Free Brother Death by Steve Perry

been part of it. She and her brother had never talked about it before, not in any depth. Maybe this was a good time, during his visit here, to see how he'd handled being shot at and shooting back. To see if sometimes he dreamed about the things he had done.
    She went back to bed, took a while to fall asleep again. If she dreamed again, she did not remember it when the morning came.

Chapter NINE
    SNAKE ROAD BEGAN at the cutback edge of South Leijona and meandered to the southwest in a lazy S-curve through an old-growth forest spared by the treecutters and now a national park. The road could easily have been named for its shape as viewed from the air; could have been, but was not. In the early years of the colony on Tembo, more serpents lived in this region than did everywhere else on the planet combined. In those times there thrived Bloat Adders, green, orange and blue Neons, Black Tigers, Birdheads, Queen-and-Jacks, Water Rollers, Hilt Ring Asps-and scores of other legless reptiles from a few centimeters long and thin as spaghetti to ten meters and thick as a big man's thigh. From harmless to dead-before-you-hit-the-ground toxicity if one bit you. Snake Road had been a herpetologist's orgasmic dream, a place where an active scientist could spend years simply identifying and cataloguing new species.
    Many of those species were gone now, killed out of fear or for their unique hides or simply by passing vehicles and the press of civilization, but hikers were still advised to carry repellors when walking along Snake Road and warned to be careful even with the electronic protectors. A man squatting to defecate in a stand of flametrees had been bitten on the buttock last month by a doubtlessly surprised Grassmaster and had died before his companions could com for aid. And a tourist heading for the ruins only last week stepped on a kitani, a variant of the local Linen Snake, and lost his foot from the poison despite immediate first aid and aggressive medical treatment begun within five minutes of the strike.
    Civilization might be able to fling humans across the galaxy in ships that bent the fabric of space and time, but it still paid to watch where you put your feet when walking in snake-infested bush.
    Kifo smiled at the thought as he walked along the edge of the plastcrete road. The morning sun was halfway to its midday perch, but the humid air was still considerably cooler than the body temperature it would achieve in the afternoon unless one of the local rain showers stymied it. Pollen and mold and other plant detritus hung fecund in the air and the smells were tropical and damp. He was far enough away so the airwash of passing vehicles didn't bother him much, close enough to stay out of the chemically stunted brush that lined the pedestrian path. He carried a repellor, of course, the small device even now uttering silent but jangling and harsh electronic pulses that supposedly made the average reptile wish to hurry and seek its fortunes elsewhere. And his vouch rolled along behind him on its rugged and fat all-terrain silicone wheels. The vouch was Healy's top-of-the-line model and could, so Kifo had been told, climb a wall or a tree with special grapples to reach its master should the need arise.
    The little suitcase was also supposedly full of antitoxins proof against any known venom the local slitherers carried.
    The repellor and the vouch were helpful, of course, as was the wide-beam hand wand secretly built into his walking stick, but Kifo did not really think any of them were necessary. The gods would hardly allow their Unique to be taken down by a common snake or passing cutpurse unless they were mightily displeased with him, and he didn't think he had given them any reason for such displeasure.
    It never hurt to check, though. Which was why he hiked the ten-kilometer stretch between the outskirts of South Leijona and the Zonn Ruins. He could have ridden, of course, but walking allowed a man the time to put himself in