Eric Flint - The rats, The bats and the Ugly

VIP免费

2024-12-19 0 0 706.99KB 343 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Back | Next

Contents

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Hominidae

Chip: A vat-grown conscript. A thing of rags and tatters.

Ginny: A damsel of high degree-o.

Fitz: The very model of a modern Major.

Van Klomp: A large parachute officer.

Sanjay Devi: Hecate.

John Needford: A schemer, well-dressed.

Len Liepsich: A schemer, hitching up his pants.

Mike Capra: A legal beagle.

Ogata: A legal eagle.

Talbot Cartup: A villain in the first degree.

General Cartup-Kreutzler: His brother-in-law; and accomplice.

Tana Gainor: the original asp in Cleopatra's bosom; with bosom.

Rattae

Fal: Great of stomach and small of martial vigor.

Doll: A rattess of considerably negotiable virtue.

Melene: A rat damsel of acumen and a very attractive tail.

Pistol: One-eyed rat-at-arms.

Nym: A veritable giant among rats; with a mechanical bent.

Doc: Rat philosopher and medic.

Ariel: A rattess of fell repute; and always with Fitz.

Pooh-Bah: A rat of many parts.

Battae

Bronstein: She-bat who must be obeyed.

O'Niel: A somewhat plump bat, fond of drink.

Eamon: A large and dangerous bat.

Et Alia

Fluff: Alias Kong

Yetteth: Jampad; a prisoner on the Korozhet ship.

Darleth: Jampad; head of the Ratafia

Various Korozhet villains.

And a large supporting cast, numbering in millions for the greatest production off Earth!

Prologue

The planet Harmony and Reason, a human colony;

a starship, both vast and alien, in the middle of

George Bernard Shaw City, the colony's capital.

At center stage: five Korozhet conspirators,

all members of the inner-high,

in their adjoining waterbaths.

074348846602.jpg

"The un-implanted human, the one that was reported to the spawnship as being involved in this disaster,

must certainly die—and as soon as possible. He will have seen too much when he rescued the juvenile

Shaw creature."

So spoke the Ruling Five-high, with the certainty that always characterized her while in female form.

The Purple Seventh-instar clattered its spines in vigorous agreement. "While he is a low-status creature,

we cannot overestimate the importance of this human's immediate death. It was from just such neglect

that the campaign against the Jampad suffered. Serious steps must be taken with the human military.

Fortunately, we have virtually complete control of their command structure. We will of course not be

betrayed by the implanted human or the uplifted creatures. Nonetheless, I agree it is wise to have the

implanted human taken into custody as their social structure makes her death undesirable. Difficult, for a

certainty."

"Do you think that this 'Cartup' will understand the implications of the device he has been provided with

for securing her compliance?" asked the High Five-spike. "There are certain inherent dangers involved.

We do not want the trigger phrases to be discovered."

"The calculators indicate a very low probability. He is unaware that the device would affect anyone

except this 'Virginia Shaw.' He is quite unaware of what it actually does. It contains the standard

self-destruct booby traps, after all."

* * *

In the diffuse green light, cringing figures moved hastily between the spiky shadows reclining in their

waterbaths. The slaves were careful not to make any noise that might disturb their masters. To do so was

to invite certain pain, if not death, and even the most wretched slaves still clung to life. The air was full of

hissing sighs. The squat, blue-furred, four-armed slave carrying the bucket of live baby Nerba, the master

species' favorite snack, almost gagged at the thickness of the naphthalene reek.

"Still. One of the Overphyle is dead at the hands of a human. We cannot allow subject races to think that

this is even possible—let alone something that will go unpunished. Is there any chance that word could

spread back among the Magh' nests or the human hives?"

The Nerba-carrier did not allow the faintest change in his posture or manner to betray his pleasure. The

implant in his head said that the death of one of the Overphyle was an awful thing—but the

Nerba-carrier's hatred of the Overphyle, and all their works, was almost as intrinsic to him as the

programming not to attack a Korozhet was in his implanted soft-cyber chip.

He walked closer to one of the inner-high, and placed the Nerba cub on the floor. The soft-furred little

creature creeled weakly and hungrily. A dart hissed out of one of the Korozhet killing spines, and

impaled it. The little thing screamed as the neurotoxins were pumped into it. The Purple Seventh-instar

heaved itself out of the bath, humped over the prey, and began to evert its stomach into the snack. Nerba

died slowly, and this one was still pleading weakly as the digestive enzymes liquefied its flesh.

Controlling his revulsion, the slave walked on to the next inner-high of the Pentarch. This one was

speaking, so he waited, respectfully. "They are still putative subjects. I hold, despite their dexterity, that

these humans will make poor slaves."

The Purple Seventh-instar that was busy feeding clattered its spines again. "Those we have captured and

implanted have proved more than adequate."

"But their ability to resist our Magh' client-species is better than predicted. And if the confused reports

coming from their media are to be believed, there is a possibility that our plans and works might be

uncovered."

As always, that being its principal function, the High Five-spike was the voice of caution. The Ruling

Five-high shifted in her waterbath.

"It is a low probability, considering the level of influence we have on their leadership structure. But

nonetheless we must send in a clean-up squad. And perhaps step up supplies of materiel from the

spawnship to our client-species. See that the Magh' are contacted on the closed beam, and given such

information as the clean-up team can gather. As a final alternative there is always direct action. We have

a large slave army, potentially, at our disposal."

The youngest of the inner-high flicked his spines in respectful assent. The slave had learned to read the

clatters as clearly and easily as the soft-cyber implant had taught him the Overphyle's speech. The

youngest of the inner-high was still diffident in his suggestions. He was only a sixth instar, after all.

"Perhaps some chemical agents, Highest? And some more sophisticated delivery mechanisms, for the

client-species?"

"Yes. And bring my snack, slave. Before I dine on you."

The slave did. Then moved cautiously away, as hastily as he dared. He was just in earshot when he heard

one of them say something that made him nearly drop his bucket. "Do you think that there is any

substance in the report that a Jampad was freed in this debacle?"

The slave desperately wanted to stay and listen. But he dared not. There were slaves of some seven

different species on this ship. But he was the only one of his kind, and he had not believed there could be

others, so many light-years from home. Had one of his people succeeded in breaking free?

Elsewhere in George Bernard Shaw City,

in a space more cavernous but no less dark.

At center stage: other conspirators.

The third of the plotters, as usual, arrived late for the meeting.

"Where the hell have you been?" demanded one of those already there. "How can somebody with a

reputation for being a genius not read a clock? You know—those gadgets that have two hands, one long,

one short."

"Save that tone for those who intimidate easily. You ought to know by now it's wasted on me. Besides,

I've been productively occupied."

The conspirators, from long years working together, knew each other's tastes. One of them smiled evilly

at the tardy one. "Killing swine, eh?"

"Not yet. Just sharpening the blades."

* * *

When the meeting was over, the old tastes resurfaced.

"When shall we three meet again?"

The other two laughed. "When the hurlyburly's done, of course," chuckled one of them.

"And the battle's lost and won," added the other, in a grimmer tone of voice. "Assuming you don't show

up late again."

Back | Next

Contents

Chapter 1

The colony world of Harmony and Reason.

Enter a military vehicle, returning from the front.

Its motley inhabitants, each in their own fashion,

celebrating the first victory of humankind and

its allies against the alien Magh' invaders.

"Hic!"

Private Chip Connolly looked up into the terrifying upside-down gargoyle-face. The long white canine

teeth gleamed against the twisted, folded blackness of that face. The batwings briefly unfolded, as the

jeep hit some severe corrugations.

"Hic!" said the plump bat again, dangling from the metal struts that held the canvas cover.

"Why are you making that funny noise, O'Niel?" asked Virginia, snuggling into Chip and blinking

myopically at the bat.

The bat blinked back at her. "Why Ginny, 'tis traditional when you're drunk as drunk can be. And it is

feeling I am as if the drunk is turning into a hangover, indade. So in the interest o' prolonging the drunk,

I'm after stickin' to the tradition."

Chip grinned. There was something reassuring about the fact that after all they'd been through, the bats

still stuck to their phony Irish accent, right down to the detail of saying "indade" instead of "indeed."

"The normal method," he explained considerately, "is to drink some more." Bats were new to strong

drink. It was only in the interests of trans-species friendship that they'd ventured on it at all.

The cyber-uplifted bat's genome had been spliced heavily with the leaf-nosed Rhinolophidae. It wasn't

possible for the evil black crinkled face to turn pale. But the bat shuddered. "Indade . . . no. I . . . I

couldn't, Chip." Somehow the voice managed to carry the very essence of a green pallor.

A long nose twitched up from underneath the seat. It was the front part of a ratlike creature the size of a

small Siamese cat, which, with a stoatlike lithe sinuosity flowed up onto the seat. The ratty thing had an

eye-patch, a bottle of grog and a suitably piratical expression to go with these accouterments. He waved

the bottle at O'Niel in a friendly fashion. "Here, you fat swasher, take some sack."

The bat shuddered, shook his head so vigorously that his large ears flapped. By the pained grimace that

followed, he plainly regretted that action. "No . . ." he said, weakly.

The elephant shrew wrinkled its long nose, and with a red-toothed snigger waved the bottle under the

bat's nose. "I'faith, methinks 'tis a fine brew, and here we are back on wheels. 'Twas the best way to

travel you said. You had to choose between drinking and flying, and, as you had a vehicle, you gave up

the flying."

"To be sure, I am fond o' vehicles, Pistol," said the bat. He looked disdainfully at the truck. "Though,

indade, this one is no patch on a foine noble beastie loike the tractor, but I'm after wondering if they can

arrest the motion o' this one for a while. 'Tis vilely ill I think I am about to be." O'Niel descended in a

sprawl of wings onto the seat.

Pistol winked at Chip and Virginia. "I will not say 'greasy egg,' O'Niel—or what of a fine fatty slab of

cold Maggot?"

Chip was always amazed at the range of expression that the soft-cyber-uplifted creatures could coax out

of their voice-synthesizers. Rats didn't have a lot of spare sympathy for anyone at the best of times, and,

on the subject of hangovers, even less. But O'Niel, who could normally give as good as he got, looked

distinctly unwell. Best keep the peace . . .

Before he could intervene, however, the bat lurched erect and launched for the open back of the truck.

He didn't quite make it and landed clumsily on the last seat, retching.

A gargantuan ear-shattering bellow of outrage erupted. "Santa Maria, San' Marco . . . San' Cristophoro .

. . you conjoneless flying mouse! Watch where you are up-a-bringing!"

The owner of the vast voice stood up and shook a furious fist at the hapless bat. The creature was

considerably smaller than his voice—and smaller than the bat. Except for his tail, the little lemurlike

galago would have fitted into a soup mug. He wore the remains of a frogged red velvet waistcoat, and

made up for his size with volume and attitude.

The huge-eyed miniature primate-caballero twitched his tail angrily. Flicked at a spot on his waistcoat.

"My honor she is impinged upon! To say nothing of my precious waistcoat! I challenge you, you . . .

fledermaus. I demand a duel!"

"Name your seconds, sir!" he bellowed at the hapless bat. The bat was at least twice the soft-furred

galago's size, but was certainly in no condition to respond.

O'Niel groaned and clung to the tailgate of the truck with his wing claws. "If it is killing me you wish, Don

Fluff, could you not be after doin' it quietly? It's something of the headache I have."

"Indade. Will you all be shutting up?" demanded another sleeper, in the Irish accent of the bat-voice

synthesizers.

Then the vehicle veered wildly. It overcorrected and skidded, tossing them all about. With a squeal of

brakes, it bounced, nearly rolled. Righted . . . and then came to a stop at about a forty-five degree angle.

Chip picked himself up off the floor, off Ginny. She was smiling worriedly up at him. "Is your arm all

right?" she asked.

"I'm fine," he said, feeling at the laser wound on his shoulder. The infantry doctor had said it should

recover more easily than a knife wound would have. "Everybody else okay?"

The bats had taken to the wing when the crash occurred. They were all fine. The fierce caballero had

flung himself into Virginia's arms, and clung as tightly as only a small primate can. "I had to protect you,

señorita," he said, shakily.

Meanwhile Chip was doing a quick roll-call of rats.

They were all unhurt, barring Pistol, who was nursing a cut paw-hand and lamenting over the loss of his

looted bottle of over-proof brandy.

And Nym. The gigantic rat of mechanical inclination was missing. For an awful moment, Chip thought he

must have been flung out of the vehicle, and be lying broken at the roadside.

Then the horrible truth dawned. Obviously, to judge by the vile language issuing from Bronstein, Fat Fal

and even Doc, the same thing had dawned on all of them.

"Who let that shogging mad bastard whoreson drive?!" demanded Fal.

* * *

It proved to be true enough. Chip crawled backwards, out into the ditch full of glutinous mud, and then

around to the cab. The trooper who had been driving was still sitting there, staring in shock at the ditch . .

. and the stone wall they'd missed. Barely. And Nym was still clutching the wheel, his eyes manic and his

snout still contorted in a wild grin, making brrm-brmmm noises.

Chip shook his head and sat down in the mud and started laughing.

Three minutes later, they had hauled the shocked driver out of the vehicle, even if it was apparent that the

vehicle was not coming out of the ditch.

The trooper shook his head. "He said he could drive . . . So I thought it would do no harm to have him

stand on my lap and let him hold the wheel . . ."

"Here," said Nym waving a bottle at him. "Some griefs are med'cinable. 'Twas not a patch on the tractor,

but not a bad vehicle to drive."

"Drive? Drive! You mad animal—" The driver coughed as he took an unwary swallow of the proffered

drink. It was raw, uncolored, high-test brandy looted from an abandoned wine-farm. It would have made

great lighter fluid.

They all pushed. The rats and bats didn't have much push to offer, given their mass, but they tried. They

bounced, heaved at the truck. Piled rocks in the ditch. Became covered in mud . . . and the vehicle

stayed embedded in the mud-churned ditch.

"Well, at least we're stuck in the mud on this side of our lines," said Chip, digging for a jack behind the

seat of the jeep. "And I'm not in that much of hurry to rejoin the army, anyway."

"Yes. Things could be worse," said Doc cheerfully, offering Melene some of the brandy. "One has to

view this in Neoplatonistic terms, I think."

"Adversity's sweet milk, philosophy," said Fal sourly. "Spare me. So what do we do now? Send the bats

to fetch a rescue?"

"Indade, no. I think we hang tight. A vehicle will be along presently and they can pull us out." O'Niel was

one of nature's laziest fliers.

"Methinks 'tis goodly advice," said Pistol, stealing Fal's bottle. "If they're going to hang us for this, that is.

If I have any choice I'll not hang sober."

" 'Twas not what I meant," said the bat. "I meant a comfortable dangle by our feet."

* * *

Standing in the soft rain, looking at the truck in the ditch, listening to the rats and bats bicker amicably,

with a mutual lack of understanding—despite a common tongue, Virginia Shaw had to think about her

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

Back|NextContentsDRAMATISPERSONAEHominidaeChip:Avat-grownconscript.Athingofragsandtatters.Ginny:Adamselofhighdegree-o.Fitz:TheverymodelofamodernMajor.VanKlomp:Alargeparachuteofficer.SanjayDevi:Hecate.JohnNeedford:Aschemer,well-dressed.LenLiepsich:Aschemer,hitchinguphispants.MikeCapra:Alegalbeagle.Og...

展开>> 收起<<

Eric Flint - The rats, The bats and the Ugly.pdf

共343页,预览69页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Eric Flint - The rats, The bats and the Ugly

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: