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Page 13.
Chapter 5. Kion and Piri on the Run
 H-u-u-u-r-r-p! echoed that braying klaxon over desert dunes under a darkening sky.
As Kion Danos and Jac Piri ran for their lives, evening slowly descended, and with it the hope of a brief respite—if they could dodge the day's last, frantic hail of expert sniping from the skimmers. The merks were, as always, determined to collect their bounty money. No matter what losers and criminals they might be in real life, capturing or killing escaped prisoners brought out their primary talent—hunting.
H-u-u-u-r-r-p!
Kion shoved Jac Piri in one direction, and threw himself in the opposite direction. The ground around them erupted with impacts from that one merk skimmer whirring overhead. Kion and Piri landed in a shallow, ancient crater. The desert was wracked with many such leftovers of long-ago geoviolence.
"You okay?" Kion asked Piri, who crawled back toward him in the shelter of the crater's rim.
H-u-u-u-r-r-p!
"Let's see…I think I'm still alive, unless I'm kidding myself."
"At least you still have your sense of humor."
"That's light and easy to carry. Wish we had some water."
"I know, I'm thirsty too."
H-u-u-u-r-r-p!
They shared a few more tiny food packets. They had enough to last about a day if they ate very sparingly. The food in them naturally contained tiny amounts of water. The gamey, almost foul jerk of tog tasted quite nourishing about now. Tog was any kind of food animal, caught and salted and dried out. Kion particularly reacted with relish when his teeth and tongue found one or another stray, sweet, tiny chunk of overly ripe fruit. He had never eaten anything so good. But you had to exist in a POW camp to appreciate things as fine as these.
H-u-u-u-r-r-p!
They dodged among boulders, and lost the merk. Or the merk lost them, more appropriately. The craft continued plodding above the rocks. No doubt every man on board stared down through port holes and viewing apparatus for a sign of their prey.
By early evening, Kion and Piri had been on the run for several hot, grueling hours. They'd made it far enough, just over the horizon, so they could no longer smell the sour-salty smoke of prison field kitchens. The lone merk persisted in hunting for them.
Kion let his mind drift back to home while he trudged carefully amid shadows, from one sheltering boulder to the next. He pictured the green hills of Tancran chA, with his homestead tucked against a high ridge of boulders under a blue sky rich with white, billowing, water-rich clouds. There was a garden behind the house, in the lee of those shady hills, where he would sit in the evenings with his wife Anet, and their daughter Anetena. Those were their beautiful formal names. His fondnames in speaking with them were Anet and Anny. Their home was on a long, sloping hill that overlooked Bilton Hills township. There they lived, learned, loved, voted, shopped, went out for dinner, went dancing to sinuous music of a 15-piece orchestra called Ray's Merry Dozen or More, and so many other thoughtless daily deeds that were now just fond memories and desperate wishes. If he closed his eyes tightly enough, he could smell steek and roasting pipars, and see the smiles of Anet and Anetena…what he would not give right now for a crisp, wet, cold pikolokip slice! All this had been amputated from his soul by a distant and bloody war, and then an even more remote and grueling captivity.
"D'you notice something?" Piri asked.
"What?"
"That siren—it's stopped."
Kion listened. "Sure enough. They must be done hunting us for the night. Unless it's a trick."
"Pretty terrifying."
"We can't let it get to us."
"We just need to be smarter than they are," Piri said.
"We can hide through the night," Kion said as they trudged in the shadow of large boulders scattered on the desert floor. His companion looked dubious. What a droonz. Kion wondered why he'd let the mess sergeant join him. He reminded himself why: you never said no when a fellow human, far from home and on the road or in trouble asked for your help. He was an officer, and had a Dominion code to live up to. They could make it through the night, but when dawn broke, their lifespan would be anyone's guess. If he had to die, it would be as a free man. He would pass proudly into the house of his ancestors, with a vision of Anet and Anetena the last light in his dying eyes. Homen.
Three merk skimmers appeared in the dimming bluish-purple sky—suddenly, almost dead overhead. Bolts of white-blue, hot energy slammed down as the merks looked for a quick kill. Their reward for bringing a bolter back alive wasn't marginally much higher. Taking captives took much more energy, and was dangerous because recaptured prisoners were usually desperate and violent. Most merks were cowards at heart, and didn't have the heart to take on smarter, more ambitious men—or women—who would gut them just as readily as a merk would shoot a runaway prisoner.
"Do you suppose there's a Starways gate out here somewhere in all this sand?"
Kion shook his head. "It there is—and I doubt it—the Swarm would have long since found it. Our hope is with the Pitz Boat, if we can get that far."
"I hear that may be just a story, too."
The desert air reeked of burned sand—and eons of accumulated insect guts.
"We can make it!" Kion repeated as he towed the smaller, older, slower man along by his belt. They must make it to the next crater. "Think jungle continent. We can lose ourselves in that."
"Can't make it," Jac Piri gasped, though he gamely plugged along.
"Yes we can," Kion said. "We'll find shelter for the night, and we'll find water." Piri used the rag of nondescript color around his neck again to wipe sweat and grime from his eye orbits. The battle was not over yet, and both men knew it. There simply was no choice but to keep running.
The yellowish sun Manaul sank rapidly amid a hot bath of tomato-colored dust on a mountainous horizon. The shooting started again. The merk skimmers had a strategy of creeping in low from the horizon, then popping up and firing with all guns for a minute. But, as long as the two runners stayed out of direct range of their guns and detector beams, their merk hunters could only fire blind,. To top that, the merks never received the aliens' best technologies. The merks needed line of sight for a sure kill shot, or even to detect their prey with any certainty.
A row of gritty plumes stitched its way between the two men.
"Run!" Kion shouted. The next burst string might cut a man in half if it hit true. He pulled Piri along by his belt. "C'mon, we're gonna make it!”
They ran from one boulder to the next, from cover to cover. The hot desert gravel on all sides smelled faintly like low tide, though the Great Blue Ocean lay far south of this latitude. Kion had heard prisoners talk. He'd seen crudely drawn maps during barracks discussions. The gleaming seas sprawled across the equator, where Kion wanted to head. His objective was the jungle continent of Manaul 5J, where a few escaped prisoners were said to live free under the forest canopy, along with a native people called the Fith.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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