Flight Sergeant Faron Gosweller sat in his LUF, LUF 1, wishing his computer had something interesting to read. He was parked at the edge of a half-acre glade, backed between two trees and concealed by the eaves of the forest. The last twilight had faded from what little he could see of the sky, and it was dark indeed.
It had been a long day, and he still hadn't gotten a call.
As far as Gosweller knew, the enemy wasn't aware of him. Even if they'd picked up his 360° call to the cadet force, the night before, that had been from two miles away and above the trees. The only investigation he knew of had been by local wildlife. Twice large herds of tiny deerlike animals had entered the glade to browse, stopping frequently in their feeding to look toward the floater. The herds had numbered twenty and thirty-odd; exact counts had been impossible because the animals moved around too much. There'd also been a band of much larger deer—an even dozen of them. Of these, the larger had three horns each—a central pike flanked by two lesser, out-curved horns. The smaller wore only the central pike, a matter of sexual dimorphism he suspected.
Once a band of small piglike animals had entered the glade, where they seemed to be rooting up tubers or mushrooms. Then something like a big cat, black dappled with tan or gray, had rushed out and killed one of them. After momentary panic, the pigs had rallied, swarming at the predator, and the cat had escaped into a tree. After a little the pigs left, and the cat jumped down to reclaim its kill.
The cat looked big enough to kill a man, it seemed to Gosweller, and he'd decided not to go out unarmed. Or at night.
Too bad I couldn't have downloaded a book on Terfreyan wildlife before I left Iryala, he thought. Instead, everything not essential to his mission had been erased from his computer's memory, on the off-chance that the enemy might capture the craft.
But what they really didn't want the enemy to capture was the teleport, tricked up though it was. Sitting power-up a few yards outside his floater, and connected to it by a power cable, it was Gosweller's escape hatch. If the enemy threatened to find him, he was to run to it and press three switches in order: The first targeted the port on Iryala on a reverse vector; the second activated a destruct mechanism with a one-minute delay; and the third opened the gate for a single passage, after which the targeting program would revert to the default target, which was the teleport platform itself. If anyone tried to follow him before it destructed, they'd enter a loop and arrive at the same place and time as they'd "left." But in teleport shock, unless they'd been defused.
A tiny light began flashing on Gosweller's console, accompanied by a soft beeping. He reached, opening a switch, knowing who it had to be. His computer screen told him it was a scrambled message via a fifteen-degree beam pulse transmission; the regiment knew, of course, approximately where he was.
"LUF 1, LUF 1, this is Little A, this is Little A. Bring your teleport to the accompanying coordinates. Repeat: Bring your teleport to the accompanying coordinates."
His computer copied the coordinates and he had it read them into his navigator. Then he acknowledged the message. And even as he pressed the acknowledge key, he realized he'd screwed up. He was a civilian pilot with warrior tendencies, who'd been called up from the reserve for this project, and he'd brought some civilian habits with him. He'd sent 360°; he should have sent a narrow beam aimed at the coordinates. Or not acknowledged at all.
He swore under his breath. Well, he'd hustle—load the teleport and get away from there quickly.
The slowly cruising Klestronu gunship was alone and it wasn't; a narrow carrier beam from brigade's comm central was locked on it. The badly bored pilot, Flight Sergeant Sarkath Veglossu, was expecting an order to return to base; nothing had been heard of the enemy radio source since the night before.
Instead he received a set of coordinates for a new enemy radio source less than three miles away, and an order to attack it at once. His computer gave the coordinates to its navigation program, and the gunship swung around.
The teleport was on an AG dolly, which made it easy to raise off the ground. Its mass and inertia were considerable for one man to handle though; otherwise Gosweller might have had the rig inside the LUF before the gunship got there. As it was, one end was in the door. He might even have gotten off the ground with it—perhaps even gotten away. As it was, Veglossu's high-intensity floodlight caught the Iryalan by surprise, blinding him for brief seconds. Long enough that he wasn't able to find any switches, let alone press them, before the gunship fired a concussion pulse that struck the side of the floater less than four feet from him.
Veglossu saw him fall, and put a crewman down to investigate. Sweating, heart thudding, the Klestronu private made his way to LUF 1 and the teleport by a series of short sprints, hitting the dirt after each of them. He had no notion that he'd make it alive. When he did, he found Gosweller dead.
Using his belt radio, the private let Veglossu know. Veglossu then radioed base to send out a floater and pick up the loot, whatever that consisted of.