“Yes, well, this isn’t camping.” Petris dismissed her memories abruptly. Oblo spoke up.
“Do you remember seeing anything that indicated someone else used the island that way?”
“No.” Bubbles wrinkled her nose. “No—in fact, we always had to clear the trails every year. I wanted to have someone do it, but my father insisted we ‘have the fun’ as he put it.”
“So this kind of hunting was either somewhere else, or not going on then,” Oblo pointed out. “It would be interesting to know when it started, if your father hired someone new, who could have set it up. It would take connections—someone who knew likely clients—”
Bubbles frowned. “I’m trying to think. Daddy mentioned he’d hired a new outrange supervisor when Vittorio Zelztin retired, but I don’t remember what he said. It didn’t seem important.”
“Not as important as staying alive,” Petris said. “And we need to break this up and get moving. Let me finish the briefing.” He waited until Ronnie wanted to ask why, then went on, sure of their attention. “They introduce new prey when they have confirmed killing all but two of the old ones. Those are the preeves, the previous survivors. That’s how we know some of the things we do, and that’s where our few weapons come from. New prey’s given two days free, then hunting resumes. They supply basic rations every four days at a single site on the west side of the island, during a non-hunting period. They hunt no more than fourteen Standard hours a day. The problem is, we’re not sure which fourteen hours. Sometimes they do a split shift. If we don’t keep a constant watch, they’re over here before we know it.
“What the preeves told us is that the first week they hunt only in daylight. That weeds out the really stupid and incapable, they think. Then they start night-hunting. They have dark gear; we don’t. If they hunt all night, they’ll leave us alone the following day, but they usually hunt only half a night shift. From sundown to midnight, or midnight to sunrise, say. We’ve been here a couple weeks, so they’re night-hunting almost every night. Last night they didn’t—I expect they were waiting to see if you were followed.”
“If they have Barstow sensors, why don’t they just find us and wipe us out?” asked George.
“They don’t use Barstows,” Petris said. “Again, that’s not ‘sporting’ in their books. The preeves say if someone eludes them the full month, they’ll use a Barstow to find and capture him—but that almost never happens.”
“But if they know we’re here—and they want to eliminate witnesses—won’t they use Barstows sooner this time?”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that. They might. And if they do, we’re out of luck. We can’t build a shelter that will shield us from Barstow scans and escape notice in flyovers. The island’s not deep enough, and the woods aren’t thick enough.”
“That other flyover,” Raffa said. “That could’ve been a rescue attempt, but we weren’t there.” Ronnie had missed the flyover, but they’d told him about the flitter that came, hovered above the wreck, and then departed.
“They’d only want to rescue us if they could do it before we made contact with the prey,” Bubbles said. Looking at her now, Ronnie could hardly believe that was her name. None of the fluffhead left, none at all. “They’ll think—if we meet them—the secret’s out. Either they have to kill us all, and fake an accident somehow, or they have to escape. And even if they do escape, there’s the evidence. . . .”
“So the only logical thing for them to do is add our names to the list and go on.” Raffa shivered. “I don’t like this. Yet—if they kill us, there’ll be the evidence then, too. When someone comes to look.”
“Unless they try to capture you four,” Petris said. “And then kill you in some way that can be explained. They might well try a chemical weapon. Knock you unconscious, take you up in a flitter—even your own—and drop you into the rocks. If we’re all dead and gone—or if they can create that accident on another island—it might well pass. Ordinarily, the preeves say, they don’t use chemicals, but now they might.”
Ronnie lifted his head. Had he really heard something, or . . . Petris was alert too. Something—but he couldn’t define it. “Flitter,” said Oblo. “I’ll see about it.”
“We make a plan every day,” Petris said, as if nothing had happened. “You have to . . . else it’s just running and waiting to be killed. That’s what happens to most. Or they make a plan, and run the same one every day. That won’t work either. The only hope is to make the hunters work . . . get back at them.”
“Attack them?” George asked. “You do have more men, don’t you? How many hunters are there?”
“More, but not more firepower. Not more resources. We can’t attack in force, but we do feint. We scare them sometimes. They like that, the preeves tell us; I hate to give them the satisfaction, but it does make them slow down and be careful. As for how many, it seems to vary. I’m sure we’re not seeing the same ones each day; if it’s anything like big game hunting, there’s a larger party of hunters over on Bandon, and they take turns. I’d like to kill them but so far we haven’t.”
“Has anyone ever?” Raffa asked.
“So I hear,” Petris said. “But you don’t know how much to believe. The preeves they send with us are not exactly reliable. They’ve been known to turn a group that was doing too well. We found a locator on Sid, for instance.”
“But you didn’t kill him,” George said. “Why not?”
“Do you kill everyone who just might hurt you someday?” Petris looked disgusted. “Get some sense, boy. Everyone who’s been through this has knowledge we need; we can’t afford to lose anyone. He knows we know he might turn; he knows his best chance at survival is with us—at least now.”
“So how many do you have, altogether?”
“Never you mind. What you don’t know, you can’t tell. But we’ve lost only two, in the time we’ve been here; the preeves say that’s much better than usual. Now—what we’re going to do is this. . . .” Petris leaned over the map. “We’ve got to separate you four, because they need you worst. Can’t let them get you in a lump. The longer it takes, the more chance one of you’ll be alive to report all this. At the same time, I can’t protect you all. My people wouldn’t go for it, and I don’t have the ability anyway. So you ladies will have to go here”—he pointed to the ravine on the map—“unless you can find those hiding places you think you remember . . . ?” He looked at Bubbles.
“I wish Kell hadn’t been so secretive,” Bubbles said. “I’m sure there is a cave somewhere—” Petris ignored this; he had not been impressed with a possible cave she had never seen for herself.
“You want me to go somewhere alone?” Raffa asked. She looked pale.
“It would be best,” Petris said, almost gently. “That ravine’s hard to climb; they avoid it except at the ends, and there’s a lot of cover—big rocks and so on. They go along the edges, and watch both ends, but they can’t see everything. If you tuck yourself under a boulder, that’s as safe a place as I can offer.”
“I want to do something,” Raffa said. “Not sit under a rock and shiver.”
“We don’t have any training,” Bubbles said to her. “Not even as much as Ronnie and George. The best we can do is stay out of the way.”
“No.” Raffa glanced at Ronnie and away; he felt his heart contract. She was thinking about him, he knew it.
“You two,” Petris said, with a nod to Ronnie and George, “are another problem. You might be useful, or not—I can’t tell until I see you in action. What we’re going to do is try to make them think you wandered into the forest north of the stream, maybe heading for the point up there. It’s more rugged country. I want you to go up there now, and make some trail. Scuff and scrape as if you’re dragging something or someone. Drop something unimportant that might have fallen off your packs. There’s no way to disguise what happened to your flitter, but they may not have realized we’ve met. If you headed that way, and we were keeping watch to the south and east, you could have gotten away from us. Not really, but they might believe it.”