Chapter 2

I looked at the other two hunting prospects while Lola was getting the information for me on the Sismac. The next one I studied closely resembled a huge hog, specifically a wild boar. My ridiculous sense of humor grabbed me with this one and I named it Porky after the cartoon character Porky Pig. Porky appeared to be about 10 feet tall at the shoulder and to have tusks about a foot long. The intelligent people on Asbad resembled a four-foot tall stalk of asparagus, and were the favorite food of Porky.

The other prospect closely resembled a pterodactyl. When resting on the ground, it was about 12 feet tall, but it had a 36-foot wingspan. No, it did not need magic to fly—it was that strong. Naturally, I named it Dracula. The sentients on the planet were amphibians that resembled the octopuses of Earth. Dracula was an omnivore, and ate anything that moved or grew from the ground. Their population had grown to the point that it was dangerous for the natives to appear on the ground.

I decided to save Dracula for last because I wanted some experience with the show before I went after a flying beast. I didn’t want to get snapped up when I was distracted because I was worried about camera angles. That was one of the things that had to be worked out with the cameramen. In fact, I was probably going to need a camera director.

We worked until their normal quitting time on digging up information on the Sismac. At first, I was a bit upset because there was so little available, then I found out that most people who tried to study Sismacs wound up inside one of the beasts before the investigation was complete. It looked like I was going to become the universe’s first expert on the damned beast!

It took longer than I expected, but Lola and I finally put together a production crew that had promise, though it did not have the experience that I really needed. At least, these guys were really interested in the job and wanted to put on the best show possible. Lola seemed to excel at any job I gave her, and I began to depend on her more and more as we got close to the actual shooting of the first show. I wanted to collect a lot of footage just in case the show needed a lot of editing. It certainly was cheaper to get this on our first trip than to have to go back for it.

At last, we left for Holith. This was surprising—no spaceship was required. All transportation was done on what AC’s people termed a transporter. That could move any thing of any size from place to place anywhere in the universe if you just knew the proper coordinates of the starting and end point. All I could understand of the process was that it was virtually instantaneous because it used some facet of quantum mechanics that was not tied into time. We lived and worked in a spaceship simply because that was a convenient container off-planet, but in close orbit. That way, we disturbed the ecology of Holith as little as possible, yet were close enough so that Lola and I were the only one who had to visit the surface of the planet.

Some preliminary work had been done to identify the Sismac that was causing the most trouble. It was the one picked out to be my specific target. If the opportunity arose, I planned to kill other Sismacs as my contribution to the good health and longevity of the native sentients.

Fortunately, the Sismacs preferred to inhabit the open areas of the planet, so we did not have a lot of trees getting in the way of our cameras. Naturally, we planned to shoot the show in essentially chronological order. There was no practical way for us to do anything else if we were not going to do a lot of editing and animation to cover the transitions from segment to segment.

That was one of our main selling points; namely, anything shown was something that really happened when it is shown happening, and not something dubbed in to catch a point we missed or to gloss over an error we made. That was to be a part of Lola’s opening remarks for every episode. The one exception to this was that we would film Lola’s introduction to the episode after all of the other stuff was shot so that we would not miss something important or mention something that did not happen later. We didn’t consider that to be cheating, just good scheduling.

I dropped into the scene with no equipment except for my replicator. The first thing I ordered was my gun. In this case, it was a 10-gauge shotgun loaded with what I called hog-load shells. A hog load is a shell that keeps all of the shot together until the target is struck. This means that the initial hit on the target is with a slug about 0.75 inches in diameter and 2.5 inches long. That in itself is one hell of a blow, but, upon impact, the “slug” breaks apart into 12 individual pieces of shot approximately 0.33 inches in diameter. These shot fly off in random directions, doing the damage that would be done by 12 pistols of .33 caliber being fired at one time.

Often, only one hit was required because of all of the damage done by that first shell. However, my shotgun, though a single barrel, was designed as an auto-loader that ejected the spent shell and sent a fresh shell into the chamber ready to be used as the second shot. It used a box-magazine that held 10 shells, meaning that I had an initial load of 11 shots before I had to replace the magazine. I figured that any animal that needed that many shots to put it down was going to kill me before I killed it.

This shotgun was recoil compensated so that it was not such a bear to handle and shoot. Theoretically, I could fire all 11 shots of the initial load without having to give up and quit because of the pain in my shoulder. Well, I had tested that on the shooting range, but I hoped never to encounter that situation on a hunt.

Because the area had been scouted by me prior to teleporting in, I knew where to head to find my prey. Of course, the prey could have moved during the interval between my scouting and my arrival, so I did not know exactly where the animal might be. In the case of the Sismac, I did not have to be too careful because of the aggressiveness of the creature. Unless it saw something more enticing, I expected to be charged at as soon as I was spotted.

I was as lucky as I had planned to be, so I was looking toward the Sismac as soon as I materialized on Holith. Therefore, I saw it as soon as it saw me, even though it did have the better eyesight. To the Sismac, I must have looked enough like one of the locals to be an enticing morsel. It began to run toward me through grass that was about two feet tall. That was no problem for me to walk through and certainly no problem for the Sismac.

I was not showing off when I let the Sismac get within 100 yards of me before I fired my first shot. That was necessary because of the relatively limited range of the shotgun. I saw the impact of the slug in the breast of the Sismac because of the plume of dust, feathers, and blood that seemed to burst from the creature. Surely, that was enough to kill the creature, but it kept running toward me.

Oh, shit, that was when I remembered how long it took a chicken to die completely, even when its head was chopped off. Now what? I had to put another shot into the Sismac to insure its death, but I was not sure what to do. Dammit, my options were fading fast as the Sismac got closer and closer. Then it dawned on me that the creature was already dead. This would be like shooting one of those TV zombies.

It was going to continue to run in a straight line for as long as it could, so all I needed to do was to take out one leg, and that would stop its charge. The creature was now only about 50 yards away, so I had to act quickly. I ran to my right far enough to ensure that the Sismac would not run into me. That put me about 10 yards away from the Sismac’s path. I fired again, this time at the giant bird’s hip. The Sismac was still moving fast, so I had very little time to aim and shoot.

At least, the Sismac was running in a straight line and a constant speed, so getting the proper lead was not too difficult. I fired, and my long experience with hunting paid off because I hit the creature at almost exactly where I had intended. The Sismac fell and rolled for a short distance. Damned if its uninjured leg didn’t continue to twitch in a running motion for another 8-10 minutes.