Daisuke ground his teeth, reaching for control. He ought to be thinking about other people’s danger, not his own fear. “How can we help them?”
“The buffalo?”
He sighed. “How can we help the people? Nurul and Sing.”
“I don’t know, Dice. I don’t even know if they’re in danger.” An angry little jerk came vibrating down the kelp-tree stalk. “I’m never going to learn what’s down there, am I? What sort of metabolic pathway throws off carbon monoxide, for God’s sake? Are the structures down there made of ferrofluids or what? Who knows? I don’t, and I can’t find out because I have to chase after some stupid, cowardly bloody Russian! What the hell is he even running away from all of a sudden?”
It wasn’t the first time Anne had asked the question, but it was the first time Daisuke had had the luxury of time to think about an answer. The machinations of fellow humans were infinitely more pleasant to consider than the impenetrable dangers that might even now be cruising the turbid air below.
“He could have run away from three things,” Daisuke said. “The Death Wind, whatever force closed that wormhole, or us.”
“Us? Why would he suddenly be scared of us? Oh, this is your stupid murder scenario again, isn’t it? ‘And Then There Were Nun’?”
Daisuke bit his tongue. Once again, he stuck his head up and she hammered it back down. He should just keep his mouth shut. On the other hand, what sort of Iron Man of Survival would Daisuke be if he remained silent just because he was afraid of being yelled at by his girlfriend?
“What if Misha is trying to escape justice?” he said. “What if he is the murderer?”
An irritating groan from above. “Why would Misha want to kill any of us?”
Daisuke remembered the linguipods. “He was killing everyone who slowed us down. Me, after I was poisoned. Hariyadi, who wanted to stay in the Oasis biome. Tyaney, who abused our native guide. Pearson, who wanted to stay on the glasslands.”
“Christ Almighty, Daisuke, that’s….” The stalks of the kelp-trees trembled as she shook her head. “Stop being so damn paranoid.”
Why won’t you listen? Why do you punish me for speaking the truth? Daisuke closed his eyes and bared his teeth, strangling the questions in his throat. The cool surface of the kelp-tree stalk pressed into the place on his left hand where his wedding ring had once lain.
“I mean, Misha the Russian hippie? He’s in a hurry now, but he was dragging his feet from the plane crash until we lost Hariyadi and Rahman. I guess I could believe he offed Tyaney in a fit of passion, but that’s not how that happened, either.”
She went on like that for some time, but Daisuke was too exhausted to listen. He could never reveal his real face. Not to Anne, not to anyone. Because nobody was interested in Daisuke Matsumori – only the Iron Man of Survival was worth their attention. Daisuke would put aside his plans and emotions and focus on survival. It was what he did best.
He let his gaze fall to the toxic clouds below him, where a shadow bloomed.
“Oh my,” said Anne. “That’s certainly a big bloody thing.”
The Death Wind organism looked less like an animal than a machine built by some far-flung and sinister future. Some deranged art student’s idea of a lily, or maybe a spiderweb, all tangled wire and swirling black liquid, as large as a radio telescope.
“Can we, uh, fly away?” Anne asked.
“I’m sorry,” said Daisuke. His teeth chattered audibly as the organism extended silently below them. “That there is nothing we can do to avoid that…death flower.”
The death flower changed shape as he watched. Wires curved or protruded or coiled out of its central mass, which spread itself up their scaffolding like iron filings flying to meet a magnet.
Somewhere in the distance, Sing was screaming.
Daisuke could do nothing. No feat of derring-do would save them from the thing that uncoiled below them. Survival lay entirely outside of Daisuke’s hands, which was some comfort. Nobody could blame him for dying.
A new mechanism took shape under the Death Wind flower. A coil of wire had attracted black skin, which turned it into a tube. A collar spun around the base of that tube, spiked and crackling, while the tube itself swung around like the barrel of a cannon…
“Anne,” said Daisuke, “I have something to say to you.”
…and aimed past them at Misha’s and Sing’s balloons.
“Huh?” Anne said.
A thunderclap passed through Daisuke’s head, a wave of violated air. Something hurtled through the night, sleek and massive as a porpoise.
Sing screamed again. Her and Misha’s balloons jerked down and to the side, suddenly weighted down by a wad of wire and black tar.
“Daisuke,” said Anne, “your binocs.”
“Binoculars?” They were still dangling from the strap he always kept fastened around his right wrist. Now all he had to do was convince the fingers of that hand to loosen their death grip on the tree.
Just imagine there’s a camera on you.
Daisuke composed his face and brought the binoculars up to his eyes. He focused on the creature dangling from Misha and Sing’s pair of balloons, glimmering gold and royal blue as it threw off whips of wire. No, not whips. Tracks. The creature flowed up the wires like a giant amoeba, bristling toward Misha.
“What are they doing, Dice?”
“Fighting each other,” he said. Sing was wrestling with Misha for possession of…what? A gun? A knife? No. “Anne, Misha is holding a little radio.”
“A bloody what?”
“A…a….” What was the damn word? “A walkie-talkie.”
“Misha had a radio all this time? Why didn’t he tell us? Why didn’t he call for help?”
“Line of sight,” said Daisuke, who remembered the days of wilderness exploration before communications satellites. “We cannot call someone we cannot see.” Daisuke tried to stabilize his trembling arm against his body. “He is shouting into the radio. Listening. He is talking to someone.”
“He’s generating radio signals is what he’s bloody doing,” Anne said. “Doesn’t he realize he’s flying over an ecosystem based off the interactions of magnetic fields with ferrofluids in an anoxic atmosphere?”
“I…don’t think he realizes that, no,” Daisuke said.
The monster had developed a brownish crust, which cracked as it extruded a sheaf of wires like questing fingers, reaching up toward the radio Misha held against his ear.
“His modulated electromagnetic signals summoned a big bloody iron-eating monster,” said Anne. “Do you think he’s figured that out?”
“Sing has, yes,” Daisuke said. “She is tugging on his sleeve, screaming. She wants him to—”
“To drop the radio. Obviously!”
Misha did not seem to hear her. Still shouting into his walkie-talkie, he tried to climb away from the monster, but there was nowhere for him to go. The monster flowed up its tracks with the speed of a locomotive.
There was no way Daisuke could have heard Sing’s tongue-click from this distance. He must have only imagined it. That and Sing’s toymaker’s sproing!
Misha howled with pain – a noise Daisuke really could hear – and clutched at his shoulder, where, yes, a miniature ballista bolt protruded. His arm went limp, and the radio finally fell.
The amoeba monster twitched and dissolved. It dripped off the kelp-tree as skeins and loops of wire spread, acquired bristling black flesh, and became wings. The amoeba, now shaped like a manta ray, flapped clumsily after the plummeting radio.
Daisuke caught a glimpse of the rusty monster settling over the lower slopes of the mountains like a funeral shroud, stabbing its wires into the broken metal tool.
Daisuke gasped for breath, held the tree, tried to think. “Misha had a radio,” he said. “All this time he had a radio. He was talking to someon
e. Why?”
Anne did not answer him. Daisuke was relieved. He should never have revealed himself to her.
Chapter Seventeen
Coming Down
The wind did not conveniently blow Daisuke and Anne to where Misha and Sing had landed. It didn’t even take them to Nurul. Instead, it threatened to bounce them back into the Death Wind biome. The wind pushing them south-east met another coming off the mountains, and the vectors seemed to be adding up to a course through the thickest part of the valley.
“We should cut the stalks,” Daisuke told Anne. “Now, while we are over the Lighthouse biome and we know the air below us is breathable. Release the balloons one at a time.”
“Maybe if we wait, we can catch up with Misha or Nurul,” said Anne. “We can go faster by balloon than he can on foot.”
“I think that’s not true,” Daisuke said, looking out over the sluggishly moving landscape. Morning sunlight lit the peaks of the Inner Toymaker Mountains and slanted out of the mouth of the Death Wind Pass. If Daisuke used his binoculars, he could see the green of Earth vegetation there. But below them spread the bare yellow branches of trees.
In daylight, the Lighthouse biome looked less like a glowing fairy garden than a blighted wasteland. That amber color, his instincts insisted, had to be a sign of pollution or disease. The fact that the animals didn’t seem to be moving added to the impression of desolation. At least, Daisuke thought those things dangling from the skeletal branches were animals. Here was yet another new ecosystem, entirely unknown, potentially deadly.
“Cut the stalks now,” said Daisuke. “If later, we won’t be alive to regret it.”
“You make a persuasive point.” Anne fumbled for her knife. “Okay, I’m going to cut this one first.” She gave one of the stalks a tug, sending vibrations down to where Daisuke dangled.
Daisuke started untying himself. He was no longer unconscious ballast on this flight, but he hadn’t trusted his strength enough to loosen his trusses before now. His hands shook. His head pounded in pace with his pulse. He kept feeling like he wasn’t getting enough air, but that was probably psychosomatic. And his chest still twinged alarmingly when he spread his arms.
Has the Iron Man of Survival ever been in such a dire situation? thought Daisuke, glancing up at Anne’s boots.
“Okay,” he shouted, “cut them!”
One of their balloons floated away and they sank. Very slowly.
The yellow canopy reached up toward them, smaller saplings surrounding larger trees surrounding forest giants in overlapping fractal circles like ripples in a pond in the rain. Farther south, some other kind of plant (or giant animal?) had carved a clearing out of the forest, with reeds or fence posts growing in a spiraling pattern like the shell of a nautilus. It would be a better place to land than the forest, but Daisuke didn’t see how they’d get there. As low as they were flying, their balloons would get hung up in the crown of one of the big cypress-looking trees, tens of meters above the ground. “Another one! Cut another balloon.”
Anne didn’t need convincing. She selected the smaller of their remaining balloons and set to work on its stalk while Daisuke carved grips for himself into the other.
They jerked as the second balloon tore away, and the trees swept up under them. Losing one balloon had had almost no effect on their buoyancy, but losing the second made them drop like a stone. Typical. Well, this is no different from that time paragliding in Brazil.
Teeth gritted in pain, Daisuke swung himself at the end of their last balloon stalk, turning himself into a pendulum, yanking them away from the sharp branches of one particularly tall tree. Those branches appeared to be tipped with little crystal spikes. He managed to pull his knees up to his chest, bringing his legs into position to kick out at the next tree that got too close. Crystals sliced his shins, but the sole of one boot connected with a solid branch, and he could give them a firm shove back the other way. Then it was time to spin and kick at the next tree and so on until their balloon finally got caught and wedged immovably into place.
Daisuke looked past his feet at the ground, maybe three meters away. In this higher gravity, in his battered condition, he would be a fool to let himself drop. His only other option, though, was to swing himself into the nearest tree trunk and climb down it.
“Get ready, Anne,” he said. “I’m going to swing us into that tree.”
“Oh,” came Anne’s voice from above. “Now you think to warn me. What about all that swinging you were doing before— Whoa!”
Daisuke let go of the kelp-tree stalk and struck the yellow tree trunk with three limbs and his knife. It was like stabbing a tube of PVC pipe. The knife blade jerked in his hand, sending agonizing shocks up his arms as his legs wrapped around the ivory-slick bark. But the tip of the knife had sunk in far enough to give him some leverage, and Daisuke managed to stop himself from plummeting to the ground.
He hugged the tree for a while, breathing.
“Okay,” said Anne eventually. “So what now? We slide down this thing like a fireman’s pole?”
“I think,” Daisuke said, his forehead pressed into the bark, “we rest!”
“Normally I’d let you have all the rest you wanted, mate, but right now we have a traitorous Russian to catch.”
Daisuke breathed deeply, searching for the reserves of strength he needed to play the survivor for Anne.
“Plus,” she said, “I don’t think you want that alien to catch you.”
“Oh, what? What alien?” With a stab of pain from his much-abused head, Daisuke opened his eyes and focused on the growth dangling from the branch just above him and to his right. What he had thought was some kind of large fruit or flower was now moving toward him with slow purpose.
The animal was the same yellow color as the tree, and probably more massive than Daisuke. What he had thought were the petals of a flower now revealed themselves to be fleshy, flexible tubes capped with hard shell, ranging in size from pencil-tip feelers along the forward end to the six foot-long hooks that gripped the branch overhead. A seventh hook, even larger and more wickedly pointed, protruded from a cluster of horn-tipped tentacles at the front.
All of the tentacles, small and large, were in constant motion, swelling, shrinking, questing about as if in search of something to impale. And that complicated contraption hanging from the center of the body…was a mouth? A sense organ? A sex organ? Either way, Daisuke didn’t like the way it was pointed at him.
“Would you stop looking at it and get out of that tree?” yelled Anne.
The body of the marigold-colored creature rippled and three of its legs shifted, pistons of tissue swelling, shell-tips scratching across each other and the plastic surface of the tree. How long before it would be in striking distance? What was its striking distance?
Daisuke tried to focus, but all he could think about was how hurt and tired he was. Well, at least a quick death smashed against the ground would be better than being slowly eviscerated by a carnivorous sloth-flower.
And if I break a leg but stay alive? Anne will just leave me. All right, enough thinking. Time for action! Daisuke squeezed his knees together and yanked the knife out of the tree.
He shot toward the ground, his knees hot against the slick plant, his knife vibrating and bouncing in his hands as he pressed it against the tree, trying to brake. He tore through branches and what felt like a man-sized spiderweb made of snot. Almost by accident, he found a grip on the knife that worked. Holding it perpendicular to the tree, he slowed his descent, peeling off a long curl of bark as he fell.
His ass hit the ground hard enough to compress his spine, but Daisuke barely noticed. He just rolled out of the way and gasped like a landed carp while Anne made her own rather more athletic landing.
“Okay,” she said, hands on hips. “Let’s go.”
Now, what would be a more macho way to say, ‘please let me
rest, I’m tired’? “If you offered me the choice between getting up and another toymaker attack, I would let them chop me to pieces with their little hammers,” said Daisuke.
Anne either didn’t understand his message or ignored it. “Now’s not the time, Dice. Up we go!” Anne grabbed him under the armpits and slid his body up a nearby tree trunk.
“No,” he said flapping his hands. “No. I’m all right.”
“Don’t be stupid,” she said, pulling him onto her shoulder. “You’re weak and injured and poisoned. You can barely stand. Now put your bloody weight on me and let’s get a move on, all right?”
Daisuke wondered why Anne bothered. Maybe she thought he’d be useful later on, or maybe she cared about his health, if not his feelings for her. Together, they hobbled eastward.
The understory of the Lighthouse biome was brighter than could be accounted for by the mere leaflessness of the trees. Those crystals redirected sunlight around obstacles, bathing Daisuke and Anne in a constant shower of light. Yellow plastic grass rippled around their feet – ribbons of tough material undulating in the steady south-easterly wind. Translucent bluish globs floated through the air or rolled across the ground like tumbleweeds.
“How are we going to find Misha and Nurul and Sing?” Anne asked.
“We can only hope that the others will want to go the same direction we do,” said Daisuke. “East, toward home. If we go that way too, we will catch up to them.”
“Or we won’t catch up,” Anne said. “Or they’ll get lost and go off in different directions.”
Where the hell did she get off being so pessimistic? Didn’t she know they were still on camera? Daisuke glanced at Anne’s bodycam and he smiled. “I think we will find them. Let’s try.”
Junction Page 26