The Lawgivers: Gabriel (2 page)

She couldn’t look like a man. She was
too short and too slight—especially since she’d had so little to
eat in so long. It sure as hell wasn’t safe to look like a woman,
though, and especially not a young girl. That was just asking to
become a victim.

Besides which the guards were certain
to suspect that she’d been sent in by a gang to scope the place out
... in which case they’d probably kill her on the spot … after
they’d raped her and tortured her to try to get information out of
her that she didn’t have.

Moving off a little further, Lexa found
the cover of a medium sized boulder and some scrubby plant growth.
When she’d managed to untangle the knotted rope around her waist
that she used to secure her supply bundle, she dropped it to the
ground and peeled her tunic off. The chill wind of dusk made her
skin pebble all over, but she gritted her teeth and dug out a strip
of cloth, wrapped it around her chest and used it to flatten her
breasts. Not that they were particularly large to start with, but
they jiggled when she moved and that was enough, she’d discovered,
to catch a man’s eye since they always seemed to be on the lookout
for a female to fuck.

She was filthy and she didn’t exactly
smell lovely since she hadn’t been near enough water to even make a
stab at cleaning herself in weeks—a circumstance that she found
extremely repugnant—but she’d discovered men didn’t allow that to
put them off.

Actually, in her personal experience,
they generally smelled far worse—which might account for that. They
probably couldn’t smell her unwashed body over their
own.

There wasn’t much, as a matter of fact,
that would distract them once they set their sights on rutting—even
the discovery that they were rutting another male—except maybe a
knife between the shoulder blades ….

She’d fashioned herself some facial
hair that she liked to think gave her more of the look of a young
man—hopefully too old to appeal to the men that liked boys, or at
least were more than willing to rape them. She struggled for a few
moments and finally gathered enough spit to moisten the sap she
used to glue the hair to her face and patted it in place. Finally,
she tied her hair back, tucked the ends into the back of her shirt,
and wedged her battered hat back on her head, tipping it forward to
shadow her face.

Everyone had long hair and any male old
enough to have hair on his face had a beard. The problem was that
she knew her hair was longer than it should have been for a boy the
age she was trying to portray.

Because she was many years past
puberty.

When she’d done the best she could with
her disguise, she studied her ‘treasures’, trying to decide which
would make the best trade items. It had to be desirable or she
wouldn’t be able to get what she needed but if it was too valuable
she could have the same problem. Or worse, they might decide to
just take what she had.

Of course, there was always that
risk.

When she’d made her choices, she buried
the items she didn’t want to trade and what remained of her food,
tied her pack to her waist once more, and tried to calm her racing
heartbeat. It wouldn’t do to allow them to see just how scared she
was. They could smell fear and they were liable to interpret that
to mean that she was a threat to them.

She discovered the guards were still
sitting in the shadows near the gate when she returned. Girding
herself, she stepped out into the open and approached the gate.
Neither of the men moved.

She stopped when she was within a few
yards of them and the gate, straining to see if she could tell if
they really were sleeping or if they were dead.

They weren’t snoring. She thought they
should be if they were asleep and not dead, but she didn’t see
anything to indicate that they’d been attacked. She hadn’t heard
anything and if anyone else had, she would’ve heard an alarm go up.
There weren’t any signs of a struggle—no churned up dirt or
anything knocked over and no blood.

After a brief debate, she finally
decided to risk slipping past them. That seemed dangerous, but
waking them also seemed perilous, and, of the two choices, she
liked trying to sneak in much better.

A cold sweat was trickling between her
shoulder blades by the time she’d slipped through the narrow
opening.

She was definitely going to take
another route out when she left, she decided.

* * * *

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.