Saturday 12/2/2061, Location: 49.23276, 20.00482, Time 08:00

The night passed without event, other than a slow and steady build-up of rain clouds and precipitation that started as occasional drops but intensified to a consistent drizzle that seemed never-ending. The clouds bought with them some much needed warmth though, and the temperature rose towards zero – though strangely enough, it still rained rather than snowed. When the drizzle hit the ground or branches of a tree, though, it built up a layer of slick ice that quickly grew, weighing down the foliage or making the ground underneath slippery and treacherous, and a shallow shell of ice built up over the tilt-wing.

Tads saw the dawn in with her customary rituals, though it felt odd turning towards where the sun should be, beyond the sharp mountains and valley walls, greeting the sun's first rays whilst still being in the dark herself. Still – dawn was dawn, regardless of what she could see, and she gave silent thanks to Elk for the gifts bestowed upon her and her life. After she was done, her clothing was already frozen, having collected enough of the ambient moisture in the air to trigger some kind of process that allowed the falling rain to form into ice almost upon impact with her. She snapped a tiny ice bauble off a stray hair, and tucked the loose strands back under her hat and sighed.

With a moment of concentration she pulled enough mana to levitate herself up in the air, and surveyed the aircraft, looking for the small gashes and marks where the pistol shots of the Danish police had grazed the surface and left shallow gouges. Hovering up in the air, she worked with her knife to score and break the shallow crust of ice off, and examine the photo-voltaic cells beneath, looking for damage to those, too. When she found them she summoned more mana and used her magic to fix the individual sub-tiles, rendering them good as new. She still didn't understand how they worked, but she didn't need to – the magic somehow could determine between 'broken' and 'fixed' and that was all it needed. As she hovered in mid-air, letting the magical energies flow through her fingers she looked around in the grey light of what was technically post-dawn, hearing a few birds chirping through the incessant drizzle, and wondered what the day had in store for them.

Climbing back inside the tilt-wing she heard people stirring and started to get the things out for breakfast, knowing that if they were going to be out hunting today, they were going to need a large meal to fuel the activity. Thankfully they weren't that high – with the team being as fit and well-travelled as they were, even the fifteen hundred metre altitude wasn't going to slow them down much. One by one the team woke, each in turn roused from their sleep by the noise of their neighbours moving about and getting changed, until they were all awake and tucking into their food and chosen drinks.

"Was thinking about what went on yesterday." Kai wiped a few crumbs from his lips and took a sip of his tea, then continued. "When we were being chased by those planes. I presume we have sensor data on them, and what they were doing and stuff. Can we sell that? On the shadowlands?"

"I don't think so." Hunter tried not to roll his eyes, convinced that Kai was now mis-naming it deliberately to get a rise out of him. "Unless we had sensor information on something like a missile launch and tracking data, or details on their counter-measures or counter-counter-measures that would help someone actually evade – then I don't think it's worth anything meaningful. It might be worth a bit of kudos though to just release what I have?"

"What about counter-counter-counter-measures? Or counter-counter-counter-counter-measures?" Kai added with a grin. Hunter just shook his head and then uploaded the sensor data to the smuggling special interest group on Shadowland under his tag, giving a brief account of their border incursion and the response time and aggressiveness of the Danish response.

"Is it worth trying to get hold of the pilot? Aksel? Have we got enough data to find him? He seemed to want to warn us off, and he might be worth getting in touch with?" Tads suggested.

"His surname was Sorensen," Marius added as he recalled the introduction over the radio. Hunter finished his post and set a search-bot off, looking for people or businesses in Denmark with 'Aksel Sorensen' in their name, and also set off another bot to trawl social media sites using 'Melanie' and several variations of 'learning to fly', looking to get some more information. It didn't take long before he had a whole slew of posts showing a smiling Melanie sitting in the cockpit of the Cessna next to Aksel, holding up her tablet showing a steadily increasing number of checks and completed modules, and the small matrix site of 'Sorensen Flight School'.

"Well, I found her, and him. And I can tell you that he uses Nokia as his MSP, as he's using the free node builder supplied with his account to make his matrix site, and he's using some of the stock code from them as well – and he's got the same basic security flaws baked into his site as most of the other weebs that rely on the supplied tools." Disdain dripped from his voice as he viewed the code and checked out the vulnerabilities and confirmed that yes, he could brute force his way into the password directory using a well-known exploit and reset his password to allow access.

"Is that important?"

"Well, it would be if we wanted to hack his site. Not that we would – I mean it's pretty much just his contact details, a few pictures in a gallery application and a price list. The site doesn't do anything or lead anywhere. And you can tell he's built it himself, as there's still a few bits where he's forgotten to replace the example text with his own information. It's just a bit ugly, is all."

"Well, we've got his contact details, so we can drop him a message and get him to get in contact, I suppose."

"No. Not on your life, Kai. If the police were involved, they're almost certainly monitoring his communications, so we don't want to be giving them our contact number. We can do that once we've set up a burner phone or matrix account on some anonymous remailer somewhere, that they can't use to hunt us down."

"Oh, right. I guess that makes sense… well, can you sort that out some time, then. In the meantime – we should think about getting our gear together and going out to look for these bears. We've not got a huge amount of daylight from what Tads and Aswon were saying, and it doesn't look like it's going to stop raining, so we might as well just get on with it. Tads – can we have a quick scout please, same from you Marius?"

A minute or two later the surveillance drone was prepped and launched, lofting into the sky with a spirit to guard it against hungry or jealous eagles. Marius found it much more responsive than the day before in the lower winds, but his task wasn't significantly easier – the combination of their altitude and the low clouds gave him a very narrow slice of the sky to operate in, limiting not only his viewing angles, but also the amount of room he had to manoeuvre in. He did the best he could though, sending the drone out in a few wide arcs and trying to interpret the data gathered by the drone.

"I have identified a number of hot-spots in the forest, that indicate either large creatures, or a collection of smaller creatures. I have uploaded the locations to the rough map that Hunter provided, and sent them to your pads."

"You can't get a better fix?" Aswon asked, somewhat surprised. "I'd have thought they'd show up nicely in the cold."

"Normally yes, but the rain here is mostly falling as a mizzle. The droplets are so small, it is more akin to a descending fog than actual rain, and that is stopping the thermal scanners from working at their normal efficiency. Everything is somewhat 'washed out' and much fainter than normal. I can locate the larger and more obvious signatures, but even those have a somewhat nebulous location."

"Well, we'll just have to use our eyes a bit more – but at least we've got a rough location. It's a lot better than just blindly wandering through the trees!" Aswon smiled, trying to make it clear that he understood the constraints and limitations that Marius faced, and wasn't blaming him for the somewhat imprecise data.

"So – Tads, what about an astral scout? Can we send some spirits out?"

"We can, but they won't fare much better than Marius and his drones. Things that block our line of sight in the physical world block the line of sight in the astral realm, too. So they'll have to go into the forest, under the canopy to look, and that puts them in biting and clawing range of whatever is in there. If they're not magically active, we'll be ok, but if they are – we might well just warn them we're coming, or even worse, feed them and rile them up. I'll go for a quick scout myself in a minute, though."

"Ok, well, we'll just have to make do."

"Right, I've added the drone data onto the map. The map is blotchy as all hell 'cos it's a really low resolution map – best I could find for free, though. As regards the burner phone, I'll add it to the list when we get somewhere with better matrix access. While you're out though, I'm going to hook my deck up to the medkit, and do another detailed analysis on Marius and his new 'ware, and compare to the last survey we did, see what's changed and work out if we're getting near a baseline performance yet, or what's going on.

"And as soon as you are all out of the way, I will prepare the combat drone and place it at the bottom of the ramp, ready to deploy. If you need support, I can be there relatively quickly and provide plunging fire." Marius gestured to the vector-thrust drone on the rack at the top of the cargo area. "But I will need some room to get it set up. Hopefully the rain will not affect it too badly."

"I'll rig up a tarp over the back to try and direct most of the rain away, at least on a short term basis," Aswon offered, grabbing a large square of material and some ropes.

The team tidied away after breakfast and started to get ready. Tads sat down and projected from her body, doing a quick flit around the area to look for signs of the critters or any intruders, while the others got prepared. Marius and Hunter got the diagnostic equipment ready while Kai, Shimazu and Aswon got their wet weather gear on, checked their weapons, and loaded their equipment. As soon as Aswon had his gear sorted, he grabbed the tarp and headed outside to rig up the temporary shelter. It wasn't much, but it at least directed a lot of the precipitation away from the tail area, and might keep the others a little drier.

"Might need that!" Kai said as he grabbed the medkit, pulling out all the cables Hunter had just connected. Hunter scowled and fetched out the Saviour kit they'd recently acquired and reconnected his systems to that instead – though on reflection it would probably give him better data than the standard kit anyway.

"I couldn't see much out and about – I think they're being sensible and staying under cover as much as possible to stay out of the rain. Even with feathers or fur coat, it's still going to draw heat out of the body much quicker in the wet than the dry, so that's not surprising. So we'll have to go into the forest to find stuff…" Tads sat up as her spirit returned to her body, and she stretched for a moment as she settled back into a body of muscles and bones rather than thoughts and concepts, before she got up and grabbed at her rain poncho and started to put that on. The others slid the side door of the tilt-wing open and started to climb down and she hurriedly grabbed her equipment and jumped down from the open door to follow the others as they headed over the rocky shore towards the ragged treeline. Hunter grabbed the door and slid it shut, cutting out the fine haze of cold mist that had started to fill the troop bay, freezing into a patina of ice almost immediately on the cold surfaces it landed on.

While the others departed the tilt-wing and started the hike towards the forest, Hunter and Marius worked through a number of exercises, stretches and scenarios, gathering data from the cyberware and running through the built-in test routines to try and work out if it had fully settled into his systems properly, and what other changes might be due.

After a while of testing, and a mass of recorded data, Hunter stopped the data capture and looked up to a sweating and tired Marius.

"Looks pretty good. Your vehicle control rig is nicely settled, and looks to be working well, but the wires on your reflex and speed enhancements are still all over the place. I think we need to get you some proper combat drill, something that will get the adrenaline going. You need to have that rush of combat so it can pick up on the chemicals and body reactions properly to augment them. Maybe you should go after the others?"

"I do not think that engaging in combat with vicious para-enhanced bears are what the designers had in mind. I certainly do not want to be dealing with cyberware that is still adapting to my physiology in such a circumstance either."

"No… but maybe some hard sparring sessions with the others might do the job. Something where they're actually trying to bat you round the head. Not enough to wound you, but enough to hurt – so you get that combat sensation."

"I am willing to try. But for now, I need to get out of these damp clothes. Excuse me." Hunter nodded and went back to analysing and tabulating the data while Marius stripped down and cleaned himself as best he could with the minimalist facilities and quickly got dressed in his alternate change of clothes, covering up flesh that was a mass of goosebumps from even a brief exposure to the sub-zero environment.

The hunting party approached the edge of the forest, seeing up close the devastation that the storm had wrought on the area. The trees were coniferous, close-growing and covered in dense foliage, growing straight up into the air with the typical long and straight trunks that made them a favourite target of loggers. The storm, however, had bought winds over a hundred and fifty kilometres per hour to the area, ripping through the valley and sending some of the weaker trees crashing down, intermingled with their neighbours or ripping up huge chunks of the ground with their exposed root systems.

Instead of a relatively clear area under the foliage, where the forest would be carpeted with needles but no undergrowth, the ground was a mess of exposed roots, new growth ground cover, banks of snow and ice and torn and crumpled earth lousy with long snaking roots. In some areas it looked like as many as one in three of the trees had been felled, crashing at random angles through the remaining trees and making a series of dense tunnels, dead ends and obstacles that were going to be challenging to negotiate. Sight lines were reduced to a handful of metres, and the team instinctively bunched up a little tighter, making sure they were in position to support each other. Shimazu led the way, vibroknife in his offhand, hacking at roots and branches to clear a path where needed, with his primary hand resting lightly on the hilt of his sword. Aswon followed behind him, spear in one hand while the other was held out to steady himself. He had to almost crouch in some places to get under the lower branches, and while his long legs helped him climb over some of the lower-lying obstacles, they proved as much of a hinderance while he tried to duck under the higher obstructions.

Tads followed along behind him, using her staff to help steady herself on the slippery patches and moving with a slow, quiet and conservative determination as she quickly dropped to a speed that she could keep up for days if needed, while her head kept turning to survey the area around her, and Kai bought up the rear, punch-dagger held in one hand and the other being used to fend off branches or grab at logs as he worked his way through the forest. The terrain was difficult and their progress slow – the steep slope conspired with the weather to leave them walking at angles no matter which way they faced, and they struggled just as much on the downslopes as they did on the up.

For an hour they moved through the woods, dropping speed several times as they adapted to the conditions and worked out how best to proceed. Once they had gotten past the initial edge of the forest, Shimazu put his vibro-knife away. It did clear a path nicely through the thinner material, making it much easier to move – but the snarling buzz and whine as it cut through the wood and foliage echoed up and down the mountain and would surely warn off any of the creatures they were trying to hunt.

Tads and Aswon stopped, stiffening almost as one, and Kai nearly bumped into the back of her as he concentrated on the fifty degree slope he was climbing rather than looking at her. Shimazu heard the inrush of breath and he stopped, too – seeing the two in the middle looking around them at the trees and branches.

"It feels like…"

"..like we're being watched." Aswon finished, her statement, then picked up his spear and changed to a two-handed grip. His eyes flicked around, from tree to tree as he looked for whatever had kicked off his danger-sense.

There was a flurry of movement, a sudden blur of fur as a large shape erupted out of the tree cover on one side of the path, leaping gracefully through the air – towards Kai's head. Shimazu leapt into action, already moving towards the team leader, sword appearing in his hand without travelling through the intervening space to Aswon's startled peripheral vision. The creature, though, passed through the air behind Kai, a large mouth snapping to one side and grabbing at several of Kai's arrows as it passed, huge paws already reaching out ahead of itself towards the floor to cushion and absorb the landing. It saw Shimazu closing, the sword already coming down in a powerful overhead swing, and the creatures started to dissolve, turning to mist before their very eyes.

It wasn't quite quick enough though. The sword impacted in the centre of the torso, slicing neatly through it and slashing into the ground below.

The body fell in two halves, with the area around the sword blow a bizarre and nebulous goo, a viscous and unusual looking jelly that seemed to be slowly dissolving into the ether, caught in a half-state between worlds.

"Ahh… a mist lynx. Or something like it." Aswon said, his senses catching up with his surprise.

"I can guess what it does from the name. I think it was trying to get away, to turn to a less vulnerable form, when you got it." Tads gestured towards the traditional feather fletchings on the arrows that had fallen to the floor as the creature had tried to escape from Shimazu's blade. "Guess it thought that maybe it was a bird on your back or something. Some kind of easy prey…"

"Well, that's got to be a pretty unusual bit of telesma there. A mist lynx slain mid-state. Someone will pay good money for SHIT!" He cut off abruptly as the rest of the pack of lynx leapt out of the trees towards them, enraged by the death of their matriarch. The first made the unfortunate decision to leap at Shimazu, but a quick flick of the wrist positioned the tip of the sword in such a way that the big cat impaled itself upon the blade, dragging it down towards the ground with the weight of its corpse. The second leapt at Kai, who managed to thrash and slash with the dagger, fending off the teeth while his rugged armour stopped the sharp claws from penetrating. Aswon got swarmed by the next three, his spear flashing back and forth as a tsunami of claws and fur and teeth enveloped him. The spear opened up large slashes on two of the foes, but in return he took a nasty gash on the side of the face as a claw raked at him.

Tads ducked and took two rapid steps, then turned towards the group, making sure she could see everyone, and everything – then unleashed a torrent of mana upon them. The blast of stunning energy washed over the cats, driving them to the ground in a pile, while her shields and wards protected her team-mates from the devastating assault. As quickly as the assault had started, it was all over, silence descending on the forest once more.

"You need a hand? It sounded a bit… growly there for a moment?"

"We're fine, Hunter, just some big cats. All handled now."

"Roger."

They examined the recumbent forms laying on the forest floor, surrounded by blood and faint steam rising from the ice. Shimazu gave a heave on his sword, withdrawing it from the body of the one that had leapt at him – that one was utterly and clearly dead. One of the three Aswon had faced appeared to be badly wounded, large spear gashes and puncture wounds all down one flank, while a second had a few lesser cuts and scrapes, while the remaining two appeared to be unwounded.

"Can we just leave them?" Tads asked, looking around. "Not so much the dead one – that would be a waste. But the others."

"I don't know. Out here, I think a wound like that is pretty much a death sentence anyway." Aswon gestured towards the badly injured cat. "It'd be probably more merciful to kill it now, while it's asleep. The others should all survive though – though we're passing up on potentially a fair amount of money in materials.

"But we don't need to take them all. We shouldn't be greedy."

"Yes but…" Aswon paused a moment, and took a deep breath, letting the adrenaline fade from his system and then concentrated on his breathing, slowing down his heart rate through force of will. "Ok, I think I see your point – and no, we don't need to wipe out a whole family group. Let's take the dead one, and I do think killing the heavily wounded one would be the right thing to do. But we can try to patch up the other wounded one and then move them out of the way, and let them wake up in a few hours." Tads nodded, still not entirely happy, but much happier than with the concept of slaying them all. "I don't think Elk will hold this against you – you used your magic to save us from harm, and one was already dead. Without intervention, this other one would certainly die out here, in winter. But we can give thanks to the forest, and pay our respects – and let the spirits know we have considered our actions as well." He waited for Tads to nod approval, and then chanted out a prayer, a rhythmic song that sounded like it should have drumming or clapping accompanying it, his head bouncing slightly as he hit each beat. They assumed he was chanting in Nigerian, as it made no sense to them, but given his predilection for telling the truth, Tads didn't doubt for one moment the sincerity and intent of his words.

While he was chanting, Tads moved over to Kai and laid her hands on his wounds, channelling life-giving energy into his flesh to knit together the long slashing wound caused by the razor sharp claws of the lynx, before moving over to the lightly-wounded animal and repeating her efforts. When she was done, they moved all of the sleeping cats up onto a branch, laying them on a wide bough that at least kept them off the ice, while they recovered. They might still fall prey to other predators – but such was nature.

Shimazu, meanwhile, was already at work on the spitted corpse, gathering telesma from it carefully and storing them in sealable bags. A tooth here, one of the ears, the tip of the tail, a claw in perfect condition, the scent glands. He worked carefully, but there was no getting away from the fact that he was dismembering the corpse, and he was soon stained with blood and the clearing started to resemble an abattoir. Kai pulled out some of the larger bags, and they worked to get the front and back halves of the first Lynx, taking them whole – they'd never seen the weird coagulation of the flesh as it was slain mid-transition, and they had the idea that it was very unusual, possibly unique – and that meant there was likely to be good money involved.

When they were done, all of them were covered in blood to a lesser or greater extent, but after a prompt from Aswon, Tads pulled mana to her and focussed it upon each of the team members in turn, cleansing them of the sticky residue, removing the scent and cleaning up their appearance. The spell was normally used for cleaning dirty clothes or freshening the appearance, but the spell and the mana neither knew, nor cared about the difference. The formula was designed to return clothing to its original condition, and that's what it did, regardless of the source or type of dirt present.

They were just about ready to pick the bags up and pack them, to move on through the woods when Tads waved for them to stop, instead motioning for them to put the bags of animal parts all together, as close as possible. She started to gather mana to her, slowly drawing it in, taking nearly thirty seconds to build up as much power as she could safely handle, before expelling it in a stream of freezing air that engulfed the bags. They were already cooling fast in the sub-zero temperatures, but the blast of super-chilled air effectively flash-froze the parts, making them hard and rigid, and also preventing them from giving off any smell or scent.

That done, they left the area, Kai glancing back at the path that was daubed still in blood and guts, spotting a few birds already feasting on the offal that lay around the place, skittishly watching the team as they left, but driven to risk proximity by the lure of such high-energy food. A few more metres and they were obscured, as the team continued to work along the slopes of the mountain, climbing up and down trees and through fallen limbs, circumnavigating dense clumps of foliage and occasionally managing to find a few metres of clear trails or paths to follow as they headed towards the spots marked on the map.

The first two locations were empty, though there was some spoor and sign of movement – possibly creatures just resting here for a while, or that had stopped overnight before moving on at dawn. They'd been pushing through the woods for nearly two hours now, and had not encountered anything larger than rodents or birds since the attack by the lynx. At a few points, Aswon called a halt and they stopped and listened, standing unmoving for twenty to thirty seconds while they recovered their breath, just trying to listen for any movement in the distant woodlands or sounds that might alert them to their prey.

It was closing in on eleven, the team having been on the go for nearly two hours and they had reached a plateau of sorts, a small area of nearly level ground on the shoulders of one of the peaks. Somewhat sheltered from the main direction of the storm, slightly fewer trees had fallen here, and the ground was marginally clearer. Aswon was just about to call a halt and suggest they take a few minutes to eat and drink, when he noticed the sky darken somewhat. His eyes flicked upwards, and a huge shape descended silently from the trees branches above, rippling in the light as the fur seemed to change colour and texture before his eyes, no longer the dark mottled green that had let it blend perfectly in amongst the foliage above. In his peripheral vision he saw two more enormous shapes, dropping down on the team.

The surprise was almost complete – neither he nor anyone else had even the slightest hint of their presence before they attacked, and they were almost flat-footed. Only by chance did he have a good grip on his spear with both hands, having been transitioning from one side of his body to the other. Reflexes and instinct took over, and he scrabbled to the side and thrust out his arms, driving the spear into the giant frame of the bear as it plummeted down towards the ground. He put everything he had into the attack, and the spear head slammed into the falling body – the upwards thrust of his arms almost irrelevant to the crushing force supplied by a body that weighed nearly seven hundred kilos crashing down, accelerating at ten metres per second squared. The bear gave a roar of pain as the spear drove through the sternum, driving up into the body and deep through the chest.

Aswon was convinced the blow should have killed the creature, yet it appeared the bear had other ideas – the head snapped and bit at him, and he almost lost grip on the spear as the body slammed downwards. He ducked and pulled hard, wrenching the weapon out, leaving a massive bloody gash nearly a metre long.

Tads and Kai were not so lucky – both had the bears land on them, precisely lined up with their heads as they walked under the trees. The bears seemed to favour drop attacks – certainly it was the only way they could explain the simultaneous attacks with matching methods. And, in no possible world would they ever be described as being as competent with their weapons as were Aswon and Shimazu. Neither of them were 'not dangerous', but their skills lay in areas other than direct combat and melee confrontations – and that was in ideal circumstances.

This, was most definitely, not an ideal circumstance.

The crushing weight of the bear landed on them, driving them down to the ground in less than a blink of an eye, and the four huge paws raked at them cutting through their armour and rending the flesh on their shoulders, arms and flanks as they descended. Matted and stinking fur enveloped their heads, the undersides of the bears wrapping around them both and blinding them, trapping them in a suffocating mass while they were borne down with the enormous impact of the bears' attack.

Tads had been mid-step, and perhaps this saved her from more serious harm. There was no way she was going to remain standing with the unexpected impact anyway, but with one leg off the ground and the other already bent, her standing leg collapsed quickly and she crumpled downwards, naturally contracting and rolling into a ball, pulling her limbs inwards and perhaps reducing the leverage of the crushing claws somewhat. Regardless, the wounds on her were deep, and blood welled up quickly, gushing down her slender frame and sending deep coursing pain through her mind.

Behind her Kai was borne down in a similar fashion, but his natural reaction it appeared was to flail rather than contract, and the wounds caused by the third bear were more severe. Two of the claws passed within a centimetre of his jugular, exposing a deep rend in his neck that drove almost to the vertebrae but didn't quite reach it, saving him from near instant death.

At the front of the line, Shimazu whirled with his customary speed, and his sword flicked out, before he had consciously assessed the scene. That was fine, though – his subconscious was more than sufficient for the task of recognising 'not-Aswon' and his muscle memory and countless hours of training sent the katana slicing through the air, ripping open the bear's throat as it passed. Blood fountained out, drenching both he and Aswon as the bear twisted in death throes, sending spurts of bright red arterial foam arcing across the trees and ground in a sanguine mist, legs thrashing futilely as the commands from the brain were disrupted and then ceased.

A mighty roar echoed over the mountain as both remaining bears bellowed in rage, facing off against Shimazu and Aswon, their claws and enormous weight trampling the collapsed bodies of the grievously-wounded Tads and Kai into the ground, preparing to spring into combat against the two remaining team members.

"Scrambling drone – hang on." Marius hit the emergency start-up sequence, while Hunter threw himself out of the aircraft, fifty calibre rifle on a sling over his shoulder and the massive form of the 30mm canon held in his beefy arms. He looked across the valley at the dense woodland, nearly a kilometre away and started to run, but in his heart, he knew it would be decided one way or another, long before he reached them.

Behind him the engines whined on the drone, and much like Hunter, Marius looked at the distance involved and the time it would take to cover, even if he red-lined the engines – wondering if he'd be in time to avenge them, let alone save them…

The two bears charged.