He landed skidding, 300 yards short of the Mei-Li's coordinates. "Off," he barked, then triggered the scooter's delayed destruction charge and sprinted sixty yards before it blew. For a few seconds he lay panting, then got to his feet. His commandos were unhurt. After orienting himself in the deep dusk, Stoorvol sent the others on to find the Mei-Li. Alone he paused, squatting by a fallen forest giant overgrown with lichens, moss, and toadstools. The firing had stopped when the scooter had blown. Now it began again, and he sprinted around the root disk to crouch behind the great log. More debris rained down.
Clicking his transmitter, he spoke. "Gunny, do you read me?"
"Loud and clear, sir."
"Boats, do you read me?"
"Loud and clear, sir."
"Good. Gunny, if you've got any men on board, get them off now, ready to fight.
"Boats, Haynes and the civilians should reach you with the hornets soon. On foot. As soon as they're secured, get the Mei-Li out of there, without lights if possible. Gunny's people will help you. Did you both hear that?"
"Loud and clear, sir."
"Loud and clear, sir."
"Good. And Boats, those hornets need to reach the Bering as fast as safely possible; otherwise they may die, and dead they won't be much good. Then we'll have come all this way for nothing. Do not wait for me; I'll be keeping the Wyzhnyny distracted."
It seemed to him he'd already done a pretty good job of that. Otherwise they'd probably have found the Mei-Li and pounded hell out of her.
Meanwhile the trasher fire had stopped again. He suspected what that might mean, and getting to his knees peered over the log toward where the scooter had been. A minute later he saw Wyzhnyny troopers lowering through the canopy in slings.
Crouching, he padded off into the gathering darkness.
With the help of his helmet's active night vision, Stoorvol found his way readily. Even with his belt nav, and knowing his own and the Mei-Li's coordinates to four decimals, it would be easy to miss the boat in the jungle. Abruptly, gunfire sounded from multiple locations overhead: the rapid thumping of trashers, and the sizzling cracks of trasher bolts burning vacuum trails through the air. But without the tearing crashes of detonations in the forest roof, or the dull earthy whumps as they exploded against the ground. This continued for perhaps five long seconds, then cut off. The sound and its cessation told him what the target had been: the Wyzhnyny had been firing at the Mei-Li as she accelerated outward. But there'd been no explosion as of the collection boat blowing up or crashing. Menges had gotten away into warpspace.
Which meant that Haynes and his civilians had run all the way, carrying their hornet traps… Either that or Menges hadn't waited. His fists curled at the thought.
At any rate the situation had changed. He was here until he either died or was picked up by the Mei-Li, when and if she returned for Wyzhnyny prisoners. Stoorvol had ridden from Terra in stasis, and barely knew Weygand. Some commanders might justify leaving the system with what they had-the hornets. But there were others who'd try for the jackpot, especially since it seemed not to endanger the Bering herself. Weygand, it seemed to him, might be one of them.
As for himself, Stoorvol intended to get at least one Wyzhnyny prisoner. Stash him somewhere, properly stunned, safe from rescue or escape. When they'd left Gabrovo Base in the Balkan Autonomy, every one of his commando carried a stunner, a gag, and a fifteen-foot roll of tape in his rucker.
As if on cue, he heard faint voices in the direction he'd come from, and maxxed his sound sensor. Alien speech, and not via radio. It sent a chill through him. How many times, as a boy, he'd daydreamed that!
In a perverse way it also irritated him. Their stealth discipline was lousy! They probably thought their quarry was out of reach in warpspace. They were also moving his way. Spotting a strategically situated liana, he tested it, then climbed thirty feet or so to the crotch of a tree.
Now the Wyzhnyny angled off toward the gorge, perhaps to be picked up and returned to their base. Out of his reach. That would never do. Climbing back down, he trotted after them, blaster ready. Shortly he spotted a Wyzhnyny soldier and shot him in the back, then dropped into a hole left by the uprooting of a mouldering, wind-thrown tree. Blaster pulses hissed, fired blindly into the darkness.
He stayed where he was for several long minutes, blaster ready. Probably they'd sent a squad back to look for him, and they'd missed his hole. Cautiously he raised his head, then screened by the log, crept toward another large tree a few yards away. A liana had rooted to its trunk, and he climbed it, to fit himself into a crotch forty feet up. It wasn't comfortable, but it mostly hid him. Minutes later a squad of Wyzhnyny appeared-the searchers returning from hunting him. He shrunk behind one half of the fork, hoping the concept of an enemy who could climb trees hadn't occurred to them. As they passed, he got the closest look he'd had at one. Centaurs? Not hardly, he told himself. Leave off the necklike torso with its arms, and it looked like an oversized mastiff.
But beyond a doubt, they could run a lot faster than he could.
The warp jump from the gorge back to the Bering had been quick. Menges had reemerged in F-space above the lunar farside not far from the survey ship, then closed in gravdrive. Olavsdottir and her techs had promptly disembarked with their winged captives.
Briefly Sergeant Gabaldon told the skipper what he wanted to do. The skipper never blinked. "Go for it," he said. So Gabaldon claimed the pilot's seat, and with Menges as his copilot, moved away from the Bering, generated warpspace, and headed back for Tagus.
This time he didn't need to grope for the gorge. As sensed from the F-space potentiality, the gravitic coordinate system was blurred, but he had a "sort of" fix on Menges' old hiding place.
His plan, such as it was, was based on two operational premises: (1) The Wyzhnyny were already alerted; and (2) the mission now demanded quickness, not stealth, aggression, not caution. But not stupidity, either.
The immediate challenge promised to be finding a place to pull into the forest. He couldn't expect to find Menges' old hiding place; his fix wasn't that good. But his warrior muse smiled on him: he emerged above the gorge at close to rim level, within recognition distance of the gap between trees that Menges had used before. Jockeying the Mei-Li fully into the forest, he set her down.
His marines were already gathered at the gangway; he keyed it open and they moved out, taking defensive positions nearby. The naval gunners sat tense and ready at their heavy weapons. Gabaldon opened his transmitter and spoke. "Stoorvol, this is Gabaldon. We're parked where Menges hid earlier, but close to the rim. Do you read me? Over."
The message took Paul Stoorvol by surprise. "Gunny," he murmured, "there should be a platoon or so of aliens very near you. Maybe just north, if you're where you say. They seem to be waiting for a ride home, or maybe for orders. They've given up hunting for me. I'd about decided I needed to do something more to keep them around. Right now I'm in a tree, a couple of hundred feet from… from the rim."
He'd stumbled orally because the Wyzhnyny on the ground had opened fire, at either the Mei-Li or the marines. He doubted that anything the Wyzhnyny had on the ground was adequate to breach her hull metal, but if they concentrated on her sensor array… Or if a gunboat was still hanging around…
From his perch he could make out two Wyzhnyny, eerie gold by night vision. He unslung his blaster and shot them both, not to draw attention-the firefight with the marines held that-but to help the odds. Then he climbed down the liana, unslung his blaster again, and clicked his helmet transmitter.