Fic: The Summer Intern (cont.)

[jeriendhal]

Nan slipped both of the pistols into the belt of her culottes, then drew her own cloak over her head.  With the hood up it activated automatically, the view through the field of invisibility grown dim and slightly fuzzy, like an aging monitor screen.  “You there, Nez?” she asked, raising her paw cautiously in front of her.  It touched a section of invisible fabric that covered something soft, warm and slightly squishy.
 
“Yikes!  Please don’t grab there again,” Nez said, her own voice sounding distorted through her cloak’s field. 
 
“Sorry,” Nan muttered, glad her roommate couldn’t see her ears turning back in embarrassment.  “All right, follow me.”  She made her way down the path of beaten foliage, walking so slowly that occasionally Nez bumped up against her back.  At one point they both stepped back from the path as yet another pair of armed slavers, one a female creo, the other a disreputable looking galen with his race’s typically thin humanoid features, feather head pelt and delicate hearing tines, went past them.
 
“Grag and Jeljel ought to have their stupid grey heads smashed open, or their equipment cut off, for getting so distracted,” the galen said as they walked past.  “We need to be getting out of here.”
 
“Tell me somethin’ I don’t know,” the creo muttered.  “Bad enough we’re workin’ for a…”  Her voice faded as they headed up the path.
 
“They’re looking for the missing creo,” Nan said as they emerged from under cover.  “The alarm might go up if they don’t find them soon, and will go up if they do find them.  We have to hurry!”
 
“Right.  Lead on,” Nez agreed.  She followed Nan as they headed up the path once more.  They stopped again some ten meters further when they spotted a tall metal pole some five meters tall stuck in the ground.  They looked up to a fine netting mounted at the top of the pole.  The net was made of metallic threads and sparked as raindrops struck it.   “What’s that?” Nez wondered.
 
“I saw it when I was in the Service,” Nan said.  “It’s camouflage netting, like our spoofer cloaks but designed to cover a large area of ground from spy sats and surveillance drones.  It cloaks everything from visible light to x-rays and infrared.  We have to be getting close now.”
 
“We’d better get off the path then,” Nez said. They went back into the cover of the trees, crawling forward on their haunches. Finally they came to the edge of a wide clearing, perhaps hundred meters across, grasses and trees chopped down by what looked like energy weapons judging from the blackened stumps and lingering burning smell. In the center of the clearing, sitting hunched down on its landing gear like hunting grass chaser, was a small cargo vessel. Around were pitched several tents and at least five large cages, each easily big enough to hold four grass chaser mounts. Instead they held closer to thirty ferin each, huddled miserably against the rain. Two contained the bucks, two others contained the does, and the fifth cage holding almost twenty joeys of various ages being tended by a pair of beleaguered does locked in with them. Every adult ferin had a dampening collar locked to their head and several looked wounded. “Bismallah,” Nez said in quiet shock.

Nan squinted, trying to get a better look at the cages through the rain. “I don’t understand. There are more ferin here than were reported in the troupe we were coming to help. Where did they all come from?”

While they watching the appalling scene, a ferin was escorted out of the ship’s yawning cargo bay door by a pair of slavers, his arms bound behind him, his tail hobbled close to one leg to keep him too off balanced to jump properly. Despite the rain matting his hair and the blood running freely down his face from a cut in his forehead, Nan recognized him immediately by the old feed port scars on his chest. “I know that one,” she whispered excitedly to Nez. “It's the rogue buck everyone has been looking for, the one they think murdered the Furrows.”

“What’s he doing here then?” Nez asked.

Nan shaded her eyes from the rain, trying to look more closely through the bars of the cages. “I think I recognize a couple of does from his troupe. I think they’ve been captured along the troupe we had expected to meet.”

"That doesn't make any sense. I thought that they were supposed to be marauding around in the wilderness."

"Apparently not," Nan said. "Wait, what are they doing?"

A figure, smaller than the nearby creo, emerged from the ship, enveloped in a heavy rain cloak. In their hand they carried a heavy sealable plastic bag, of the sort used to transport objects that needed to protected during brief jaunts in vacuum. The figure gestured to one of the creo holding the buck. The creo pulled the buck's head up with a yank to his hair, and the figure slipped the bad over the buck's head, sealing it tightly against his neck with several turns off duct tape. They let go of the buck, who rolled around on the ground for several moments struggling for breath, before calming down and rising to his knees awkwardly.

"Oh, that's nasty," Nez said, managing to somehow sound appalled and appreciative at the same time.

"I don't understand," Nez said. "Okay, I see they sealed the bag over his head so when he started running out of air his vacuum support instincts kicked in, but what's the point besides frightening him?"

"Think about it," Nez said. "In thirty minutes or so his bion reserve is going to be depleted and he's going to fall into a minimum life support coma. They do that to the others as well and they can stack the ferin up like cord wood in that little ship."

"Oh, Goddess bless, we have to stop them!"

"How?" Nez hissed. "There's ten slavers that I see and two of us."

"We keep it simple," Nez said. "We've got our spoofer cloaks on. Take one of the guns and head to the cages. We blast off the locks as quick as we can and the ferin can just flee into the jungle."

"So what do we do when nearly a dozen slavers start shooting at us?"

"Run like we've got the Varn Dream Stalker behind us. We get more than ten meters into the jungle then the ferin can help us hide in the trees and the slavers will never spot us."

"I don't know," Nez said uncertainly. "How fast can you run with your tail injured?"

Nan wished she hadn't brought the subject up. She'd been more or less able to ignore the occasional shooting pain that went up her spine as she'd walked along, but Nez's question made her aware of just how much it was hurting. "I can run pretty fast when I'm motivated," she temporized.

"All right, I can't think of anything better myself," Nez agreed grudgingly. "Let's do it."

TBC

And really, what could possibly go wrong at this point.

Comments

[drhoz.livejournal.com]

trashing the ship's engine didn't occur to them?

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Nope. Though neither of them are engineers. Making the powerplant explode might be a bad thing given how close the ferins' cages are. :)

[drhoz.livejournal.com]

good point

[lilfluff.livejournal.com]

To bad there isn't a good way to bring down that camouflage netting. Hmm. Although if it's sparking when the rain hits then presumably it requires power... But there'd probably be an almost instant alarm if it stopped working.

I'd hate to be one of those slavers once they're caught. Whoever is allowed to take charge of the case, they'll almost certainly be 'Made an example of'.

[mjkj.livejournal.com]

Ah, well, the first thing I would do would be disabeling the cloaking of the area - and then go for the ferin ... (or split up to do both...)

*comforts those poor Ferin*

mjkj