It was hot out, but the climate of Blair was far more tolerable than what Tyger was used to on worlds like Siberna and Dorado. Those two may as well have been planet-sized hot boxes. And in spite of the bumpy, rocky, scrub-hedged thing that passed for a road, his situation was worlds better than that damned swamp. And with his hopes of reconnecting with a past he’d thought lost buoying him, he was in a far better mood now than when he arrived. He could only hope that the ship was in good condition when he found it.

            “You guys have heard of asphalt, right?” Tyger commented to his guide after a particularly bone-jarring pothole in the gravel, “or antigravs?” He didn’t particularly need a guide, and had told Galen as much, but the man had insisted, probably recalling what had happened to his father here. And the offer, however unnecessary, had been at least welcome. Paige sure as hell couldn’t spare anyone to babysit him on what she’d thought was a fool’s errand. Still, it was a comforting thought that she and the Shadow Star crew were waiting at the outer fringes of the system for the word so they could come pick him up. He had said that it would only be a couple of days, and the crew was probably thankful for the down time anyway. The old ship was long overdue for a maintenance sweep, and this jaunt gave them time to do it. If things got complicated down here, he was pretty certain Paige would come for him, all hands on deck be damned. 

            “Hard roads make the Knives soft,” his guide said flatly.

            “Still, with a hopper, we could’ve been there within the hour,” Tyger replied.

            “We are people who embrace challenge,” he countered just as tersely as before.

            “Translation: ‘We live too far away from each other and are too stubborn to ask for a little budget for development,’” Tyger muttered with a disguised smirk. But his guide, a lanky, scruffy young man who acted like he was three decades older than he looked, was probably right. Nevertheless, he liked the rustic atmosphere of the Knives in spite of the almost barbarian single-minded outlook of so many of the natives. Its remote location in Imperium space meant a dearth of Imperial military presence, making it clear to Tyger why his dad would have preferred this place as his favorite haunt in between jobs ... at least until he met his mother.

            Tyger glanced back towards the storage area behind them as the road took a steep turn into a valley, where plants began to grow up more lushly than in the previous territory. Galem had assured him that the hangar was in an area where there were few truly dangerous animals; that was a big comfort, especially on a planet whose wilds were considered a death trap otherwise. Still, his guide had made sure that they were armed to the teeth for this trip. He’d never seen so many weapons packed in one vehicle.

            A damp aroma of greenery began to permeate the formerly dry air as foliage became thicker around them. While they were still on the higher elevations, his guide pointed out a large clearing that nearly touched the horizon, citing it as their destination.

            “That smoke we saw coming from the clearing,” he asked once their descent into the valley reached a point where the tree line covered the horizon. “Is there a caldera or something there? Or maybe a geyser?”

            “News to me too,” the guide confessed. “I guess we’ll find out when we get there.”

            Tyger pursed his lips as he studied the uncertainty in the man’s tone of voice. Being a hybrid, he did have some training to look into the minds of others, but it required a conscious effort on his part, and he rarely used it. There was something that felt intrinsically ... wrong about such an intrusion. But his ability to study the character of others was a skill he’d honed over years of dealing with agents and promoters for the Gestalt tourneys. Compared to those sharks, this guy was easy. The guide’s words held the typical bravado of the youth of the Knives, but beneath them was a certain apprehension. Then again, with the small arsenal they’d brought with them in the back of the van, one could say that the young man had been apprehensive since leaving Solace. However, a sense of uneasiness, not connected with the wildlife, was something that Tyger felt as well, though he couldn’t say why.

            Galem had said that the trip to the hidden hangar where he’d mothballed the El Tigre would take about a day and a half. Tyger considered it fortunate that Blair was too out-of-the way, and the subsequent recovery costs so prohibitive that it had never been sold in the twenty-three long years since its abandonment. Even when the guide insisted they stop for the night in the middle of the woods, the thought of seeing a piece of his father’s past only known from stories passed down from his mother drove sleep from him for most of the night. And when sleep finally found him, his dreams consisted of memories of the faraway days of his childhood back on An’Re’Hara, when he lay in his little hammock, listening to his mother spin the tales of Cole hunting monsters on faraway planets and outwitting space pirates during his days as a freelance smuggler. All the while, cool ocean breezes blew into his room and his mother’s muzzle purred against his cheek, lulling him to sleep.

***

            He slowly became passively aware of the van rocking as the fully-awake guide cranked it into life, but remained in a state between sleep and wakefulness until a shout shook him fully into the land of the living.

            “Wake up, man! Wake up!” The guide’s panicked voice became clear, as well as the sensation of him shaking his shoulder like fresh laundry. Tyger blinked, shoving the man’s hand off of him, scowling as he squinted in the dappled daylight that bled through the canopy. The rumbling of the engine was shaking the van in a very strange way.

            “What’s up?” Tyger asked. “Engine trouble?” He turned toward his guide, and saw that he was holding what could only be described as a small arsenal in his lap. Between them, the satchel that held part of their obscene number of weapons was wide open, and he was frantically piling up even more. Already he had three bandoliers of shotgun rounds, as well as hollow point and antipersonnel slugs slung over his shoulders along with the weapons themselves.

            “That’s not the engine,” the guide’s wide-eyed gaze shifted frantically from the road ahead, and back to the satchel, like a squirrel scavenging for nuts in an open meadow. “Listen again; that’s a stampede and it’s headed this way! Grab all the guns you can, and let’s go!”

            Tyger, realized that the van wasn’t even running. The rumble was indeed coming from the outside. Growing fear obliterated the last vestiges of his sleepiness, and he grabbed two pistols, an assault rifle, and one bandolier of compatible bullets along with a belt containing a sheathed machete, gun holster, and ammo pouches. He then slipped out of the van, running in the opposite direction of the driver’s side.

            “You’ve got more than you can carry already,” he called back to the guide as he stumbled through the undergrowth that skirted the side of the wide, dirt ‘road’. “Head for the tree line! Now!”  He could smell the scent of the Creator knew how many beasts on fast approach, and could only hope that the guide had heard him over the growing ambient cacophony. He paused to look up at the towering trunks and vine-covered, interconnected branches of the massive trees that surrounded him, and swallowed against the onset of a different fear. Fortunately, even the skyscraper-high trees of An’Re’Hara didn’t trigger his fear of heights too terribly, as there was always a way to get down. With skill honed by climbing those prodigious trees of his homeworld, he clawed his way to the higher boughs of a redwood-like tree, wedging his claws into the pliable bark and leaping from vines to boost his climb. In little time at all, he was about five stories over the path just below the canopy, brushing leaves and errant bugs off of his person, but keeping a secure purchase as he looked down towards the van. He searched frantically for any sign of the guide either in the vehicle or the trees on the opposite side of the road, but found nothing. Using a loose vine, he tied himself into the tangle of its fellows that climbed up the trunk. It provided extra security in the face of the approaching stampede, which made its appearance with all the subtlety of two Gestalts clashing over a pile of explosives.

            Two trees beyond the one onto which he’d latched himself came crashing down to the left and right with a thunderous creak and clatter. For a moment, Tyger thought that he would be felled just as easily, but when the animals appeared –a wild, shoving mob of manta gryphons, pseudodimetrodons, spine bears, dire boars, jackal monkeys, and scores of other creatures tearing through the woods, flattening the van and kicking up a cloud of choking debris that rose to his height and nearly suffocating him–, he realized with growing relief that he’d picked a sturdy place to cling for dear life. Only twice was his faith shaken as he felt the tree give a tremendous, tooth-chattering rattle due to some particularly frantic tricorn bison ramming against its base, but it held fast.

            Tyger removed a handkerchief from his coat pocket and wrapped it around his nose and mouth to filter out the dust and smoke. Through the near-obscuring cloud and even through the cloth that filtered out the choking particles, he began to notice the scent of blood amidst the olfactory cornucopia. Squinting through the dust and debris below, he realized the very telling sight that confirmed his suspicion, that in the stream of bestial panic that pushed and crowded through the narrow wooded path, they all shared the same feature: gaping wounds on their pelts, skins, spines, and scales. Each and every animal in this stampede had been more or less wounded, from some kind of bladed instruments.

            It took about half an hour, but the stampede at last subsided, and the migraine-inducing vibrations of hooves, feet, and pseudopods subsided into background noise, and then faded into an eerie, deathlike silence, with even the constant calls of the creatures that inhabited the canopy missing. Even aboard the Shadow Star, he was surrounded by the hum of machinery; here, a silence so profound remained like an unnerving resonation in his head.

            “Um, hey dude? I’m okay,” Tyger called out, realizing with chagrin that he hadn’t committed his admittedly unassuming guide’s name to memory. His words broke the silence with near-frightening abruptness, sending a shiver down his back and tail. When there was no response, he called more loudly. But when his effort was only met with more of the sepulchral silence, he only felt downright silly for having made it.

            “Shit,” he whispered, and felt his intestines become like cold jelly as he clawed his way down to the forest floor, still surrounded by silence that only grew more unnerving. Realization dawned upon him. This could be a worst case scenario. The ground, formerly a crude dirt path about twice as wide as the van, skirted by dense foliage, was now packed solid as rock with vegetable matter and turned stones pressed indelibly into the hardened soil. Tyger spotted the remains of the van, now little more than a flattened metal lump in the compressed ground, and his eyes followed the most likely direction the guide would have gone to escape the stampede.

            He found him, unfortunately. And immediately, he lost his lunch.

            The sight reminded him of a piece of classical human literature he’d perused from the libraries in his hometown on An’Re’Hara, a short story from the long-lost human homeworld wherein the author described a trampled corpse he’d seen:

            “Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.”
 

            “Devilish” was an understatement for the masticated lump that remained of the guide. He was no stranger to death, having been in his fair share of fights on the less civilized worlds, or locales that were less than welcoming to someone of his mixed heritage. But in his years of witnessing people being reduced to little more than meat, he had never seen something quite so horrifying. And this was not even the worst of it. Tyger knew the worst part about the whole deal would haunt him for the rest of his days, like the corpse of that long-ago story, he never knew his name.

            As Tyger struggled to lose focus of everything in order to rid himself of the queasiness, a noise that he had never heard before, combined with an equally alien scent, brought things sharply back into focus.