Chapter 13

Pan would have been almost unrecognizable to those he had left behind at the Citadel only a couple of weeks before. Never a muscular man, he had always had the wiry, whipcord strength of an athlete, a runner. The past weeks had pared that down to the most basic essence, stripped every ounce of fat from his frame and re-sculpted him. His cheek bones stood out like knife blades from his sunken cheeks and his jaw, always strong, had a chiseled look of weathered stone. His eyes, normally a vibrant green, were dulled with pain and sunken in dark, smudged pits.

His fiery locks had been shorn, all except a narrow crest of hair, a strip 5 or 6 centimeters wide that ran from his widow's peak to the nape of his neck. Dyed a muddy auburn color, where it had stood in a proud crest before, now it lay dirty, matted and tangled against his stubbled scalp. His eclectic and colorful clothes had been replaced with a non-descript blue coverall that was stained and torn. Mud caked and filthy, what skin showed through the rents in the fabric was abraded and raw.

He inched a little further along the game trail, dragging his ruined legs behind him. His hands, cut and bleeding, grasped at tufts of grass, tree roots and rocks, pulling himself forward.

The crash of his flyer had been a spectacular one, or it would have been had anyone been near enough to see. He had been flying nap of the earth, following a thin road that kept disappearing under the thick foliage of the forest below. The road was not on any maps and, according to his sources, was the only route to the hidden base where his target was said to be.

His mind kept turning back to the last few seconds in the air, when the threat alarms on his flyer let out an ear splitting warning tone and the controls went dead in his hands. The flyer dropped like a proverbial stone, smashing through the forest canopy below like the fist of an angry god. It was all a jumble, that fall from the sky. The horrific screech of tearing metal, the crystal tinkling of shattered glass and a voice, his voice?, screaming.

It was dark when he woke in the fork of a tree, the junction of a shattered branch almost as thick as his waist and the trunk so large he could not wrap his arms around. Through the destroyed canopy along the path of his crash, he could make out the stars shining and the hint of a moon somewhere to his left. His entire body hurt and breathing sent jagged slivers white-hot fire through his chest. His left leg was a throbbing mass of pain from the knee up, and numb below. His right leg was a little better, though that was a relative term, because he could feel pain from his toes to his hip. When he tried to shift his position to see how high up the tree he was, the pain proved to be too much and he blacked out.

The second time he woke, shivering and damp from the morning dew, the world was lit in shades of green. Weak sunlight, forcing its way through the heavy foliage showed that he was only about three meters up the tree. Slowly, carefully, he used the strength of his arms to inch his way into a sitting position. He had been draped, face up, over the crotch of the tree and even that slow movement caused his back muscles to scream at the abuse they had taken; and at the long period of unnatural strain caused his position. Shaking with strain, his face and hands drenched with cold sweat and his belly cramping with nausea, he looked at the carnage his wreck had caused.

There was a swathe of mangled and ragged stumps, smashed and torn branches along the trail his flyer had plowed through the forest top. Below and to his right, a scattered patch of mangled metal and just a wisp of smoke showed him where the remains of his machine lay. Gathering his courage, he looked down at his own body, afraid of what he would find.

His left leg was bent and twisted unnaturally, jagged bits of bone, startlingly white against the torn flesh of his calf. His foot, or what remained of it, was a dangling, almost formless mass of mangled flesh. Nausea overwhelmed him and bile rose in his throat. The pain in his chest almost caused him to pass out again as he bent, retching. When the heaving had passed, he forced himself to look at his right leg and was relieved to see it was mostly intact. His lower leg was obviously broken, swollen to at least twice the normal circumference and, where the coverall was not torn, it was sausage-skin tight against the bloated flesh.

His breath was ragged and, as he carefully ran a hand along his ribcage, the pain told him he had broken two or three of his ribs. He didn't think that he had punctured anything vital, but the pain from his body was so pervasive that he wasn't sure if he would be able to pinpoint a specific injury.

It took him more than a day to work his way out of the tree, and, if you had asked him to recall how, he wouldn't have been able to tell. It was all a feverish, pain-filled blur. His next clear memory had been of lying on the ground, looking up at his perch from below as a soft rain splashed on his face.

The next two days were a fever induced nightmare. Using a jagged shard of metal from his destroyed flyer and strips of cloth from the shredded remains of his coverall, he fashioned a pair of crude splints that should, at least, help prevent any further injuries to his mangled legs. The rain supplied him with water he could sip from shallow impressions in the ground and tears traced thin trails through the dirt on his face when he found his pack, or what remained of it.

He had been planning to land short of his objective and continue on foot. He had packed two days rations, a basic first aid kit and a few emergency supplies. He hadn't thought he would need any of it, but his training as an Agent had led him to pack it anyway, almost by rote.

When he was lucid again, he realized that days had passed since he crashed, though he couldn't be exactly sure how many, his wrist comp had been torn off in the crash. No one knew he had left town and no one would miss him. That meant that there was no rescue coming and if he were to survive, he would have to save himself. Somehow.