For Love of Mother-Not - Alan Dean Foster [75]
He winced at the “boy,” but otherwise had to agree with her. With considerable effort he kept himself from dashing blindly into the black forest. Instead, he forced himself to the back of the skimmer and checked out the contents of the backpack she had assembled for him. “Don’t I get a gun, too?”
“A fishing lodge isn’t an armory, you know.” She patted the rifle butt. “This is about all we keep around in the way of a portable weapon. Besides, I seem to recall you putting away an opponent bigger than yourself using only your own equipment.”
Flinx glanced self-consciously down at his right boot. His prowess with a knife was not something he was particularly proud of, and he didn’t like talking about it. “A stiletto’s not much good over distance, and we may not have darkness for an ally.”
“Have you ever handled a real hand weapon?” she asked him. “A needler? Beam thrower, projectile gun?”
“No, but I’ve seen them used, and I know how they work. It’s not too hard to figure out that you point the business end at the person you’re mad at and pull the trigger or depress the firing stud.”
“Sometimes it’s not quite that simple, Flinx.” She tightened the belly strap of her backpack. “In any case, you’ll have to make do with just your blade because there isn’t anything else. And I’m not going to give you the dart rifle. I’m much more comfortable with it than you’d be. If you’re worried about my determination to use it, you should know me better than that by now. I don’t feel like being nice to these people. Kidnappers and wervil killers.”
She checked their course on the tracker, entered it into her little compass, and led him from the cabin. The ground was comparatively dry, soft and springy underfoot.
As they marched behind twin search beams, Flinx once more found himself considering his companion. They had a number of important things in common besides independence. Love of animals, for example. Lauren’s hair masked the side of her face from him but he felt he could see it, anyway.
Pip stirred on its master’s shoulder as it sensed strange emotions welling up inside Flinx, emotions that were new to the minidrag and left it feeling not truly upset but decidedly ill at ease. It tried to slip farther beneath the protective jacket.
By the time they reached their destination, it was very near midnight. They hunkered down in a thick copse and stared between the trees. Flinx itched to continue, knowing that Mother Mastiff lay in uneasy sleep somewhere in the complex of buildings not far below. The common sense that had served him so well since infancy did more to hold him back than logic or reason.
To all appearances, the cluster of dimly lit structures resembled nothing so much as another hunting or fishing lodge, though much larger than the one that Lauren managed. In the center were the main lodge buildings, to the left the sleeping quarters for less wealthy guests, to the right the maintenance and storage sheds. Lauren studied the layout through the thumb-sized daynight binoculars. Her experienced eye detected something far more significant than the complex’s deceptive layout.
“Those aren’t logs,” she told Flinx. “They’re resinated plastics. Very nicely camouflaged, but there’s no more wood in them than in my head. Same thing goes for the masonry and rockwork in the foundations.”
“How can you tell?” he asked curiously.
She handed him the tiny viewing device. Flinx put it to his eyes, and it immediately adjusted itself to his different vision, changing light and sharpening focus.
“Look at the corner joints and the lines along the ground and ceilings,” she told him. “They’re much too regular, too precise. That’s usually the result when someone tries to copy nature. The hand of the