Jo Clayton - Fire in the Sky

He slipped his improvised halter onto the first, drove the tether’s holding peg into the ground with a powerful blow of his fist. As soon as he’d dealt with the second, he cut them free and let them get to their feet. Then he backed off and squatted next to a bush where his silhouette would be camouflaged.

They pulled at the tethers for a moment, blatting their distress, but when nothing more alarming happened, they forgot about the intruder and went back to grazing.

He waited patiently. Grazers were grazers on every world he’d visited, the same narrow acuteness and the same stupidity. When he thought the time was right, he moved slowly, a step at a time, away from the bush. They retreated as far as they could, but he didn’t chase them, just dumped two small heaps of grain on the ground beside the pegs, then went back to his bush.

They nosed at the grain, then began eating it.

He took some more.

They shied a little, but only retreated a few steps.

After about a hour, they were used to him and after a little practice on lead, ambled contentedly along behind him, the calf trotting at its mother’s flank. They were his shield against the devices in the flier, large warm bodies that would camouflage his warmth. It wouldn’t work against a military filter, but a clutch of Scholars wouldn’t have that kind of equipment. For one thing, they wouldn’t need it.

He set up camp near the last of the killing places, climbed a tree and watch the flier hunt. It was in the air on the far side of the Vale, casting about, shifting from side to side to cover the forested area between the floor and the peaks. Looking for him and being very thorough about it. He watched with calm approval, he would have done much the same, sweeping the ground to make sure he missed nothing on that first circle, widening the circle to the far side of the mountains on the second round. It would have caught him on foot or riding. Using the miniskip would be like shouting here I am, come get me.

Another thing he approved of. The flier barely missed the tops of the trees. It was in easy range of his cutter.

He left the tree and took a shovel into the small meadow where his animals grazed. He dug out rectangles of sod and set them aside, then settled to deepening the hole until there was room for him to lie down in it. He trimmed thin branches, used them as supports and replaced the sod so that all but a small opening at the end was covered. The flier was equipped with a stunner, but he knew those clunkers, they were energy gluttons and the Harper wouldn’t use it until she spotted him.

That was what he had to prevent. He needed them close enough to let him disable the lifters.

He dropped the last sod pieces into the hole and went back to his tree to watch the progress of the flier.

The telltale bonged softly. Shadith closed her eyes, extended the mind touch.

“You can relax, Shadow. It’s only a couple of grazers.”

She sighed and sat up. “This has been one of life’s more tedious days. Wonder if we’re wasting our time.”

“Fivescore dead choreks say he’s out here somewhere. And there’s been no energy output from the skip.”

She shivered. “If I ever had qualms about going after him…”

“He’s a thorough cattif, give him…”

The flikit screamed as the cutterbeam gouged through the lifters, broke through into the cabin, grazing Shadith’s thigh. The flier turned into a rock and went plunging down, not much forward movement because they were going so slow. Marrin slapped in the lever for the emergency rockets. This triggered the crash belts. They came slapping around both of them, locking them into the seats.

For a moment Shadith thought the rockets weren’t going to blow, then they roared awake, slowed the fall, the flikit trembling and shaking and threatening to veer onto its side and go slicing down again. She clung to the seat with both hands and stared at the trees rushing toward them.

They slammed into a tree top, bounced, hit another, tilted crazily, bounced from tree to tree, metal screeching, the stench of hot sap as the trees started to smokier, the snap, groan, creak of the mangled trunks. The motion stopped.

Silence.

Tilted at an acute angle, the flikit was wedged into a thicket of thornbush that grew up against a large squat tree that was still shuddering under the impact of the crash.

Shadith unclipped the crash belt. Marrin was bent over, his belt loose, his head against the readouts, a trickle of blood wandering down the side of his face. “Tsa! It would happen…” She stuffed two of the cached cutters down her shirtfront, climbed onto the seat, reached for the stub of a branch and used it to swing clear of the thorns. After a quick scan of the area, she raced for a pile of boulders where the cliff looming over this strip of forest had crumbled in some long past earthshift.

She’d barely got settled in a niche between two boulders with a bit of scrub as a screen when the spy burst from the trees, heading toward the wrecked flikit with a velocity that startled her so much he’d vanished into the trees before she could turn the stunner on him.

She left her plans in the dust behind the boulders and went across the scree as fast as she could, slipped into the trees away uphill from where the Chav had entered them and ran to reach the spy before he found Marrin, cursing her own stupidity because she’d forgotten he was heavyworld, a hunter.

She tried a sweep as she ran, hunting for the hunter, but her foot slipped on a patch of fungus, her ankle turned under her and she fell hard. When she stood, pain shot up her leg. She took a step, the pain was bearable if she went down heel first and didn’t bend the ankle, so she went ahead, walking more carefully. Stopping at intervals to do a sweep because she didn’t want that Chav coming at her out of nowhere.

She heard the humbbbzzapp of a cutter. She stopped, probed.

Frustrated fury. That was the Spy.

Pain, cold anger. That was Marrin.

She tracked the Spy for a moment. He was shifting continually, moving too fast for Marrin as he’d moved too fast for her. She followed him for a moment, hunting for a pattern. When she thought she’d found it, she began limping forward, pain sweat streaming down her face, her stomach knotting as she kept hearing the cutters go off. Marrin would be pinned in the crashed flikit with cutter beams coming at him from a dozen different places. Must feel like he was under siege from half the world. Still, he had the cutter cache at hand and was keeping the Chav away. For the moment.

She pushed through the lichen and molds and fungus, footing treacherous, trying to move as silently as possible. From the intensity of the Spy’s focus on the crashed flikit, she suspected he didn’t know she was out, that he perhaps thought she’d been injured in the crash.

She heard him crashing across the mycoflorid forest floor, mashing and tearing mushrooms, mildews, slimes, lichens, and all the rest of the fungal forms. With a sigh of disgust, she lowered herself to the mucky ground and crawled forward. It was easier to move on knees and elbows, the weight off her injured ankle, but the smell was indescribable. She slid along, flicking out the mind touch every other breath to keep track of the Chav.

She flattened herself behind a pulpy growth as he came charging past, still maintaining that terrible speed and power, an ogre in seven-league boots. A

moment later she caught a glimpse as he stopped, fired, flung himself aside as Marrin answered the blip with a sweep from his own cutter, moving it side to side around knee level. It missed the Chav only because there was a hollow there that gave him a kind of shelter. Obvious that he’d planned it that way. Not just powerful meat, but a hunter’s brain.