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It saved both their lives. A sudden blast of force erupted in the air to their right. Even the turbulence at its very edge was nearly enough to send them into the rock wall so close to their left. Under Han’s desperate efforts the little swoop wobbled, then righted and flew on.

Overhead and to the right banked one of the other swoops; its pilot had brought it down in a steep dive and snapped past, opening his accelerator at the bottom of the dive in an effort to knock Han’s vehicle out of the air or tear its riders from their saddle with the sheer force of an engine blast. Played for near-misses and scares, this sort of thing had been a game Han had known well in his youth; played for real, it was an efficient form of murder.

He knew there would be at least one backup man; they wouldn’t leave more than half their number on high cover. He came up on a forking of the way, took a split second’s bearing on the angle of the sun and dodged into the canyon he had selected. The woman was pounding him on the back, demanding to know why he’d taken the more confining way.

There was a long overhang running along one side of the canyon, but he clung to the other side, dividing his time between the harrowingly fast decisions of the ride and stolen, microsecond glances at the canyon floor. He fought the urge to pull up and get clear of the insane obstacle course; with its double burden, his swoop would almost certainly be overtaken and hemmed in and someone flying high cover was a good bet to buffet him right out of the sky.

A flash of warning was all he got. The sun’s slanting rays showed him another shadow not far behind his own on the canyon’s floor. His instantaneous brake-and-accelerate sequence was based more on intuition than on computation of angles and speeds. But it served its purpose; the other swoop overshot, its rider’s aim thrown off by Han’s maneuver. The other rider pulled out of his dive, but by then Han had pulled into a position to meet him as he brought his swoop into an ascending curve. As he rose, the other rider found himself gazing into the rear end of Han’s swoop’s engine pod.

He couldn’t avoid Han’s afterblast. The other swoop careened off the canyon floor, wobbled in the air for a moment, then plowed into the ground. Han didn’t stop to see whether the rider survived the spill or not; he poured on all the speed he safely could, and considerably more besides. Climbing, diving, and sideslipping, it was all he could do to keep from having a collision of his own.

It was a shock when, coming out of a frantic bank that had their swoop’s underside within centimeters of a vertical canyon wall, Han and his passenger broke into the open, leaving the hills behind. Unexpectedly, the other three pursuers, who had lost track of Han in the maze, came flying at an almost leisurely pace across his course.

He had a moment’s view of their astounded faces, a human and two humanoids whose gold-sheened skins gleamed in the hazy sunlight of the long Bonadan afternoon. They swung their swoops around to resume the chase as Han accelerated.

Even as he did, he knew a straight run would be futile. With the woman aboard he was bound to be overtaken before he could reach the safety of the patrolled city traffic patterns. What he needed was something to break off the pursuit.

Something off to his left attracted his attention. The huge cylinder of the automated weather-control station was just beginning a slow swing on its aiming apparatus, realigning for a new assignment. Han yanked at the handlebars and cut a new course for it.

His passenger screamed. “What are you doing? They’ll catch us!”

He couldn’t take time to tell her they would be overtaken anyway. Closing fast on the station’s supporting framework, he had to cut speed. Quick looks told him that his swoop was being bracketed above and to either side by the remaining pursuers. He cut speed even more as the support framework loomed directly before him.

For the moment his pursuers held back, not sure why he was riding straight at this huge obstruction.