Free Hunted by James Alan Gardner Page A

but it’d be a pathetic excuse for an evac module if it didn’t carry basic supplies. On the other hand, I didn’t think I’d have to settle for bland protein bars and squeeze tubes of fiber paste…because behind me were fields full of vegetables as far as the eye could see.
    The canal ran along one edge of a valley whose soil was almost jet-black. That meant the dirt was as rich as gravy…and it was covered with crops planted in neat rows forming neat squares—a checkerboard in shades of green stretching from the canal all the way to some distant hills. The plants looked young, like this was only late spring or early summer, but I could already recognize onions and lettuce and carrots in the fields closest to me. Honest-to-goodness Earth food growing in a big gorgeous garden that smelled of humus and greenery.
    A paved road ran close in front of me, parallel to the canal and separated from the water by the scrawny trees growing on the bank. Here and there along the road stood little environment domes in clusters of two or three—living spaces for the families who worked these farms. At the moment, I couldn’t see anyone out in the fields…but the strong orange sun was straight overhead, and toasty hot even with my clothes soaked to the skin, so I guessed everybody had gone inside for siesta.
    I got up, brushed the worst-caked mud off my uniform, and started down the road toward the nearest domes. No one would want me showing up unannounced in the middle of lunch; but I’d wait till people went back out to work, and I’d say hello then. On a day like this, there was no need to hurry. It was heaven just to breathe real air, away from the nanites and the black ship and Troyen…
    A doorway dilated in the side of the closest dome. Out stepped a Mandasar—warrior caste, big and red. The instant he caught sight of me, he screamed a battlecry and charged.

    Mandasar warriors are only half as big as queens, but they’re still the size of Brahma bulls. They’ve got the basic lobsterish look, but bulked-up and stocky, from their flat wide faces to their strong blunt tails. If a warrior props his tail good and solid on the ground behind him, you can hit him with a truck and he won’t be knocked backward; in fact, once he gets his eight legs on solid footing, he can push that truck back the other way, over rough terrain, for hour after hour. Put a bunch of warriors together and you get a line of foot soldiers who can steamroll over anything in their path…except another line of Mandasars driving the opposite way.
    Don’t get the idea warriors are slow-moving hulks; they can storm forward on those eight strong legs as fast as horse cavalry. When they’re running they look like old Greek centaurs, because the front part of their body is angled up vertically as tall as a human. Upright front, lobstery behind.
    Like queens, every warrior has pincer claws, but only two of them, on stubby arms down at the waist. The claws are sharp and nasty enough to lop clean through a human’s leg, bones and all, if you’re careless enough to let your ankle come within reach. At shoulder level, warriors have another set of arms, called the Cheejreth or “clever twigs”: spindly six-fingered things used for fine manipulation. Cheejreth are nearly as long as human arms, but skinny and fragile—so weak, a human five-year-old could wrist-wrestle a warrior ten wins out of ten. During a serious fight, the Cheejreth stay folded against the chest, tucked into arm-sized niches in the warrior’s carapace; those niches evolved to keep Cheejreth safely out of the way, rather than flopping around and getting snapped off.
    Topping the body is a head like a cannonball, its carapace armor twice as thick as any other part of the warrior’s shell. The head has a few delicate parts—huge feathery ears like moth antennas, and cat-style whiskers around the snout to serve as extra scent receptors, waving about to catch odor molecules from the air—but