The Summer Thieves

by Paul Di Filippo

  All the hunters on this exclusive outing were wedding guests, and so naturally Johrun and Minka had to function almost as host and hostess, accepting an endless stream of good wishes, the eternal jokes about the imminence of future offspring, and sometimes probing questions about their plans for Verano, once the planet slipped into their hands. Johrun bore up with a patient good will which morphed gradually to actual pleasure the longer Minka behaved herself. Her conniptions of the morning seemed extinct, and she was more like his girl of old, standing hip to hip and arm in arm with him, smiling and making amiable conversation. Anders Braulio, thankfully, had fixed his attentions on Grassella Hatherly, a slinky brunette old enough to be his grandmother, but of course preserved in virginal shape by the highest-grade Polly juvenescence technics that her gigachain fortune deriving from her family’s strangelet mines could provide.

  The bonas began signalling that it was time to mount up again. The simiakentauroi packed everything away. Tipstaff approached Johrun as he slung a leg over Tinkerbelle’s girth.

  “I hope I did not lay on talk of dangers too thick, Vir Johrun. But I always prefer to err on the side of scaring these reckless ninnies into caution, rather than risk losing anyone.”

  “No, Jebb, you did well.” Johrun thought for a moment about asking Tipstaff to keep a special eye on Braulio. But, pleased by Minka’s return to normality, and feeling that singling out the fellow would be grossly unfair and might reveal an unworthy prejudice on his part, he said nothing.

  In due time the expedition reached the edge of the Caramel Patches, a zone so named because of the lazy butterscotch-colored streams that divided up the land into expansive turfy islets supporting only intermittent scrub brush. The gravel-bedded waters were shallow and almost without current, and the simiakentauroi forded them without even wetting the shoe tips of their riders.

  Immediately, everyone came alert, scanning the skies and horizon for gryffoths. But none showed themselves immediately.

  Braulio had come to ride alongside Johrun and Minka. “How is it that the lodge itself is not infested with these flying creatures? Surely they could range so far.”

  “They are geofenced to this locale. Trespassing beyond the borders causes them to feel very painful internal prods.”

  “A useful technique. It might even be applied to humans. By the way, I understand you’ve never left this planet.”

  Before Johrun could formulate an adequate reply, Braulio darted away, laughing. Johrun was left fuming. He looked to Minka to see her reaction, but she seemed intent on leaning forward and whispering foolish nonsense into the large leathery ear of her mount.

  Tipstaff cantered up. “Form on me, Tipstaff’s Warriors! Satellite coverage reveals the whereabouts of our prey!”

  The four other groups had already diverged under their leaders to aim for different points of the compass, and other knots of quarry. The quick dispersal meant that soon Tipstaff and his ten were out of sight of the rest.

  Without the full boisterous crowd, narrowed down to only eleven, Johrun instantly felt more isolated, more aware of the small human presence on Verano, just as when he flew alone on his wings through the far precincts of Sweetmeats Pasturage. But for some reason, his wonted contentment with this status, a verity since his earliest youth, had changed to a kind of skittish timorousness, as if his bonds to the planet of his birth had been tainted somehow.

  Shrugging off the unnatural feeling as best he could, Johrun concentrated his attention on searching out the gryffoths. And his focus was rewarded in a short time by sight of a flock, a half-dozen soaring specks several kilometers distant. As the humans drew closer, the specks began to resolve into the aerial chimeras: hirsute, trunk-dangling mashups spiralling and acrobatting like elephantine hummingbirds. And the gryffoths took notice of the intruders, as evidenced by some assertive bellowing that carried easily across the narrowing gap.

  Suddenly one of the flock peeled away, arrowing at great speed in a descent aimed at the hunters. The creature, a large male, presented the appearance of a hairy meteor arriving at cosmic speeds. The inexperienced hunters froze in place. Johrun managed to pull his rifle out of its saddle holster. But before he could take aim, the gryffoth had soared over their heads, arced back up and around the way it had come.

  At the instant of its lowest approach, the hurtling behemoth discharged a substantial bolus of ripe and potent manure which splattered to the ground right at the foot of Braulio’s steed, a very near miss. Scents of methane-rich fermenting hay and decomposed pillbug rose up, not completely unpleasant for someone raised around herple dung.

  Braulio scowled and shook his fist at the retreating beast. “You flying compost heap! I’ll wear your guts for a necklace!”

  Urging his simiakentauros to a gallop, Braulio was quickly off toward the herd.

  Tipstaff shouted, “After that rascal, if you will, Vir Johrun! I can’t leave these others unprotected.”

  Johrun sent Tinkerbelle after Braulio at top speed, uttering some choice curses all the while. The ape half of his steed drew in great snuffling breaths to fuel its run.

  He caught up with the ex-student only when Braulio had come to a voluntary stop himself. Tipstaff and the rest of the party were a good kilometer or two behind them now.

  The herd had come down to the ground about two hundred meters distant. Females and immature gryffoths were placidly browsing while the males formed a restive defensive perimeter between their families and the humans.

  Johrun laid a hand on Braulio’s arm to stop him from moving closer. The burly fellow shook him off.

  “Don’t try to restrain me! I’m determined to get my revenge.”

  “Revenge? For what? The beast was just making a natural defense. After all, we’re here to take its life.”

  “Call it what you will, I won’t stand for it.”

  “You’re just being foolish and pig-headed now. Let’s go back to the others. Tipstaff will set up a more favorable ambush for us.”

  As Johrun tried to reason with Braulio, three of the male gryffoths began to move slowly toward the humans. They started to accelerate, their strapping leonine hindquarters working in uncanny concert with the massive front legs. And even while the chimeras were afoot, their wings seemed to come into play to add propulsion.

  Johrun took instant stock of the situation. “We can’t outrun them. We must separate, so that we make two targets, not one. Quick, you go that way! If we can each nail one, then maybe the third will relent!”

  The two men galloped off in opposite directions.

  Johrun halted. His scheme had worked. But not to his advantage.

  One gryffoth chased Braulio. Two gryffoths bore down on Johrun.

  Johrun brought his rifle up to his shoulder. Trained to this task, Tinkerbelle remained calm and steady. Cold sweat pimpled Johrun’s brow and saturated his armpits. Fifty meters for lethality! This was stacking the deck in favor of the animals in a all-too-generous way! He put his eye to the scope, tracking the one beast that was the marginally closer opponent, and his vambrace automatically synced to the gun and began to recite the distance remaining.

  “Six-forty meters, six-twenty meters, five-ninety meters . . .”

  Johrun heard the signature ionic sizzle of another rifle being discharged. He took his eye away from the scope for a second, and noted with relief that Braulio had bagged his beast, which lay on the turf with an enormous gobbet gouged out of its middle.

  “Three-thirteen meters, two-seventy-five meters . . .”

  Johrun estimated that if he hit the lead gryffoth, he would have about ten seconds left to target the other and fire. Just doable. With luck and a calm nerve.

  “Ninety meters, fifty meters!”

  A curious placidity had descended on him. Johrun snapped off the shot as if aiming at a clay pigeon. The lead gryffoth catapulted to the grass head-first, flipping its hindquarters forward over its wooly mammoth portion that had plowed the ground.

  Johrun swivelle
d toward the second behemoth. But before he could fire again, the air-warping clap of his first shot suddenly seemed to have an echo!

  At the next moment, Tinkerbelle exploded beneath Johrun, sending the man hurtling through the air to impact the cushioning soil.

  Johrun leapt to his feet. Every muscle ached. His rifle was nowhere to be seen. The second racing gryffoth seemed close enough to smell. Could he dive away to one side? No, this was goodbye to everything—

  Suddenly the gryffoth was just not there. Instead, an atomized mist of blood, flesh, and bones in an expanding nebula enveloped Johrun, blinding him and knocking him down again.

  He clambered erect, wiping gore from his face.

  Two riders were approaching, the nearer at a relaxed canter, the farther figure at full gallop. The nearer was Braulio, and coming up fast was Tipstaff.

  Braulio dismounted nonchalantly. “You’re fine, I take it, despite my lousy aim. I was trying to help you with the second one, but got your mount instead. Awfully sorry.”

  Johrun confirmed Braulio’s supposed bad aim with a glance. Poor Tinkerbelle had been riven by the glasma burst at a point just behind the saddle, resulting in almost instant death from shock and blood loss. Apparently the anti-murder artilect in the scope had not considered this animal target prohibited, despite human proximity.

  Tipstaff careened up and leaped off. He quickly assessed Johrun’s safety and integrity, then said, “Three prizes so soon! Though one is essentially irrecoverable without a wet-dry vac. I’m willing to call that a day!”

  “You saved me. But how?”

  Tipstaff hoisted his rifle. “Are you dim enough to imagine that my gun has the same limitations as yours? Your prior training was most egregiously lackluster! I could probably take down a suboribital craft with this. Automatic fire is a nice feature as well. How many glasma particles can dance on the tusks of a gryffoth? I think we achieved an estimate today!”

  The rest of Tipstaff’s Warriors, amateur division, were arriving now, looking pale and concerned and relieved. Johrun readied a warning for Minka not to rush to embrace him in his filthy state. But the injunction proved unnecessary. She sidled her mount next to Braulio. But instead of proclaiming her relief and thanks, she said, “Anders, that was very bold shooting from you. And Joh, you as well. I’m glad everything worked out okay.”

  Tipstaff took a towel from one of the pack animals. He handed it to Johrun while rolling his eyes at Minka’s bland words.

  “Here, go plunge in that closest rivulet and try to get somewhat clean. If you’re going to ride double with me, you can’t resemble the Inside-Out Wretch of Rackstraw Hollow.”

  The Indranet vitagraph on Anders Braulio, extensively compiled through deep data-mining by the personalized ferret partials leased from the Indrans themselves, held no surprises: no hidden predispositions, connections, motivations or antisocial behaviors that might have explained what seemed, in a certain suspicious light, to be an attempt on the life of his host. Johrun could piece no plausible causes together from the hard facts.

  The Braulio family, long established on the Bricker-predominant world of Maradyth, was solidly well-off, although only in the upper-middle-class sense, not possessing anything like the planetary-level wealth of the Corvivios or Soldevere families. Like many of his relatives across several generations, Braulio had majored in engineering at the University of Saints Fontessa and Kuno on Loudermilk III: specifically, strangelet engineering, a discipline devoted to the many applications of that universal power source. While an undergraduate he had excelled at several sports, including marathon swimming and kine-roistering. Somewhat anomalously for such a physical extrovert and out-doorsy type, he had also been a key member of the University’s Choir of Empyrean Throats, supplying a mellow tenor. And in fact membership in that sodality had been responsible for introducing him to Minka, who also sang in the group. An innocent and serendipitous connection if ever there was one. Fair-to-middling grades had not prevented Braulio from crossing the graduation stage, and he already had a nice journeyman’s job lined up back home. He had not paraded on the Indranet any outrageous assertions or violent opinions, no blue japes or any greater number of visual testimonials to the joys of inebriation than his peers. The latest set of photos to be found under his Indranet digichop chronicled the post-graduation interplanetary tour he had undertaken with Ox, Braheem, Trina, Viana, and Minka. The visuals represented common and harmless tourist activity: riding the Rainbow Flumeway on Mingming Fan; eating a platter of burglar crabs on the beach at Apfelt Bay; visiting the famous Badway Oasis nightclub on Leschly II. The only slightly off-kilter photo depicted the six graduates foolishly skylarking at the Glass Grotto on Irion, despite a prominent shaped-light sign warning visitors of the recent phagoplasm incursion and declaring usage of the site to be undertaken on an at-risk basis only.

  Sitting in a hot whirlpool tub in his room several hours after the safari’s return, allowing the bath to soothe his aches while the Polly repair patches worked on his contusions, Johrun commissioned a lesser workup on the other four students. The swift report revealed similarly innocuous and harmless lives.

  Faced with such an absence of malevolence, no grudges or greed to serve as reasons simple or complex, overt or covert, Johrun finally decided to accept Braulio’s explanation: a sincere desire to help take down the raging bull gryffoth, and bad marksmanship abetted by nerves and the strain of having just faced down his own charging behemoth. No other scenario possessed any likelihood.

  Just as he was stepping out of the tub, his vambrace brought a call from Landon Corvivios. Obeying tailored privacy protocols, the device of course excluded transmission of Johrun’s nude condition. Johrun’s father said, “Son, I need you and Minka to meet the rest of us in the boardroom as soon as possible. This obnoxious delay in your ceremonies has become an unavoidable reality, and we can’t keep the circumstances from your bride-to-be any longer. It’s not really fair. Although we thought to spare both of you, once you discovered the situation we should also have told her. Now we’ll remedy that inequality.”

  “I’ll be there in a moment.”

  After hastily dressing, Johrun scurried to Minka’s room. He found her sitting in an almost trance-like condition at her dressing table, although she was already fully attired for the night’s banquet. However, a gentle nudging of her shoulder roused her to a lively condition, and Johrun chalked up her deep abstraction to a host of obvious and excusable preoccupations.”

  Oh, Joh, it’s you. How are you feeling after that horrid hunt? I’ve never been on such an ill-fated expedition before.”

  Johrun took pleasure in Minka’s concern. Her entrancing face and charms, at once familiar yet foreign, suddenly leaped into his eye and heart. He felt a sudden access of desire for her, a wish that they could be alone together on some deserted paradisiacal island. He knew he could not act on such a fantasy—at least not at the moment—but at a minimum he wanted to convey the enduring depth of his love for her. Maybe he hadn’t been demonstrative enough since her return.

  “I’m completely fine, dear. But I would have gladly sacrificed myself if your safety were at stake in the slightest way. I couldn’t bear to see you harmed. You mean the world to me.”

  Minka responded as if Johrun’s declaration were a trifling sentiment granted a stranger, such as “I hope you enjoy the show.”

  “That’s very nice. Of course, I feel just the same.”

  Forced to content himself with this tepid reply, and not daring to ask for more, Johrun switched topics. “You heard the summons from my father just now?”

  “Yes, of course. Do you know what it’s all about?”

  “I do. But better to let him explain.”

  In the boardroom, two generations of two families stood in a loose aggregation, seemingly arrayed so as to convey a sense of informality and inconsequentiality, as if the possibility of any real crisis were laughable.

  Here were the eternal patriarchs and matriarchs, rugg
ed and unique: Xul and Chirelle Corvivios; Brayall and Fern Soldevere. The men and women who had won a world and established its vital role in the Quinary, garnering a fortune along the way. Then their not inconsiderable offspring and their mates, more youthful yet still formidable—Landon and Ilona, Arne and Fallon—who had upheld all the earlier virtues and sophisticated the familial enterprises with new ideas and energy. Johrun felt an upwelling of pride and respect, affection, and awe, as if the eight practically radiated a life-giving light. He vowed always to be worthy of the legacy they represented, and to bring their beloved world of Verano to new heights of excellence.

  Without unnecessary ado and in a concise and direct manner, Minka’s grandfather Brayall explained the whole situation to her: a formal suit, mediated by the Brickers, asserting that the transmission of their title to Verano was improper, murky somehow, or even null and void.

  For the first time in the past couple of days, Johrun thought to ask, “Who is making this ridiculous claim?”

  Bryall said, “It’s some kind of blind holding firm dubbed the Redhook Combine. Despite our best efforts, we have been unable to secure any information on the principals behind that moniker. And their past dealings are nonexistent. They seemed to have been expressly formed just to pitch in against us.”

  Minka appeared to be taking in these unsettling revelations with stolid acceptance, a kind of overly phlegmatic affect. “And do you feel you can defeat this charge?”

  Minka’s mother exhibited her soldier’s gung-ho nature. “Absolutely! Our âmago is unbreachable. Once we are put under the inquestorial meshes, we will emerge fully vindicated. No one will ever consider stealing our summer world again!”