The Corps of Discovery Trilogy Box Set: Books 1-3: A multiverse series of alternate history

by James S. Peet

  After a week the outrigger was ready to sail and the storage baskets were made. Then the hunting began in earnest. In an effort to ensure they didn’t lose anything to hungry animals, one team would always remain behind while the other team hunted, and usually, each team was successful every day. It helped that the local fauna had no fear of humans or experience with rifles that could kill further than a lion could pounce.

  On one of their final hunts before launching the canoe, Bill and Meri wound up on the shores of the Mediterranean. Stopping, they looked south to the endless waves. “Sure is empty out there,” Bill commented as the two stood on the beach holding hands, rifles slung.

  “And big,” Meri replied quietly.

  Bill felt Meri’s hand slip from his as she turned to head back up the sandy beach in search of game. As he turned, he could see a tear slipping down her face.

  “Hey,” he said in an attempt to cheer her up, “we’ve made it this far. Nothing’s gonna stop us now. Not even the GLF.”

  She smiled back at him and replied, “Damned right! Nothing’s gonna stop us.”

  PART TWO

  TREKKER

  30

  Bill Clark wouldn’t say he was a particularly skittish guy, but when your nascent fiancee fires a rifle off in your ear at two in the freakin’ morning, it tends to make you a bit skittish. That’s pretty much what happened to him, just minutes after crawling into his hammock. Granted, Meri Lewis wasn’t shooting at him, nor even particularly close to him, or in his direction; and he wasn’t even asleep yet’ but any shot within twenty feet is too close when you’re not expecting it.

  Bill’s first reaction was to roll out of his hammock, holding his personal defense weapon at the ready. Unfortunately, rolling out of a hammock involves gravity, and after slamming his face into the ground of Planet 42, courtesy of said gravity, he staggered to his feet. Scanning around the gravel bar in the light of a half-moon, Bill could see the love of his life aiming for another shot at whatever it was that had perturbed her in the first place.

  As she shot again, the muzzle flash showed him the threat: a lion just outside the trip wire line. Bill brought his gun, a PDW-1, up to add his support and heard a crashing sound from the lion’s position. More crashing echoed through the nearby forest. At that moment, Karen Wilson announced her engagement in the fracas by shining a small, powerful flashlight into the dark. The lion Meri had shot was down, possibly dead.

  “Keep your eyes peeled,” Karen warned, shining the light around with her left hand, rifle in her right. “Lions hunt in packs.”

  Then Ben Weaver made an appearance, also armed with the Corps’ ER-1 rifle, a bolt action rifle with a low power scope mounted on it, identical to the ones Meri and Karen held.

  After several tense minutes with no other sounds, not even the usual night sounds of bugs and birds, Karen said, “I think they’re gone.”

  She ordered Bill, who was armed the lightest, to throw some more wood on the fire. Ben muttered, “That’s it for sleep.” Bill silently agreed.

  Meri Lewis came into the fire’s circle of light and Bill looked at her questioningly, concerned. She shakily smiled back at him and said she was okay, just scared. “No doubt,” Bill said.

  After circling the camp, Karen came back to Meri and asked how she was doing.

  “Fine, but I can’t wait to get off this beach.”

  “Yeah, well, another couple of days and we should be good to go.” Karen glanced into the dark brush. “I’m thinkin’ that bad boy you shot’ll add to the larder.”

  After ordering Ben and Meri to keep watch, Karen and Bill dragged the lion’s carcass back to the campfire, careful not to set off the tripwire. The huge carcass required both of them, particularly since neither of them was willing to set down their weapon.

  As the fire roared to life, Bill shouldered his PDW. He and Karen cut up the dead animal while Ben and Meri continued to keep watch.

  It had only been a couple of weeks since their sabotaged survey plane had crashed in the Eurasian mountains on this unexplored planet, a parallel Earth. They weren’t quite used to the fauna they had to deal with. One thing was obvious, though: the animals, particularly the predators they had encountered so far, were not scared of humans.

  Before setting out on the survey they had been told that it appeared the planet was a non-impact planet. This meant that the meteors that were suspected of slamming into the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the late Pleistocene, causing major flooding and climate change and leading to the extinction of most megafauna, never happened in this timeline.

  So not only were the four crew members stranded 10,000 kilometers from any help, but they were also dealing with megafauna of the late Pleistocene. Not that all the animals were bad, but in just a couple of weeks they had been attacked by a pack of hyenas which were larger than their African cousins, and now a pride of lions. Fortunately, technology in the form of rifles and flashlights had triumphed over fangs and claws.

  “Y’know,” Bill said, “I was taught in survival school that fires kept the critters away. Sure doesn’t seem that way to me.”

  “Well, I’m gonna disagree there, man o’ mine,” Meri said, her blue eyes laughing. “So far, other than that hyena, nothing’s come into the camp. I spotted that lion out beyond the trip wire. I think it was trying to figure out how to get in but the fire kept it away.”

  Bill mulled that over, then reluctantly agreed with her. When it came to survival stuff and megafauna, she was far better versed than he. After all, he was only from Earth, while she was a native Hayeker who had earned a bachelor’s degree in Exploration Science. If that wasn’t enough, she was also the only child of the Commandant of the Corps of Discovery.

  “Either way, we’ll be out of here in a couple of days,” Karen said. “Unfortunately, we can’t carry as much food and water as I’d like, so we’re almost at the limit of what we can carry. Simba over there might just top up the larder once we dry and jerk him. I want to sail fairly close to land until we pass through the Strait of Gibraltar. That way we can continue to get fresh game. Which reminds me, I want you two,” she indicated Bill and Meri, “to gather up makings for bows and arrows tomorrow. I figure we’ll be in that outrigger for about a month, so that should give us plenty of time to get them made.”

  Bill and Meri nodded acquiescence.

  Sunrise came early, thanks to the time of year. Mid-June was still fairly cool at night, but the days on the southern coast of what was France on Earth were getting quite warm. As the sun came up, fish started jumping in the Rhône River, feeding on bugs on the water.

  Karen suggested lion for breakfast. Knowing how much Bill and Meri enjoyed fishing, she added, “We’ll be eating enough fish as we cross the Atlantic. No sense in burning out on it early.”

  Soon lion steaks were grilling over the campfire, pierced by sticks held by hungry Explorers. The rest of the lion would be turned into jerky, and some of that would be made into pemmican, depending on how much fat they could render from the carcass.

  Yesterday, Karen had spied a number of oak trees several hundred meters from the river. She informed the crew that she and Ben would take a couple of baskets the crew had made and collect as many fallen acorns as they could find.

  “When we get back, we’ll have a nut cracking party,” she said, looking at Ben and Bill, both of whom raised their eyebrows and made mocking gestures of protecting their privates. The two women laughed, a much-needed break from the stress of the morning.

  “I’ll want you two to stay around camp and keep an eye on the meat,” Karen said, after everyone has stopped laughing. This, of course, set them all off again. Finally, wiping her eyes, she went on. “Take a moment to check the snares, and if you find any edible plants, collect them. We’re gonna be pretty shy on veggies when we cross the ocean. And keep an eye out for whoever made that point,” she said, referring to a stone artifact Ben and Meri had found on the opposite side of the lake from where they had crash landed. The
y had discovered a fire pit and the point, but no other signs of humans or other hominids.

  Breakfast over, Karen and Ben each grabbed a basket and headed off into the forest east of the river. While they were gone, Bill and Meri did a quick walk around to each of the snares that had been set out yesterday. They found several rabbits and a couple of squirrels, all dead, all destined for the lunch stew pot. Smaller animals were consumed fresh, while the larger animals were being turned into long-term storage food.

  They reset the snares, moving them to new locations nearby, but still along the game trails.

  As they made their way back to camp, visible through the trees, they heard a rifle shot. Bill and Meri, their own rifles raised in the ready position as always, froze and looked in the direction of the shot, several hundred meters away. Another shot rang out.

  “I hope they’re shooting at something they found.” Bill left unsaid the hope that they weren’t shooting to protect themselves.

  Meri said, “Me, too,” in a low voice.

  One of the most frustrating things about being stranded was the lack of two-way radios. While they each originally had one, the same electromagnetic bomb that destroyed their plane had also fried nearly all the electronics inside said plane. All that survived was one server, two field tablets, and a solar charger that were in a combination crash box/Faraday cage. Not being able to communicate, even over a couple of hundred meters, meant that something could be happening to one pair of Explorers and the others would know nothing about it. The only means of communication they had, other than yelling or shooting, were the small whistles each Explorer was issued.

  After another minute passed with no further gunshots, Bill and Meri continued back to the campsite, stepping over the tripwire line and into the circle of hammocks.

  Bill took the dead lagomorphs and rodents from Meri and began cleaning them: decapitating, removing feet, gutting, and then stripping off the skin. He had hunted a lot before joining the Corps, and killed and cleaned a fair amount of game, but it was still a task he didn’t like. He liked animals, and didn’t like seeing them suffer or die, despite how much he enjoyed eating them. As he cleaned the game, he thought about this, then told himself, If I didn’t kill them, I couldn’t eat them. Then I’d be dead. That brought back memories of his father, who would often say, “You don’t work, you don’t eat. You don’t eat, you die.”

  His hands on the first squirrel, Bill thought of what he had read in an old western novel back in his Earth days. “A squirrel ain’t nothing but a rat with a cute, fluffy tail.” All right, cute, fluffy-tailed rat, into the pot with you.

  Bill’s father was a career military man in the U.S. Air Force. He had been a bit surprised when Bill announced, after graduating college, that he had joined the Corps of Discovery on Hayek as an aerial survey specialist. Hayek was the first multiverse planet discovered when Dr. Tim Bowman had invented the gate that allowed people to move between parallel Earths.

  It was hard to believe that Bill’s conversation with his dad had been only a year ago. In that one year, Bill had been through several months of training, had a propeller blade slice into a plane he was transitioning in and decapitate the instructor pilot, spent several more months on a survey in the Caribbean, and then spent the last two months on the Initial Survey of Planet 42, where they were currently stranded.

  His job had been to use remote sensing platforms for mapping and, most importantly, to determine if any humans, civilizations, or proto-civilizations existed on the planets they were surveying. On the recent flight, Ben was the pilot and Meri the co-pilot. Karen had double duty. Not only was she the Survey Commander, but she was also an aerial survey specialist.

  Bill had met Meri just before starting Explorer training, and the two had hit it off so well that they had moved in together after their first survey. When they moved into the small apartment Bill had said something to the effect of, “Geez, just like married people.” Meri took that, in jest, to be a poorly worded marriage proposal. Ever since then she had called him her “sorta fiancee.” Bill was secretly pleased with that and was planning on having the phrase changed, dropping the “sorta” part. Of course, that was before they crash landed in the Alps a couple of weeks ago.

  It was still several hours before lunch, so Bill wrapped up the cleaned game in fresh leaves and set them in the shade. They would go in the stew pot an hour before lunch, with whatever edible plants they could find.

  Soon, Ben and Karen hailed the camp, giving Bill and Meri fair warning that it was them and not some hungry pre-Holocene predator coming in for a snack.

  As the nascent hunter-gatherers stepped over the trip wire, Meri asked if all was all right, and was told it was.

  “We shot this monster-sized bull,” Ben said by way of greeting, dropping his basket of acorns by the fire. “The thing’s over two meters at the shoulder and must weigh at least a thousand kilos.”

  Karen nodded.“I think it’s an auroch, or something similar. Either way, the damned thing’s huge and should have plenty of fat on it.” She set her basket of acorns next to Ben’s.

  Fat was pretty important for the stranded Explorers. Not many animals ate well enough to develop the marbled fat that domesticated grain animals had, which meant that all the protein the four crew members were getting was lean meat. Fat contained plenty of calories, so it was greatly desired. Fat was also used in the making of pemmican and soap. Pemmican,a long-term storage food, was made from ground up dried meat, clarified fat, and whatever nuts or berries could be found and added. The crew was hoping to carry as much as possible for their journey across the Mediterranean, and then across the Atlantic Ocean to North America, or Ti’icham as it was called on Hayek. Soap, of course, was useful for staying clean, something the Corps of Discovery considered one of the most important things Explorers could do when in the boonies, other than survey, that is.

  “After lunch, Ben, you take Bill and clean the bull,” Karen said. “Hang whatever you can’t carry in a tree, so take some rope with you. It’s probably gonna take several trips, and I’d like to get as much in before night. And definitely, before it attracts too many predators. We’ve already seen just how nasty some of them can be.” With a grin, she said, “Meri and I’ll just stay here and crack some nuts.”

  “Bad, Karen, just bad,” Bill said, shaking his head in disbelief.

  After lunch, the two men gathered their rifles, and some rope, and headed out beyond the trip wire. They walked with rifles ready, heads moving all around and up and down, looking for any potential threats. Both had been taught in survival school that threats could come from anywhere, including above, where some predators like to hang out and jump their victims.

  In addition to their rifles, they carried backpacks full of survival equipment, a web belt, a survival vest, and their Corps of Discovery uniforms - also full of survival equipment. Bill estimated they each had well over two thousand dollars, or about two-fifths of a troy ounces, worth of equipment on their bodies. The Corps standing rule was that any time an Explorer was on a survey planet, they carried their rifles and wore vests and belts. If they stepped away from the group, they took their packs. This was emphasized so much that every probationary Explorer, or “Probie” as they were called, was required to wear all survival equipment during training. It was now second nature to Bill.

  As they walked through the forest, Bill could smell the rotting vegetation. It reminded him of the Cascade Mountains he used to hike in.

  The two arrived at the dead auroch. Bill was amazed. That thing’s freakin’ huge! It’s larger than a bison. Luckily, no other scavenger had arrived yet, but buzzards were starting to circle. As Bill kept watch, Ben commenced butchering the big bovine. It had already been gutted, so now the task was to quarter it, then hang the meat out of reach of scavengers. It didn’t take Ben long, and soon they had over half the big bull in the air, strung between several large branches.

  Bill cut a sapling down with a hatchet he kept on his
belt, and the two strapped a large chunk of meat to it. Ben then used his canteen to wash the blood off his hands. No sense getting his rifle stock all sticky with blood.

  When Ben’s hands were clean and dry, Bill picked up one end of the pole and Ben the other. The two, rifles still at the ready, staggered back to camp with their heavy load.

  The two women had already cracked open all the acorns and were leaching them in several small pots of boiling water to extract the tannin. Acorns were edible only after the tannin was removed, and boiling them in water was one way of doing that. The acorns would be used as flour, and also in stews.

  “Drop it here,” Karen said, indicating a spot near the fire. “We’ll take care of it.”

  The men dropped their burden, untied it, then turned and headed back to the kill, rifles at the ready.

  By the time night had fallen they had made several trips to haul in as much of the auroch carcass as possible. Karen called for a two-on, two-off watch for the night; that much meat would most likely attract predators and scavengers. The men were told to sleep first and were given four hours. They collapsed in their hammocks after a quick supper of stew.

  They were awakened at two o’clock in the morning. At least nobody’s shooting this time, Bill thought. Karen had made coffee, telling them to nurse it; she didn’t want to use it all up in one night. Then the men stood watch with rifles at the ready and flashlights handy. The light from the campfire threw a circle around the camp, casting long shadows into the dark forest. Bill and Ben kept a watch for any reflections from eyes staring at the camp.

  Over the course of the next four hours, nothing approached, nor were the trip wires activated. They could hear hyenas laughing at the auroch kill site, though, and Bill heard a wolf howl in the distance. Great, just what we need, he thought, now it’s either regular wolves or dire wolves. Hope they don’t come ‘round here.

  31