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figures in Earth’s dry soil. He’d hated math when he was a boy and he hated it now, but despite his great childhood conviction that he would never need to learn how to solve his schoolwork in the real world, here he was: A ship leaves High Court on Jota Prime at two of the bells traveling nine hundred kilometers an hour. If he maintains his speed and pilots the most direct course, what time will it be on Earth when he lands at these coordinates?
    He was getting a headache. Already. Gods.
    So, all right. It would be the middle of Earth’s night. So. In all likelihood, E’Var was aimed east and Tagen was three Earth days behind him. He would have to manage better than one hundred kilometers a day in order to overtake the prisoner, and he would have to do it on foot, on an alien world, in temperatures in excess of one hundred degrees.
    As he moved into the woods under the blistering eye of Earth’s sun, Tagen found himself hoping he really did find E’Var somewhere on this miserable planet.
    He’d hate to think he was having all this fun for nothing.
     
     
    *
     
     
    Kane woke to the sound of incessant screaming. Even before his eyes had opened, he reared up and balled a fist to knock whoever the fuck was responsible silent if not completely senseless. The movement brought out a flare of agony all down his back. He snarled out a curse and carefully sat up.
    Earth’s sun had really done a number on his bare skin. His arms were stinging, red and shiny, and if the pain was any indication, so was his back and his face. It wasn’t a serious burn, he knew, but it was going to get that way soon if he didn’t find a better way of traveling than on foot.
    He was inside the human’s shelter. Flimsy as it was, it was still protection from the brutal sun. He could even remember, very dimly, dragging the female in here with him. And there she was, lying on her back beside him and staring straight up into space. She wasn’t screaming.
    But something sure as fuck was. Short, hoarse, relentless screaming, each one a spike straight to Kane’s brain. He crawled to the mouth of the shelter and looked out, shading his eyes against the brilliance of mid-day.
    There was a bird on top of the table. A big, black bird, and it was shrieking like all hell.
    There were no birds on Jota. Kane could remember a time when he’d thought that was a pity. One of Urak’s So-Quaal contacts kept a collection of birds, many of them from Earth, and as a young boy, Kane had been allowed to look at them while his father and the So-Quaal scientist talked. Some of them could even mimic speech. Over several of these visits, Kane had managed to teach one of them to say, “I’m going to kill you in your sleep,” in So-Quaal. He still thought that was pretty funny and, despite the beating that it had resulted in once the So-Quaal found out about it and complained to his father, he thought Urak had, too.
    Moving slowly so as not to spook the shrieker facing him now, Kane reached out and found a nice palm-sized stone. The bird saw him well enough, and even cocked its head to acknowledge him, but kept right on ripping the woods up with noise.
    Kane bared his teeth in a hard smile and threw, his arm producing a shriek of its own as it cut through the air. The stone struck, shattering the bird’s breast, and it flopped over with a final cry, slapping its wings against the ground futilely until it died.
    Kane grunted and lay back down beside his human. He was awake now and he supposed he should get up, but it was too damned hot to think about travel. Still, he had the female, and that was something. Heat would be on him again in an hour, but once he’d fucked it out of his system, it would probably be well on to evening and cool enough that it would not return until tomorrow. He could travel tonight and take the human with him.
    Kane raised himself up on one elbow and looked his female over, thinking. If she could pilot the groundcar he saw outside, so much