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Kasarax and Shazeen breasted the water neck and neck, shrilling challenges to one another. Han began to wonder whether a hike around the lake wouldn’t have been a better idea after all. Why do I always think of these things too late?

IX

TOWING hawsers thrummed like bowstrings. The rafts moved forward with surges matching the Swimmers’ rhythms.

Han clasped the low deck rail. The water teemed with sauropteroids, both Kasarax’s cronies and Shazeen’s supporters, who had been kept from work by Kasarax’s alliance with the shore gang.

Long, scaled necks cut the water; rolling backs and broad flippers showed with each dive, and the spray of swimming and blasting blowholes made it seem the rain had resumed.

“Chewie!” shouted Hasti, who was hugging a rail stanchion, “the bag!”

The shoulder bag containing Skynx was sliding aft. Badure rolled from a stern-rail corner and caught it, wrapping his legs around a stanchion. Skynx popped out of the bag, his big red eyes more glazed now than before.

Taking in their situation unsteadily, the Ruurian scuttled up halfway onto Badure’s head, his antennae bending in the breeze, clinging resolutely with every digit he could spare, and hurled the empty jet-juice flask into the air, cheering, “Weee-ee heee-ee! I bet five driit on us!” Spying Kasarax’s raft, he added shrewdly, “And five more on them!” He sank back down into the bag, which Badure closed over him.

The rough ride didn’t trouble Han nearly as much as the fact that this was no ordinary race. The two bulls were straining, neither able to gain headway against the other. Kasarax made a bid for the lead, then another, but Shazeen matched his spurts and held the pace. Han could hear their booming grunts of effort over the rush of the wind and the slapping of water against the rafts.

Kasarax changed tactics, slackening his line. Shazeen followed suit. The younger creature changed course in an instant, cutting across Shazeen’s path just behind his elder. He ducked under Shazeen’s towing hawsers and pulled hard. His tow-raft came slashing after, hawsers brushing at angles under Shazeen’s.

Han saw the shore-gang chief hoist a broad-bladed axe; Kasarax’s men obviously intended to sever Shazeen’s hawsers when the hawsers came up against Kasarax’s raft’s bow rail. The pilot drew without thinking; a blaster bolt flickered red across the water, and the axehead jolted, sparks arcing from it, a black-edged hole burned through it. The shore-gang chief dropped it with a cry as his men ducked.

Someone else grabbed the axe and swung it as both rafts and the Swimmers towing them were dragged and slewed around by each other’s momentum. Han’s aim was spoiled and the axehead descended. Perhaps it was an off-world product with an enhanced edge; in any case the axe parted a hawser with one blow and bit into the bow rail. Shazeen’s raft swung, coming nearly side-on, with the unbalanced pull of the remaining hawser.

The chief had the axe back, ready to chop the other hawser. Han was aiming carefully at the axe when Shazeen changed course in an effort to see what had happened. The remaining towing hawser dragged across Kasarax’s raft’s rail, catching the shore-gang chief and pulling him overboard. At the same moment Shazeen’s maneuver bumped his own raft into a trough. Han lost his footing, slipped, and fell, whereupon the blaster flew from his hand.

The chief was still clinging to Shazeen’s remaining tow-hawser, lower body in the water, sawing at it with a knife. Han couldn’t spot his blaster, but was determined not to let that second line be severed. The gang chief was working at the hawser, Hasti was shouting something about not starting a firefight, and Badure and Chewbacca were yelling something he didn’t want to take time to listen to, being in no mood for a debate. Losing patience, he threw off his flight jacket, stepped over the bow rail, sprang, and began drawing himself down the hawser, hand over hand, his legs wrapped