Counterweight

by A. G. Claymore

  He held it out and gave the string a gentle tug to gauge its strength. It moved a short distance, to the amusement of his fellow crewmen, but Emerie was intrigued. The shopkeeper motioned for Rick to give it a serious try.

  Rick set the weapon down on the counter and accessed the manual controls on his EVA suit. The upper body retracted almost entirely, leaving only a flexible armature over his spine with flexible arms mimicking his ribs. His upper body was now able to move freely and he performed his pre hunt stretching ritual.

  “Norns!” Erik muttered. “What sort of engine room were you trained in that you’d need muscles like that?”

  Rick looked over at him as he picked up the bow. “I told you, I used to hunt with one of these.”

  Freya was looking at a shop up the street and Rick wondered why she wouldn’t want to watch the outcome of Emerie’s challenge.

  He’d started using a bow by the time he was seven. Hunting had been a necessary part of life for the isolated community of the Canal but, for Rick, it was also an escape from being the bottom of the social order. As he grew into an adult, he progressed through an increasingly powerful series of composite bows until Cameron, the community’s best bow maker, finally told him he couldn’t make them any stronger.

  The result, much like the archers of fifteenth-century England, was a normal lower body but an incredibly powerful upper body.

  He raised the bow and tested its full power in his mind. He saw himself drawing it with greater ease than his own and so he resisted the urge to use his full strength. This bow and the ability to draw it, were an obvious source of pride for Emerie, just as it was for Rick.

  No need to embarrass the man by making it look too easy.

  He began the draw, feeling the tension of the first half in his back. It felt good to hold a bow again, though he’d only been away for a few weeks. The required force quickly diminished as he brought it to full draw and he held it for a few seconds to impress his crewmates who wouldn’t be aware of the bow’s characteristics.

  Finally, he eased the weapon and handed it back to its owner with an approving nod. “This is beautiful,” he told him. “Where did you get it?”

  Emerie beamed with pleasure. “My brother,” he said, “and you, my friend, can carry one on the hunt, if you’d like.” He took down a second bow, slightly lighter in color, but with similar dimensions, a couple of strings wrapped around the grip.

  Rick took the weapon, loving the heft it.

  He looked up at Erik’s whoop of pleasure.

  “We eat for free,” he declared happily. “Assuming you can hit anything with that monster, you get to keep whatever you shoot.”

  Emerie called into the back of the shop and a young girl appeared. After a quick conversation in a language Rick had never heard before, the Eesari turned back to them.

  “Let’s go,” he said simply. He led the way past the young girl, through the shop and into a small courtyard opening onto a back alley. Emerie pulled a few black bags from a wall rack and threw them into an open-topped mag vehicle that looked as though it had seen better days.

  They all clambered aboard and he fired up the power plant, easing out into the alley. “You’re only the seventh customer I’ve ever had to give a bow to,” Emerie called over his shoulder as he exited the alley and crossed a main thoroughfare. “It’s been a zero-cost guarantee for me so far,” he continued. “None of the other six ever hit anything, so all I lose is the arrows and they’re cheap enough.”

  They entered another alley and picked up speed again, Emerie hitting his horn from time to time to warn other shopkeepers of his passage.

  “Were any of them used to hunting with a bow?” Rick raised his voice as they passed the courtyard of a metal-working shop.

  “No,” the Eesari admitted, “and I think this may be the first time I come back with empty pockets.” He chuckled. “It’s still a worthwhile gimmick – lots of offworlders show up thinking they can get free food.”

  They passed out into a narrow forest track and he accelerated dramatically. Rick cringed as the tree trunks blurred past but the rest seemed relaxed, so he tried his best to look nonchalant.

  They took a side trail, even narrower than the first, and began a descent into a heavily forested river valley, visible from time to time when the trail turned in a cooperative direction.

  Emerie pulled to a stop in a side cutting and shut down. “There’s a runnel not far from here,” he explained. “Bifleet use it to move between feeding grounds, so we might get a chance…”

  “A chance at losing your arrows,” Freya insisted. She turned to Rick. “Bifleet are high-value game but they’re fast. They move at more than a hundred kilometers per hour when sprinting and they cruise through these runnels at close to sixty. You can’t shoot them from inside the runnel or they’ll crash into you. You have to fire at them from the perpendicular through the trees and branches.”

  “Which is why he’s never had to come back with empty pockets,” Thorstein added dryly.

  “My guarantee – my rules,” Emerie insisted. “Your boy has to earn it, just like any other customer.” He raised an eyebrow to Rick. “Ready?”

  “One second.” Rick hopped out and took a string from the handle. Looping one end over the top nock, he slid the bow behind his left leg and angled it forward to rest the bottom nock against the front of his right shin. Holding the upper end of the bow in his left hand, he bent his entire body forward until his right hand could slip the string over the bottom nock. He eased back until the tension was taken up by the string and he stepped out of the bow.

  “He might just earn it after all,” the Eesari mused, handing Rick a quiver filled with arrows.

  A half kilometer later, the two men settled in to wait. The Midgaard crew had opted not to waste their sweat on a lost cause, though Thorstein had given him a mischievous wink when Rick had looked back.

  Rick had thought they were content to let him do the dirty work of the hunt. It fit with most of his limited experience back on 3428, where the upper strata of society felt hunting was beneath them. Freya had seemed downright dismissive but, as his mind replayed his departure from the vehicle, Thorstein’s wink seemed to indicate otherwise.

  His crewmates weren’t showing disdain for him. They just had no faith in his chances of catching anything. They resented sitting in the hot sun in a bug-infested forest while he blundered around with Emerie.

  He looked to the left as a rhythmic pounding became apparent in the distance. Emerie caught his attention and pointed up the slope before chopping his hand down toward the valley. The prey would be moving downslope from left to right.

  Rick pulled out a handful of arrows and stuck them into the ground to his right. He put the first to his bow and waited.

  Two of them? He nodded to himself and adjusted his plan.

  Emerie held up a hand with two fingers spread and then indicated Rick should take the first one while Emery, being on the left, would take the second.

  It was Rick’s plan anyway. The sound was very close now and he waited until he saw the perfect shot. He released his first arrow and snatched up the second, bringing it to the string and heaving back with all his strength, knowing he couldn’t waste a single second on a slow draw.

  And then everything changed. Rick’s first arrow changed his immediate future. The second bifleet, seeing the first go down, opted to attack rather than flee. Emerie’s arrow skittered off tree trunks in the distance.

  It turned faster than seemed possible, crashing out of the dense wall of brush, pounding straight at Rick.

  Rick realized the beast was almost on him, massive jaws gaping open to show enlarged canines. He suddenly dropped onto his back, letting the arrow fly uselessly into the trees and dropping the bow. He rolled over, pulling his knife from the sheath on his hip, and scrambled to his feet to race after the enraged animal.

  He reached it just as the massive creature was coming to a stop. It was going to come back for a sec
ond pass and, agile though it may be, it still had to come to a stop if it wanted to reverse directions. Rick reached it just as it was half turned and he plunged his knife into the cardiac muscle in the upper half of the oddly located rib cage, near the legs rather than the upper limbs.

  He jumped back to avoid the flailing tail and, with the terror of the moment over, realised he was breathing heavily. That almost never happened during a hunt back home.

  “How the hells did you pull that off?” Emerie demanded quietly. “I thought the second one would make a run for it after you ducked it but you managed to out-guess it and be in the right spot to knife him.”

  A shrug. “My people depend on the hunt,” he replied. “If we fail to bring back anything, we go hungry.”

  “Huh,” the Eesari grunted noncommittally as he opened one of his black bags. He pulled out a large net and a machete. “Let’s get into that runnel and get our catch moving.”

  Rick was impressed by the simplicity of Emerie’s solution to moving big game. The large bipedal beasts were roughly five hundred kilograms each and it would have been impossible to move them by hand, even with the help of the three Midgaard waiting at the vehicle.

  They couldn’t joint it here and carry it back in pieces or it would quickly become too contaminated for them to eat. It had to be carried out in one piece.

  Emerie laid a net out next to the bifleet in the runnel and, with Rick’s help, rolled it onto the net. He clamped the edges together before getting a maglev emitter from his bag. He attached the small device to the seam in the net and activated it, dialing up the power level until the creature hovered just off the ground.

  Rick pulled it out of the runnel, while Emerie started setting up the second catch. After they were ready, it was a simple matter of strolling back to the vehicle, each towing a bifleet gently with a single hand.

  As they rounded the corner, he saw Thorstein sit up in surprise, then smack Erik on the shoulder, pointing at the returning hunters. After a brief exchange of words, the weapons officer handed a credit chip to the engineer.

  “We’ll be lucky to fit even one of those in our cooler,” Erik observed gleefully. He may have lost a bet to Thorstein but the idea of stocking their ship with something other than tree rats was more than adequate compensation.

  “So Emerie won’t return empty-handed after all.” Rick gave the Eesari a slap on the back. “It would have been yours anyway, once you got a second arrow off. That one had slowed right down to come back for me.”

  The Eesari’s gloom evaporated in an instant. The beast was worth a ton of credits, after all.

  And the Brisbane had enough protein to keep the crew fed until planetfall. Now they just had to restock on reactant but that would make this hunt look like child’s play.

  There was absolutely no market for the type of reactant favored by the Human/Midgaard Alliance, at least not here in what was essentially Republic space. The only way ships like the Brisbane could operate this deep in enemy territory was to have fuel dumps set up in strategic locations.

  A large number of LRG missions were essentially replenishment runs. They’d head for a dump with a minimal crew so they could pack every cubic millimetre with reactant modules. Once there, they kept only enough to make it home.

  The scout ships used a lower grade of reactant, favoring the longer half-life over higher speed. It made for reliable fuel dumps but very long transit times. With a furtive sidelong glance at the captain, Rick realised he was looking forward to the less-complicated life that spatial transition afforded.

  If they didn’t launch soon, he was sure he’d make a fool of himself.

  Fair Warning

  Tsekoh, Capital of Chaco Benthic

  “And I’m telling you,” Graadt growled at the company officer, “that you need to change your routines – all of you. This is going to boil over and, when it does, you can be sure they have profiles on all the high-value targets.”

  He waved a hand at the restaurant behind the Dactari chairman, causing the two magisters at his side to twitch their hands a little closer to their weapons. “This is a prime example,” he said, fighting to keep calm. “You have your weekly profit-and-loss meeting in this place on the same day every week.”

  Fixed to the underside of the city’s roof, the glazed-floor establishment offered a view straight down into the depths of the atrium.

  “As we have for centuries,” the company chairman replied stiffly, “and will do for centuries to come.” He looked down his nose – literally – at the Stoner. “Your kind may not understand the importance of tradition but the concept of loyalty should have had some currency, at the very least.”

  Graadt’s voice grew cold. “Meaning what?”

  A glance at his magister guards. “You say you’re hunting a Human agent and that he’s responsible for the deaths of our magisters but witnesses put you at the scene of at least half the incidents.” He aimed an accusing finger. “Whose side are you really on, Oudtstoner?”

  It was monstrous. Oh, sure, Graadt had killed planetary officials before but to be accused of it when he was innocent? He took a moment to regroup his thoughts.

  “When the day of your death comes, Chief Mouse, remember who tried to warn you.” He spat on the floor. “Then you can have the answer to your idiotic question.”

  He spun on his heel and stalked back across the narrow bridge to the pedway where Kaans and Nid waited.

  Kaans nodded to where the chairman was entering the restaurant, ready to convene the weekly meeting. “Your talk went well, I see…”

  “Motherless clone needs to pull his head out before he loses it,” Graadt fumed. “Had the nerve to accuse us of killing his people!”

  “Why that son of a…” Kaans frowned. “Wait, we didn’t – right?”

  “Not this time,” Nid offered mildly, “though I’m sorely tempted right now.” He looked to Graadt. “So now what?”

  “You can’t fix stupid,” Graadt retorted. “We’ll just have to work around him.”

  “That’s a tall order,” Nid mused. “An idiot who runs a planet can put a lot of road-blocks in our way.”

  “We might end up killing a few magisters after all,” Kaans added hopefully.

  “Not unless…” Graadt stopped at a muffled crump from overhead, crouching reflexively as his brain registered the sound of an explosive charge.

  Before they could even turn their heads up to look for the source, six more detonations followed in sequence, surrounding the glazed pod of the restaurant in a haze of debris and gasses.

  As they watched, the structure dropped out of the cloud like a ship leaving an atmosphere. Tendrils of smoke and dust trailed behind it as it accelerated toward the bottom of the atrium, taking the company leadership with it.

  “He does neat work, that Human,” Nid mused as he watched the restaurant disappear into the mists of the lower levels. “Not sure I could have dropped that thing without smashing half the pedways on the way down.” He shrugged. “Well, that’s our roadblock out of the way, at least.”

  “Not really,” Graadt said quietly. “They’ll blame this on us.”

  “You just tried to warn him…” Kaans exclaimed.

  Graadt stared back at him as a crash from below heralded the end of the restaurant’s unexpected journey. He tilted his head toward the railing. “The only three people who heard my warning were in that. So I don’t think we can rely on them to confirm our alibi, especially not when they were killed while we were standing twenty meters away, like a pack of gods-damned veldt-cats.”

  He shook his head in disgust. “Motherless clone’s probably looking at us right now. That couldn’t have been a coincidence.”

  Substitute Heads

  Tsekoh, Capital of Chaco Benthic

  Callum watched the Stoners from three levels down and a hundred meters to the south. The Stoners had a decent grasp of how he operated. In most cases that would be an advantage but he was using their knowledge against them.
<
br />   The last time he’d come up against the Stoners, they’d tried to warn the administration. When things began to heat up, they’d known from previous experience that Cal would attempt to decapitate the enemy leadership.

  Striking the head off the snake was one of the best ways to maximise the chaos and there was no juicier target, here in Tsekoh, than the weekly profit-and-loss meeting. It was almost a guarantee the Stoners would show up and try to convince the company to reschedule and relocate.

  It was just as certain the company would refuse to listen to sensible advice, especially if it came from the Stoners. Their loyalty was in question, after all.

  It had worked out perfectly. The Stoner had been seen in an argument with the chairman who ruled the planet and then the chairman and his senior staff had died minutes after the Stoner left.

  Cal had placed those charges more than two weeks ago.

  The Stoners were very useful to Cal, as enemies go. Their position outside of official Republic society made them objects of suspicion to begin with, and recent events had served to amplify official mistrust.

  That would draw attention away from him and from the movement. It would also make it all but impossible for the Stoners to get assistance from the magisters and, more importantly, it would prevent them from trying to fill the recently created power vacuum.

  With the death of the executive board, the planet was effectively leaderless. The next most senior official was the chief magister but he was a security officer and knew nothing about running the city or its commercial operations. He’d never abdicate his position, especially not to a pack of Stoners, and he’d never support their taking over the administrative side.

  That meant repair parts would run out, machines would grind to a halt, pay would stop flowing and workers would have a lot of free time and anger on their hands. The city was about to descend into chaos and the small complement of magisters would be hard-pressed to contain it.