“Ahoy down there!” Exar exclaimed, “I heard shootin! Everything hunky dory?”

“Everything’s fine. Just dandy,” said Rene. Zildiz picked herself up out of the bushes she’d flung herself into, picking thorns out of her cheek. The explosion had startled her. That mad creature was at it again, turning the inanimate substances of the natural world into tools of convenient destruction.

Rene planted his gourds carefully and covered the grassy stretch with what amounted to a minefield. Using the last of the webbing he coated each mine with a layer of gravel and pebbles. This was to increase the shrapnel density and overall lethality of each explosive. Rene wasn’t satisfied, however. The short delay it took for the laser designator to set off the gourds was unacceptable as it increased the chance of a misfire or dud. He ordered (or rather, politely requested) Zildiz to start piling up brush and tinder around each mine. This would help conceal them as well as ensure proper ignition.

She just gave him another one of those supercilious sneers that came so naturally to her and refused to cooperate.

“I was under the impression that you weren’t keen on dying with me,” Rene reminded her from the branches of the juvenile pines where he was setting up more of the fragmentation mines among the pine needles. The Leapers were sure to come swinging or gliding through here, which was another reason he had chosen this place to make their stand where the trees were shortest.

“I will not sully my hand with your foul artifices,” Zildiz said.

Shaking his head, Rene jumped down and started cutting some of the skinny pygmy dipterocarps, his monomachete scything through them with ease. What would have taken a team of loggers most of a day to clear only cost him a few seconds. He picked up one of the felled trees and trimmed its end into a sharp point.

“But you will fight, won’t you?” he asked, holding up the crude spear and hefting its weight.

“Of a certainty I will fight, Fleet-man. To do so is essence of my being.”

“Good to hear. Because a unit breaks down if its members aren’t all pulling their weight.”

“Again with that term. Unit,” Zildiz sniffed, taking a few eager practice swings with her swords, moving lightly on her clawed toes. The woman seemed absolutely elated at the prospect of combat. Without any warning she stepped up alongside him and swung hard.

Farewell, cruel world, Rene said to himself, believing that the moment of her inevitable betrayal had come at last. But rather than taking his head off, Zildiz attacked the clusters of dipterocarps, chopping clean through five of them with blazing speed. Even as they tottered and fell she struck off their tops with precise diagonal slices. Neatly catching them all before they hit the ground, Zildiz presented Rene with five razor sharp stakes, saying:

“I am a Gallivant. I am a unit of one.”

Rene blanched, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a cork. Zildiz turned on her heel and started piling up the tinder for the mines just like he’d asked her to. Rene didn’t have time to ponder her sudden change of heart—there was too much left to do. Finishing a pile of fifty stakes, he began setting them up in a wide ring at the foot of the bluff, planting them thickest at the front and right flank next to the depression.

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“Got movement at nine o’clock,” yelled Exar, “Eight klicks out, five fast movers.”

“Copy that, Ex,” Rene called back, “Keep us posted.”

Rene sped up his final preparations. Dragging up a pile of brushwood, he started a bonfire at the center of ring and stuck his spare stakes in the dirt underneath the coals. The heat would bake their points into hardened spear tips in twenty to thirty minutes.

“More of them closing in!” Exar announced, “We got activity from three to twelve o’clock. Closest heat signature is one klick out!”

Rene anxiously checked his meager defenses, his confidence ebbing somewhat. Was there nothing else he could do to even the odds? The Pathfinder racked his brains trying to find some detail he could still turn to his advantage.

What would the lord navigator Deschane do in his place? At memory of the dour, unsmiling grump of an officer, a wave of affection and sorrow welled up in Rene chest so strong he almost choked up with tears.

Deschane had always known what to do. If only he and boys were still around to help. Lt. Jensen would be cracking jokes about Lethway’s wife Bearisse right about now. Beariss the Butterball, they called her, on account of her mild eating disorder. Rene had had tea at their apartment once and met the matron in person. Lovely lady, even if she did have to shuffle sideways to fit through any doors. Made the best cassava cakes in the whole damned mound.

Rene hated waiting. The silence before the storm was always the worst. He threw more fuel onto the bonfire and sent it climbing high, a pillar of orange visible for many leagues. No point being subtle now.

Zildiz began to giggle. Was the warrior woman cracking under the pressure? She soon dispelled his doubts when she climbed atop the bluff, crossing her swords above her as she screamed out into the void:

“I am Zildiz, of the Blade-Wings! You hungry? Then come get fed! Come one, come all!”

Crazy bint, Rene thought privately. But if the fire wouldn’t draw them in, that surely would. Drums sounded in the depths of the fog, and wordless howls of hatred in answer to her challenge.

“Here we go…” Rene said, chewing absently on his thumb.

#

“On your left, tovarisch! Hundred meters out and closing fast!” Exar said. Rene sat behind the embankment and waited.

A line of Leapers came swinging out of the jungle, headed for the grassy bare slope. Rene stood up to let them get a good look at him, and they slowed, taken aback by his brazen appearance.

See? I’m all soft and juicy, Rene mentally urged them on. No threat at all.

“Stop!” he shouted across to them, “I’m human, can’t you see! Let’s talk this out! We are all scions of a proud empire that once stretched across the stars. Can we not make common cause as brothers and sisters of the Fleet?”

The pack looked at each other, stunned. Then they all let out a series of hacking coughs, slapping each other on their hairy backs.

“They are laughing,” Zildiz told him, also chuckling herself.

“Yep,” Exar seconded, “Sounds like a negative on their part, boss. Good speech, though!”

The Leapers rushed up the slope, all racing to see who could reach him first. Rene let them pass the first layers of gourds then shone the laser designator at the centermost mine.

“I warned you. You stupid bastards. I warned you,” he said through tight, whitened lips.

There was no delay this time. One moment, over a dozen Leapers were running up the hill in an unstoppable tide of clawed limbs. In the next, smoking pieces of them were spread all across the shaking grass, their torsos dissolving in a fine tomato slurry of blood and shrapnel. A fragment of a human molar pinged off of Rene’s visor. The surviving Leapers were too shellshocked to do anything but quail where they stood while Rene turned his attention to the other mines. One after another he set them off, and once the dust had settled the handful of Leapers who hadn’t been cut to shreds beat a hasty retreat, vanishing back into the rainforest, leaving the wounded and the dying to roll feebly among the craters.

“That’s round one over with,” Rene said grimly, taking one of his fire hardened spears and going out to finish them off.

“Ding-ding,” Exar said with satisfaction.