Fire in the Sky

5

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.

She eased the stunner from the holster in the middle of her back, sighted on him. She had to hit him full on the first time; it would take a large and protracted jolt to put him down. Before she was ready, he was up and gone.

She edged forward until she was close to a tree, hidden by the lichen webs that dropped thickly from the lower branches, settled herself to wait, praying as she did so that Marrin’s present luck would hold.

Once again she heard the crash of the Chav’s feet, got herself set.

He circled behind her this time, flashing through the trees, choosing an alternate route to keep Marrin confused. She froze, but he ran on without even a stutter in the pound of his feet. He was already out of sight before she recovered enough to start breathing again. She couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen her, though she was fairly well concealed by the lacy drape of the gray-green lichen, yet it had to be true because a tap on the firing sensor and she’d be in two pieces right now. He wouldn’t even have had to break stride.

Stick to your pattern, Chav. Stop trying to be clever. Come on. Come on, stomp right past Give me a shot O gods, Marrin must be half crazy wondering what happened to me. No, Shadow. Keep your mind on what you’re doing. This is no time to measure the whichness of the why.

She eased a little forward and tore a hole in the lichen veil.

The flikit had settled more since she’d left it, it was almost invisible down in the thornbush. The bush was

. lo Clayton too damp to catch fire, but it was smoldering as were a number of the trees around. There were no flames, just smears of stinking smoke that for the moment tended to give additional protection to Marrin since the thornbush thicket and the huge tree it grew around were for some reason at the center of a large glade. There was little shelter for the Chav. As she watched, Marrin followed the Spy’s beam pulse with one of his own.

For several moments the play was on the far side of the clearing, then she could hear the Chav heading her way. She drew in a long breath, held it, then let it trickle out slowly, counting as she did so, steadying the stunner on her forearm, waiting…

He came bounding through the trees, his head turned away; he was watching the thorn patch.

Shadith centered the stunner on him, swore in frustration as he flung himself back and to one side as a pulse from the thorns came at him. He retreated farther into the trees-Shadith stiffened, wondering if her luck would hold again-and turned back on his path, moving more silently this time, more slowly. Marrin had ears like a bat-she’d noticed more than once how acute his hearing was-that was probably the reason he’d kept the Chav off.

A moment later the Spy’s cutter pulsed, this time cutting at the thorns rather than the flikit.

A pause. Another cut.

Marrin answered, took a chance this time and held the beam longer than a pulse.

No response.

Shadith chewed her lip. What are you up to now?

Nothing and nothing. Not a sound from the Chav.

She heard the foof as a puff ball exploded, then a faint brushing sound. A moment later a dark solidity undulated swiftly along the ground. The Chav. Crawling.

Marrin, don’t you dare fire, I don’t care what you hear. That’s right, sweet spy, just a little closer, little little little…

She touched the trigger sensor, held her finger on it.

The Chav roared, fought to his feet and leaped toward her. She didn’t move. She kept the stunner full on him and prayed the power would last long enough. By the third step he was falling, he moved his foot clumsily for another step, tumbled onto his face.

She got to her feet, backed away several steps to put more distance between them. “Marrin,” she called. “He’s stunned. I don’t know how long it’ll last. Bring the come-alongs. If you can. I don’t want to take the stunner off him.”

“Shadow.” The relief his voice was almost a sob. “Don’t think I can do that. Something wrong with my legs.”

“Oh, kortch!” She edged around the Chav, keeping as far from him as she dared. She gave him a last shot from the stunner, ran limping toward the thorn patch trying to ignore the pain that shot up her leg. The ankle was badly swollen, she was going to have to cut the boot off her foot. What a clutch of ‘cripples. When she reached the edge of the thorn thicket, she said, “Weight them with something and toss me the ties. I want to turn our Spy into a package soon as I can. Oy! he’s fast. And I can see him pulling trees up by the roots and using them as quarterstaffs.”

When Marrin’s face showed above the thorns, it had a greenish undertone and his eyes a feverish glitter. His hand was shaking as he swung the bundle until he had some momentum then released it rather than threw it.

The comealongs were straps woven from Menaviddan monofilament inside a sheath of graal cloth to keep the filament from cutting to bone. With metal closures that could be shifted at need, then locked in place. And even a Chav’s full strength wouldn’t break the closures once they were in contact and activated.

She bound his wrists in front, used a second strap to link his elbows so he couldn’t move them from his sides. The third strap she used on his ankles, giving him enough play so he could shuffle along, but not enough for a full stride.

He showed no sign of coming round, but she didn’t trust that and got away from him as soon as she was finished with the tethering.

She limped back to the thorns and stood looking at the tree and remembering how easily she’d jumped, caught the limb and swung down. “Marrin, you still with us?”

“Just about.”

“Think you can get a line over that limb?” She pointed. “I can’t make it by myself.”

“What happened to your leg?” She could hear him shifting about, moving with a painful slowness.

“Stupidity. Stepped wrong on a slime patch and twisted my ankle.”

“Wondering what that smell was.”

“You should meet it up close and personal like I did.”

The rope came over the limb and snaking down to meet her hands. She got her hands set, began pulling herself up.