Enemy, Chapter 4
#4 of Enemy
Chapter 4
14 December 2357
"Do it," I said.
"No."
"I'm ordering you to do it, slave," I growled. "If you disobey me again you'll be punished." I held up a small silver-grey remote control to punctuate my threat.
The fox eyed it knowingly with a look that displayed a defiance born of pride, coupled with a fear born of experience. But there was also hatred in those green eyes, and I knew her response before she opened her mouth.
"Do it your own damn self, wolf."
I pressed a button and her body shuddered with a spasm, from tail-tip to ear-tip, caused by an electric shock that raced through her body. She didn't make a sound but her jaws clenched. The zap was a mild one, but it was obviously painful.
I tried my command again. "Pick up that ration box and carry it. Now!"
She didn't respond for a long moment. The small creature glared defiantly up at me, her rebellious stare little changed by my warning. It was frustrating me immensely, and I think she knew it. This inferior little whelp was testing me. Very well. I had plenty of time and plenty of tools at my disposal.
"Once more, fox: Pick it up, or I'll shock you again."
Another long moment hung between us. But she turned and walked to the crate of flight rations I had been pointing at. I felt a brief moment of victory, even relief. The fox bent over it, making an obviously staged attempt to lift it. It barely budged under her paws. Turning to face me she sat on it lightly, her paws folded across her narrow chest.
"It's too heavy," she said matter-of-factly, a small sneer of triumph on her muzzle.
I growled angrily. "Do you think I'm stupid?"
"I don't know, wolf. Are you?"
"You carried it here from my camp. You can carry it back."
"What makes you think I did it by myself?"
I hesitated, suddenly remembering that I had been unable to account for two of the slaves after the crash. "I don't believe you," I said. I hadn't smelled any other foxes in the area recently. I had to fight the urge to look around. I refused to give the impression of uncertainty. It would only serve to fuel her impudence. But I must have failed at hiding it because she laughed at my face.
I turned up the shock intensity and hit the command button on the remote. This time she made a high-pitched shriek and grabbed at the collar around her neck, falling off the crate and into the dirt. When the shock subsided she remained sprawled in the dirt, panting heavily.
I hardly felt satisfied. This was a step back from what I wanted. It was taking more than half an hour to accomplish what should have taken five minutes.
After finding the fox's camp and knocking her out the night before I bound her paws and carried her back to the Nuara. I had no easy method of detaining her. The ship's slave pen had been destroyed in the crash and I had nowhere else to lock her up. I wasn't comfortable with tying her to something: foxes were notorious for being escape artists and this vision of a dark figure with green eyes towering over me still gave me shivers. I couldn't release her. I thought briefly about terminating her. That would have solved so many issues, namely keeping her from bashing my head in with a rock while I was asleep. Plus, I wouldn't have to feed her.
But I dismissed that idea rather quickly. Somehow I couldn't bring myself to kill her, least of all while she could still prove useful.
I decided the smartest thing to do would be to lock up all the weapons and fit her with one of the slave's control collars and arm myself with the remote. If she gave me trouble I could shock her into submission. If that didn't work I could activate the collar's self-destruct mechanism.
I secured her, still unconscious, to a bulkhead in the cargo bay with a sturdy cable and bedded down nearby so I could get some rest.
Sleep never came, however. Every time I got near to slipping away I'd jerk awake again, my attention snapping to the small figure; half in hope she'd be gone, half in fear that I'd catch a glimpse of a rubber conduit before it broke my skull open. Each of the dozen or so times this happened, the fox would always be motionless in the corner where I had left her. More than once I got up to see if she was still breathing. When she was I would be not just a little disappointed and fiddle with the remote control in my paw for a few moments before retreating back to my makeshift cot, hating myself for being afraid of such a weak creature.
When the sun was finally low in the sky and the temperature outside had fallen I woke her and explained she would have to work for her food and water, if she expected to live, and I would effectively be her master until we were rescued.
"Cross me," I had said gravely, "and I will not hesitate to kill you."
"You shouldn't wait for an excuse," was all she had said.
Her fur coloring was the standard orange-red of her kind, with a creamy white chest and black-gloved paws. Neither I nor my family had every had enough money to own a slave, but on occasion a high-ranking officer would take one on ship deployments, as they were privileged to do so. I didn't know who this particular slave belonged to. To me, she was just another piece of cargo and, in a way, my responsibility until delivered.
This was the first time a piece of cargo had tried to kill me.
I walked her to her camp. She had been relatively compliant until I ordered her to pick up some of the gear she had stolen from me and carry it back to my camp.
She was still on the ground, breathing hard, her paws grasping at the metal collar at her throat, when I crouched down beside her.
"I imagine that hurts pretty bad," I said evenly. Then she looked at me and tears caught the glint of the dying sunlight in the distant horizon. I tried hard to suppress a feeling of shame that I suddenly felt. "That was a warning. You need to learn to obey me, and learn it quickly. Then I might trust you enough to take that collar off."
The fox snarled a little as she pushed herself up onto her haunches. When we were both standing again she beat the dirt off her dingy clothing and wiped her face with the back of a paw. I wish I were better at recognizing scent markers. It was a social instinct of my wolven ancestry that was all but forgotten, and it would have served me well to recognize the mood her scent was no doubt broadcasting.
"You should know better than to ever trust me," she said, her voice dripping with venom. "I have a warning of my own, wolf. I'm not afraid of you. And I'm not afraid of death, either."
My mouth hung open as my brain stumbled for a reply. I thumbed the control that seemed to have become like another digit in my paw.
The fox wasn't frightened. She took a step toward me, baring her teeth in a snarl.
"I hate wolves. More than I could ever say," she hissed and as I stood by, frozen to the ground, she lifted the ration crate onto her shoulder and started walking toward the ship.
I almost forgot to follow her.
***
19 December 2357
The fox didn't give me another reason to punish her after that night. She gave me the barest level of effort she could get away with, but didn't fight me. We rarely had reason to speak to one another. For the most part I gave her orders to do this or that and she said even less back to me. The way she looked at me said what her bitter tone never did, the kind of look that made me never let her out of my sight.
I...we...had been on this planet now for over two weeks without any contact from abroad. I knew that with each day that passed rescue was less and less likely by the simple fact that if anyone was able or knew where to look for us, they would have done so already. I was coming to accept it more and more in an odd, indifferent way.
She didn't seem to care, one way or another.
I continued broadcasting my distress signal and monitoring the communications system aboard the Nuara, but what had started out as something I didn't dare walk away from for more than ten minutes turned into a chore I had to remind myself to do.
"Do you expect anybody to hear you, wolf," the fox had asked one day.
"Stop calling me 'wolf'," I snapped. "I have a name."
"A lot of good it does you out here."
I growled inwardly and considered punishing her for that. I had gotten a keen sense that I wasn't necessarily the one in control. I may have had the power of pain over her, and I think she feared that, but hers was a different kind of power over me. A week ago I would have told anybody that foxes were weak, subservient, stupid animals. She was surprisingly articulate and independent, and while she did what I told her to do (for the most part) I know it wasn't motivated by fear.
I couldn't shake the sense that she was planning something.
***
We went through every unit of cargo in the Nuara for anything that could prolong our survival but came up empty-pawed. The Nuara had been hauling mostly military supplies; medical, ammunition, mechanical parts, etc. We did find a box of personal belongings with an admiral's name on it. Inside there were, among other things, several pairs of socks and underwear, a fancy dress uniform, and one bottle of a very expensive Lupine whiskey. All useless.
My original fear that I would run out of water remained alive and well, and seeing as there were now two mouths to wet instead of one meant the supply was starting to dwindle earlier than I had hoped. I estimated that we had less than a week left, and that was being optimistic. I said as much to my companion.
She muttered something about useless wolves under her breath. When I snapped my jaws impatiently she huffed.
"Didn't you look for water out there?" She made a sweeping motion with her paw.
"Where is it," I demanded, knowing by the provocative overtone she made no effort to hide that she was hiding something from me. "Do you know where there's more?"
She didn't say anything. I made a deliberate motion with my paw to shock her but she reacted first, turning her back to me and starting out into the scrub bushes around the camp. I didn't follow
"Well," she said, stopping to look back at me as I glared angrily back at her. "Come on. You want to die of thirst?"
I followed her to a low spot in the landscape where the foliage was thicker than elsewhere, not more than a stone's throw from my lean-two. She walked around in tight circles, following a trail that only she seemed to know and stopped when she found a spot below a thistle bush that interested her.
"There's nothing here," I said with a scowl. "If this is some kind of game..."
She got down on all fours, her long bushy tail twitching excitedly as she pressed her nose to the dirt. Little clouds of dust kicked up as she sniffed the ground and I realized that her sense of smell must be better than mine. Finally her nose stopped and with a sudden burst of energy she lunged forward with her paws and started digging furiously, flinging dirt and rock all over the place. I yelled at her to stop, but by now she wasn't listening.
She stopped digging as suddenly as she had begun, sitting up with a dark mass in her paws that I strained to see in the moonlight. The fox brushed dirt off the long slender thing, about 10 centimeters across and maybe four times as long. It looked like a thick, knobby root.
When she was satisfied she held it up to my face. It smelled strongly of dirt and not much else. I snorted and she laughed; not mockingly, either. Her face was alight with genuine excitement and pride.
"Here," she said, "watch this."
She bit one end of the root, tore it off with a yank of her jaws, and held it upside down. Drops of liquid spilled freely from it onto the ground, the little pat-pat-patting sound making my ears perk. The fox wrapped her paws around it and squeezed. About a liter of liquid spilled onto the ground.
"There're plenty of them around. I think it's how these plants stay alive when it's dry. It doesn't taste very good, but it's something."
I took the root and sniffed its fleshy end. It smelled a bit harsh, a bit acrid. I looked to the fox suspiciously.
"It's not poisonous," she said.
I tipped the end over my tongue and squeezed. It was bitter, like cold herbal tea. But it was definitely water.
"See?"
"How long have you known about this," I asked, tossing the root down beside her lap.
Her attention followed the root, that clever smile of hers fading a good measure. "I found them a few days after the crash," she said evenly.
"Why didn't you tell me about this before," I demanded.
She stood up to brush herself off. It made little difference. "Should I have," she asked simply. The air of pride was gone, but she said it with a kind of conviction that stated she was not ashamed, that she would do it again, given the chance.
A silent conflict between the two of us for the last four days had been a mutual wish by one for the other to meet an untimely death. I would be lying if I said this troublesome slave's death would not be a relief to me, and I doubt she didn't feel the same about mine. At this point her life was literally in my paw and a simple motion on my part would end part of my torment.
But it had not always been that way, which was another part of my torment, part of what robbed me of sleep.
"I understand why you want me dead, fox," I said calmly. "Why didn't you kill me when you had the chance? On the ship?"
My words brought a viscous sneer to her muzzle. The dim light played off her sharp little teeth. "To tell you the truth, wolf, I thought I had. And I was glad, too, because I thought I was free. Completely free. And you know what...for about a day, I was." The little fox's voice was low but clear, the honesty of her assurance giving a cold bite to an otherwise warm night. "I know that you fear dying, wolf. I can see it in your eyes every time you look at me. Maybe you fear the unknown of death, or maybe it's because you love life too much to give it up. But for my entire life I have never had a life to lose." She tugged at the collar around her neck. "When I thought I had killed you, I thought I was finally free, that my life was finally mine. Mine!" she yowled, her voice cracking.
I hadn't realized until now that she was standing right in front of me, her nose turned up to snarl into mine.
"Know this, wolf-never forget this: For that brief moment on your damn ship, your life was in my paws. And if I knew then what I know now, I would have made sure you were dead."
She pushed past me and I grabbed her arm, jerking it sharply toward me. She tried to pull away but I held her firmly.
"Now look here!" I barked. "As I recall you attacked me first, not the other way! I didn't even know you were alive. I did nothing to you!"
"No, of course you didn't," she hissed. "You didn't enslave my parents, did you? You weren't the one that took me from my mother while she begged and pleaded to keep me for just one more day. It was some other wolf, wasn't it? Always some other wolf. Well, master wolf, Mr. Wolf, sir, answer me this: Should I have expected anything different from you a few days ago?" She turned her nose to the remote in my paw. "Was I wrong?"
I said nothing. I had nothing to say. I wanted to say yes. I wanted to say no. I wanted to say anything if only to break an awful since that hung between us. I looked away, but I could still feel those green eyes burning into my pelt.
She snorted contemptuously at my silence. When she jerked her arm away, I didn't resist, nor did I watch as her form disappeared into the darkness around me.