Daniel X: Game Over (14 page)

Now the screen showed the Pleionid home world of today: a gray, dusty cinder of a planet. Just another burned-out orb, like so many others the Outer Ones had left in their wake.

Emma was practically sobbing at the sight, and the rest of us weren’t far behind. Joe shut off the feed.

“Anything else, Joe?” I asked.

“They haven’t activated the tracking program yet, but it should work once they release the activation code. And I think I’ve figured out how to triangulate any signal we get on the Pleionid—hopefully that will help us find it before the other hunters do.”

“What about intelligence on the other safari hunters, or on Number 7 and Number 8?”

“Nothing really, but there’s one image here…”

And right then, the screen lit up with a headshot of another alien. An all-too-familiar and disturbing one.

It was a high-res photo of
me
.

THE FACT THAT Number 7 and Number 8 had put my mug shot into the device meant, at a minimum, they wanted to warn the hunters of my presence in Tokyo. Quite possibly, it also meant I was the next target in their hunting “game.”

I suffered through lectures, worried warnings, and a firestorm of pleadings from my friends to call the whole thing off. But either I acted now, or I let the universe’s last living Pleionid die. So—after my friends were done saying every discouraging thing they had to say—I politely thanked them for their concern and waved them out of material existence.

Now that I had the hunter’s tracking device and we had pored over every piece of its data that we could unlock, there was only one lead left to pursue in the hours before the hunt began—Kildare Gygax.

I’d learned he was going to participate in the Pleionid hunt. I also knew he was the child of my two immediate foes. But my most compelling interest in Number 7 and Number 8’s kid had to do with an unshakable hunch that he wasn’t as simpatico with his parents as they might have hoped. Besides, I knew something about feeling distant from your parents.

Of course, it still took quite a lot to psych myself up and go to his school to find him. Never mind the obvious risks, there was also the matter of that horrible, soul-scarring school uniform, the
seifuku,
I had to wear. I swear, even the ever-kind Emma would die laughing if she ever saw me in it. And Willy, Joe, and Dana—forget about it. They’d probably call me Sailor Boy until the day I died.

I choked down my last shred of dignity and put on the ridiculous thing.

Having spent the morning stealing and analyzing the hunt transponder, I didn’t arrive at school until lunchtime break. Unlike most of the other kids, Kildare was not out on the playing fields; I found him alone in the science lab intently studying ants in a glass terrarium. With all my senses on high alert—ready to fight or take flight as the circumstances dictated—I approached and cleared my throat.

He whipped around so fast, I swear, even the ants in the terrarium jumped in surprise.

“WHAT ARE YOU doing here, Daniel? Why weren’t you in class this morning?”

“Um, you know, immigration stuff.”

He looked me up and down, and, though I’ve seen more convinced expressions, he nodded. He had a notepad in front of him with formulas scribbled all over it.

“What are they doing?” I asked, bending down to look at the ants.

“Their favorite thing—eating,” he said.

The ants were swarming over a lump of something white and were methodically carving it into transportable pieces that they carried back to the nest entrance one by one.

“What was it?” I asked.

“A turnip,” he replied.

“Good thing turnips don’t have nervous systems, huh?” I said. “That looks like it might hurt.”

“Yes,” said Kildare, looking up at me. “It’s definitely a very lucky thing for turnips and anything else that ends up in front of a hungry colony of ants if it’s unable to feel pain.”

I nodded grimly, trying not to imagine what it might be like to be stung to death and then carved up into a few million bite-size pieces. “It’s amazing how coordinated they are. How they work so well together.”

“They use pheromones,” Kildare explained. “They lay down scents and other chemical markers that affect each others’ behavior. As social communications systems go, it’s unrivaled. They can even stalk and kill prey thousands of times larger than themselves.”

“Of course,
Myrmecina nipponica
don’t do a whole lot of hunting, do they? Aren’t they pretty common house ants here in Japan?”

He looked at me with surprise. “This terrarium isn’t labeled. How did you know the name of this species?”

“Big Edward O. Wilson fan, dedicated Discovery Channel viewer, and budding entomologist, I guess,” I improvised.

“Me, too.” He smiled and turned back to the ants. “Actually, you’re right about their dietary habits,” he went on. “More than ninety-eight percent of what ants eat is vegetative or already dead. Some species can and do hunt other living animals, but their reputation as predators is grossly exaggerated.”

“And that’s a good thing,” I said, “considering they
represent more than fifteen percent of the biomass of all creatures on Earth—more than ten times that of all living humans—or they might eat us all up.”

“Yes,” he said, looking up at me again with a curious smile. “It’s a very good thing.”

Just then, the door opened and Professor Kuniyoshi came in with two students.

“Ah, Kildare,” he said. “How’s the colony?”

“Very healthy, Professor,” replied Kildare. “I expect they’ll soon be fledging.”

“Good news, good news!” beamed the teacher, taking the two students to his desk to review some papers.

Kildare remained focused on the ants, perfectly content not to talk. I couldn’t help liking him, but he was definitely an intense kid. There’s an old Japanese saying—still waters run deep—and something told me I hadn’t a clue what lay in the depths of Kildare’s personality.

IT FELT ROTTEN spying on Kildare, but I had no choice but to follow him when school got out. After all, I’d only known him for a day. It wasn’t like I could ask him what he knew about his parents and the Pleionid hunt in the middle of class.

I expected him to go home to the GC Tower, but I wasn’t completely surprised when he headed in the opposite direction instead. I trailed him down the street, onto a bus, to a Mister Donut—where he bought a dozen glazed—and then to the
shinkansen
station. He seemed distinctly gloomy, and I again wondered what he might be thinking about tonight’s hunt. Was he really just going along with it for some almost-human reason, like maybe he wanted to please his father?

Not, of course, that it really mattered. Right then I had
more immediate things to figure out—like where the heck he was going. The bullet train he was boarding ran out to the northeast suburbs of Nishinasuno and beyond.

I’m pretty good at tailing people, if I do say so myself, but we’d only gone twenty minutes when he nearly gave me the slip. The train was hurtling through the fields outside of Kurodahara when I noticed him getting up from his seat and heading forward, maybe to use the bathroom in the next car.

But no sooner had he exited the car than I happened to spot him
out the window!

Somehow he’d gotten himself off the train and was striding through a rice field like he was a farmer out for a stroll.

With a quick “Pardon me” to the middle-aged commuter at my side, I made my way to the bathroom, then teleported myself off the train, something that I assure you is much easier said than done. I didn’t know the area very well, so, to be safe—and to make sure I didn’t teleport myself into a rock or something—I simply rematerialized myself five feet off the ground and on the opposite side of the train, in case Kildare happened to look back in my direction. Only problem was I forgot to materialize at a speed relative to the ground. That meant I was still traveling as fast as the bullet train.

Yeah, over one hundred miles per hour. Ouch is right.

I bounced and rolled like one of those Olympic downhill skiers who wipes out halfway through the course, only my wipeout was in a muddy, flat field. It was a good thing
I’m a pretty sturdily built kid and that there weren’t any trees. It was also a good thing Kildare was too far away to hear me crash to the ground.

Once I’d determined I wasn’t mortally wounded, I turned myself into a butterfly whose anatomy I’d fortunately had occasion to memorize from Professor Kuniyoshi’s collection. I caught up with Kildare just as he made his way to a moss-covered old Buddhist lantern at the edge of a small field.

The timing was good, because what happened there was something I really had to see with my own eyes. As Kildare approached the stone lantern and placed his hand on it, the moss began to move—
and talk!