Nate — The Ridgeline
The laser came on first. A thin green bar swept left to right across the bowl, catching frost on the beargrass, then climbed the slope toward his boots. The quadruped’s front legs unlocked. Hind legs followed half a second later. Search-and-track gait: three meters, pause, sensor cluster rotate, three meters.
Nate broke left off the rise before the beam finished its climb. Deadfall, then the dense spruce belt that ran the contour. He kept trees between his torso and the aperture. Counted paces. Twelve to the first thick trunk. Eight more to the next. The machine’s legs hit stone behind him — short, even impacts, not hunting speed. Sweep pattern with a dwell. Not dangerous if he stayed outside the beam path. Not yet.
He dropped into the shallow creek where the spruce thinned. Water to mid-shin, cold enough to bite. The clay banks were dark and wet. He went to his knees in them and packed clay over his face, neck, the backs of his hands, the warm metal of the rifle barrel where his grip had heated it. Thermal contrast was how it had held the doe at forty yards after the spook — warm body against cold ground, delta high enough to reacquire. Wet clay flattened skin temperature toward terrain. He worked it into the seams of his cuffs and the open collar at his throat until nothing exposed read warm at any useful range.
Uphill, the gait paused at the spruce edge. Sensor cluster ticked through another cycle. No beam found him in the creek bed. He moved.
The chokepoint was sixty yards west where the game trail pinched between a leaning snag and a stack of basalt the winter freeze had already half-split. He had walked this trail a hundred times. The snag was dead lodgepole, root ball cracked, trunk angled over the pinch at a load that would come down if the base went. He cut the last holding roots with the folding saw from his belt, left the trunk propped on a single wedge of rock he could kick free, and backed into the brush on the far side with the rifle across his knees.
He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled once — short, high, the same pitch that had put the doe to flight two days back. Then he stood, full height, for a three-count, and dropped again. Thermal flare, brief, then gone. Reacquire trigger. The gait resumed toward the pinch.
Front legs entered the chokepoint. Sensor cluster forward. He kicked the wedge.
The lodgepole came down across the midsection and the rear hips. Stone shifted with it. One hind leg pinned flat. The front end stayed live — legs scrabbling for purchase, scythe limbs unfolding from their stowed position along the flanks. He came in from the pinned side with the rifle reversed, butt stock first, aimed at the sensor cluster.
The right scythe caught him on the way in. Edge across the left forearm, below the elbow, deep enough that the fabric opened and the skin under it opened with it. Hot, then wet. He did not look at it. He drove the stock into the sensor housing twice, three times, until the glass cracked and the aperture stopped rotating. Then the folding saw into the cable bundle at the neck joint where the housing met the chassis. He cut until the bundle separated and the front legs locked mid-reach.
It stopped. No wind-down. Just inert weight under the lodgepole.
Blood ran to his wrist and off his fingers onto the housing. He crouched there and turned the unit enough to see the dorsal plate. A short antenna mast, base ringed with a collar stamped UL-4 / TX-CYCLE 900. Status LED behind a smoked lens. Dark. Nine hundred seconds. Fifteen minutes. The same interval logic he had used for years on the receive-only rig when he timed the county survey — a check-in window, and a silence that meant the window had closed without a packet.
He left his hand on the collar. Blood in the stamped groove. The LED stayed dark.