by Gary Gibson
‘Please God,’ Sam croaked. ‘Kill me or let me sleep. Make your choice.’
‘You said to tell you when the Howlers finally left,’ Amit reminded him.
‘So I did,’ said Sam. His mouth felt gummy and dry, his head pounded from dehydration, and the back of his throat still felt unpleasantly raw.
By some effort of will, he somehow managed to struggle back onto his feet before following Amit up to the command deck. There, he found Kim stretched out on a narrow strip of floor between two seats, snoring quietly. The screens displayed a dawn sky above the clearing, smoke still rising from the burned-out remains of the Howler’s bonfire.
Sam cleared his throat noisily and scratched at itchy stubble. ‘Are they definitely all gone?’
‘To all appearances, yes,’ Amit reassured him. ‘They…destroyed our prefab shelters, I’m afraid.’
Sam felt his eyes grow wide. ‘And the truck…?’
‘Is unharmed, I’m glad to say.’
Sam sighed with heartfelt relief. ‘I guess they didn’t know what it is.’
‘Perhaps. I…’ Amit’s voice trailed off.
‘What?’
‘It struck me,’ said Amit, seemingly fighting to get the words out, ‘that their attack was extremely well-coordinated and thought-out.’
Sam gave him a look. ‘What are you getting at?’
‘I appreciate this might sound ridiculous,’ said Amit, sounding almost apologetic, ‘but…well, one might almost think they had done this before. They seemed to know precisely which part of our lander to attack.’
‘Maybe you’re overthinking things. Could be they’ve smoked rival tribes out of caves in the past. And they’ve seen us entering the lander from the ramp, so it’s a pretty obvious weak point to attack.’
‘Of course.’ Amit smiled uncertainly. ‘That would be the logical explanation.’
There were dark pouches under Amit’s eyes, and Sam wondered just how much sleep he’d been getting. ‘You’re worried we might not get through this, aren’t you?’
Amit’s smile faltered, betraying a glimmer of fear. ‘There are just twelve of us now,’ he said, his voice dropping to an uncertain whisper, ‘and so many of them. Hardly the best odds.’
‘At least they’re out there while we’re still in here,’ said Sam. ‘They don’t seem to like daylight, so presumably we can still explore during the day.’
‘True.’ Amit drew in a sharp breath, flexing his shoulders. ‘And perhaps if I can get the mothership to respond, there might be a way for it to help us.’
Sam looked at him in surprise. ‘How, exactly?’
‘By manufacturing more supplies and sending them to us,’ Amit replied, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. ‘If it can construct this lander along with its contents, it could certainly do it again if we need it to. For all we know, it could have already dropped supply pods somewhere out there in the forest that we simply don’t know about.’
Sam gaped at him. ‘Amit, is that possible?’
‘Any number of strategies and contingencies were being discussed as part of the Initiative’s long-term planning. And perhaps if things had gone the way they were supposed to, and we still had all our memories, I’d be able to say whether that was the case. But until the mothership responds, guessing is all we have.’
‘Any idea yet why it won’t respond?’
‘It’s possible the lander’s transponder was damaged during the landing. I can’t find out for sure because the transponder is located in a part of the ship that got crushed against the boulders. Systems tests, however, suggest it’s still functioning.’
Amit stepped over to a low table and picked up a coloured sheet, handing it to Sam. ‘This is for you. It’s composited from the drone’s footage—it’s not nearly as detailed as I’d have liked, but it’ll help keep you oriented on your trip to the mesa.’
Sam saw it was a map: the clearing had been rendered as a rough oval, rendered in flat green. The building, as they’d come to call it, lay to the north-west, past territory depicted as broken and hilly. The river plain, where they’d come across a herd of buttheads, lay to the north-east, while the mesa lay directly to their east.
‘That’s great,’ said Sam. He carefully rolled the map up. ‘Thanks.’
Amit nodded. ‘I’ve already given a copy to Vic for his expedition.’
They heard people moving around on one of the lower decks just then. ‘Sounds like Joshua and the others are up,’ said Sam. ‘I should get back down—we’re going to have to clear all that crap away from under the ramp before we can even go outside.’
Amit nodded, a slight tremble in his hands as he turned towards a console. ‘Of course. I’ll continue—’
‘No.’ Sam put his hand on Amit’s arm. ‘Get some sleep or you’ll be worse than useless. I’m sure Kevin and Kim can find their way around the lander’s systems just as well as you do by now.’
Amit managed another faint smile. ‘Good luck, Sam.’
‘Thanks,’ Sam replied. We’re going to need it, he thought, as he made his way down the shaft.
* * *
Down in the lower cargo bay, he found Jess and Karl standing on either side of the still-closed ramp. Each held an improvised shovel made from flat pieces of scrap metal they had lashed to sturdy branches using vines and discarded electrical wire. Their lower faces were covered with ragged strips torn from the sleeves of their jumpsuits. Traynor stood between them, also facing the ramp, with Joshua and DeWitt standing right behind him. All three men carried printed water bottles on their backs, held in place with more knotted vines.
‘Okay,’ said Karl, reaching out to the ramp controls, ‘here goes.’
The ramp shuddered, then dropped about a metre before coming to a jarring halt, still only partway open. Sam looked out at a narrow envelope of red dawn sky, smoke eddying away from them.
‘Amit set the lander’s internal air pressure to slightly higher than outside,’ said Karl, looking around at the rest of them. ‘That way the smoke’s blown away from us, instead of coming back in.’
‘Still stinks like a son of a bitch,’ Traynor muttered.
‘Me and Karl will go outside first and get started on the clean-up,’ Jess rasped, walking up to the edge of the part-lowered ramp and grabbing hold of its open lip.
‘Careful,’ Traynor warned her. ‘I can feel the heat even from in here.’
She nodded, then squeezed through the narrow gap between the hull and the part-lowered ramp, her head bent low.
‘All clear,’ she said, scanning the clearing. She dropped her improvised shovel to the ground, then pushed herself the rest of the way through and out of sight. Sam heard her hit the ground a moment later, followed by a great deal of cursing and shouting.
‘Hey, Karl,’ she shouted after several seconds. ‘Roll to the right. There’s less hot ash on that side.’
It was Karl’s turn to climb up to the ramp’s edge and peer down. ‘Doesn’t look so bad.’ He glanced around at the rest of them. ‘The bonfire’s collapsed to the left. It still looks pretty hot, so roll soon as you hit the ground. We’ll be there to help you.’
Then he, too, dropped out of sight.
‘Our turn,’ said Traynor, stepping forward.
Traynor next dropped over the edge of the ramp, followed by Joshua and then DeWitt. Kevin appeared while Sam was waiting his turn, saying he wanted to check the truck over and make sure it was still functional.
When Sam peered over the lip of the ramp, he saw it had come to rest on top of a mound of cinders and half-burned wood. His eyes swam from the billowing smoke, and he held his breath for as long as he could while he manoeuvred himself through the gap between the ramp and the hull.
He saw Jess, waiting below to one side of the collapsed bonfire. ‘Anyone else coming out?’ she called up.
‘Just Kevin.’
‘You’re going to need a hand,’ Joshua called up to Sam.
Sam favoured his injur
ed shoulder the best he could, but it still made things awkward. When he let go of the ramp, he tumbled to the ground like a bag of rocks. Jess and Joshua hurried to drag him away from the hot ashes.
He still managed to inhale some of the smoke and started coughing uncontrollably. Joshua thumped him hard on the back where he lay sprawled on the ground, while Kevin dropped from the ramp.
‘Better?’ Joshua asked.
Sam nodded, his eyes watering. ‘yeah.’
Narrow shafts of early morning light came through the trees to one side of the clearing. Sam looked around, hearing and seeing nothing beyond the rustle of leaves and the cries of native wildlife. Jess and Karl got to work shovelling the ashes away from under the ramp, their faces tight grimaces beneath their improvised masks.
What I would give, thought Sam, for a bulldozer.
‘Soon as you start feeling any kind of side-effects from that smoke,’ Traynor warned Jess and Karl from a safe distance, ‘find someone to take over for you.’ He turned to Sam. ‘Well, I guess this is it.’
Sam nodded. ‘Good luck.’ At least this time, he was able to meet the other man’s eyes without hesitation. And maybe one of these days soon we’ll find out why you’re here.
Traynor nodded stiffly back. ‘You too.’ He turned and made his way over to the north-west edge of the clearing.
Joshua came up to Sam and clapped him on his good shoulder. ‘See you tonight.’
Sam watched as Joshua went to join Traynor, followed by DeWitt, who turned to raise a hand to the rest of them back beside the lander. The three men stood there at the clearing’s edge for another minute, studying their map, then stepped forward as one, slipping into the forest and merging almost immediately with the shadows.
Sam stared after them, hearing only the sigh of the wind, and the sound of Jess and Karl shovelling hot ash.
Kevin, who had gone to check the truck over, came to stand by Sam, pausing on his way to grab up a handful of pale yellow leaves from the bonfire.
‘Smell it,’ he said to Sam, holding out a fistful of the leaves.
Sam took them and held them close to his nose. They had the same sickly sweet scent as the smoke that filled the lander.
‘The thing I keep wondering,’ said Kevin, ‘is how did they know these were poisonous to us? It’s not like we’re even from here.’
‘But they don’t know they’re not poisonous to us either.’
‘We need to set this whole damn forest on fire,’ Jess called over to them. ‘Burn the fuckers alive. Level the whole damn forest if we have to.’
Sam looked at her. She was leaning on her shovel, her eyes bright with fury.
‘That won’t work,’ said Kevin, turning to look at her.
She stared at him, incredulous. ‘You get that it’s us or them, right?’
‘What I get,’ said Sam, ‘is that starting a war we can’t win isn’t going to do us any good.’
She took a step closer. ‘This already is a war! You want to pretend we’re in a democracy, fine, but we’re not. Vic was saying—’
‘You’re right,’ Sam said evenly. ‘It’s not a democracy, except that the majority decided to put me in charge. Got a problem with that?’
‘All I’m saying is—!’
‘Shut up,’ Sam snapped, his temper finally fraying. There was, after all, only so much he could put up with. ‘Finish your damn work like you were told to, then go back inside the lander and help anybody who needs it.’
He held her gaze, her hands gripping her improvised shovel as if ready to swing it at his head. ‘Nobody’s burning anything down because there’s a million of them out there and a bare dozen of us,’ Sam reminded her. ‘Even the worst gambler in the world would stay away from odds that bad.’
She regarded him blackly for a long moment, then turned away, stabbing the blade of her shovel deep into the remaining ash as if she were driving it into his skull.
20
THE BONES
It wasn’t long before they had cleared enough of the ash away that they could lower the ramp the rest of the way down. Irish emerged first, her compound bow slung over her shoulders along with a quiver of steel-tipped arrows. She went to join Sam and Kevin, who were waiting by the truck.
‘When we get back,’ said Kevin, ‘I want to park the truck up inside the cargo bay in case those animals try to take it apart the next time they attack us.’
Sam squinted at him. ‘You sure there’s enough room for it?’
‘Only barely,’ Kevin admitted, then cast a significant glance towards the torn-up remains of their prefabricated shelters. ‘Don’t get me wrong—it’s going to make things a lot more cramped than they already are, but I’d rather not take any chances.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Sam. He patted one of the curving safety bars on the truck. ‘How long before we roll?’
‘I figure about now.’ Kevin walked around the truck like a man convinced he’d forgotten something, but couldn’t quite recall what. ‘Everything looks about right, but…’ He sucked at his teeth.
‘Anything goes wrong, and we get stuck out there with no way back,’ said Sam, ‘we’ll eat you first. Deal?’
Kevin’s frown faded, and he chuckled. ‘Seems fair enough.’ He slid into a front bucket seat and touched a flat-screen console set beside a steering wheel. Almost immediately a whine built up from somewhere under the chassis; the wheels turned, kicking up dirt, and the truck lurched a metre or two backwards before juddering to a sudden halt.
‘Shit,’ said Kevin, studying the screen. ‘Give me a second here.’
The truck rolled forward this time, but at a much slower pace. Kevin brought it to a gentle halt before looking over at them.
Irish laughed in delight. ‘Well, all right,’ she exclaimed. ‘It lives!’
Karl, standing leaning on his shovel next to the lowered ramp, applauded. Jess sat on the edge of the ramp, fixing the bindings holding her shovel together, and pointedly ignored them all.
‘I think it’s time to test-drive this thing,’ said Kevin.
‘Shotgun!’ yelled Irish, climbing into the seat next to Kevin’s. Sam got in back: the seat proved to be quite rigid, and he had a feeling a couple of hours sitting on it might be enough to make him desperately wish they’d walked instead.
The truck rolled forward again, and this time Kevin nearly steered it into one of the lander’s legs before he managed to brake.
‘Problem?’ Sam asked dryly.
‘Whoever designed this thing,’ Kevin groused, ‘didn’t build for ease of steering, put it that way. Okay, here we go again…!’
Kevin reversed the truck again, swearing under his breath, then drove around and past the lander’s leg. He kept the speed low, circumnavigating the entire clearing before parking it near where he had started out but with the vehicle’s nose facing east.
‘All right,’ he said, looking around at his two passengers with a cheery grin, ‘First Safari tours of Aranyani welcome you aboard!’
* * *
Irish took on the role of navigator, studying Amit’s printed map as they drove towards the rising sun.
At first, the driving was as easy as Amit had suggested it would be; the terrain was remarkably smooth and flat, and most hollows or dips they encountered were smooth-sided and shallow. The trees were evenly spaced, growing far enough apart that Kevin was only rarely forced into making any kind of detour. Sam, meanwhile, kept his eyes out for clusters of blue flowers. He held onto the safety bar with a death grip and wished he’d tried harder to persuade Kevin to build a cabin over the chassis.
His worst fears came true when, not too long after they’d set out, they were attacked by a bungee-bug.
Kevin was hunched over the steering wheel, guiding them up the incline of a low-lying hill, when some instinct caused Sam to glance upwards. He lifted his head in time to see a toothy maw ringed with tentacles come rushing down towards him with bowel-loosening speed.
The bug smashed into the truck�
��s crash-bars, the vehicle skewing wildly as Kevin temporarily lost control. Irish let out a scream and snatched up the compound bow laid across her lap, but it was already over. The bungee-bug was behind them now, twisting on the end of its long, ropey umbilical as it reeled itself back up into the overhead foliage with an indignant squeal. Somehow, they’d driven through a spray of blue flowers without any of them noticing.
Irish spat out an impressive string of anatomically unlikely expletives. ‘So much for bringing my bow,’ she said finally.
Sam laughed shakily. ‘You sound disappointed.’
‘Well, I am. That thing could have fed us for days!’
He looked at her with unfeigned surprise. ‘A couple of days ago you hated the idea of killing anything.’
‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘but that was before.’
He shook his head, heart still beating wildly from the near-miss, and wondered if all this time he’d misread her. ‘There’ll be other opportunities.’
‘Could be a whole new sport,’ Kevin mused as they picked up speed again. ‘Like horseback archery. Drive under a tree, wait for a bug to knock itself out trying to eat you, then shoot it.’
‘I’ll cheer you from the sidelines,’ Sam assured him.
* * *
After another half hour of slightly more careful driving, and with no further encounters with either bungee-bugs or any of the local fauna, the forest thinned out even more.
‘I think we’re almost there,’ said Irish, who had flattened their map across the dashboard so they could all see it. ‘It looks like there’s a big clearing up ahead. Once we’re across that, there’s some more forest, and finally the mesa.’
They ascended a low hill, from the top of which they could get their first good look at the mesa, now seven or eight kilometres distant. It rose above the surrounding forest, a flat plug of red rock topped with a carpet of green and red. Mist, perhaps from a waterfall, rose along its southern flanks.
Now that he could see it clearly, Sam realised how huge it was. More than enough room for them all.
They rolled down the far side of the hill until they came to the edge of the clearing, which was about a kilometre across. Its far end sloped down to the shore of a river, its waters sparkling in the late morning sun. Steam rose from a hot spring close to one shore. The sight of it filled Sam with a near-irrepressible urge to tear off his increasingly rank jumpsuit and dive into its steaming waters.