After dropping the body of the Ralan pilot into space, he decided the seven-hour run gave him a slight advantage. Once the Talada got moving, it had speed enough to check over both worlds without losing a significant amount of time. They could figure out his air requirements as well as he. If they arrived before he was finished and gone, the raider’s scanning devices were almost certain to spot the lifeboat wherever he tried to hide it.
The chances seemed very good that they simply wouldn’t get there soon enough. But the minimum goal remained a factor. Quillan decided to cache the Sigma File in some easily identifiable spot as soon as he touched ground, take the boat to another section of the planet to do his recharging, come back for the file when he was prepared to leave. It would cut the risk of being surprised with it to almost nothing. . . .
4
How many hours had passed since then? Clawing his way up through the boulders and shrubbery, slipping in loose soil, Quillan glanced back for a moment at the sun. It was noticeably lower in the sky again, appeared to be dropping almost visibly toward the horizon. But that told him nothing. He remembered the landing now; it had been daylight and he had come down to hide the Sigma File . . . had hidden it, his memory corrected him suddenly. And then, for the next six or ten or fourteen hours, he appeared to have simply waited around here, in some mental fog, for the Talada to come riding its fiery braking jets down from the sky.
The raider might arrive at any moment. Unless . . .
Quillan blocked off the rest of that thought. The slope had begun to level off as he approached the top; he covered the last stretch in a rush, lungs sobbing for breath. He clambered on hastily through a jagged crack in the back of the ridge. For an instant, he saw the shallow dip of the valley beyond.
He dropped flat immediately. They were already here.
It was a shock, but one he realized he had half expected. After a few seconds, he crept up to the shelter of a rock from where he could look into the valley without exposing himself.
The Talada had set down about a hundred yards back of the lifeboat, perhaps no more than half an hour ago. The smaller vessel’s lock stood open; a man came climbing out of it, followed by two others. The last of the three closed the lock and they started back toward the raider, from which other men were emerging. Ajoran had ordered the lifeboat searched first, to make sure the Sigma File wasn’t concealed on it. Without that delay they should have caught him while he was still climbing up the slope. . . . The group coming out of the Talada now was a hunting party; most of them had quick-firing energy rifles slung across their backs.
They lined up beside the ship while a wedge-shaped device was maneuvered out of the lock. It remained floating a little above the ground near the head of the line, about twenty feet long, perhaps a dozen feet across at its point of greatest width. Quillan had seen such devices before.
It was a man-tracker, a type used regularly in Ralan expeditions against settlements on other planets. Its power unit and instruments were packed into the narrow tip; most of its space was simply a container, enclosed and filled with the same kind of numbing liquid preservative as that in the prisoner vats in the Talada ships. It could be set either to hunt down specific individuals or any and all human beings within its range, and to either kill them as they were overtaken or pick them up with its grapplers and deposit them unharmed in the container. They could use it to follow him now, the clothing he had left on the ship would give it all the indications it needed to recognize and follow his trail.
More men had come out behind the machine, including one in a grav-suit. Colonel Ajoran apparently was assigning almost the entire complement of the Talada to the search for Quillan and the Sigma File.
Quillan decided he’d seen enough. If he had been observed on the hillside as the Talada was descending, they would have gone after him immediately. Instead, they would now follow their man-tracker over the ridge and down to the swamp where the herds of native animals were feeding. It gave him a little time.
He crawled backward a dozen feet into the narrow crevasse, rose and retraced his way through it to the other side of the ridge. Beyond the plain, the sun was almost touching the horizon. The gray forest into which the aggressive biped had retreated began a few hundred yards to his right. He’d have better shelter there than among the tumbled rocks of the ridge.
He went loping toward it, keeping below the crest-line. His eyes shifted once toward the swamp. One great tree stood there, towering a good hundred feet above the vegetation about it. The Sigma File was wedged deep among the giant’s root, a few feet below the water. He’d seen the tree from the air, put the lifeboat down in the little valley, hurried down to the swamp on foot. Twenty minutes later the file had been buried and he’d started wading back out of the swamp. What had happened between that moment and the one when he found himself sitting on the hillside he still didn’t know. . . .
He reached the forest, came back among the trees over the top of the ridge until he saw the valley again. During the few minutes that had passed, the ridge’s evening shadow had spread across half the lower ground. It had seemed possible that when they realized how close it was to nightfall here, the hunt for him would be put off till morning. But Ajoran evidently wanted no delay. The man in the grav-suit still stood near the open lock of the ship, but the search party was coming across the valley behind their tracking machine. They headed for a point of the open ridge about a quarter-mile away from Quillan. They’d have lights to continue on through the night if necessary.
The chase plan was simple but effective. If the man-tracker hadn’t flushed him into view before morning, the Talada could take the lifeboat aboard, move after the search party and put down again. They could work on in relays throughout the following day, half of them resting at a time on the ship, until he was run down.
The Sigma File was safest where he’d left it. The tracker’s scent perceptors were acute enough to follow his trail through the stagnant swamp, getting signs from the vegetation he’d brushed against or grasped in passing, even from lingering traces in the water itself. And it might very well detect the file beneath the surface. But—ironically, considering Ajoran’s purpose—the discovery would be meaningless to the machine except as another indication that the man it was pursuing had been there. It would simply move on after him.
The worst thing he could attempt at the moment would be to get down to the swamp ahead of the searchers and destroy the file. He would almost certainly be sighted on the open slopes below the forest; and either the tracker or the man in the grav-suit could be overhead instants later.
Quillan’s gaze shifted back to the grav-suited figure. He would have to watch out for that one. His immediate role presumably was to act as liaison man between the ship and the hunters, supplementing the communicator reports Ajoran would be getting on the progress of the search. But he was armed with a rifle; and if Quillan was seen, he could spatter the area around the fugitive with stun-gas pellets while remaining beyond range of a hand weapon. He had floated back up to the Talada’s lock for a moment, was now heading out to the ridge, drifting about fifty feet above the ground.
It wasn’t a graceful operation. Maneuvering a grav-suit designed for weightless service on the surface of airless planets never was. But the fellow was handling himself fairly well, Quillan thought. He came up to the ridge as the troop began filing across it, hovered above the line a few seconds, then swung to the left and moved off in a series of slow, awkward bounces above the hillside. He seemed to be holding something up to his helmet, and Quillan guessed he was scanning the area with a pair of powerful glasses. After some minutes, he came back.
Quillan had crossed over to the other side of the ridge to follow the progress of the column. It had swung to the right as it started down, was angling straight toward the swamp along the route he had taken with the file. He watched, chewing his lip. If the man-tracker happened to cross his return trail on the way, he might be in trouble almost immediately. . . .