Read Hunter's Run for Free Online Page B

ground than they had been on
the city streets. Dew soaked the grasses and the leaves of the shrubs. Small
monkey-like lizards leapt from branch to branch before him, calling to each
other with high, frightened voices. There were millions of uncataloged species
on São Paulo. In the twenty minutes it took him to make his way to a promising
site at the base of a stone cliff, Ramon might have climbed past a hundred
plants and animals never before seen by human eyes.
     
    Before long, he found the
discontinuity, and surveyed it almost with regret; he’d been enjoying the
effort for its own sake, pausing frequently to enjoy the view or to rest in the
watery sunlight. Now he’d have to get to work.
     
    The lichen that clung to the rock
of the mountainside was dark green and grew in wide spirals that reminded
Ramon of cave paintings. Up close, the discontinuity was less apparent. He
could trace the striations from one face to the next without sign of a break or
level change. Whatever Ramon had caught in the failing light of the day before,
it was invisible now.
     
    He took the field pack from his
shoulders, lit a cigarette, and considered the mountain face before him. The
stones around him appeared to be largely metamorphic - their elongated grain
speaking to Ramon of the unthinkable pressure and heat near São Paulo’s mantle.
The glaciers, when they passed, would have carved this ground, strewing parts
of any given field far from their origin. Still, the underlying stone was
certainly igneous or metamorphic. The sedimentary layers, if there were any,
would be higher up, where the ground was newest. It was the sort of place where
a man might find the strike he’d hoped for. Uranium ore, possibly. Tungsten or
tantalum if he were lucky. And even if he only found gold or silver or copper,
there were places he could still sell the data. The information would be worth
more than the metals themselves.
     
    The sad irony of his profession
had not escaped Ramon. He would never willingly have moved off São Paulo. Its
emptiness was the thing that made it a haven for him. In a more developed
colony, the global satellites and ground-level networked particulates would
have made solitude impossible. São Paulo still had frontiers, limits beyond
which little or nothing was known. He and the others like him were the hands
and eyes of the colony’s industry; his love of the unknown corners and niches
of the world was unimportant. His experience of them, the data and surveys and
knowledge: those had value. And so he made his money by destroying the things
that gave him solace. It was an evil scheme, but typical, Ramon thought, of
humanity’s genetic destiny of contradiction. He stubbed out his cigarette, took
a hand pick from the field pack, and began the long, slow process of scouting
out a good place for a coring charge.
     
    The sun shone down benevolently,
and Ramon stripped off his shirt, tucking it into the back of his pistol belt.
Between hand pick and his small field shovel, he cleared away the thin covering
of plants and soil, finding hard, solid rock not more than a foot and a half
below the surface. If it had been much more, he’d have gone back for the tools
in the van - powered for minor excavations, but expensive, prone to breaking
down, and with the whining electrical sound of civilization to argue against
their use. Looking along the mountainside, there would likely be other places
that would require the more extensive labor. All the better, then, that he
begin here.
     
    The coring charge was designed to
carve a sample out of the living rock the length of an arm. Longer if it was a
particularly soft stone. In the next week, Ramon would gather a dozen or so
such cores from sites up and down the valley. After that, there would be three
or four days while the equipment in the van sifted through the debris for trace
elements and ores too slight to identify simply by looking. Once Ramon had that
in hand, he could devise a