Authors: Charles W. Sasser
I continued on foot. I started out at a fair pace, following the stream as the day’s storms built up and rolled across the menacing skies. I quickly tired. What I hadn’t counted on was the debilitating extent of my physical injuries. A Zentadon’s chest plate was not merely ersatz ribs, as a Human’s. It was both protection for the vital organs and a node center that served the same function as the nerve center in a Human’s spinal column. The amount of pain I suffered warned me of nerve damage.
Also, the plate’s qualities as a diaphragm for taking in adequate air during periods of high exertion were severely limited. I realized I was lucky for the time being if I could move as fast as the sniper, much less outrun him. The most I could hope for was to maintain my small lead.
I tested my senses, let them sniff around through the high country in hopes of picking up Blade’s spoor. Blade erected in his mind an icy barricade against my probing. I almost felt him sneer at my puny efforts. I sensed him, always nearby, but when I sensed him it was almost like he and the Presence were one. The trouble was, I couldn’t tell where he was. Just that he was there. Near. Coming. Relentless. Like the skilled hunter he was.
The best I could hope for was that my Talent act as a barometer for his emotions, that I might judge the rise of his excitement to determine exactly how near he was. He had thrown a rage after having botched the assassination and allowing one of his targets to escape with the prize, but it was not a mindless rage. Quite the opposite. Although his fury reached such extremes that, in spite of his blocking efforts, I actually palpated it with the fingers of my senses, his thoughts remained cool and calculating and focused. I could tell now that he knew from my slow progress that I was hurt and my abilities to resist limited.
I felt him as a predator excited by the distress of his injured victim.
My feet left deep, lasting impressions in the crusty forest floor. Water quickly filled the prints to leave a track readable from a hundred meters away by a blind man. Blade didn’t need the sensors and the LF tracker scavenged from the dead. It wasn’t even necessary that he be an exceptional tracker to follow my trail as I made an obvious beeline for the pod.
I attempted to place ridges between us in order to foil the LF. I waded streams and backtracked to cover my trail; but still I felt him and the Presence always with me, driving me toward the pod. I even took a rocky canyon that led off at a tangent from the due north azimuth that pointed toward the black river, but Blade refused to be fooled. He seemed elated that I was in more open country where his chances at a sure shot increased.
Alarmed, I returned to the forest where my chances of fighting back with the short-range Punch were better. Blade seemed to anticipate my every action.
I recalled from the old histories of the Human Rebellion how the ill-armed and outnumbered Humans had won their freedom from the Indowy and we Zentadon warrior slaves through the general utilization of guerrilla tactics. Roving bands of Earthling fighters tormented the enemy with ambushes, sudden raids, sabotage, assassinations, and terrorism. They appeared as unexpectedly as birds of prey, then disappeared like smoke.
One of their most effective tactics was the use of what they referred to as “booby traps.” Entire areas of the battle zone on Galaxia were made off-limits to Indowy troops because of man pits, sharpened stakes, mammoth whips … The Humans used everything available to impale, maim, injure, and kill the enemy by enticing him to trip the traps himself.
My battle harness contained a small clasp knife. The blade was too short to be considered a weapon. As I walked, fleeing, I cut lengths of a tough bamboo-like plant, each about two feet long, and sharpened them on the ends. I collected about a dozen before I lay my trap.
First, I left a trail of footprints across a small open marsh. That was the bait. In the forest on the other side I selected a tough, springy branch that reached across the trail about chest-high to a Human man. Using the knife, I inserted the sharpened stakes at intervals of two inches for the entire length of the branch. Finally, I cut a tough vine with which to pull the branch into tension, and a much thinner vine to arrange a trip wire across the trail. The dripping rain from the trees, tendrils of fog, and the dimness provided by cloud cover and the forest canopy made the trip wire almost invisible, merely one of many such plants intertwined. If my luck held, the next thing Blade Kilmer felt was the teeth of the whip lashing out to skewer him through and through.
It troubled me that I had it in me to coldly calculate the slaying of another sentient, but I assuaged my conscience by telling it that what I was doing was for the good of all in the galaxy, not for mere self-survival. The power of the Indowy lindal must not be released. Besides, it wasn’t actually like I was killing him with my own hands. Concentrating on that thought kept my taa contained.
I felt Blade coming. I felt him near. He was cautious, wary, suspicious. That was his nature. That was the nature of anything that would survive on the Dark Planet.
I ran hobbling deeper into the forest. Drenched foliage lashed at my face. I had to get as far away from the actual killing field as possible to avoid lintatai. I made my mind go blank.
The whip triggered with a force that shook the trees involved. I suppressed the sudden taa that threatened to burst into my system. I experienced a moment of satisfaction, if not exactly elation. Blade had fallen for the trap. I stopped and looked back.
A peal of maniacal laughter swept through the jungle. It was difficult to determine where Blade left off and the Presence took up. Chills engulfed my body. He — they — were still coming. The trap had not got him.
If the Presence feared me, it wasn’t something that showed.
M
y heart pounded. Drawing my Punch, I hid underneath the low concealing branches of a tree to examine my back trail. I waited, my throat dry and my chest wracked with spasms of pain. I saw him. A mirror image among the trees, the telltale presence of someone wearing chameleons.
I aimed the gun. My hand shook at the prospect of killing. Again I verged on lintatai. Which was the mirror and which the mirrored? Now would be the time for his chameleons to malfunction, for my benefit if certainly not for his.
Lightning cracked, reverberating and rumbling across the sky, strobing into the forest. A breeze rustled one side of the mirror but not the other. That meant it wasn’t him after all. I collapsed with relief, the moment of truth postponed, and felt the hard rough bark of the tree grinding against my forehead. It suddenly occurred to me that my gold hair must shine in the dark forest like, well, gold. I cut off part of a leg of my cammie trousers with the clasp knife and tied it around my head like a scarf, leaving my ears free to twitch. They had reason enough to be active.
What with the sensors in Blade’s possession and his training and experience on the battlefield, I had about as much chance of waylaying him in an ambush as I did of reaching Galaxia without the pod. His canniness had aided him in surviving my booby trap whip. I felt him out there, patient, waiting now until all the advantages were on his side, playing with me.
I turned once again into the forest, desperation driving me. Looking back over my shoulder, expecting him.
Absorbed as I was, I literally ran into one of the snake-like creatures stretched across the path. It was of a thickness equal to my height and so black it gleamed dully in the rainwater washing off its sides. It was hard and muscular. When I bounced back, its entire amazing length converted into a lashing whip. Its tail hurled me thirty meters through the air and into the trees. When I landed, the breath knocked out of me, its triangular head lifted high among the trees, darting and probing, searching for the interloper. Tongues, for it had four of them, flickered like mercury, testing the air.
I didn’t know if the thing could climb trees or not, or if I could climb fast enough or high enough to escape it, but the treetops seemed my only hope. I scrambled painfully to my feet and made it to one of the forest giants. Because of lightning strikes, the trees were exceptionally tall but also exceptionally slender. Dropping the black lindal at the foot of the tree, I hugged the trunk and began shimmying up it like a simian.
The ebony head slithered through the trees. I swung out onto a branch just as it struck. Rows of teeth ripped off bark just above my hands, leaving a bright gash in the trunk. The head cocked for a second strike. Lidless black eyes the size of plates sized me up. Contemplating the little animal that was about to become lunch.
What difference did it make if I gave away my position to Blade if I were to be killed and eaten by this creature anyhow? Hanging onto the branch with one hand, I drew my Punch Gun and fired. The creature’s head and half its body blew up, showering the surrounding forest with purple-gray blood and shredded flesh.
A moment after, a bullet ripped past my head so near and with such velocity that it seemed to suck out my breath. Twigs and leaves exploded. I had no taa left, so I merely reacted. I let go the branch.
Underbrush cushioned my fall. Luckily for me, I managed to hold onto my gun. I scrambled around in the snake’s gore until I found the Indowy case.
“Elf!”
Blade’s grating voice, diffused and multiplied, seemed to come from all around me, as though it were the voice of the dark forest. Bruised and scratched and breathing heavily, I listened on hands and knees.
“Give it up, elf. This is one you can’t win. You can make it easier on yourself by turning the case over to me now. Or we can do it the hard way. Either way, you have to die.”
I tried to think of a brave, snappy comeback, something like
I have just begun to fight
, or
Damn the starships, full warp ahead
. All I came up with was one word. I shouted it from the bottom of my lungs, hurling it back at him. “Fu-uck!”
I plunged deeper into the forest with the black box, laughing almost hysterically. I was going mad.
Soon, however, I was again nursing a core of loneliness and fear. I had grown up in a civilized, rather protected environment. Taa was something I only experimented with occasionally, cautiously, aware of its danger. Now, here I was, taa-depleted, wounded and battling for my life. One damned thing after another, to coin one of Pia’s endless old, old Earth expressions.
It occurred to me that Blade didn’t have to kill me in order to get the case. Aldenia’s savage denizens could do it for him. Either way, he had the prize and a clear claim on the landing pod.
I paused and looked at the case. I had to make sure he didn’t get it, no matter what happened to me.
I found an outcropping of rock and smashed at the case with the largest stone I could wield. As I expected, the thing proved virtually indestructible. I beat on it without even marring its glossy surface. No wonder it had survived the centuries and still functioned.
I thought about throwing it in the stream and letting it sweep out to sea. It floated. I even contemplated hiding it. In the end, however, I kept it. Sooner or later, the energy it emitted with the Presence’s help would lure Blade to it. If not him, then, someday, another Blade. The genie contained in the lamp possessed such evil that only the vastness of space was large enough to bury it.
Survive
, said a solemn voice fully formed inside my head,
if for no other reason than to get rid of the case for all time
.
That
, I promised this new Presence,
I would do
.
The shorter of the two Aldenia nights was almost upon me. I halted, thinking. My tracks were leading Blade in the direction of the pod. No matter what tricks I used in attempting to shake him from my back trail, I felt him doggedly back there. It was almost like an electronic string led from me to him; it was much more than the LF tracker, which was precise as to locations only at short distances. The Human was good at tracking, I had to hand him that. Sooner or later, the way things were going, he was bound to win.
I should reach the river early in the morning after the coming short night. If I reached it, Blade was toast. I was out of here like a bad dream, leaving the sniper behind to see if he could survive Aldenia a second time.
He couldn’t let me do that. So what was his next move?
All he had to do was forge ahead — he had no problem getting ahead of me in my weakened condition — and set up an ambush between me and the pod. I might survive one ambush, perhaps even a second. But he would eventually score.
But what if the prey did the unexpected, the unpredictable …? As long as I was heading for the pod, the only game in town was “Blade wins.” Changing rules in the middle of the game might extend the chances against me from perhaps one in four or five, to perhaps one in eight or nine. Play the odds. Another old, old Earth expression. Make my day. They would have amused lovely Pia.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” I murmured, pleased at the phrase and still thinking of Pia.
Mind made up, I turned away from the north and toward the east. The stream I had been following faded behind me into the trees and I looked for rugged, rocky high ground that would both challenge Blade’s tracking skills and prevent his getting another shot at me.
T
he strength and endurance of a Zentadon did not come without costs. Although the chemical analog our bodies used instead of ATP was more efficient, the lack of long-term energy storage meant that after a day or so of high energy activity without food our bodies began drawing entirely upon muscle mass. Plant matter might be high in complex sugars, but there was minimal usable protein in it. The grueling events since the neural grenade went off in the rocks, along with my injuries, had taken a lot out of me. If this pace continued, I needed food, real food. Meat.
The thought caused my stomach to roil.
The matter should all be academic tomorrow anyhow — if my ruse worked. There was plenty of food on the pod.