It would be a year there, and a year back. But they guaranteed me as much gold as I could get back to A9 with (which I should have realized potentially included, in the event of my not being able to get back to A9 at all, the amount no gold at all). They sold me the tools to mine the gold, and a miniature cyanide plant for refining the ore. In under three years’ time, I would be set for life.

  “Careful, Yuri, you’ll spook him. The last thing we want’s a sympathetic detonation of the whole herd.”

  Yuri, clearly visible in deep camouflage on the other side of the herd of chrysolopes, hissed into his radio: “The last thing I am wanting, Alasdair, is for him to charge me. He must be massing over three hundred kilos. That is one hundred kilos of xenonogold ester bound up in his big fat hairy ass. If I am needing to put a bullet in him at close range the blast will blow the slug back up my pipe and my face round the other side of my head. If anyone is getting spooked here, it is me.”

  The chrysolopes were one of the few herds remaining in our area—one of the few remaining in the whole of Gulvellir Forest. They stood shoulder-high at the shoulder, and had magnificent dorsal crests that would fluoresce visibly at Hard Dawn if Atlas A were still below the horizon, metabolizing warmth for the beasts out of high energy X- and gamma-rays that would kill a human being on contact. They had no natural weapons; they needed none.

  Many years ago on Earth, chemists had discovered xenon and gold would form cationic complexes; out by Atlas A we’d found out they’d form polymers. The chrysolopes’ fat deposits, an essential defence against winter cold that could freeze dry ice out of the air, were not made of carbon/hydrogen triesters, but freakish xenonogold analogues. Noble gases and noble metals are very difficult to put together and very, very easy to convince to come apart. How the ’lopes synthesized such materials inside themselves was anyone’s guess—no zoologist had taken the trouble to get close enough to a live ’lope to examine it. Almost certainly, though, it was something to do with the high energy photons they collected in their dorsal crests. Dead ’lope flesh also stank of fluorine and burned incautious fingers; the noble molecules were stable only in the presence of fluoride counterions. And they weren’t that stable in any event. The fat deposits on a chrysolope, besides keeping it warm through a long hard winter, were several orders more explosive than nitroglycerine, plastique or that other gold compound known to mediaeval alchemists, aurum fulminans. The chrysolopes’ natural defence was to explode if you messed with them. Or, in occasional cases, if they farted too hard.

  High above, green lamina of auroras rippled in the evening sky. Dark Companion could not be seen, but its position could be inferred from its terrible gravitomagnetic effects on all matter around it. Only the fact that we were still inside the Pleiades cluster made stars visible through the aurorae, and there were aurorae even where we were, close to the equator. Across the clearing, a patch of Hackle Grass was standing up in the increased magnetic field. Companion-rise was approaching. We needed to nail the herd leader and go to ground, get a metre of earth between ourselves and hard gamma.

  “Easy with the LED pipe, Yuri, or you’ll be the one scraping up everything that’s left of him into a bucket. But we need to get this done quickly. There’s a tzee hereabouts, a big one. I saw its foot-craters a quarter kilometre back.”

  The radio scoffed in my ear. “Tzee feet are smaller than the craters they are making. They are just travelling fast.”

  I took a swig from the sweetwater canteen at my belt. Water, water everywhere was dripping on my head out of the rain jungle, but there was no way of knowing whether it was rain or whether it had dripped out of some form of Midas plant life, in which case it would give me heavy metal poisoning and cause organ shutdown weeks in my future. “I’m less concerned with the size of its feet and more with the size of the hole it’ll leave in me. A ’lope factory dozer up near Oro Que Camina had its crew killed to a man by one.”

  “They have probably provoked it. We’re not their natural prey.”

  “’Lopes aren’t our natural prey, but we’re doing a hell of a job on them anyway. The tzee’ve started trailing the hunting teams. They don’t take down ’lope s normally because ’lope and tzee are an explosive combination, but if they find a carcass, they’ll leave the fat and scoff the muscle and organs. Guy back at Croesus Station said they’ve started getting hungry enough to dart in and take flesh off the one side of the bone when a roboprocessor’s already stripping the other. We’re killing everything in their food chain. That’s got to piss a life form off.”

  “I have the bull in sight now . . . just a couple more metres . . . ”

  “Brad, spook the rest of them. I don’t want them anywhere near him if your ex runs him into something hard enough to set him off . . . ”

  The LED pipe was my own design, although, in actual fact, it was an adaptation of a twenty-first century invention. It fired dazzlingly brilliant pulses of laser light, not enough to permanently blind, but enough to cause a human being to keel over clutching his eyeballs and losing his lunch at the same time. We’d had to experiment to work out the correct frequencies for Midasite species, many of whom, for obvious reasons, were able to see well into the x-ray spectrum and even, in some cases, into the gamma. Our machine now had two reliable settings—human and chrysolope. The human setting delivered light at a group of wavelengths that could be accurately described as taupe, which I had long suspected to be the colour of the Devil. Chrysolopes, meanwhile, kingly beasts that they were, preferred the purplest of purples; once hit in the eye with a LED beam, the beasts would fall to the ground in blank confusion, and once down, a fully grown ’lope had great difficulty getting up again. The stag would be ours to tranquillize and liposuck. Then, in an hour’s time, he’d be bounding away, scared and confused but alive to grow a fresh layer of fat for next year. This was our grand plan for perpetuating the herds whilst allowing us to drain off our regular bucket of blood. We could get up to a hundred kilos of fatoid from a fully grown ’lope , which equated to forty-five kilos of gold. Truth to tell, we just hadn’t got the heart to kill the beasts. We were city kids (well—I was a city kid. But I’m pretty sure Brad and Yuri hadn’t seen a cow or pig close up till they were in college, much less killed one).

  Still, it beat being down in Chrystopia Fields. Anything beat being down in Chrystopia Fields.

  “Almost have him . . . but there is a tree in my line of fire . . . ”

  “Take the shot, Yuri. He’s close enough to that tree to lose it in his forward blind spot anyway. That’s why the hammerheaded bastard’s so close to it.”

  “It won’t work, you can’t see it right from your angle . . . ”

  “TAKE THE SHOT—”

  Someone took the shot. The chrysolope stag disappeared in a blinding orange flash. When I raised myself back up onto my elbows, there was ’lope blood all over my binoculars. The blood was a dull orange colour, the colour of vomit. Worse were the fatoid deposits, releasing raw fluorine as soon as they detonated, hydrofluoric shrapnel causing the trees to hiss around me. I was glad the binocular lenses were polyethylene-coated.

  I knew who’d taken the shot.

  “JESUS—” That was Yuri, who was still alive, no thanks to—

  “Balak, you UTTER, UTTER WANKER.”

  A voice cackled through my earphones on the same channel we’d been using to talk to Yuri. “Sorry about that, McQuarrie. Trigger finger slipped. Our herd, our hunting ground. If we can’t have him, no-one will.”

  Brad’s hand fell on my shoulder, and she hissed into my ear: “Careful. You know how many guns he has working for him. We can’t see them. But they can probably see us.”

  Brad stands for Bradamante. It’s a made-up mediaeval romance name, like being called Lancelot, only for girls. Brad’s parents were Filipinos from a sea floor submarino settlement. You know a place is bad when it’s named after a form of torture. Brad’s submarino was so infra dig it had a number rather than a name. Brad’s mother had dreamed of her daughter standing bareheaded under a sun, any sun, breathing unrecycled air. Sometimes her fantasies had run to Brad riding mighty horses through virgin forest and very possibly robbing the rich to feed the poor—hence the name. She was eventually committed, but hey, a gal can dream.

  “He’s all over the landscape now. We’re trying to save these beasts so we can keep farming them for gold—”

  The radio cackled again. “Me, I’m trying to kill as many of ’em as possible. Don’t much care for saving ’em. Got plenty of non-explosive rounds for all the does and fauns. Then it’s back to Earth and a tropical paradise of my own. I’m thinking Madagascar.”

  “You’ve spooked the whole of the rest of the herd! They’ll be miles away by now!”

  “We’ve got technology on our side. Nothing can outrun an electric car.” Designed for use in prospecting asteroids, ’Roid Rovers had had to be extensively modified to be any use in gravity this heavy. One tonne weights had to be removed from their centres of gravity, to begin with.

  “Leave it, Alasdair,” whispered Brad. “We already have over two hundred kilos of fatoid.” She was remarkably forgiving, considering Balak had just narrowly missed detonating her ex-husband. Yuri had come from a Russian sea-floor settlement in the Arctic; the way Brad and Yuri had met had been the stuff of Brad’s mother’s romances. Both trainee comms operators, they had heard one another’s voices on VLF radio, and despite a thousand miles of separation, fallen in love. After they had finally met face to face, more prosaic things such as Brad’s gat teeth and Yuri’s bald head and belly had come to the fore. They were divorced on our third journey out to Canis. Once they were divorced, they got along a whole lot better, and their sex life seemed to have improved.

  “And that buys us what, in Robinsonade? A couple of nights’ stay at a hotel I wouldn’t piss in back on Earth? A couple of square meals we know won’t give us heavy metal poisoning?” I tore off the radio earpiece and threw it down in disgust. “And now the whole herd’s dead in any case. And we’ve been tailing it for months.”

  “Maybe the fauns will run clear. Maybe we can save Li’l Truck Bomb.” Li’l Truck Bomb was my favourite, a gawky, fifty-kilo foal who I’d watched slithering out of the egg sac only weeks ago. He was already bigger and stronger than many of the older males around him, and looked set to become an alpha even bigger than his father.

  Far off in the ever-present mist, we could hear low-velocity rounds popping off, aimed for heart shots and maximum bleed. Balak’s crew were practised at this—we heard none of the does exploding. Warning squeaks issued from the ’lope lets on the fringes of the herd—their parents didn’t protect them for the first week after birth, and it was their job, by erecting brightly coloured crests like flamenco fans, to act as Distant Early Warning. But Balak’s team weren’t ignoring the juveniles any more than they were the alphas, betas and does, and ’lope lets were scattering pell-mell through the trees like a heron in a box of frogs, being taken down in mid-air for no reason at all, unless the shooters thought they needed the practice. “Lopelets didn’t grow substantial fat deposits at this time in the long year round Atlas A. No profit would be gained by shooting them; but the herd would die. I could already see, in the middle distance, a processing dozer flinging chunks of bleeding orange flesh hither and yon in a blur of waldo arms. They had already started to carve up the fallen. Seventy-five per cent of the kill would almost certainly be lost in payment for booze, food, fuel and tail for the team back at Robinsonade. A good deal of the rest would be needed to pay for jerry-building whatever device they were planning to use to boost them back to Atlas A. So far we had no proof anyone had ever made that trip successfully. Dark Companion’s magnetic field made radio communication with Atlas A impossible, but every Midasite who’d made the trip knew the drill—to shine back a laser beam at the frequency of one of the Fraunhofer absorption bands for gold when Midas was at periatlasion, to let everyone else know they’d made it, that the journey home was feasible. No such signal had ever been received. Whether the jury-rigged nuclear blast engines had given out or the Jackinaboxes had taken to sandbagging returning prospectors, we had no idea. But no matter—our local engineers were getting more ingenious by the day. Soon we would be able to solve the problem that had killed all our fusion drives—the lack of any form of helium on Midas to cool the superconductors. Helium was relatively common in the Solar System, but out here, gold walked around in tonne-sized chunks, and helium was a rare earth.

  And then he came, tearing out of the nearest thicket at our hide as if he’d always known it was there, moving with incredible speed for a three-legged creature. Brad had fed him by hand when he’d been a ’lope let, and he charged for her, pursued by tracer fire. The rounds produced by Robinsonade’s geegaw armaments industry were inaccurate, and gave a sufficiently small and agile target an even chance of evading a bullet. Brad had no heart to shoot him while he was outside our danger space, and then he was inside our danger space and had leapt up into her arms, knocking her over. When he’d been ever so cute and small, he’d been able to get away with the manoeuvre. Now he stood over her looking down, his retractable eyes out on their horns in puzzlement.

  I could see men trundling our way through the trees, bringing their ‘Roid Rovers to a stop, home-made weapons rising to their shoulders. I saw Yuri stand up suddenly in front of one, take his weapon off him, and beat him viciously about the head, forearms and balls with it. The others switched their aim from Lil’ Truck Bomb to Yuri.

  Without thinking, I flicked a laser pointer up; it hit one of them dead in the eye. He shielded his face and waved to his companions to back off. He knew what would have followed the laser beam if anything had happened to Yuri. The laser beam’s big brother. I’d made the laser harquebus out of a cutting torch designed for use in zero gravity. It was almost too heavy to heft around down here, but the beam would leave a hole in a man big enough for him not to feel a tank shell if it came after.

  Unfortunately, we also only had the one harquebus, and they had considerably more of their less exotic weapons. Within a second, I had also broken out in a bad case of laser dots. Brad, who was still wearing her headset, said: “Take the pointer off him, Alasdair. Balak is telling you to. He says there’ll be what he describes as ‘consequences’ if you don’t.”

  “They can take their guns off Yuri first,” I said, whilst getting the odd feeling I was listening to some distant suicidal idiot saying it. But Balak might shoot Yuri anyway if I lowered the gun. He was that sort of nice fun guy. I wasn’t sure how long I could hold the heavy barrel up in any case. This might all be academic.

  And then the man I had the dot on, and down whose barrel I was looking, disappeared in a puff of blood and bile. I could actually smell the gut acid. Something had hit him so fast that it had burst his stomach like a balloon. He was falling to the ground and had not hit it yet before the next man to his left died. And the next. And the next. All I saw of how it happened was a blur, occasionally and tantalizingly decelerating into a suggestion of shape, of multilegged, low-slung, springloaded-limbed efficiency. Red laser threads were swinging confused through the mist, searching for an enemy that was already elsewhere.

  I heard Balak’s voice fulminating from the grass and snatched up my headset again.

  “—THAT WHAT I THOUGHT IT WAS, McQUARRIE?”

  “I think so. It killed three of your men and went to ground.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “You’re a very lucky man, McQuarrie.”

  I grinned. “Don’t have enough guns left to finish us off reliably, huh.”

  “I’ll deal with you later. I’m not in the habit of sticking around where there’s a rogue tzee.”

  “Neither is a rogue tzee,” said Yuri. “You only ever see where they were, not where they are. I’d get the hell out of here quickly if I were you, Balak, or if it doesn’t get you, I will—”

  “Thank you for that. I now know which of you to do this to.”

  A shot sounded; Yuri yelped and dropped to one knee, hands clasped around the other one. Blood seeped from between his fingers.

  “Be seeing you. Tzee like wounded prey, so I hear. They’re like cats. They like to play. Gives me time to make my exit. Nothing personal.” I heard a sound of backward scuttling through undergrowth. The radio clicked, and there was nothing more but static.

  “Where is it now?” whispered Brad. “Anything moving at that speed would send the underbrush flying.”

  “Common wisdom has it tzee probably need to cool down after they move,” I said. “It might have flopped into a stream or something.”

  “What do tzee loook like, you know,” said Brad, “standing still?”

  I shrugged. “No-one knows. No-one’s ever seen one do that. No-one’s ever even found bones. We don’t even think they have bones. It’s a mystery how they’re held together. They’re named after a creature in an old Earth novel. A creature that kills so quickly noever sees it. I’m going to see to Yuri.”

  “Yuri’s injured. Balak said tzee like injured prey.”