Star Hunters by Jo Clayton

Author:Jo Clayton [Clayton, Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780886772192
Publisher: Penguin Group USA
Published: 1981-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

swarm up the ladder, laughing again, his old eyes dancing. A damn good life, mine, he thought.

Better than any of those bastards can boast. He shot the first man up the ladder and the second.

He died hard. Like the roots of a water tree, the roots of his life went deep in the wiry old body.

He lasted longer than the other teachers. When they were dead, he was still fighting, roaring out his old songs, nearly buried by dead men. But in the end he died. Torn apart by the mob. They worried at him like wild dogs worry their prey. Then they burned the building down around his fragmented body. And wandered back into the street, the blindrage appeased by blood and destruction. With tired satisfaction the attackers left the burning buildings behind them and ambled back to their families for food and sleep.

Grey sat up, conscious at first only of the pain in his body. He grunted as he probed the sorest spots, then grimaced in reluctant appreciation. A delicate job of battering. Every inch of skin bruised and not a bone broken.

Faiseh lay huddled beside him, still out. Grey ran fingers over his head wondering if the watuk had a concussion. There was a knot over his left ear but he was breathing easily. Grey touched the large artery in his neck. A good strong pulse.

Groaning, stretching, working his hands and his body to warm out the stiffness, he walked around their odd prison. They were in a cage six meters on a side with a solid metal sheet underfoot and overhead, joined by heavy square bars about a hand’s width apart. He looked through at the room beyond.

They were in a great natural cavern tailored for human usage by slabs of metacrete. At his left a metacrete sheet blocked off part of the cavern. It was pierced by several arches. Through one he could see a gray-floored corridor.

Through another, the obligatory white tiles and complex instrumentation of a lab, with white-coated acolytes bustling about or hovering anxiously over banks of dials. Grey scowled and rubbed at his ribs. These attendants seemed absurdly out of place in the rugged stone of the cavern.

Closer at hand, almost within reach of the cage, a watuk sat cross-legged on a cushion, facing a glass wall with a great maze of glass cubes behind it. Each cube held a limp hare, bulging head shaved, tubes weaving through and around its lumpy body like a glassy cocoon, shimmering lines of force flowing around and over each obscene pink head. Grey counted the cubes. Twenty up, forty across. And behind the front tier, stretching away like fading images in a hazy mirror, more hares, more cubes. He licked his lips, feeling nauseated. Hastily he looked back at the silent, seated watuk.

The watuk’s head was shaved and a web of light like those shimmering over the harebrains hovered over it, linked to a polished steel scull cap. Beside him a metal egg a meter and a half tall rested enigmatically on a squat metal cylinder.

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