Designated Miss

Designated Hit

Bound and gagged, Morgan considered the man pacing about him. Whatever specie inhabited this place, they seemed capable of shielding their mind from his ability to read them. He tried manifesting a knife in his hand to cut his bonds, but that sensation of having his mind squeezed like a sponge returned. Most of the chatter in his head was gone, save one precious inherent link, which they apparently couldn't suppress.

Morgan wondered why they had gagged him, but perhaps they thought he cast like most scafir do. They left him laying there for the length of several hours. He heard them argue, copulate, sleep, and eat. During a quiet period, their leader removed his gag. He handled Morgan's eyelids and tapped his forehead.

“If you were born here, you would have been left to die,” the leader said evenly.

“Mother wanted to do that, I am told.”

“You are alive. Someone stopped her.”

“My human foster father.”

“Gratitude.”

“Profusely so.”

“You fight well for a scafir, child. They teach you confusing thoughts.”

“No. The humans taught me higher mathematics.”

Magish was a passable language for discussion, but it had its shortcomings. The habitual lack of interrogatives was one of them. Its limited vocabulary was another. Morgan was forced to transliterate mathematics into “number studies.” The term still confounded his captor.

Morgan tried to force a sentence into a question. “You know you are my father?”

“Yes, I remember your mother. You smell of her.”

Morgan presumed he meant he smelled like her. It occurred to him that he might simply smell like a scafir.

“Your race?”

“We are the the'pf. The greatest hunters in all the cosmos.”

“And yet, I was able to overcome you with trigonometric functions,” Morgan murmured to himself. His “father” apparently understood the intent, if not the words.

“You have a vocation.”

“Generally, I kill people. I am an assassin.”

“And you killed many.”

“Yes, more than there are in your tribe five times over.” Morgan estimated the “tribe's” size from differences in cadence of movements.

“If that's true, you are an impressive.”