They cut through a dense artery of traffic, leaving a flurry of randomly scattered vehicles in their pursuers’ path. The obstacle only slowed the chasing hovercars, but it gave Quinn and Pennington enough of a lead that Quinn was able to accelerate through two quick right turns, double back through the open core of a large building, and make another right turn that merged them back into airway traffic.

Blending in with the flow of the hovercars around them, Quinn slowed down and settled into the middle of a thick pack of vehicles. Ahead of them, city patrol fliers raced across their path, lights flashing and sirens wailing, then vanished into the nighttime canyons of the city.

After a couple of minutes of coasting along with ordinary traffic, there was no sign of pursuit, by either the police or Quinn’s aggrieved clients. Pennington sat up and stretched his legs, which had been tucked anxiously against the edge of his seat. “Nicely done, mate.”

“Nothin’ to it,” Quinn said. “Like my pappy always said, two wrongs don’t make a right, but three rights do make a left.”

As they neared the coastline, Quinn veered north. It took a moment for Pennington to notice that they were heading away from the city’s spaceport. “Aren’t we going back to the ship?”

“What for?” Quinn said. “No point leaving without a cargo or a fare. Flying empty’s just a waste of fuel.”

Still paranoid that the men who had been shooting at them earlier might reappear, Pennington said, “After what happened, I figured you’d want to get off this rock as soon as possible.”

“Nah,” Quinn said. “Getting shot at? Occupational hazard. It happens. Besides, it’s not like they know where we parked. Might as well scare up a job before we breeze out.”

For once, the grungy middle-aged pilot made sense. “All right,” Pennington said. Nodding toward the seedy-looking sector of the city they had cruised into, he asked, “What kind of job are we going to get here?”

“Ain’t here to get a job,” Quinn said. “We’re here to get drunk. And if you can learn to stop runnin’ your mouth all the time, we might get lucky, too.” He slowed the hovercar and guided it to a shaky landing on a dark street crowded with the drunk, the indigent, and the shifty. In other words, amid a throng of people just like Quinn.

Quinn vaulted out of the driver’s seat and walked around the front of the vehicle toward a dive bar, which pulsed with annoyingly shrill synthetic music. Two enormous, vaguely reptilian bouncers loitered beside the entrance.

Pennington sat in the passenger seat, exhausted. All he had really wanted to do after evading the gunmen was to get back to Quinn’s ship, the Rocinante, and tumble into his hammock for some much-needed rest. “Go on without me,” he muttered.

“Come on, newsboy,” Quinn said. “I know you’re not into having fun, but you oughtta try it, just to see what all the fuss is about.”

Too tired to argue, Pennington pulled himself out of the hovercar and followed Quinn toward the bar. As they neared the door, one of the bouncers pointed at the hovercar. “You can’t park that here,” he said.

“We didn’t park it,” Quinn said, slipping the bouncer a few notes of the local currency. “We abandoned it.”

The bouncer pocketed the cash and opened the door. “I understand, sir. Have a good time.”

He and Quinn pushed through the crowd inside the dim, smoke-filled, and deafeningly loud bar. Pennington could barely shout loudly enough to be heard, never mind to convey how irritated he was. “Did you just give away our hovercar?”

“I gave away a hovercar,” Quinn yelled back. “And seeing as we stole it to make our getaway, the sooner we’re rid of it, the better.” He bellied up to the bar and caught the female bartender’s eye. He pointed at a bottle on the shelf, held up two fingers, then pointed at Tim, who squeezed in next to him.

“Well, that’s just great,” Tim said. “How the hell are we supposed to get back to the ship?”

Quinn accepted the drinks from the bartender, tendered some more local paper currency, then held up two fingers again and directed the bartender’s attention to a pair of attractive young alien women at the other end of the bar. As the bartender nodded and moved off to refill the women’s empty drink glasses, Quinn gave Pennington a brotherly slap on the back. “Relax, Tim. These things have a way of working themselves out—if you just stay calm and keep drinking.”

13

Captain Nassir huddled with Sorak and Razka around Niwara and her tricorder. Circled around them was the rest of the landing party except for McLellan and Tan Bao. Everyone was drenched and caked with mud from their desperate sprints through the jungle. The warm rain had slowed to a steady drizzle in the hour since they’d crash-landed, but there was still enough precipitation that Niwara had to wipe a sheen of droplets from the tricorder’s screen every few seconds while the captain and the landing party studied the area map.

“There’s no telling how far downriver Theriault might be by now,” Razka observed. “Our scan’s accurate only to ten kliks. After that, we’re making educated guesses.”

Sorak pointed at the screen. “This much is clear: the landscape slopes downward to the north. It is reasonable to deduce that the river therefore continues in that direction.”

“Agreed,” Nassir said. “Assuming she survived the fall, the river’s our best hope of finding her. If she makes it to either bank, and she’s able to walk, she can follow the river back to us. If not, it’ll give us something to follow.”

Niwara said softly, “I volunteer for the search mission, Captain. I was the one who lost her; I should go find her.”

“You didn’t lose anyone,” Nassir reassured her. “Accidents happen, you know that. And considering what we were up against, things could have been a lot…” Words failed him as he saw Tan Bao emerge from the tree line, supporting McLellan’s weight while she hopped along on her one remaining foot. Her right leg had been cut off just below the knee, and the severed limb protruded from Tan Bao’s backpack.

Tan Bao’s voice cracked with strain and exhaustion. “Little help?” Razka and Sorak both ran to his aid and relieved him of McLellan’s weight. The two scouts draped her arms across their shoulders and swiftly spirited her back to the circled landing party. The bedraggled medic jogged behind them and dropped to one knee beside McLellan as the scouts carefully set her down.

“Report,” Nassir said to Tan Bao, who was busy scanning McLellan with his medical tricorder.

“The Shedai…whatever it was, it did this,” Tan Bao said, gesturing at McLellan’s leg. “I can’t explain what this glasslike substance is, or why it seems to happen to every living organism the Shedai attacked. The good news is that it cauterized her wound, so she hasn’t lost much blood.” He packed up his tricorder and looked anxiously at Nassir. “We need to get her to sickbay, sir.”

Nassir plucked his communicator from his belt and opened it with a flick of his wrist. “Nassir to Sagittarius.”

Terrell answered, “Go ahead, Captain.”

“Raise the ship. We have wounded. And grab two full packs—I need you to lead a search and rescue.”

“Understood,” Terrell said. “Stay clear of the north bank; we’re coming up.”

The rest of the landing party began backing away from the riverbank. “Acknowledged,” Nassir said, following the others.

Seconds later the sepia-colored river boiled with white foam. Large waves formed in the middle and radiated ashore. The narrow bulge of the secondary hull emerged from the froth, followed by the rest of the oval-shaped primary hull. The ship hovered a moment, as if it were afloat. Then it drifted slowly toward the landing party until the port side of the primary hull scraped against the sandy bank and came to a halt.