It was a thunderstorm to match the mountains through which the skimmer was currently flying, though perhaps flying was not, at that moment, the most truthfully descriptive word. Rattling would have been more accurate, or even the hoary term bucking that related not to mechanicals but to the violent gyrations of a certain domesticated Terran ungulate. Despite its robust engine and advanced stabilization technology, the skimmer jumped and slid wildly through the violent air currents. Powerful downdrafts threatened to send it crashing into trees whose weirdly outstretched upper branches began to resemble beckoning hands. The besieged, wind-tossed craft actually did “top” a couple of native growths, sending splintered branches and spore-laden spongy packets flying. The rental agency, a grim-faced Flinx reflected as he vibrated helplessly in his seat’s safety harness, would not be pleased with the appearance of the vehicle’s underside when he returned it.
Rain machine-gunned the transparent canopy. It alternated with heavy hail and occasional blasts of snow as Gestalt’s atmosphere threw everything in its meteorological arsenal at the stubborn skimmer. Not so idly and given the current circumstances, Flinx found himself wondering if removing the craft’s locator and leaving it behind in Sluuvaneh might have been a less-than-optimal way of disregarding procedure in order to protect his privacy. On the other hand, if anyone at the rental agency happened to currently be tracking the weather in the northlands, they would not be worrying about their vehicle. According to its locator, their skimmer was at present safely and comfortably at rest in a well-protected service hangar in Sluuvaneh.
As he gritted his teeth and held on, both physically and mentally, he reminded himself that this was not New Riviera. Then again climate, terrain, and isolation combined to create exactly the sort of discouraging place that would appeal to the hermetically inclined. Someone like, he could not keep himself from yearning hopefully, his father.
Raising his voice in order to make himself heard over the banging and rattling against the plexalloy of the current hailstorm, he shouted at his escort. “Is the weather like this often up here? Should we put down and wait it out?” He was starting to think that where local Gestaltian meteorology was concerned, maybe allowing a little extra travel time was the better part of traveling valor.
Despite the unabated violence of the current storm, however, Bleshmaa did not seem at all concerned. “Weather in north can be viciousvicious, as yu see, but usually not longlong.” She was looking, he noted, not at him but at the forward console readouts. “I agree with skimmer-mind. We will be through this very soon. Not tu be worried. Besides, ground here is covered with snowdriftings. If forced landing necessary, would be very soft.”
Another Tlelian attempt at humor, he thought. Or maybe not.
His escort was as good as her doubled words, however. Five minutes after he had seriously considered directing the skimmer to find a landing site where they could wait out the tempest, it subsided as swiftly as it had overtaken them. Impenetrable rain-swept darkness gave way to an uncertain drizzle. Then the clouds parted, to reveal blue forest carpeting the steepest slopes they had encountered thus far. Towering pink-tinted cumuli clustered protectively around the highest peaks like giant cherubs guarding a goddess. Turning slightly farther to the west, the skimmer began following the course of yet another ferociously churning wild river.
“I am going tu open canopy slightly.” Disdaining the artificial supports that had kept her upright during the worst of the storm, Bleshmaa slipped out of her safety harness. A curious Pip hovered behind her, fascinated by the two sets of grasping cilia whose supple curling movements were not so very different from those of her own coils. The flying snake was a presence the native had already learned to tolerate.
Disengaging from his own fastenings, Flinx reached up and outward in a long stretch that emphasized his lean frame. “Letting in some fresh air?”
“Yu will see.” In the absence of a physical smile on the native’s wide, flattened face, he found that he was able to perceive an emotional one. “I think yu will enjoy.”
A portion of the port-side canopy slid down into the skimmer’s lightweight composite frame. By design, the craft slowed its speed to reduce drag and allow for onboard observation without instruments. Scrubbed clean by the storm, alpine atmosphere heavy with oxygen flooded the single compartment. Having experienced firsthand one more reason why offworlders might not want to live on Gestalt, Flinx now found himself enveloped by a reason why they might.
It was the most wonderful air he had ever inhaled.
Filtered and flushed through the immense undisturbed alien forest below, richer in oxygen than the atmosphere of Earth or Moth or even Nur, the air that filled the skimmer was infused with the full, unadulterated fragrance of the blue forest: redolent of scents half remembered and swirled with others he was unable to isolate and identify. The simple act of breathing threatened sensory overload. Similarly stimulated, an equally exhilarated Pip proceeded to turn a series of backflips and pinwheels that suggested her respiratory intoxication exceeded even his own.
“I…” He had to pause long enough to take in another wonderful, invigorating lungful of air. “…see what you mean.”
Standing near the opening but not sticking her head outside the canopy, Bleshmaa, too, was drawing in breath after breath. “It is wonderfully clean and clear, is it not? No contaminants ever drift this far north. A visitor does not need a sensor capable uv detecting airborne poisons, because there are none. The atmosphere uv the northlands is safesafe.”
“Of course it is,” Flinx responded, “but it’s so much more than that! The aroma, the sheer combination of fragrances is simply—”
He broke off. She was staring at him. He could sense the confusion in her mind even if he could not see it in her wholly nonhuman face.
Fragrances? Aromas? What are those? her feelings seemed to suggest. It hit him hard. The extravagant perfumes the blue growths were releasing, the full-bodied bouquets—she could not detect any of them. Nor could any member of her olfactory-deprived species. They could measure such emissions scientifically. Instruments would tell them something was being added to the atmosphere in the same way others could detect the paths of subatomic particles by recording their paths. But like all Tlel, Bleshmaa had no sense of smell. The phantasmagorical, pungent perfumes of the blue boreal forests of Gestalt must remain forever an unknown quality to those who had evolved among them.
By the same token, he went on in ignorance of anything organic in the skimmer’s vicinity that might be generating electrical impulses. While he could smell the spectacular forest, she could “smell” him and Pip and doubtless the skimmer as well by sensing and measuring the strength and type of current that ran through their brains and bodies. He found himself wondering. If some djinn or sorcerer of legend could somehow offer him the ability that among sentient species was unique to the Tlel, would he trade one sense for the other?
Of course, he knew nothing of what an individual’s electrical field “smelled” like. Was it like a scent, or more like a clashing of bright colors? Or perhaps more like the emotions his own singular ability allowed him to perceive? In the absence of the requisite biological equipment, how to imagine such a thing?
Not only could the Tlel not whiff their marvelous surroundings, they could not whiff one another. That ability was left to visitors and settlers who arrived with the properly evolved detection mechanisms pre-installed. He did not have to inhale deeply to smell his escort. Her body odor, to which she and her kind were completely oblivious, fell somewhere between a stench and a reek. Even were he tactless enough to point this out and complain about it, it would not matter.
She would not know what he was talking about.
CHAPTER 6
The storm that had bounced the skimmer around like a wood chip in a wind tunnel was not the last they encountered as they continued northward, but it turned out to be the most severe. By comparison, the occasional subsequent snow flurries and intermittent assaults
by windblown hail seemed almost benign. Allowing for the skimmer’s need to follow a route through deep canyons to avoid having to crest ten-thousand-meter-high mountain peaks, another day or two of comparatively easy travel should find him and his escort at his chosen destination.
Then would come the initial encounter and introduction. Hopefully, it would be followed by a cordial interview and, if fate and fortune were with him, the means to obtain the minuscule volume of organic material that would allow him to determine with certainty if he bore any genetic relationship to the person he had spent a bit of time and money to meet. And if, in the end, nothing along the line he hoped for eventuated from that?
He would return to Tlossene, and he would try again.
For now, it was enough to relax and enjoy the uninspired but nourishing qwikmeals the rented skimmer’s cooker served up, to chat with his ebullient escort about her people and their culture, and to continue his hesitant forays into the throat-spraining complexities of the Tlelian language. Much as voyagers on the ocean grow familiar with the motion of a boat and thereby gain their sea legs, he had become accustomed to the occasional jolts and bounces the northland weather imposed on the skimmer.
The small missile that flew past, however, was another matter entirely.
It had happened so fast that the craft’s AI had not even had time to make a warning announcement. One moment they were cruising along as usual: Flinx in his forward seat, Bleshmaa busying herself in back, Pip coiled on the console in front of him. The next, the skimmer took a lurch to port more violent than any induced by wind or storm. Out of harness, he was nearly thrown from his chair.
“I must please ask you to secure yourselves in your seats,” the synthesized voice hastily declared, “as we are—”
“I know, I know!” Ignoring the preprogrammed regulation warning, Flinx stumbled to the rear of the skimmer. From a standing position and despite her sturdy Tlelian posture, Bleshmaa had been thrown to the floor. He helped her up, for the second time in as many days careful not to put too much overbearing human weight on her upper arms.
“Someone is trying tu kill us.” Her disbelief was palpable. It was as much question as statement. He shared her bewilderment. Taking evasive action, the skimmer slammed back to starboard, nearly throwing them to the floor together this time.
He did not venture to disagree with her analysis. But who, and why? Here on Gestalt, of all places! He had no enemies here.
He quickly corrected himself. That conclusion was self-evidently mistaken.
In any event, on the all-too-numerous occasions in the past when he had been confronted by other sentients whose intentions toward him had tended to the homicidal, they had invariably declared themselves as well as their objective. As the skimmer rocked and weaved, dodging the occasional explosive projectile flung in its direction, no angry voice spat from its speakers, no accusatory projection coalesced in its interior. Whoever was pursuing them was apparently content to commit murder anonymously.
Except that with Flinx as the intended target, no would-be murderer could remain completely anonymous.
Despite the skimmer’s violent bucking as it fought to avoid obliteration, he reached out with his Talent. The source of the enmity that was pursuing him opened immediately to his probe. Its most notable characteristic was a cool detachment. The individual who was trying to kill him was not particularly angry. Yes, his emotions were heightened by the exhilaration of the chase, but insofar as Flinx could tell the man’s feelings were devoid of personal rancor. It was a state of being Flinx recognized immediately because he had encountered it previously. The feelings of professional assassins such as the Qwarm differed noticeably from those whose actions were inspired by raw emotion. The man (as usual, it was easy for Flinx to identify the gender of the individual whose emotions he was perceiving) who was pursuing him was not entirely all-business. There was a feeling of excitement, a sense of glee at what he was doing, that was starkly at odds with what Flinx had once sensed in the mind of a Qwarm. His pursuer was not a member of the Assassins’ Guild, then. They truly were all-business, as cold and unfeeling when cutting throats as a designer cutting fabric.
The skimmer sought salvation in low clouds. The attempt did nothing to throw off the pursuit, or even to slow it down. Clouds, fog, snow—in these days of heightened instrumentation that rendered climate of any kind invisible, weather made bad camouflage. That the man hunting him was properly equipped for his murderous work was evident by the alacrity with which his own craft followed Flinx’s through the cloud bank where his and Bleshmaa’s shuttle had sought refuge.
The forest would have offered more cover, but darting through the densely packed growths would have forced the skimmer to slow, thus rendering it an even easier target for the craft on its trail. It and its occupants were not entirely helpless, however.
Though the rental was equipped to protect those it transported from the depredations of inimical fauna, no maudlin regulations prevented it from defending itself when attacked by sentient beings. The same shell-pumper that had messily dispatched the attacking hlusumakai now fired back at the pursuing craft. In forcing it to take evasive action of its own, their pursuer fired less often, choosing its shots with greater care.
That one would eventually hit home was likely, Flinx knew, given that his skimmer’s ability to keep flying and dodging was severely circumscribed. A commercial rental, not a stingship, it was being asked to perform maneuvers for which it had never been designed. The assassin on their tail knew that just as well as Flinx himself, he reflected. It would be interesting to know why the man wanted Flinx dead. Under tight control, however, the killer’s emotions offered no clue as to his motivation.
There was a loud bang, as if a large container full of trash had been dropped onto the plexalloy canopy. The skimmer endured an abrupt drop of several meters and broke off several treetops before recovering altitude. He did not have to ask the AI for an explanation. One was supplied anyway. The calm, emotionless tone of the skimmer’s voice was maddening.
“We have been hit. My defensive weapon has been disabled and is not repairable. I will continue evasive maneuvering.” A pause, then, as air roared around them, “I have made several efforts to contact the craft that is assaulting us, in an attempt to obtain an explanation for the hostile and dangerous behavior it is displaying. Neither it nor any plausible organic occupants have responded.”
If he had been with his own skimmer from the Teacher, Flinx knew its far more advanced weaponry would already have dispatched the pursuing vehicle. His craft mounted concealed armament that was not only illegal but also well in excess of that available to most nonmilitary transport. Seeking as low a profile as possible while on Gestalt, he had opted instead for the local rental. Now he was paying for it. In more ways, possibly, than one.
Still, even though the rental skimmer’s own weapon had been put out of action, they were not entirely defenseless. He still had his pistol—as well as access to another, far less visible weapon. In order to make maximum use of its potential, certain forced adjustments would first have to be made to the skimmer’s present tactics. Orthodox instructions would have to be manually countermanded. Fighting to keep his feet as the deck rocked and bucked beneath him, he turned his full attention to the craft’s console.
In the pursuing skimmer, Halvorsen was hard-put to rein in his frustration. Judging by the make of skimmer that his quarry had rented, it ought to by now be a smoking ruin somewhere on the ground below him. Instead, its unexpected ability to avoid obliteration was continuing to delay his return to Tlossene. Must be a newer model, he told himself. He sighed. Its strained efforts to evade his assault were only postponing the inevitable. Especially now that its single defensive weapon was out of action.
Secure in battle harness while his own craft’s automatics managed the pursuit—indeed, managed it far better and more efficiently than any organic pilot could have done—he contented himself with firing at the target whenever it f
ell within range of his own skimmer’s weapons. In this almost leisurely manner he sought to murder the occupants of the craft that was desperately trying to shake him. It could not do so, he knew. There was no chance its internal AI could outthink his far more sophisticated craft’s instrumentation. His skimmer had been specially modified to win this kind of chase. A rental whose principal function was the shuttling of people and light cargo back and forth between towns would eventually run out of evasive options. One by one, his own skimmer’s adaptive intelligence would record them. As soon as one previously utilized maneuver was repeated, as it inevitably would be, his craft would be ready to respond with a corresponding fatal blow.
Diffidently, he checked the chronometer. Another ten minutes, he told himself, and no matter how new, his quarry’s AI would surely have run out of evasive options. Twenty at most. If a lucky shot didn’t precede a predictive one. Either way, he was confident he would be on the ground scraping up proof of his labors before the hour was up. That was why he did not employ his vehicle’s most powerful weapons. Utterly obliterating the frantically dodging craft in front of him would be counterproductive. He needed to be able to recover at least a little intact DNA to attest to his accomplishment in order to collect the promised payment.
Struggling to keep erect, Flinx did his best to secure Pip inside his jacket. He didn’t want her flying free inside the wildly gyrating skimmer. For one thing, despite her exceptional aerial skills, an unexpected jolt of sufficient violence could send her crashing into dome or deck.
Also, he had something else in mind.
“Open rear canopy!” he bellowed, directing the command to the skimmer’s AI.
Well behind him, a frightened and shaky Bleshmaa flashed her horizontal ocular in his direction. “Open? What fur du such a thing, Skua Mastiff?”
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