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Malthus XIX was unquestionably one of the worst places to be a convicted felon in the whole of the Galactic Empire. The reasons for this can be traced back to the original settlement of the world by the Major House Kel'Lantinvanii, who reasoned that finding a habitable life-sustaining world just sitting unclaimed must be a grand stroke of luck indeed. As with most things that seemed too good to be true, Malthus XIX was in point of fact the worst kind of luck. Barren of all but the least valuable minerals, possessing natural flora that seemed almost aggressively hostile to all animal life and soil cultures that made even the genetically-engineered miracle crop ogren, the empire's staple, struggle to survive. Dismayed but too proud to give the world up, the Kel'Lantivanii put their Patrician House the Tzmeti in charge - exactly what they did to earn this goes unrecorded by history, but is rumoured to involve a duchess, a speeding aircar, a semi-trained Tabrian gilt-hound and two hundred tonnes of liquid fertiliser - and quietly pretended it didn't exist for the next two hundred years. And so it might have remained, if the Duke Tzimeti hadn't drank himself to death (and given the amount of anti-poisoning augmentation the typical aristo has, that must have taken some concerted effort on its own) trying in vain to make Malthus XIX into something resembling a thriving world but was instead thwarted at every turn by the planet's relentless hostility to life, with poverty, disease and - most of all - crime on the rise with each passing year.

His son, the new young Duke Diocletian Tzimeti, was so distraught over his father's untimely passing that when one of his ministers approached him looking for answers as to what to do with the planet's bursting to capacity prisons he flippantly ordered the prisons opened into the wild so he could at least have a decent hunt for once. To his later shock the minister actually did exactly as he ordered, and - with the sort of commitment to a bit one gets when you have no choice but to follow through or face unreasonable levels of embarrassment - Diocletian ordered his hunting skiff loaded up and readied. When he returned, a dozen carcasses heavier and somewhat harder of jaw and colder of eye, he declared that he had seen a future for Malthus XIX, one that would see it prosper hand over fist. And it wasn't as an agri world or a factory world or even as a trifling lumber-yard, it was as a pleasure_ world_ of a very particular kind. And so it was that Malthus XIX became known for that most rarified of noble pastimes, manhunting. And prosper it did, becoming so popular among a certain subset of the Imperial nobility that House Tzimeti had to actually start importing condemned criminals from other worlds to meet the demand, paying by the head and making a profit off every one.

This leads me to my current predicament, shackled in the hold of a Tzimeti dropship en route to the prestigious Hunting Reserve 7 (lucky me!) and bound for the next run of patrons. And for a crime I didn't commit either. Oh I was doing _some _crimes, certainly, industrial espionage and confidence games to be precise, just not the one I'd actually been committed for, you see. I had been running a potentially quite lucrative scheme, posing as a dashing smuggler trying to convince a Countess of House Tilandro to plumb some of her ample funds into a venture to secretly transport priceless Hu artifacts that had once belonged to the now-dead House No'Talax, promising her first pick among the relics. The relics of course didn't actually exist, but everyone knew the rumours that House No'Talax's uncanny fortunes (up until the point where it ran out to a terminal degree) were due to some secret, mysterious power and that was enough to convince her. Well, almost. I _thought _my enticing tale combined with my ineluctable charms would have been enough on their own, but just to be on the safe side I had also covertly approached the Baron Fenlat with the same offer, though not so covertly that the dear Countess' spies wouldn't have known about it, you see... and conveniently putting me in a position to raid his data network for saleable secrets while I was at it, it's always good to have a backup plan.

Foolish move, it had transpired. Turned out my charms were just a bit _too _ineluctable, the Countess thought I was sleeping with the Baron and in a fit of jealousy had the underfloor spaces and walls of my apartments planted with enough assorted narcotics and nanoactive weapons to kill a small city and brought down the authorities on my head. How was I supposed to argue when I'd already introduced myself as a smuggler? I had just enough time to swallow the microdrive containing the data I'd nabbed from the baron and hide it in my second stomach implant before they kicked in the door. It was dumb of me to sleep with the mark while running a double-deal fakeout, of course, too much potential for bruised egos and nobles have sensitive constitutions for that sort of thing. Ah well, it can't be helped now.

Oh, forgive me, I have quite neglected to introduce myself. I don't know my homeworld but as a coyote it's probably somewhere deasilwise and rimward on the fifth outer arm. I am five-four, somewhere in my early thirties (again, this is a detail I'm a little hazy on), and nondescript in a very deliberately cultured way, the kind of nondescript that with a slight change of stance and expression can instantly change to 'swaggering dandy', 'rangy dock-thug' or anything in between.

My name is currently Jax Damanthus, and I am fucked.

Now, given the nature of my work this isn't the first time I've been well and truly buggered from both ends by circumstance but I normally pride myself on having at least three different ways prepared to unfuck myself at any given moment, this time... I would have to improvise.

Tzimeti prison guardsmen, 'chainers' in the local parlance, kept a close watch over me and the others who had been selected for this afternoon's sport. Had they been normal guards I might have been able to discreetly release the magnetic locks implanted between my thumb bones and slip free of the cuffs, maybe grab one while his attention wandered and hold him hostage long enough to arm myself and beat a retreat. If I was really lucky I might have even managed to convince one to take me in a backroom for a bit of fun, thus earning myself an ident badge, a weapon and a uniform, all a boy could need to effect a daring escape. But not these ornery sons of bitches. Grim-faced Iguanidae combat clones to a man, with regulated endocrine systems and Order and Duty instincts hardwired straight to their pleasure centres. In the face of all that tailored biology my charms were rather more eluctable than usual, I'm sad to say.

My fellows in bondage? One look was all I needed to know that they'd be little help to me either. A gecko who kept on looking away to disguise his intermittent sobs, a resigned-looking ginger cat, a sealion who fidgeted constantly with his hands, absently flicking the webbing between his fingers like the strings of an instrument, twin black rats who held eachother's hands - they'd look after eachother, but doubtful they'd trust anyone else, and a wolverine with barbarian clan-scars who so far hadn't uttered a word of catalos or any other intelligible Imperial language and probably couldn't. Maybe if I could get the wolverine free, he might cause enough chaos for me to do something in the confusion... but I had no idea what. More likely we'd both go down in a hail of lasefire, hardly an improvement.

The dropship shuddered slightly as it ceased forward momentum and a few seconds later shuddered violently as it made landing, no fancy contra-inertials here, even with all the security they didn't want to risk transporting prisoners in anything we could escape the planet with.

A red light flashed on the wall in time with a soft but insistent chiming sound, the chainers ceased their pacing and formed up around us with their laserifles raised at the ready. For a moment I thought that maybe some plan had changed and that they were going to just execute us on the spot, but then the shackles that had been holding our ankles affixed to the benches we were all lined up on disengaged.

"Prisoners! Stand!" barked the chainer's sergeant, distinguishable by his braided epaulettes and the short, curved shiversword sheathed at his side.

As one we shuffled reticently to our feet, the wolverine was the last to catch on as to what was going on which only reinforced my initial supposition that he probably didn't understand the Imperial dialect. Barbarian languages are, alas, one of the fields in which my education was less than thorough. Still, it was worth a try and you don't move in the kind of circles that get you sent to Malthus XIX without picking up a few words of the heathen tongues along the way.

"Hey, do you speak Balak?" I tried, mumbling under my breath too quiet for the chainers to pay attention to. No response was forthcoming from my would-be friend with the fascinating skin decor.

"How about Zinti? Do you know Kodru? Are you Escyri-clan?" If he knew what I was saying he made no sign of it. "Was your father to blame for your thick skull and ugly face or did your mother lay with the meat-animals?" I said in badly accented Samlach. Nothing, damn.

That left me on plan C, throw myself on someone's mercy, oh dear...

The chainers herded us out through the dropship hatch into the suddenly blindingly bright sun. After spending the past five weeks in dungeons, starship brigs and now, most recently, the hold of a dropship, my eyes were poorly adjusted to the light level. I scrunched them shut and blinked rapidly until the sun's rays felt less like needles and peered at the surroundings.

We were in a circular forest clearing, surrounded on all sides by the inhospitable Malthusian woodland, a place even the best survivalists in the Empire couldn't last for more than a few days. Malthus XIX had no native animal life, even at the insect level. Plants pollinated by explosive airborne expulsion or through their root network. That meant no hunting, no seeds and no fruit. There were a few species of edible grasses and leaves, most of which were indistinguishable visually from other species that were lethally toxic. Malthus XIX could support life, just not my life, and that's what was really important to me at that moment.

On the far side of the clearing from where the dropship landed a low dais had been erected and covered with a gazebo awning. Beneath it, attended by a bevy of Tzimeti-liveried servants, the three gentlebeings who would be our executioners for the evening were sitting. My escape from this whole regrettable state of affairs depended entirely on whether or not I could convince one of them to take me offworld alive. Now, I am fairly persuasive when I want to be, I was trained _by the best in the business _to get inside people's heads and flip their switches, but even I can't work miracles. There needed to be an existing willingness to work on. It's next to impossible to persuade someone to do something they weren't inclined to do anyway, at least without a gun to their head, metaphorically speaking, it was much easier to remove the barriers that prevented them from acting on a pre-existing compulsion. Right now all three of them were getting ready for a nice relaxing evening of murdering me, to say I was apprehensive about my chances of swaying them was a laughable understatement but if I couldn't I'd have to pull a plan D out of my derrière, and shapely as it is it can only stretch so far.

My eye naturally fell upon the most physically imposing of the three, a rhino in burgundy and gold military attire with the bone-white half sunburst of the House Ro'Boroxis surrounding his left eye. Leaning against his chair was the deadly profile of a matte green and gunmetal lightlock musket and a pair of predation imager goggles sat in his lap. A servant approached bearing a tray of drinks and he took a large glass of what I guessed to be some kind of fortified wine which he proceeded to augment with a splash of something from a hipflask. No, I couldn't expect leniency from this one. The lightlock was a powerful weapon, virtually guaranteed to kill or mortally maim with even a glancing hit, but it needed to be reloaded between each shot as it's inefficient power-hogging circuits would drain a cell dry instantly. That meant he considered himself a sportsman, he wanted the prey that got away to have a chance to give him a good chase. On the other hand he wasn't so much inclined to sporting conduct that he wanted to risk them actually eluding him, so he cheated with the imager goggles that would let him track a person's bio-spoor for miles no matter how well they hid. Finally, judging by his choice of drink he wasn't afraid to go out into a wilderness - full of presumably dangerous criminals with nothing to lose - while moderately sauced. I immediately pegged him as an old school aristo type, the kind who hadn't got the memo about peasants having souls, was born with a streak of entitlement wide enough to drive a main battle tank down and considered anyone without a title to occupy a space of importance somewhere between a riding beast and dirt. Pleas would only annoy him.

Next along was a jaguaress bearing the downwards-pointed triangular black wedge of House El'Tezapoca beneath her left eye. She was clad in a form-fitting tan synth-muscle smartsuit and wore a colour-shifting autocamo stealth cloak. I saw no firearm on her person but she had a pair of short shiverblades resting in their sheaths on each hip. The drink's tray came her way but she took nothing, just making a dismissive flicking motion without her eyes ever leaving us for a moment. My heart fell, there would be no chance of lenience from her either. She was in it for the blood, for the murder. Her choice of hunting gear alone could have told me that, this was someone who wanted to get close when they killed someone, to feel the blood on their hands. And she wanted to do it sober as a judge, not because she was afraid of making a mistake but because she knew that it would just dull her appreciation of the _real _intoxicant on offer here. Exactly what species of psychosis was at work behind those eyes I would hesitate to diagnose, but I knew crazy when I saw it.

That left only one option left...

Snakes, why did it have to be snakes? Even for someone with my education the serpentine species were hard to read at the best of times. Oh they had the same emotions as other species, certainly, and in roughly the same quantities, it was just that they gave far fewer obvious cues as to what those were at any given time. I wished I'd had white lotus powder, lucidia, coloszene, any kind of nootropic empathy-enhancer, something that would give me a degree of assurance into what little I _could _read...

He had no need of a chair like the others, content to simply rest upon the coil of his tail. A cobra with the yellow lightning-bolts of House Na'Khambara showing vividly against the blackish-green scales of his hood. He wasn't really attired for the hunt, wearing a white shift on his upper body embroidered with patterns of leaves and vines, strung about with gold chains, armlets and jeweled and gold rings pierced through the edge of his hood. On a thick red cord looped across his chest a quiver of red-fletched arrows was strung to his back and in his lap rested an ornate graviton bow, an oddly romantic choice of weapon. Not that it wouldn't pin a man to a tree from a mile away with the greatest of ease. The servant with the drinks tray approached and he took a tall fluted glass of sweet tea.

My heart leapt. Now this _I could work with... I hoped. It was the best chance I'd seen so far, anyway. The details started to correlate and cross over in my mind as I started to form a hazy profile of his personality. The lack of practical attire suggested someone who was either supremely confident or utterly unprepared. The Na'Khambara believed in showing off their prosperity as a point of their culture, jewellery meant wealth and the quantity of it meant wealth _and vanity. The choice of weaponry was also similarly revealing. It wasn't the kind of weapon someone would use unless they were either very good with it or they hadn't used anything else. Archery was another part of Na'Khambara culture that they were very proud of, to the point that they valued great archers even higher than shiversword masters.

So, either a complete novice or a killer so hardened and sure of their abilities as to be willing to use a novelty weapon while dressed for a garden party, quite the dichtonomy. Like I said, snakes are hard to read. In the end it was his choice of drink that swayed me closer to the former.

There was just something about his whole bearing that seemed oddly... childish. Not in a petulant way, but a certain sense of a lack of experience. He chose the tea because he was nervous and excited and anxious and wanted something sweet to take his mind off it, I was sure of it. The different clues all coalesced and I suddenly had a more complete image of his personality and history. He didn't really want to be here, not really, a well-meaning friend or relative had bought him this trip because they thought he'd enjoy it... no, not because of that, re-correlate... to toughen him up. Yes, that made more sense. The reasons behind the romantic choice of weapon was suddenly so obvious - a shy and bookish boy, the kind of lad who spent all their time reading fantasy adventure stories, who practiced with such archaic weapons to emulate the heroes from their tales. A nerd, in other words. I wouldn't be surprised if he was into historical re-enactment, the little dweeb.

I smiled, for the first time in what seemed like months. I had a chance, I could make it. My elation was quickly stifled by another matter though, namely how to survive long enough to make use of the cobra lordling, particularly how to survive the first few seconds once that rhino shouldered his gun. I eyed the still-sobbing gecko and a plan formed in my mind.

"Hey," I whispered, sidling up to him. "Hey, listen! When we're released you stick with me, okay? I've got a plan, I'm not dying here." I pitched my voice to a frequency guaranteed to go straight to the trusting part of his brain, exactly the same voice I'd used when discussing bootleg Hu artifacts as a matter of fact. He turned to face me with a start, dumbfounded expression on his face. "Do you understand?" I said.

He nodded, confused, relieved, surprised to find any kind of friendship in this place. I wondered sometimes what he'd done to end up here, whether he had been a murderer or worse or simply found himself friendless at the worst possible time. When the wheels of Imperial justice turn they do tend to crush those on the bottom, after all. I never made a serious attempt to find out later on, would it have made it better if he had been some deranged psychotic? Seeing as how I don't put much stock in any of the manifold faiths, cults, sects, philosophies or hagiographic flagellant-orders that permeate this fine empire of ours I will simply have to beg forgiveness from you, dear reader, for what I did to that poor, pitiful wretch. My only defence is that there was no plan I could conjure that would have gotten both of us out alive, and no sacrifice I could have made that would have gotten him out either (not that I would have made it if I could - I am, as I'm sure you've already gleaned, somewhat self-centred). It's not much of a defence, but it's all I have. If it speaks any better of me, what happened next has featured quite vividly in my nightmares ever since.

Over by the dais a primly dressed crane representative of House Tzimeti was just finishing up giving their honoured guests the usual blurb, the do's and don'ts, wishing them a good hunt, invitations to the post-hunt ball, et cetera. All the usual formalities that one must undertake to ensure the proper level of decorum before murdering one's fellow man. This done, he turned to face our group and raised a hand to the captain of the chainers.

"Die well, and entertain our guests." He said, not even looking particularly pleased, and pressed a finger to a small chrome disk sutured onto his temple. Immediately our restraints unlocked and clattered noisily to the ground. The chainers were immediately withdrawing away from us, giving their noble patrons a clearer field of fire.

My fellow prisoners and I took no time in quite sensibly running for the treeline, true to my instruction the gecko stayed at my side. From the corner of my eye I saw the jaguaress leap to her feet, draw the camo-cloak around herself and become a mere haze in the air, belting across the grass toward us as fast as the wind.

"Scatter!" I shouted in my most commanding tone, and the others thankfully obliged. The blur that was the jaguaress swerved and went after the two rats, still hand-in-hand. I breathed a sigh of relief, of the three she was the one I could have done the least to counter, I was decent in a melee but without the benefit of her augmentation suit or shiverblades a fight between us would be a foregone conclusion.

As I suspected though, it was the rhino who I had mentally pegged as "the General" who would still get the first kill. I chanced a glance over my shoulder and saw him level his lightlock directly at me, the worst case scenario.

You can't dodge a relativistic weapon, the only ways to survive against someone wielding one were shields and armour, which I didn't have, or using cover and being faster than they are. I was reasonably sure I was faster than the General, but until we hit the treeline the only cover available to me was, well... other people.

I made a fist in the fabric of the gecko's sleeve and turned a tight arc on one foot, executing one half of a martial arts move I had learned in a previous life. Completed it would throw an unsuspecting foe to the ground, opening them up for a finisher. As it stood it simply served to position his body between me and the lightlock's blast.

Had the General been using a more conventional graser weapon it wouldn't have saved me, the beam would have sliced neatly through the gecko's flesh and mine, and the trees behind us for some distance too. But grasers were ethical weapons, designed to put their victim in the hospital rather than the morgue, leaving eminently disabling but often survivable injuries. The lightlock musket on the other hand... its beam was diffuse, readily releasing its energy on the first surface that it landed on in a pulse that immediately drained a standard power cell. It lacked the penetration of the more constant graser beam but in terms of raw destruction of flesh and bone it was nonpareil.

The gecko took the blast directly to the torso. A spray of blood and stringy matter showered me and my arms suddenly became very heavy, when I opened my eyes I realised it was because the force of the blast had explosively bisected the gecko's trunk, his legs were lying on the grass and his upper body was supported only by my hands. I dropped him. The expression frozen on his face was one of surprise more than fear, I noted as I ran. Behind me I heard the General's barking guffhaw and the 'click-clack' of the lightlock being broken open to be reloaded.

I was well into the forest by the time another shot rang out, atomising the bole of a tree and sending it crashing to the ground behind me. So, the General had decided I was to be his prey. The next step then would be evading him, none too easy a proposition as long as those goggles were locked onto my bio-spoor. Fortunately, not impossible. I had some experience in eluding such technologies on a past job and thankfully the prison I had been sent to before the Tzimeti bought me had been so slapdash and provincial that they hadn't even scanned me for surgical or nanetic augmentations.

Nothing would help me as long as I was covered in blood and bits of assorted tissue though, which would leave a clear trail to lead the General straight to me. After what was probably a good fifteen minutes of panicked sprinting I found a river creek by hearing, a quick scan revealed nobody so I judged myself safe enough for the time being to strip down to my skivvies and drop my fouled prison clothing by the side of the river as I washed off the remains of the gecko's blood. If Malthus XIX has only one thing in its favor, it was at least a warm planet and I didn't really feel the loss of the extra layers as I knelt in the river and diligently scrubbed my body clean of the majority of traceable scent with handfuls of riverbed silt. It was singularly unpleasant and left me feeling gritty and raw but the cool water helped a little.

There was another crack of lasfire and another tree fell with a crash. The General had found another prey by the sound of it, but he was still on my trail. I decided something had to be done about that.

My work done, I was now functionally invisible to his predation imagers for about the next four and a half minutes if I was lucky, maybe ten or fifteen if I controlled my autonomic processes with a bit of noetic meditation - ah, biofeedback, so handy. I could have taken that time to run and left him with a cold trail to follow, but if I was going to have any chance of getting some uninterrupted time with that Na'Khambara lordling it would be best for the General to exit the picture entirely.

With a pair of sticks as tongs I gathered up my shed clothes and crossed the river, it took me some time but eventually I found the ideal place to lie in wait. I scampered down a steep hillock, dragging the bundle of clothes behind me and buried them under a carpet of branches, rocks, handfuls of sod and a few little surprises. That done I rounded the hill and clambered back up it on hands and knees, and hid behind a copse of thorny bushes with shiny black-blue leaves.

"Where are you, you ragged-arsed little whoreson..." I could hear the General mumble and spit as he trudged his way through the brush. I waited, listening to him grumble and swear and name me things I shan't soil your precious eyes any further by recounting here, dear reader. At last he stopped and through a gap in the bushes I spied him touch a finger to his temple to touch the reset button on his goggles.

"Ha! Won't slip me this time, you [redacted for reasons of modesty]." He exclaimed and for a moment I worried that I hadn't done my job of scrubbing down well enough but no, he walked right past me, following the trail I'd left.

I held my breath for several long seconds as he trudged warily past me, swinging the barrel of his lightlock from side to side. He approached the slope and scanned it with his goggles, he chuckled - the trail went dead in the bushes at the base of the hill. He shouldered the lightlock, took aim and fired. There was a crack like lightning and the air filled with the stink of ozone. I took off like it was a signal gun, not giving him time to reload. To his credit the General had fast reactions for such a large fellow, maybe he was running some kind of noetic trickery. Whatever the reason, he heard me coming and wheeled around, intending to drop me to the ground with the butt of his musket before I could hit him. I just happened to be faster. I leapt into a flying kick that landed square in his chest and knocked him stumbling... but not far enough. Rhinos are big creatures, one of the largest and most dangerous species in the Empire, and my scrawny (if exceptionally shapely) ass just didn't have enough mass to topple him off his feet and down the hill to the broken branch spikes I had left lying in wait when I stashed the clothes.

A heavily-muscled wolverine on the other hand...

The General recovered, and with a snarl of contempt hefted his musket like a club and swung it hard enough to snap my spine like a dry noodle. I dodged back and had to let myself fall to avoid the blow. Prone, I wouldn't last long, and so the next battle for my life began. Or it would have if the wolverine hadn't run from the bushes like an avenging spirit of the Way and tackled the General around the waist. The force of the tackle carried both of them over the slope, tumbling and uncontrolled. I scrambled to my feet and ran to the edge. I saw the rhino on his back, impaled in three places by the sharpened branches, alive only through sheer cussedness and the quality of his nanofauna. The wolverine was battered and had one arm twisted at a gruesome angle, but was otherwise unmaimed. With a grunt and a snarl he grabbed his dislocated arm with his good one and re-set the joint, making me wince involuntarily, and then seemed to pass out from the pain.

Let me tell you, present circumstances notwithstanding I was suddenly feeling very pleased with myself indeed. I positively skipped down the hill to inspect the results of my handiwork. To my mild dismay the lightlock had been split in half by the General's weight, unrecoverable. But aha! I spied the hilt of a misericorde sticking out over the collar of the rhino's right boot - no doubt for delivering the kill to any poor wretch who got hit with a lightlock blast but didn't have the good sense to immediately die. Better than nothing, certainly. He kicked and thrashed at me as I stole it, but was in too much pain to do more than flail weakly.

"You'll fucking pay for this, both of you, you think you've won here?" the General spat between pained heaves and ragged breaths "Even if you kill me, dying here on this shithole world would have been a mercy _compared to what my family will have done to you." He managed to grin, though one eye was stuck closed with pain, flashing bloodied teeth. "There are men in our employ... artists of pain... you will die by inches for _years."

I folded my arms and put a finger to my lips in mock contemplation, my hand still holding the misericorde. "Hmmm, well, you drive a hard argument, but..." I knelt and placed the tip of the long dagger to his neck, just beneath the gizzard. "If I remove one more poisonous cunt like you from the galaxy in the process then I think it's worth taking my chances with your kin, and besides..." I looked around me exaggeratedly at the silent woodland. "Who's going to tell them?"

His eyes went wide for a moment. His mouth opened to plead for mercy, then I stapled it shut with the misericorde- driving it up into his brain. A clean sever of the corpus callosum, by far the quickest and least painful way to kill someone. I was trained well, and wasn't a _complete _monster.

I pulled the dagger free and blood spilled over my hand. In disgust I wiped it off on the clean bits of the rhino's uniform and then began rifling through his pockets for anything useful. A pouch of laslock rounds, useless now that the gun was beyond repair. A personal link - no reception for me to call anyone, alas - I suspected the hunting park was radio shielded in case of that very eventuality - but worth keeping. A cigarette lighter which I took. And finally a hip-flask of... if my nose does not deceive me, platinsgraff! Well, well, looks like he had some Nal'Galagar friends, this was pricey stuff - and useful too. Now I just needed a way to carry my acquisitions... I inspected the bushes where I had stashed my gore-splattered clothes and as suspected found only a smoking crater where they had been. If I hadn't just murdered a man I might have laughed at the absurdity of my situation, an image flashed through my head of me traipsing around a forest in my underwear with bits of assorted gentleman's appurtenances stuffed down the front and a bloody knife in one hand. Truly, today's indignities were unceasing.

The unconscious wolverine provided an out. Gingerly I stripped him of his prison jacket and donned it myself, big enough to be a coat on my frame, and filled its pockets. I considered whether I should wait for him to wake, gaining an ally in all this might be a good idea... but no, it would spoil my actual escape plan. With him I might survive another few hours, without him I stood a (slim) chance of actually getting off this rock.

Still, I did owe him, so I dragged him into cover and laid a bit of loose foliage over his unconscious form. It was the best I could do, I had a hot date to get ready for.

The last thing I lifted from the General's corpse was his predation imagers, shiny and new right out of the box - the controls even had that little plastic anti-scratch film on. Now I just had to hope that they were enough of a new toy for him that he'd try testing them out on his fellow patrons. I donned them and cycled through the recorded spoor patterns. I cycled through all the other prisoners' patterns before I found them... yes indeed, he'd turned these things on the iguana guards, the jaguaress and - Aha! - the cobra!

Now I just had to cut across the forest until I found his tracks and then... well, I'd improvise.

I sighed, mostly out of mental exhaustion. Improvisation was a knack I'd cultivated over the years, but it was no substitute for good planning. A swindler is a creature of habit, by necessity - it makes it easier for your cover to stick. I'd lived long enough to realise that getting stuck in a rut was a sure way to get identified and tried to vary my game over the years, but even for me this was getting mentally taxing. The stakes didn't make it any easier.

I heard a scream, high and panicked, and followed swiftly by a choked gurgle, blessedly far away. A moment's indecision gripped me, then I was running, against all my better judgment, toward it.