Hunting Party

by Elizabeth Moon

  Ronnie snorted. “They do love drills, don’t they? At least down here Captain Serrano can’t interrupt our sleep.”

  “No. That’s the purview of your aunt, waking us up before daylight to gobble a disgusting breakfast and clamber onto great clumsy, smelly animals. . . .”

  Ronnie felt a perverse desire to insist that it wasn’t that bad, but Bubbles had already started laughing.

  “And you did look so funny, lamb, when you were stuck in that hedge, all red-faced and blubbering.” She patted him on the shoulder as she clambered past him. He could see by the dome-light that Raffa was trying to smother her giggles and shush Bubbles.

  “Fine.” Ronnie slid the canopy forward; the others were still giggling and stowing their supplies in the lockers. He was beginning to wish he hadn’t agreed to this, but how could he back out now? He called up the preflight checklist on the display and started down it. The computer would have done everything, of course, but he was not as careless as his aunt thought.

  “Come on, Ron,” George said. “Get this thing off the ground.”

  “Preflight,” Ronnie said. George should know that—or was he so involved with Bubbles that he’d lost the rest of his wits? George heaved a dramatic sigh, which Ronnie ignored. He worked his way down the rest of the preflight list in silence; as usual, everything seemed to be in order. Ronnie inserted the cube and checked the readout: it had accepted his course programming, and calculated fuel consumption based on satellite weather information. “Refuel once,” he said. “Anyone care if it’s Bandon or Calloo?”

  A ragged chorus, which sounded louder for Bandon; Ronnie entered that with the touchpad, cast a glance back to make sure all the loose items were stowed, and pressed the green button. The engines caught, and the computer took over the final preflight power checks. At least he knew what the readouts meant, though he could not, from this point on, override the computer’s decisions. Not much like a Royal trainer; these civilian models would fly themselves, given the chance. He laid his hands lightly on the yoke anyway, and punched for manual takeoff. He felt the yoke quiver, and the computer displayed his options. If he stayed within these margins, he could have control—and within those, he could control one axis. For a moment it amused him—for a human to be allowed to fly the machine, he had to fly like a machine.

  It would be practice, and he had always enjoyed flying. He flicked his fingers over the yoke studs—power, directional focus, attitude—and the computer agreed that he knew what he was doing. He didn’t know if the others noticed, but he had manual control until he chose to relinquish it, when the craft was at 5,000 meters and on course to Bandon.

  “It’s dark outside,” Raffaele commented as the craft leveled. “There’s nothing but—” She peered back. “Nothing but the House lights. . . .”

  “We had to leave before daylight,” George pointed out. “Or Ronnie’s aunt would have stopped us.”

  Ronnie tried to see past the reflections on the canopy. Nothing but darkness. . . . He flicked off the interior lights, and looked harder. Nothing ahead but darkness, nothing to either side but darkness. He’d never seen anything quite so black in his life.

  “It’ll be dawn soon,” he said. “And the computer doesn’t need daylight.” As it came out of his mouth he realized that they knew that—he was comforting himself. Darkness hid his blush. Behind him, ostentatious yawns indicated that the others would pretend to sleep. Someone turned on one of the tiny reading lights, a soft glow in the rear of the cabin; Ronnie left the main cabin lights off.

  He found that he kept looking to the right, hoping to see some glimmer of dawn. Just when he had given up hope, and convinced himself that he would have to endure flying down a black drainpipe forever, a sullen glow lit the horizon, more feeling than color. Soon he was sure of it; a dim redness blotched with black—clouds, he realized—and then a curious fuzzy quality to the outside. Still dark, still impenetrable, but somehow seeming larger than it had. As the light strengthened, he saw the sea beneath, oddly brighter than the sky. Away toward sunrise it stretched, and the clouds hung over it in dark columns, their tops flushed pink now with the coming light.

  Ronnie had never flown along a coast at sunrise; he had not imagined the impossible combinations of green and blue and purple, the piles of pink and gold, which clouds and sea and sunrise make. He looked down on the dark land slowly coming out of the dark haze of night, the shoreline edged with ruffles of colorless surf that would soon be silver and blue. His quick memory for maps told him they were almost a third of the way to Bandon; the computer would soon change their course away from sunrise, across the narrowing belt of land and out across the ocean to that cluster of islands. He hoped it would not change before he could see the sun lift out of the sea.

  “There’s nothing down there at all,” Raffaele said, in a voice that began sleepy and ended worried. “Where are we?”

  “This is the Bottleneck,” Bubbles said, yawning. “Gorgeous morning, especially since I don’t have to climb on a horse. Don’t worry, Raffa, we can’t get lost. The computer on this thing has a direct line to the navsats. If we went down, someone would be there in no time.”

  “But somebody must live somewhere,” Raffa grumbled.

  “On up the coast a bit there’s a settlement of wildlife biologists,” Bubbles said. “They’re to keep the stuff we don’t want out of the Hunt grounds.”

  The sun came up and glittered on the surf just as he had imagined, and a few minutes later the computer swung them left, away from the coast, and across the forested Bottleneck. Bubbles served breakfast, pastries and fruit and hot coffee she’d filched from the kitchen before they left. Ronnie stretched, enjoying the comfort of baggy trousers, loose shirt, and low, soft-sided boots after the confines of hunting attire. By the time they’d eaten, they’d crossed the other coast and were headed across a blue wrinkled ocean toward the islands. Ronnie had nothing to do, so he turned his seat around and listened to the girls speculate on when Bunny would send someone after them.

  “I hope it’s not Aunt Cece,” Ronnie said.

  “He wouldn’t send her; she’s a guest,” Bubbles said airily. “It’ll probably be some boring mid-level administrator.”

  “We could just tell your father,” Raffa said. “Once we get there, that is.”

  Bubbles wrinkled her nose. “You don’t know how he is. He’ll lecture me. I’ll get mad. We’ll argue. And then I’ll have to make up, or he will, and that takes time I could be enjoying with you.”

  * * *

  Ronnie put the landing system on automatic when he thought they were in range of Bandon. It would contact the field, and bring them in without his intervention, though he hoped the computer would allow him a “manual” landing. When the com beeped, and the field-authorization light turned red, he assumed that the field wanted a voice-contact; it seemed a reasonable way to keep out unwanted guests. “Any special code words?” he asked Bubbles. She shook her head.

  “No—just give the flitter number. It’s on the family list.”

  “Bandon field,” Ronnie said. “Permission to land and refuel, number 002413.”

  “Permission denied.” The flat, almost metallic voice conveyed no interest in negotiation. Ronnie stared at the computer display. He had never heard of a civilian field refusing permission to land and refuel.

  He repeated his original call, and added that they were low on fuel.

  “Permission denied,” the voice said again.

  “Override that,” Bubbles said from behind him. “Put in ‘Landsman 78342’ and see what happens. That’s Father’s personal code.”

  Ronnie poked at the screen, and hit the orange override button, but the voice repeated the same statement with the same mechanical lack of expression.

  “Can we make Calloo from here?” asked George.

  “Just barely,” Ronnie said, with a glance at the fuel readout. “And I don’t see why we should. This is Bunny’s flitter, and Bubbles just gave us the internal auth
orization number. If it won’t accept it, something’s wrong.”

  “We don’t want to land if something’s wrong,” George said. Then, “What could be wrong? What’s on this island, anyway?” He turned to Bubbles.

  She frowned thoughtfully. “Well . . . the landing field, maintenance station, and the family’s lodge—no resident staff, though—”

  “There’s a lodge here, too?” Ronnie asked. “Then why did you tell me to program for Whitewings?”

  “We wanted to be out of everyone’s reach. This is too close—it’s the first place they’d look.”

  Ronnie looked out the canopy. Heavily wooded islands lay scattered in odd shapes across the sea. Bandon, the computer readout told him, was a half hour ahead. He could see its distinctive shape beyond the nearest island. Calloo, the northernmost of the chain, lay far to their right. “We ought to find out what’s wrong,” he said. “We’ll go on to Bandon and take a look.” They could still make Calloo, he thought, if they had to, and if they found out something important, Bunny might forgive their disappearance. With the vague notion that he was being careful, Ronnie let the flitter drop lower and skimmed just above the forest, following the contours with care, then made a low approach across the sea between that island and Bandon, edging past a smaller island not quite in his path between them. He did not look outside, concentrating instead on his instruments. If he dipped too low, the flitter’s automatic safety overrides would lower the plenum and convert it to an airboat. That could be most embarrassing.

  George saw the danger first. “Look out!” he yelled. Ronnie looked back at him, wondering what kind of game they were playing back there; Raffa yelped, peering out the starboard side. Then he saw it, just before it struck, an odd shape trailing a line of orange smoke. The flitter jerked itself out of his control, bouncing up and sideways, and a good half of the readouts went red; something snarled angrily in its power section, a sound that spiralled up into a painful whine and then stopped abruptly.

  Ronnie grabbed the controls back, felt the ominous mushiness, and went into the emergency landing sequence he had never expected to use once past his piloting exam. Would they make it to land? The airspeed readout, like all in that bank, was dead; the white beach and green trees ahead moved nearer too slowly. Behind him, no one spoke. George clambered forward, disturbing the flitter’s precarious balance, and dropped into the other forward seat.

  “I think it was a signal rocket,” he said calmly, as if continuing a casual conversation. “All that red smoke . . .”

  “She’s nose-heavy,” Ronnie grunted. “And the hydraulics are shot. Use that big foot on the floor, not your mouth.”

  Whatever George did made no difference; the flitter sank toward the waves. “Brace up, you girls,” George said to the back seats; Raffa was the one who said, “Brace up yourself, Gee—we’re trying to get the raft out.”

  Ronnie tried once more to pull the nose up, but the flitter shivered all over like a nervous dog. Flitters don’t stall, he remembered being told, but they crash all the same. It occurred to him that even if they made it to land, he might simply crash head-on into the lush forest. Could he maneuver at all? Altitude, then maneuver, he remembered. But he had no altitude. He tried; the flitter slewed sideways, but answered sluggishly. He could parallel the coastline and those trees. . . .

  “George—there—those people—” Ronnie did not look; he had to keep the flitter in the air as long as he could. George leaned to see, then grunted, as if it were a marvel.

  “Damn near naked,” he said. “But armed. . . . I think that’s the launcher he hit us with.”

  Ronnie put all his strength into willing the flitter not to crash into a lump of trees nearer shore than the rest.

  * * *

  They were down, and not dead—at the moment, that was all he cared about. His hands ached; his ears rang; his whole body hurt. But they were alive, and out of the flitter—which now looked far too small to have held so many people and so much fear. Bubbles and Raffa, with far more gumption than he would have expected, had unloaded everything useful from the flitter. The survival raft and all its provisions, the scuffed but whole duffles.

  “Never pays to buy cheap luggage,” George said, in the tone that had won him the nickname “Odious,” as he brushed the sand off his and hoisted it to his shoulder. “Come on, now, Ronnie—give the girls a hand, can’t you?”

  Ronnie glared at him. He looked, the odious George, as he always did—fresh, creased, polished to a high gloss. Not a hair of his dark head ruffled, not a smudge. He looked like that on horseback, and even when he fell off he never looked rumpled or dirty. He looked like that on mornings after, and on hot afternoons on parade. It was unfair, and his brother officers had done all sorts of things to ruin that polish—but nothing worked. “Dip the odious George in shit,” some senior cadet had said their first year, “and not only wouldn’t it stink, it’d take a shine.”

  Now, on the sandy beach after a flitter wreck, Ronnie thought he knew what he looked like. He said nothing, but picked up two of the remaining duffles, staggered a bit, then dropped them.

  “What now?” asked George.

  “The beacon,” Ronnie said, clambering onto the flitter. He wished he could remember how he’d gotten out of it. “We need to signal for a pickup, unless you plan to swim back to the mainland.”

  “You gave it to me,” Bubbles said. She looked worried. “You don’t remember?”

  He didn’t remember. He crouched on the flitter’s canopy, suddenly aware that he was not functioning in some important way. He looked around, blinking. The sea, the sand, the trees: he remembered that. They’d crashed the flitter, and whoever owned it would be furious. Who had crashed the flitter? They weren’t designed to crash easily and he and George were both good pilots. He looked at the flitter itself, at the large hole in the engine section, the scorchmarks black on the outer skin. “What happened?” he said, knowing it was a stupid question, though it was all that occurred to him.

  “Damnation!” George’s voice, closer. “He’s concussed; he doesn’t know what’s happened or—c’mon, ladies, we’ve got to get him away from here.”

  He heard Raffa ask why, and Bubbles remind George that injured people shouldn’t be moved until medical personnel arrived, but someone stronger than Raffa or Bubbles pulled him off the flitter and slung him over a muscular shoulder. That completed his collapse; he spewed the breakfast he’d eaten down George’s legs and knew nothing more for a time he could not measure.

  * * *

  Ronnie awoke lying on his back with the sun prying his eyelids apart and someone beating his head with a collection of spoons. At least that’s what it felt like. He had no desire to move, though he would have appreciated quiet, darkness, and a cool wet cloth on his forehead. A sympathetic murmur would have been nice too. Instead the only voices he recognized sounded angry and frightened.

  “If my father knew—” That had to be Bubbles, pulling off her best daughter-of-greatness act.

  “And what makes you think he doesn’t?” asked a man’s voice, in a tone that meant Bubbles was making no impression at all. Or the wrong one.

  An instant’s pause, then, “What do you mean, he knows?”

  Laughter with no humor in it, the kind of thing Ronnie had heard only a few times in his life; it frightened him then, and now.

  “I don’t suppose he knows his daughter’s involved, no.” The man’s voice had some familiar tone that Ronnie felt he should know but could not quite recognize. “But something like this, as big as it is, on his favorite resort world: how could he not know?”

  “Something like what?” That was Raffaele, Ronnie thought. A girl who believed that the facts would explain themselves.

  Another man’s voice, this one quite different. “Oh, I ’spect you know, little lady.” Every hair on Ronnie’s body rose at that “little lady.” He wanted to leap up and knock that voice into the sea, but he could not move. “It’s a hunter’s paradise, isn’t i
t? And your dad, or maybe it’s her dad, is a famous sportsman, isn’t he? And the whole point of sport is you give the prey a chance, eh? Isn’t it? That makes it a challenge, see?”

  The reiterated questions struck Ronnie as false, theatrical, like something from a storycube. Certain dialects did that, he thought.

  “Manhunting,” the first voice said. “As you very well know, since you came here for that purpose.” Ronnie tried to process that: manhunting? Manhunts were for escaped criminals, or lost children.

  “But it can go two ways, see?” the second voice interrupted. “Hunting predators it can always go two ways, and men are the most dangerous. There was a story once—”

  “Everyone knows the story, Sid; be quiet.” The command in that first voice finally made the connection for Ronnie. It sounded like Captain Serrano. It sounded like Captain Serrano the time she had ordered him off her bridge, or the time he had overheard her talking to Aunt Cece about battle. He struggled to open his eyes and found himself blinking up at a dark unsmiling face. “Well,” the man said. “And what have we here, young man? Who are you?”

  “Ronald Vertigern Boniface Lucien Carruthers,” he heard himself say, as if in one of the practice sessions in the squad. “Royal Aero-Space Stellar Service.” He looked around, now that he could see, and there was the odious George, looking remarkably tidy with a gag stuffed in his mouth and an angry expression on the rest of his face. Bubbles looked almost as angry; he wondered if she was going to come out of her usual wild-blonde disguise for the occasion. And Raffa—whom he hoped would someday be his Raffaele—had no expression at all. He had never seen her like that, and he hoped he never would again.

  The dark face above his did not smile. “Royal ASS, eh? And you probably think that means something here.”

  Ronnie had heard that version of his service’s initials before; he ignored it now, as beneath the notice of a wounded officer. “And you?” he asked, as he wondered which of his limbs still worked. “I have not the honor—”