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Words: 27635 in 15 pages
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THE MAN THE TECH-MEN MADE
The relentless heat of yellow-white twin suns boiled the thin desert air and it seared his laboring lungs, and he knew why this was called the Desert of One Thousand Mirages. The Desert of One Thousand Hells would have been a better name.
They said a man could go mad here. If not from the crazily twisting, undulating heat shapes themselves, then from the pain-tortured vagaries of his own brain. But mad or not, Jonny Kane knew he must somehow stay in the saddle that was not fashioned for human buttocks; stay astride the silver skinned, hairless beast never bred for human transportation, and ride.
They could be all around him, of course, and he might never know until it was too late to wheel his fleet qharaak and dash again for freedom in yet another direction across the shifting, low-duned wastes. They could be but yards behind him but there was not the strength to look back, only to grip the thick reins twined about his bleeding wrists, to keep his cramped legs stiff about the qharaak's sloping flanks. And ride, and choke on the smoking sand.
His brain bubbled inside his head, and he shut his eyes.
He would tire and lose his grip, and so lose his mount, and fry to death on the blinding whiteness of the sand. Or he would go crashing into them, and they would lead him back to the outpost village, and his death would be of their making. What chance, after all, had an Earth-descendant against the copper skinned native police of a Procyon planet, who rode its deserts as if they were the cool, green fields of the mother world of which his father had so often spoken? What chance?
There was flame in his lungs, and fire was burning the insides of his half naked, once strong young body into crumbling, blackened ash. Ride--
"Hold! Hold, or there's a barb through your evil heart!"
The booming command was from the left. And he wheeled the qharaak so sharply it reared and nearly lost its sextuple footing in the shifting sand. A sudden thrummm went past one ear. He tried to loose his legs enough for a kick in the lunging animal's flanks, but the muscles in them were like steel clamps. They would not move.
The reins about his wrists were slippery and stinging with sweat and sand as both mixed with his blood, and were pulled easily enough from his grasp by the vicious, sudden tug from one side.
And then the overpowering odor of the other lathered qharaaks flooded his nostrils as the Dep-Troopers closed in upon him. He retched with it, and was sick.
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