I knew he was government the minute I saw him. Conservative gray leathers, short dark hair slicked back, mirrored UVs pushed up on his head, I figured him for IRS so it was a real surprise to see the silver DOI buffalo heads flashing from his narrow collar. He came around the corner of the stables, walking like he didn’t want anything sticking to his high-gloss jackboots, his eyes on my team like they were solid gold and about to melt any minute.

I had just watered down the sorsh. Steam rose from their green-mottled hides as they stretched out muscle kinks and chittered away in whatever passed for an adrenaline rush in their xenosaurian chemistry. All three of them were high with winning, slit-nostrils huffing, membranes snapping back and forth over their orange eyes, snouts half open so that you could get a glimpse of dozens of back-curving teeth in the sorsh version of a victory smile.

"Hi. My name’s Nick OCallan. This your sorsh team?" The easy grin and the hand he stuck out were for me, but his intense blue gaze was on the sorsh.

The question struck me as rhetorical. I whistled through the gap in my front teeth to get the team’s attention. "This is Kharkh, Sehn, and Yhss, Team Sorsh White Edge, who, I am proud to say, just won the first heat of the 32nd Iron Thing Triathalon." To the sorsh, I handsigned Fat rabbit who controls land. Likes you. Maybe police.

They are shameless in their desire for attention, rowdy roisterers always ready to strut for an audience. Kharkh stretched to his full two-meter height, preening the indigo crest running from the flat of his wedged head to the end of his sinuous tail. Long muscles slid iridescent waves over his pebbled skin. Sehn and Yhss flowed through their warrior’s poses, scarlet tongues flickering hisses at OCallan, handsigning way too fast for me to keep up, but something about the taste of fame.

OCallan barely hesitated before he held out his hand to the sorsh in their fashion, palm up. Kharkh glanced at me for the okay before he delicately touched his claws to OCallan’s fingertips. Yhss followed Kharkh’s lead, but Sehn twitched one claw. A bright drop of blood appeared on OCallan’s thumb. He ignored it. "A fine team. Congratulations."

Then he turned the full force of that big, white-toothed grin on me. "And you’re Sonia Vasilyeva, Sorsh Runner Registry Number SV004."

Unlike my sorsh, I get twitchy when someone knows who I am. Fame gets you in trouble, more often than not. "So?"

The sorsh picked up my unease and became suddenly very still, their toothy snouts centered on OCallan.

OCallan showed no sign of noticing. He unzipped his left sleeve and bared his forearm, showing me his ID imprint with a holo of the Department of the Interior seal and Special Security designation. "The Department needs you for a hunt."

I’m good at controlling my emotions around the sorsh. If I wasn’t, I couldn’t run them. Damping the anger that surged in a sullen wave, I signed to the sorsh to head for the mud pool to stay limber for the next heat. Kharkh hung back for a moment, watching, before he followed the others.

The sun slanted in over the rim of Meteor Crater, reflecting on thousands of UV glasses in the stands built up the sides of the bowl. A raw-throated roar bounced around the arena, echoing from side to side, more animal than human. But then, forty years ago, humans would have thought that most of the xenos packed into the stands were animals. Less than human. That got knocked out of us pretty fast. Learning that the only reason the galactic Dyarchy contacted you was so they would have another frontier world on which to dump their riffraff cuts you down to size real quick.

But life goes on and you gotta eat. By some weird kink in galactic chemistry, I have the right combination of pheromones and emotional stability to run sorsh, to bind them to me so that my well-being is their first concern. It’s a genetic imperative in their species to protect any female who smells like I do. We make a good team. I’m culture-normal, so I make the plans, do the paperwork, and the sorsh are lethal and loyal brawn with a nasty sense of humor.

In their own culture, my sorsh are the lusty males, the pirates and brigands, the swashbucklers who push the boundaries and step off the edges, lured by curiosity and dreams of glory. In Dyarchic space, they’re criminals whose racial name translates as kineaters.

OCallan waited me out while I pretended to watch the sorsh leave and reminded myself that in the halls of power, I wasn’t even a janitor. And this easy-standing, smiling man was more than he had yet showed. I dried my hands on the towel hung around my neck and pushed sweaty hair off my forehead. "We’re not in that business anymore. We retired."

He had the kind of grin that started with his eyes and warmed you all the way to the ground. "Washington told me that’s what you’d say. Give me a chance to change your mind."

"We paid off our contract. We’re free and clear."

He ducked his head. "Look, I’m not trying to bludgeon you into this. Just let me lay out the deal."

"Not interested."

"The money’s good, and it’s a perfect hunt for the sorsh–"

"Mr. OCallan–"

"Nick."

"Mr. OCallan, we’ve brought in murderers, rapists, terrorists, kidnappers, and two women wanted for high treason. It’s an ugly life and we’ve done our share. Now we’re finished. As far as the money goes, my team is about to win 400.000d in this competition. You can’t give me anything we need."

He nodded. "Yeah, they’ll probably win. I watched the first heat. No other team can match them for speed. They’ll likely take the agility heat, but they’re not likely to take the strength trial. The Ferroven Blue team has got two gravities on your sorsh, and armor that will turn their claws."

He had a good eye for the virtues of the teams. I was a little worried about the strength trial, too. "The points are cumulative. If we take the next heat, we can come in third in the last heat and still take the title."

"And run the risk of getting them seriously hurt. The fans want blood, and the Ferroven will be glad to give it to them. The Blues won last year because the other finalist teams didn’t have enough members on the field to finish the trial."

He had that same ability as the sorsh to be very still, to focus totally on his intent. I felt like I was being skewered to a pin board.

"And if you win, what then?" he asked.

"We buy a piece of land with plenty of game for the sorsh, and peace and quiet for me."

He chuckled. "If your team is the new Iron Thing Champions, peace and quiet is the last thing you’ll have. Every sporting goods manufacturer, every crook and shyster from every planet in this slice of the galaxy, will be after them for endorsements, personal appearances, live-action commercials, get-rich-quick schemes. Is that what you want?"

"We’ll weather it. There’ll be new champions next year."

OCallan shrugged. "Maybe. Look around you: livesat cams, color, noise, excitement, hard money, all the trappings of fame. I hear it gets seductive."

He was right, of course. The sorsh loved it. They’d want to do it again next year, and the year after that until they were killed or beaten.

He leaned in at me, still grinning. "Sonia, let me be honest with you. I’m authorized to go as high as 600.000d for a successful dead or alive hunt, 300.000d even if we fail. One human, armed and dangerous, a terrorist gunrunner, alone in the Dark Canyon Primitive Area. We need this done quietly, no upsetting the tourists. A week maximum, full government compensation for any and all injuries or deaths, first-class logistics. And then it’s all over. You have the money and the freedom of anonymity. You can do what you want, go wherever you want." His voice dropped into an intimate murmur. "The sorsh will do what you tell them. Leave right now, before the next heat. Scratch the team. I have a jumprig waiting; you can be at the trailhead in three hours."

And damn him for a slit-tongued liar. It wasn’t that easy. It was never that easy. I whistled the sorsh out of the pool, gathered them around OCallan, and handsigned, This man wants you for hunt. Now. Big money, bad job.

Our physiology prevents much verbal communication and they steadfastly refuse to learn to read and write in either language, such activity being beneath their warrior status. They respond to my attempted pronunciations of their names, but I had to learn their hunting handsigns. It limits our conversations mostly to pragmatics.

The sorsh hissed and snicked to each other for half a minute, then Kharkh signed, Yes. After win.

No. Now. Quit contest.

Kharkh’s claws cut the air. Win first.

I shook my head. I could feel OCallan’s impatience at my shoulder.

Sehn hissed for attention. Win here, get big metal thing and money? Go on Chewed Bone Path, kill and get money? Not both?

"Yes."

OCallan’s grin got an edge to it. "What are they saying?"

"They’re deciding where the most honor lies in this situation."

The five-minute warning klaxon for the second heat blared over our heads, answered by a surge in the crowd noise. Kharkh raised his long head, tongue tasting the air. Female, what think? Yes, no?

Tired of hunting and maybe killing people, was what I wanted to say. I signed, You choose, warrior.Kharkh chittered, and Sehn and Yhss puffed up their throats, agreeing with him. Make bargain, female. Run next heat, beat rot-slime Wasash team, take their honor, then go hunt. Make happen, yes?Sometimes their perfect trust in me is an ethical pain in the ass. Try. I hung my head, chewed at my lip, scuffed in the sawdust. "They’re not interested," I said.

OCallan’s voice got calm. I didn’t need the sorsh’s pit sensors to feel him smooth over. "But you can change their minds, Sonia. It’s a good offer, good money."

"They don’t care. They want to win the Triathalon."

If you’d run my somatotype preferences through a computer, you’d have come up with OCallan. Maybe they did, because he was using all the wattage of that friendly, open grin and those galvanic blue eyes to reach me.

"I need you, Sonia. You and your team. I have a killer running loose somewhere in about a million square acres. I can’t pick him up off satscan because there’s also about a million Dyarchic tourists wandering around the same area. Every one of them is in danger. We need this done quietly. We need your sorsh team."

The two-minute warning sounded. The sorsh hissed with eagerness. I looked at OCallan. "We’ll run this heat, win or lose. Then we’ll do your hunt, but we want the extra 400.000d they would have won here, and Dyarchic Freespace Passports. The passports up front." I gave his smile back to him. "I can talk them into that."

OCallan joined me at the barricade, UVs down, hanging his arms over the railing and looking down into the trials pit. "DOI says to give you what you want, but I think you just derailed my promotion track for a couple of years." He held out four bright new passport chips and shined on that grin again. "In return, how about you pretend I’m a real human being and not a government cog?"

I tucked the passport chips in my neck purse. "I can do that."

The teams were milling around in the starting circles, bristling at each other, but keeping it clean under the eyes and sensors of the referees. They weren’t free to injure each other until the contest began, but insults to your maternal being sound much the same in any language.

No humans at this level of competition, these days. We aren’t fast enough, or big enough; no fangs or claws, no spikes or carapaces or venom. All we are is vicious enough, and that hasn’t gotten a human past the prelims in a quarter of a century. Turns out we make a great training planet, though.

Last year’s champions, the Ferroven Blues, are from a higrav planet some 50LY toward the galactic center. They look and sound like hairless bears that have grown their own football armor. Their hides are pumpkin color and their shoulders sparkle with implanted milky jewels. The shortest one was half a head taller than Kharkh and outweighed him by a factor of three.

The Wasash, in Red, are another reptilian race, which is probably why my sorsh are so scornful of them. When I ask them, they only sign something about the Wasash laying eggs in tall trees, a cultural insult that escapes my sensibility.

The Hurove Greens have no single Terran analog. Parts of them seem insectoid, parts cephalopodic, parts mammalian. They look wrong. Your eyes kind of slide away when you try to look at them. They’re mostly dark blotches with various protrusions. Good all around competitors, though, even if you can’t quite tell how they move.

OCallan’s nostrils widened, taking in the mingled smells of the arena, a compound of mud, sweat, bloodfluids, and the lust of the tight-packed crowd.

There are two kinds of spectators at sporting events: the investors who risk nothing but money, and the lusters, who fantasize being out there, win or lose. I would have bet OCallan for the first, but I was wrong. He was reacting physically to the blood-energy.

The scoreboard strobes went on, flashing through the range of visible light for each team. The teams settled into their starting positions. I forgot OCallan.

We’d gone over strategy and tactics until Sehn finally had a fit and refused to study any more, his raised crest and slitted hiss saying he was serious. We could beat any team on agility, but we had to get past the Blues to reach the first obstacle, an inward-leaning bungee net salted with 125 decibel sonic grenades.

Our starting placement wasn’t all that good: second, with the Blues third, right next to us. The Blues weren’t big on subtlety. When the starter’s strobe flashed, they made no pretense of following the course. All three of them lunged for my sorsh.

Sehn followed the plan, bless his heart. With an eye-tearing burst of speed, he went for the net, slashing a claw at a Wasash Red on the way. Kharkh and Yhss ganged the lead Blue, taking it down in a tumble of flashing scales, then split to engage the other two.

The Blues were slow, but damn they were big. One caught Yhss with a backhanded blow that knocked my sorsh thirty feet across the sand. Yhss lay unmoving while the Blue lumbered down on him. Kharkh had the other Blue tangled up in its own legs as he circled it, slashing with his feet claws, finding chinks in its armored hide, pale pink blood beginning to splatter the sand.

Sehn had streaked past the rolling skitter of the Green team and was halfway up the net, stretching for a grenade. He grabbed one, popped the pin, and tossed it at the two Reds who had clotted up on the net below him. The concussion flung them to the ground, taking a Green with them as they fell. Sehn slithered sideways across the net, going for another grenade.

Yhss was half up, shaking his snout, with the Blue looming over him with a raised fist the size of Kansas, when Kharkh slid past his opponent and loosed all that wiry muscle into a flying tackle that brought the Blue to its knees, Yhss rolling wildly to the side. Kharkh yanked Yhss to his feet and they lit out for the net, all three Blues on their tails and a Red and two Greens between them and Sehn.

They split at the net, Yhss leaping over the two concussed Reds, scrambling toward an unguarded patch of grenades, Kharkh swarming overtop the various protrusions of a Green, slashing back with his hind claws, slowing the jumbled mass, but not stopping it. A reptilian Red fastened his jaws on Sehn’s whipping tail, dragging my sorsh back into the clutches of the other Green, becoming a hissing, growling, whistling, tangled ball of legs, tails, pincers, and tendrils. Kharkh darted to the left around them, climbing the bouncing net with a burst of speed not yet seen. From a position above them, Kharkh gripped the net and shook it, dislodging one Blue that fell ten meters, landed with a sickening crack and didn’t get up.

Saurians are masters of energy conservation. Alone among a patch of grenades, Yhss was still, sides heaving, ignoring the two concussed Reds who were now crawling slowly up the net at him, his eyes on Kharkh.

Kharkh hung from the net by his back talons, slashing at the tangle around Sehn with his foreclaws. He must have ripped something important on one of the Greens, because all its appendages folded inward and it dropped from the net to lie curled up on the blood-splotched sand. Kharkh grabbed Sehn’s hand and pulled. Sehn came halfway out of the tangle, then lost his grip, dragged back into the melee that now included a Ferroven Blue. The other Blue was coming in sideways at Kharkh, its massive paws stretched to gather up my slender sorsh into its bone-crushing grip.

Kharkh fled. He swarmed up the inward incline of mesh, scrambling as far as possible from the tangled clot of fighters.

I heard OCallan grunt, a scornful negation of Kharkh’s flight.

From the top of the net, Kharkh wound his arms and legs through the strands, then shrieked a saurian warcry, a knife edge sound that stood your neck hair on end.

Yhss returned that cry, and tossed a sonic grenade at the struggling mass around Sehn. The detonation cleared the tangle from the net, all except for Sehn who had, after all, studied the plan, and was left hanging unconscious but with all four limbs thoroughly tangled in the mesh. Kharkh went for Sehn while Yhss lashed his tail at the two Reds below him, snicked one quick claw along a Red snout, and leaped for the top of the net.

With Sehn’s limp body over one shoulder, Kharkh joined Yhss. Leaving a hissed insult in their wake, they flickered across a half-meter Teflon-covered pipe bridging a pit of stakes, down a slope of buckyballs spiked with razor-edged baffles, and strutted across the finish line in a contemptuous walk, Sehn’s arms stretched across their shoulders, his pupils only wandering pinpoints in his orange eyes, but his feet on the ground.

The crowd, as they say, went wild.

The sorsh weren’t happy about scratching a sure win. They wanted their pictures taken with the trophy, preferably with their feet propped up on the submissive bodies of the Wasash Reds. But they understood 600.000d over 400.000d, and agreed that their honor was satisfied just in defeating the rot-slime Wasash. I didn’t yet tell them about the passports. To be able to see space again, other planets, to rieve and roister–they didn’t need that distraction right now.

OCallan was looking at them with different eyes. He’d never seen how that saurian ability to conserve energy could be released so explosively. He kept shaking his head and grinning, saying he’d never seen them move.

He still hadn’t. I didn’t see any reason to enlighten him.

It wasn’t a pleasant ride from Meteor Crater to the Dark Canyon area in the southeast corner of what used to be part of Utah. Even nose-dead humans could smell the fluid that oozed from the sorsh’s femoral pores, in their world, a call to all available females that here were victorious warriors, deserving mates who would produce strong offspring. To us, it smells like rancid bacon.

Below us, the land swept upward in broad strokes, red-brown and yellow and gray, dotted with oases of green where enough water collected to support a few cottonwoods and tamarisk in this arid desert. Towns were few and far between. Sheep dotted the roadless expanse of the NavaHopiUte Republic, punctuated here and there by villages of three or four hogans. The land started breaking up the farther north we flew, pierced by dark spires of ancient volcanic vents, sandstone buttes and mesas; and cutting through the land like a Mandelbrot fractal, the Colorado River and its tributaries carving tortured canyons from the rock. Hot, dry, much like their homeworld, it is just the kind of terrain the sorsh love.

When we passed over the Greater Mexican Hat Metro area, Yhss was avid to open a porthole so he could spit down on the city, but the pilot said no. Just as well. If Yhss had done it, Kharkh and Sehn would have wanted to do the same. Then they’d have wanted another pass to see who could do it better. A sorsh spitting contest can go on for hours.

We set down at the Kigalia Guard Station on Elk Ridge. A cool wind was wandering through the Ponderosa pine, taking the edge off the sun’s rays. The sorsh flattened their crests and spread out to bask while OCallan and I unloaded our gear. The NPS ranger, an old woman weathered as badly as the once white clapboard siding on the tiny hut, viewed us with narrowed eyes, obviously no love lost for a DOI Special Security agent–or an alien hunting team, either. I figured her for one of the old farts who are forever nattering about how good the world was before the Dyarchy. As if it mattered in today’s reality.

Our vehicle was an ancient SUV, a hunk of topless rusted metal missing its fenders. When the guard reluctantly stabbed her thumb at a track of broken pavement leading west through the forest, saying, "Your man headed out that way," Yhss signed to me, Now? We go, yes? Kill, yes?

Hunt, yes. But take alive, no killing. OCallan didn’t seem to care how he brought his man back, but I like to discourage the sorsh from killing sentient beings if I can help it. I’d read the file on the prey: one Sebastian Johns, a Navajo accused of gunrunning for the Republic, a terrorist or a patriot, take your pick. The dossier was empty of any information of substance, just the usual government disinformation spin stuff that could be handed out to any media flacker. What the hell, his guilt or innocence wasn’t our problem. I learned long ago that moral judgments usually get you into trouble. For the sorsh it was simple: pay us and we hunt.

OCallan took us inside the guard hut, pointing out where Johns had rifled the dry food stocks. The sorsh took his scent, Kharkh’s flicking tongue carrying the information to his nasovomeral glands. Ah, good.

Easy, Sehn agreed.

"What did they say?" OCallan asked.

"The trail is strong. They’ll have no trouble following it."

He pushed his UVs up on his head. "Can you teach me to talk to them? It could be useful if we run into any trouble."

I shrugged. "I can teach you the hunting signs, but the sorsh won’t pay any attention to you."

"What if something happens to you? How do I control them?""You can’t. You don’t smell right. It doesn’t matter to them that I’m a Homo sapiens female–their own species is oviparous. Form doesn’t matter, pheromones matter. If they’re not chemically shackled to me, they’ll make their own decisions on how to deal with you."

He nodded his head slowly. "I’d better make friends with them, then."

"You can try." He still didn’t understand.

With the sorsh darting ahead of us, OCallan and I piled into the SUV and headed into the forest. With OCallan driving, I took a look back at the old ranger watching us leave. Just as we disappeared around the first turning in the road, she gave us the finger.

Dry pine crackled in the firepit, unnecessary with our finest government self-heating food packs, but comforting amid all the darkness. Living in cities makes you forget how much of the planet is still wild; even more, maybe, than there used to be before all the offplanet migrations. They say our air is cleaner with the advent of Dyarchic technology. I don’t know, but what we were breathing that night was cold, fresh with the sense of never having been breathed before. It smelled of lonesome distances and the possibility of strange adventures.

We’d found Johns’s battered old pickup truck abandoned above Black Steer Canyon. Kharkh showed where Johns’s scent led over the canyon rim along what looked to be an old cattle trail, less than six feet wide in some places, clinging to the cliff-face–not a path to take in the dark.

OCallan didn’t look like a man who would be comfortable sitting with his butt on hard ground, but he had a grin big enough to light up a small city as he crouched before the fire, feeding it with pinecones to watch them flare. He nodded at the sorsh, an entwined pile that seemed to have too many limbs, at the edge of the firelight. "I thought lizards were solitary critters."

I stretched and settled my hip into a sand hollow. "Terran lizards are. You can’t think of the sorsh as earthly animals." The pile twisted and Kharkh’s head appeared. He hissed a sigh of contentment at me and stretched his jaws, tongue lolling.

OCallan fed one final cone to the flames, then settled back on his blanket. He looked up at the black sky. Spica in Virgo was bright overhead. "I wonder how it felt to look at the stars and imagine space was empty."

"My mother said we felt bigger then."

He flopped down on his back, knees bent, head pillowed on his arms. "Your mother was from Havana."

"And my father was from Kiev. So?"

"So I’ve never seen a brown-skinned, red-headed woman before. You wear your hair long."

"It helps distribute my pheromones into the air."

"I’ve read your file. No living relatives, no long-term commitments. You don’t have a life apart from the sorsh."

"What kind of a life do you think I need?"

"A social life. Friends."

"Kharkh, Yhss, and Sehn are my friends."

"But they’re not human."

Always it came down to that. Every damn conversation about the sorsh. "So?"

"So what do you do for–" He waved his hand in a vague gesture. "Someone to talk to, get drunk with, dance, whatever."

"Why do you think I want those things?"

"Most people do."

"Most people aren’t capable of running sorsh."

OCallan turned on his side, his head propped on one hand. Firelight flickered in his eyes. "You’re ducking the question, Sonia. You’re human. The sorsh are not. They can’t give you what another human can."

What? A hard time? I could have spent the rest of the night relating how I’ve been screwed over by humans. I sat up and poked another stick into the fire. All three sorsh heads slid free of the pile, slit-eyed with pleasure at the love I sent wafting their way.

"You’ve never run sorsh. You can’t imagine what it’s like to live among three sentient beings whose only purpose in life is to keep you happy. No, they can’t discuss our classic literature, but their favorite firetalk concerns the same questions that puzzled our philosophers. We just talk in more basic terms. If you think about it, you can discuss most human concepts in a warrior/hunter vocabulary."

He laughed. "Okay, okay, I give. But if you can’t actually talk, how did you learn their signs?"

"There’s a sign dictionary in my pack. Once in a while I still have to use it, but their basic language is so compressed that one sign means many things depending on body attitude, eyes, crests, throats, claw extension, color changes–you just have to learn by experience."

"How did you get them to obey you before you got fluent?"

That’s the point no one ever understands. "The sorsh don’t ‘obey’ me. They follow my directions because they trust me and want to please me. If they seriously object to something, I step back and take another look."

"And if you decide to do it anyway?"

"They do as I ask."

"There’s a difference?"

"Yes. Because they know that I won’t ask them to do something that dishonors them."

I could see a thousand more questions behind his eyes, but he held them in. I had some questions myself, such as why DOI was willing to pay six times our usual fee for a hunt and give us Dyarchic passports. Either this Johns guy was a hell of a gunrunner, or OCallan hadn’t told me the entire truth about this hunt. I was betting on the latter.

I always get a good night’s sleep with the sorsh on guard. OCallan looked like he hadn’t. I was building the fire by the time he managed to crawl out of his sleeping bag. "Coffee’s almost ready," I said.

He grunted and ambled off into the trees.

Kharkh settled beside me, deigning to hand me a stick of pine. He does not fear prey. He tilted his head back and looked at me down the length of his snout. Why?

True. OCallan was wound loose. No tension in his body, no over-the-shoulder looks at unknown noises, the guns strapped down. Could be that he didn’t have enough field experience to know whether or not a situation was dangerous. Could be that he depended on the sorsh to warn us of danger. Could be a lot of other things, too. Good question, I signed back.

Even Dyarchic technology can’t make powdered eggs taste much better than a cardboard box, but it doesn’t much matter since my coffee takes all the morning hairs off your tongue. By the time the sun rose over the peaks of the Abajos, we were packed up and ready to go. OCallan’s official government-issue backpack had a bit of maglev, so he carried more than his fair share, which was okay because I’d have thrown away about half the crap he brought. The stuff solidified my suspicion that he was a HQ agent, not a field man.

He had some damn interesting armament on him, though. A pulse-projectile rifle slung over his shoulder was latest issue. His hand-held recoilless 12-gauge made my Sig auto look like a popgun.

I don’t carry much weaponry. I have the sorsh.

The old cattle trail baled over the edge of the canyon, sand and rocks, with a long drop to the bottom. I stood surveying it while the sorsh faced the east and chanted their rising sun song. OCallan watched the sorsh. "What are they saying?"

"I don’t know. I’m not warrior caste so they don’t talk about warriors’ religion to me."

"What caste are you?"

"I have no caste. I’m the most perfect being on the face of the earth."

"But you haven’t let it go to your head." He said it so seriously, it took me a second to catch the lurking grin. Damn, he even had a sense of humor. It was getting easier to like him, DOI Special Security or not.

We reached the canyon floor about two o’clock. OCallan wasn’t used to hiking in broken terrain. He moved like a man whose depth perception was formed by concrete and carpets. It took him half the morning to loosen up, to fall into that spring-kneed walk that carries you over rocks and through blow sand, across gullies and around prickly pear spines, covering ground with the minimum of effort. At least he wasn’t a complainer, though I did hear a bit of muttered cussing from time to time.

The sorsh were waiting for us, all three of them flattened within the scarce shade of a sandstone boulder. We’d descended from the cool of the pine forest into a barren, rocky gouge in the earth so sun-wasted that there was no green even along the stagnant pools of the stream that sometimes trickled down Dark Canyon on its way to the Colorado. Yucca, edges frayed by the wind, fought with sagebrush for a hold on the alkali soil. Dirty-yellow cliffs lifted above us, their flanks littered with blasted and fallen piles of broken rocks.

Sehn uncoiled from the shade and came to me, his taloned fist gently closed. His other hand signed, Look. He opened his fist. In his palm lay a tan side-blotch lizard, its sides heaving and its throat fluttering. It pumped its front legs, bouncing up and down as it threatened us, its ribs spread wide. Someday, sorsh.

Mean enough, I agreed. Sehn knelt and lowered his hand to the sand. The lizard leapt from his palm and skittered for cover.

In the sun, the sorsh’s darker mottling turns a lime green. Every time I see it, I am struck anew by how beautiful they are. Sehn caught the emotion and preened, then grinned.

OCallan took two drinks from his refrigerated canteen, spitting the second mouthful onto a red bandanna that he tied around his forehead. He looked doubtfully at a drying puddle of filmy water. "Think my purifier can handle that?"

"If we push on, we can make it to Young’s Canyon tonight. There’s better water there."

"We’re not going to catch up with Johns today?"

I asked Sehn, who signed back, We go too slow. Prey is faster. More than a day.

"Tomorrow, maybe, if we can make up some time. Sehn says we’re too slow."

It wasn’t an accusation, but he heard the truth behind it. "Then we’d better move out. I’ll keep up."

He did, too. It was rough traveling and his butt was dragging when we sighted the turquoise-green spring-fed pool that marked the juncture of Young’s Canyon with the main cleft of Dark Canyon. In truth, I was ready to pack it in myself. It had been a while since we’d done a hunt that covered this much ground.

We made camp fifty yards down canyon from the pool, high enough up the southern wall to be above the flash flood line. While OCallan gathered deadwood for a fire when the desert night cooled, Kharkh asked, We hunt meat, "Yessss?"

"Yes," I said. When they use the few human words they can pronounce to butter me up, I usually give in. Yhss signed a thank you and they whipped off up the canyon, green streaks in the twilight. Thunderclouds were massing in the southwest, promising a gorgeous sunset and the frail hope of rain. Gray veils of virge drifted down from the clouds, evaporating before they reached the ground.

OCallan dumped a small pile of dried twigs into the circle of rocks I had built. "Not much of a fire tonight," he said. "Where did the sorsh go?"

"Hunting for dinner."

He wiped dusty sweat from his forehead. "Will they bring us back something? I could go for meat instead of trail rations."

"No, they’ll eat it when they catch it. Be glad. You don’t want to watch them eat."

He looked a question at me.

"The pheromones released by terrified prey are crucial to their biological functioning. It isn’t a pretty process."

"So if they don’t get to hunt live meat, what happens?"

"They survive, but they go torpid." I could see his mind click over, filing away all this information. When the sorsh returned just before dark, long bellies bulging, mottled hides streaked with dark red, he signed, Good hunt? They saw, but they ignored him and settled to lick each other’s skins clean while thunder racketed along the horizon.

With the daylight only a slice of orange behind uplifted mesas, a fat drop of water hissed in the fire. Then another, and another, and suddenly the bottom dropped out of the bucket.

"Shit!" OCallan hollered and jumped for his pack, drenched before he could get his rain poncho over his head. I sat there and turned my face to the rain, a blessing in the high desert. With the rubberized plastic poncho stuck around his shoulders, OCallan looked at me, water dripping from my hair and a crazy smile on my face, and threw the poncho off. He shrugged. "Guess I won’t melt."

Lightning cracked, its image still on our retinas when thunder jarred the ground. Its wild energy uncoiled the sorsh, crests spread, talons extended, hissing with delight as they flung their long arms around each other’s shoulders, leaping high and snaking low, circling in a desert dweller’s dance to the lifeforce. In the electric strobes, they seemed demonic, all teeth and claws and slithering tongues.

OCallan was looking at them like he was remembering the monsters that hide under a kid’s bed in the dark. When Sehn broke the circle and stretched out one hand, I pulled OCallan up with me. "Come on. Dance."

Wide-eyed and breathing hard, OCallan joined the sorsh. Kharkh slitted a grin at him and whirled through fighting moves, tuned to the rhythm of their dance. OCallan held his ground as Kharkh’s claws cut the air bare inches away. Kharkh turned his toothy grin to me.

Stop, I signed. Mine.

Thought so, Kharkh signed and hissed his amusement. Laughing like idiots, we danced the rain, the sorsh flowing like liquid metal, and me and OCallan stumbling over the rough scree.

I’m not sorsh, but I’m not immune to pheromones, myself. Nor was OCallan. His hair was slick to his head, his eyes wild, his wet clothes clinging to his body, a very good body, at that. He took my hand, pulling me into a close embrace that owed something to a tango, and much more to a different kind of dance. He wanted me. I wanted him. The sorsh were in favor. But then, they always are. They don’t want to watch, but they do want to be within scent distance. They bask in the pheromones I give off. I don’t mind; hell, why not? It’s the closest they’re going to get to sex on this planet.

You can always find an excuse for doing what you want. A lot of people make pheromonal decisions against their better sense. Thigh to thigh, mouth to mouth, touching in all the places our bodies fit, we stumbled back to OCallan’s wet bedroll, sank down on it, and ripped a few buttons in our hurry to get flesh to flesh, an urgency intensified by the sorsh’s reflected desire.

It wasn’t love, but it was damn fine lust.

The rain had washed away Johns’s scent trail. As the rising sun steamed the damp from our clothes, Kharkh sent Yhss down canyon to see if he could cut the trail. By the time he was back, we were packed up and ready to move, OCallan looking as if he felt as well-oiled as I did.

Yhss shook his long head, a human gesture that for some reason delights the sorsh. No sign. Go further?

OCallan was getting better at signs. "Is there any place Johns could climb out of this canyon?"

"A few places. Depends on how well he knows the country."

He scuffed the ground and looked up the canyon walls. "What would be the easiest route for someone who doesn’t know the country?"

"Follow the canyon down to Lake Powell."

"And maybe catch a ride on a boat." OCallan rested his hand on the butt of his 12-gauge. "How far is it to the lake?"

"We could be to where the water backs up by late afternoon. A hard run, though."

"How far ahead is he now?"

I asked Kharkh. OCallan understood the signed answer. "If he’s only half a day, let’s get on it. I want this guy." He racked the slide on the P/P rifle.

Kharkh tilted his snout at OCallan. Now he has fear.

 Water flowed in the creekbed and the air smelled like wet sage as we headed down canyon, moving fast and watching the ground since a broken bone would be real inconvenient at the moment. Kharkh ranged ahead, while Yhss and Sehn skittered up and down the canyon walls, searching for scent.

OCallan wound tighter, you could see it in the set of his shoulders. So far, he hadn’t acted as if the terrorist we were hunting was armed and dangerous. Now he kept one hand close to the 12 gauge; the ready light shone on the stock of the rifle slung over his shoulder. Made me nervous. Why now? Why not all along? Johns could have circled back, set up an ambush at any time, and OCallan didn’t know enough about the sorsh to know that they would give warning.

Hormones being what they are, I was fighting the desire to trust him. Sleeping with a man usually makes me think better of him, but I just couldn’t get a handle on OCallan. Why would DOI Security send an HQ man on a field hunt? And why not a well-armed team, why just one man? OCallan’s explanation that this hunt needed to be done quietly so as not to upset the tourists just didn’t wash. If there was a tourist in this sun-blasted wilderness, they were damn good at hiding.

If Johns was a gunrunner, you’d think he would have resources, accomplices, access to comsat links and extraction vehicles. Maybe his Navajo heritage drew him to the wilderness, but then again, OCallan seemed to think that Johns wouldn’t know the country, which argued against a man trying to disappear into his own territory. The questions were piling up, and I didn’t like not having any answers. But I did like the idea of Dyarchic passports.

We ate on the move, chewing high-energy ration bars and drinking from our canteens. The canyon walls faded from dirty yellow to dirty gray, barren despite the waterfalls rilling off the rim of Black Point half a mile above the canyon floor. Heat sucked our sweat before it could cool our skin. The sorsh were darting from one boulder-thrown patch of shade to the next. Ravens sailed on the thermals, air riffling through their wings, their rusty squawking echoing in the silent distances.

It’s hard to stay alert when you’re moving through land that’s two degrees hotter than hell. When Kharkh popped up in front of me, I jumped like a startled jackrabbit.

Prey is close.

I took two long, slow breaths to get my heartbeat back to normal. Where?

OCallan caught up. "What’s happening?"

Since a short run for the sorsh was a day’s walk for me, I’d insisted that the sorsh learn our distance referents. Kharkh signed, Less/more than three miles.

Glass flashed in OCallan’s hand. "About three miles?" In his palm lay my sorsh sign dictionary. The back of my neck got tight. He put his hand on my shoulder and looked straight at me, his face serious. "I need this, Sonia. If we’re going to take Johns, I need to be able to talk to them."

I stared at him until he took his hand off me. "You could have asked."

"Yes. I should have asked."

Damn straight. But this was not the time to get into that. According to Kharkh, Johns was holed up in an alcove on the north bank just beyond the beginning of the swampwater backed up from Lake Powell. He wouldn’t be able to see us until we were well within weapon range, but OCallan was concerned that Johns had a clean field of fire across a hundred yards of undulating slickrock.

"I don’t want the sorsh hurt," he said.

When the sorsh decided to move, they would cross that hundred yards in an eyeflick, but it was OCallan’s hunt and it had been strange all along. I didn’t protest, just let him lead off. Kharkh watched me, doubt showing in his orange eyes and half-raised crest. You trust, female?

Not much, warrior, I signed back. Stay alert.

Powell is a dead lake. The smell hits you first. The bloated carcasses of range cattle and a mule deer or two bobbed in the fetid water backed up Dark Canyon two miles from the lake itself. No reeds, no frogs, no tamarisk, even the ravens scorned the free meals nudging the shoreline. I’ve heard that Powell was a pretty lake, once; but now it’s a sewer, blighted and noisome. Doesn’t keep the boaters away, though.

Trying not to gag on the stench, OCallan and I joined the sorsh who were gathered behind a large sandstone boulder at a bend in the canyon. Sehn lay flat on the sand. Look.

Peering around the boulder, following Sehn’s pointing talon, I could see where Johns had gone to ground in a shallow cave angling back under a broad ledge of slickrock. Not smart. No retreat, Sehn signed.

There were enough large rocks on the alcove floor that Johns was hidden from view, but if the sorsh said he was there, then he was there. "So." I looked at OCallan. "How do you want to do this?"

OCallan wasn’t grinning now. Any semblance of charm or friendliness had sloughed away like a second skin. Whatever pheromones he was putting out snapped Kharkh’s head around, crest rising and hunter’s senses refocused on OCallan. A long, slow hiss came from the sorsh’s baretoothed jaws.

"I’ll give him one chance," OCallan said. He wound his arm through the P/P rifle’s sling and braced the weapon against the side of the boulder. He fired off three quick shots, striking shards from the lip of the alcove. "Johns! This is Interior Security. Throw down your weapon and come on out."

Silence from the alcove.

OCallan walked three more shots across the back of the cave. "Come out, you son of a bitch. If we have to come up there and get you, you’re dead."

It sounded like the truest thing I had ever heard him say.

Johns’s voice was tiny in the distance. "Don’t shoot me. I’ll come out if you don’t shoot me."

OCallan’s smile was nothing but bare teeth. "Get your sorry ass out here."

A dark figure stood up in the alcove. His hands were spread wide. "I don’t have a gun."

OCallan didn’t relax his shooter’s stance. "Walk slow. Keep your hands where I can see them." He nodded at me. "Send the sorsh out to get him."

They were intent on OCallan. I clicked my tongue for their attention and signed, Go. Take alive.

Something wrong here, Kharkh signed.

Johns was starting to stumble his way down the slanting rock. Heat waves shimmered him into a scarecrow figure as he walked into OCallan’s sights.

Go. Now!

They went, flowing over the rock like green water. When Johns saw them coming, he froze. A strangled scream pierced the hot air. Yhss and Sehn each grabbed an arm, stretching Johns’s body between them. Kharkh touched his handclaw to Johns’s chest, five bright drops of blood appearing on Johns’s dirty blue shirt, marking the man as warrior’s meat. Kharkh shrilled a victory cry, but it was halfhearted, form more than substance. Sehn and Yhss were silent.

They were right. This was too easy. At fifty yards, the details that came into focus showed a frightened, bruised, and beaten man, the leather of his city shoes shredded, his belt pulled tight against the gauntness of hunger. His body was soft, a man who made his living sitting in a chair. His face was pulled into a rictus of fear, his eyes darting from one sorsh to another, white showing all around. He keened a continuous soft cry, the terrified wail of a man pushed beyond all endurance.

If Johns was a terrorist gunrunner, I was Betty Crocker. I swung on OCallan. "What the hell is going on here?"

OCallan relaxed his stance, keeping the rifle at ready. "With your help I’ve accomplished my mission."

"Which mission was that?" I signed the sorsh to stop, wait. "You want to cut through the lies? Who is Johns? Why are we hunting him? He’s no terrorist gunrunner."

OCallan tilted his head, his lips parting in a soundless laugh. "No, you’re right there. A little trouble with the IRS and he got a choice: jail or cooperation. He was a convenient test case. A laboratory rat, if you will. He served his purpose." Then he raised his rifle and shot Johns square through the heart.

As Johns’s body sagged in their grip, Yhss and Sehn went lizard-still. Kharkh, halfway between us and them, also went immobile, his crest fully raised, long tongue flickering.

"You bastard. You vile piece of shit."

OCallan kept his rifle trained in the direction of the sorsh. His smile twisted. "Just doing my job, Sonia. Have you figured it out, yet?"

Yes, and damn me for an idiot for not figuring it out sooner. "You want my sorsh."

He nodded. "You sorsh runners are loose cannons. DOI wants sorsh hunting abilities, but we want them under our control. We can create the pheromones in a laboratory, and I’ve learned how you handle them."

"And that’s why you didn’t want them to win the Triathalon. If they were the new champions, you couldn’t make them disappear." The sorsh’s focus was intent, a kind of electric aura that presaged violent action. The tip of Kharkh’s long tail twitched. "You’ll never get them back without me. You take your eyes off them even once and they’ll kill you so fast you won’t even know it happened."

"You think I’m stupid?" His twisted smile faded. "I don’t intend to get them back without you and I don’t expect your help. A jumprig will be here within half an hour of my signal. Cages, tranquilizers, I think we can handle them."

"Why this charade? Why didn’t you just ask for a demonstration? There’s a planetful of sorsh out there, you don’t need my team."

"DOI had to see them in action. Had to see how you do it." Keeping his rifle on the sorsh, he dug a comsat link out of his pack. "I’m sorry it has to be this way, but you have to face it, sweets, this is no longer your sorsh team."

"Like hell." I went for him and he swung his P/P to target me. I froze. The black hole in the end of the barrel looked as big as death.

He still didn’t understand the sorsh. Kharkh was ten yards off, and Yhss and Sehn farther yet. OCallan felt safe, his weapon on me, his finger tight on the trigger.

With the smell of my fear in his slit nostrils, Kharkh moved, an explosive saurian leap that hit OCallan in the chest, the rifle clawed from his grip, blood leaking from a punctured carotid artery. Kharkh slammed OCallan to the fried sand, one scaled knee on OCallan’s chest. Then Sehn and Yhss were there, pinioning OCallan’s outflung arms.

OCallan’s face was blank with shock, his jaw working, but no sound making it out of his mouth. Bright blood pulsed. Kharkh’s thin tongue flickered just short of the growing scarlet pool at the base of OCallan’s throat. All three sorsh looked at me, flat-eyed and trembling. "Yessss?" Kharkh said.

Maybe I shouldn’t have let them kill and eat OCallan. I’ve since thought it sets a bad precedent, but the truth is that the sorsh already consider all humans except me as prey anyway. At the time, it seemed the thing to do. I wish I could regret it. I didn’t watch, and I tried not to listen as I scratched out a shallow hole in the sand and buried Johns’s body. If that was his name. He had no ID papers, no wallet full of credit chips, no holos of friends or family. Poor lab rat, I wondered if he even knew why he died.

We took OCallan’s gear and weapons and what was left of his bones, tossed them down a slot canyon, then made our way back to Kigalia Station. The old ranger didn’t ask what had happened to OCallan, and she only watched with a grim smile while I smashed her comsat link and loaded some provisions in the SUV. She shook my hand as we left.

I figure we’ve got a couple of days until DOI gets nervous and starts looking for OCallan. When they find what’s left of him, they’re going to see the toothmarks on his bones, and they’re going to know that he wasn’t chewed on by any coyote or mountain lion. With Dyarchic passports, we’ve got just enough funds to get off-planet before somebody starts asking rough questions. And I guess we’ll go back to making our living as a hunter team. It’s what we do best, it’s what the sorsh need, and I wouldn’t mind seeing some of the rest of the galaxy myself.