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Page 14.
 Smaller shots sizzled down and stitched the rust-colored soil around them with pops of stinging grit. Kion glanced up and spotted a dark-goggled humanian grinning behind a glassix porthole, in his cockpit 500 heads above. He longed for a good sniper rifle with proper scope and some nice guided-trajectory bullets. Not having such a luxury, he ran like hell to save his ass. The cook chased after him as best he could.
Several shooters laid down crossfire to box them in and set them up for kill shots. The merks were used to winning, Kion thought, so they must think of this as easy sport. They were having fun. Without a weapon, or a map, a compass, or even a canteen of water, the Runners were at a severe disadvantage. But maybe these shit-birds would get over-confident.
Most often, they brought escaped POWs dead or alive for show and effect, while hurp sirens made horrid music. Even now, the silence of night still rang with their memory on the wind:
Hu-u-u-u-urp!
Long pause.
Hu-u-u-u-urp!
Long pause.
Hu-u-u-u-urp!
Long pause…then long, long pause.
Silence.
The merks were still hunting, but the klaxon was asleep for the night.
Kion had seen mangled and dripping bodies brought back to camp—slung in low-hanging nets under whirring skimmers piloted by gloating merks. They flew low on such occasions, to scare the other 10,000 prisoners of Aerag-15 into staying put. Comparable conditions prevailed in a hundred similar camps, some for men, others for female military and police prisoners of war—from the arctic circle to the equator, on icy or desert continents. On the big, forested J continent, as the saying went, only the law of the jungle prevailed. What went in never came out, and the Swarm had more important strategic concerns amid their war of conquest.
The merks were relentless, as were the hurp sirens. The merks salivated for their bounty money, one of the strongest motivators in the universe. Prisoners might be dead or alive—either way, the merks got paid by their alien masters.
In the last, lingering glow after sunset, Kion kept up a punishing pace among the large boulders that littered this arid canyon in the vast desert. The older mess sergeant was suffering, lagging, breathing hard.
Kion felt he had not spent his energies busting rocks and getting his spine laid open by a grinning overseer to lamely go back under the lash. He worried about Piri, but reasoned the man must have stored up energy. Piri had been secretively feasting on nourishing tog jerk, and drinking all the water he wanted, so he could not be in terminal shape. If anything, Piri might be a little sluggish from nervously eating up his supplies.
The boulders were rusty-red—debris from a great flood eons ago. They afforded scant cover as the two men ran, but cover it was. A disk-shaped skimmer darted left and right above, looking for a good shot.
Meanwhile, clouds of macabs hummed ferociously around a man's neck and face, so he near died swatting himself to avoid their tiny stings. The Manaul deserts had little to show in terms of larger life. Omnivorous sword-plants leaned out from shady spots between boulders and sand—evolved to gorge on macabs or soak up sunlight to make chlorophyll lunches with stored water, but just as happy to devour any larger meat that happened along.
Salvation came in the form of the canyon Kion had been desperately hoping for. As he ran, he noticed a gradual wash sloping away to his left, and turned in that direction. Piri followed.
A merk skimmer was dead on their heels.
Ahead, another minute or two of terrified running, was a zig-zag cleft in the ground, full of sunken shadows, and dotted with sparse greenery. Kion couldn't see into it from this angle, so their run and dive into it would be a blind shot, fearing the worst, hoping for the best, and settling for something inbetween. Best case, the canyon meant life-saving shelter. Worst case, it would be their death trap.
A kill-pack exploded nearby with noise and white heat.
The two runners cut their run short, and threw themselves into a shallow crater perhaps a billion years old. Manaul's was an ancient landscape that might once have been under a long-ago lost ocean. Even far more ancient were the shallow ghost craters that dotted the landscape from a time, billions of years ago, when genesis comets and meteors regularly pounded the newly formed planet's hellish magma.
But that was then, and this was now.
Right now, in real time, those hunter-machines darted around.
Kion and Piri descended into a cool, shadowy canyon with high cliff walls all around, and ghostly boulders piled on each other. It was silent in the canyon, except for a ghostly wind growling low amid the stones. The place smelled of rotting macabs, but the moaning winds brought fresh breezes with hints of distant seas and jungle shores. It made Kion want to keep going. He longed to fish in such a sea, and then lie on a beach beside a campfire, while the sun beat down on a free man.
The merks continued whirring about for a time. They could cover many kliks a minute, shooting out red-spectrum, man-seeking rays. When they spotted prey, they would cut loose with blue-white, hot man-killing rays shot from the skimmers' underbellies like ghostly sunbeams. The beams cycled alternately warm and hot, gathering power from the inboard nukes and the sun outside. On the down or warm side, the rays were tinged red for blood and black for doom, as if resting. Cycling back, the'd become evanescent, and riddled with whatever clouds happened to be floating underneath, or fluttering bird formations. Once the disks spotted you, and started shooting—nothing would stand, or fly, in the path of their searing, hot-blue, near-white kill packets.
As the two men found niches to hide and sleep in the rapidly failing light, each looked like an apparition. All the POWs were kept closely shorn against macabs and lice in the Kaarrk prison camp. Kion's strong jaws in a lean face bore heavy beard shadow, and his shorn skull was already darkening with new growth. Piri apparently grew hair the way some people shed tears, and his beard and hair were already thick and black.
"We made it," Kion said. Thus far…
"So far so good," quavered the other man's voice.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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