Hunter's Run by George R. R. Martin Read Free Book Online

strategy for garnering the most useful information
in the cheapest possible way. Even as he set the first charge, he found himself
fantasizing about those long, slow, lazy days while the tests ran. He could go
hunting. Or explore the lakes. Or find a warm place in the sun and sleep while
the breeze set the grasses to singing. His fingers danced across the
explosives, tugging at wires and timing chips with the ease and autonomous
grace of long practice. Many prospectors lost careers and hands - sometimes
lives - by being too careless with their tools. Ramon was careful, but he was
also practiced. Once the site was chosen and cleared, placing the charge took
less than an hour.
     
    He found himself, strangely,
procrastinating about setting it off. It was so quiet here, so still, so
peaceful! From up here, the forested slopes fell away in swaths of black and
dead blue and orange, the trees rippling like a carpet of moss as the wind blew
across them - except for the white egg of his bubbletent on the mountain
shoulder below, it was a scene that might not have changed since the beginning
of time. For a moment, he was almost tempted to forget about prospecting, and
just relax and unwind on this trip, as long as he was being forced to hide out
in the hills anyway, but he shrugged the temptation away - once the fuss over
the European had blown over, once he went back, he would still need money, the
van wouldn’t hold together forever, and Elena’s scorn if he returned
empty-handed again was something he wasn’t anxious to face. Perhaps there will
be no ore here anyway, he told himself almost wishing it, and then wondered at
the tenor of his thoughts. Surely it could not be a bad thing to be rich? His
stomach was beginning to hurt again.
     
    He looked up at the mountain
face. It was beautiful; rugged and untouched. Once he was done with it, it
would never be the same.
     
    ‘All apologies,’ he said to the
view he was about to mar. ‘But a man has to make his money somehow. Hills don’t
have to eat.’
     
    Ramon took one last cigarette
from its silver case and smoked it like a man at an execution. He walked down
to the boulders he’d chosen for shelter stringing the powder-primed fuse cord,
hunkered down behind the rocks, and lit the fuse with the last ember.
     
    There was the expected blast; but
while the sound should have been a single report echoing against the mountains
and then fading, it grew louder and longer instead. The hillside shifted
greasily under him, like a giant shrugging in uneasy sleep, and he heard the
express-train rumble of sliding rock. He could tell from the sound alone that
something had gone very wrong.
     
    A great cloud of dust enveloped
him, white as fog and tasting like plaster and stone. A landslide. Somehow
Ramon’s little coring charge had set off a landslide. Coughing, he cursed
himself, thinking back to what he’d seen. How could he have missed a rock face
that unstable? It was the kind of mistake that killed prospectors. If he had
chosen shelter a little nearer than he had, he could have been crushed to
death. Or worse, crippled and buried here where no man would ever find him -
trapped until the redjackets came and stripped the flesh off his bones.
     
    The angry, thundering roar
quieted, faded. Ramon rose from behind the boulders, waving his hand before his
face as if stirring the air would somehow put more oxygen in it or lessen the
thick coating of stone dust that was no doubt forming in his nose and lungs. He
walked slowly forward, his footing uncertain on the newly-made scree. The
stones smelled curiously hot.
     
    A metal wall stood where the
facade of stone had fallen away; half a mountain high and something between
twenty and twenty-five meters wide.
     
    It was, of course, impossible. It
had to be some bizarre natural formation. He stepped forward, and his own
reflection - pale as the ghost of a ghost - moved toward him. When he reached
out, his blurred twin reached out as well,