“Nothing official,” she replied. “Iji calls them lollipop trees. I heard Talbot call it a ping-pong-paddle tree. We’ve never had the time or people to fully study them, let alone a lot of Donovanian life. That’s what Tyson Station was originally all about. If there were any notes about those trees, they never survived the evacuation.”
Kylee unlatched the door to stare out thoughtfully, her nose working, as if she’d pick up anything beyond the stench of exhaust and hot motors.
“Let’s go, people,” Talina called, pulling her rifle from the rack. “We’ve only got a couple of hours before dark. Flute? We’re here. You can open your eyes and turn blue and pink now. You survived your first flight.”
An eye popped open on the top of the terrified quetzal’s head. It focused on the open door. The beast damn near bowled Kylee off her feet as it rushed to make its escape.
“Hey! Don’t be an asshole!” Kylee shouted at the departed quetzal, then slung her backpack with the extra water over one shoulder, grinned, and leaped out after Flute.
Talina handed Dek his rifle, saying, “Keep the door closed. Anything tries to get in that’s not us? Shoot it.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Dek took his rifle.
“Talina!” Kylee’s scream brought Talina to the door, her heart skipping a beat.
Kylee was standing at the edge of the root mat, staring up over the top of the airtruck. Flute, too, was fixed on whatever was up there, his panicked colors instantly gone, replaced by perfect camouflage as he hunched down and blended with the background. Only his three gleaming black eyes were visible.
Talina leaped to the ground, whirled, bringing her rifle up.
For a moment, she could only blink at the impossibility of it.
The ping pong paddle tree was moving, bending. The fifty or so giant paddle fans—each maybe ten to fifteen meters across—were glowing in eerie viridian as it leaned toward them, the bulk of it hidden by the airtruck.
“Dek!” she screamed. “Get out of there!”
As she did, the first of the big paddles slapped down on the top of the airtruck with a solid thump. Another pasted itself against the tailgate, shivering the truck. Dek, in the open door, was knocked free. Rifle in hand, he tumbled to the ground—barely kept himself from landing face-first.
“What the hell?” Talina barely whispered as the airtruck was shaken as if it were a toy. The huge paddles had conformed and latched onto the top and sides. And then the tree began to straighten, lifting the vehicle as if it were a feather.
Behind her right ear, Rocket’s sibilant voice told her: “Run!”
56
When Talina Perez shouted “Run!” Dek was still stumbling forward. Using his rifle for balance, he staggered to a stop, tried to understand what had happened. One instant he’d been in the door, looking down at Talina, Kylee, and most astonishing of all, the way Flute had seemed to vanish before his eyes.
The next it was like the hand of God had pitched him out onto the ground.
As he caught himself, he turned to look. Couldn’t believe what he was seeing: the airtruck was being lifted, something big and flat, glowing lime green, stuck to its top. More of the great pads had attached to the sides and front. And behind them, the rest of the giant fan-shaped green spatulas waved and fluttered, as if trying to get to the airtruck.
“What the hell?” He stood rooted.
A hard hand pulled him around. Talina glared hotly into his eyes. “I said run! Follow me. Now!”
She dragged him violently backward.
Kylee was already sprinting across the roots to disappear into the shadows under the trees.
“Flute!” the girl called as she vanished into the forest. “Come!”
The quetzal materialized out of apparent nothingness, seeming to just pop into existence. The beast moved like nothing Dek had ever seen. Literally a streak of yellow and black as it shot into the shadow of the trees.
Following on Talina’s heels, Dek spared one last look over his shoulder. The lollipop tree had lifted the airtruck a good sixty or seventy meters into the air. He could hear the buckling of metal; the loud popping as sialon and duraplast ruptured and broke.
As pieces fell from the crushed vehicle, the lower leaves caught them, fielding the wreckage like baseball mitts caught fly balls. The whole huge tree seemed preoccupied with the bits and pieces.
And then he was in twilight, heart hammering, a cold sweat like he’d never known turning his skin clammy.
Kylee had slowed, staring around. Flute, his colors still a riot, was making a weird tremolo from his tail vents.
“What the hell?” Talina asked, rubbing a hand on the back of her neck. “You ever seen that?”
“Nope.” Kylee muttered. “I got nothing from quetzal memory, either. But my quetzals aren’t from around here.”
“Keep moving,” Talina told Dek. “Don’t let the roots grab hold of your feet. And you follow us. Do as we do.”
All he wanted was drop to his knees and shake, but somehow, he nodded. Said, “Yes, ma’am. So . . . what do we do now?”
“Link up with Kalico,” Talina muttered. She checked her wrist compass, said into her com, “Kalico? You there?”
Dek couldn’t hear the response through Talina’s earbud.
“Yeah, well, I’ve got bad news. One of those ping pong trees just destroyed the airtruck. Crunched it up like it was made of paper.”
A pause.
“No shit! And I’ll add a fuck, cunt, damn, and hell, to boot!”
Talina’s expression communicated distaste as she listened.
Then: “Yeah.” A pause. “It’s that or nothing.” Another pause. “We’re headed your way.”
Talina took the lead, walking softly across the thickening mat of roots. “Wow. Turns out the Supervisor can really cuss when big trees eat her airtruck. Too bad you weren’t listening in, kid. You could have learned some great new swear words.”
“Never knew anyone could out-cuss you, Tal. So, what’s next?” Kylee had one hand on Flute’s side as they stepped over a thick root. To Dek’s amazement the root was squirming, as if uncomfortable with the very soil in which it was embedded.
Talina told her, “We’ve got to link up with your folks and Kalico. Find shelter for the night. Then, in the morning, we’ve got to get to high ground. That, or a radio where we can get back in touch with PA.”
“That sucks toilet water,” Kylee murmured, then pointed. “Dek, see that? That’s called you’re screwed vine. Don’t get close to it.”
“And don’t touch anything,” Talina warned.
“No shit.” He took a real good look at the you’re screwed vine, committing it to memory. Clutched his rifle close. As he followed, he kept staring down at his booted feet. Weird feeling how the roots squirmed underfoot.
Around him, in the dim shadows, the world seemed to close in. In places the roots crowded into great bundles that merged into the monstrous trunks of trees that in turn rose to impossible heights. Vines, their stems the diameter of oil drums, wound up into the overstory. Here and there he could see clumps of inter-knotted roots as if neighboring trees were wrestling and trying to strangle each other.
The sound! The chime here was louder than he’d ever heard. Rising, falling, shifting. And when he looked closely, he could see the invertebrates scrambling through the root mass. Keeping a wary distance from their passage.
Flute uttered a gurgling chitter, his hide flashing teal and sky blue. Kylee turned her attention to the quetzal, asking, “How so?”
Flute, his colors going muted green, displayed in a riotous pattern followed by royal blue and a deep purple.
“Flute says there’s something bad here. It’s an old memory. Almost mythical. He thinks we should veer a little more to the east. He’s just catching hints.”
“Flute?” Talina called. �
��Take the lead. Your call. We just have to get to Dya. You understand?”
A harmonic sounded from the quetzal’s vents, the color patterns turning sunset-orange as the beast hurried on ahead.
Talina must have had an incoming communication. Dek heard her answer, saying, “All I can see from here is roots and tree boles. Something’s spooked Flute. We’re headed a little more east before we veer south. Should have eyes on you sometime soon.”
A pause as Talina listened.
“No,” Talina told her com as she hurried along. “Can’t hear a thing over this chime, but we’ll be listening for your call.”
“I wouldn’t have believed it,” Dek whispered, watching in awe. “Quetzals are intelligent? They can understand something as complicated as that?”
“Well, duh,” Kylee muttered under her breath, gaze turned up as something shifted in the branches above.
The pace picked up with Flute in the lead. Dek found himself pushed to the edge of endurance, panting, trying desperately to keep up. When had his rifle grown so heavy? And the damn thing was always in the way.
“Flute?” Talina called. “Got to slow down some.”
Dek grinned under his layer of sweat. “Sorry. Ship muscles.”
“Yeah, and don’t think forest travel is always this fast,” Kylee added. “It’s remarkable how many predators run for their holes when a quetzal’s out front.”
“But don’t get cocky,” Talina growled, gaze roving. “Tooth flower, biteya bush, brown caps, claw shrub, and the like couldn’t care less. They’ll still kill you.”
Dek funneled all of his concentration into just keeping up. Putting one foot after another where Talina put hers. In the trees overhead, something screamed, the sound agonized and unearthly.
At a bundle of giant roots—all laced together like a nest of monster worms—Flute bounced gracefully to the top. Froze there.
Laboriously, Kyle, Talina, and finally Dek climbed up, scrambling from one massive root to the next, like ascending giants’ stairs.
At the top, Flute remained motionless, his collar fully expanded, muzzle lifted, mouth open as he sucked in air and vented it behind his tail. For Dek the process was fascinating to watch.
“What’s up?” Kylee asked, her own nose lifted and sniffing.
Talina, too, was scenting the air.
Something about the way they did reminded Dek of hunting dogs.
For the moment he was happy to crouch in the half light, pant, and wipe the sweat from his face. Damn hot in here. Moist. Felt like a low-level steam bath.
Talina cupped her hands and bellowed “Talbot? Kalico?” at the top her lungs, then cocked her head to listen.
Up in the high branches, some creature tweeted, cackled, and cooed in an unearthly juxtaposition of sound. Might have been something from a bad dream, but none of the others seemed bothered by it.
He glanced around, wishing he had better light. Wondered at the smells of the place: all musty, damp, and curiously mindful of mold-slimy cilantro. When he concentrated on just one spot, he had the eerie realization that things were moving. Slowly, to be sure, but moving nevertheless. The roots, the vines, the shadows, all alive.
A distant scream was followed an instant later by the sound of gunshots.
And then silence.
Viscerally, Dek understood: That scream had been human.
57
What the hell was it? Talbot stared at the oddity. Some sort of seed? No, had to be a creature. Reminded him of a picture he’d seen of a sea urchin back on Earth—a big ink-black ball-like thing bristling with countless slender needles pointing out in all directions. But this wasn’t under water, it rested on the forest floor. The beast was at least a meter in diameter, and clearly had three eyes. So, animal then. What sent a shiver down his back was the hundreds of gleaming needle spines, and each of them was quivering.
Kalico was still spouting the occasional colorful curse word. She’d started cussing upon receiving word of the airtruck’s fate. Kept muttering the occasional acid-laced profanity.
Behind him, Dya said, “Never seen anything like that before. Looks like a . . . a . . .”
“Giant sea urchin?”
“Yeah. But this thing’s bigger than an oversized beachball.”
Talbot glanced around; the masses of roots piled and interlocked like a giant knot. Tough to go around.
The forest began to chime with a greater intensity, as if building to a crescendo. A few faint beams of light shown through the high canopy a couple hundred meters overhead. The vines swung as if in a breeze—though the muggy air pressed down, still, heavy, and damp.
Reaching into his pouch, Talbot dug around for an obsidian pebble he’d picked up during a geologic survey with Lea Shimodi. Squinting, he pulled his arm back and threw.
The pebble arched, hit the pincushion dead center.
Talbot figured the thing would threaten, wave the long needle-thin spines around. Instead, to his horror, a haze of them shot out from the round body. Deadly little arrows traveled five or six meters, sticking into the surrounding roots like wicked spears. The roots immediately began to writhe as if in great pain.
“Guess we don’t want to go that way,” Dya said dryly.
“Guess not,” Talbot agreed, rising from his crouch. “All right, it’s backtrack or nothing.”
“Great,” Kalico whispered. “What I’d give for a bottle of water.”
“Wish it would rain,” Talbot agreed. “That aquajade we tapped didn’t have enough to more than wet our whistles.” Not to mention the heavy metals that had to be in the sappy and thick liquid.
He turned back the way they had come, seeking to avoid stepping on the same roots they’d disturbed earlier. The chime seemed to mock them as the invertebrates played their rhythmless symphony.
Talbot retraced his way around the old chabacho with its five-meter-thick trunk, took his heading as best he could. North. They had to keep going north and a little west. Once they hooked up with Talina and Kylee, they could keep better track of Kalico and Muldare. When it came to forest, nothing beat Talina and Kylee’s quetzal sense.
Face it, Mark, he told himself, you’ve just been lucky so far.
He’d avoided disaster by the merest hint of luck since leaving the cave. Just that innate sense of his, developed during all those months in the forest down south. But it was only a matter of time before the odds caught up to him.
Here, outside Tyson Station, the pincushion-sea-urchin thing was just the latest of the threats he’d barely recognized in time. So, too, had been the purple-burst flower, as they’d called it. The plant had just been too gorgeous: a riot of crimson, canary-yellow, and deep purple. He’d poked at with the extended barrel of his rifle and barely managed to keep his gun when it shot out and tried to eat the muzzle.
But so far, the only casualty was Muldare, who’d somehow gotten too close to the local variety of gotcha vine, which, it turned out, was significantly more mobile than the varieties Talbot and Dya were used to. Unexpectedly, it had leaped out far enough to brush the marine.
They’d had to pull sixteen of the wicked spines out of Muldare’s arm and shoulder. Briah, trying to be stoic, wasn’t succeeding. Her face remained a mask of pain.
“Kylee?” Dya shouted as they started back around the big chabacho.
The chime mocked her in response. Overhead a flock of scarlet fliers swooped low from the branches, apparently drawn by the change in the chime. A few of them managed to snatch a couple of inattentive invertebrates, and then they were gone. Vanished back into the heights.
Again, Talbot took the lead, climbing over roots, lending a hand to Dya, who lent a hand to Kalico, and then to the grimacing Muldare as she brought up the rear.
“Do you know the difference between roots and a marine boot-camp obstacle course?” Muldare asked as she clambe
red over the latest pile of slowly writhing roots.
“Obstacle courses don’t eat you?” Dya wiped at her sweaty brow.
“And they don’t move,” Kalico groused as she jerked her foot away from a closing gap where two roots pulled themselves tight.
“We can’t be more than a couple hundred meters from them,” Talbot insisted as he helped Dya down to what he assumed was ground level.
Kalico tried her com, asked, “Talina? Where are you?”
A pause.
Kalico nodded, said, “Yeah, we’re still headed north. But in this shit? We could miss you by fifty yards and never know it.”
To the rest she said, “Talina says that all she can see is trees and roots.”
“When we get home,” Dya insisted, “Su’s making us spaghetti with that red sauce and chamois meatballs.”
“Damn, that sounds good,” Kalico said between panting breaths. “Me, I’m pouring a bathtub full of water and drinking it dry.”
“Watch it,” Talbot told her. “Slug there.”
The thing was stretched out on a rare bare patch of damp soil. Odd to see one just out in the open like that. They usually liked having a layer of dirt between them and their predators.
“Shit,” Kalico skipped sideways. Her boots were probably thick enough to stop the creepy little beast, but why take chances?
“Yeah, I see it,” Muldare declared as she leaped down. With a quick draw, she used her combat knife to slice the thing in two. It contracted, spilling goo onto the nearest root. Even as they watched, spindles of root began to suck up the fluids and entwine themselves in the twitching halves.
“Spaghetti, huh?” Kalico said longingly as Talbot started toward the next bundle of straining and bunched roots. They blocked the way between two of the towering broadvine trees, their trunks almost obscured by thick coils of vines.
“You’re welcome to come,” Dya told her. “We can always set an extra place.”
“Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had spaghetti? Don’t imagine it will be the same as Luigi’s in Transluna, but I’m already salivating.”
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