Runners: Escape Prison World or Die (Empire of Time Series) by John Argo

Page 17.

As he zigged and zagged, throwing himself from one shady patch to the next, where the shooter could not target him, Kion reflected on the oddity of this.

"Hey!" Piri yelled hoarsely. His brown, oily fist still clutched a nondescript rag. Now he was visible—a compact goat of a man with a blue-black curly mane and skin the color of sunset on a mud flat. "Gottendam, what kept you?"

Stones exploded around Kion's feet. A volley of shots stitched into the sand, following him as he dove for cover with Piri.

The skimmer circled in slow, steady arcs for a full field of fire.

"They're blind to us," Kion said.

"For a few seconds," Piri said. He tied the rag around his neck and pointed into the desert. "Killjaeger."

Kion's heart sank as he spied the spidery robot hunters advancing from a thousand heads away. "Four, five of them."

"Four is about all they can carry on a skimmer," Piri said. "But we can't outfight or outrun them. They're armed and we're not." In his dark brown face, his eyes had a darker, hooded look.

"Can you run?"

Piri nodded. "No serious injuries."

"We have to keep moving."

"You're the boss, Captain." He had a subversive, furtive air about him. Kion got the sense, not for the first time, but now palpably, that he could not trust Piri. It would be a good thing to know if he were in a jam, and expected this bastard to keep his back safe.

As the skimmer provided cover, the killjaeger robots advanced and began issuing their own light fire. From their silvery finger tips, they emitted bright, crackling bullet-rays. The lightning bursts were were painful to look at. Each left a smoke residue of burned atmosphere around it. What landed with each shot was an energy packet that exploded in an incandescent burst when it struck. The air filled with smells of vaporized stone, bits of kelp with their distinctive wettish soggy smell, and the general low-tide aroma of toasted, low-bio sand.

"Look!" Piri shouted.

Kion led the way down into the canyon, following the wash. The two men darted out and ran, following the canyon's zig-zag path. They hopped left, right, down, down, from rock to rock. Then dodged around corners in both directions as they followed the seething, boiling path of a flood that must have happened eons ago, when Manaul 5 was much wetter than now. The lower they went into the cleft, the cooler and darker the air around them got. The ground seemed damper, and green, red, and blue plants with huge sword-like fronds leaned into the sparse sunlight from every corner. Shallow fissures in the tall sandstone formed dead-end caves on either side.

"Plenty of spots to hide," Piri gasped.

"Won't buy us more than a minute or two," Kion said breathlessly. "Keep running."

A good round hit above their heads, exploding a soft sand core and showering reddish dust and debris all around. Rocks continued falling and clattering for a minute or two. Meanwhile, another round struck, again raising a cloud of reddish dust.

"That's the skimmer," Kion said. He had the athletic prowess, the intellectual thinking, and the combat training to think a step or two ahead of the older cook. And yet, there was an unspoken hint of something, an equalization, in that Piri was metropolitan-bred, while Kion had been born and raised on a farm world. His family's estate was outside a city nowhere near as big and complex as Piri's metropolis.

The attack from above lessened suddenly. The air grew still, with floating dust that smelled like low tide and cracked, burned molecules.

They stopped to rest a moment in a huge crevace with a high peak over a wide, sandy floor.

Water had coursed down, eons ago, cutting this cave. The cliff walls were lined as if water had dripped just yesterday, but it was a quarter billion years ago. In the arroyo itself, outside, water must have run for thousand years in serpentine fashion, white waves switching left and right. The water was long gone, but its sandy debris path lay unchanged.

The opening in which they stood was a massive 200 heads in diameter with a sandy floor. The cliffs curved together into a point, a hundred heads up, which was only halfway to the desert surface above. The inner rim of the cave prospered with dull green, succulent plants. Huge, wavy swords of yucca and agave (Humansh generic descriptors when specific botanical breaklists failed) defiantly rose in the clefts between stone and sand.

"Holy Sam," Piri said.

"Gottendam," Kion echoed. "Something smells terrible in here."

Thank you for reading. If you love it, tell your friends. Please post a favorable review at Amazon, Good Reads, and other online resources. If you want to thank the author, you may also buy a copy for the low price of a cup of coffee. It's called Read-a-Latte: similar (or lower) price as a latte at your favorite coffeeshop, but the book lasts forever while the beverage is quickly gone. Thank you (JTC).

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