by Baen Books
“Nancy-Kaye has done the trick!” she exclaimed. “The police have agreed to let us alone, providing we do not cause any injuries. Mount up, foxhunters! Let us go find Xan. I am sure it will be a thrilling chase. I offer three bottles of my father’s finest brandy to the one who catches him!”
Cheering, we scattered to our various mechanical steeds, suited up, and strapped in.
“Away, drones!” cried Rillion Kinago Innes, our volunteer Master of the Hounds. The cylinders lifted silently into the sky, their baying limited to howls in our earpieces, and swept off to the northeast. We followed, view-hallooing happily.
Behind us, the LAIs patiently turned their attention to cleaning up the site of our party and packing away the uneaten food, overseen by the ever-efficient NCK-0722. A few securitybots with both city and Imperium markings hovered up over the eaves and scanned the area. I recalled Parsons’s cautions that the man he sought intended to sabotage communications. I grew curious as to the rest of the facts of the case, then ruthlessly pulled my attention away. I would throw all my energies into assisting him later on.
I scanned the clear azure sky ahead of me, both with my natural vision and the heads-up display in my visored helmet. As yet, the Poctil Hounds had not yet discovered any of the trace that Xan had been laying down. He would certainly have provided false trails galore. My cousin was a wily game-player and a worthy competitor. My honor was at stake, since he had been the one to capture me.
“Where do you think he is hiding?” Nell asked me, pulling Destrier up beside my Tybalt. I studied the sky. Not a cloud marred its turquoise beauty. He could not lurk there.
“Xan favors industrial facilities. Their labyrinthine layouts allow him to indulge his propensity for surprise.”
“Where is there a sufficient factory or plant in this city to conceal an individual flyer?” she asked, more to Destrier’s location database than to me.
I heard the tinny ping as the small computer went to work.
“Aha!” she exclaimed. “Hounds, two hundred seventy degrees, nine kilometers!”
Her pack veered off in that direction. I performed a similar search, and Tybalt’s onboard navigator informed me that she was heading towards the city’s power plant. I directed my Poctil Hounds to follow. If there was a trace of Xan to be sniffed out, I had faith that they would discover it before hers could, despite their newer hardware.
My cousins spread out in numerous directions behind their packs of drones. A few of them peeled off from the formation and arrowed west with us. The rest sought their fortune in other potential venues around the city. This initial seeking was the hardest part. Until we determined the quadrant he had chosen as his lair, it could take us hours of hard hunting, but I believed I knew Xan’s thinking.
We threaded in and out of Nikplig air traffic. Heavy goods vehicles tended to stay fairly low, so as to lessen the impact should they lose power and plummet to the ground. At the altitudes we were traveling, in the five to ten kilometer range, long-distance passenger transport, education caravans and tourists were the most likely to be our neighbors in the skies, keeping to well-defined airways patrolled by airborne policebots and cycle-riding officers. Still, here and there I caught disembodied glints and ripples outside the flight paths. Experience had taught me that those were single vehicles covered by Boland devices. Xan was not the only person who wished to conceal his passage. Could any of these be the person for whom Parsons was looking? That must explain the presence of so many law-enforcement agents.
Traffic thinned out to almost nothing by the time we arrived. The Nikplig power plant was exactly the kind of terrain that we adored for a game of this type. Fields of bright silver solar arrays covered the desert ground for kilometers, surrounding the bases of complex wind turbines. Here and there, a grim round tower containing a geothermal retrieval unit loomed up out of the expanse of mirrors. A complicated array of girders strung with wires and emitters lined the perimeter, intending to keep migratory flocks of birds who might think the shining panels were bodies of water from coming to grief. My Poctil Hounds began to cast about. Danae, one of my newer hounds, emitted a sharp bark. I examined her readout in my display. The trace was very faint, perhaps one particle that might or might not have belonged to Xan. They spread out around me, whimpering into my ears as they sought for more evidence of his presence.
But, hark! A slip of shadow passed across a nest of girders a hundred meters from me. I glanced up. Nothing was there that could have cast it. Xan!
I grinned. He was being too clever by half, but he could not escape being a solid body in the eyes of the sun. The Boland would translate part of the image of sunbeam striking him, but the processors were unable to completely conceal a moving image. Melusine loped out ahead of me. She took a sharp right and angled up sixty degrees. I tilted my controls to follow. She was on his scent.
“Here I come, Xan!” I chortled into my microphone. He didn’t respond. I did not expect it. He was no doubt concentrating on how to elude my hounds. “Seek!” I exhorted them.
“Where are you, Thomas?” Nell’s voice sounded in my ear. “Our packs are going mad! Xan must have sneezed upon every millimeter of this place.”
“He’s over here,” I said, forwarding my coordinates to her. “I just spotted him. My beasts are on his trail.”
“On my way!”
“Skycycles, attention, please. This is a restricted area,” said a very severe female voice. “Repeat, this is a restricted area. There are electrical and environmental hazards. Please leave at once. Repeat, please leave at once.”
“Very sorry, madam,” I said, absently, as I steered the cycle through the crossed struts. “I am Lord Thomas Kinago. We are engaged in retrieving one of our number, and will be off the premises as soon as we get him.”
I heard snickering from my cousins over the shared frequency.
“Please leave now,” the woman said. “You do not have authorization to be in this area.”
“Yes, madam. As soon as we can, madam.” I clicked off.
I glanced at the chronometer on the scope. Xan only had to elude me for two hours, then he would be considered the winner of this round, as well. Confound it! I would not have him beat me twice!
But the Poctil hounds were on the scent. The group had joined together now behind Melusine. Ahead, I caught another hint of shadow hovering close to the roof of the main generator building.
“Yoicks!” I cried.
As I bored down upon it, the specter hesitated, then lifted off, rushing toward the forest of windmill towers. I grinned ferociously. We should have a merry chase. The Poctil Hounds tightened into formation, baying hysterically in my ears. Alongside their music were the voices of my cousins.
“You found him? Where are you?” “Thomas, how did you find him so fast?” “Your machines are malfunctioning; I have him!” This last was from my cousin Nalney. My location map showed him as clear across town. Whomever he was chasing, it wasn’t Xan.
Xan was a fleeting shadow zipping in between the pylons and up between the blades of the largest turbines. His timing was perfection; he managed to flit between the gigantic white vanes without clipping a single one. The hounds followed him, but they were forced to hesitate lest they come to grief. They were programmed to avoid collisions. In this case, not only would I be subject to a swingeing fine, but a crash might put the city of Nikplig into darkness for an unforeseeable period. I wanted to avoid that.
Tybalt juddered under my bottom as I poured on all velocity. The Xan-ghost took a sharp dive, hoping to lose me among the pipes and catwalks at the base of a cluster of enormous cooling towers. My breath quickened as I leaned left, then right, then left again, matching my drones’ hurtling flight through the narrow gaps. Showers of paint chips shaken loose from the elderly conduits by the vibration of our passage rained down upon us. Melusine’s distinctive bay was the loudest, indicating she was the closest to the source of the scent. I leaned forward avidly.
I heard
a loud pop! At first I feared that Xan had struck something, then green smoke filled the air. In this tight maze of pipe and concrete cylinders I couldn’t turn around. Instead, I plunged into the thick cloud.
I tried not to breathe. My eyes stung. Acid bit at my throat and the inside of my nose. Moisture ran out of my nostrils, but I couldn’t wipe it away through my faceplate.
“No fair, Xan!” I cried, coughing. “If you can’t win within the rules, then surrender!”
No answer. I blinked hard as I emerged from the smoke grenade. The Xan-shadow was nowhere in sight.
Luckily, my hounds’ detectors were more efficient than my poor senses. They led me up over the nearest cooling tower and down into a cat’s cradle of walkways. I caught a glimpse of a shadow, which retreated off to the left. The hounds followed it. I kicked Tybalt into a higher gear. We veered under a metal staircase, shocking a worker in a white jumpsuit and safety helmet into dropping its viewpad. The shadow took a hard right around the next cooling tower. The hounds, as one, pursued it.
But it appears that my faith in the aging Melusine was greater than its capabilities. Even as the pack swerved around a sharp arc, Melusine continued off in a tangent, hurtling down a narrow passageway. In my earpiece it was still baying its electronic cry, insisting that it was following the true scent.
“Confound it!” I exclaimed, turning my skycycle in its wake. I jammed my finger down upon the control on my console that ought to have recalled it. My other hounds responded, turning back from the quest. Melusine’s call was desperate. She must be nearly on top of her quarry. I had no choice but to follow.
The other hounds were behind me as I hurtled down the corridor. Windows onto the power plant’s offices opened up to either side of the concrete walkway. They must have been astonished to see me roar past, rattling the explosion-proof glass. I grinned. It would give the employees something interesting to discuss when they returned to their humble homes that evening.
I steered Tybalt up through the framework of a spiral staircase that led up and over to pipes that poured into broad, rectangular pools. I caught sight of Melusine almost skimming the surface of the water, her drives churning up a narrow wake. A second wake was visible ahead of her. I didn’t need the hound to show me my quarry any longer. I kicked Tybalt to its highest speed and stood up in the saddle. I would show Xan what I thought of his smoke grenade!
The reflection of the brilliant afternoon sun almost blinded me as I closed in upon my quarry. I could not see Xan directly, true, but I gauged where his cycle must be based upon the angle of the sun, the shadow, and the point of the wake. As soon as he left the pool I would lose him. My timing must be absolutely perfect.
“Steady, Tybalt,” I said. I let go of the handles, then grabbed them again as the cycle lurched. “Steady! Commence autopilot!”
This time when I let go, Tybalt remained on an even keel. I braced myself. Waves leaped and curled around the rear of my cycle, making it surge like a speedboat. Xan’s shadow was nearly to the lip of the pool.
Steady.
Steady.
Ready!
I sprang.
I threw my arms around virtual nothingness. For a moment I thought I had missed him, but my head and chest impacted with a hard body.
My momentum knocked him loose from the saddle of his cycle. He tilted over. I held on tightly. We hurtled onto the concrete walkway. Pain lanced through my shoulder. I landed hard on the arm that Nell had struck earlier, doubling the bruise. The two of us rolled over and over together, wrapped in the drape from the Boland device. Clattering accompanied our motion, as if I had knocked the housing off a part of his cycle.
“I caught you, Xan!” I cried, swiping at folds of cloth. It changed color and pattern again and again as I fought my way free. I saw my own hands, then the rectangular pools with my hounds hovering above them, then a man’s head. It was round, almost spherical, with close-clipped black hair and a tawny complexion like that of my cousin Jil. Our eyes met, and his went enormous with shock.
“Wait a moment, you’re not Xan!” I said. “Who are you? Did he hire you to draw us off the scent? That’s strictly against the rules!”
For answer, the man rolled onto his back and struck out at me with both feet. I gasped at the impact. The force knocked me backwards. Nimbly, the man rolled over one shoulder and came a standing position.
“No need to be rough!” I protested, rubbing my sore ribs. “It was pure mistaken identity.”
I noticed an object on the ground, a featureless, gray impact case about forty centimeters by twenty-five with a fold-up handle on one of the narrow sides. That must have been the source of the clattering noise when I had knocked him off his cycle. The least I could do was return his property to him. I reached for it. He reached for it. My arms were longer and I was a bit quicker, so I had it by the handle before he could touch it. His eyes widened. I held it out to him. He rushed at me, seeking to shove me over backward. Out of pure defensive reaction, I swung the box. It hit him in the shoulder, sending him sprawling.
“My dear man, I am so sorry,” I said. I went to help him up with my free hand, but he sprang to his feet again, backed away from me, and fled.
As he ran off, I gawked after him. He was not my cousin. I had assaulted a stranger. Undoubtedly I owed him an apology, although he wasn’t waiting around to receive it.
But as he ran, Melusine left the pack of hounds and flew after him, her signal baying in my ear.
“He’s not Xan, you silly creature!” I called to her crossly. “Follow Xan’s scent, not his!”
But I had a sudden revelation. Back on the roof, the drone’s sensor compartment had come open. Xan’s cloth had fallen out… And I would have bet a week’s vacation on a luxury space liner that the scent-marker that Parsons had replaced belonged to this man instead.
An innocent man would not have run away. He would have threatened me with arrest for assault. This was Parsons’s fugitive!
I looked down at the case in my hand. It was without a doubt the infernal device whose existence Parsons feared. I glanced around at the power plant, concerned for the wellbeing of the unsuspecting employees, and came to a decision. Since he had not had time to secret it, the device would not be armed and hence not dangerous. Still, I was convinced he would try to come back for it. He must be apprehended before he could call for reinforcements. But I had my own. I ran for my skycycle. With hands almost trembling with excitement and reaction, I secured the case in the carrier on the back, and kicked the machine into life. I opened the family frequency.
“Nell!” I shouted, as my cycle lifted off the ground.
“What? Did you find Xan? The rest of us have been around and around this wretched plant. Have you uncovered his hiding place?”
“No! Nell, do you still have Melusine’s frequency on your console?”
“Of course I do, Thomas. Why?”
I peered ahead. The man had disappeared down a flight of concrete steps. I could hear the echo of his passage as well as Melusine’s cry.
“Follow it! She is chasing a man,” I said. “I believe him to be a miscreant that the government wishes to apprehend.”
Nell sounded bored.
“Oh, Thomas, what do you want me to do about it? I’m not the police.”
“Follow her! Head him off!” I cried. “I will take care of the rest. This is more fun than chasing Xan!”
“Really? All right. Come on, everyone! Thomas is pursuing a felon!”
I smiled.
Even the fastest of human beings are no match for airborne drones, let alone skycycles. Although the round-headed man had a head-start and what must have been an intimate knowledge of the plant, he no longer had his Boland device to hide from the security cameras in use all over the campus. In any case, he could not elude the elderly, outdated Poctil Hound, Melusine. I followed his progress down the concrete stairs, across the broad industrial campus, and into the midst of my cousins, who swooped out of the sky, shrieki
ng and whooping. They circled him, laughing like drunken university students on senior prank day, their engines drowning out his yells and cries of protest.
They could logically be credited for his capture, but it was I who dove into their midst, I who leaped off Tybalt’s back and tackled him, and I who reached for my viewpad and tapped the icon at the top right on my Favorites menu.
“Parsons,” I said, as the man struggled fruitlessly in my grasp, “I believe I have someone who belongs to you.”
“How did you know that this person was wanted by the authorities?” Nell asked, as the Imperium Security vehicle left, all lights flashing, with their fuming prisoner and the plastic crate. Parsons had arrived with them. He had favored me with a single shallow nod, which was as much praise as a chestful of medals. Then he had disappeared, as if he was never there to start with. My cousins were agog, as were the executives and security personnel of the power plant, with all the excitement. “Are you taking up law enforcement as an enthusiasm?”
I emitted a short laugh. The bruises left by the twin footprints on my chest made breathing a trifle uncomfortable.
“Great stars, no!” I said. “But one can’t help seeing those images of wanted felons go by on the tridee features. I knew I had seen him before.” It was a white lie, but one that would preserve Nell’s image of me as her foolish big brother.
Erita descended upon me with an aggrieved expression writ large, her helmet under her arm.
“Thomas, you have ruined my afternoon,” she said. “This person was not part of our entertainment, and Xan is still out there!”
I leaned close, drawing Erita and Nell into my confidence.
“I have the most marvelous idea,” I said, dropping my voice for dramatic effect.
“What?” asked Nell breathlessly.
I fancied I could feel my eyes twinkling with mischief.
“Let’s leave Xan here. We have already had more excitement than we would normally enjoy in a month. We captured genuine prey today. Mother expects us for cocktails at seven. We have just enough time to hurry back and tidy up before the first drink is poured. Xan will wonder for a while where we have all gone. He can catch us up when he figures it out.”
