Hunters Run Page 0,119

information they had about the planet's mineral resources, and once he was making enough money to keep it from seeming weird, he'd put stop claims on the land they inhabited, make sure those sites weren't developed, that no other prospectors blundered upon them. In order for that to work, he'd have to be making a lot of stop claims. So he'd have to be making a lot of money. In fact, he'd have to be one of the richest men in the colony, so it was pretty important for Maneck and the others to make sure Ramon got a lot of very rich claims.

The trick, of course, was that he had to tell all this to the aliens so that they'd understand what the deal was, and what the consequences to them would be if they just killed him on the spot rather than listen. He'd recorded it all - times, coordinates, descriptions of the aliens and their relationship to the Enye - then encrypted the file and given it to Mikel Ibrahim to keep in whatever drawer held Ramon's old gravity knife. The man had proven himself capable of keeping a secret. Maybe, when Ramon got rich, he'd hire him as an overseer or something. Regardless, the agreement was that Ramon would come get the data when he was done with this run. If spring came without him, Mikel would hand it over to the cops. Ramon knew intellectually that trusting the aliens' fate to Griego's fifth-rate van was a shitty thing to do; if the lift tubes failed or the power cell blew, the aliens would suffer the same fate as if they'd killed him. But Ramon hadn't seen any other way to go about it. Plus, if it came down that way, he'd be dead himself and wouldn't care.

It was a risk, of course. Maybe a big one. There was no knowing what these bastards would think or do. Stranger than a norteamericano, or even the Japanese. If he couldn't make them understand about the insurance policy he'd left behind, they'd probably kill him. Hell, maybe they'd kill him anyway, even if they did understand. Who could know? But life was a risk. That was how you knew you were living.

The morning came late that far north, and Ramon had to cycle through startup three times before the lift tubes all de-iced the way they were supposed to. It was just shy of noon before he took to the sky again, skimming over the snow-laden treetops, watching the ice clouds high over the mountains, and humming to himself. Off to the west was the thin silver-white band that was the Rio Embudo, where he'd almost died. Somewhere in that flow - eaten by fish, his bones washed out to sea - the other Ramon had by now become part of the world in a way that could never be undone. Ramon touched his brow in a sign of respect for the dead. "Better you than me, cabron," he said again.

He had been afraid that the change of seasons would have made the discontinuity in the land's face hard to find. He'd budgeted three days to poke through the mountains, but he didn't need them. He put the van down in the same upland meadow where he'd landed so long ago, in another life, wrapped himself in warm, waterproof clothes, and took up his new field kit. It took him less than an hour to divine the shape of the stone beneath the snow, to recognize where exactly he was and where he wanted to go.

As he trudged through the snow, he pulled the caver's spike from his pack. It was as long as his forearm with a tempered, sharp point and a small blasting cap on the end. Ramon had also brought coring charges, but he didn't want to take down the whole rock face again if he didn't have to. When he reached the cliff, he dusted it with his hands, looking for a likely spot, paused to judge the overhanging snow - dying in an avalanche would be a stupid way to go, at this point - and set the caver's spike.

It fired off with a sharp, dry report. White-feathered lace crows unfolded themselves awkwardly from the trees, squawking in complaint, and tenfin birds flew up along the slope, crying like grieving women. Hopefully the tip of the spike had driven into the silvery metal of the hive. Ramon remembered what he'd felt like, walking up to that imperfect mirror, seeing his own foggy reflection stumbling toward him out of it.

For a long time, nothing happened. Ramon began to wonder if he'd gotten the wrong place. Or if the spike hadn't gone in far enough. Or if the aliens had abandoned the hive, fleeing to some even more distant corner of the world, or maybe burrowing deeper into it. That would have been just his luck. What if they'd decided that his own escape had constituted gaesu after all, and all committed suicide? What if inside the mountain there was nothing but the dead?

But as he began to turn back to the van to get the coring charges, to try again, the snow far above him and off to the left shifted. Great sheets of it crumbled and fell as the stone beneath it irised open. A hole appeared, blacker from being set in the white of winter. And then, with a high-pitched whine like a centrifuge spinning up, a yunea emerged, its pale, ropy sides shining the yellow of old ivory. The box hovered for a moment as if considering him.

Ramon waved his arms, trying to catch the thing's attention and also show that he wasn't afraid of it. He'd come there intentionally. The alien craft hovered, shifted one way and then another, as if trying to make sense of him. Ramon, reassured by the alien's hesitation, lit a cigarette and grinned into the cold wind. The slats of the yunea's side thinned, and Ramon saw the alien form within. It was perhaps two meters tall, its skin yellowish with a swirling pattern of black and silver that was scarred in places from old wounds. One of the hot orange eyes had darkened permanently. Ramon smiled at his old friend and captor.

"Hey, monster!" he shouted, his hands cupped around his mouth. "Come on down! Another monster wants to talk to you!"

The End