by Gary Gibson
‘We need to do something about Traynor,’ said Kim, with a surprising display of emotion for one typically so reserved.
They entered the clearing, and Sam saw only a few of the stranded still sat or lay by the campfire. Sun sat alone, watching the flames rush upwards as Jess added a bundle of sticks. Sun glanced up at the sound of their approach, but when Sam nodded to her, her cheeks coloured, and she stood, hastening towards the lander.
Jess, who had been watching, caught Sam’s eye and shrugged, a small smile curling up one corner of her mouth.
Sam tried to put it out of his mind. He motioned to Joshua and Kim, and the three of them sat together close by the campfire. Sam warmed his hands until some of the chill had left him, then turned to Kim.
‘You talked to everybody yesterday, right?’ he asked the Korean. ‘How much do you remember of what they all said?’
‘Everything. What do you want to know?’
‘Their names, for a start.’
The way he rattled off the details led Sam to suspect the Korean had an eidetic memory.
Apart from Vic Traynor, six others had military backgrounds. These were:
Jess Underwood,
Wardell Brooks,
Angel Hickson,
DeWitt Thomas,
Karl Gabarro,
and Piper Rubin.
Kim went on to explain that DeWitt and Karl had both mentioned working freelance for different private security contractors—which, in Sam’s experience, usually translated as mercenaries. The rest, while technically military, had primarily technical and support backgrounds; Jess, for instance, was a qualified aerospace engineer. The only pure grunt amongst them was Angel Hickson, a tall, blond fellow with broad shoulders. His apish, rolling gait led Sam to suspect serial steroid abuse had played a significant factor in his previous life.
The civilians turned out to be a little more varied. Kim himself was a biologist. Kevin Amaro was another aerospace engineer, working on autonomous robot systems for asteroid mining conglomerates. Irish Wilson was a geologist, Sun an epidemiologist, Ethan a doctor, Joshua a shrink, and Amit Subarash…
Kim came to a halt just then because, he explained to Sam, he still wasn’t sure just exactly what Amit’s profession actually was. It seemed both Amit and Traynor had been extremely reluctant to divulge any personal details beyond their names; the most Kim had gleaned from a few conversational clues was that Amit might be yet another aerospace engineer.
The average true age of the military was twenty-four, confirming what Joshua had said about them not being much older than they now appeared. The average age of the civilians, by contrast, was closer to forty-five.
Sam’s gaze wandered towards Kevin Amaro and another man moving around beneath the lander, each taking turns to point up at the fuselage. The man with Kevin was tall, with drooping shoulders and a permanent hangdog expression. Kim identified him as Wardell Brooks, one of the military.
Sam looked around the campfire. Apart from the three of them and Jess, no one else was around.
Someone had once given Sam the advice that the best way to convince people you were in charge was by acting like you already were. It had worked in the camps and in Korea, and he was pretty sure it’d work here too.
‘People can’t keep wandering off,’ Sam said quietly, once Kim had finished telling them everything he’d found out.
Joshua grunted. ‘Look who’s talking.’
‘I know,’ said Sam. ‘Under the circumstances, I can’t blame anyone. But we don’t know how safe it is until we know more about what’s out there. Who else is missing?’
Kim thought for a moment. ‘Ethan went off some place with Irish. They said they were going to do some exploring.’
‘I think they did a whole lot of mutual exploring last night when they went off into the woods together,’ said Joshua. He caught Sam’s eye. ‘You and Sun weren’t the only ones.’
Sam felt his face redden. ‘And Amit? Where is he?’
Kim shrugged. ‘Haven’t seen him all morning.’
* * *
Irish and Ethan eventually reappeared most of an hour later, at least by Sam’s estimation; he had noticed the sun on this world tracked across the sky at a noticeably slower rate than back home.
Sometime after, Traynor finally reappeared, along with two others whom Kim identified as Karl Gaballo and DeWitt Thomas. Karl had dark, hooded eyes and an easygoing manner, like he was trying to make the best of a bad situation. DeWitt, by contrast, looked like someone who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Amit appeared from the direction of the lander, although he was reluctant to say exactly where he’d been. Others reappeared in dribs and drabs until they were all, by some unspoken mutual consent, gathered back around the campfire.
Sam stood and raised his hands and waited until they all fell silent.
‘If anyone found a 7-Eleven,’ he said, ‘all I care is if they’ll sell beer on credit.’
Someone faked a laugh, and Piper glared balefully at him. ‘Don’t joke about it,’ she said. ‘I’d kill every last one of you motherfuckers and spit on your graves if it got me just five minutes with my coffee maker.’
‘All right.’ Sam dropped his hands back down by his sides. ‘After last night, I think it’s safe to say rescue isn’t coming any time soon. We need to talk about what we’re going to do from here on in.’
DeWitt got back up and walked away from the campfire without a word. Sam watched him retreat to the edge of the clearing, where he sat with his back against a tree, ignoring them.
‘I don’t want to hear any more bullshit about alien planets,’ Traynor muttered, his eyes fixed on the flames.
‘Are you crazy?’ said Ethan. ‘Can’t you see the evidence of your own eyes?’
Sam glanced around, seeing expressions ranging from tired acceptance to blank denial.
‘There wasn’t a familiar constellation in the sky last night,’ Kim added. ‘The flora and fauna here are of a type entirely unknown back home.’
‘I don’t care,’ Traynor insisted. ‘You can’t convince me that—’
‘I’m simply stating a clear and mutually observable fact,’ stated Kim, a petulant note creeping into his voice. ‘We are not on Earth.’
‘How the fuck is that even possible?’ snapped Jess, stabbing a finger towards the lander. ‘There’s no way in hell that thing could fly us light-years to some other star system. The technology just doesn’t exist!’
‘And yet,’ said Kim, ‘here we are. Therefore, the technology does exist.’ He glanced at the lander. ‘You’re right about one thing—we didn’t come the whole way from Earth aboard that craft.’
‘Then how?’ asked Joshua.
‘I believe something else transported us here,’ Kim replied, ‘and either carried that lander with it, or constructed it upon arrival. A mothership, in other words.’
‘So, is there some way we can fly back into space, find that mothership and go home?’ asked Angel, leaning forward.
Kim shook his head. ‘Out of the question.’
Angel looked taken aback. ‘What makes you so damn sure?’
‘Even at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light,’ Kim explained, ‘a distance of a few light-years couldn’t be covered in less than several decades. You’d be an old man by the time you got home. And whatever brought us here, I guarantee it travelled a lot slower than light-speed.’
‘So we’re stuck here for good,’ said Piper, her eyes dark hollows. ‘Is that it?’
‘How we got here isn’t nearly as important as the fact we are here,’ said Sam. ‘We can either try to figure out how to deal with the situation as it is, or we might as well give up now.’ He nodded to Traynor, remembering his promise to Joshua. ‘I heard you did some more exploring this morning. Find anything?’
Traynor regarded him from beneath hooded eyebrows. ‘A great number of trees, Mr Newman.’
Jess snickered quietly.
‘Nothi
ng else?’ Sam persisted, his temper fraying.
Traynor shrugged. ‘We tried heading further out, hoping we might find…I don’t know, a road, maybe, anything that might tell us where we are.’ He shook his head. ‘No luck. The terrain got rough, fast, so we had to turn back sooner than we wanted. We also tried looking for the source of that stream, but we must have taken a wrong turning somewhere. We could find it if we tried again.’
Well, that was something at least, thought Sam. ‘All right,’ he said, looking around, ‘I propose we split into two groups, one to find the source of that stream, and the other to find anything we can eat.’
‘What about shelter?’ asked the round-faced geologist, Irish Wilson.
Sam nodded. ‘I was just getting to that. I figure if the weather takes a bad turn, we can wait it out inside the lander’s bay if necessary. We should probably build some temporary shelters close to the campfire, but that can wait until this evening. Right now, let’s focus on food but most especially water.’
‘I got to thinking there might be some way inside the lander through that big tear in the upper part of the hull,’ said Ethan. ‘I keep wondering if they’ve got showers inside. One night sleeping rough is more than enough for me.’
‘And beds,’ said Karl, his voice filled with longing.
Angel laughed. ‘Yeah, with a mint on every pillow.’
‘If there ever was a way in,’ said Irish, ‘it’s gone. Those robots already patched that hole back up again.’
‘Talking about food,’ said Angel, ‘can we eat anything here?’ He looked around nervously. ‘I mean, if this isn’t Earth, then maybe we can’t eat anything at all.’
‘Only one way to find out,’ said Sam, who had been wondering the same thing. ‘We could try to do some hunting, assuming we can find any animals. Anyone got experience hunting?’
‘I do,’ said Traynor. ‘You?’
‘Sure,’ Sam replied. ‘I lived rough for a while, living off the land.’
Traynor looked impressed. ‘How did that come about?’
‘I spent a year in the Amazon Reserves with Gaia Army.’
Ethan blinked rapidly. ‘What the fuck,’ he asked, ‘is Gaia Army?’
‘Eco-terrorists,’ Traynor said dismissively.
‘Activists,’ Sam corrected.
‘So you were one of them?’ asked Piper, clearly fascinated. ‘Aren’t they supposed to be a bunch of crazies?’
‘I was part of a UN investigative team sent into the Reserves because the Brazilians wanted Gaia Army out. The Amazon basin is a protected environment, and the government claimed Gaia Army was a threat to its ecology.’
‘And?’ Piper prompted him.
‘Well, they’re extreme by some standards, but it turned out they were doing a better job preventing illegal logging than the Brazilians ever managed themselves. So they stayed where they were, over the protests of both the Brazilian army and the Brazilian government.’
‘And you lived with them?’ asked Karl Gabarro.
Sam nodded. ‘Lived and hunted, otherwise they’d never have trusted us. Peccary, tapir, deer…we hunted the same animals as the native tribes.’
Gabarro shook his head. ‘I don’t understand—Gaia Army are hardcore Mannites, right? So how can they eat meat?’
‘The point is, they live sustainably—and sustainable living doesn’t automatically preclude hunting. Farming or importing food from outside the jungles would have created much more of a negative environmental impact. So they chose to hunt.’
‘I can’t quite picture you running around naked in the jungle with a spear,’ Traynor said dryly.
‘When in Rome,’ said Sam.
‘All right,’ said Traynor, ‘you want food, me and some of the others will go out hunting and see what we can find.’
Kim stood abruptly. ‘Must I remind you again,’ he said heatedly, ‘that a number of us oppose any form of hunting or killing!’
‘Nobody’s making you eat meat if you don’t want to,’ said Sam, failing to hide his irritation. Kim glared at him, but said nothing more.
Amit, meanwhile, watched the proceedings stonily. He sat slightly separate from the rest of them with his arms crossed, as if disappointed with them all.
Traynor stood and nodded to the men gathered nearest him. ‘Wardell, Karl, Angel,’ he said, ‘you’re with me. And get DeWitt—maybe this’ll get him out of his funk.’
‘You’re going now?’ asked Sam.
Traynor shrugged. ‘No point in waiting.’
The three other men stood without a word and one of them went to fetch DeWitt, still sitting separately from the rest of them. Jesus, thought Sam, watching them confer, barely one day in this place and already he’s got his own obedient little army.
He glanced at Joshua, and they shared a look. Perhaps Traynor was going to be a bigger problem than any of them had realised.
5
THE STREAM
By the time the day’s heat built up to the same level it had been when Sam first woke, he, Ethan, Piper and Sun had made their way past the mound of boulders against which the lander had come to rest and deep into the forest in search of the source of the stream.
The forest quickly grew denser until it was very nearly impenetrable, and the stream itself was soon lost amidst a tangle of bushes and spiny plants. At first, Piper, who had gone with Traynor on the previous search for the river’s source, led them to a hill where she was sure they had taken a wrong turning. They went in the opposite direction this time, fighting their way through more undergrowth, the air all around filled with the strange cries of unseen creatures.
Sun accepted Sam’s hand when he helped her scramble over a fallen tree, but beyond that, she showed him the same cordiality she might to a stranger with whom she had been forced to share a taxi. He tried to tell himself it didn’t matter, that what had happened between them had been nothing more than a passing thing—the natural reaction to dreadful and unexpected circumstances.
Somehow, that didn’t make it sting any less. It felt like every time he closed his eyes, he could see her beneath him, her skin pale and luminous under the starlight.
Once past the hill, the trees in every direction became so closely packed together that their upper foliage merged into a canopy that blocked out much of the sunlight. Orienting themselves by the trail of smoke still barely visible to their rear and rising high above the lander, they spread out, calling to each other as they made their way through the forest. Before long they rediscovered the stream when it once more emerged into the open, taking turns cupping unpolluted water in their hands and thirstily drinking it down.
Piper managed to fashion a kind of water-carrier from fat, orchid-like plants that grew in profusion near the water’s edge, breaking their stalks and scooping water up in them. It was far from an elegant solution, but good enough they could carry some water back to the clearing.
Hunger and thirst had sharpened his senses, something Sam remembered from his time in the Amazon. But although he could hear life all around him, that same life was doing a terrific job of staying out of sight. The most he or anyone else saw were small, dark shapes that flitted along high branches, almost too fast to see.
They were on their way back to the lander when Piper died.
Sam had taken the lead as they passed through a narrow gorge dense with foliage. Ethan was by his side, expounding on his theory that the robots must have carried their pods out of the lander to save them from the fire.
Piper was at the rear of their party when she let out a sudden sharp scream. Sam turned in time to see a dark shape rising vertically towards the canopy far above, Piper in its grasp, her legs kicking as she struggled to get free.
Then she was gone, disappeared into the dense foliage. It had all happened so fast Sam only had a single, fleeting glimpse of whatever had a hold of her.
They all heard a second, agonised scream from far above, and then nothing.
Sam ran back the way to where Sun
stood by the base of a single huge and ancient-looking tree. She peered up into the foliage overhead, her face slack with horror.
‘Did you see that?’ yelled Ethan, pointing up into the canopy, his voice trembling with fright. ‘Goddammit, what was that thing?’
Sun was still staring upwards. Sam grabbed her shoulder and twisted her around to face him. ‘What the hell happened, Sun? What did you see?’
She stared at him blankly for a moment, then shook her head. ‘I heard something behind me, and when I turned to look it had dropped from out of nowhere and grabbed hold of Piper.’ She swallowed. ‘It was like an enormous spider, hanging from a rope.’
It was Sam’s turn to stare into the branches overhead, but he could see nothing.
‘I think she was about there,’ said Ethan, pointing to a where a spray of small blue flowers grew between the roots of the tree. He craned his neck as he looked back up at the canopy. ‘If she’s still alive, I don’t know how the hell we’re going to get her down,’ he added.
Sam shook his head slowly, thinking of the way her scream had been cut off. ‘Something tells me she’s dead already,’ he said. ‘This means we’re going to have to be extremely vigilant wherever we go in this forest.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Ethan, ‘you can’t just give up on her and—!’
Sam blinked, feeling a faint spray of moisture against his skin. He reached up to touch his forehead and his hand came away spotted with red.
Sun made a choking sound. He looked around at her and saw that her jumpsuit was also dotted with red.
It took a moment for Sam to understand it was Piper’s blood.
‘Goddammit!’ Ethan yelled, and they all moved rapidly away from the tree.
Sam tried to wipe the rest of the blood from his face with shaking hands. Sun, ashen-faced, walked a short distance away, covering her own face with her hands and breathing loudly through her fingers.
‘There wasn’t any warning,’ she gasped, panic edging her voice. ‘How can we keep from getting killed by something we can’t even see?’
‘Let’s all do like Sam suggested and be vigilant as all hell,’ said Ethan. ‘I don’t know about you,’ he said, his voice lower, ‘but I’m starting to feel way out of my depth.’