18The following hours proved his suspicions that she would not give up on her maniacal quest to pick at his skin. Why? Why do this? What was her obsession?!
Every time he let his guard down even slightly or turned his back on her she would reach out with her scrawny arms and try to press her grubby fingers into his side or much too close to his still-healing wounds.
This was an invasion of his personal space, enough to drive him up the wall and back into his hole of a former camp. Yes, he hid from the human and not in the way a hunter should.
She waited below again, but not patiently and not with food to bribe him back down. She babbled and squawked urgently up at him. He made no sound, not a single corpuscle of effort to reply to any of her nonsense as she paced around. She had plenty of noise in her to make up for his lack of will to respond. Hours, she spent hours just bitching at him nonstop, periodically taking breaks to sit and huff and mutter, once even taking a short nap close enough that he could hear her breathing.
Of course, he understood very little of what she had the gall to lecture him about, but from what scattered words he was already familiar with, he had a hint. She seemed to think he had a terrible malady. An infection? She thought he had contracted an infection? He didn't think that was exactly what she meant but close. He didn't know what else the word she used over and over could relate to. Infestation maybe? Fuck if he knew. Well, he wasn't concerned about infections. Although he didn't think she meant infection in a microbial sense, he knew he didn't have to worry about that in particular after the injection he'd taken on his first cycle imprisoned here.
Still, where would she get such an idea? What was she seeing upon his skin to make her think he was ill? He was still ignoring her raving, but he was beginning to consider self-examination too. Maybe he was developing a rash that he could not yet feel but she could see the first signs of with her alien vision?
"Hey, Stupid Asshole!"
Cir'ide may not have been able to make sense of her every shrill bleat, however, he possessed the past experience to know the meanings of colorful ooman belligerence. Oh, how he bristled.
"Puny vermin! I know what that meant!" he shouted. She couldn't understand his words but surely she had enough gray matter in her round little head to recognize the ferocity in his roars.
All she did was cross her arms and snort before going on another tangent he didn't care enough to decipher. When her displeasure and frustration reached its limits she stooped to the only scheme that might bring him down from his perch. She began to hurl stones.
None were heavy enough to do any harm at all, they were mere pebbles as far as he was concerned. Her objective was not to maim but to pester. He remained tolerant and undisturbed by her new tactic as long as he could, but he was not nor shall he ever be known for his patience. One or two of her minuscule projectiles whizzed by his head close enough for him to hear them whistle past his ear.
Gods, whatever her intentions in trying to get her hands on him were, it had better be important. He could not focus on much of anything with her behaving so badly. Once again, the repairs to the solar unit had to wait so that the ooman could be dealt with.
Cir'ide leaned out from his tiny space to snarl at her before making his way down. She must be punished for her rudeness. After that, maybe he'd consider trying to work out what her issue was all about.
She seemed to understand that he was in no gaming mood, for as soon as his talons touched the stony basin of the chamber, she was scurrying backward out of his immediate reach.
She jibbered and pointed her fingers, then waved her hands around wildly until finally slapping herself across the chest a few times. He could only tilt his head and watch all the ruckus and movement repeat in deepening confusion. He couldn't figure what she was trying to communicate, and she appeared to sense that, so she tried touching him again. Her hand darted for his leg, aiming for the periphery of the tear in his skin. This was absolutely unacceptable. Her fingers were swatted harshly and she yipped as she skittered away, sucking on the ends of the digits with a hoarse whine.
He could be a cruel boy, most younglings lack much real empathy. He was amused at her voicing of pain and trilled a laugh. To put a fine point on it, he decided to mimic the barking of human delight at her.
"Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha!"
The Imp did not appreciate the accuracy of his imitation. She didn't bare her blunt teeth, though. She sucked in a breath, stuck out her fleshy tongue, then blew flatulent sounds at him. The action sprayed cooling droplets of spittle into the air between them. Disgusting .
"Haha! Ha, ha, ha!" again he mocked.
She tried a clumsy open-handed slap at him, but it was too easy to step out of the way and redirect the move with the flick of his wrist. She tried again, and he parried again. Eventually, she tried a balled fist, and he allowed her to strike him. Her form was poor and the blow glancing. He could simply step into it and send her away from him with a shove at the shoulder.
This was almost fun, albeit a bit sad. She couldn't do any harm to him without her teeth or a big rock, and both of the methods mentioned required him to be too distracted to stop her. Circling like sparring partners, she was as ineffective as a freshly weaned pup. He made a mistake in the comparison. She was not as hardy as yautja pups.
A playful backhand may simply have bounced off the snot slick face of one of his unblooded peers aboard the clanship. The ooman, she didn't take the little slap well at all. Hell, at first he was not even certain that he'd hit anything solid. She was flung aside like a suckling's plaything, her neck and back twisting with the motion. It sounded like a wooden drum being thrown against a wall, a hollow popping noise that echoed sharply away and back. She then lay prone on the floor, unmoving. Her head had slammed against the pinnacle of a small stalagmite. The stench of thwei found his nose. Cjit.
Cir'ide stood frozen in place, looking on at the bloody and completely unnecessary scene he had created with his carelessness. The tiny body began to convulse.
He had not been thinking, he had failed to consider the well-documented truths of oomans. They were intelligent, frightfully so, but delicate. This pup was so very fragile that he could shatter her bones without meaning to.
When his frigid feet finally moved, time felt as though it were twisting, wrenching itself forward against his desire to trace back every step to undo what was done. What he'd done. It was a crime to end any being if it is not worthy prey, a challenger, or food. Much more, it was a massive blight on the soul to murder children.
Another reason to worry and act quickly: There had, beyond the conscious grasp of his psyche until this moment, grown a fondness.
He didn't touch her, he was afraid to. If he had inflicted a spinal injury as well as a cranial wound, then he could do far more harm than good by moving her. Still, his hands hovered barely a finger width from her skin as he tried to work out what to do.
Finally, he left her to fetch the kit. It was all he had with which he could attempt to mend the damage he had done, but even then as he lunged upward toward the perch he was not certain that anything in his meager supply of emergency medical equipment could save the ooman. She was simply too different. Convergent evolution is a lying fiend, they only looked similar. Good medicine for him could just as easily serve as a noxious poison to her.
When he returned to her prone form she was still and quiet, like death. The seizure had subsided. He couldn't tell if it had simply passed or if the convulsions stopped because she had expired. Touching at her wrists, ankles, and throat did little to convince him she was still alive. All he could detect was his own thwei rushing through his fingertips.
In purity, the easiest way to find a heart rhythm was to turn her over and listen at her sternum. Lifting her posed a problem, it could wrench around a broken back, which was not ideal. It was a gamble, but he needed to know if she was already dead before he could proceed. So he turned her over and leaned close to listen.
It was hard to tell if her pulse was normal without his helm in working order to tell him so. Damn, he probably could not tell what a normal heart rate sounded like in one of his own species, much less this alien. It sounded too fast, her heart, in his opinion. He didn't know what that meant, but she was alive and he praised Paya for this.
Cir'ide had to focus to slow his own elevated heart rate. With what action he had planned to take, he'd need steady claws. He was no healer, but he had a few tools with him which might tell him the severity of her wounds and what treatment would be best suited for her. It didn't matter that he'd been spreading the supplies thin until now to preserve them, he would spare nothing to correct the wrongdoing.
He set aside the kit and opened it with the touch of a claw. It was self-contained, neatly organized, and well designed to be carried by a hunter without being a hindrance. You could mend wounds of wildly varying severity right on the hunting ground.
His initial concerns with implementing medical science familiar to his own kind, which he hardly understood at this early phase of his life, were soon confirmed. There was nothing he had that wouldn't require major adjustments before it could be useful to her, except one thing.
Way back in the Beginning of Beginnings, they believed that when a hunter drank the blood and took the skulls of his prey, this transferred qualities of the worthy slain unto him. This was mere religious superstition until they advanced suchly that they truly could take on traits that would make the core of their beliefs a reality. The genetic material of their finest prey makes them better hunters, but there are risks. You may not react favorably to medical intervention as it was administered before your "rite of the blood" and the changes which follow. New treatments were developed. Medicine that could adapt as quickly as a hunter could take exquisite prey and assimilate their best qualities into himself. Maybe this treatment could adapt to an ooman.
On their hunts throughout his childhood, his sire had shown him what to do. It had been his responsibility to teach him how to use his equipment and to supervise its use. Cir'ide remembered how he'd broken his own wrist to demonstrate the process, but was quick to inform him that this was for a last resort only. A useless dominant hand is not enough, one must be dying but unable to erase himself from the hunting grounds in a cleansing blast. In an hour he had full use of his hand once more.
The case for the emergency treatment was a heavy oval that flips open, inside were two ampules of murky fluid and an injector apparatus. The pair of glass tubes clinked together in his palm as he plucked them from their case. The fluids within were cool and shown darkly against the warmth of his flesh.
Cir'ide only had the required two doses for a single administration and had been recently considering the idea of using them on himself to heal his broken ribs. The idea was to mitigate the breathing attacks. Circumstances had changed, and his honor was at stake.
The fluid within the ampules consisted of a neutral carrying agent, and secondly though most importantly, innumerable micro machines. They were each no larger than a bacterium. These marvels of modern healing could piece shattered bone and tissues back together, then stimulate their host's body to produce the materials needed to fasten complex flesh back together far faster than anyone could naturally heal.
His best guess was to inject near to the back of her neck under the right ear, nearest to the visible wound as possible without scraping the shaft of the needle against bone. Her thin alien skin offered no resistance. It was as easy as dipping a claw into water.
The first dose is exploratory, required now that many high-status warriors alter themselves with the traits of their kills. The second dose makes the repairs. It just takes time, time the ooman may not have. These tiny artificial beasts were to be tasked with mapping out her entire being. He could sync them to the readouts within his kit, and would have to do so in order to know when it was time for the next injection.
Now all he could do was wait, but there was a problem. The tide was coming in. Where the ooman's body lied would be under waist-deep seawater within the hour, but the possibility of spinal damage... He couldn't move her without knowing.
Ah, lessons always come hard. his equipment contained a device that was only useful in detecting where breaks in bone lie. He always considered it an unneeded redundancy, for only a fool would not realize that he'd broken a bone.
When you are alone with an unconscious body that surely cannot tell you nor point out its pain, such a thing as claws-off diagnostic implements prove their worth.
It was cylindrical, no bigger than a little finger, on one end was a port to link it to a power supply to charge. Thank the gods that his sire drilled his children on making certain all equipment was properly energized before a hunt, no matter how useless you perceive that equipment to be. Everything in his medical kit thankfully retained enough life to give aid.
One pass over her torso was enough to tell him that her spine was, thankfully, beautifully intact. Just to be certain, he waved the wand over her throat to check her neck. A soft whir sounded, bruised bone, but no break. Finally, he decided to slip his fingers under the thin neck of the prey pup and lift her head to scan all the way around her cranium in a sweeping pattern. Goddess, for such a small head to swell so rapidly to the proportions he then witnessed should have been enough indication of how serious the injury was.
The sharp whine of the sensor told him where the break started, and with building horror, he followed it more than halfway around her head. He'd nearly cracked her braincase into halves. Oomans are smart, yes, but brittle as ancient bones in old crypts all their lives.
This was the first time he ever felt real and unselfish guilt. Fuck honor, the little beast didn't deserve to be destroyed just because she was an annoyance.
If he ever escaped Fire, then who would know of this day unless he shared the story with them? No one, but he would know. On a personal level, the substance of his spirit would be haunted by this crime.
Cir'ide gathered his kit to his belts and lifted her from the floor as the cool waters began to wet the soles of his feet. He was beginning to imagine one catastrophe after another. The blood could pool in her head somewhere or the swelling might crush her brain, he worried.
Fundamentally, she was already dead. It would not be long before the brain shut down and there would be no more signals to tell the lungs and heart to work. I should pray the first dose moves through her system quickly , he thought before his sense returned.
High ground, he had to find high ground. Taking her to the chambers of the cavern where she seemed to live would have been the best option had there not been the inconvenience of his torn open legs and busy arms. There was also her broken head to concern himself about jostling.
Where she always roasted her meals was a rocky slab with shale washed in a pile around its base, and it was never wet at the top. That was where he would take her.
Cir'ide had to wade against the waters flowing in to reach the place he'd chosen to shelter from the incoming flood. It took a great effort, for he was young and he did not then have the strength he does now. The flows were crotch deep before he reached the higher haven, and he stumbled to one knee often to avoid falling back and being swept by the current deeper into the underground. With each fall he was hefting the ooman high to prevent her wound from touching the water. He was out of breath by the time he felt loose shale under his talons. His chest burned.
"Not now, Paya, not now," he begged the gods. They offered him no miracle. His throat tightened, he rasped and gagged, and finally collapsed, having barely clawed his way high enough to put the short one down. Another breathing attack.
He'd tried not to dump the limp ooman too roughly, but he no longer had endurance enough to hold up his own weight. Time sped forward before, now it dragged as he lied on his side retching although there was nothing in his chest or upper guts to expel.
Pain and panic gave way to exhaustion. He knew that he was dying and for the first time he was not afraid. It felt like a lifetime spent gasping, each suck of air weaker than the last. He would almost be willing to welcome death, had he not tasked himself with a final mission.
Cir'ide heard the kit at his belt pinging an alert to him. He needed no more prompting than that. Now was the time for the second half of his final act. His life was over, he had no doubts regarding his fate, but perhaps the ooman still possessed the luck and favor of the gods to pull herself back from the veil of departure.
Cir'ide struggled to will his finger to flip open the kit and press the last ampule into the injector. Now he had to roll toward the lifeless form at his right. She was colder, she didn't burn hot like sun rays any more. Once more he checked for a pulse, dragging himself close enough to press a palm across her sternum. Nan'ku, alive, good.
His fingers shook now, he wouldn't dare try for her neck again, so he went for what was closest and meaty enough to take the needle. Left thigh. It wasn't ideal, but he didn't want to snap off a sliver of metal into a bone. He depressed upon the trigger and tossed away the now useless tool. It was over. He was done, the rest was on her. If she had the fight in her to stay alive long enough for the treatment to do its work, and if Paya wills it, she may recover.
He hadn't any idea of what future there could be for an ooman on the planet of Fire but to survive this long must have denoted a higher purpose.
Maybe he was delusional from lack of air, however, he hoped that some hunting party would stumble upon this island and hear the story of his death through her.
If Cir'ide, son of Cir'ide, could tolerate and even come to respect this little demon in the slightest degree, then she would have her chance. This was his last prayer before he began to sense the Black Warrior circling.