There was no closing in on it. Tagen remembered seizing a female’s leg and yanking her under cover with him, containing her frantic struggles as he tried to think what to do. He could feel the blaster fire peppering the upended breeding table he was hiding behind, could feel the metal warming slowly to the melting point.

And then Commander Cura had ended it all, and much the same way Tagen would someday do himself. He’d drawn his plasma gun and let the human catch it right in the heart. It had been just as swift, just as brutal and reeking a death, but Tagen had never questioned the need. Some outcomes could not be avoided. But had this really been one of those?

The human Tagen had killed was still smoking, but the sounds of plasma eating flesh had finally stopped. Its right hand was twisted under itself, still reaching for its belt. Fat swelled out the sides of its uniform. Its hair stirred in the little breeze that trickled down the slope before him. It didn’t look much like a threat. Certainly it had not been raving or psychotic. Frightened, yes. Perhaps dangerous. But not savagely so.

Worse, its uniform gave Tagen the distinct impression that the human had been an officer of some sort, one of Earth’s On-World Security force. An officer, in other words, who was perfectly justified in treating Tagen as a threat. Humans didn’t know any better. It was Tagen’s responsibility to take control of the situation, with force if necessary, but without gratuitous violence. He represented the Fleet. He represented all of Jota. He couldn’t just blast away at everything that took an unexpected move.

Tagen holstered his gun and went unsteadily toward the body. Its meat was soft under his hands, still damp with sweat. He turned it over, doing his best not to look at the shocked and staring eyes (there were tree needles stuck to them now), and studied the weapon in the human’s dead hand.

It looked like a primitive sort of gun.

Impossible. Humans had no such technology.

Badly shaken, Tagen rolled the corpse back onto its face. He backed up, retrieving the rest of his uniform when he stepped on it and quickly dressing. He strapped on his gunbelt, cinching it tighter than was required, to feel the pinch of its reality.

It was no weapon at all, just a device that any resembled one. A device for…something, dammit! Something any Human Studies scientist would recognize at once. It made no difference. It was a mistake, that was all.

He got his supply pack, and went rapidly up the slope on his way east. There, he stopped in his tracks.

There was a road at the top of the slope. There was a groundcar on the road.

Its design was alien and somehow sinister, but it was perfectly recognizable all the same. It was a groundcar, and it could be nothing else. The driver’s side window was open. Tagen could smell smoke and sweat inside. Human sweat. The human had driven this groundcar.

Tagen clutched at his brow as though he could pull his thoughts out and crush them in his hand. He could hear his blood pounding in his ears. It was not fear that had him now, but it was not too damned far from it. The gun and the groundcar. What did it mean?

A thought struck him suddenly, a wonderful thought. A thought to explain everything.

The human he had just killed was in league with the slavers who preyed on this world. The slavers had provided it with the gun and the groundcar both. The reason Tagen did not recognize the design of the gun was because it had been constructed here solely for human use, as the groundcar had been. With that technology, the human would be an unstoppable force, able to gather any number of its defenseless fellows and to hold them somewhere until the slavers returned. In exchange, he supposed the slavers provided it with special treatment—perhaps merely the promise of continued life, perhaps wealth or food or its pick of the females it helped to enslave.

Yes. That was it. That made perfect sense. That even explained the human’s strange uniform. Every piece fell into place.

And perhaps this road beneath Tagen’s feet led to the holding cells for the captured humans. Should he follow it, in the hopes that it was E’Var’s destination as well? Or should he continue east, trusting to his instincts?

A groundcar could cover a lot of terrain, and the woods may well be thick with roads. It wouldn’t take more than one or two forks before Tagen was hopelessly lost, and then not only would he never find the holding cells to which they led, but he would then have to backtrack to his original position. There was no guarantee that Tagen was directly on E’Var’s trail, but his gut told him he was at least going in the right direction. He would continue on. If he encountered the holding cells by chance, so much the better. In the meantime, he would go east.

Tagen moved around the groundcar and climbed the slope behind it, his eyes fixed ahead of him. He ignored the twisting of his guts, the anxious hammering of his heart. He left the dead human behind him, facedown in the dirt. He did not let himself think about it anymore.

He went east.

*

Kane moved through the woods, well back from the road in deference to the rare instances when light from a human groundcar splashed through the scenery. He had seen several, slightly more by day than by night, which meant that somewhere on this forsaken planet, there were humans. He had seen none since the yellow-haired female drowned her stupid self, and that had been five days past. Kane often found himself wondering idly, if he had it to do all over again, would he pay better attention to her and not let her wander off? Or would he take his time and kill her right? He had different answers for that at different times of the day, but it was cooler now, and he was inclined to have taken better care of her. Certainly, he would have done so had he known it would take so long to find another one.

Still, even Kane could be patient when circumstances demanded it, and although he was not in the habit of practicing moderation on a hunt, he did it now. It would be an easy thing to lay a trap across the stone roads the groundcars traveled on. Any humans that survived the crash could be pried from their smoking vehicles and culled for Vahst until Kane found himself another female. Oh yes, easy, and on some level, viscerally satisfying, but it would also be stupid. Even on Earth, something like that couldn’t go unnoticed for long, and there was such a thing as having too many humans underfoot. As crude as their pellet-projectile weapons might be, they were still extremely capable of putting holes in Jotan heads. He’d seen it happen, and as old Urak had remarked at the time, you only had to see something like that once before you learned to respect it.

So Kane walked, within sight of the road but without putting himself in view of any human travelers. Sooner or later, he knew his patience would be rewarded. One of them would stop.

No sooner did the thought pass through Kane’s head but one of the groundcars did gear down and pull onto the soft gravel that bordered the road. Kane, five days gone with maddening Heat and once more on the verge of dehydration, kept walking for a step or three before that fact sunk in.

Kane stopped moving and looked back over his shoulder, all his senses keenly fixed on the groundcar. It idled there for several long minutes, blasting the forest ahead of it with light but not moving. Kane could see nothing inside it, could make out no sound beyond the grumbling of the thing’s engine.

Suddenly, the lights blinked out and silence fell. Three doors opened. Three humans emerged.

Kane turned all the way around and moved closer to the edge of the trees. He could hear voices, but could make out none of their speech. The three of them came to stand close together; there was no way Kane could approach without at least one of them seeing him. They might have food or water with them, yes, but they might also be armed. Kane hunkered down to consider his options.