He moved over to the edge of the cliff and hefted the big rifle so he was pointing it unsupported. He couldn't hold it up for long, and God knows, he wouldn't be able to fire many rounds. But he wouldn't have to.
* * *
"Don't eat them!" Orostan bellowed as the boom of a rifle came from over beyond the obscuring vegetation. "They are mine!"
The only response was a burble from beyond the brush as another boom echoed on the mountain. The trees were whipped in a gale as the God King reached the summit and started to descend. The trail was tricky, more broken even than on the way up and the rhododendron, laurel and white pine was whipping in his face as he finally came into the open.
The human seemed to have been waiting for that, for Orostan would always remember the smile. The apparently sole survivor just smiled that tooth-baring human smile, jumped back and fired.
And flipped backwards into nothing.
* * *
It was tricky. As expected the shot, which undoubtedly went off into nowhere, gave him a few extra feet of boost. The Barrett had always pushed him backwards a few inches no matter how hard he braced and when he fired it off-hand it had pushed him back a couple of steps with each shot. So firing it completely unsupported, effectively in midair like some sort of damned Coyote/Road Runner cartoon, actually turned him for a somersault.
The good part about this was that the combination took him well out from the ledge. He had chosen his spot carefully and he had actually been standing on an overhang. However, the ground started to slope outward after only a few hundred feet long so it was important to get prepared quickly.
The static rappel system was one of the first that used the more advanced Galactic sciences in a device of purely human design and manufacture. Humans had implemented "old" Galactic technology, some of which was close to the cutting edge of human tech and theory, in many designs. New gun barrels were the most common devices, but there were also some small railguns designed for humans and "human only" fusion plants, that were only five or six times the size of equivalent Galactic and about a third as efficient.
This device was the first that used theories that were beyond human ken. The Tchpth considered gravity to be, at best, a toy and, at worst, a minor nuisance. A few of their "simpler" theories were explainable to humans, such as the theory that led to the Galactic bounce tube.
When Indowy wanted to travel up or down in their megascrapers, they generally traveled by bounce tube. This was a narrow tube that went to a specific floor. You entered it and if you were at the bottom it shot you to the top and if you were at the top it let you drop to a screaming (in initial usage this was literal) stop at the bottom. What it took humans a while to discover was that while bounce tubes were "active" devices on the lift side, they were "passive" on the drop. That is, a device at the bottom detected something coming in at high velocity, generated a very minor field and when the item hit the field it was decelerated using its own positive momentum for energy.
The Tchpth and Indowy considered this purely efficient. The humans initially considered it magic.
However, after staying up for several days, smoking a large amount of an illicit substance and taking a very long shower, a research grad at GalTech suddenly realized that if you took some of the things that the Tchpth were saying and turned them on their sides . . . sort of, it was a lot of very good stuff . . . it made a certain amount of sense. Then she wrote them down and slept for three days.
After deciphering what she wrote, which, as far as anyone but her mother was concerned was apparently Sanskrit, she created a little box that when thrown at a wall "threw back." The energy usage involved was no more than that of a small sensor and it always threw back, even when fired from a low velocity pneumatic cannon. (The cannon was called a "chicken gun" and was usually used to test aircraft windshields. But that is another story.)
There was a current upper limit on the device, that is, when fired at very high velocity it tended to break the windshield, and it was better at stopping itself than it was at stopping stuff coming at it. So there was no "personal forcefield."
In other words, it was a very fast way to get to the ground in relative safety.
The device was modified and adjusted until it didn't just stop itself, but created a "static repulsion zone" which, when there was a situation of sudden kinetic change, damped that change. Then it was turned over to TRW for manufacturing purposes. The device was being installed on every vehicle still on the roads and in other places where sudden stops happened in a bad way. And it was issued to all the LRRP teams.
Mosovich looked down at the rapidly approaching ground and swore he was never, ever going to do this again. "It's not the fall that kills you," he whispered.
Generally, if you're going down a cliff or the face of a building, the best way is to rappel. Tie off a rope, hook up any number of devices and lower yourself on the rope. However, there are any number of cases where this is impractical; ropes are not infinitely lengthy. There was another device available that used a very thin wire for the same purpose. And Mosovich really wished he had one with him. But they were much harder to construct than the static repulsion boxes and weren't standard issue. Given the number of times this sort of thing came up, he was definitely getting one for everyone in the team and keeping them.
The problem was that static repulsion systems didn't slow your fall at all until they came nearsolid materials. For example, this system was going to completely ignore the trees he was just about to hit.
* * *
"Fuscirto uut!" Orostan shouted, jumping over the corpse of the last oolt'os and darting to the edge. His talons scrabbled on the rock as he almost slid over the side then he looked down the cliff face just in time to see the human disappear into the trees below.
"You cannot escape me that easily!" the oolt'ondai shouted to the winds, knowing that the words were a lie. "I will still eat your heart!"
Orostan looked out over the valley below and screamed in rage. The sun was sinking to the northwest and before anyone could get to the landing area the human, if it was alive, and he doubted that it had just committed suicide, would be kilometers away. In any of three directions.
Cholosta'an came up beside him and looked down. After a moment he pointed downwards with a flap of his crest.
"Yes," Orostan ground out.
"Alive?" the younger Kessentai asked.
"Probably," Orostan snarled. "And there was only one."
Cholosta'an thought about that for a moment. "The last time we had a good count it was over by the town of Seed. There were four."
"Yes," Orostan said. "Four."
"And now there was only one," Cholosta'an said. "One. And no bodies."
"No."
"Oh. Fuscirto uut."
"I'll send someone around to look for a corpse," Orostan said after a few moments' contemplation. "But I doubt they'll find anything." He looked at his tenaral and started to wonder who. Finally he turned away and started back down the hill. The human might have escaped today, but it undoubtedly was "based" beyond the Gap. Its time would come. Soon.
* * *
As the last Posleen normal faded out of sight, the "rock" that Mosovich had been standing on shifted and rippled, revealing something that looked very much like a four-eyed, blotchy, purple frog. The creature, if it was stretched out, would have been about eight feet from four-fingered foot-hand to foot-hand and was perfectly symmetrical; it had two hands and two eyes on either end with a complex something in the area where a nose might be.
The Himmit scout leaned out from the rock, its rear two foot-hands spreading out over the surface for purchase, and noted the faint heat signature moving away that was probably the human. He then levered himself back and looked towards the retreating Posleen. Such decisions. Human/Posleen, Human/Posleen? Finally, deciding that humans were always more interesting than Posleen—who basically ate, killed and reproduced and who could make a story from that?—it leaned sideways and started flowing from handhold to handhold down the cliff.