![]() Someday he would Hunt them, the oomans.įor now, he had a ship to fly, Hunts to prepare. What were they doing out here? Where were they bound? A pity he was locked into this Hunt, responsible for a score of itchy would-be warriors full of themselves and ready to show off their prowess. ![]() They were tool folk, had weapons equal to those of the yautja, and were, if the stories could be believed, the ultimate pyode amedha. He knew of them, the oomans, though he himself had never Hunted them. He had taken hundreds of young males out to learn the Hunt and had lost but a dozen, most of whom would still be among the living had they obeyed his orders.īut he sighed at the ship now so far behind him as to be invisible to even the sensors' keen eyes. He was Leader of the Ne'dtesei, son and grandson of ship leaders and warrior trainers, and he bowed to no one in his skill with blade or burner. As befitted a true warrior, Dachande himself never spoke of the battle, but let others tell the tale, holding a serious mandible at the embellishments they added in the singing of it. He could have had the tusk capped and reground, but he had left the broken fang a dull stump to remind himself-and any warriors who felt brave or particularly stupid-that only one yautja of all had ever faced the Hard Meat unarmed and walked away. Good prey upon which to train the young warriors. The Hard Meat, save for the queens, were no smarter than dogs, but they were fierce and deadly game. It could be considered an insult, but he was proud of it. That name meant "different knife," and it referred to his left lower tusk, broken in a bare-handed fight against the Hard Meat, the kainde amedha, they of the black armored exoskeletons and acid blood. He was Leader his very name meant "brave one" but he knew the warriors called him "Dachande" when they thought his ears too dull to hear them. Seated in front of the sensor array on Ne'dtesei, Yeyinde watched the alien ship dwindle in their wake. "Like we were going to chase and catch it even if it was solid platinum, right?" Scott smiled. Nobody wasted any money on these ships for such things as decent hardware. "Fucking spectrograph missed it altogether." He slammed the heel of his hand against the console. "I'm just a grunt, pal, don't blame me for the way the universe gets run." Better scrub your conscience clean, Scotty." "Yeah? Maybe it's God on His way to the Final Reckoning. Nova debris, maybe, old rock spat out by a real big planet-buster blast." That acceleration would probably turn people into seat pancakes. "Goddamned cheap fucking doppler!" Tom said, trying to get the computer to adjust its scan. Okay, yeah, it was a couple hundred klicks away, but out here, that was almost a sideswipe. Here in the middle of the Big Deep, where there was nothing but their vessel and occasional hydrogen atoms to bounce off it, something had just shot past them so fast it wasn't even a blur. Scott waved his hands over the controls, trying to get a fix on the blip. "Jesus, you are so damned close-minded-whoa!" Talk to old man Chigusa with your raping-the-environment complaints." "And," he continued, ignoring Tom, "and the barge, this ship, the cowboys, and you and me are all owned body and soul by the Corp. We're towing a half-full barge with about fifteen million tons of rendered fish and animal products and the processor that did it to collect more meat on the hoof from the poor suckers on Ryushi, a bunch of shit-kicker cowboys-no, not even cows, they're rhynth boys living on a middle-of-nowhere planet." The Lector, in case you fell asleep during the orientation session, is a tug. "I don't recall that I stuck my dick into the dirt anywhere lately," Scott said. You can't just keep raping virgin planets, stripping them of everything valuable, and leaving the hulks behind." But I'm telling you, the bill is gonna come due sooner or later. Around them, the stale ship air smelled like a gym locker. Scott stroked his blond beard and waited for the reply he knew was coming. Tom, whose still-short dark hair had been cropped to his skull before he'd gone into the sleep chamber, was up on his soapbox again, looking kind of like a military-college freshman in free-speak alley. Still a few weeks out from their next port, but it was starting to look like a few years. The others were working the plant or attending to ship routine and the two pilots were alone in the control module, staring into the blackness of the Big Deep. They'd dropped out of hyperspace a week back, were running on the new and improved gravity drives, and the old argument had been lit and burning almost since the crew left the sleep chambers. Scott smiled to take a little of the sting out, but not that much. Well, not to put too fine a point on it, I still think you're full of crap."
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