Star Hunter

MP3 Audio CD. Star Hunter

I


Nahuatl's larger moon pursued the smaller, greenish globe of its
companion across a cloudless sky in which the stars made a speckled
pattern like the scales of a huge serpent coiled around a black bowl.
Ras Hume paused at the border of scented spike-flowers on the top
terrace of the Pleasure House to wonder why he thought of serpents. He
understood. Mankind's age-old hatred, brought from his native planet
to the distant stars, was evil symbolized by a coil in a twisted,
belly-path across the ground. And on Nahuatl, as well as a dozen other
worlds, Wass was the serpent.

A night wind was rising, stirring the exotic, half-dozen other worlds'
foliage planted cunningly on the terrace to simulate the mystery of an
off-world jungle.

"Hume?" The inquiry seemed to come out of thin air over his head.

"Hume," he repeated his own name calmly.

A shaft of light brilliant enough to dazzle the eyes struck through
the massed vegetation, revealing a path. Hume lingered for a moment,
offering a counterstroke of indifference in what he had always known
would be a test of wits. Wass was Veep of a shadowy empire, but that
was apart from the world in which Ras Hume moved.

He strode deliberately down the corridor illuminated between leaf and
blossom walls. A grotesque lump of crystal leered at him from the
heart of a tharsala lilly bed. The intricate carving of a devilish
nonhuman set of features was a work of alien art. Tendrils of smoke
curled from the thing's flat nostrils, and Hume sniffed the scent of a
narcotic he recognized. He smiled. Such measures might soften up the
usual civ Wass interviewed here. But a star pilot turned out-hunter
was immunized against such mind clouding.