STARLINER by David Drake

The creature walked into the clearing on four legs. It had a barrel-shaped body with a small head and a meter-long spike on either shoulder. One of its eyes rotated separately to follow the aircar without a great deal of interest. Ignoring the soft vegetation underfoot, the creature lifted up on its hind legs and began stripping tree branches of their bark and prickly foliage.

Franz laughed in relief. “Well, I guess it could’ve stepped on us,” he said, “so I won’t say it’s harmless. The damned thing scared me out of a year’s growth.”

“Are there more of them?” Oanh asked. She held the aircar in a hover, even with the herbivore’s raised head. “It must weigh five tonnes.”

“At least,” the boy agreed.

He held the rifle gingerly, now that he didn’t need it anymore. The weapon was of an unfamiliar design. Franz wasn’t sure how best to empty the chamber, and he was afraid to put it back in its clamp with only the safety catch to prevent it from firing in event of a shock.

They were both glad the creature had changed the subject, because they knew the discussion wasn’t going anywhere.

“The guideb—”Franz said.

The creature that burst out of the shadowed undergrowth was bipedal and ten meters from nostrils to tailtip. It had the lithe ranginess of a bullwhip. As the herbivore tried to settle and turn, the attacker caught it with long, clawed forelimbs and slammed fanged jaws dosed on the victim’s throat.

“Back!” Franz screamed as he pointed his rifle over the side of the car and leaned into it. Oanh had already slammed her throttle against the stops, transforming the vehicle’s hover into a staggering climb.

The animals below shrieked like steam whistles as they rolled together across the forest floor. The carnivore kept clearof its victim’s defensive spikes, but the shock of hitting even soggy ground beneath the tonnes of scaly body should have been devastating. A sapling twenty centimeters in diameter shattered when the creatures slammed against it.

Franz took a deep breath and relaxed, swinging the rifle’s muzzle upward again.

“You didn’t shoot,” Oanh said. They were hovering again, a hundred meters in the air. The battle went on below through wrappings of mist roiled by the aircar’s fans.

Franz looked at his weapon. He still didn’t know how to clear the chamber. “There wasn’t any need,” he said. “If I’d had to, I would have shot.”

Oanh was staring at him. It made him uncomfortable, though she no longer seemed angry. “Well,” Franz said, “we’re getting our money’s worth of sightseeing, aren’t we?”

Oanh adjusted the fens forward and brought the car around in a sweeping turn. “Let’s go back to the terminal,” she said. “There’ll be a hotel there, or we can use your cabin on the ship.”

Franz nodded, his face neutral.

“We don’t have very much time,” Oanh explained. She swallowed. “I don’t want to waste what we have.”

* * *

The fringes of Taskerville were colorful prefabs of reinforced thermoplastic, one or two stories high. They had been erected in the past fifteen or twenty years, since Hobilo got its own industrial base to process the hydrocarbons which permeated all levels of the planet’s rocks.

Old Taskerville was built of limestone and concrete. In surviving structures, plastic tile had replaced the original roofs of shakes laid over wooden trusses, but the walls were as solid as rock outcrops.

That was true even of the buildings which had been blasted beyond repair in the fighting that ended the Long Troubles. Two of them stood gaunt and blackened on the north side of the square: a cube and a tall pyramid of concrete struts which had once been joined by full-height stained glass windows.

Originally the structures had been the Municipal Building and the Roman Catholic cathedral for the Western See of Hobilo. At the start of the Long Troubles, they became the military headquarters for the Sword of the New Dispensation and the home of the Prophet Elias, late Father Elias, an itinerant priest whose congregation spanned scores of hunting camps and wellheads.

Twice during twenty-seven years of war, flying columns of troops of the government in Crater Creek had penetrated to Taskerville. Both units were cut off. They attempted fighting retreats which dissolved into routs with eighty percent casualties. Mercenaries from a dozen fringe worlds, officered by Grantholmers and paid by a consortium of multiplanetary corporations, finally achieved the total victory which had eluded the local government.