For a second, I wondered if I was crazy to be out here at all. How did I think I could help? It was one thing to take on a single untrained warrior in full daylight; but if a navy recovery team was under attack by a whole militia of warriors, with every Mandasar believing the team was a desperate threat to their hives… it would take more than a few fighting tricks to get anyone out in one piece. Including me.

On top of that, these navy folks likely came from the Jacaranda. They may have been sent to capture me and drag me off to some awful place halfway across the galaxy. If they were as nasty as Tobit said, they might even have set off a fake Mayday to flush me out of hiding.

But… it was stupid to worry over what-ifs when there was only one right thing to do.

Help the best I could. Hope the rest worked out.

I started running up the road beside the silent dark waters of the canal.

The first thing I found was an unconscious worker. It could have been Hib, Nib, or Pib… but it could also have been any other worker in the valley. Even with the moonlight, it was too dark to make out the teeny facial features that distinguish one worker from another.

As far as I could tell, the worker wasn’t hurt, just unconscious. Breathing peacefully. That made me think it’d been shot by a hypersonic stunner — a standard navy-issue weapon, mostly used by Explorers who encounter unknown alien lifeforms. It’s handy to have a little pistol that knocks out attackers without killing them… especially when you’re on an unexplored planet and don’t know whether you’re shooting at a big dumb predator or a sentient being who’s just mad at you for trampling its sweet potatoes.

If the navy team had stunners, they might not be in such trouble… as long as the guns’ batteries held out. Stun-pistols were good for twenty shots or so. That wasn’t nearly enough to take down every Mandasar in the marsh, but it was better than nothing. I’d have to be careful myself. If the team was looking to capture me, one shot from a stunner could lay me out cold for six hours.

I left the worker where it was and moved forward again, this time keeping under the shadow of the trees between the road and canal. Soon after, I found an unconscious gentle, then an unconscious warrior. During our discussions that afternoon, Counselor had said all three castes took turns at sentry duty… and if an alert came in, the whole community fanned out over the marsh to find the intruders. Lucky for me, the searchers in this area had already got stunned; otherwise, they might be shouting, "He’s here, he’s here," and bringing the militia down on my head. That would be very bad.

Half a kilometer and six more unconscious bodies later, I came to the escape pod. It was still floating in the middle of the canal, barely moving on the slow current. A scatter of Mandasar bodies lay flumped unconscious at the edge of the water, all of them warriors… as if there’d been a pitched battle here, not just sentries caught off guard in the dark.

No human bodies in sight. So far, the navy folks were holding their own.

I used my wrist implant to take another direction reading on the Mayday. Now, the signal was coming from the far side of the canal. The recovery team must have decided it was crazy to go farther into the marsh; instead, they’d headed across the water, where the land wasn’t cleared for crops. Nothing over there but scruffy black forest, and the ground sloping upward into low hills. The navy people were obviously running for cover and getting the heck out of Hollen valley. Good, I thought, they’ll be okay now. The recovery folks were retreating, and they didn’t have far to go till they’d be safe; Counselor had said there was no Mandasar population once you got to higher ground. I could go back the way I’d come, without having to worry about the navy team… and I’d better do that fast, before I ran into someone who wanted to slice first and ask questions later.

When I turned around, the starlit marsh was alive with warriors galloping in my direction.

The Mandasars hadn’t seen me yet: I was standing in dark shadows under trees. One of the unconscious warriors lying in the mud must have got off a signal before he was stunned — it only made sense that someone would be carrying a radio. Now the whole militia was charging toward the battle site… and I wanted to be long gone before they arrived.

As quietly as I could, staying in shadow, I knelt and slipped into the canal. The water was just as cold as at lunchtime; just as muddy too, with the stagnant smell of algae right under my nose. I took a deep breath, then slipped beneath the surface, swimming with my eyes shut because I wouldn’t be able to see in the black muddiness anyway.

My plan was to reach the trees on the other bank and just hide in the woods. I wasn’t one of those stealthy stalker-types who could slip silently past a horde of warriors on the hunt. My only hope was that they wouldn’t bother to search the far side; none of their people lived over there, so the warriors would likely concentrate their efforts on patrolling the main valley rather than making forays across the canal.

I slid onto the opposite shore just before the first warriors arrived. When they saw the heaps of unconscious bodies, they broke into an angry chatter that covered any noise I made creeping into the woods. I kept going, crouched low and moving as fast as I could, trying to put distance between me and the Mandasars. Any second, I expected someone to shout, "Look over there!" But they were all too busy gabbling over their fallen comrades, and pointing toward the evac module bobbing quietly in the water.

As I moved, things squished softly under my feet. I didn’t know what they were: insects, or puffballs, or jellyish Celestian lifeforms, I couldn’t tell. Fleeing through the dark doesn’t give you much chance to appreciate alien ecologies. I just hoped I wouldn’t disturb any teeny critters with venomous bites. The Mandasars would’ve cleared out all larger predators — their race has no guilt about endangering species they don’t like — but they wouldn’t bother to deal with anything whose teeth were too small to go through carapace. Black widow spiders, for instance. The closest real black widow was surely forty light-years away, but I still managed to make myself nervous about them as I slunk through the pitch-dark forest.

Every now and then, a puff of breeze brought the burning-wood smell of Musk B. The warriors behind me were keyed up, just itching to fight something. If I were a worker or gentle, I’d be heading for home real fast — warriors would soon be swiping at trees just to work off their tension. It wouldn’t surprise me if they hauled the escape pod out of the canal and tin-snipped it to ribbons; with so much musk in the air, they’d be looking for anything to attack.

The land under my feet angled upward in fits and starts: a little slope, then a level patch, then another slanty climb. The sound of angry voices faded behind me. I was just thinking it might be safe to rest when I came across a heavy slash of damage to the forest’s undergrowth.

It looked like someone had driven a bulldozer through here, on a big swath leading backward to the canal and forward up the wooded hillslope. That could only mean one thing: a warrior had come to this side of the canal and was plowing his way after the navy team. He must have spotted them running away from the scene of the battle… and like a typical musk-mad lunatic, he’d charged after them on his own instead of waiting for reinforcements.

That was good news for the recovery team — if the warrior had stayed behind to tell the militia what was happening, the whole forest would be crawling with berserker Mandasars. As it was, the warrior probably got himself stunned cold as soon as he got close to the navy folks.