JSJ S-F: Pursuit

PURSUIT

First draft 8/72, submitted to Analog 9/78

For the distance measurements: kilems, dekloms and measures, please see this article.

Pál Immer entered the data into the console, commanded it to automatic and sat back to watch the screens as the little scout ship dropped rapidly into an isolated star system. The ship flashed in and out of the Galen mode as it neared three of the system's planets, finally stopping in the shelter of innermost planet's moon. According to the analyzers the portion of the small satellite directly below was fairly well sprinkled with enough conductive minerals to camouflage the ship.

He shut down all but the passive receptors and waited for a trace of pursuit. He trimmed the magnet down so that its field was just strong enough to get back into the Galen mode, drew himself a long drink of water and sipped it slowly.

The trace of a smile flickered briefly across his youngish face as the long-range translight receiver, cranked up to maximum gain, began to flash that a moving metallic object had been sensed. Still too far off for identification but what else would it be but the Rahad cruiser? Now the screen displayed a few numbers - the first approximation of direction, velocity and mass - confirming what Pál already knew: the Rahad's vessel was simply faster than his scout. Somehow they had developed a nuclear powered drive that could go translight.

His fellow Space Force officers might laugh at the huge clumsy craft but they were all too familiar with the results when a Rahad one-man cruiser caught an SF scout in interstellar space. As in the old battles between hawks and sparrows the CCC ships could only hope to outmaneuver the Rahad when they had the aid of a planetary system for cover and the time for fast, sublight turns,

This portion of the battle between the Central Civilized Corps and the underground Rahad space forces had been going on long enough now that both Pál and his adversary knew that the odds were evened up. And now Pál had tried to fool the Rahad into thinking that he had gone onto the next star system, giving himself a full twenty-minute lead, if only the ruse worked.

The enemy cruiser was now into the system also, but it stayed in drive mode and flashed completely through, slowed, went sublight and turned just outside the orbit of the outermost planet. Pál's ship had been detected. He initiated the decoy generator sequence,

The Rahad would be reading, the results of what little his detectors had been able to record as he passed through the system because most of the Rahad instruments were too crude to do on-line analysis of data captured at translight speeds - they could only hope to record shifted data and wait for it to process. It might not have been the best thing going but it was enough to sort natural from unnatural phenomena and apparently it had sorted Pál's ship.

A green light flashed on the console indicating that the decoy was ready and his ship microjumped simultaneously to the opposite side of the moon. He would like to see the Rahad home in on the decoy, it was a rather new gimmick, armed with a proximity-tripped nuclear device and...a yellow light flashed - the Rahad had sent a missile of its own to destroy the decoy.

Now Pál had to be on his toes. On the symbolic display the red light that represented the Rahad appeared first at one edge and then the other of star system. 'RSP #2' appeared on the scout's display. Pál shook his head in disapproval. Was it simply that none of the Rahad who used their random search patterns ever got back to tell about it or could their computer utilization be that unsophisticated? They used three standard random jumping patterns to search out their intended victims but these were based on pseudo random number series that were so well known that the Space Force computers could analyze and plan evasive action after only two or three Galen jumps. Pál noted this in the log while his ship did the proper thing, setting him into a low orbit around the next planet out.

He grabbed a food pouch, attached it through the seal in his faceplate and let it feed him as he secured the thick, clear helmet to his outlandish, bulky but terribly efficient spacesuit. He had scarcely finished and discarded the empty pouch when the alarm sounded. A red glow flashed off and on from the walls throughout the ship coupled with a low-level warning tone that would galvanize any Space Force member into life-saving action. The Rahad's radar had locked onto him.

It was only a matter of seconds before a warhead would burst in his neighborhood. He set the scout to jump a scant three dekloms backward, hit the autocombat control, slammed home the eject interlock and voice commanded, "Eject." And he was free from the ship, diving toward the cloud cover of the planet below as the scout jumped again to cover his escape.

The control console/lifeboat combination accelerated with the aid of its rocket engine but only long enough to move him out of the battle area. It cut off soon enough to prevent him from digging a hole in the planet. Pál's main hope for survival was that he reach the surface while the scout - following standard CCCSF battle plans in its computer - kept the cruiser busy. Pál set the scanners to locate the heaviest ore concentrations on the planet's surface and then watched the progress of the battle on the display.

Far out in space - where he had been less than a minute ago - a sudden yellow spot slowly bloomed and faded on the symbolic display. The warhead had been rather late in arriving. The two ships were in a very complex, close-in dog fight moving now closer, now farther, almost into interstellar space when the lifeboat angled sharply away from its perpendicular flight and began to level off a few dekloms above the calm sea.

The lifeboat was constructed of the same basic material as the scout but in the form of very light weight alloys and equipped with enough EM shielding to keep it from being seen by the Rahad's detectors from this distance and especially not while its attention was being held by a life or death struggle with the scout.

The EM detectors had homed in on a long twisting valley still somewhat distant over the open sea. Pál watched all indicators carefully, hoping to reach the shelter offered by the land before the Rahad in some way traced his escape path. If not, the best that he could hope for was to go under the water to avoid a nuclear device or, if the Rahad lost the battle out in space and bailed out for this planet as well he might have a shot at it with the lifeboat two individually tracking positron projectors. This last might not be so difficult as it was a very closely guarded secret that any of the Space Force lifeboats carried armament.

On the console, the symbolic display continued to report the cat-and-mouse, hit-and-run battle that the two ships were engaged in. Pál wondered briefly whether the Rahad might have also bailed out and was directing its ship from the surface of yet another planet.

The damaging blow that his ship delivered to the cruiser ended his on speculation. Both craft were very close to the planet on which Pál was seeking cover and as the red light on the display faded to pink - out of the battle but not destroyed - another, smaller red light branched away from it and dropped to the planet's upper atmosphere. Pál didn't want to take the chance - however remote - that the Rahad might have some new device to command its cruiser down for assistance or even activate Pál's scout, although neither ship was worth much in the atmosphere.

He followed up the attack remotely with three searing slashes to the cruiser's central control section and then jumped the scout far out into space but in a stationary orbit above him and 'locked' the door. If the cruiser was ever reclaimed by the Rahads it would be several months in the repair shops, and if the CCC crews got there first it was not in such bad shape that it could not yield a lot of data on the rebels' recent progress.

The darkening surface of the sea slid by on Pál's visual display and in the distance the rather rugged coastline was growing steadily more distinct. Some fifty dekloms distant Pál could just distinguish the reflection of the setting sun on the surface of a large lake.

By this time the Rahad would have realized that there was a recent trail of chemical vapors in the upper atmosphere and the reason the scout was not after him was that the Human had run for cover long ago. After having its hard-won spaceship shot out from under and then to find that the battle had been directed from the safety of a planet's surface the Rahad would be rather upset.

"Upset, hell," said Pál out loud. "It'll be madder than the proverbial Martian sand crab!" As the other lifeboat dropped down to his level he cranked the little ship around in a hard turn - it was much better to do battle over the sea - and finished with a steep dive which brought him a few measures above the surface of the water, paralleling his own trail and using the cover of the darkness at sea level.

As the alien's lifeboat came over the horizon Pál was onto it in a full power run and it was all that the Rahad could do to avoid a collision, such was the fury and directness of Pál's attack run. It apparently had not expected such a suicidal attempt to ram his own ship and was even less prepared for the dual slashes of intensely bright positron beams as they melted halfway through the armor plate on its underside.

"They must have something new," Pál logged as his ship ran ahead of the other. "It wouldn't be after me after seeing my firepower unless they finally got some armament for those tin cans." He logged a few more possibilities and physical features as he shoved in the emergency boosters, pushed the boat over on its nose and dove furiously toward the water again. The Rahad had just noticed that Pál had dived and was tilting his nose down to follow when Pál again flashed by with guns blazing.

It was a little more alert this time and almost in desperation two brilliant ion beams lanced out at the enemy who was already out of range.

"Got 'em!" Pál almost shouted into the log. "They're twin ion beams, bright blue, less than a deklom apparent range. Projectors are dual-tracking, mounted under the leading edge of the glide surfaces. Probably not more that 15 or 20 degrees of freedom total."

He had the ship once more running for the shoreline. The sea was now black splotched with russet reflecting the red-orange clouds above. The timing could not have been better. He rechecked his gear and spoke to the console: "Fake a ditch on the next enemy contact. Hit him once." He serenely watched the red dot close on the green one, flashing to due to its closeness, observed the violet beam which simply appeared between the two dots, saw the yellow of the shield as it absorbed all of the energy. Externally, the CCC ship reacted with a couple of erratic jumps, obligingly belched a little smoke and flames, waited for the Rahad to pursue its advantage and then turned end-for-end with both positron beams, now noticeably weaker, slicing wild arcs across the glide surface underside of its attacker.

After that its flight became even more erratic and as the Rahad closed up to strike again it slid a half circle turning dive and fell in the water. This surprised the Rahad even more than the daring attacks and instead of following up the enemy's misfortune it beat a hasty retreat to a higher elevation. It had been caught once too often by Pál's surprise attacks and wanted to be far enough away to maneuver when he came bursting out of the water.

Pál was halfway to the shore by this time, speeding along almost on the bottom of the water, being pulled along by a one-shot high pressure air jet. As the pressure began to drop in the tank he angled toward the surface, released and sank the tank, and cautiously poked his head up to check on his companion's progress. The Rahad was still maintaining its vigil but even farther out than it had been when Pál went under. With this safety margin Pál felt secure enough to take to his gravplate and minijet to reach the shore on the surface. The jet would drive him under the water as well but at high cost of irreplaceable jet fuel; the gravplate ran off of the rechargeable suit power pack. Pál rolled the suit over on its back and sped off, the choppy little waves partially hiding the jet's exhaust. He was a half deklom into the mouth of a small river when a bright light made him look back.

The Rahad - once again attempting to prove that expressed aggressiveness was the better part of valor - was criss-crossing the area where Pál's lifeboat lay, its ion beams boiling away the sea water in great clouds of dense steam. The whole scene brought a chuckle from Pál but his slight amusement was short-lived as the Rahad cut off the weapons, turned on a high-intensity searchlight and began circle the area. Pál angled sharply up and away from the water and flew along at treetop level up a rather steep canyon, out of sight of the sea and the searching Rahad. There were a lot of heavy ferrous deposits under this whole region and Pál was counting on that to keep him off of the enemy EM screen.

As he flew he increased the intensity of the IR to help him locate the cliffs ahead that by now were mere silhouettes against the emerging stars. The air was already cool; without the suit it could have been an uncomfortable night. As a matter of fact it would have been extremely uncomfortable for Pál as the air composition here had enough oxygen to allow a Human to breathe for about a half standard hour before losing consciousness and perhaps another quarter before death. The suit had to constantly filter this air and store away the useful mix in its reserve tanks.

When Pál was far enough up the side of the cliffs to come into sight of the Rahad again, he dropped to the ground and climbed the gentle slope that led to the top of the precipice until he reached the top. None too soon, he noted, for the searching ship was just completing a circular sweep that brought it uncomfortably close to the shore, albeit still some distance from his viewpoint.

Pál turned the gravplate control to a notch below full gravity cancellation and stepped off the cliff.

The orange sun was again a ball on the horizon when the EM proximity alarm woke Pál from a light sleep. He checked the suit's status as he fed himself, glancing occasionally out the narrow opening of the small cave that had hidden him for the past several hours. The sea was visible through the opening, but not the five or six dekloms of intervening land over which he had flown the night before. As he watched, the LM alarm sounded again and the Rahad lifeboat appeared momentarily in the cave mouth. It was still more than a half deklom distant but at the same level with Pál's shelter.

Several things were apparent to Pál. The Rahad was not certain that Pál was even here. It had spent the night sleeping as well or it would have been farther inland by now. It was going slow enough to be using a visual searching technique. Pál logged these details for later transmission to the scout while he prepared a little surprise for the Rahad. He also considered the possibility that the Rahad might just be killing time while awaiting rescue - the Rahads were both brave and persistent, if a little foolhardy, but as with most races they had a stopping point.

Well, thought Pál, whatever its intentions, this should change its mind. Setting the fuse for ten seconds, the angle for 100 degrees and loading a minimal charge into a heat-seeking missile, he crawled slowly to the opening of the cave, fired up the canyon, away from the receding Rahad. The tiny projectile disappeared from sight almost immediately. A full minute passed while it flew up the canyon, turned and streaked toward the sea, seeking any heat source reasonably above ambient. It quickly sensed the Rahad exhaust and swung toward it.

When it struck, the ship twisted slightly from the impact, the small explosion put an abrupt end to the rocket motor and the ship went gliding down toward the tree tops until it settled with a quite satisfying crunch as it tore the upper limbs off of one of the trees, leaving a noticeable gap in the dark foliage.

Pál launched himself off the cliff face with the gravplate on low power, using the jet only to change his direction when he reached treetop level. He skimmed over the treetops, the air slowing him until he was down to a crawl as he neared the gap left by the passing lifeboat. From then on he cautiously pulled himself from tree to tree, keeping just below the tops, looking for signs of movement below with the aid of the IR. The EM sensor would not be of much help now because the lifeboat was no longer able to make sudden, large scale changes in the local magnetic field - it was now a part of that field.

Pál saw it now and held his position in the top of a tall, palm-like tree with broad leaves, hoping that it might prevent his shadow from being so noticeable from the ground. The IR showed only two small animals poking around below, while the ship itself was a fairly strong source having been so recently in the rising sun's rays, and the damaged engine and propulsion tubes were still quite hot. The Rahad was nowhere to be seen.

He edged closer, not feeling in too much danger as Rahads had a high enough body temperature to stand out clearly on the IR. Nor did they have the sort of heat utilizing suit that Pál possessed. As a matter of fact, in this atmosphere the Rahad wouldn't even need a suit, the air being 95% normal to their home planet. The Rahad was either still in the ship, against which eventuality Pál drew his stunner, or he had escaped immediately that the vessel touched down. The latter was more likely the case as the craft had obviously been landed with skill and wasn't in such bad shape - merely a few dents from the rocks on which it was setting and of course the rocket engine with a two measure hole blown in its guts.

As he had surmised, the ship was empty. So the Rahad, like Pál, was out on the surface. Of course it knew now for certain that someone had brought the ship down and that it might have been superstitious natives with slingshots probably never entered its mind, mused Pál as he entered the craft's large hatch. These Rahads, for all of their intelligence were quite single-minded and unyielding, making the CCC cleanup of them a little costly.

Seven standard years before the CCC Exploration Service had found the Rahad living on two planets in-their out-of-the-way system. The landing party established a center for solving communication obstacles and waited until conditions seemed right for a full conference with representatives from the six CCC races. During the conference the CCC reps stated their conditions and the background for each one. Principal among them was that the member societies were accepted only if something close to a consensus of the populace wanted it - in some cases this was not so simple - but generally something was worked out.

Some of the more technically oriented Rahads felt that a sellout was in the making. Couple this with their position of seeing themselves upstaged, their complete access to the local technology, and general hard-headedness of the race, and there had to be trouble.

Rahad mercenary troops, hired by the technocrats, charged into the talks which _followed_ the signing of the pact, overcame the Rahad and CCC security forces, and killed the entire delegation as well as some of Rahad's high ranking officials and industrialists.

CCC and SFHQ at first knew only that the delegation had been murdered, there being no one alive who knew all of the details. This left the CCC Directorate no choice but enforce the agreement which had been so recently signed: they sent in a rather formidable force of combat space ships, disabled the major spaceports and sealed off the system to space travel. It was only then that they got the details of what had actually happened from the Rahad's military leaders, who had secretly been recording the main sessions, looking out for _their_ best interests. Things still weren't too easy to straighten out as all of the principal interpreters were killed as well and the computer-based autointerpreters were not too satisfactory but they had not been debugged.

Meanwhile, the technocrat faction had spent the several weeks, between the signing of the treaty and the massacre, at the CCC free access data banks on Earth as a part of the first group of touring dignitaries. After the attack several of the group were not to be found. These later turned out to be technocrats who wanted no part of being caught with hot data on their hands when all of the other dignitaries were arrested.

The Rahad that was somewhere out in the wilds was one of the original group. Slowly but surely they had been building up a little fleet of versatile battle craft, combining their own ingenuity with what they had acquired, and the Space Force was slowly but surely picking them off as they tried little forays against outposts and individual scout ships. The Space Force tried to avoid using any of the more advanced weapons or techniques against the rebels to not add anything to their larder in the event the Rahad won a battle - which they did on occasion. A careful record was kept of just which weapons had already been exposed to the Rahads and the others were kept out of use except in an emergency. At the rate they were acquiring new concepts and that the Space Force was capturing or destroying them, there was a joke going around the fleet that soon the Rahad rebels would be down to one battleship, capable of holding off the entire CCCSF.

Pál finished transmitting all of the pertinent new details that he had found on this latest version of the enemy warship, as well as its approximate location, keeping a constant eye on the IR for the chance return of the pilot. From yet another pocket in his suit he took a small resonant cavity, rose up to tree top level once more and secured it with a strap. It might be many months - if ever - before someone could swing by to pick this ship up and by then the vegetation might well have covered it over. The resonant cavity would act as an r-f mirror allowing the salvage ship to home in on it.

Making a wide circle Pál returned to the cliff where he had been earlier and crept up to the edge, peering cautiously between two bushes and turned on the IR. In a matter of minutes he had spotted the Rahad. Pál pulled out the hand telescope, removed his faceplate and examined his pursuer in more detail, the built-in faceplate optics leaving much to be desired in long-range viewing. The Rahad was armed with a longish pistol strapped across its broad chest, it was using its whole spacesuit - maybe for the armor that it afforded. With its gray metallic suit, its long neck and four stubby legs it looked to Pál like something out of the books on prehistoric Earth - a miniature dinosaur. It was also walking very determinedly toward the spot where Pál lay observing and seemed to have no doubts about the direction from which his ship had been downed. Time to move on.

In the four standard hours that followed - a half day by Earth reckoning - Pál made fairly good time on foot, using minimal power on the gravplates to lighten the load of the suit while keeping the batteries up for night use. He tried not to leave too many footprints or to break off leaves and branches from the shoulder height, delicate bushes that studded the gently rising hills. As the afternoon wore on he was in increasingly rougher terrain, making it necessary to use a little more power to jump across the deep, rain-cut gullies which were simply too steep and time-consuming to traverse on foot. At the back of his mind were two things: the tortuous gorge that he had seen from the air the previous afternoon and which now awaited him at the top of this long climb, and then the Rahad, with its fifteen measure stride against Pál's nine would be able to get across these gullies as well as Deb without gravplates. He occasionally checked to see if he was maintaining the lead which he needed to reach the crest ahead of the Rahad, and as close to sunset as possible to leave the Rahad wondering at the top while Pál got another night's peaceful rest. By now the Rahad should be thinking that the fleeing earthman had exhausted his bag of tricks or it wouldn't have wasted all day hoofing it across this nobeast's land after him.

In a little over another hour Pál made the crest. The view was breathtaking; the deep shadows left by the fast sinking sun made strange shapes in the huge, water-eroded expanse below. The drop was heart stopping; it was a straight drop of two kilems, a rocky ramp of some 45 degrees for a short spell and below that was nothing. It was either too dark or too steep to see beyond the edge.

Pál set up his light-duty energy shield and sat down on the edge, dangling his feet and looking for some likely rocks on the slope below. The IR still showed no signs of the Rahad within seeing distance, let alone shooting distance. Pál got to his feet and wandered slowly back down the incline to where it became steep and crouched, waiting and watching the IR. While he waited he pulled a small vial from a pocket, opened it and filled it with water from the suit's drain spout. He or shook it vigorously until it was a uniform color. Just as he was beginning to think that the Rahad had found some comfortable place to bed down for the night he caught its form on the IR. He moved back to the crest and waited. It should be less than five minutes before the Rahad would be close enough to see him and try a shot. Pál turned and watched the sun, now a dark orange ball flattened out on the horizon, sink slowly in a cloudless sky.

The first shot hit on his right side. He spun halfway around, making a flaying motion with his right arm, the side where the shield had scintillated slightly as it had absorbed the energy. Clever bastard, thought Pál. Probably has it all doped out that most Humans are right handed.

The second shot was dead center. It came while he was making as if to reach his own weapon with his left hand while his right hand, dangling uselessly, was emptying the vial of instant blood on the rocks where he had been sitting. He used the force of the beam against the shield to help push him over the cliff. He dropped free fall, using a little push from the jet to assure his clearing the incline and pulled his pistol, preset to give a low-energy shove rather than a disintegrating blast to the pile of rocks he had sighted earlier, dislodging them and starting a small avalanche. Hoping for good timing he pulled the gravplate control up to maximum and scanned below with the IR on high intensity to see how fast the ground was coming up to meet him. It was still too murky to see any details but the water was still a good ways off so he relaxed a little and let the gravplate do its job.

When he dislodged the rocks he had veered slightly to the left and now, as he slowed, he saw the rocks tumbling by, dull red globs on the IR, passing by on his right side and then speed on to hit with a great deal of splashing and crashing in the water and on the rocks on the canyon floor. Not too bad, Pál nodded in satisfaction and hoped that it would sound equally realistic to the keen-eared Rahad.

Pál noted that he was no longer falling and reduced the nullgrav unit's power until he settled gently on the firm ground a few feet from the water. He began to pick his way down the canyon and had a moment of near panic when a straggler rock struck the water not ten measures away.

For a split second he had envisioned the crazy Rahad jumping over the cliff after him. He continued with care, it wouldn't do to have the Rahad hear him stumbling along the bottom so soon after an obviously fatal fall. Pál was convinced that the Rahad would not sleep peacefully until it could see Pál's suit appropriately compressed. He hoped that it would wait until the next day as there was no quick way down to the bottom and by then Pál would be far away. He continued his walk, a little faster now, planning to walk at least two dekloms before taking to the gravplates. As he walked he emptied another food pouch.

After what seemed like a long time to his tired legs he increased the resolution on the IR to maximum and searched behind him and along the rim above. Satisfied, he launched off on the gravplate and the jet and was soon a good kilem above the rocky floor as the water-cut rock fell away from his level flight path. He changed his flight angle slightly downward, cut the jet and let his slightly aerodynamic suit pick up speed. This would gain him a good ten dekloms for the price of gravplate power alone. As he picked up speed he became more alert for obstacles. After all of this effort he had no intention of becoming impaled on some weathered pinnacle.

Another full standard hour had passed since his dive off of the cliff when his line of flight brought him close to the valley floor again. He leveled out but his momentum was enough to carry him for quite a distance still. He turned on the small IR source in his suit and began to search the still steep walls for a ledge of some sort. Luck was still with him and he had only to use the jet a touch to get up to the level of the dirt-filled fissure that was over a centem from the ground. He circled once to slow down and landed with scarcely a jar.

Patting himself mentally on the back for having so skillfully used up all of his kinetic energy, he pulled out a small flask of gin - service issue - flipped open his faceplate, had a long pull and thought about the morning. The lake was still some thirty dekloms distant but with any luck he would make it by midday. Even if the Rahad followed him that far it would mean more frustration for it - there was a small island in the middle, and Rahads were deathly afraid of water.

He was brought out of his reverie by the life support system warning whistle; he was taking in too much local air. He breathed suit air for a while, then lit up the stub of a hand-wrapped rossian cigar which he had smuggled against regulations into one of the myriad suit compartments and stared at the starlit valley below. He alternated between suit air, service issue gin and the slightly intoxicating cigar for ten minutes, then sealed up and crammed himself in against the rock and fell off into a deep sleep. He was awakened only once by a vicious scream from somewhere up the canyon - something had not found such a secure place for the night.

Pál was not certain just how it was that he knew that the Rahad was somewhere in the area, even if not actually after him again. There was more than one way to the bottom if there had been time, but there had not been. The Rahad would not be following his trail unless he had verified that Pál wasn't lying dead at the bottom of the gorge or had seen him travelling this morning. Then there was the question of direction. If the Rahad had found a place to descend there were many paths he could follow in the maze that Pál had flown over. Suddenly he had a possible scenario: the Rahad walking along the ridge until it could see the spot where Pál should have landed ...but then what? Oh, of course, the Rahad's ion gun. Using it for a light source and whatever optical device the Rahad possessed, then a good night's sleep and on the road again before Pál.

While he was grinding out this supposition he reached the rocky, broken top of the eroded pinnacle he had been ascending and sat down to observe. He had been gliding as much as possible all morning, landing on climbable slopes and gaining altitude by foot power and then diving off again. In this manner he had crossed almost twenty dekloms, kept low in the shadows in the early hours and now was less than a half deklom from the rim of the wash. He looked back at the still prominent mountain that overlooked his sleeping place of the night before, scanned the intervening terrain both visually and with the IR and saw nothing. It was difficult to see anything on the IR because the sun was almost overhead and even the Rahad's spacesuit would be close to the temperature of the rocks around it.

In disgust, Pál opened his faceplate, withdrew the telescope and began to search slowly, purposefully, marking off the areas mentally and sectioning the land so that he would miss nothing. The Rahad certainly was not dangerously close but why then was his sixth sense sending out the strong warning? Then he had it. There, bigger than life, on the rim ahead of him, was the Rahad, galloping along with its unlikely gait, dull orange in the sunlight without the top half of its two-part space suit. It was some two dekloms between them at this point, the Rahad was lumbering along at about eleven or twelve dekloms per standard at which rate it would reach the lake before Pál. This was a rather wild assumption because it would mean that the Rahad knew of Pál's objective, which was highly unlikely, but nonetheless, Pál wanted to be there first.

It was then that the Rahad had to cut back into the forest around a steeper peak on the rim and Pál had his chance: he launched himself straight off the rock and drove at full power with the jet for a point seven dekloms ahead farther along the rim. It was a fifteen-minute journey, the job he had to do took another thirty, leaving less than five to position himself. If the Rahad was keeping up its pace it should have appeared in the half standard that had passed.

Pál had to wait an extra five minutes before the twelve measure quadruped came into sight on the flat stretch below Pál's lookout. It was skirting some heavy underbrush when Pál tossed a shot from the positron gun down the slope and watched the reaction.

The Rahad jumped sideways and moved inland. Pál didn't want it to get around him and set up an ambush for him so he also moved inland, found a large boulder with some scrub trees growing around it, turned up the sound on the suit and squatted to listen. In another little while he heard sounds of scraping, then a few cautious footfalls and then more scraping. The Rahad was crawling and then jumping to a new cover. Pál waited a little longer, looked cautiously through the bushes until it was about time for the Rahad to move again, removed his faceplate, waited till it appeared, then stood, screamed a war whoop and fired, felling a tree almost in front of the beast. The Rahad tried to scramble its four hefty legs in all directions at once as it attempted to escape Pál's blast and the falling tree at the same time. To re-enforce things a little Pál fired another bolt where the Rahad had been standing a second before.

In spite of this show of firepower, Pál knew that the Rahad would stubbornly cling to the illusion that it had a weapon advantage over the Human and would come out blazing once it had the situation "evaluated." Pál made a silent departure back toward the rim. When he was safely out of pistol range he kicked a few rocks loose and came out of cover, striding purposefully up the open hillside. He soon heard a yell of anger, the singing sound of an energy weapon and the thud of running feet as the enraged Rahad came charging up the incline after him, hoping to catch him in the open. Pál kept up his rapid but untiring pace, glancing back frequently to make sure that the pursuer wasn't gaining too quickly. At the top of the hill were a lot of heavy shrubs and two huge boulders. Pál disappeared between the boulders.

From the other side of the pass came a tremendous crash and rattling and sliding and then silence. The Rahad continued his approach to the pass but more cautiously now, skirted the brush and looked over a steep drop. Below him lay the inert space suit of the - finally - erstwhile enemy. There could be no mistake this time: the body lay at such an unnatural angle, with liquid darkening the rocks and even a little steam and smoke rising from some electrical short. The Rahad's pistol discharged twice for insurance and this time it was certain for large, jagged holes appeared in the mottled covering. There was no way down the drop to where the Human lay so the Rahad retraced his steps and went through the pass between the two boulders. Two steps on the other side and it fell a half centem into the pit that Pál had prepared for it earlier.

It landed on all fours and was amazed to find that the pit was several measures deep in shock absorbing foam. It took up a position in a corner with weapon poised. The Human would surely come back to finish him off - how else to be defeated by such a cowardly being?

After a five minute underwater trip Pál let himself into the airlock, shed his suit and got his decontamination shower. A short while later, stretching in a relaxing leisure uniform, he checked in.

"Pál, welcome back!" the duty desk sergeant was as long on this post as he was. "You got one, huh?"

"You bet." Pál answered, wiping mock sweat from his brow.

"A rough one, eh? Well, that's five for you. You get your goody pin and your walking papers now. Shipping out?"

"You know, Jon," Pál confided. "I haven't thought about it all that much, but I guess that I will have to start now."

He read over the duty roster and checked the time. It was a half hour to the next shift, he might as well eat and turn in his report to the oncoming duty officer.

"How's the ship?" Jon asked. "Still holding together?"

"Yeah, I'll fill out a complete damage report during my next watch."

"It's just that we're running out of these old buggies and SFHQ says that this situation isn't serious enough to warrant pulling any of them out of the museums." They both laughed.

"You know, when I was a kid I used to dream of flying one of those ships, watching the HV re-runs of the Newport Terrors."

"Yeah, sure," Jon smiled. "Me too, but to fly them now, on a serious mission - hard to believe."

"Oh, the suit got shot up. Better replace it."

"Right. See you next watch."

Pál ate in peace until the offgoing shift poured into the mess hall. "I hear you almost got eaten."

"Yeah, a real live one. I had to ditch out in the water."

"No shit? All the way up Juniper gulch on foot?"

"Did you shoot him or what?"

"No. Made it all the way and dropped him in the pit."

When Pál reported to the officer of the day he received a warm welcome. "Pál, congratulations," he said, extending his hand. "All five and you're the first to make your quota without once hitting the panic button."

"Thank you Major," he smiled back somewhat wearily. It had been a long two years.

"Nothing unusual to report? I have seen what you relayed in, of course."

"A very persistent cuss: Hard headed as they come but I think he'll make a good trooper."

"Well, Captain Immer," he said, somewhat more formally. "Will you relieve me at the desk so that I can go out and pick up number - ah - 78, of our erstwhile warriors?" The Major added to himself, Captured in the only way acceptable; defeat by a single enemy.

"Certainly, sir. Consider yourself relieved. I imagine that you will be a welcome sight for a little while."

"Yes, they always think that I am part of a rescue team."

The bronzed Major stretched to full height and put on a formal officer's cap. "What a way to get recruits." They exchanged the Human and Rahad versions of smiles, saluted and the Major trotted off down the passageway to teach his ex-compatriot the ways of the Galaxy.

Back to Index