They made for the hillock that Rene had seen earlier that day. It was the closest bit of high ground they had seen, and it had hatched the beginnings of a cruel idea in his mind, one that he wished to turn into reality.

“Stay close to me,” he told Zildiz as they strode, “We stand a better chance of living through this if we act as a unit.”

“A unit of what?” she inquired, puzzled by his use of the word, “Weight, length or time?”

“No, it means that we should work together,” he tried to explain, quickening his pace to a light jog. The hunting parties had gone silent—they hadn’t the talk of their drums in ages. The quiet was somehow more unnerving than the screams.

“We watch each other’s backs,” he continued, running along a fallen log, “It’s a sort of code we Pathfinders have. No man or woman dies alone.”

Try telling that to Lethway, said a snide voice in his head.

“I have no wish to die alongside you, Fleet-man.”

“That’s not what I…ah, never mind. Here,” Rene handed her back her severed blades, “As promised.”

How had these people ever managed to survive this long? Zildiz wondered as she held her weapons again, manually sheathing them in her arms. It was like taking sugarcane from a baby.

The fog was thinning noticeably. They had forded the river and reached the base of the hillock when they heard another shout from the southwest, sounding much closer this time. The drums began to speak again, the music almost keeping time with Rene’s triphammering heartbeat. Rene led them round the flank of the rise into a deep gully, trying to use the terrain to hide their movements.

“How’s their sense of smell, Zildiz?” he asked her as they picked their way up a pebbly, bone-dry creek. Rene hopped across the boulders and offered her his arm for assistance.

“Depends on the Leaper and their grafted organs,” she told him, leaping past him and pointedly ignoring his efforts at playing the gentleman, “But they are all excellent trackers. They will find us. It is inevitable.”

“Aye, but we’ll be ready for em by then. Hopefully,” Rene added with certain lack of conviction, “To be frank, I don’t know a power on this earth that can stop that horde we saw earlier.”

“They will not use the creatures of the jungle against us. The warband that is hunting us now cannot be larger than thirty to fifty braves.”

“And you know this how?”

Zildiz said nothing. She was under no obligation to tell a child of the Betrayers of the Vitalus’ capabilities. The more creatures the Leapers involved in this secret hunt, the greater the chances that the Vitalus would discover their violation of the truce. It would be a small and private war, and that suited her down to the ground.

She felt stronger now and surer of her footing, as if the chase had breathed new life into her muscles and lungs. Why, she felt as if she could fight a dozen Leapers. Either her innards had adjusted to the workload or her exomorph was regaining some of its functions. She dashed ahead, rejoicing in the steel-spring action of her sinews. The weak-spined Rene, on the other hand, was dawdling below her in the creek, up to some foolishness as usual.

He had stopped to gather fistfuls of gravel which he stuffed into his socks and pockets until they bulged. He even opened his kit and crammed pebbles in the loose corners of the case.

“Hurry up,” she called to him, speaking softly now that danger was close.

“I’d have to agree with Zildiz here, tovarisch,” Exar chimed in, “Now’s not the best time to be gathering mineral samples.”

Rene shook his head and refused to explain. After some minutes of the uphill marching, he spoke to Exar, saying:

“This high enough for you?”

“Ten more meters above sea level should do it.”

They were almost at the summit of the landmass, in a grove of benguet pines and thin pygmy dipterocarps growing amid a hardscrabble sand. On the right shoulder of the hill were the clusters of fire gourd trees whose seeds he had mistaken for cannon fire, the ground plastered with dried-up foam. Beyond this stretched a scorched and blasted hellscape of blackened, dead trees.

“We don’t have ten more meters,” Rene said, “That is, unless…”

He craned his neck to see the tops of the pines, which had straight smooth trunks and sported no lower limbs to grab onto. Most were stunted and malnourished by the poor soil, but at least one of the adults looked like a good candidate. It would be hard climbing.

“It’s times like these that I wish these commercial kits still came with thruster packs,” Exar said regretfully, “But all those models got phased out. Budget cuts, whatcha gonna do, eh?”

“What’s a thruster pack?”

“Never heard of one? That’s funny,” Exar paused as if he had come to a sudden realization, “That’s real funny, you sayin that…”

Rene unsheathed the monomachete and emptied his kit of all gear except for the panel and the allcomm antenna. He cut out some footholds with the monomachete and began his ascent. Rene nearly made it to the top without making the mistake of looking down. As it was, he risked a peek at Zildiz gawping up at him all the way down there and nearly swooned, his scrotum tightening round his pearls like the jaws of death. He clamped the sword of the ancients between his teeth and bit down hard to steady himself.

“Join the Pathfinders, they said,” he growled around the bare metal, “See the sights and look pretty for the girls, they said. What was I flipping thinking?”

He swung up to the slender upper boughs and carefully wedged the solar panel amid the branches, angling it so that it caught the weakening gaze of the suns. Then he balanced the allcomm antenna and its tripod on the uppermost twigs and hooked up the cabling.

“Good work, bhaisap,” Exar said when it began to rotate, “I’ll start transmitting our coordinates to any and all stations while getting a fix on our position.”

“Splendid. Say, you’ve got some nice sight lines up here, Exar.”

From where he stood Rene could see for leagues around in all directions, and he kept his eyes peeled for movement.

There! Specters gliding above the murk, twenty or so klicks out and moving fast. A hoarse scream from the east confirmed his worst suspicions: the Leapers knew exactly where they were. The cannibals were hemming them in, herding Rene and Zildiz they had done with the army of beasts. He could imagine them spreading out in a wide crescent whose horns would envelop the hill from both sides.

Rene estimated that he had little more than an hour to prepare.

“Exar, could I ask you to be our lookout from up here?”

“Thy wish is my command. A la mi presente, al vostra signori, as they used to say.”

As who used to say? Rene thought. Much of what the sphere said tended to be incomprehensible. Rene unfastened the sphere and Exar extended his spike legs to fix himself in place.

“But wouldn’t it be safer for you to stay up top with me?” Exar pointed out.

“Yes, it would. For them,” Rene replied with as much false bravado as he could dredge up. Scattering pines and bark shavings, he slid back down and ran over to the stand of fire gourds. To his relief some of the fruit on the outlying trees furthest from the blaze had not gone off. Rene reached up and picked as many of the gourds as he could fit in his arms. He carried them back to the pines, making several trips to amass a sizable collection.

Zildiz had her swords out and was cooly sharpening them one against the other.

“So they’ve finally run us down,” she said in a flat tone, “Are you ready?”

“Not quite,” Rene said shortly.

He began the project by arranging his other components. Spool of webbing, check. Socks full of pebbles, check. Gauntlet, check.

“Exar, how much longer till our rescue gets here?” he hollered up at the sphere.

“I’ve hailed a shuttle from one of the toroidal stations. ETA 128 minutes.”

“You’ll have those minutes,” Rene promised him, then spoke to Zildiz, “Heads up, Gallivant. From this moment on, our sole objective is to hold off the enemy for at least two hours. We live or die on this hill. Get me?”

“Brave words. And how do you intend to back them up?”

“With the help of a little friend I call firepower,” Rene said, getting right to work. He wound the silk around one of the sloshing gourds until it was sticky all over, then took fistfuls of gravel from his socks, densely studding the fruit with them. Rene held up the finished prototype and grinned evilly. All in all, it had taken him less than five minutes to put it together.

Defensive tactics required careful selection and preparation of the ground. Half the battle was won if one could dictate where the fighting took place.

Pathfinders were scouts above all else and did not specialize in fighting sieges. Rene tried his best anyway, choosing a spot among the pygmy pines and with a deep ravine on his right and a spread of open ground some twenty meters wide and sixty long on his left where nothing grew but itchy buffalo grasses. At his back was a sheer bluff, only four meters tall or so, but still a solid feature upon which to anchor his defense. He placed the prototype in the center of the field and ran back, going prone behind a shallow bank of earth and taking up his gauntlet.

“Come on,” he pleaded with it, training the beam on the gourd’s hard shell, “Sing for daddy…”

Nothing happened for a long moment. Rene blinked; the gourd had abruptly disappeared. In the next instant, shards of shell and rock and specks of foam lacerated the air above his position, ricocheting off the hard cliff face. Rene clapped his hands to his ringing ears and got up. Inspecting his position, he found the bank of earth studded with his improvised shrapnel and arrowhead-shaped seeds.

“Pop! Goes the weasel!” he shouted, overjoyed by the result, “That ought to ruin someone’s day.”