I got up, moved forward, and revealed myself to ten or twelve swift, heedless stragglers who were instantly gone.
Kretzoi was to my left, closer to me than to Elegy, and he was wrestling with a terrified Asadi male whose back he was riding with one foot dangling down as a brake against the other’s efforts to free himself. It was comic, this wrestling match – except that blood streaked one of Kretzoi’s forearms and suddenly he was hoot-screaming so loudly that the echo reverberated in the trees.
At last Kretzoi bulled the small Asadi to the ground, and there the two of them thrashed and bucked like bloodthirsty lovers. About the comic opera of their coupling, Kretzoi’s aria of panic soared anguished and soprano.
‘Ben!’ Elegy cried, almost in counterpoint. I saw her running forward from the eastern woods, the parallel silver rods of her tranq launcher glinting in her hand. A few strands of her weighted net had been pulled out of her backpack and down across her right breast so that she could grasp the ends and shake out the entire net almost instantly.
At that moment, though, neither our tranq launchers nor our still tightly furled nets were of any use to us. Seeing the blood clotted in Kretzoi’s wrist hair, Elegy cried his name and halted dead.
I was upon the two animals. You don’t need a tranq launcher, I told myself, holstering it. What you need is a water hose.
The smell of both Kretzoi and the small Asadi male was overpowering, glandular. Suet and syrup steaming in the same pot. I reached into that musky confusion of pelage, though, and yanked back the only handle I could find – Kretzoi’s unhurt arm. He howled, and I pulled him aside. The Asadi male scrabbled away several meters toward the Wild as I tried to free my tranq gun again and take aim.
You’ve lost him, Benedict, I told myself. My stomach slid sickeningly into the first coil of my upper intestines. You’ve lost him . . .
Then, almost dreamily, Elegy’s weighted net was spiraling down out of the air and enveloping the Asadi like a collapsing parachute. Tufts of hair protruded obscenely from the net’s reticulations as the Asadi dragged it westward while clawing, biting, and frenziedly pirouetting. I tranq’d him with a single shot, and by the time he’d reached the Wild he was half asleep in his own sputum and piss. A downed Yahoo.
Before either Elegy or I could move to examine him, Kretzoi dashed forward and began pummeling the Asadi with his open hands. Bam, bam; bam, bam. Right through the twisted netting, as if he hoped to crack several ribs and reduce the alien’s internal organs to holiday pudding.
Elegy hurried to Kretzoi’s side, squatted beside him, and draped an arm over his shoulder. He quieted immediately and looked at her. Standing apart from them, I felt, suddenly, the fearful nakedness of our presence there in the Asadi clearing. The twilight sweeping like impalpable snow into the empty clearing only heightened my uneasiness.
‘You’d better go back for the Dragonfly,’ Elegy told me. ‘It’ll be dark soon, and you may have trouble finding the way.’
I plunged reluctantly back into the rain forest, conscious now that at every step I was perhaps walking beneath the nest or past the camouflaged burrow of an Asadi. They were out here with me, and I had no idea where they were. We never did.
We had forgotten to take down the awning attached to the Dragonfly. I did that hurriedly, sloppily, wadding the nylon against my chest in a huge pie-dough lump and then heaving it into the helicraft’s aft section. The twilight had taken on the color and the floating wispiness of bourbon dregs. I staggered about inside the Dragonfly either securing gear or kicking aside what I couldn’t secure. Then I sat down inside the forward cabin and punched the long-dormant overhead rotors into life.
The surrounding forest thrashed and whipped as if a storm had blown up. Despite my inclination to let the BenDragon Prime rip its way out of the drop point, I eased it upward like a man picking a coin out of a box with a pair of remote-control pincers. My hands stayed steady.
Once fully airborne, I activated the spots on the Dragonfly’s undercarriage and let them play giddily on the darkening canopy below. Almost immediately, it seemed, the Asadi clearing came tilting up at me out of the jungle, beckoning me to put down beside the three tiny figures huddled near its western boundary. In a flurry of revolving lights and up-churned dust, I landed as close to them as I could. Elegy was at the open door even before I could wedge myself through to meet her. The helicraft’s rotors were still spinning whickeringly above us.
‘How long will the tranquilizer keep the Asadi unconscious?’ she shouted at me, turning back toward Kretzoi and our poor downed Yahoo. God, did she look young! Her face had an unearthly bronze sheen.
‘I don’t know,’ I told her, running beside her, feeling the lead flowing moltenly in my gut and upper thighs. ‘I wasn’t sure it would have any effect at all. Asadi biochemistry’ – I paused to catch my breath, huffing and puffing gigantically – ‘it’s probably a good deal different from that of terrestrial forms.’
Elegy caught my arm. ‘You didn’t even know the tranqs would work?’
‘Not for sure, no. How could I? We’ve never done anything like this before. It’s always been illegal, taboo.’
She looked at me searchingly, casting about for an appropriate response. ‘It’s my grant,’ she finally declared. ‘Mine.’
We got the Asadi male into the helicraft and netted off the aft section so that if he awoke on our way home he would be imprisoned there. (While moving
