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Updated: May 11, 2025
Tendrils of smoke curled from the thing's flat nostrils, and Hume sniffed the scent of a narcotic he recognized. He smiled. Such measures might soften up the usual civ Wass interviewed here. But a star pilot turned out-hunter was immunized against such mind clouding. There was a door, the lintel and posts of which had more carving, but this time Terran, Hume thought old, very old.
Vye's fading hope brightened. Then the Out-Hunter was a follower of the Fata Rite. That would explain everything. If you could not repay a good deed to the one you owed, you must balance the Eternal Scales in another fashion. He relaxed again, a great many of his unasked questions so answered. "You will accept?" Vye nodded eagerly. "Yes, Out-Hunter."
If that stare and statement was intended to rattle Hume it was a wasted shot. To discover that he had just returned from that frontier planet required no ingenuity on the Veep's part. "Perhaps." "Come, Out-Hunter Hume. We are both busy men, this is no time to play tricks with words and hints. Either you have made a find worth the attention of my organization or you have not. Let me be the judge."
I still have the long report to make to the Guild, so the material is still available on my note tapes." "Excellent. Out-Hunter Hume, I salute a new colleague." At last Wass' right hand came up from the table. "May we both have luck equal to our industry." "Luck to equal our desires," Hume corrected him. "A very telling phrase, Out-Hunter. Luck to equal our desires. Yes, let us both deserve that."
"These watchers you don't know them?" "No. Nor do I like what you've seen of them, Brodie. So I'm willing to call a truce. The Guild believed Jumala an open planet, our records accredited it so. If that is not true we may be in for bad trouble. As an Out-Hunter I am responsible for the safety of three civs back there in the safari camp." Hume made sense, much as Rynch disliked admitting it.
"And you, Out-Hunter," Wass' reptilian regard had moved again to Hume, "perhaps you have an adequate explanation for this discovery." "None of his doing," he burst out, "I remembered " Some inexplicable emotion made Rynch defend Hume then. Hume laughed, and there was a reckless edge to that sound. "Yes, Wass, your techs are not as good as they pretend to be.
The Kogan-Bors-Wazalitz combine incurred your displeasure. I see you are also a man who does not forget easily. And that, too, I understand. It is a foible of my own, Out-Hunter. I neither forget nor forgive my enemies, though I may seem to do so and time separates them from their past deeds for a space." Hume accepted that warning both must keep any bargain.
No, the Out-Hunter had expected a castaway who would be just what he ordered. Then this affair of the watchers creatures the Guild men had not found here a few months ago Rynch felt a small cold chill along his spine. Hume's game was one thing, something he could understand, but the silent beasts were another and somehow far more disturbing threat.
Things such as this did not happen, except in a thaline dream, and he wasn't a smoke eater! It was the kind of dream a man didn't want to wake from, not if he was port-drift. "Would you be willing to sign on?" Vye tried to clutch reality to himself, to remain level-headed. A gearman for an Out-Hunter! Why five men out of six would pay a large premium for a chance at such rating.
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