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  “It was his call, friend. I’m not the one who’ll have to pay the fine if he gets caught skimming around without a locator. That’s between him, the law, and the company that rented him the transport in the first place.” She nodded once more in the direction of the recently extracted device. “Told him I’d have it checked out and ready for reinstallation when he gets back tonight.”

  If he gets back tonight, a fuming Halvorsen seethed silently. The visitor might have told this pasty-faced woman the truth—or he might choose not to return for a few days, or a couple of weeks. When he finally deigned to do so, it might be via a circuitous route that would make him difficult to intercept before he bade final farewell to this happy, smelly world.

  Halvorsen briefly considered returning to Tlossene and doing nothing more proactive than waiting for his quarry to finish his gallivanting around and show up at the shuttleport. Such a course of action presented complications of its own. His diligence might draw the attention of curious authorities, or he might simply miss his transiting quarry while in the process of doing something as simple as eating, sleeping, or attending to demanding necessary bodily functions.

  One possibility the exasperated hunter discarded from the outset was any thought of trying to sneak aboard the visitor’s private shuttle, there to lie in wait for its wandering owner to return. Such craft were invariably equipped with defenses designed to deal harshly with snoopers and interlopers. Furthermore, the shuttleport itself was often busy. Even if he did manage the timing so that he could confront his quarry, there was always the risk of encountering potential witnesses.

  No, to ensure the safety and success of the modest enterprise on which he was presently embarked, he needed to find his target and deal with it as far away from Tlossene, as distant from the innocent eyes of curious bystanders, as possible.

  Unsurprisingly, when questioned the phlegmatic technician had no idea as to her recently departed customer’s destination. The tall young offworlder had not volunteered the information, and she had not regarded it as any of her business to inquire. Which lack of information left the irate Halvorsen no choice but to commence the arduous and disagreeable task of asking questions around town. Much as it repulsed him, this meant not only interacting with the local Tlel but being polite to them, as well. Having no other choice, he held his nose both literally and figuratively as he strode from place to place in search of information that might give him a clue which way his absent, perambulating “friend” might have gone.

  He spent a furious, wasted day in search of clues before finally finding one the next morning in the person of a native functionary working at the central administration center. Clue was the operative description, since “he said he going north” was as specific as this even more than usually malodorous individual could be. Though damningly ambiguous, it was the only information on his quarry’s plans that Halvorsen was able to unearth. The administrative functionary, of course, had no reason to suspect that a fellow human’s motivation in inquiring as to the route taken by one of his own kind was anything other than benign.

  A delay. That was all it was, Halvorsen fumed as he made his way back to his own craft. This taking off without a tracking locator was very inconsiderate of his quarry. Fortunately, Halvorsen’s skimmer was equipped with sophisticated tracking equipment that did not rely for success on following the clear signal of another vehicle’s safety instrumentation. Catching up to his target would require a couple of days longer than he had anticipated, a bit more expenditure, a little more wear and tear on both himself and his equipment, before he finally ran the man down. Though the provisional aggravation quotient continued to rise, he knew it was only a matter of time until he would be able to claim the stipulated reward. It was often so. One sometimes had to spend more time and money than originally envisioned in order to make more of the latter. The only thing he could not amortize was his own irritation.

  So upset was he at the unexpected turn of events and in such a rush to resume the pursuit that before he left town he neglected to check with the repair technician to see if there was actually anything wrong with the locator his quarry had left behind to be “checked out.” Had he lingered long enough to learn that it was in fact in perfect working order, the surprising revelation just might have proven sufficiently unexpected to give even Norin Halvorsen pause.

  CHAPTER 5

  One way that escort and employer passed the time as the skimmer cruised steadily northwestward was to work on improving their knowledge of each other’s language. In this the willing and voluble Bleshmaa had the clear advantage, since she already spoke very good terranglo while Flinx’s knowledge of Tlelian barely qualified as minimal. Ten meters below the skimmer, the crests of the highest alien treetops unfolded like cauliflower florets in a recurring eruption of green and shocking blue.

  “Nono,” she told him, employing the characteristic Tlelian doubling of a word to indicate emphasis. “Clelet cleleen jlatat. Notnot jliteet.”

  Flinx tried again. As befitted a moderately expensive rental, the skimmer’s seats were warm and comfortable. Plush but not pushy. Outside, the lush but chilly surface of Gestalt sped past at a constant speed maintained by the skimmer’s automatics. Pip dozed nearby, only occasionally glancing up whenever her master or his new friend grew more than usually excited.

  Bleshmaa, it developed, was not presently conjoined. Both she and her deceased mate, who had been killed in a backcountry encounter with something large, hairy, and tooth-laden called a sleang, had supplemented their income by escorting not only human visitors and settlers but also other Tlel into some of the more primitive, less visited expanses of Gestalt’s wild northland.

  “Clelet cleleen jlatat.” Flinx repeated the phrase clearly despite the fear that by doing so correctly he risked swallowing his own tongue. The feeding cilia beneath Bleshmaa’s flattened, horizontal chin rippled in a brief wave of approval.

  “Muchmuch better. If yu continue tu progress, tomorrow we will try some more advanced action words.”

  The farther north they traveled, the more variable and unpredictable the climate became. The good weather continued to hold, however. Nothing beyond the occasional light hailstorm or brief shower interrupted the spectacular view outside. Flinx was most impressed with the ferocious rivers. Descending from the high mountains that marched down from the northern pole, these roared southward in what seemed to be a multiplicity of never-ending cascades of churning, frothing water anxious to reach the equator. The glint and flash of white water was particularly striking where it cut through tall stands of fibrous growths that were azure or cobalt in hue. Against dense alien forest, the rushing rivers resembled shifting cracks in a vast pane of blue glass.

  When not initiating her employer into the mysteries of Tlelian enunciation, Bleshmaa busied herself with typical native amusements. Some were simple enough to improvise without external input. Others required downloads accessible via her own basic but perfectly adequate communit. Due to Gestalt’s long association with the Commonwealth, advanced technology had made more than casual inroads into Tlel society, transforming it in ways her ancestors could not have dreamed. Like most of her kind she was as comfortable with the progressive advances and with the skimmer’s full complement of sophisticated instrumentation as was her current human employer.

  The fourth day of steady flight found him three-quarters of the way to his goal: the coordinates that had been supplied by the helpful Rosso Eustabe. Accessing information from the skimmer’s instrumentation via his own communit, he continued to hunt for additional information on the enigmatic Mr. Anayabi. As with his original probe conducted from Tlossene’s administrative center, search after surreptitious search turned up nothing new. In lieu of hope of actually learning anything, he had given to substituting persistence, a quality that had served him well in the past.

  His attention was drawn sharply away from his research by the voice of the skimmer’s AI. For a change, the message did not involve the weather. The announcement was as terse as it was utterly unanticipated.

  “I must please ask you to secure yourselves in your seats, as we are currently under attack.”

  Taken aback, a startled Flinx asked the AI to repeat the alert. It promptly did so, in the same even tone of voice. As alarms went, Flinx thought the rental craft’s excessively polite.

  Throwing himself into the forward passenger chair, he instinctively pushed back into the crash padding and allowed the safety harness to activate around him. While it did so and as an agitated Pip settled onto his shoulder, he looked around wildly, searching for the source of the declared threat. A quick scan of the deep blue sky through the craft’s transparent plexalloy dome revealed no imminent danger; no diving aircraft, no incoming kinetics, no paralleling vehicles of any kind. Bemused, he started to press the AI to project whatever it had detected into the air above one of the forward consoles.

  Then he felt it.

  The hlusumakai came diving out of the brilliant white sun, heading straight for the skimmer. A bare moment after Flinx’s cantankerous special Talent sensed the creature’s murderous intent, he saw it. Swift, septuple-winged, golden-hued, and furry, the aerial predator had eyes as big as the skimmer’s aft port, a trailing cranial crest of feathery crimson tassels, and a mouth large enough to swallow Flinx whole. One outstanding feature dominated the remarkable beast’s appearance. Like a great golden sail, a translucent membranous arc formed an enormous spine-supported, fan-shaped semi-circle from one side of the creature’s head to the other.

  As the hlusumakai swept past, pulling up at the last minute to avoid a head-on collision with the skimmer, Bleshmaa flinched in her seat. Letting out an untranslatable cry and moaning in obvious pain, her long arms doubled up to allow their cilia to grasp her flattened head, she remained upright on a floor pad only due to the support of her automated safety harness. At the same time, several readouts on the skimmer’s instrument console went temporarily crazy. In contrast, all Flinx felt was a slight tingling.

  “I will now proceed to take evasive and defensive action.”

  The voice of the AI was as calm as if it were delineating standard arrival procedures at Tlossene shuttleport. Sharply descending several meters, it dropped dangerously close to the cerulean crowns of several of the highest forest growths before resuming flight on a more or less level path. Leaving her perch on Flinx’s shoulder, an angry Pip fluttered and beat at the transparent canopy like a frustrated, oversized butterfly, seeking the open air beyond and a chance to strike back. Meanwhile a concerned Flinx, disregarding the skimmer’s request to remain in his seat, had thumbed the manual release on his harness to go to the aid of the obviously beleaguered, suffering Bleshmaa.

  “My head!” Her alien whimpers reminded him of a distressed kitten. The Tlel did not cry, not in the human sense. But the emotions were undeniably akin. “Hlusumakai attacks with very strongstrong flii.” She managed to recover her equilibrium enough to gesture outside with one long arm. “If I not protected by partial diffusion mechanism integrated as safety measure into all Tlel transportation, I might be dead now.”

  “Dead?” Flinx had seen no poison spewed, witnessed no strike of fang or claw, observed no emission of a natural explosive or disabling gas. Come to think of it, other than a possible attempt to intimidate through sheer size he had not seen the hlusumakai initiate any kind of hostile action whatsoever. Then he remembered the short-lived but unmistakable reaction of several of the skimmer’s instruments. They had gone momentarily crazy when the creature had been at its closest to the skimmer.

  The Tlel had the ability to sense the electrical fields emitted by other living beings. The carnivorous kasollt that had tried to vacuum him up subsequent to his arrival at the shuttleport had possessed the same natural faculty. What if a native predator had evolved the ability not only to sense such fields, but also to overpower them with some kind of projection? In the same way that a human would be blinded by contact with Pip’s caustic venom, could a Tlel’s highly evolved electrosensory facility literally be short-circuited by a high-powered blast from another denizen of Gestalt?

  In Flinx’s widespread travels he had encountered creatures that could blind by focusing and concentrating light, and others that could stun by emitting deafening blasts of sound. Why not a disrupter of natural electrical fields as well? Much in the fashion of a solar flare or lightning discharge, a sufficiently powerful natural emitter might for a split second even generate a strong enough pulse to momentarily interfere with the electrical systems of a modern vehicle. Just as the skimmer’s instruments had been momentarily affected.

  He recalled his fleeting view of the diving hlusumakai’s flaring cranial membrane. A sexual attractant—or some kind of organic transmitter? The burst emitted by the beast had only given him a slight tingle—because unlike Bleshmaa, he possessed no highly developed capacity for detecting electrical current in others, no wide-open sensory apparatus for the attacker to disrupt. Similarly, a sound-generating creature would have little effect on someone who was totally deaf. Just as the olfactory-deprived Tlel would be immune to the odiferous persuasions of skunks.

  A glance upward through the transparent canopy showed the imposing dark mass of the hlusumakai pacing the skimmer overhead. Perhaps it was puzzled, Flinx reasoned, as to why its peculiar intended victim continued onward above the treetops instead of plunging to the ground like proper prey, stunned into immobility. As he stared, the predator’s shape changed. Folding its multiple wings, it plunged like an arrow and began to grow larger. Pip continued to bang against the skimmer’s unyielding canopy, desperate to gain open sky in which to fight.

  “Here it comes again!” he shouted more forcefully than he intended. Whimpering and rocking slightly against her safety harness, Bleshmaa folded both arms across the front of her head, completely blocking her arc of vision.

  Gazing deliberately at the fast-diving hlusumakai, Flinx readied himself to try to project onto it. He would conjure a sense of danger and attempt to frighten it off. As it happened, his questionable effort was not needed.

  No Gestaltian enterprise worth its liability insurance would allow a rental skimmer out into the wilds of the northlands without suitable protection and appropriate defenses against the manifold dangers that lurked there. Its partial diffusion screen had served to keep Bleshmaa from being numbed into insensibility. Now it responded to the hlusumakai’s second attack with a more proactive apparatus. This took the reassuring form of an integrated pumper built to unleash explosive shells. Having identified the target from its initial pass, the skimmer’s targeting apparatus locked on. Deploying from a port in the craft’s ventral side, the protruding weapon swiveled, locked on, and fired once.

  Not wishing to have to pause in his journey in order to clean the skimmer’s canopy, Flinx was relieved when the hlusumakai blew up well off to the craft’s starboard side instead of directly overhead. Or worse, forward. Blood, shattered bone, and torn flesh rained down on the forest below, unexpected manna of Gestaltian biblical proportions for the hungry scavengers undoubtedly roaming among the cobalt growths.

  “Evasive and defensive action concluded.” The skimmer’s AI voice was identical to the one it had used when it had first declared the emergency. Unlike the Teacher, it was not sophisticated enough to have a command of emotional modulation.

  Careful not to exert too much pressure on her strong but slender arms, Flinx helped a trembling Bleshmaa out of her safety harness. Though her wide, flattened feet provided a stable base for her tapering body, she still swayed slightly for a moment or two after he released his grasp on her and stepped back.

  “Very painfulpainful,” she declared when she finally spoke again. Tilting back her disc-like head, she focused her cryptic eyeband on him. “Yu humans are so very different from us. Sometimes it is a lucky thing tu be blind. But yu are ignorant uv the beauty uv the fliiandra. Yu will never—see it. Nono,” she corrected herself. “That is not the right wording fur what I am trying tu say. I think in yur language there is no right wording.”

  He nodded, because it seemed the proper thing to do. “Yes, I’m afraid that the beauty and mysteries of the fliiandra will always remain an enigma to me.” A hand gestured outward, past where Pip was humming back to rejoin him. “On the other hand, I am immune to the danger posed by the hlusumakai and any others like it.”

  “Passengers will please resume safety seats,” the AI suddenly declaimed.

  Both Flinx and his escort looked around apprehensively. This time he could detect no homicidal animal emotions rushing toward them. Bleshmaa sensed no oncoming disruption of her flii.

  “I don’t see anything,” he finally declared aloud. Nor perceive anything, he added, but only to himself. “Another hlusumakai?”

  “The problem is not organic in nature,” the skimmer explained. “We are approaching an area of very turbulent low atmospheric pressure. If you prefer, I can set down and wait for it to pass.”

  Flinx considered. “How long do you estimate, at our present speed, it would take to go around it?”

  “It is a fairly large, active area moving rapidly south-southeast and transecting our present course. Perhaps a day or two.”

  “How long to fly straight through it?”

  “Approximately one hour.”

  Flinx had battled and survived serious weather on a host of worlds boasting wildly disparate climates. Where rough conditions presented an obstacle, he had always found it better to get through them as quickly as possible. He would not waste days sitting on the ground waiting for a storm to pass, or even one going around it, and he so informed the skimmer’s AI. Besides, how bad could it be?

  Very soon he found himself presented with yet one more reason why Gestalt did not rank high on the list of those humans and thranx who were desirous of emigrating to another habitable world. In fact, he soon found himself completely engulfed by that particular reason.