Freedom's Landing

Remembering her survival course gave her the clue to superficial testing on her skin. She'd had two violent reactions to stuff that the ground animals seemed to devour in quantity, but the avians had guided her to other comestibles. Her tem in the food preparation unit of her "master' had given her other commodities to look for - though few of those grew wild in this jungle. Still, there were little yellow-scaled fish from the river that had provided her with both protein and exercise.

A low-pitched buzz attracted her attention. She got to her feet, balanced carefully on the high limb of the tree.

Parting the branches, she peered up at the cloudless sky.

Two of the umpteen moons that circled Barevi were visible in the west. Below them, dots that gave off sparkles of reflected sunlight were swooping and diving.

The boys have called another hunt, she mused to herself and, still smiling, leant against the tree trunk to take advantage of her grandstand seat. The jungle had quite a few really big, really savage creatures which she had managed to avoid, making like a jungle heroine and taking to the trees and vines. By dint of hard work and sweat, she had used the useful tools from the kit on the ffitter to tie vines to trees that led to and from her favourite food-browsing spots and to the river. Her escape routes were all aerial.

Before she had taken absence without leave from her situation', Kris had done her homework on more than what was edible on Barevi. She had picked up a good bit of the lingua Barevi, a polyglot language, made up from the words of six or seven of the languages spoken by the slaves and used by the "masters' to convey orders to their minions.

She had gleaned some information about those who had invaded Earth, the Catteni. They were not, for one thing, indigenous to this world but came from a much heavier planet nearer galactic centre. They were one of the mercenary-explorer races employed by a vast federation.

They had only recently colonized Barevi, using it as a clearing house for spoils acquired by looting unsuspecting non-federation planets, and a rest-and-relaxation centre for their great ships' crews.

After years of the free-fall of space and lighter-gravity planets, Catteni found it difficult to return to their heavy, depressing home world. During her brief enslavement, Kris had heard the Catteni boast of dying everywhere in the galaxy except Catten. The way they "played', Kris thought to herself, was rough enough to ensure that they died young as well as far from Catten.

Huge predators roamed the unspoiled plains and jungles of Barevi, and the Catteni considered it great sport to stand up to a rhinolike monster with only a single spear.

That is, Kris remembered with a grim smile, when they weren't brawling among themselves over imagined slurs and insults. Two slaves, friends of hers, had been crushed under the massive bodies of Catteni during a free-for-all.

Since she had come to the valley, she had witnessed half a dozen encounters between the rhinos and the Catteni.

Accustomed to a much heavier gravity than Barevi, the Catteni were able to execute incredible manoeuvres as they softened their prey for the kill. The poor creatures had less chance than Spanish bulls and, in all the hunts Kris had seen, only one man had been injured and that had been a slight graze.

As the flitters neared, she realized that they were not acting like a hunting party. For one thing, one dot was considerably ahead of the others. And by God, she saw the light flashes of the trailing ffitters' forward guns firing at the "leader' Hunted and hunters were at the foot of her valley now. Suddenly black smoke erupted from the rear of the pursued ffitter. It nosed upwards. It hovered reluctantly, then dived, slantingly, to strike the tumble of boulders along the river's edge, not far from her hiding place.

Kris gasped as she saw a figure, half-leaping, halfstaggering out of the badly smashed flitter. She could scarcely believe that even a Catteni could survive such a crash. Wideyed, she watched as he struggled to his feet, then reeled from boulder to boulder, to get away from the smouldering wreck.

With a stunningly brilliant flare, the craft exploded.

Fragments whistled into the underbrush as far up the slope as her retreat, and the idiotic thorn-bushes she had recently triggered sprayed out their poison-tipped little darts.

The smoke of the burnihg ffitter obscured her view now and Kris lost sight of the man. The other ffitters had reached the wreck and were hovering over it, like so many angry King Kongish bees, swooping, diving, trying to penetrate the smoke.

An afternoon breeze swirled the black clouds about and Kris caught glimpses of the man, lurching still farther from the crash site. She saw him stumble and fall, after which he made no move to rise. Above, the bees buzzed angrily, circling the smoke and probably wondering if their prey had gone up in the explosion.

Catteni didn't hunt each other as a rule, she told herself, surprised to find that she was halfway down from her perch. They fight like Irishmen, sure, but to chase a man so far from the city? What could he have done?