Starliner(60)

"Yeah, I think maybe I would," Ran said. "But it must be out of your way?"

A train accelerated out of the station with a squeal and clatter that devoured all conversation. Wanda Holly stepped to the cab and thrust a credit chip into the reader there. The driver watched without expression as he revved his engines up to operating load.

"Taskerville," Wanda said. The AI in the device debited her chip by the amount of the fare. "There isn't much difference in where you are on Hobilo, except for Crater Creek, where the city's domed and environmentally controlled. I wouldn't mind seeing Taskerville."

Ran paid his fere and followed Wanda into the lead car. The driver didn't bother to let them settle on the hard plastic bench before he threw his shift lever into drive and the train lurched forward.

A small freighter screamed skyward on its own motors and those of a pair of tugs, making the monorail sway as it plunged off the plateau toward the misty forests below.

"Why Taskerville?" Wanda said. When Ran didn't answer, she went on, "If you don't mind my asking?"

Ran cleared his mind of an image of guns winking in a swamp, while muzzle blasts splashed the water beneath them. "Sorry Wanda," he said. "Because my Dad was here."

Forest closed in as a green shadow. The driver extended a cutter from the bow of the lead car. Almost at once the sharp-edged loop began to slap at tendrils which had grown toward the line since the train made its inward run.

"During the Troubles?" Wanda asked.

"The end of them," Ran agreed. "It was three more months before they caught the Prophet, but Dad always said they'd broken the back of the Troubles at Taskerville."

He licked his lips. "He was one of the mercenaries hired by the corporations. I once asked him what he'd gotten out of—being a mercenary. And he said, 'A lot of things to think about, Ran.' Later, I found the chips his helmet had recorded during, during Taskerville. And I thought I'd . . . see the place myself."

"Your father's dead?" Wanda asked gently.

"Oh, yes," Ran said. "Nothing left of him but bones and maybe a few memories."

"No maybe there, friend," Wanda Holly murmured so softly that her lips scarcely seemed to move.

Something the size and shape of a dirty gray blanket hung from a tree just off the cleared line. It rotated as the monorail passed. One of the passengers on the rear car fired her rifle at the creature without evident effect.

Ran Colville's mind filled with bloody memories of sights his eyes had never seen.

* * *

"You can drive, you know," Oanh said as she pulled the aircar in a tight bank around a stand of conifers whose peaks reached many meters above the vehicle's present altitude. Oanh spoke harshly, and she showed a hard hand on the controls. They were traveling through the close vegetation at 40 kph.

"I've never driven one like this model myself," Franz said precisely. "You're doing better than I could."

He was half lying, but he didn't want a fight, and anyway, Oanh was in full control of the aircar. She was driving uncomfortably fast and cutting too close to obstacles, but those were deliberate ploys to get him to object—and thus put himself in the wrong.

They blasted down a boggy creek. Bands of denser mist flicked past the windscreen of the open car.

The danger was that in trying to make Franz react, Oanh would drive the vehicle into a tree or down the throat of a giant carnivore.

A dozen quadrupeds weighing between one and three tonnes apiece browsed among the reeds. They lurched up on their hind legs as the car overflew them. Each male had a coiled resonator on the end of his beaked snout. They hooted in mournful surprise.

Franz twisted in his seat to look back at the herbivores. "The guidechip said that you had to get much farther from the terminal to see herds like that," he said. "I guess it was wrong."

"Well, that's not surprising," Oanh said, her eyes straight ahead and her hands clamped like claws on the controls. "Everybody's wrong except you, aren't they?"

"Oanh, set her down and let's talk," Franz said.

"I don't want to set down!" Oanh shouted. She turned to glare at her passenger. "And there's nothing to talk about anyway, since you've made up your mind!"

"Love—"

An air plant lowered a trailer from a high branch, angling for an open space in which its fluorescent bloom would be visible to the nectar-drinkers that fertilized it. The car slammed into the flower with a jolt and a splotch of sticky pollen that looked like a bomb-burst on the bow and windscreen.

The tendril, freed of the flower whose weight it supported, sprang up. A coil of it snagged the barrel of the rifle Franz held upright beside his seat.