The Lawgivers: Gabriel Read online

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  Their stench led Gah-re-al to them. It always did.

  In general, they were nomadic. Roaming in undisciplined bands, they raped the world that had already been crippled by some cosmic cataclysm and then, when they had denuded an area of food and fouled or depleted the water supply, they moved on in search of more food and water. When they gathered, they often lived in the ruins of the civilized beings that had come before them and littered their ‘nests’ with the waste of their existence. In the heat, the unburied dead, the rotting remains of the beasts they occasionally caught and slew for food, and their own bodily waste produced a stench that was nearly overpowering and drew hordes of insects from miles around.

  They were filthy, disease ridden pests—violent barbarians that preyed upon one another—raping, pillaging, and laying waste to a land already struggling to recover.

  Trying to bring law and order to the savages, in Gah-re-al’s opinion, was a waste of time. He, and the other lawgivers, had been trying to do so for almost a decade of this world’s cycles, but for every warlord/merciless tyrant they eliminated, it seemed two rose to take their place. They brought order and meted out justice in one area and moved on and as soon as they did, chaos erupted in their wake.

  He wasn’t convinced by any means that the new directive would work any better.

  Rehabilitation, he thought with derisive contempt.

  That implied that they’d been civilized before and he saw nothing about the species to convince him that they ever had been.

  Survival in extreme situations had a way of peeling away civilized behavior, he knew. He’d seen it himself firsthand, many times, in his career as a soldier Elite—his first career, before he’d been reassigned as a lawgiver. He supposed the scientists studying the civilization that had once thrived here could be right. The barbarians that were ravaging what remained of the world could be the remnants of that civilization, but he found that hard to believe. He had yet to stumble across any that were making any attempt to rebuild and that was what civilized people did—they rebuilt.

  At least, that was what his species did.

  Mentally, he shrugged. They were aliens. Without more time and effort put forth to study them he didn’t see how any conclusions could be drawn about them.

  Not by the scientists, the khabler, who spent their days digging in the ground and carefully piecing together their puzzle from the things left behind. If they’d spent nearly as much time observing the behavior of the aliens, he doubted they would have reached the same conclusion.

  He shook off his thoughts as he reached a rise and the dung pile his nose had been leading him to came into view. His lips curled faintly in disgust as he caught the full brunt of the stench despite the fact that he’d become more or less accustomed to the smells.

  He doubted the social workers that were so happily plotting to ‘rehabilitate’ them would be nearly as optimistic if they’d seen one of the ‘villages’ where the savages squatted. In fact, he doubted they would realize that was what it was. The first time he’d stumbled upon one he’d thought it was nothing more than a refuse heap.

  Narrowing his eyes against the setting sun, Gah-re-al studied the village.

  There was little activity, but he spotted two guards posted at a makeshift gate and movement here and there within the compound to convince him that the nearly overpowering stench was from a fairly large number of savages that had been squatting on the place for months if not years.

  Doubtful that it was years, he amended derisively. They hadn’t found any areas capable of sustaining even a handful of people for more than a few months when they did nothing but live off the land.

  If they hadn’t brought years’ worth of supplies when the first colonists had arrived to establish a base on the new world, they would’ve been dead before the first supply ship arrived. But then they’d been aware before they targeted it for colonization that the planet had suffered an extinction event that had wiped out at least fifty percent of all life and possibly more.

  Finding planets suitable for colonization was no simple or easy task, regardless of their technical capabilities. For the most part, if the planet was reasonably stable and capable of sustaining life, it was already occupied and quite often with intelligent beings at some stage of development. If it was devoid of life, it usually couldn’t sustain life. There were some worlds where conditions were such that they could be terraformed and made habitable, but that was a damned expensive enterprise and it was far easier to find worlds like this one—which still required some terraforming but were basically livable and could be made more comfortable with minimal effort.

  Of course the natives were rarely happy to welcome them. As it was with most orphans, quelling discontent had been his job from the time that he’d reached the maturity to be released from the facility where he’d spent most of his childhood. This one only differed in the sense that the species native to this world was more of a problem than most. They bred faster for one thing, increasing in numbers despite the harsh conditions faster than the harsh environment and the predators of their own kind, could kill them off. The only thing that slowed them down at all was the fact that their gestation period was nearly a year, but the females of breeding age generally managed to turn out a new one yearly and having two at the time wasn’t particularly rare—producing even three or four at the time wasn’t unheard of for them.

  For another, despite the fact that they appeared to be a species just emerging, or close to emerging, as a civilization they weren’t prone to viewing his people, the udai, with the awe, fear, and respect they were accustomed to when they encountered primitives.

  If they were better organized and less prone to prey on one another they could have been even more of a problem—still could be if they were allowed to continue—so their politicians believed. For his part, he was more inclined to think they’d eventually wipe themselves out, not organize and put forth a concerted effort to wipe out the intruders—them.

  But then that scenario was what the social workers and scientists feared. They considered the natives an important species that should be preserved, that needed only guidance and a helping hand to ‘recover’.

  So while no one really agreed on why it was important to ‘do something’ with the natives, they all seemed to agree on one point, at least—they could no longer be left to their own devices. In most cases where they encountered intelligent but primitive species, interference was never considered wise or desirable—at least not interference of the sort the social workers had proposed—too much knowledge in the hands of primitive, undisciplined minds inclined toward violence was a dangerous thing. In this case, with this world, all bets seemed to be off. Instead of sending out an army to quell them and bring order as they generally did if they found some interference necessary—to keep the natives from interfering with their plans—those in power had put together a group of lawgivers to bring about ‘enlightenment’.

  When that plan didn’t seem to be working, they’d decided to change tactics. Clearly, it wasn’t enough to eliminate the predators among the natives. They needed to be educated out of their unacceptable behavior according to the social workers.

  He’d believe that when he saw it!

  He frowned, narrowing his eyes as he assessed the situation.

  He was an Elite. Clearing out the nest by wiping them out would be no problem even if he was right and he’d stumbled upon a sizeable group. It would be risky, but he had superior fighting skills and weapons far more powerful than anything they had.

  Unfortunately, simply wiping them out wasn’t allowed. Those weren’t his orders or the prime directive.

  He could understand the revulsion of such a drastic measure to a degree. It was disturbing that these creatures had been cast in a distorted image of the udai themselves—which, to the squeamish, made that solution seem rather too much like genocide—but the similarity went no deeper than that general appearance and he was more inclined to
agree with the faction that wanted to simply eradicate the ‘problem’. In their opinion, it wasn’t genocide, regardless of that physical similarity, to destroy the weak and sickly and foul and violent things that infested the world they’d found and crippled attempts to recover it by terraforming. They were a pestilence, a blight that strained the few resources the world had remaining to it.

  These creatures had to be something that had evolved after the city builders had vanished. They were scavengers, living primarily off the labors of the race that had vanished—and raiding the colonies of critical supplies. They did nothing but fuck and produce more to overburden dwindling resources and what they didn’t consume, they destroyed.

  The first colonists to arrive had nearly starved because the pests invaded their fields, trampling down the delicately nurtured plants they didn’t uproot and feed on.

  It hadn’t aroused any pity or empathy for them in the hearts of the colonists.

  Not surprisingly, the majority of the colonists, at least the first colonists, sided with the faction that thought eradication of the pests was the best solution.

  The scientists believed that the event that had brought the world of the builders to an end was a cosmic collision—one devastating enough to cause a mass extinction—or at least set one in motion. As far as he was concerned that nixed any possibility that these beings were related to those who’d built the cities they’d unearthed.

  The problem with being too dependent upon the technology of an advanced civilization was that the typical citizen had no real knowledge or understanding of the technology they were so dependent upon and when it was taken away from them they had no skills to survive. That, he was sure, was what had become of the builders—who’d been intelligent enough to build great cities and advanced technology but too arrogant to husband their resources or prepare themselves for disaster. They’d died out and this savage species had survived because they were savages.

  Lifting his nitin for a drink, Gah-re-al tilted his head and looked up at the star the natives called the sun. It rode low on the horizon, edging toward sunset.

  It was dangerous to enter a human village in the day time but even more so after dark.

  Particularly if one happened to be udai.

  The humans were terrified of them—which meant they attacked viciously and killed on sight if they could manage it.

  He shrugged. One udai of the Elite was more than a match for a dozen humans—no matter how savage.

  Of course, he thought wryly, if there were more than a dozen, he might be in trouble. Questioning the guards might be the quickest way to discover what he was up against, but it would also be the quickest way to alert the entire village of his presence and intentions.

  There was nothing for it. He was going to have to take the guards out and see what he could discover from a reconnoiter once he was inside the village walls.

  Chapter Two

  Lexa knew she was in trouble as soon as she entered the mercantile.

  Her luck had held up until that moment. Neither of the guards had roused to challenge her or chase after her and the few people she’d seen apparently believed she’d been allowed entrance. None of them had seemed alarmed or confronted her. They’d merely glanced at her curiously, or uneasily, and hurried on their way.

  She saw two men and a woman that looked to be an older but probably wasn’t much, if any, beyond breeding years before she saw anybody that looked safe enough to approach for directions. The trade area of any village was usually in the middle for the best protection, but she couldn’t afford to waste a lot of time hunting. She glanced at the boy several times as she approached him, trying to decide whether he was old enough to be a threat or not and finally decided he was still young enough he probably didn’t have a lot of interest in women yet.

  “You know the way to the mercantile?”

  The boy stopped abruptly and stared at her owl-eyed.

  It sent a frission of fear through her. She finally decided it wasn’t her voice, though, that she hadn’t inadvertently given away her gender, but rather his fear of strangers.

  “You got stuff to trade?”

  Lexa resisted the urge to roll her eyes and point out that there wouldn’t be much point in going to the mercantile if she didn’t. “Do you know or not?”

  The boy nodded vigorously and turned to point. “Three streets down and then one that way.”

  ‘That way’ was left—his left. There didn’t seem to be a lot of people that knew their left from their right anymore if they ever had, but the directions were simple and clear enough and that was all that mattered. She nodded, glanced uneasily at the horizon, and kept going.

  She should be able to reach the mercantile before the sun dropped below the roofs, she decided. Thirty, maybe forty minutes of haggling, she calculated, and she should be on her way out of the village before it was good dark.

  As she’d expected, the closer she got to the trade center of the town, the more people she saw. They glanced at her curiously—no surprise! Nobody was used to seeing strangers and she always got plenty of glances, but they dismissed her as they generally did. She didn’t look anybody in the eyes. That was dangerous. She merely glanced at them long enough to be sure they weren’t overly interested in her and then moved on to assess the next possible threat.

  The mercantile was in sight when she saw the stranger entering the trade center of town from the opposite direction. She knew that he was a stranger just as she was because everybody he passed either stopped abruptly and stared or glanced at him uneasily and rushed away.

  He was a bold son-of-a-bitch, striding down the center of the road as if he owned the place. In fact, she thought for several terrifying minutes that he did own the place, that he was the local king. The long, black coat flapping around his narrow hips, long, muscular legs, and knee high boots was dusty, though, not spattered with the typical mixture of filth she was accustomed to seeing—a combination of months of grime, grease, food, and usually a mixture of blood spatters from people who’d had unpleasant encounters with him.

  The orange dust denoted somebody that had crossed the barrens.

  Stranger, she decided and tried to dismiss him.

  The arrogant swagger of his walk was hard to dismiss, though. This was somebody either too stupid to live—a fact not upheld by the harsh plains of his face that suggested he was well past first maturity despite the odd lack of any kind of facial hair—or he was completely confident that he was the most dangerous of all.

  No great surprise that he felt that way, she thought uneasily as his long stride brought him closer and closer. He was armed to the teeth. There were two knives in his belt, one in his boot, some kind of club dangling by his side and something bulky enough strapped to his back beneath his coat to make him look like a hunchback.

  Please, gods, don’t let him be headed to the mercantile, Lexa thought unhappily, slowing her step and moving a little closer to the edge of the road.

  Either the movement or something else about her caught his attention because his gaze zeroed in on her and his eyes narrowed assessingly. She felt her heart skip several beats and lifted a shaking hand to her moustache to check it.

  * * * *

  Gah-re-al wasn’t sure what it was about the small figure approaching him from the opposite direction that caught his attention, but something did and he studied the boy assessingly. After a few moments, he realized it was the fact that nothing fit and nothing fit because the ‘boy’ was actually a she—disguised to look like a boy.

  Except that she didn’t, regardless of the stringy mat of hair she’d covered her face with.

  The question was, what was she up to?

  In his experience, no one went to such lengths to project a lie unless they were up to something and that something was generally unethical at the very least and usually something illegal.

  Even that didn’t seem to fit, though. As hard as it was—between the dirt and the hair--to penetrate her disguise,
he thought she was young. Her stature and build also implied that. The ragged, filthy clothes she wore fluttered around her and barely touched the body beneath, which suggested she was thin to the point of emaciation.

  Of course that didn’t necessarily mean that she was young, it just suggested it. It could also mean she simply couldn’t fight for enough food.

  Or it could mean that she was not a villager.

  None that he’d seen beyond the bullies that ran the place looked well fed but they didn’t look starved either.

  So maybe she was up to nothing more nefarious than stealing food and the disguise was in the hope that she couldn’t be identified if she managed to succeed and escape?

  It bothered him to think that was the plan. The law was clear and unyielding. There were no gray areas. Stealing was stealing and against the laws of the land—the laws laid down by the acting colonial government—the laws he was duty bound to protect.