Chapter 1

I turned into the office of Chief Ranger Friznan, marched up to the desk, and stopped the proscribed three feet from the desk’s edge. “Sergeant Ranger Ojif Markol reporting as ordered, Sir.” This was followed by a stiff and very proper salute.

CR Friznan returned my salute with the proper form for his rank. “Pull up that chair, SR Markol, and make yourself comfortable. I have an assignment that will probably take some time with all of the details. This is another one of those problems with the damned Marinkos, again.

“This time, they have released a pregnant orlan on a planet already occupied by a relatively primitive alien race who call themselves ‘Humans.’ Look at the hologram to your right for a representation of the orlan to stir your memory.”

I knew what an orlan looked like, so I had no problem recognizing this one. I had the gut reaction of every Ranger who had ever faced an orlan and reached for my blaster. Fortunately, I had checked it in before I entered the CR’s office as protocol required. Otherwise, I would have blasted a hole in the holograph projector before my brain was fully engaged. That was my AI at work, and I did not chide it for its reaction.

The orlan is a beast that is born for one purpose: to kill and eat any other living thing that it encounters. That is partly because it is fiercely territorial, but also because it is always hungry. The adult beast has six legs equally spaced along a nearly cylindrical body about eight feet long. It stands about five feet tall at the shoulder when it is using all six limbs as legs, but its four front legs have appendages that function as either hands or feet. Its hands have four fingers and two opposable thumbs, all equipped with claws.

Its head is attached to a very muscular neck that is on the order of two feet long. The neck is attached to the body between the two front arms/legs. The head is approximately spherical at the rear where the brain is located, and it has one ear on each side of its head. There are three eyes spaced at 120° around its head at its greatest diameter. I have been told, and I believe it, that the orlan can use any two eyes in binocular fashion or all three independently as it chooses.

A nose and a pair of jaws project from the front lower part of the sphere. The jaws open and close horizontally and contain four rows of triangular teeth that are serrated and extremely sharp. The jaws can bite through the strongest titanium alloys up to nearly ¼-inch thick, so metal armor is of little value against the beast. The odd thing, and the beast’s only known weakness, is that it cannot exert much force to open its jaws. An Arsorlan such as I could easily hold its jaws closed with one hand if he could survive what else the orlan was doing to him.

The orlan had a single horn very near the top of its head, and this made a very effective weapon. In fact, if it was in a good mood, the orlan might choose to fight only with this horn. That did the victim no good, but it was an interesting observation.

The orlan had a tail that counterbalanced its head and neck. The tail was about the same length as its body and had a knob of bone on the end which served as a very effective mace.

Normally, the orlon was black, but it could change its color to match any background on very short notice, so it could be very difficult to spot when it was lying in ambush.

In summary, the only good orlan was a dead orlan, and the best way to achieve that happy situation was to shoot it with a blaster. Just looking at the creature’s hologram was enough to make my skin crawl.

CR Friznan continued his lecture with a few notes about the home planet of the orlan, but that was only of curiosity value. The important point was that I had approximately three weeks to kill the orlon before it could deliver its litter of infant orlans. For some currently unexplained reason, a female orlan did not kill and eat her young for the first five months while she was teaching them how to be a proper orlan. Concurrently, they did not attack her. However, after that initial five-month training period, all bets were off. They had approximately a week to scatter, and after that, they would try to kill and eat each other if at all possible.

There was no reason available as to why the Marinkos decided on this form of practical joke, but they delighted in bedeviling the rangers. We had to kill this orlan before she could drop her litter, or the humans would be wiped out within 500 years. Currently, the humans were living in a stone age culture, and would have no chance to fight the orlan; therefore, I was being sent to Earth to eliminate the beast. If I could not find and kill it, then the problem would be increased at least eight-fold because the litter usually consisted of eight infant orlans.

As usual, the Marinkos gave us some clues as to where to find their latest joke, and they had done an adequate job from their point of view. Earth was in the midst of an ice age, so the orlan was limited to only certain areas where food could be found. The creature had been dropped into the northern hemisphere near a massive lake that was currently covered by a sheet of ice.

I would be dropped into the danger zone with a detector which would help me find the orlan. Other than the usual survival equipment that included a small replicator that worked with dark matter and dark energy, I would have two blasters: a pistol for my primary use and a backup. The blasters were sometimes cranky in cold weather, so the second one was decidedly welcome. The replicator could make more blasters if that ever became a problem, but no ranger, so far, had been forced to do that. Nevertheless, our union had insisted that the replicator be equipped with this option.

It turned out that we Arsorlan very closely resembled the Humans, so the only work done on my body was to darken my skin and hair. When they finished, no simple visual examination would have detected any difference. That was very convenient. The technicians also taught my implanted AI several local languages, plus the common trade language that was a kind of sign language. That would make it easy for me to pass as a local. I was almost sure to have to do that because I would want to ask if any of the natives had seen the orlan or one of its kills.

I dressed in what looked like the local outfit for a warrior in good standing. I was wearing a controlled temperature under suit that would maintain my body temperature no matter how cold it got outside. It would also cool me if that ever became important, but it was very unlikely. The suit was the same color as my skin, so I could remove my outer clothes without the inner suit being noticed in dim light.

Okay, I was ready to go. The technical people had been able to pin down the orlan’s location to somewhere in a circle about 50 miles in diameter. That was as close as they could get, but I was impressed with what they had been able to do, and I told them so. That comment seemed to make their day; apparently, people rarely told them that they were doing a good job.

I was set down in an open space so that there would be less likelihood that the orlan would be close enough to attack me before I could orient myself. I’m not sure just how fortuitous it was that I came to rest about 300 yards from two men and a woman. My outfit on the outside seemed to be made from the skin of a local bear, and its color was close enough to that of the general snow-covered terrain that I could use that as an explanation of why they had not seen me approaching them.

Local custom required that I approach them, so I started walking in their direction. For one thing, I needed to get far enough from where they first saw me so that they would not notice the lack of footprints in the snow leading up to that place. The three locals politely started walking toward me, but the men kept a good fighting grip on their stabbing spears just in case I turned out to be hostile. The woman was carrying some things, and she was not armed with a spear. I figured that somewhere she did have a sharp knife for protection.