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Updated: July 19, 2025
Vye was so completely baffled by this odd turn of action that his voice came out almost plaintively. "Seeing as how a great deal of time and effort went into placing you in the position where you could give us that tape, I must admit some disappointment." "Give us?" Vye echoed. The officer removed the viv-root from between his lips. "Tell him the whole sad story, Hume." But Vye began to guess.
With hands laced into tendrils, Vye hunched to look down on a beaten ribbon of gray earth a trail well used by the evidence of its pounded surface. That area had to be crossed on foot, but his passage through the brush below would leave traces. Only there was no other way. Vye checked the lashings of his weapons again before leaping.
So it was that Starns was installed in the com cabin of the spacer, sending out the request for Patrol aid, while Rovald was locked in the storage compartment of the same ship, pending arrival of those same authorities. As Hume sorted out supplies and Vye loaded them into the waiting flitter, Yactisi approached the Hunter. "You have a definite plan of search?" "Just to cast north from their camp.
"We may be too far in the mountains to pick up the beam. I wonder...." He swept the needle in another direction, slightly to the left. A crackle spat from the mike. Vye could not read code but the very fury and intensity of that sound suggested panic even terror. "What's that?" Hume spoke without looking away from the control board. "Alarm." "From the safari?" "No. Wass."
There was only one small period of risk for Vye to face. Those days he would have to spend alone on Jumala between the time Wass' organization would plant him there and the coming of Hume's party to "discover" him. Hume himself would tape every possible aid to cover that period.
Wass was a Veep, one of the criminal parasites dabbling in human misery along more than one solar lane. But he was also human and, as one of their own species, had his claim on them. Vye watched Hume take over the controls, felt the flitter answer another change of course, then heard the frantic yammer of the distress call as they leveled off to ride its beam in to the hidden camp. "Automatic."
They sorted the crash rations into small packs. A blanket of the water-resistant, feather-heavy Ozakian spider silk was cut into a protective covering for Vye. That piece of tailoring occupied them until the graying sky permitted them a full picture of the pocket in which the flitter had landed.
The civ smiled again, this time including Vye in that evidence of good will before he walked away. Hume made no comment. "That does it," he told his companion. "Still want to go?" "If you do and you can't do it alone." No man could take on the valley and Wass and his men. Hume made no comment.
But Hume's eyes had closed again. "Trouble maybe...." His voice trailed off. Vye rested his hand on the stock of the needler. "Hoooooo!" That beast wail as they had heard it in the valley! Somewhere from the wood. Vye brought the needler around, so that the sights pointed in that direction. There death might be hunting, but there was nothing he could do.
Then Vye had been brought into the shop, supplied with a ration container, and left to himself within this bare-walled cabin to meditate upon the folly of talking too freely. Why had he been so utterly stupid?
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