Ch 1 Part Three

Chapter One

Part Three

The human clutched the child, his hold punishing as he wielded the boy like a shield. “Don’t come any closer. I’ll kill him. I swear I will.”

The boy struggled, flailing even as his captor dragged him backward.

Gus shook her head at the child. “Calm.”

Surprisingly, the boy listened. His expression oddly trusting as he rested in the human’s hold.

Silly child. Hadn’t his parents taught him the perils of trusting a stranger?

Gus sighed to herself, a little worried about his instincts of self preservation. She forgot sometimes that there were those who didn’t grow up in hell. Until now, this boy had probably never encountered an adult who didn’t have his best interests at heart. He didn’t know the horrors that existed in this universe or how sometimes the most evil beings hid behind the prettiest of faces.

“What are you doing? I said don’t come any closer!” the human yelled as Gus started toward him. “I’m not playing! I really will kill him!”

“To carry out that threat, you’d have to be breathing,” Gus pointed out.

“Wha—?”

The human’s eyes rolled so far back in his head that only the white showed. Bubbles appeared at the corners of his mouth. He started to shake, his breathing becoming labored as his lungs filled with blood.

The boy pulled away as the man’s hold slackened.

“I’m afraid, my unfortunate friend, you’ve already cross the river Styx.” Gus glided toward them, taking out a bottle of pills from her cloak. “You just didn’t know it yet.”

The boy backed further away from the man. Surprise on his features. But no fear. Just a grim kind of satisfaction.

Normally upon witnessing something like someone randomly dropping dead, a person’s first thought was of themselves. Usually something along the lines of “Am I next?”.

This boy felt nothing but hatred and relief over his enemy’s death.

“How did you—?” the boy started in human standard.

Ah, there it was. The second most popular question.

Rather than answer and risk exposing secrets not even her siblings were privy to, Gus popped a pill into his mouth before he could finish that sentence.

He swallowed by reflex.

“What did you give me?” he demanded, fear finally making an appearance.

“Antidote.”

Gus assumed he didn’t want to go the way of the human.

She’d taken a chance spreading one of her poison’s through the air with her limited amount of ki. It had paid off though. The human’s fear and panic had hastened the spread of the poison through his system.
If the boy hadn’t listened when she told him to stay calm, this situation could have had a much different outcome.

The boy touched his throat. “An antidote to what?”

“Poison.”

The boy flushed at Gus’s tone.

“Here,” Gus said, stuffing the Nawana orchid into his arms before he could say anything else.

The boy stiffened, holding the orchid as far out from his body as he physically could.

“It won’t hurt you,” Gus said, heading back toward Caius.

“Are you sure about that?” the boy asked, a hint of sass in his tone.

“Don’t touch the leaves, flower, or roots and you’ll be fine.”

“So basically the entire plant,” the boy grumbled.

“Would you prefer dealing with him?” Gus asked, tilting her head at Caius.

“Yes, actually. I would.”

Gus eyed the boy’s scrawny looking arms and then Roake’s unconscious commander, half tempted. Unfortunately, Caius’s frame dwarfed the boy’s. Even with the aid of soul’s breath, the boy would have a hard time getting him into the container. Let alone these two others.

“You complain a lot,” Gus said, reaching down to take Caius’s ankles.

The boy’s response was lost as faint shouting came from a distance.

They froze, listening.

“Quick,” Gus urged.

When possible, she preferred to hide rather than fight.

Once again, Gus bent to grab Caius by his ankles. A lot of grunting and straining ensued as she dragged him inch by painful inch toward her container.

Unlike some of her siblings, Gus wasn’t adept at using ki to strengthen her musculature and skeleton. It took hours of training on her part to simply be considered just barely stronger than the average human.

The boy was a bundle of nerves next to her, fidgeting anxiously, his fear of the orchid forgotten as he clutched its pot to his chest like some kind of talisman.

Despite his rising anxiety, he never once urged Gus to leave Caius behind. Nor did he tell her to hurry.

He was quiet and focused. A protective shadow as they made their way the short distance to her container.

Finally, Gus slapped her hand on the hidden bio scanner on the container’s side, murmuring her password in a low voice.

The container unsealed, allowing them entrance.

“Inside,” Gus ordered.

The boy dashed inside as Gus renewed her struggles. By the time she got Caius’s lower half into the container, Gus was red faced and sweaty. She pushed and shoved, not being gentle, until at last he was all the way inside.
Even then, her job remained unfinished. Something had to be done about the trio of dead humans and the blood trail that led straight to her door.

“Stay,” Gus ordered the boy as she grabbed a couple of madras. A particularly interesting sub species of moss that thrived and quickly multiplied in damp, wet environments.

She’d once seen a single plant replicate itself enough to cover a ten meter surface in less than half an hour. The most fascinating aspect was the way it had completely absorbed the liquid it had taken root in. To the point there was no trace of it left afterward. Not even a molecular bio-signature.

She was hoping it had the same effect on blood.

The people who had done this to Caius likely had their own method of tracking. After all, even humans had long possessed chemical reagents capable of identifying the presence of blood. She needed a way to wipe all trace of his passage. The madras was her answer.

Hopefully, it also worked against those species, many of them tsavitee, who came equipped with natural biological traits that made them excellent trackers.

The very aptly named tracker among them.

God, Gus hoped it wasn’t a tsavitee tracker. They were worse than bloodhounds, possessing a sixth sense that was almost impossible to fool.

After summoning a cargo trawler and several cleaner bots Gus darted back outside to scatter the madras over the pool of blood that Caius had left.

She waited with bated breath as they remained inert, floating on the blood’s surface, doing nothing. Round specks of unassuming brown and green.

Then, gradually, the tightly furled leaves began to uncurl. Wiry hairs extending from their bottom as the body of the madras started to poof out.

“It’s working,” Gus whispered, feeling excitement and fascination as tiny children plants sprouted from the extended leaves of the moss. In a few minutes, the blood would be gone and she would have several more madras moss to add to her collection.

That left her only the bodies to hide.

That’s where the trawler came in. A second later, it rounded the corner, trundling toward Gus like a well behaved beast of burden.

She bent, loading the first of the three humans into the trawler a few seconds later. It wasn’t as difficult as it had been with Caius. Human muscle mass wasn’t nearly as dense as Tuann. Not that these two had much muscle on them to begin with. Most of their bulk was due to fat.

The boy poked his head out to see what was keeping her. Gus waved him back. At the same time, she programmed the trawler to carry the bodies inside.

Once that was done, she set off to follow Caius’s blood trail, not forgetting to toss out a madras for every few drops she came across. They poofed out satisfyingly every time. Like fuzzy dandelion seeds.

Gus made a mental note to collect them on her way back. Madras weren’t common in the Consortium so she wasn’t worried about someone seeing them and immediately jumping to certain conclusions.

Still, better safe than sorry.

Her optimism that everything would turn out alright lasted until she rounded a row of containers and stumbled onto the scene of a massacre.

Blood was everywhere she looked. In pools on the ground. Streaks that ran up the sides of the containers. Arterial spray. There wasn’t an inch of space that Caius or his assailants hadn’t managed to bleed on.

Gus stared around her in dismay. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to hide this.”

With the sound of pursuit getting ever closer, it wouldn’t be long until this place was discovered. The first thing they’d do upon realizing they’d lost Caius’s trail would be to spread out and conduct a search of the nearby containers. They’d find Gus’s sanctuary. All her efforts would be for naught.

“Think, Pityrodia. What can you do in the time you have remaining?” Gus muttered.

There were no bodies. So at least there was that.

Though what Caius had done with them was a mystery for later

The whir of the cleaning bots she’d summoned earlier interrupted her panic.

That was it. If she couldn’t hide the blood, she’d spread it far and wide. Lay a false trail the humans would have no hope of following.

Gus whipped out the wrist scroll she kept on her person at all times. A basic model, it was nothing fancy, but it allowed her to communicate with the station’s systems.

As one of the shipyard’s administrators responsible for the smooth operation of Titan’s docks, she’d given herself admin privileges her first week on the job.

If, every once in a while, she also “vanished” certain containers using those same privileges, there was no one who could hold her accountable since a certain level of corruption was expected on Titan. As long as you didn’t go too far or mess with someone you shouldn’t, no one would comment.

That was how she’d managed to create her sanctuary. By redirecting certain containers. Mostly those who’d lost their owners. Either through death or because they failed to pay the station dues.

In a matter of seconds, the first of the cleaning bots she’d conscripted rounded the corner.

There was a whir as it deployed its cleaning brushes. Without the cleaning liquid, disabled courtesy of Gus, the bristles would spread the blood in small, concentric circles, leaving a trail behind it as the bot went on its merry little way.

With no bodies and no clear source, Caius’s pursuers would have no choice but to search the entire yard.

All several miles of it.

The last two bots trundled around the corner, joining the first in creating a path that would hopefully throw Caius’s pursuers off the scent.

Stopping only long enough to collect the now fully grown madras, Gus headed back home. Preoccupied as she was juggling an armful of madras while also re-activating her security systems, Gus failed to notice the boy standing as far on the opposite side of the room as he could get, his eyes wide and his features set in an expression of worry.

It wasn’t until a hand wrapped around her throat from behind, yanking her more firmly into a hard chest that she started paying attention again.

“Who are you?” the owner of that hand growled.

For a brief moment, Gus regretted the impulse that had led her to get involved. She should have left Caius where he lay. Once again, being nosy had brought her nothing but trouble.