They glided into badlands seeped in pre-dawn mist, the guidance systems keeping them low, between the hills, and then threading them through sandstone canyons and monuments that leaped from the shadows as if they were shoots seeking light. Flex’s tumbler dodged and weaved, leaving him free to scrutinize Annie’s.
Her tube was negotiating the labyrinth, so its maps and guidance were operational. But execution was sluggish-it was slow to evade on all planes. These mountains and rocks provided perfect cover for tiny personal craft to sneak in, but there was no room for the kind of slop that Annie’s tumbler was exhibiting. He watched with horror as Annie careened toward an outcropping, only to avert it at the last minute.
“Not while I’m here,” Flex said, adding a choice swear word he overheard in an isolated vacuum plant while still a boy on Jinx. That was not far from Brain Freeze, where he later learned what the word really meant.
A large stone pillar loomed ahead, and he felt his tube adjust for a tight pass. That’s how this course had been charted, as a geographilic caress of the landscape. Even though they had strayed from the plan, the guidance system adjusted. He felt his thruster ease off some, but noted that Annie’s did not.
That was the problem, then. Somehow her tube was not modifying its speed properly, so its steering was wild and uncontrolled. She was going to hit that mountain.
In desperation, Flex kicked over to manual and gunned it. His tumbler shot ahead, directly toward the rock wall. He caught up with Annie and pulled alongside. With a hearty “Tabam!” he nudged over, physically knocking her tube away from the death ahead.
It worked. He saw her tube shoot off to the left, to a relatively open area. His own tube had yawed to the right, so to avoid the mountain, he had to shoot around the other side, losing sight of Annie. He found her again, this time sliding dangerously toward a rock-ribbed plain.
“Come on, Annie, wake up!” he said. “I can’t steer for both of us!”
He zipped in her direction, taxing the poor maneuverability of the tumbler. The only evident way to keep her from crashing would be to get underneath her, and jostle her upward. He straightened out in front of her and cut power. Annie’s jet was pegged, and as she passed above him he bumped her just enough to level her off. Then he allowed her to move ahead again.
“Wake up, Annie, we need you! You’re the only one who can get S’larbo out alive!” A calculated exaggeration.
Ahead, the ground sloped slowly, sinking into a verdant morass. The kzin backyard was somewhere in that jungle, and somehow he had to get them safely grounded there.
Twice, Flex kicked Annie’s tumbler this way and then nudged it that. One last time he saw the other four tumblers kilometers away. Then the green hills separated them from sight.
Trees seemed to shoot into the sky, the tumblers rising above them, Annie’s with a little kiss from Flex’s. It was impossible to steer the speeding tubes between such dense obstacles.
An alert signaled the final tumble. Flex’s tube pitched 180 degrees back to the braking position that had countered the planet’s gravity a while ago. Annie’s followed suit and their thrusters beat at the steaming air above the forest canopy. Flex predicted that if her thruster did not modulate it would overbrake, and she would drop into the ground like a hot javelin through snow. So with his own retro roaring, he again slid beneath her and gave her an upward push, their hulls grinding together like teeth.
Too much. He contacted off center, too close to the engine. Her tube rose into the air, while his own, scorched from her flaming exhaust, began to shut down. The last thing he saw was her tube, still on a defective autopilot, tumbling back into braking attitude, but yawing and rolling like a snuffed candle discarded into a cloud-spackled sky.
Completely fried, Flex’s tumbler lost power, and the crash net deployed prematurely, draping uselessly over his legs. In utter blackness, he felt the tumbler chopping branches away from the canopy.
He wished that he had broken silence before losing power, if only to say good-bye. What more was there to lose?
The benefit of autopilot is that the organic pilot is free from complicated tasks to focus on tasks more reliant on a natural intelligence. Yet the human mind has its own autopilot, wherein autonomic bodily functions or rote activities continue without conscious management. In Flex’s case, his autopilot was shock-induced, his full consciousness deferred. His legs moved him through the kzinti recreational area, his throbbing head unaware of his surroundings. When he came upon a running stream, a decision was forced upon him, and that kicked him back into manual.
Flex remembered where he was. Slowly, his vision widened, and with a lone breeze that meandered through the trees, he heard the multitude sounds of the jungle. Insects circled him, distant unknown animals barked and cried, and overhead, the whir of a motor grew faint and was gone. A bird began a sweet chirping that invariably ended in a mock-death scream. Its warble-warble-tweet-tweet-YAAAGH neatly encapsulated the beauty and horror of any number of jungles in known space. The sun slanted through the steamy air, slicing the contours of gray-green foliage into confusion.
Born and raised in the nearly doubled gravity of Jinx, Flex Bothme was short and stocky, a knotted muscle of a man. Such a knot might slip at any moment, and he often had. He was wearing cammo flight togs, and his wristcomp still worked. Apparently, he had been walking for only a few minutes. He thought to backtrack to his tumbler, but suddenly he remembered Annie Venzi. If she was still alive, she was in mortal danger, so he had to find her immediately. Had he, in his traumatized subconscious, calculated which way she must be? He’d been walking northeast before encountering the stream. That would be about right, so he decided to continue.
A large winged insect dared a pass at his neck, but before he could swat it, it changed his mind. “Guess I don’t smell right,” he muttered. On Gummidgy, Annie and Flex chased pests through the air with a sizzler, and then swung lazily in a hammock. They watched the wan light of the little moon bobbling on Circle Sea, and then made love. That was number nine on their “worlds to make love on” list. Flex swore to himself that if he found her alive on Meerowsk, he’d make love to her there and then, even if it meant mission interruptus.
In the sandy loam at his feet, fresh footprints from a small clawed animal with at least four legs ran along the stream. Flex was not a tracker, but he was not the stereotypical dull-witted Jinxian either. It was obvious that the thing had lingered for a drink and then bounded downstream, to his left. This might be important if the animal was being tracked by kzinti hunters. After all, this was a recreational park designed for their amusement. Flex might suddenly find himself the prey of known space’s finest hunters.
He scanned the shallow stream up and down. He had a sidearm, but would be no match for a kzin in this situation. Even if he survived, there would be no way to rescue Annie. Come to think of it, his best chance to find her was if the kzinti found her for him. And there was one way he could help them do that.
Flex used his wristcomp to estimate the direction of Jarko-S’larbo’s lodge. His comp calibrated to the planet’s magnetic field, and he bounded off in that direction. If he could surrender to the kzinti, he might be able to bargain for her life, mission be damned. Annie had always said it was a bad idea to serve together. Despite all the fun and profits they’d had, she was right. What good was it earning money to buy expensive treatments to try to extend their short Jinxian lives if you got killed in the process?
Only bruised here and there, Flex made good time through the forest, but he was far from stealthy. He heard the crashing of limbs behind and above him-something large but elusive was leaping from tree to tree, chasing him. He darted behind a thick mossy trunk, drew his flashlight laser, and chanced a look back.