Legacy by Steve White Read Free Book Online Page B

eye the bogies swooping in. Yeah, finish us off with lasers. It's a nice clear day, and why waste more depletable munitions?
    What followed happened almost too quickly to register on the mind.
    With a thunderous roar, one of the bogies exploded in a gout of flame and smoke, raining wreckage on the forest below. Then, like a streak of silver, a new craft screamed in from the west. Once past the bogies, it began to shed velocity, and started a 180 degree turn. It couldn't be doing it on gravs, which wouldn't have maintained stability—yet there was no sign of any kind of reaction drive at the tail of that sleek shape.
    The remaining bogie tried to maneuver, seeming as slow and clumsy as Sarnac suddenly felt his own craft—or any craft he had ever flown—to be. But the stranger came around and, while Sarnac was still wondering whether to admire the pilot or the technology the pilot commanded, launched a missile that flashed home with preposterous speed, and sent the Talon-6 to join its fellow in fiery death.
    But the stranger cut it a little too close, unable to kill all of his velocity, before he swept through the flying chunks of debris that had been a Talon-6. He flashed on, but now a trail of smoke appeared behind him as he began to lose control.
    Sarnac snapped out of his trancelike concentration on the impossible dogfight, when he suddenly saw that the damaged grav-repulsors were failing. But the fate of their inexplicable savior could not concern him as he sought to nurse the shuttle to an emergency landing.
    As the forest's green roof—Danuan plants used a pigment very similar to Earth's chlorophyll—drew closer, he remembered that he hadn't heard any sound from the other two for a while. And he discovered that he needed some human noise . . . badly.
    "Did I just see what I think I just saw?" he asked the shuttle at large.
    "You did." Natalya's voice sounded frayed from more than merely pain. "We all did. But the radar didn't."
    It was all Sarnac could do to concentrate on the gravs. The development of sensors had advanced to keep pace with stealth technology. What they still called radar was a far more broad-spectrum affair than the twentieth century original. State of the art stealth hulls could fool sensors—but not at this close a range.
    Then a wicked-looking tangle of tree limbs was whipping upward at them with vicious speed, and all he could think about was getting the shuttle down.

Chapter Three
    Sarnac brushed what he decided he might as well call an insect—there were no pedantic biologists around—from his face. It wasn't the exercise in futility it would have been on Earth, for these insects hadn't acquired a tormentingly persistent taste for homo sapiens. Sarnac's visitor instinctively recognized a life form it couldn't live on, and took the hint.
    Of course, it cut both ways. If the local life forms couldn't live on them, the reverse also held true. It wasn't that Danuan food would poison them. Some of the plants would—but even without the notes and specimens they had left behind at their base camp, they could recognize the safe ones. But it also wouldn't sustain them. Certain essential vitamins were missing. Luckily, they had salvaged some vitamin supplements from the shuttle. What would happen when those ran out was something Sarnac had resolved not to let himself think about just yet.
    He had brought the crippled shuttle down to a near-miraculous landing, sans gravs, in the dense forest. At first, the shuttle had been suspended in a tangled canopy, formed by gigantic ancient trees, and it had taken some ingenuity to lower themselves and the gear they could carry to the ground. After which they had gotten as far as possible from the alarmingly swaying shuttle and the creaking, groaning trees that supported it. The support soon gave way and the shuttle smashed to the ground, breaking its back and bursting into flames.
    And now they were doing the only thing they could think of: continuing to