A Big Shiny Blue Marble Ch. 46

He began to transmit again -- deciding that he could lie just as well or better, "Understood, Redblade. Be advised that transmissions are being monitored by Mountain Sector Control. Rescue craft are on standby now. Climb and maintain zero-eight one, heading one one zero. Decrease speed to ..."

"What are you doing?" Shaevre asked over the intercom.

"He's asking for directions. I'm instructing him to meet us. But we won't be quite where he thinks."

At his speed, it took Tirran over sixty miles to turn around. He hated to do it, but he knew that he was on their screens anyway, so he turned on his strobes and position marker lights.

"A Xer cutter," Arrax smiled as they looked at their night screen while Tirran passed them without knowing it, "blacked-out with no markings and being flown by a Xer pilot with at least some military knowledge. I like this game more and more."

Tirran frowned. If he were in the frigate now, he'd already be alone again and the other craft would be a wreck on a mountainside, but as it was, he knew that he couldn't turn on his own search equipment if this was an air defense unit craft.

"Mountain one-six-five from Redblade one-one. Request that you turn on your positional markers, please," Tirran said as he looked around in the darkness.

Oh, I can do better than that, Arrax smirked to himself.

Tirran's warning receivers went wild and he knew that he was locked up tight in somebody's targeting system. If this was any sort of half-decent patrol interceptor, he had to play this by the numbers now. They had him cold.

"Redblade one-one, from Mountain one-six-five. Slow to zero and descend straight down please. Current altitude above ground is ..."

When he'd turned on his belly lights and landed, Tirran sat cursing himself over having fallen for the ruse when it had been his intent to steer them away a little and then get lost in the ground clutter, flying off as fast as he dared in manual control with no mapping scans.

As he hovered along behind Tirran in a slow and careful approach, Arrax had dropped the rear ramp for a moment; only long enough for Shaevre to run out with a meg.

Tirran stared as the other dark shape swung past him, turning in a large arc as it went to keep its weapons trained on him When it had set down, Arrrax turned on his lights and Tirran wanted to laugh bitterly.

He was looking at an old transport. It had guns slung under its wings, but it was still nothing more than a transport skiff. Tirran suddenly knew why his systems had not been able to tell him very much about the search scans that he'd been hit with -- there wasn't anything much to tell -- the tracking and targeting on that thing must just be so old that they weren't known by his own. He was about to reach for the controls again when a snowball dashed itself against the side of the canopy. As he turned his head, Shaevre switched her laser to the visible spectrum and he knew that the dot was aimed at his throat. He was looking at a meg. What was it doing here? Who the fuck were these people?

Where the female out there stood, she was inside the space where he could erect his shields. That weapon slung from her shoulder left little doubt that he was dead if he did anything but hold up his hands and smile. She dragged the edge of her hand across her own throat and Tirran nodded, reaching to shut his engines down.

The meeting in the moonlit field had been amazing. Arrax wasn't known as a fighter pilot, but he still had a reputation all the same, and Tirran was pleased to meet a pair of walking legends. He'd never met Shaevre, but her name was known to him, since they'd worked together in combat before. To him, she'd been a voice on the other end of a communications link which never changed, no matter how bad things were on the ground as she directed the flights of close air support craft, telling them exactly where they needed to release in order to do the most good.

"Tirran," she beamed, "So good to finally meet the one who never flinched and always laid it down where I needed it. I don't think that I can count the number of times that it was you more than anyone else who peeled our enemies off my face at a bad time. I owe you my life several times over."

When he'd had a chance to explain things in only the briefest terms, he set a golden egg before them.

"So you know the reason for these demon outbreaks?" Arrax asked, "They are all mostly one kind but something drives them to it. We live together with Reds AND Merrens and they do not behave the way that the masses of the Reds do when they come.

"I can tell you all you need to know," Tirran said, "and I can do better than even that. If you can let me park this cutter somewhere and give me a lift, I've got a frigate, armed and ready to fly, and if they make it the rest of the way, I will need to find a home for about a thousand abominations. They follow me and my bitch, Rosa, wishing to have a life outside and a land that they can inhabit and live free. If I can, I want them to have a new name.

But we must act soon. I need to get the frigate away from the outpost where it is now. Better if I had a place to hide it, but, " he shrugged, "It's a frigate, after all."

"How much time do you have?" Shaevre asked, "And what is the threat?"

A high Merren minister of some bureau on Mer," Tirrran said, "I demolished the building where he was when I left, but I think that it would not have been enough to kill him. He will regenerate and then he will want to contact Mer, and he will likely be hunting me as well, once he guesses that I faked him out when I left."

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"I feel a little silly," Shawa smiled as he held the rabbit pelts against himself so that Cesar could guess where to make the small holes that he'd need to run the thin deerhide strips through so that it held together, "But I'm thankful, Cesar."

The large beast looked up and smiled a little, "I wish that I had a lot more of these. I could make something that might keep you warm then. You got no fur, and I'm worried about snow and blizzards.

"Well I'm liking the cave-girl look," Noriko grinned as she shook her hips a little as she held up the pelts that he'd use to make something for her next.

"There's so much that I don't understand," Shawa said with a shrug, I think that the furs would look good on you, Noriko, but why do you need them if you've got fur?"

Shawa stared as Noriko changed then and became a rather small and very lovely oriental woman, standing on bare human feet and on bare human legs. Without the shape of her legs, the girl was a lot shorter.

"I haven't forgotten who I was once," she said, without any of the cocky banter that so often came from the light colored werewolf. But after a moment, Shawa saw that though she looked and sounded so different to the way that she had before, there was even more quiet confidence to be seen this way.