She strode into the place of the hunting circle, iridium-sheathed slasher claws click-click-clicking across the steel deck with each confident step. Her ceremonial robes, colored a deep, blood-blue, were thickly encrusted with platinum braid, silver and gold scale, lead inlay, uranium gorget and wristlets—the heavy-metal emblems of her rank and wealth. Her entourage of males and brooders took up their positions to either side of the circle gate, their vertically slitted eyes blinking in the twilight with a savage, reptilian intensity.
Her name was Aghrracht the Swift-Slayer, and her line was one of the richest and oldest of Zhanaach. Her rank and her title—within Malach culture the two concepts were identical—was Ghaavat'ghavagh, a gargled snarl best translated as Deathgiver.
Aghrracht's Second approached, offering ceremonial challenge with a piercing hiss, then genuflecting with stooped carriage, upraised snout, and bared throat. Aghrracht's jaws gaped wide, then snapped shut in the ritual nip, closing lightly on her Second's vulnerable jugular. For a moment, she felt the lifebeat of the other's pulse beneath the pressure of her jaws; gently, almost reluctantly, she released her grip.
"Welcome, Deathgiver, to the circle of your plains," the Second said. "Kill and eat!"
The place was, in fact, a large, circular room aboard the huntress ship, but projections on smoothed bulkheads and curving overhead gave the illusion of open veldt, the ancestral hunting grounds of Aghrracht's matrilineal line on far-off Zhanaach. Malach tended to be as uncomfortable with closed-in spaces as they were with solitude; by human standards, they were both claustrophobic and monophobic—a psychological legacy of their evolutionary roots as pack-hunters on the open plains.
The others of her hunting circle regarded her with slitted, ruby eyes, their flat heads carefully held a few taych below the level of her own.
"The scout packs have returned," Aghrracht announced, with her customary lack of preamble. "They have found fresh prey within the target cluster. Soon we will run the Gift to ground, and then we shall kill and eat."
The others in the circle stirred, some lifting throats in obeisance, most watching with guarded expressions through ragged, vertically slit pupils. "Kill and eat!" several said together in ancient litany.
"Kill and eat. Sha'gnaasht gives us the right."
"Honor to the prophet of true divine science, Sha'gnaasht the Skilled Tracker!" the others intoned, all speaking now in solemn chorus. "Honor to Sha'gnaasht!"
Aghrracht gestured with a razor-clawed fore-hand. A holoprojected image appeared at the circle's center, a shivering, strangely articulated creature, the image part of the recorded data transmitted by the scouts. The thing was bipedal but with legs awkwardly jointed backward from the digitigrade stance of the Malach. It possessed only two arms, but those were gangly, outsized things, oddly placed, with too many digits on the wide hands and with vestigial claws only at the tips. The head was round and blocky on a stub of a neck, the eyes small and close-set, the mouth a thin slit with an omnivore's pathetic excuse for teeth and no feeding tendrils at all. The creature's unarmored hide looked as soft and as invitingly tender as the velvet skin of a goregh.
"A specimen of the cluster's dominant organism, taken by our scouts," Aghrracht said quietly. "Unarmored. Weak." She paused before delivering the final adjective with the sibilant modifier that was the Malach's equivalent of a shrug of dismissal. "Solitary."
Several approving hisses and whistles sounded from the watching circle. The image shifted ahead to a later stage of the creature's interrogation. Its limbs had been splayed on an examination table, its torso opened up, revealing the arrangement of organs within the body cavity. One—presumably one of the hearts—continued pulsing behind a cage of flat, white bones; the blood that spilled from the cavity as the creature writhed against its bonds was bright red.
"Odd-colored blood," Sh'graat'na the Prey Wounder observed.
"Is it good to eat?" Kha'laa'sht the Meat Finder wanted to know.
Aghrracht opened her left hind-hand, a gesture of negation. "Incompatible body chemistries," she said. "Regrettably. Their blood chemistry is based on an iron-bearing molecule, which is why the blood is red. Several of their proteins would be poison to us. But the worlds of this cluster are rich . . . rich." She closed both fore-hands, signifying both affirmation and approval. "It is as our cosmologists predicted. As in the Zhanaach Void, early-generation stars are metal-poor. Only the youngest have elements heavy enough to allow planetary formation, and those have few resources. Late-generation suns, however, are almost invariably circled by planets heavily laden with metals. By our standards, the inhabitants of these worlds are fabulously wealthy . . . and ripe for hunting."
Sh'graat'na gestured at the holo image, where the specimen's struggles were rapidly fading into death. "These creatures have no greschu'u'schtha?" The word was a complex one, carrying shades of meaning suggesting military camaraderie, the high morale that comes from comfortable crowding, and a sense of triumphant purpose. "No soldiers or warriors? No hunter packs?"
"They have soldiers," Aghrracht said, with a dismissive hiss. "Their organization, however, seems divided between soldiers and non-soldiers . . . a strange concept. Their hunter-thoughts are predicated on defense rather than offense . . . the tactics of omnivores and plant eaters. Our scouts encountered only a single weapon in their sweeps that offered any serious challenge to our pack tactics."
She gestured, and the now-still form on the examination table vanished, replaced by . . . a machine.
Judging from the scale set in one corner of the image, the thing was huge, a thousand erucht long at the very least. Unlike Malach war machines, it was inelegantly squat, cumbersome in appearance and ponderous in its movements, more of a mobile fortress of some kind than a deadly fighting machine.
"Our scout packs encountered this machine on the second world they investigated. It proved a formidable foe, armed with plasma and laser beam weapons, as well as a variety of missile and close-in point-defense weaponry. It destroyed a number of our hunters before it was overwhelmed and disabled at last. It was, however, pathetically slow. Those armored belts you see are driven by sprocketed wheels . . . in effect creating its own road or track, but its speed is limited to, we estimate, no more than two t'charucht per quor. Our hunters ran rings around it, wearing down its defenses, destroying its armor, until it was vulnerable to attack at slasher claw range."
"Like dismembering a swamp-mired gr'raa'zhghavescht," Kha'laa'sht said with a satisfied snap of razor-edged fangs. She never failed to take each opportunity of reminding her pack sisters of her spectacular gr'raa kill, during her Ritual of Ga'krascht, many years before.
"Like the gr'raa'zhghavescht," Aghrracht said, closing a hind-hand in agreement, "these machines are solitary, intended purely for defense, helpless against hunter-pack tactics. Still, I dare say, these devices will add a certain spice to our campaign, the challenge we all hunger for."
"We should name them," Zhallet'llesch the Scent Finder—and Aghrracht's Second—said. "To honor valiant opponents, however mismatched they might be against us."
"According to the scout packs," Aghrracht said, drawing herself up and opening her pupils wide for emphasis, "the cluster's inhabitants have a name for them already. Apparently they are robots of a sort, fighting independently."
"Robots?" Kha'laa'sht snorted noisily and with utter disdain. "What kind of opponents can such be for the Race of Sha'gnaasht?"
"Dangerous, if we do not treat them with appropriate respect," Aghrracht replied. "The locals call them Bolos."