Science Fiction: The Year's Best (2006 Edition). Аластер Рейнольдс

presented him with a useless image of murky lake water. The composite transformed the darkness into a vision of hunters and hound seals slipping through water that was so clear they could have been sailing across a cloudless sky.

      “The average chase lasts about an hour,” Purvali said.

      “And then there’s the traditional social rituals after the return to the dock. I should be able to call him in about three hours, right?”

      “Yes. There’s a hunt lunch followed by a ceremonial closure.”

      “Then I suppose I may as well tend to a few business matters.”

      “Can you limit your efforts to activities that don’t require long transmissions?”

      “I’ll pull in one last download and settle for whatever distraction it can offer me.”

      The hunting seals sped through the waters in a portion of his display he located on the upper left quarter of his vision field. On the upper right quarter, images and numbers updated the situation on the north shore power delivery project. The trees and the incessant movement of the bird life provided an odd, clashing backdrop for both halves.

      Five hundred thousand human beings now lived on Fernheim. In theory, they didn’t need any kind of centralized power system. In theory, they could have fulfilled all their needs with the solar power panels that roofed most of their homes. The panels would have powered their fabricators and their fabricators would have provided them with all the essentials a rational human could possibly need.

      In practice, of course, very few people were satisfied with the basics. In the average Fernheim household, the fabricators were sucking up energy five times faster than the average solar installation could supply it. The champagne Sabor had stocked in his carrier would have used up several days of the average individual’s solar consumption. A proper standard of living, by most people’s standards, required a proper energy infrastructure, complete with large-scale hydrogen-fusion reactors, orbiting power satellites, and all the other sources of energy human ingenuity had developed.

      And, of course, a network of cables and wires that would deliver the energy to all the needy individuals who would be reduced to champagne-deprived poverty without it. In some societies the network would have been constructed by a government. On Fernheim, so far, nobody seemed to be interested in the tedious bickering—or outright violence—that normally preceded the establishment of a central government. The North Shore Energy Matrix was an exercise in long term speculation. Ninety percent of the people in the lake community—forty-five percent of the population of the planet—lived on the south shore. The entrepreneurs behind the north shore project were assuming a power network would pull new arrivals and restless current residents to the unterrestrialized wilderness on the other side of the lake. The profits would come tomorrow, the big expenditures had to be paid today. Obviously, a competent, upright scion of a famous banking family had to wave his wand and place the necessary numbers in the appropriate accounts. And watch every move the North Shore Development Association made. In exactly the same way his mother would have.

      He had been nine when his mother’s personal assistant had given him his first overview of the family business. We are a profit making enterprise, BanarJar had intoned. But we fill a social role. Bankers are the functionaries who allocate the capital resources of society. A progressive society must invest some of its resources in enterprises that increase its future wealth. We are the people who decide which enterprises will be cultivated. Governments can do that, too, but we operate under a socially valuable restraint: we forfeit some of our own wealth when we make bad decisions.

      The hunting seals cornered the yellow-feathered swordbeak in a shallow cove near the south end of the lake. The meals-and-recreation charts on the North Shore display produced two numbers that looked like they warranted a request for more information—a request he would transmit primarily as a reminder he was performing his fiduciary duties. The monotonous tramp of the widemounts carried them from the trees and birds in one section of the forest to the almost-identical trees and birds in another section.

      Sabor’s information system pipped. “You have a message from Heinrich Dobble.”

      “Display.”

      Heinrich’s recorded image replaced the North Shore display. “I’ve been advised Colonel Jina has dispatched two helicopters in your direction, Sabor. They were one hundred kilometers southwest of his hangars about ten minutes ago.”

      “They could be close enough to start running a search pattern in about forty minutes,” Purvali said. “They’ll be operating at the limits of their range.”

      Sabor grimaced. “We are reminded once again of the hazards of assuming you can predict your adversary’s intentions. Is there any possibility the second copter is carrying fuel?”

      Purvali paused just long enough to let him know he had impressed her—a reaction that always evoked a spurt of ridiculously irrational masculine pleasure.

      “It could be. Kenzan Khan could have hired one squad. And spent the savings on the copters.”

      She paused for another ten seconds. “The second copter can carry enough fuel to keep both of them in the area for seventy-two minutes maximum. They could stay longer, of course, if the tanker could find a spot to put down.”

      Sabor stared at the transmission from the scene of the hunt. Possibilities flooded through his brain. The helicopters couldn’t hover above their location and drop Colonel Jina’s staffers directly on top of them. The anti-material loads in their guns made that a foolhardy move. The ground troops would probably land a few hundred meters away and pursue them on foot. If one of the copters was a tanker, and it found a spot to sit down, the copters could stay in the area and give the foot soldiers a mobility that could be decisive.…

      “I’m beginning to feel my training in military tactics hasn’t been as extensive as it should have been,” Sabor said.

      “They probably don’t have our exact location,” Purvali said. “They probably know where we are to within about thirty kilometers.”

      Sabor placed a small map on his right display area. The random movements dictated by the system had veered them closer to the Ratagava River. They were now about twenty-five kilometers from the river bank. Should they turn away from it? The widemounts could traverse the fords marked on the map but they would be crossing a river that harbored some of the less pleasant representatives of the aboriginal fish and feather community.

      He gave the system an order and it generated a course that took them almost due east—directly toward the river.

      “We’ll obey the fates one more time,” Sabor said. “Colonel Jina may assume we’ll be avoiding the rivers—going where he can’t corner us against the river bank.”

      The security system picked up the two helicopters as the copters slipped across the forest from the northeast. Both machines seemed to be steering toward the center of the logical search area.

      The widemounts had just begun their hourly rest period. Choy thought they should let the animals have a good feed and Sabor concurred. “They won’t be widening the search this far for another hour,” Choy said. “It may be our last chance to give the animals a solid refueling.”

      Choy was scanning in one second bursts at random intervals spaced four to eight minutes apart. The system didn’t register another blip until he made two more scans. The copter was just about where it should have been if it had been executing the search pattern Choy had predicted.

      “They have to be refueling.” Purvali said. “They couldn’t be running that kind of pattern if they weren’t refueling.”

      On the hunt display, the hunters were riding toward their dock with a piece of the swordbeak’s flesh speared on each lance. The hunters had conducted their final, single-handed rushes at the swordbeak with a stately, ritualized formality but the kill itself had been a blood spattered fury of massed lance thrusts.

      “It’s going to take them another half hour to reach the dock,” Purvali said.