John Ringo - There Will Be Dragons

“Thank you, Herzer,” Daneh said tonelessly, taking a bite out of the fruit and settling in the shelter.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asked.

“I’ll be fine,” she snapped then shook her head. Really, I’m fine, Herzer. How are you? Any shakes?”

“Just from hunger,” he joked. “And these are helping. What is this stuff?”

“It was derived from a noxious weed called kudzu,” Daneh said, taking another bite. “It used to be spread all over eastern Norau; it grew wherever there was a disturbance in the ecosystem, which in those days was everywhere. Sometime in the late twenty-first century a researcher released a controlled retrovirus that modified it to kudzi. The fruit was a gene cross of kiwi fruit and plum; kiwi meat and plum skin. Anyway, that’s where it comes from. And just like kudzu, it grows up anywhere there has been a disturbance like a fire or tree-clearing; it’s a right pain in farming.”

“Well, I was thinking,” Herzer said. “With all this food here we might think about stopping. I’m pretty sure they’re well behind us.”

“No, we need to keep going,” Daneh said, lifting her chin with a “t’cht.” “We need to make it up to the road.”

“Okay, if you insist. But we’re going to stop and get some of this fruit. It will give us enough food to make it the rest of the way.”

“All right.” She nodded, taking another bite and wiping the juice off her chin. The fruit seemed to bring some color back into her cheeks and she smiled for the first time in what seemed like ages. “You go pick fruit. If you don’t mind I’ll just sit here and let you young folk do all the work.”

“Ummm, this is good,” Rachel said as he walked up. She had a bunch of the fruits in a makeshift cradle of her shirt and was biting into another. “Thanks for taking some to Mom.”

“She’s looking better for it, but she insists on keeping going,” Herzer said.

“We need to find some meat,” Rachel said stubbornly. “This is fine for us, it will keep us going at least, but Azure has to have some meat.”

“He looks thin, but…” Herzer said, looking over at the cat, which was rummaging in the vines as well.

“Cats are obligate carnivores,” Rachel replied. “That means they have to eat, every day. And they have to have protein, every day. If they don’t, they get sick. Something about fat buildups on their liver. It can kill them.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Rachel, but I don’t see any rabbits coming up to be killed.”

“Kudzi fruits before anything else,” Rachel said. “And they stay in fruit as long as the vines are green. That means that there’s going to be something coming up to eat it besides us. We probably scared some things away when we came up. Possums, raccoons, deer, something . If we just stay here a while and let Azure hunt…”

“Tell it to your mother,” Herzer replied. He had taken off Daneh’s rucksack and was filling it with the fruit, hoping that it wouldn’t release too much juice and ruin the inside of the bag.

“I will,” she said determinedly, and stalked over to where her mother was resting under the tree.

Herzer observed the exchange from afar but could more or less tell how it was going. First Rachel handed Daneh some of the fruit. Then she gestured around at the large field. Next she pointed out the cat, which was poking in every possible hole in the vines looking for something edible to a feline. The argument clearly weighed on Daneh but she shook her head and said her piece. The Rachel said hers with more force. Then Daneh’s face set and she gestured to the south, forcefully. Then Rachel’s voice could be heard from halfway across the open area. Then she stormed off.

“I have never known a more pig-headed, stupid…” she muttered as she passed Herzer.

As she passed, Herzer heard a scurrying in the vines and a field rat ran right in front of him. He had been carrying his staff with the knapsack in his left hand and he quickly dropped the bag, switched hands and then lashed out with the staff. The first blow missed but it turned the rat and the second blow hit.

He called to the cat and tossed the rat towards him as he thought about the implications.

“Rachel, is there some way you can get Azure to sort of… station himself on one side of the vines?”

“I… don’t know, why?” she asked, taking a bite out of a fresh fruit. They had been starving, but the fruit had taken the edge off and now it was already starting to pall.

“If he did we could walk along and sort of push stuff that is in the vines towards him. Things are running in front of us all the time; we’d just sort of have it run in front of us towards him .”

With a little persuasion on Herzer’s part it was done. Daneh continued to sit it out while the two younger members of the group walked back and forth across the vines. Azure quickly became aware of the nature of the game and waited patiently at the edge of the open area as the game was driven to him. In less than an hour he had bagged several field rats and a small rabbit. For Herzer’s part, that was an hour that Daneh wasn’t driving herself to keep going. She had simply sat out of the rain and eaten kudzi fruit until she was near to bursting. All in all it had been a very successful exercise in tact and diplomacy.

“And what is that you’re eating?” Chansa asked, appearing out of the air.

As usual Celine was in her workroom, which was filled with a cacophony of whining, bleating and croaking calls. He glanced at one of the cages along the wall and shuddered at the strange octopus-looking creature in the water-filled interior. The door had a sturdy lock but the creature was pushing at every opening with every appearance of intelligence. It saw him looking at it and came to the front, its skin going through a variety of color changes.

“Jelly babies,” Celine replied, lifting one of the squirming creatures that very much resembled small human children and popping it in her mouth. “Try one?”

Chansa shook his head and turned from the octopus to look at the writhing mass of faintly whining creatures. They were colored various shades and squirmed most unpleasantly.

“Avatars do not eat, Celine,” he reminded her.

“Yeah, that’s why I don’t use avatars,” Celine responded, popping a couple more in her mouth. “Uhmm, lemon.”

“Celine, we need to talk,” Chansa said, making a moue.

“Hmmmr?” she rumbled, her mouth full.

“Have you noticed Paul getting… strange?”

“You mean bug-house nuts?” she asked. “Yeah.”

“I’m not sure he’s quite what we need in the way of leadership,” Chansa said, carefully.

“See yourself in that position?” she asked, standing up and going over to one of the cages along the wall.

“No…” he answered carefully, watching as she extracted another one of her little monsters. This one looked like a fairly normal hamster for a change. He wondered what it was food for. “I was actually wondering if you would consider the position. You have seniority on the Council after Paul.”

“Hah! No thank you. I like it right where I’m at.” She lifted the hamster and cooed at it, bringing it up to a cage that held a weird creature the size of Chansa’s massive hand. The beast might have been a spider or a scorpion; it had features of both. The scorpion’s stinger and pincers coupled were fronted by a spider’s mandibles, and the body, overall, had a very spiderish look to it with long, black legs that ended in sharp points. Celine waved aside the force screen at the top of the cage and dropped the hamster in, waving the field closed as she did.