The XR-79 single passenger hi speed transport module was a rough ride when it came to atmospheric entry, but it got the job done. As far as Burt Holiday was concerned a rough ride through the Terran atmosphere was better than the rough ride he could expect on his first night back at the Martian penal colony if the trackers found him. So, it was with as much haste as he could muster that he punched the eject button the moment the module landed.

An explosive charge beneath his seat launched Holiday twenty feet into the air. Burt, aware of the stupidity of firing the ejection mechanism in full gravity, worked quickly to free himself from the seat and brace for landing. Luckily, hitting the ground running was one thing Burt Holiday was well trained at.

He wasn’t more than fifty yards from the landing site when he heard the roar of the landcycles that the trackers had dispatched for him. Burt had just made it to the tree line that surrounded the clearing, and he barely had time to get his bearings. Assuming Robert hadn’t moved anything, the cache was less than a mile in. Burt just had to choose the right starting point.

The when the cycles revved, it sounded like the gates of hell themselves opened up and Satan himself was screaming for Burt’s head. An apt description, Holiday thought, for anyone who’d ever met the warden at the Cydonia penetentiary. Burt ran.

He urged himself to keep moving, ignoring muscles that were slightly atrophied from three days of space flight. The sound of the trackers behind him drove him to push through briars and brambles without a thought to the millions of tiny cuts being left on his arms. The explosion of a shotgun somewhere behind him removed his normal instinct to exercise caution when jumping over what he hoped were just small trenches cut through the forest by wild earth movers.

Just ahead of him was a cache that included enough credit to buy a small asteroid, a pulse rifle that’d make light work of the trackers behind him, and a transport beacon that would teleport him to the cloaked satellite in geosynchronus orbit above this forest.

Burt Holiday was used to being chased. He just wanted to be chased in style.