Her brother slapped her once on the shoulder, and they nodded. Marya caught up her rifle and followed as he hurdled the gap in the sensor chain she had created.
The two OSS agents froze in unison at the hoarse cries from the path ahead. Then voices, a man and a woman’s, laughing. These woods were more open than those outside the guarded perimeter; they had had to halt half a dozen times to identify and disarm sensors. Marya slowly drew a map from a pocket on the side of her leather hunting trousers and glanced at it, nodded to the other American. They were right on target . . . if the information they had received from the underground was correct. If not, there might be nothing waiting for them but a Security Directorate capture team.
Frederick Lefarge stepped through the last screen of brush. The rain had stopped, but there were puddles on the flagstones of the pathway; beyond it he could see banks of flowers, and then a screen of hedge marking a pavilion. It was obvious enough what the pair had been at; the woman had mud on her knees and was still adjusting her underwear, the man fastening his belt. For a moment Lefarge felt a surge of panic—this did not look like David Ekstein. Too thin, too tanned, the complexion too clear . . . then the bone structure showed through. The other man’s face was liquid with surprise as he stared at the two figures in hunting leathers.
“Hey,” he said, drawing himself up. “This is my place!” A neutral Californian accent. Then, as if remembering a lesson: “Uh, Service to the State, Citizens.”
Lefarge felt himself smile, and saw the other man flinch.
“Glory to the Race,” he said, and the smile grew into a grin.
The serf girl nodded to the two agents, then stepped back. He stepped up to Ekstein, pushed the muzzle of the rifle into the defector’s stomach and fired twice. Recoil hammered the weapon into his hand, augmented by the gases cushioned in flesh. Ekstein catapulted backward, jack-knifing, the leather of his jacket smoldering. Back and spine fountained out in a spray of bone, blood, and internal organs; the air stank of burned flesh and excrement. The body fell to the earth and twitched, was still.
So simple, he thought. Always a surprise. So different from the viewer, rarely any dramatic thrashing around, no last-gasp curses, not with a wound like this. The body fell down and died, and it was over. A whole universe within a human skull, and then nothing. Jesus, I hate this job. It was done. Now they must escape; the easy way, if they could get back to the hunting party, or the hard way, switching identities and oozing out through the underground net.
“Merci.” That was the serf woman. “Et moi aussi.”
“What?” he said sharply in French, looking up. She was young, barely in her late teens; cool brunette good looks, face unreadable as she looked down into Ekstein’s final expression of bewilderment.
“Now me,” she said, looking up at him. “Surely you were told, monsieur? If you do not I must contrive it, and they will suspect everyone if I suicide. Most are blameless—I am the underground contact here—but that will not spare them interrogation, and I know too much.”
He felt his mouth open and the muzzle of the rifle drooped. “Merde! Nobody said a word about that to us!”
She swallowed, and he saw a slight tremor in the hands that smoothed back her disordered hair. “Please, quickly.” She turned her back, looked up into the wet sky with fists clenched by her side. “There is not much time before he is missed.”
“I—” Lefarge felt himself lock. There was white noise in his mind, caught between must and cannot. Marya stepped past him with a soft touch on his arm.
“As you wish,” she said to the serf girl, an infinite tenderness in her voice. “As you wish.”
“I wish we hadn’t had to drop the rifles,” Marya said. The rain was lifting, finally this time by the rifts in the clouds. Their horses had been waiting where they were left, damp and restless and turning large brown eyes full of reproach on the humans.
Frederick Lefarge shrugged, guiding the big animal with the pressure of his knees; Draka used a pad-saddle and an almost token bit. It would be like carrying a “guilty” sign to have the weapons when the police came around. Not that either of them could stand a close questioning, but if they could slip back into the hunting party . . . They walked the mounts out into the open, out of the continual patter of moisture from the wet canopy above, but the air was colder where the wind could play. Six cars, parked along the verge. Two big steam trucks for the horses and dogs, two vans for the huntsmen, two tilt-rotor dual-purpose jobs for the people . . . Draka, he told himself. Don’t get too much in character.
The tall fair young woman was leaning against the open door of one aircar: Mandy, the just-graduated pilot. And his Draka persona’s lady love, Alexandra, supervising the loading of two dead boar; her ghouloon attendant lifted one under each arm and slung them casually into the bed of the truck. The van jounced on its springs under the impact, and the American felt a slight crawling sensation across his shoulders and down the spine. That thing’s as strong as a gorilla, he reminded himself. Rather stronger, in fact, and much faster. It snuffled at its hands, licking away the blood and turned to its owner; standing erect it was easily two meters tall.
“Eat?” it said, in that blurred gravelly tone. “Eat?”
Alexandra laughed and slapped it on one massive shoulder. The sound was like a palm hitting oak wood. “Later,” she said, and the transgene bobbed its head in obedience, tongue lolling and eyes turning longingly toward the meat; drops of rain spilled from the coarse black fur of its lionlike mane.
He turned a grimace into a smile as she looked up at him and waved.
It would not do to appear unenthusiastic. Actually, it had been interesting, at least the sex had. That was like coupling with a demented anaconda. The smile turned into a rueful chuckle; it was also the first time he had been called “charmingly shy” in bed.
“Hiyo!” he called, as he and Marya handed their boar spears down to the servants. “Sorry we got separated.”
“Whole damn party did, Tony,” Alexandra said. “John’s out gatherin’ them all up, with Yolande and her girlfriend. Ah’m gettin’ hungry as Wofor.”
“Wofor eat,” the ghouloon said.
“I—” Mandy began, and was interrupted by a chiming note. She leaned in to take the microphone of the aircar’s com unit. “Wonder what the headhunters’re sayin’?” she said curiously.
The American felt a sensation like an ice drill boring through the bottom of his stomach. That was the Security override alarm. Casually, he whistled the first bar of “Dixie,” the code signal. Marya swung down from her horse and turned toward the aircar; he slid the pistol from his gunbelt and checked it. A late-model Tolgren, 5mm prefragmented bullets, caseless ammunition and a thirty-round horizontal cassette magazine above the barrel. He slipped the selector to three rounds and set the positions of the Draka in his mind: the youngster leaning into the lead aircar; Alexandra ten meters back, by the steam truck. The serfs could be ignored, they would hit the ground at the first sign of violence and stay there.
“Not bushman trouble ’round here?” he said, with a skeptical tone.
“Gods, no,” Alexandra replied. Her hand had gone to the butt of her sidearm automatically, but it dropped away again as she twisted around to look toward Mandy. “I’s born not a hundred clicks from here”—news to me, the American thought—“and the last incident was the year I was born.”