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would

have to try and unstick himself from Blue-Thunder, or wait until after

dark.

By nightfall, Steve had not managed to distance himself from the posse

despite the fact that he had lagged behind complaining of a sudden,

painful stitch, and had later developed a twisted ankle. Blue-Thunder

had slowed down until he felt better then, when he simply dropped out,

he ordered two pairs of warriors to take turns in carrying him along

with his arms draped over their shoulders. Realising his ruse had

failed, Steve made a dramatic recovery and carded on unaided.

When they finally stopped, Steve did not have to feign exhaustion and,

to add the final touch to a day when everything had seemed to go wrong,

it started to rain steadily. No fires were lit, there was no moon, and

a dense blanket of cloud obscured the stars. The M'Call warriors sat

huddled together in groups, morosely chewing on dried meat twists or

fruit rings. They didn't mind the rain but they preferred it during

the day. It was the combination of no fire and no stars that was the

real dampener.

For journeys that took them away from home for several days, the

M'Calls carried light closely-woven mats which, when unrolled, measured

approximately nine feet by six. The mat was folded down its length and

the two edges of one of the short ends had been sewn together to form a

large hood that could be worn over the head and shoulders while using

the bottom third of the mat to sit on or, alternatively, you could lie

stretched out inside it with your feet in the closed end. Used in

combination with their travelling furs, it provided a reasonably

waterproof shelter.

Despite the temporary gloom caused by the absence of a starry sky,

Blue-Thunder was quietly confident that they would catch up with the

red-skins by the middle of the following day. Steve realised that this

was his last chance. He rolled himself into his furskin, wriggled

inside the folded straw mat and lay there listening to the raindrops

plopping noisily and endlessly onto the leaves of the surrounding

trees. The cold and the damp began to seep into his bones. Rain

something that generations of Trackers had never encountered - had lost

all its novelty value during his previous stay with the M'Calls.

It was one feature of the overground he could do without.

By the time everybody was asleep, the darkness was so complete Steve

could barely see his hand in front of his face. It didn't matter. The

keyboard, function switches and the liquid crystal display were

illuminated automatically by means of a sensor which measured the

surrounding level of light when the hidden transceiver was exposed.

Sliding carefully out of his furskin, Steve picked his way around the

sleeping bodies then dropped his pants and squatted down in the middle

of a waist-high patch of undergrowth. If anyone came looking for him

his reason for being there would be immediately obvious. He couldn't

be sure but he was fairly confident that there were no Mutes' laws or

customs that forbade nocturnal defecation.

Pulling the knife from its sheath, Steve searched with his fingers for

the two hidden catches and pressed down simultaneously. Once, twice,

three times. Nothing happened. The wooden hand-grip covering the

transceiver remained stubbornly in place. Steve turned the handle over

in the darkness and tried again. Nope . . .

the catches weren't there. He had been holding it cgrrectly the first

time. He turned it back over and tried again. The triple-action

pressure lock stayed shut.

What the fuck was going on? It was virtually impossible for it to

jam.

A sudden chill thought struck him. Rapidly locating the place where

Lou Kennedy Naylor's initials had been stamped into the wood, Steve

traced the letters with his thumbnail. What he thought was an 'N'

turned out to be an 'R'. The initials were not LKN but SRB. Uhh,

Christopher ... Someone had done a quick switch. The knife he now held

in his hand was his own - which had been taken from him after being

captured the previous year.

Steve checked the initials once again just to make sure then put the