, that was all.
    He got his supply pack, and went rapidly up the slope on his way east. There, he stopped in his tracks.
    There was a road at the top of the slope. There was a groundcar on the road.
    Its design was alien and somehow sinister, but it was perfectly recognizable all the same. It was a groundcar, and it could be nothing else. The driver’s side window was open. Tagen could smell smoke and sweat inside. Human sweat. The human had driven this groundcar.
    Tagen clutched at his brow as though he could pull his thoughts out and crush them in his hand. He could hear his blood pounding in his ears. It was not fear that had him now, but it was not too damned far from it. The gun and the groundcar. What did it mean?
    A thought struck him suddenly, a wonderful thought. A thought to explain everything.
    The human he had just killed was in league with the slavers who preyed on this world. The slavers had provided it with the gun and the groundcar both. The reason Tagen did not recognize the design of the gun was because it had been constructed here solely for human use, as the groundcar had been. With that technology, the human would be an unstoppable force, able to gather any number of its defenseless fellows and to hold them somewhere until the slavers returned. In