Then there were the natives. The happy, smiling Sakuntala and the hardworking, comparatively diminutive Deyzara. Except that the Sakuntala were as likely to cut your head off as offer you a cup of traditional katola and the Deyzara would bow enthusiastically and wave their trunks in their disarmingly disconcerting fashion while quietly picking your pocket. Not that his own kind were much better. Among the many different species of sentients Hasa had encountered in his travels (and there had been many), humans fell somewhere in the shifting middle of the sentient muddle. That they were not as obvious cheats and liars as the Deyzara or as blatant deceivers and cutthroats as the Sakuntala was only due to the fact that power and experience had rendered them a tad more restrained.
Now, seemingly good and stuck in the middle of nowhere, and an unrelentingly hostile nowhere at that, he was going to have to rely on those same self-serving sons-of-bitches to extricate him from a bad fix not of his own making. Hasa was reasonably willing to take responsibility for his own mistakes. But he’d done nothing wrong this time, certainly nothing that should have led to his current imbroglio.
He’d done everything right prior to setting out: had the skimmer thoroughly overhauled and checked out, paid any overdue bills, settled with that thieving Dararpatui who ran the Kus supply depot, notified the proper authorities of his tentative flight plan, and registered his intentions with Administration. All so he could find himself, a week out from town, locked in a frantic uncontrolled dive down into the yawning depths of the Viisiiviisii. When oral commands failed to effect the necessary adjustments to his craft’s plunge, he’d taken manual control, only to find that the relevant instrumentation was also locked and unresponsive. At the last possible moment, he’d thrown himself to the left and activated the craft’s emergency self-contained landing sequencer. It, at least, had worked, as evidenced by the fact that he was still alive, mobile, and bitching.