The Outpost Read Online Free PDF

other methods. True West Thompson brought in a whole tribe of native hunters who used poisoned spears and arrows and brought down almost three thousand Landships before they started becoming scarce.
    After a couple of months, the Enclave began to resemble a war zone, and you could smell the Landship carcasses rotting from miles away, but it didn’t stop the slaughter. Kalahari Jenkins took a dry area, about forty miles square, at the northwestern tip of the Enclave, announced that it was his personal hunting ground, and swore he’d kill anyone who entered it. A feller named Kennedy wandered in one day, chasing a couple of Landships, and true to his word Jenkins blew him away. What he didn’t know was that Kennedy had six sons, and it started a blood feud. Lasted a couple of weeks before they killed him—I seem to remember that he got four of them first—and then the two remaining sons declared that it was now their territory. That lasted about five days, until old Hakira came up from the south, killed the last two Kennedy boys, gathered up all of Jenkins’ and the Kennedys’ eyestones and lit out for civilization.
    Nobody ever found out what happened to the Maracci Sisters. They were damned good hunters, those girls—but one day they just disappeared, both of ’em, and no one ever found the 8,000 eyestones they were supposed to have taken.
    Anyway, the government finally realized that they had to do something or there wouldn’t be any Landships left, and if there weren’t any Landships, both the hunting and holographic safari businesses would vanish and Peponi’s main source of hard currency would vanish, so they finally passed a ban on hunting Landships.
    They meant well, but the ban came too late. They didn’t know it, but there was only one Landship left.

    “Just a minute,” said Nicodemus Mayflower. “I’ve never even heard of a Landship.”
    “That’s not surprising,” replied Hellfire Carson. “Not many people have.”
    “I never saw one in a museum, or even in a book,” continued Mayflower.
    “Are you calling me a liar?” demanded Carson hotly.
    “I don’t know yet. When was the last Landship killed?”
    “In 1813 G.E.,” said Carson.
    “ Now I’m calling you a liar!” said Nicodemus Mayflower. “That was more than 4,700 years ago!”
    “I know when it was,” answered Carson calmly. “I was there.”
    “I’m willing to be told that this thing ain’t no ruby,” interjected Catastrophe Baker, holding up the stone. “After all, talk is cheap. But before I believe anything you say, I’d sure like to know how you came to be almost 5,000 years old.”
    “Might as well tell you,” agreed Carson. “You don’t look like you’re going to take it on faith.”
    “Tell you what,” said Baker. “I’ll take 1,500 years on faith; you prove the rest.”
    Everyone laughed, even Carson, and when the noise had subsided he spoke again.
    “It happened a few years later. I’d left Peponi and had been hunting on Faligor, when I heard there was adventure to be had in a promising little war in the Belladonna Cluster. It figured to be about a three-week trip, so I activated the DeepSleep chamber and told my ship’s computer to wake me when I was within a day of the Cluster.”
    Carson took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he scratched his shaggy gray head. “To this day I don’t know what went wrong, but the next thing I knew some medics were pulling me out of the chamber and saying they’d found this derelict ship floating in space with me inside it. All I know is I went to sleep in the year 1822 of the Galactic Era, and I woke up ten years ago, in 6513. I can’t prove it, but there are those who can, and if any doubters want to put up enough money, we’ll go hunt them up.”
    “Well, I’ll be damned!” said Catastrophe Baker. “We got ourselves a regular Rip Van Winkle in our midst.”
    “No,” Three-Gun Max corrected him. “We’ve got a Hellfire Van Winkle.”
    Which was