What the Smugglers Sold

The records do not say how the warehouse went. His next page starts after it was over, with an inventory, the way a field survey starts with a count of what is still standing.

Freebooter armor (both screwed), azimuth lasers x 2, tactical baton x 2. Then a second line, with a name at the head of it: Twomas En, freebooter armor, azimuth laser x 1, inferno knife. A credstick with fifty credits on it. The two suits of armour were ruined, whatever had happened to them. What happened to Twomas En himself, the page does not record. His gear changed hands, and the records leave it there.

One of them was taken alive, and they questioned him.

I have read the account of that questioning more times than I need to, because it is so plain. The captive carried a laser and a baton like the others. He was not the one who had done the dealing — Twomas had done all of it — but he had been there, and he knew what had been bought. Eyrub-Paqual had come to them as an academic. But he was terrifying. A korasha lashunta, male, pale and weathered, with hair gone green and grey, in a suit that was neither cheap nor fine. So the man with no photograph had a face after all, and the smuggler remembered it as frightening.

A couple of days before, the smugglers had filled his order: fifteen travel documents for the local portals, through to Truhalu Point. A comm unit, taken apart into three pieces. A shirren-eye rifle. Other firearms. A special permit for fungal spores. And he had a korasha with him, the captive said, and yes — Solstarni.

The Field Canon teaches that you can know an animal by what it carries back to its den. The smugglers had handed the party Eyrub-Paqual's list, and the list told them where he was going and roughly what he meant to do when he got there.

What they did with the captive is in his notes in two lines. Starfinders are explorers, we don't really have any authority on Castrovel. And then: Leaving the guy behind. There is no argument recorded. They were guests on that world, carrying papers that ran out, and they had no right to keep a man. They let him go.

There were eight hours to kill before their visas came through, and by the time anything else was written down, five of those hours were left. There was money too, two thousand six hundred credits, set aside to use towards finding her. He does not finish the sentence, and I don't think he needed to.

Qabarat keeps its gates in a district of their own. His notes reach for a comparison and settle on a great crossing-hall: stargates in rows, dock workers moving freight through them, travellers queued with their papers out. Most of the elven gates — the aiudara, built in an age whose craft no one now remembers — stand in that one quarter of the city. Anyone going through a portal into the wild goes through armed. The notes record this as a local custom.

Truhalu Point, they learned while they waited, was a single outpost at the far end. It had been military once and was decommissioned twenty years ago. Most of it had since been turned over to greenhouses.

When they stepped through, the engineer at the gate swore aloud as the first of them went in. The records do not explain why. I have always taken it as the sound of someone who knew more about that crossing than he had time to say.

On the other side it was night, and hot. The outpost was as quiet as twenty years of disuse would make it, and they saw no soldiers. Off in the dark was a yaruk: a giant herbivore, the notes say, and quite dangerous. A grazer that size does not need to hunt you to kill you. It only needs to be startled. He wrote down its name and nothing more. I take that to mean they let it be, which is the right way to treat a large animal at night in its own country.

A human walked out to meet them. His name was Kahir Alnuaf, the ranking scientist at Truhalu Point and the holder of its grant. He had had a call from the university asking him to help them. The group they were chasing had come through and left about a day before — lashunta mercenaries, he said, headed north-west towards elven ruins.

Kahir worked out the route for them: ten to twelve days on foot, to the foothills of the Singing Range. Then he outfitted them. Two suits of lashunta ringwear, a carbonsteel curve blade, two sticky bombs, four doses of antitoxin, four doses of spray flesh, three weeks of rations, a hundred credits' worth of ammunition. The region runs above ninety degrees, he told them. Travel in the evening. Rest through the day, in a tent that keeps the heat out.

The Field Canon has an entry on this country now. Its later additions borrowed from his notes for it, nearly line for line.

ON TRAVEL IN HEAT — country beyond the gates (later additions)
Above ninety degrees the day is not for walking. Give it to sleep.
Move at evening. The cooler hours are the road.
A tent that holds its own temperature is not comfort. It is water you need not drink.
Count rations in weeks, not days. Ten days' walking is three weeks' food.
Carry antitoxin. Carry something to close wounds. You will be far from both.
Go armed through the gate. Those who live beside it do.
Large grazers are not harmless for being grazers. Give them the ground.
An outpost without soldiers is not an outpost without danger.
Ask the one who lives there how far. Believe the longer estimate.
Those you follow went this way a day ahead. They left in the same heat.
(Kopalo, from field notes; Castrovel.)

— the Field Canon, on Travel, later additions

Novitiates find this entry dull, and they are meant to. Most of its lines are what Kahir told them, and the last is what Taeon noticed: the mercenaries had walked out into the same heat with a scholar who may not have chosen to go. The Canon keeps that line as a fact about the terrain. I have never read it as only that.

The last thing on the page is a camp. Set up tents. They pitched them at night, at the edge of a place that had been a fort and was now mostly glass and growing things. Ahead of them were ten or twelve days of walking, and somewhere in front of that, a day's lead.

Note the track a day old. It is not cold. It is only patient.

— the Observances, from the Readings on Pursuit

They would walk at evening. Whoever they were following was walking too.