Counterweight Read Free

the conference room and probed him about it. Through
several dozen questions, considered but not asked, he learned of the value that
was still placed on spicewood and knew he had the ability to apply leverage.
    They’d only landed on 3428 after being shot up by raiders,
but there was an easy way to ensure their silence. There was enough spicewood
on 3428 to make a thousand men rich and Fletcher knew the smuggler captain and
his crew, all family, would go to great lengths to protect the secret behind
their new-found windfall.
    But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t get greedy.
    The deal had been struck almost a year ago and both sides
had done well. The smugglers’ shuttle, sitting just inside the hangar bay of
the Canal , was a shiny new model, a far cry from the piece of garbage
they’d landed in the first encounter. The food and textiles brought by the
traders had gone a long way toward making life a little more comfortable for
the Humans and Rick had managed to get his hands on enough parts to start
bringing the Canal back up to snuff.
    As a direct descendant of the ship’s original chief
engineer, Sandy Heywood, Rick and his older brother had inherited the job, and
the parts brought in trade had gone a long way toward reversing the ravages of
time.
    But now, it looked like the smugglers were thinking about
cutting out the middle-man. As Rick crouched in the tropical humidity, the two
smugglers in the clearing ahead were stacking up sections of spicewood trunks.
    The agreement was clear. The Humans would harvest the wood,
and the only loading point would be in the hangar deck of the Canal. The
smugglers were obviously padding the deal with a little free wood.
    Rick couldn’t see more than fourteen seconds into his own
future, but he didn’t need his pre-cog ability to know that things would go
badly for his people if they were cut out of the deal.
    Rising to one knee, he drew his recurve bow, massive arm and
back muscles making light of a motion he’d been practicing his entire adult
life. He took careful aim at the farthest smuggler. He waited for a few seconds
to avoid an apparent lack of distraction with the nearest man and then loosed. The
arrow, made of dense spicewood, took the man in the armpit as he reached up to
wipe the sweat from his face. His body pitched sideways from the force, just as
Rick knew it would.
    He was already attending to the death of the second man, who
was just starting to notice something was amiss. Rick aimed at a spot above the
second man’s head and released the second arrow as the target rose to go to his
comrade’s aid. The arrow punched through his back, snapped a rib and destroyed
his heart.
    Rick rose to his feet and, seeing no complications, jogged
into the clearing to retrieve his arrows. Even in death, they couldn’t have
spicewood they hadn’t paid for, and the arrows would raise questions. Far
better to let nature take its course.
    He wiped the shafts on a smuggler’s shirt before rinsing
them off with some of his drinking water. He reached into his pouch and pulled
out a salve laced with chimera urine, applying it to the two shafts. With a
quick scan of the ground to ensure he hadn’t dropped anything, he turned and
loped off into the undergrowth to retrieve the springbuck he’d shot earlier.
    He was halfway there when he heard the first snarls of a
chimera. In this region, exposed humanoid blood would draw them within minutes.
If you scratched yourself and didn’t have any salve to cover the smell, you’d
be better off cutting your own throat. Weighing just over eight hundred kilos,
the chimera was a four-legged predator covered in thick, protruding chitinous
scales that acted as heat sinks. Though reptilian in appearance, they gave
birth to live young and fed them from mammary glands.
    They loved the smell of humanoid blood above all other prey
for some reason, and Rick knew he’d have an easier than usual time returning
home with the slightly-bloody but heavily