The Quillian Sector

"Expeditions sent and lost," said Yoka. "Companies formed and dissolved, as the investigations they made turned to nothing. We are not interested in such planets. We are only interested in your quarry."

"Dumarest."

"Yes, Dumarest You are confident you can track him down?"

"Guide me to a world and if he is on it, I will find him. More, give me a cluster of worlds and I will show you which he will make for. You think I boast?" Bochner shook his head. "I speak from knowledge. From conviction. From experience."

"A claim others have made. Now, they are dead."

"Killed by Dumarest?" Bochner looked at his hands. "I can take care of myself."

A conviction shared by others before they had died, but Irae didn't mention that. Instead, he said, "Tell me one thing, Bochner. Aside from the reward, why do you want to hunt Dumarest?"

"Why?" Bochner inhaled, his breath a sibilant hiss over his teeth. "Because if half of what you've told me is true, then he is the most wily, the most dangerous and the most interesting quarry I could ever hope to find."

The ship was small, unmarked; The crew, taciturn servants of the Cyclan. Alone in his cabin, Bochner went through his routine exercises, movements designed to keep his muscles in trim and his reflexes at their peak. When Caradoc opened the door he was standing, dressed only in pants, shoes and blouse, a knife balanced on its point on the back of his right hand, which was held level at waist height. As the young cyber watched, he dropped the hand and, as the knife dropped towards his foot snatched at it with his left hand, catching the hilt and tossing it upwards to circle once before catching it in his right.

"A game," he explained. "One played often on Vrage. There we stood naked and held our hands at knee height. Miss and you speared a foot. There was a more sophisticated version played for higher stakes in which, if you were slow, you usually died." Idly, he spun the knife. "You have used a blade?"

"No."

"You should. The feel of it does something to a man. Cold, razor-sharp steel, catching and reflecting the light, speaking with its edge, its point, words of threat and pain. Watch a man with a knife and see how he moves. A good fighter becomes an appendage of his weapon. A man with a gun gives less cause for concern. Why? Can you tell me why?"

"A gun is dispassionate. Everyone knows what a knife can do."

"Cut and slash and maim and cripple. True, but a gun can do that and more. But still the psychological factor remains." Then in the same tone of voice he added, "Is that why Dumarest carries a knife?"

"You have read the reports."

"Words on paper-what do they tell me about the man? I need to know how he looks, how he walks, the manner in which he snuffs the air. You think I joke? Smell is as important to a man as to a beast, even though he may not be aware of it. And a man hunted and knowing it seems to develop his faculties. So what is Dumarest really like?"

"I have never seen him."

"He wears gray, he carries a knife, he travels. High when he can afford it low when he cannot. Space is full of such wanderers. What makes him so special?" It was a question to which he expected no answer, and gained none. Either Caradoc didn't know or had no intention of telling, but it was early yet and, later-who could tell? Gesturing to his bunk, he said, "Sit and join me in some wine."

"No," said Caradoc.

"No to the wine, to the offer of rest, or both?"

"I need neither."

A thing Bochner had known but had deliberately ignored, Caradoc was a cyber and the nearest thing to a living machine possible to achieve. To him, food was mere fuel to power the body. He was a stranger to emotion and unable to feel it by virtue of the operation performed on his cortex shortly after reaching puberty. A creature selected and trained by the Cyclan, converted into an organic computer, a metabolic robot who could only know the pleasure of mental achievement.

Sitting, Bochner stared at him, wondering what it would be like to have been like him, to have worn the scarlet robe, to have relinquished all the things which most men held dear. Caradoc would never know the thrill of sitting in a hide waiting for the quarry to appear, to aim, to select the target, to fire, to know the heady exultation of one who has dispensed death. The sheer ecstasy of pitting mind against mind in the hunt for one of his own kind-the most exciting and dangerous quarry of all. To kill and to escape, which often was harder than the kill itself. To outguess and outmaneuver. To anticipate and to watch the stunned sickness in a quarry's eyes. To hear the babble for mercy, see the futile twitches as the demoralized creature tried to escape, to plan even while it begged to die, finally, when the hunter had become bored.

No, Caradoc would never know what it was to be bored and for that alone, Bochner could envy him.