Star Hunter (3 page)

"Nothing illegal, I assure you." The man crossed to set his refresher
cup in the empty slot. "I am an Out-Hunter."

Lansor blinked. This had all taken on some of the fantastic aura of a
dream. The other was eyeing him impatiently, as if he had expected
some reaction.

"You may inspect my credentials if you wish."

"I believe you," Vye found his voice.

"I happen to need a gearman."

But this wasn't happening! Of course, it couldn't happen to him, Vye
Lansor, state child, swamper in the Starfall. Things such as this did
not happen, except in a thaline dream, and he wasn't a smoke eater! It
was the kind of dream a man didn't want to wake from, not if he was
port-drift.

"Would you be willing to sign on?"

Vye tried to clutch reality to himself, to remain level-headed. A
gearman for an Out-Hunter! Why five men out of six would pay a large
premium for a chance at such rating. The chill of doubt cut through
the first hazy rosiness. A swamper from a port-side dive simply did
not become a gearman for a Guild Hunter.

Again it was as if the stranger read his thoughts. "Look here," he
spoke abruptly. "I had a bad time myself, years ago. You resemble
someone to whom I owe a debt. I can't repay him, but I can make the
scales a little even this way."

"Make the scales even." Vye's fading hope brightened. Then the
Out-Hunter was a follower of the Fata Rite. That would explain
everything. If you could not repay a good deed to the one you owed,
you must balance the Eternal Scales in another fashion. He relaxed
again, a great many of his unasked questions so answered.

"You will accept?"

Vye nodded eagerly. "Yes, Out-Hunter." He still could not believe that
this was happening.

The other pressed the refresher button, and this time he handed Lansor
the brimming cup. "Drink on the bargain." His words had the ring of
command.

Lansor drank, gulping down the contents of the cup, and suddenly was
aware of being tired. He leaned back against the wall, his eyes
closed.

Ras Hume took the cup from the lax fingers of the young man. So far,
very good. Chance appeared to be playing on his side of the board. It
had been chance which had steered him into the Starfall just three
nights ago when he had been in quest of his imposter. And Vye Lansor
was better than he dared hope to find. The boy had the right coloring,
he had been batted around enough to fall for the initial story, he was
malleable now. And after Wass' techs worked on him he would be Rynch
Brodie—heir to one-third of Kogan-Bors-Wazalitz!

"Come!" He touched Vye on the shoulder. The boy opened his eyes but
his gaze did not focus as he got slowly to his feet. Hume glanced at
his planet-time watch. It was still very early; the chance he must run
in getting Lansor out of this building was small if they went at once.
Guiding the younger man with a light hold above the elbow, he walked
him out back to the flitter landing stage. The air-car was waiting.
Hume's sense of being a gambler facing a run of good luck grew as he
shepherded the boy into the flitter, punched a cover destination and
took off.

On another street he transferred himself and his charge into a second
air-car, set the destination to within a block of the address Wass had
given him. Not much later he walked Vye into a small lobby with a
discreet list of names posted in its rack. No occupations attached to
those colored streamers Hume noted. This meant either that their
owners represented luxury trades, where a name signified the
profession or service, or that they were covers—perhaps both. Wass'
world fringed many different circles, intermingled with some quite
surprising professions dedicated to the comfort, pleasure or health of
the idle rich, off-world nobility, and the criminal elite.

Hume fingered the right call button, knowing that the thumb pattern
he had left on Wass' conference table would have already been relayed
as his symbol of admission here. A flicker of light winked below the
name, the wall to the right shimmered, and produced a doorway.
Steering Vye to it, Hume nodded to the man waiting there. He was a
flat-faced Eucorian of the servant caste, and now he reached out to
draw Lansor over the threshold.

"I have him, gentlehomo." His voice was as expressionless as his face.
There was another shimmer and the door disappeared.

Hume brushed his hand down the outer side of his thigh, wiping flesh
against the coarse stuff of the crew uniform. He left the lobby
frowning at his own thoughts.

Stupid! A swamper from one of the worst rat holes in the port. Like as
not that youngster would have had his brains kicked out in a brawl, or
been fried to a crisp when some drunk got wild with a blaster, before
the year was out. He'd done him a real kindness, given him a chance at
a future less than one man in a billion ever had the power to even
dream about. Why, if Vye Lansor had known what was going to happen to
him, he would have been so willing to volunteer, that he would have
dragged Hume here. There was no reason to have any regrets over the
boy, he had never had it so good—never! There was only one small
period of risk for Vye to face. Those days he would have to spend
alone on Jumala between the time Wass' organization would plant him
there and the coming of Hume's party to "discover" him. Hume himself
would tape every possible aid to cover that period. All the knowledge
of a Guild Out-Hunter, added to the information gathered by the
survey, would be used to provide Rynch Brodie with the training
necessary for wilderness survival. Hume was already listing the items
to be included as he strode down the street, his tread once more
assured.

His head ached dully, of that he was conscious first. As he turned,
without opening his eyes, he felt the brush of softness against his
cheek, and a pungent odor fill his nostrils.

He opened his eyes, stared up past a rim of broken rock toward the
cloudless, blue-green sky. A relay clicked into proper place deep in
his mind.

Of course! He had been trying to lure a strong-jaws out of its
traphole with hooked bait, then his foot had slipped. Rynch Brodie sat
up, flexed his bare thin arms, and moved his long legs experimentally.
No broken bones, anyway. But still he frowned. Odd—that dream which
jarred with the here and now.

Crawling to the side of the creek, he dipped head and shoulders into
the water, letting the chill of the stream flush away some of his
waking bewilderment. He shook himself, making the drops fly from his
uncovered torso and arms, and then discovered his hunting tackle.

He stood for a moment fingering each piece of his scanty clothing,
recalling every piece of labor or battle which had added pouch, belt,
strip of fabric to his equipment. Yet—there was still that odd sense
of strangeness, as if none of this was really his.

Rynch shook his head, wiped his wet face with his arm. It was all his,
that was sure, every bit of it. He'd been lucky, the survival manual
on the L-B had furnished him with general directions and this was a
world which was not unfriendly—not if one was prepared for trouble.

He climbed up and loosened the net, coiling its folds into one hand,
taking the good spear in his other. A bush stirred ahead, against the
pull of the light breeze. Rynch froze, then the haft of his spear slid
into a new hand grip, the coils of his net spun out. A snarl cut over
the purr of water.

The scarlet blot which sprang for his throat was met with the flail of
the net. Rynch stabbed twice at the creature he had so swept off
balance. A water-cat, this year's cub. Dying, its claws, over-long in
proportion to its paws, drew inch deep furrows in the earth and
gravel. Its eyes, almost the same shade as its long, burr-entangled
body fur, glared up at him in deathly enmity.

As Rynch watched, that feeling that he was studying something strange,
utterly alien, came to him once again. Yet he had hunted water-cats
for many seasons. Fortunately they were solitary, evil-tempered beasts
that marked out a roaming territory to defend it from others of their
kind, and not too many were to be encountered in cross-country travel.

He stooped to pull his net from the now still paws. Some definite
place he must reach. The compulsion to move on in that sudden flash
shook him, raised the dull ache still troubling his temples into a
punishing throb. Going down on his knees, Rynch once more turned to
the stream water; this time after splashing it onto his face, he drank
from his cupped hands.

Rynch swayed, his wet hands over his eyes, digging fingertips into the
skin of his forehead to ease that pain bursting in his skull. Sitting
in a room, drinking from a cup—it was as if a shadow picture fitted
over the reality of the stream, rocks and brush about him. He had sat
in a room, had drank from a cup—that action had been important!

A sharp, hot pain made him lose contact with that shadow. He looked
down. From the gravel, from under rocks, gathered an army of
blue-black, hard-shelled things, their clawed forelimbs extended, blue
sense organs raised on fleshy stalks well above their heads, all
turned towards the dead feline.

Rynch slapped out vigorously, stumbled into the water loosening the
hold of two vicious scavengers on the torn skin of his ankle when he
waded out knee-deep. Already that black tongue of small bodies licked
across the red-haired side of the hunter. Within minutes the corpse
would be only well-cleaned bones.

Retrieving his spear and net, Rynch immersed both in the water to
clean off attackers, and hurried on, splashing through the creek until
he was well away from the vicinity of the kill. A little later he
flushed a four-footed creature from between two rocks and killed it
with one blow from his spear haft. He skinned his kill, feeling the
substance of the skill. Was it exceedingly rough hide, or rudimentary
scales? And knew a return of that puzzlement.

He felt, he thought painfully as he toasted the dry looking, grayish
meat on a sharpened stick, as if a part of him knew very well what
manner of animal he had killed. And yet, far inside him, another
person he could not understand stood aloof watching in amazement.

He was Rynch Brodie, and he had been traveling on the Largo Drift with
his mother.

Memory presented him automatically with a picture of a thin woman with
a narrow, rather unhappy face, a twist of elaborately dressed hair in
which jeweled lights sparkled. There had been something bad—memory
was no longer exact but chaotic. And his head ached as he tried to
recall that time with greater clarity. Afterwards the L-B and a man
with him in it—

"Simmons Tait!"

An officer, badly hurt. He had died when the L-B landed here. Rynch
had a clear memory of himself piling rocks over Tait's twisted body.
He had been alone then with only the survival manual and some of the
L-B supplies. The important thing was that he must never forget he was
Rynch Brodie.

He licked grease from his fingers. The ache in his head made him
drowsy. He curled up on a patch of sun-warmed sand and slept.

Or did he? His eyes were open again. Now the sky above him was no
longer a bowl of light, but rather a muted halo of evening. Rynch sat
up, his heart pounding as if he had been racing to outdistance the
rising wind now pushing against his half-naked body.

What was he doing here? Where
was
here?

Panic, carried through from that awakening, dried his mouth, roughened
his skin, made wet the palms of the hands he dug into the sand on
either side of him. Vaguely, a picture projected into his mind—he had
sat in a room, and watched a man come to him with a cup. Before that,
he had been in a place of garish light and evil smells.

But he was Rynch Brodie, he had come here on an L-B when he was a boy,
he had buried the ship's officer under a pile of rocks, managed to
survive by himself because he had applied the aids in the boat to
learn how. This morning he had been hunting a strong-jaw, tempting it
out of its hiding by a hook and line and a bait of fresh killed
skipper.

Rynch's hands went to his face, he crouched forward on his knees. That
all was true, he could prove it—he would prove it! There was the
strong-jaw's den back there, somewhere on the rise where he had left
the snapped haft of the spear he had broken in his fall. If he could
find the den, then he would be sure of the reality of everything else.

He had only had a very real dream—that was it! Only, why did he
continue to dream of that room, that man, and the cup? Of the place of
lights and smells, which he hated so much that the hate was a sour
taste in his fright-dried mouth? None of it had ever been a part of
Rynch Brodie's world.

Through the dusk he started back up the stream bed, towards the narrow
little valley where he had wakened after that fall. Finally, finding
shelter within the heart of a bush, he crouched low, listening to the
noises of another world which awoke at night to take over the stage
from the day dwellers.

As he plodded back, he fought off panic, realizing that some of those
noises he could identify with confidence, while others remained
mysteries. He bit down hard on the knuckles of his clenched fist,
attempting to bend that discovery into evidence. Why did he know at
once that that thin, eerie wailing was the flock call of a
leather-winged, feathered tree dweller, and that a coughing grunt from
downstream was just a noise?

"Rynch Brodie—Largo Drift—Tait." He tasted the blood his teeth drew
from his own skin as he recited that formula. Then he scrambled up.
His feet tangled in the net, and he went down again, his head cracking
on a protruding root.

Nothing tangible reached him in that brush shelter. What did venture
out of hiding to investigate was a substance none of his species could
have named. It was neither body, nor mind—perhaps it was closest to
alien emotion.