* * *
Hour by hour Miko pushed on, as if dusk were eternal—if it were even dusk at all on this strange world. All the time he could feel the press of Audra’s fantastic thoughts somewhere behind him, weighing in on him like black magic. It was as if she lived still in his skin.
He shivered at the loathsome memory of her.
He passed a smoking patch of shattered trees and charred shrubs where the NAVO sentinel had fallen. Letting up his forced pace, he halted to rest, panting from exhaustion. The ship was a tortured mass of metal wedged between two goliath trees. They looked like ancient arbutus of primitive earth with trunks five stories high and soaring hundreds of feet in the air. The surrounding forest was top heavy, a towering maze of serpentish branches. Miko climbed midway up the hanging craft only to discover that the two pilots were dead, half eaten by predators.
Masking his revulsion, Miko clambered to the top of the hull and concluded that the ship was beyond repair. Sadly he entered through the broken glass of the cockpit to gaze grimly at the console link and reaching for it, found the communication system dead. Deader than Phalos’s moon.
His heart fell. Even if he wanted to, he could not contact the NAVO authorities and appeal for help. It was a tough blow. He gave a resigned grunt. Then again, if he were in a different era, thousands of years in the past or future, what would it matter, for there would be no NAVO.
The pilot laughed, a croaking sigh. And why would they help him at any rate? He was renegade pirate.
He sneered at this realization. He had loosed cannon fire upon his own race, lit NAVO ships into ruin. Why would they exercise any leniency?
Miko shook his head in pained dismay. What had he become? The last two years of his life came spinning back to him in a mix of sick clarity.
His childhood danced before his eyes: he saw himself growing up on the ranch in middle Menetin on planet Sileron, the only habitable world orbiting Tau Ceti. His parents, who moved from world to world on their work assignments, had encouraged him to apply himself in many fields. He had excelled. There had been so much closeness. He remembered his father, a successful NAVO commander, devising tactical problems for his son to solve when he was barely seven, and who had landed him his first post at Ursa Minor III as a junior cadet when he was fourteen, and then a junior officer a few years after. How those had been halcyon days—clear and defined. But so long ago. How had it all come to this? This deplorable state of aberration?
Miko wrenched himself away from his unhappy thoughts and turned his attention back to the smoking NAVO ship. He mustn’t wander off... To do so meant death.
Alien grasses, the whine of night insects, hot humid sticky air, the pad of stealthy feet—this was the world that Miko lived in. So unreal after the stark entombment in Sitty II—joined with Audra.
In a feverish haze, Miko tramped on. He itched like the devil as sweat poured in buckets down his cilia-wisped skin. His hide was now red and sore from scratching so wilfully at the already infected insect bites that had amassed overnight.
The dim amber light that peeked through cracks in the foliage, depressed him. The glow cast a perpetual twilight on this forsaken planet. It was a mystery he could attribute only to the peculiar tilt of the planet’s axis, which created an eerie, magnified umbral effect under the strangling cloak of trees. He stumbled on with misery, bashing his shins often on misshapen stumps of knotted wood, or some crusty mushroom that reared up like a troll or dwarf, blocking his path.
Miko feared to eat such flora as the mushrooms, for the effects they would have on him, remembering Kraig’s ghastly experience. The only sustenance he could forage remotely safely were certain rank berries which grew in clumps on a specific vine-like shrub. He tested a speck in his webbed palm and waited some minutes for any adverse symptoms to rear their ugly heads. None came. He did not trust the sulphurous water or the scummy ponds that abounded and could only lick what moisture he could off the cleanest plant leaves.
It was an understatement to say that Miko happened upon many fantastic things on the course of his wild rambling, but he hardly noticed such wonders, nor felt the pain of his wrenched knee and jarred ankle. The truth of it was, he was living on borrowed time. The glorious trees continued to soar above him like unreachable guardians. So high up they were in that thick, dreamy atmosphere that the ferny canopy seemed to wander to infinity and filter the wan light of Rogos’s sun into dappled shades of dim amber, rose and jade.
Miko exhaled. He saw no sign of Audra in those woodlands, but he felt her alien-ness out there, somewhere in that primitive forest, hobbling, gliding or whatever thing she did for locomotion, honing in on him like a night stalker. A strange fire still burned in the loose flesh at his hip and shin, severed now.
A sound rustled at his back.
Miko thrust about, his weapon bared. Expecting the worst, he saw a three legged beast, akin to a stork but low-riding like an aardvark. The creature pushed its reeking
