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staring off into the past. “Burly, too. Stood maybe sixteen feet at the shoulder, and they were covered top to bottom with shaggy brown fur. Their heads were enormous, and each one had a long prehensile lower lip that seemed almost as useful as a human hand. Their ears were small and rounded, and their noses were big and broad. They looked awkward, but they could move pretty goddamned fast when they were charging.”
    He stopped long enough to take a swallow from his bottle. “Most interesting thing about ’em was their eyes. Red crystal they were. Looked just like rubies, except here” — he pointed to some scratch marks — “where the jeweler removed the pupil. They always got rid of the pupil; people didn’t like to be reminded where their trinkets came from.”
    “And you really hunted them for their eyes?” I asked.
    “Their eye stones ,” Carson corrected me. “Fetched about 5,000 credits for a good pair. Probably worth a little more these days” —he grinned at Catastrophe Baker— “but not as much as a Dragon Queen.”
    “How do you know so much about Landships?” asked Max.
    “Because I killed the very last one,” said Carson.

    The Last Landship
    What you’ve got to understand (said Carson) is that the Landships were a doomed species from the moment that Men decided their eyes made pretty baubles. I’ve seen ’em worn as jewelry, and displayed as art, and even used as currency. Until today I hadn’t ever heard of one being chosen over a real live woman, but I’ve been out of touch for quite a while and for all I know it’s happened before.
    Anyway, Peponi was a colony planet, prettier than some, wilder than most, and it attracted a lot of big-game hunters and adventurers. A few of ’em started safari companies and took clients out into the bush, but most of them were there to hunt Landships and sell the eyestones they collected.
    Well, with as many millions of Landships as covered the planet and as few Men to hunt them, you wouldn’t think they could be decimated so fast, but within a century there weren’t more than fifty thousand left. They were mostly gathered in one protected area, a place called the Bukwa Enclave—and then one day the government ran out of money and pulled most of its army out, and suddenly it wasn’t protected any longer, and that was the beginning of the end. I still remember it.
    My old pal Catamount Greene was the first to arrive. He didn’t know a damned thing about tracking, but old Catamount never let minor details like that stop him. On the way to the Enclave he picked up a bunch of carvings and jewelry from one of the local tribes, then found one of the few military outposts left in the Bukwa area and explained that he was trading these trinkets to the tribes that lived in the Enclave. He gave a few of the choicest ones to the soldiers, bought them a couple of drinks, and went on to say that he was terrified of Landships and that he had heard that the Enclave was filled with them—and within ten minutes he had talked them into marking where the herds were on a map so that he could avoid them while he hawked his wares from village to village. He walked into the Enclave with one weapon, three bearers, and his map, and walked out a month later with more than 3,000 eyestones.
    Then there was Bocci, who had made up his mind to leave Peponi, but decided to stick around just long enough to clean up in the Enclave. He found a waterhole way out at the western end, staked it out, poisoned it, and picked up 700 eyestones without ever firing a shot.
    Jumping Jimmy Westerly went in with a stepladder, took it out in the shoulder-high grass where none of the other hunters would go, climbed atop it, and potted twenty Landships the first day he was there. Once they cleared out of the area, he followed them, always keeping to high grass. He’d set up his ladder whenever they stopped, and he kept right on doing it until he had his thousand eyestones.
    Other hunters used