Hunter's Run(54)

And it was where he discovered that the Silver Enye were moving on. The eaters-of-the-young had finished trading, and they were heading out to the next colony. Searching for their prey, though no woman or man on the planet knew that besides himself. The afternoon they were scheduled to go, there was another big carnival downtown in their honor, but instead of attending, Ramón got a couple beers, crawled up onto the roof of Elena's apartment by himself, and watched the ships go. When the last light of their drives had faded from the deep blue sky, Ramón flipped them off. Fucking pendejos!

Elena kicked him out about the time of the first snow, but even that was strange. The way it used to be, he would have done something, she would have got pissed, and they'd have ended throwing punches and plates. Instead, one morning Elena looked at him, shook her head, and told him it was time for him to go before he did something stupid. It had been like that ever since she'd saved his ass with the police. They still fought, they still yelled, but when it was something important, it was just a statement. The beans are cold. That shirt's not clean. It's time for you to go before you do something stupid. The plan Ramón had been working on was as close to ready as it was ever going to be, and the call of the open sky was getting louder in his heart every day. She was right. He needed to get out for a while. And then, when the city and the people and the lingering threat of the Enye were out of his system, he would need to come back.

Griego had been a hardass about the whole thing, pressing Ramón about why he didn't have better insurance on his last van. Pointing out that Ramón was asking him to trust equipment to a crazy fuck who'd gone out last time with a perfectly good machine and come back naked and three-quarters dead with nothing to show for it. The negotiation had gone on over cans of Griego's beer until they were both drunk off their asses and singing old songs. In the morning, they both remembered they'd made an agreement, but the contract they'd drawn up was half gibberish. It had their signatures on it, though, so Griego had agreed to loan Ramón a van on the understanding that the rental fee would be half of any income that resulted from the run plus depreciation on the van. He was fucking Ramón over, but Ramón didn't care. He wasn't making shit off this run anyway. This was just the first part of the plan. Getting rich came later.

The moons were both out, Big Girl high in the sky while Little Girl was just starting to peek over the horizon. Their cool blue light allowed glimpses of the terrain below. The Océano Tétrico was black as coffee in the darkness, but Ramón knew that the daylight, when it came, would reveal water a deep, lush green. Winter was growing time in the ocean, just the reverse of the land. Something to do with oxygenation levels, but what it meant to him was an endless plain of tiny green waves, the bite of winter air, and the scent of salt and turning tides. He conjured it all now, constructing the world in his mind. His belly had lost that sick feeling since he'd left Diegotown. His mind felt calmer, slower, less like a dog caged in a kennel. It was moments like this that made the difference. The van chimed, and he turned his attention back to the next of the near-infinite small manual corrections flying the thing required.

In a real van and not this half-dead lump of tin, he would have gone on to the Sierra Hueso in a single jump, but he knew that if he left the panel and tried to bed down, his distrust of the van would keep him awake anyway. Near midnight, he overflew Fiddler's Jump, aimed the van east to the unlogged forests, and circled until he found a little clearing to set down in. The snow was deep enough that it would have been hard work to get the door open, had he intended to go out. But inside the small box, its heating system online and keeping the air warm, it felt like being wrapped in a good wool blanket on a cold night. He curled up on his cot and fell asleep wondering what the difference was between blackmail and extortion.

The plan, once it had finally coalesced, was a simple one. Maneck and its people had been squatting hidden on this planet since long before the colony had begun. They'd chosen the place to hide their hive. They might even have other hives scattered around the planet. He would offer them the trade-share the information they had about the planet's mineral resources, and once he was making enough money to keep it from seeming weird, he'd put stop claims on the land they inhabited, make sure those sites weren't developed, that no other prospectors blundered upon them. In order for that to work, he'd have to be making a lot of stop claims. So he'd have to be making a lot of money. In fact, he'd have to be one of the richest men in the colony, so it was pretty important for Maneck and the others to make sure Ramón got a lot of very rich claims.

The trick, of course, was that he had to tell all this to the aliens so that they'd understand what the deal was, and what the consequences to them would be if they just killed him on the spot rather than listen. He'd recorded it all-times, coordinates, descriptions of the aliens and their relationship to the Enye-then encrypted the file and given it to Mikel Ibrahim to keep in whatever drawer held Ramón's old gravity knife. The man had proven himself capable of keeping a secret. Maybe, when Ramón got rich, he'd hire him as an overseer or something. Regardless, the agreement was that Ramón would come get the data when he was done with this run. If spring came without him, Mikel would hand it over to the cops. Ramón knew intellectually that trusting the aliens' fate to Griego's fifth-rate van was a shitty thing to do; if the lift tubes failed or the power cell blew, the aliens would suffer the same fate as if they'd killed him. But Ramón hadn't seen any other way to go about it. Plus, if it came down that way, he'd be dead himself and wouldn't care.

It was a risk, of course. Maybe a big one. There was no knowing what these bastards would think or do. Stranger than a norteamericano, or even the Japanese. If he couldn't make them understand about the insurance policy he'd left behind, they'd probably kill him. Hell, maybe they'd kill him anyway, even if they did understand. Who could know? But life was a risk. That was how you knew you were living.

The morning came late that far north, and Ramón had to cycle through startup three times before the lift tubes all de-iced the way they were supposed to. It was just shy of noon before he took to the sky again, skimming over the snow-laden treetops, watching the ice clouds high over the mountains, and humming to himself. Off to the west was the thin silver-white band that was the Río Embudo, where he'd almost died. Somewhere in that flow-eaten by fish, his bones washed out to sea-the other Ramón had by now become part of the world in a way that could never be undone. Ramón touched his brow in a sign of respect for the dead. "Better you than me, cabrón," he said again.

He had been afraid that the change of seasons would have made the discontinuity in the land's face hard to find. He'd budgeted three days to poke through the mountains, but he didn't need them. He put the van down in the same upland meadow where he'd landed so long ago, in another life, wrapped himself in warm, waterproof clothes, and took up his new field kit. It took him less than an hour to divine the shape of the stone beneath the snow, to recognize where exactly he was and where he wanted to go.

As he trudged through the snow, he pulled the caver's spike from his pack. It was as long as his forearm with a tempered, sharp point and a small blasting cap on the end. Ramón had also brought coring charges, but he didn't want to take down the whole rock face again if he didn't have to. When he reached the cliff, he dusted it with his hands, looking for a likely spot, paused to judge the overhanging snow-dying in an avalanche would be a stupid way to go, at this point-and set the caver's spike.

It fired off with a sharp, dry report. White-feathered lace crows unfolded themselves awkwardly from the trees, squawking in complaint, and tenfin birds flew up along the slope, crying like grieving women. Hopefully the tip of the spike had driven into the silvery metal of the hive. Ramón remembered what he'd felt like, walking up to that imperfect mirror, seeing his own foggy reflection stumbling toward him out of it.

For a long time, nothing happened. Ramón began to wonder if he'd gotten the wrong place. Or if the spike hadn't gone in far enough. Or if the aliens had abandoned the hive, fleeing to some even more distant corner of the world, or maybe burrowing deeper into it. That would have been just his luck. What if they'd decided that his own escape had constituted gaesu after all, and all committed suicide? What if inside the mountain there was nothing but the dead?

But as he began to turn back to the van to get the coring charges, to try again, the snow far above him and off to the left shifted. Great sheets of it crumbled and fell as the stone beneath it irised open. A hole appeared, blacker from being set in the white of winter. And then, with a high-pitched whine like a centrifuge spinning up, a yunea emerged, its pale, ropy sides shining the yellow of old ivory. The box hovered for a moment as if considering him.

Ramón waved his arms, trying to catch the thing's attention and also show that he wasn't afraid of it. He'd come there intentionally. The alien craft hovered, shifted one way and then another, as if trying to make sense of him. Ramón, reassured by the alien's hesitation, lit a cigarette and grinned into the cold wind. The slats of the yunea's side thinned, and Ramón saw the alien form within. It was perhaps two meters tall, its skin yellowish with a swirling pattern of black and silver that was scarred in places from old wounds. One of the hot orange eyes had darkened permanently. Ramón smiled at his old friend and captor.