Counterweight (21 page)

“No,” Rick interrupted. “I’d like to try it.”

Emerie pulled the bow down, strung it, and handed it over
with a wicked grin.

Rick couldn’t hide his approval of the weapon. It was
similar to his own back on 3428. It was a composite with a wood core, a layer
of bone on the inside of the curves to resist in compression and a layer of
sinew on the outside to resist in tension. It had a rich patina – testament to
endless hours of polishing with animal fat.

He held it out and gave the string a gentle tug to gauge its
strength. It moved a short distance, to the amusement of his fellow crewmen,
but Emerie was intrigued. The shopkeeper motioned for Rick to give it a serious
try.

Rick set the weapon down on the counter and accessed the
manual controls on his EVA suit. The upper body retracted almost entirely,
leaving only a flexible armature over his spine with flexible arms mimicking
his ribs. His upper body was now able to move freely and he performed his pre
hunt stretching ritual.

“Norns!” Erik muttered. “What sort of engine room were you
trained in that you’d need muscles like that?”

Rick looked over at him as he picked up the bow. “I told
you, I used to hunt with one of these.” 

Freya was looking at a shop up the street and Rick wondered
why she wouldn’t want to watch the outcome of Emerie’s challenge.

He’d started using a bow by the time he was seven. Hunting
had been a necessary part of life for the isolated community of the
Canal
but, for Rick, it was also an escape from being the bottom of the social order.
As he grew into an adult, he progressed through an increasingly powerful series
of composite bows until Cameron, the community’s best bow maker, finally told
him he couldn’t make them any stronger.

The result, much like the archers of fifteenth-century
England, was a normal lower body but an incredibly powerful upper body.

He raised the bow and tested its full power in his mind. He
saw himself drawing it with greater ease than his own and so he resisted the
urge to use his full strength. This bow and the ability to draw it, were an
obvious source of pride for Emerie, just as it was for Rick.

No need to embarrass the man by making it look
too
easy.

He began the draw, feeling the tension of the first half in
his back. It felt good to hold a bow again, though he’d only been away for a
few weeks. The required force quickly diminished as he brought it to full draw
and he held it for a few seconds to impress his crewmates who wouldn’t be aware
of the bow’s characteristics.

Finally, he eased the weapon and handed it back to its owner
with an approving nod. “This is beautiful,” he told him. “Where did you get
it?”

Emerie beamed with pleasure. “My brother,” he said, “and
you, my friend, can carry one on the hunt, if you’d like.” He took down a
second bow, slightly lighter in color, but with similar dimensions, a couple of
strings wrapped around the grip.

Rick took the weapon, loving the heft it.

He looked up at Erik’s whoop of pleasure.

“We eat for free,” he declared happily. “Assuming you can
hit anything with that monster, you get to keep whatever you shoot.”

Emerie called into the back of the shop and a young girl
appeared. After a quick conversation in a language Rick had never heard before,
the Eesari turned back to them.

“Let’s go,” he said simply. He led the way past the young
girl, through the shop and into a small courtyard opening onto a back alley.
Emerie pulled a few black bags from a wall rack and threw them into an
open-topped mag vehicle that looked as though it had seen better days.

They all clambered aboard and he fired up the power plant,
easing out into the alley. “You’re only the seventh customer I’ve ever had to
give a bow to,” Emerie called over his shoulder as he exited the alley and
crossed a main thoroughfare. “It’s been a zero-cost guarantee for me so far,”
he continued. “None of the other six ever hit anything, so all I lose is the
arrows and they’re cheap enough.”

They entered another alley and picked up speed again, Emerie
hitting his horn from time to time to warn other shopkeepers of his passage.

“Were any of them used to hunting with a bow?” Rick raised
his voice as they passed the courtyard of a metal-working shop.

“No,” the Eesari admitted, “and I think this may be the
first time I come back with empty pockets.” He chuckled. “It’s still a
worthwhile gimmick – lots of offworlders show up thinking they can get free
food.”

They passed out into a narrow forest track and he
accelerated dramatically. Rick cringed as the tree trunks blurred past but the rest
seemed relaxed, so he tried his best to look nonchalant.

They took a side trail, even narrower than the first, and
began a descent into a heavily forested river valley, visible from time to time
when the trail turned in a cooperative direction.

Emerie pulled to a stop in a side cutting and shut down.
“There’s a runnel not far from here,” he explained. “Bifleet use it to move
between feeding grounds, so we might get a chance…”

“A chance at losing your arrows,” Freya insisted. She turned
to Rick. “Bifleet are high-value game but they’re fast. They move at more than
a hundred kilometers per hour when sprinting and they cruise through these
runnels at close to sixty. You can’t shoot them from inside the runnel or
they’ll crash into you. You have to fire at them from the perpendicular through
the trees and branches.”

“Which is why he’s never had to come back with empty
pockets,” Thorstein added dryly.

“My guarantee – my rules,” Emerie insisted. “Your boy has to
earn it, just like any other customer.” He raised an eyebrow to Rick. “Ready?”

“One second.” Rick hopped out and took a string from the
handle. Looping one end over the top nock, he slid the bow behind his left leg
and angled it forward to rest the bottom nock against the front of his right
shin. Holding the upper end of the bow in his left hand, he bent his entire
body forward until his right hand could slip the string over the bottom nock.
He eased back until the tension was taken up by the string and he stepped out
of the bow.

“He might just earn it after all,” the Eesari mused, handing
Rick a quiver filled with arrows.

A half kilometer later, the two men settled in to wait. The
Midgaard crew had opted not to waste their sweat on a lost cause, though
Thorstein had given him a mischievous wink when Rick had looked back.

Rick had thought they were content to let him do the dirty
work of the hunt. It fit with most of his limited experience back on 3428,
where the upper strata of society felt hunting was beneath them. Freya had
seemed downright dismissive but, as his mind replayed his departure from the
vehicle, Thorstein’s wink seemed to indicate otherwise.

His crewmates weren’t showing disdain for
him.
They
just had no faith in his chances of catching anything. They resented sitting in
the hot sun in a bug-infested forest while he blundered around with Emerie.

He looked to the left as a rhythmic pounding became apparent
in the distance. Emerie caught his attention and pointed up the slope before
chopping his hand down toward the valley. The prey would be moving downslope
from left to right.

Rick pulled out a handful of arrows and stuck them into the
ground to his right. He put the first to his bow and waited.

Two of them? He nodded to himself and adjusted his plan.

Emerie held up a hand with two fingers spread and then
indicated Rick should take the first one while Emery, being on the left, would
take the second.

It was Rick’s plan anyway. The sound was very close now and
he waited until he saw the perfect shot. He released his first arrow and snatched
up the second, bringing it to the string and heaving back with all his
strength, knowing he couldn’t waste a single second on a slow draw.

And then everything changed. Rick’s first arrow changed his
immediate future. The second bifleet, seeing the first go down, opted to attack
rather than flee. Emerie’s arrow skittered off tree trunks in the distance.

It turned faster than seemed possible, crashing out of the
dense wall of brush, pounding straight at Rick.

Rick realized the beast was almost on him, massive jaws
gaping open to show enlarged canines. He suddenly dropped onto his back,
letting the arrow fly uselessly into the trees and dropping the bow.  He
rolled over, pulling his knife from the sheath on his hip, and scrambled to his
feet to race after the enraged animal.

He reached it just as the massive creature was coming to a
stop. It was going to come back for a second pass and, agile though it may be,
it still had to come to a stop if it wanted to reverse directions. Rick reached
it just as it was half turned and he plunged his knife into the cardiac muscle
in the upper half of the oddly located rib cage, near the legs rather than the
upper limbs.

He jumped back to avoid the flailing tail and, with the
terror of the moment over, realised he was breathing heavily. That almost never
happened during a hunt back home.

“How the hells did you pull that off?” Emerie demanded
quietly. “I thought the second one would make a run for it after you ducked it
but you managed to out-guess it
and
be in the right spot to knife him.”

A shrug. “My people depend on the hunt,” he replied. “If we
fail to bring back anything, we go hungry.”

“Huh,” the Eesari grunted noncommittally as he opened one of
his black bags. He pulled out a large net and a machete. “Let’s get into that
runnel and get our catch moving.”

Rick was impressed by the simplicity of Emerie’s solution to
moving big game. The large bipedal beasts were roughly five hundred kilograms
each and it would have been impossible to move them by hand, even with the help
of the three Midgaard waiting at the vehicle.

They couldn’t joint it here and carry it back in pieces or
it would quickly become too contaminated for them to eat. It had to be carried
out in one piece.

Emerie laid a net out next to the bifleet in the runnel and,
with Rick’s help, rolled it onto the net. He clamped the edges together before
getting a maglev emitter from his bag. He attached the small device to the seam
in the net and activated it, dialing up the power level until the creature
hovered just off the ground.

Rick pulled it out of the runnel, while Emerie started
setting up the second catch. After they were ready, it was a simple matter of
strolling back to the vehicle, each towing a bifleet gently with a single hand.

As they rounded the corner, he saw Thorstein sit up in
surprise, then smack Erik on the shoulder, pointing at the returning hunters.
After a brief exchange of words, the weapons officer handed a credit chip to
the engineer.

“We’ll be lucky to fit even one of those in our cooler,”
Erik observed gleefully. He may have lost a bet to Thorstein but the idea of
stocking their ship with something other than tree rats was more than adequate
compensation.

“So Emerie won’t return empty-handed after all.” Rick gave
the Eesari a slap on the back. “It would have been yours anyway, once you got a
second arrow off. That one had slowed right down to come back for me.”

The Eesari’s gloom evaporated in an instant. The beast was worth
a ton of credits, after all.

And the
Brisbane
had enough protein to keep the crew
fed until planetfall. Now they just had to restock on reactant but that would
make this hunt look like child’s play.

There was absolutely no market for the type of reactant
favored by the Human/Midgaard Alliance, at least not here in what was
essentially Republic space. The only way ships like the
Brisbane
could
operate this deep in enemy territory was to have fuel dumps set up in strategic
locations.

A large number of LRG missions were essentially
replenishment runs. They’d head for a dump with a minimal crew so they could
pack every cubic millimetre with reactant modules. Once there, they kept only
enough to make it home.

The scout ships used a lower grade of reactant, favoring the
longer half-life over higher speed. It made for reliable fuel dumps but very
long transit times. With a furtive sidelong glance at the captain, Rick
realised he was looking forward to the less-complicated life that spatial
transition afforded.

If they didn’t launch soon, he was sure he’d make a fool of
himself.

Fair
Warning

Tsekoh, Capital of Chaco Benthic

“A
nd
I’m
telling
you
,” Graadt growled at the company officer, “that
you need to change your routines – all of you. This is going to boil over and,
when it does, you can be sure they have profiles on all the high-value
targets.”

He waved a hand at the restaurant behind the Dactari
chairman, causing the two magisters at his side to twitch their hands a little
closer to their weapons. “This is a prime example,” he said, fighting to keep
calm. “You have your weekly profit-and-loss meeting in this place on the same
day every week.”

Fixed to the underside of the city’s roof, the glazed-floor
establishment offered a view straight down into the depths of the atrium.

“As we have for centuries,” the company chairman replied
stiffly, “and will do for centuries to come.” He looked down his nose –
literally – at the Stoner. “Your kind may not understand the importance of
tradition but the concept of
loyalty
should have had some currency, at
the very least.”

Graadt’s voice grew cold. “Meaning what?”

A glance at his magister guards. “You say you’re hunting a
Human agent and that he’s responsible for the deaths of our magisters but
witnesses put you at the scene of at least half the incidents.” He aimed an
accusing finger. “Whose side are you really on, Oudtstoner?”