by Ramy Vance
She swallowed and glanced down the slope. Toner was wading knee-deep in dinosaur-tree brains, shoveling flesh and guts into his unhinged jaw. “Alive,” she decided weakly.
“I’m exactly where you left me,” Virgil said, unsympathetic. “The droids have resumed harvesting operations. The shuttle hold is thirty percent full.”
“That’s good.” She cleared her throat, coughed weakly on dust. She looked up to see where Sphynx was. He was gone. “Sphynx? Do you copy?”
There was a brief hiss of static, then nothing. Jaeger cursed, pressing her eyes shut, trying to remember where she had last seen the catman. Had he been caught up in the landslide as well? Such would surely kill a normal creature, but then again, none of them were normal.
There was a wet ripping noise from down below as Toner pulled something free from the monster’s skeleton.
“Sphynx,” she coughed. “Do you copy?”
Another blurt of meaningless static.
“I can’t locate him on my sensors,” Virgil admitted.
“Your sensors told me there were about eight wolf-sized critters and one moose-sized critter in the area.” Jaeger eyed the centaur-locust as it took another tentative step toward her.
“Is that not the case?” Virgil sounded puzzled.
“It is not.” She sighed and dropped her comm. “Check the system for errors and standby. It looks like I have to talk to the locals after all.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Jaeger held her breath, tense and ready to fight back or scream for help as a pair of the creatures crept across the scree in her direction. They were smaller than the first and carried no spears but had sashes of woven fiber slung across their narrow shoulders, heavy with bulging pouches. They held three-clawed hands out to her, open, making no fast movements.
One of them gestured at Jaeger’s leg, pinned in the rubble pile. It clicked softly.
Jaeger sucked in the air and nodded. A lash of pain shot up the back of her skull and she hissed. These creatures didn’t know what nodding meant. Instead, she spread her arms and showed them her open palms. They took this for the welcoming gesture that it was and stepped daintily closer to begin digging in the rubble.
For the sake of convenience, Jaeger had begun to think of the creatures as Locaurs.
The scree pile, still unstable, shifted beneath them as they dug Jaeger free. She gasped, terrified that the entire bank would collapse forward again, burying her for good.
Quick as lightning, the Locaurs flitted forward, each snatching one of Jaeger’s arms in thin, twiggy legs.
No, she decided. Locari sounded cooler.
Small, translucent wings snapped open from their abdomens and beat at the air. They were too small to give the creatures true flight but large enough to let them tow her away from the rubble in carefully coordinated, descending leaps. She bit back a scream with every beat of the wings, sure they would drop her and send her tumbling right back to the stone—or worse, into the pit where Toner made his gory dinner.
When they instead set her lightly on a stable, smooth stretch of ground, she let out a very long sigh. Without the rubble biting into her, the injuries to her legs and chest weren’t quite as bad as she had feared.
The biggest Locari landed on the stone beside her, its pseudo-wings half-spread behind it. They caught the sunlight and shimmered faintly as the creature pointed down the slope at Toner, then at Jaeger.
She hesitated, nodded, and grimaced. How do you talk to people with absolutely no frame of reference?
“Virgil?” she said gently.
Her computer made an ugly crackling sound. Still functional but definitely damaged in the rockslide. The noise drew the attention of the circling Locari, who chattered and clicked curiously.
“Copy,” Virgil said.
“Can you decrypt any of what they’re saying?”
“I don’t—”
“I know. I know it’s a tall order. But there’s definitely a language in all that clicking, so just…do whatever you can.”
There was a pause, and Virgil sighed. “Keep them talking. I’ll see what I can do.”
One of the smaller Locari came forward, withdrawing something from a sash-pouch. It was a small black stick, a little bigger than a human finger. It leaned down and started drawing on the stone.
Jaeger craned her neck around as the Locari hastily etched a few arching shapes and connected them with thick, black dots. It took Jaeger a moment to recognize the shape, and when she did, she felt her stomach drop. “No…” She shook her head and held out her hand. At an approving sound from the leader, the Locari handed over the stick of soft charcoal.
“We’re not with them,” Jaeger said softly, drawing a quick sketch of the Osprey’s winged silhouette. Then she drew a simple line through the flying saucer the Locari had drawn.
An eruption of curious clicking spread through the swarm. These people didn’t seem to possess much advanced technology, but they were no strangers to the concept of ships from the sky. Jaeger wondered about relations between the Locari and the saucer-people. Neither particularly good nor bad, she hoped.
The tempo of the clicking changed, growing faster, and Jaeger looked around to see the swarm parting as Toner plodded in her direction. He moved easily, no longer limping, as he eyed the Locari parting like the Red Sea before him. They danced away, worried and uneasy, almost deferential.
Toner’s gaze landed on Jaeger. He had made some token effort to clean his face, but rust-red viscera smeared it. He moved confidently despite his shredded jumpsuit. “Hey, boss.” He sounded a little sheepish.
“How the fuck are you standing upright?” Jaeger asked as the circle of Locari around them grew wider. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a few of them were still holding spears. Not leveling them at Toner, but there was a wariness to their stance.
She didn’t blame them one fucking bit.
“Um…” Toner rubbed the back of his neck and squinted at the sun. “I’m guessing we can thank the genetic artists for that. Holy smokes. A bite to eat and I feel good as new. So much for not interfering with the locals, though.” He turned at a scratching sound. The small Locari was drawing again, frantically filling the side of a boulder with an interesting tableau.
It drew a rough sketch of itself, about a finger tall, beside a to-scale depiction of the tree monster. The tree monster had its great mouth open, and it was about to swallow a vague pile of…something.
The Locari cocked its head, studying its masterwork. Then, for good measure, it sketched another, smaller Locari on top of the dark mass of lines.
“Oh.” Jaeger blinked. “Maybe the monster eats their young. Or their eggs.”
Another Locari came forward and took the charcoal stick. It drew a human-shaped figure standing on the monster’s back, gripping its neck in long, claw-like hands.
It gave the human a wide mouth and very big teeth.
The Locari standing around them erupted into an approving buzz.
Jaeger laughed. It turned into a cough at the insistence of her bruised ribs.
“I believe they are expressing appreciation or approval,” Virgil said from her side.
“Yeah, we got that much.” Jaeger offered Toner a tired grin. The vampire stared back at her, uncertain.
Then, slowly, his hands open and empty, he sank into a cross-legged position beside her.
Taking this for an invitation, the Locari surged forward.
They swarmed Jaeger and Toner, their clicking buzz sounding almost like laughter.
They ran their tough, claw-like fingers over Jaeger’s tattered flight suit, incongruously gentle as they examined the fabric. A few of them scratched delicately at Toner’s scalp, making him jump, but he relaxed as they ran claws gently through his hair—combing it free of monster guts.
His expression faded from an uneasy grin to a full-faced beam.
The days were short on this planet, and the sunsets a spectacular explosion of crimson and violet str
etching over an expanse of forest that looked downright teal in the stretching light.
An hour or two had passed since the slaying of the tree demon. Some of the Locari had bounded back to the forest and returned carrying a variety of brightly-colored fruits and wide leaves heavy with the dew of fresh water, which they nearly pushed on their visitors.
Jaeger had washed what dust and blood she could out of her wounds and was surprised to realize that she wasn’t nearly as badly injured as she should have been.
It made her wonder, as she prodded the bruise on her ribs that she could have sworn was nastier only a few minutes ago, if maybe she had a few subtle gifts from the genetic artists, as well.
She had sustained a great number of injuries in these last two days and was still going strong. Maybe stronger than she had any right to be.
The droids had resumed their mining operations farther up the slope, and the Locari left them to their messy process without protest. Instead, they clustered around Jaeger and Toner, clicking and nibbling daintily on sour green fruits that made Jaeger politely shake her head no when they offered it to her.
“They are super friendly,” Toner said, stretching back to lie with his head nestled in his folded arms. “I like them much better than the saucer assholes.”
Jaeger watched one of the Locari scuttle past Toner, pausing briefly to drop a few colorful flowers onto his chest. “Easy to like someone who worships you,” she grunted.
“It sure helps.”
Jaeger’s computer squawked, and a few of the Locari hopped away, startled by the sudden noise. In the distance, she saw Sphynx and shuddered. She wasn’t sure why, but that cat-thing gave her the jitters.
“Shuttle hold at eighty percent capacity,” Virgil said. “I’ve compared scanning instruments to your report of the locals.”
“Really?” Jaeger nibbled at the rind of a yellow fruit that tasted like vaguely sweet garlic. “That’s unusually helpful of you.”
“The discrepancy bothered me,” Virgil grunted. Jaeger watched with a wary eye as Sphynx meandered toward them. Virgil continued, “While there is always room for error, the scanners should not be that inaccurate.”
“What did you find?”
“The scanners mainly interpret metabolic information. Their calibration assumes that creatures have metabolisms more or less similar to those found on Earth. The aliens must have a radically different physiology than expected. The scanners interpreted them incorrectly. I’ve recalibrated them. They should provide a more accurate representation of local life-forms now.”
Toner picked at something between his teeth as he watched a few of the Locari flutter past, their pseudo-wings beating at the air and flashing strangely in the dying sunlight. “Okay,” he mused. “So they’ve got to burn a ton of energy doing that. But they’re vegetarian.”
“How do you know that?” Jaeger asked.
Toner jerked a thumb down the slope, where the corpse of the tree monster lay half-buried in the rubble. “There’s a big tasty pile of meat down there, and they have no interest in it whatsoever.”
“That thing preys on them,” Jaeger said. “Not the other way around.”
“The circle of life turns in both directions, kiddo.”
“Based on the description,” Virgil said, “I suspect that they photosynthesize a good portion of their energy.”
Jaeger watched a cluster of the aliens racing toward the tree line, their wings flashing, and grinned. “They’re living solar panels.”
“Neat trick,” Toner said. “I wish I could convert sunlight into energy.”
“You’re a vampire.” Jaeger tossed a pebble at him. “Be grateful sunlight doesn’t burn you to ashes.”
“That’s fair.” Toner shrugged and scrambled to his feet, making a few of the nearby Locari stand suddenly, chattering with interest. He held out his hands. “No, guys, you stay here. I’m going to go check on the shuttle.”
“Are you going to talk to Sphynx?” Jaeger asked quietly. The catman had not been at all happy when Toner had pulled him to the side, ordering him to oversee the harvest operation—and stay away from the Locari.
Toner grimaced, brushing some dust from his tattered clothes. “Only if I have to.” He scratched his neck. “Just gonna make sure we’re good to go as soon as the hold is full.” He nodded down to her. “You rest your leg, eat your vegetables, and see if you can squeeze any more language decryption out of the locals.”
Jaeger faintly grinned as Toner turned and trudged back to the shuttle.
A few minutes’ walk away from the Locari party, the sounds of clicking, buzzing aliens faded into the screech and crack of droid mining lasers as they ripped boulders into manageable pieces. Toner wove his way through the work zone as the shadows grew long around him. The shuttle rested right where he had left it, its hold door open to receive the assembly line of moving droids.
His boot crunched on something other than rubble, and he looked down with a frown. He’d stepped on a scrap of something thin and brittle, translucent but faintly green. He picked it up. This boulder field had been remarkably devoid of organic life, not much in the way of plants or animals on the naked stone, but this thing looked like a piece of shell or carapace.
Toner dropped it and hopped into the back of the shuttle. His eyes adjusted quickly to the shadows. “Sphynx?”
No movement in the hold, except for the steady come and go of the droids as they added to the pile of ore. Toner opened the door to the cab and poked his head in. “Hey, kitty. What’s—”
He stopped and frowned. The cab was empty. He glanced at the corners, half-expecting to find a hairball or defiant pile of shit planted in plain sight. He’d never liked cats. He couldn’t remember why, but it seemed pretty self-evident.
“I told you to stay in the ship…” He sighed and went over to the shuttle console to run a quick bioscan. True to Virgil’s word, the re-calibrated scanners showed a wide and fairly accurate picture of the area, the Locari having their party further down the slope, with Jaeger’s larger sign still near their center. A few other life-forms, also Locari by their size, flitted at the edge of the scanner range. The instrument even noted the steady movement of the droids, though they didn’t exactly qualify as life forms.
Toner frowned at the human-sized life form lurking about fifty meters up the slope—near where the monolith boulder had been.
As he watched the screen, a second, smaller life form flickered around the larger one and faded to black.
Knowledge was power.
Sphynx could gather that knowledge by using his cat-like instinct to hide and observe.
Analysis of alien life form: Bold. Confident, despite its smaller size. Perhaps naïve? Yes. It must be, for its only substantial natural protection appeared to be its prodigious leaping ability.
It was perhaps dangerous in large numbers. Of course, anything can be hazardous in sufficiently large numbers.
It was, however, easily lured away from its companions. A wiggle and a whisper, and it wandered alone and curious into a boulder field.
It didn’t possess keen senses. It didn’t notice shadows moving when they should not. It didn’t catch the scent of a predator on the breeze, or if it did, it was too dull to understand.
Its legs continued to twitch for quite a while after you ripped off its head. Its big black eyes stared at you, its mandibles clicking noiselessly with some ghost of a bio-electric signal. Its fragile pseudo-wings crunched and crumbled under the slightest pressure.
The taste was agreeable enough, although pulling soft flesh from inside the carapace took an annoying amount of work, and the shell to flesh ratio was quite high.
Still, it could be an adequate food source in the beginning.
Sphynx’s head shot up. He stared around the shadows, ears twitching in all directions, pupils fully dilated. There. Beyond the crater wall, a crunching noise, different from the steady, distant scream of mining droids.
Another crunch. Footfall.
Sphynx slung his multitool over his shoulder and sprang lightly to the lip of the crater. He had his fill, anyway.
Anything more would have been playing with his food.
The oaf was walking up the slope in his direction, head turning from side to side as he studied the shadows with his pathetically weak eyes.
Sphynx slunk closer, shaking flakes of carapace and crushed pseudo-wing from his suit. He stepped out from behind a boulder.
Toner jerked in surprise, his hand falling to his multitool. Then he recognized Sphynx, and his posture relaxed—exactly one hair.
“I told you to stay in the shuttle,” Toner grumbled.
Sphynx slipped past the vampire, heading back toward the sounds of industry. “You didn’t say for how long,” he murmured. “Or would you rather I had shat in the cab?”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
By nightfall, most of the Locari had retreated to the forest, and the whirring hum of insects faded to a subdued chatter. Jaeger figured a species that got a good portion of its energy from sunlight couldn’t have much of a nightlife.
Still, six or seven of the boldest Locari followed Jaeger to the shuttle doors. The hold was full of raw ore, the droids had folded back into their travel-size states, and it was time to go.
Toner leaned out of the back of the shuttle, eying Jaeger’s tagalongs as she crunched her way over the gravel. Light from the planet’s double moons reflected coldly off his blue eyes. “Are we taking passengers?”
Jaeger smiled. The Locari that had done most of the drawing flickered up to her side, faintly clicking as it worked its charcoal nub through its claw-fingers. She’d taken to calling that one Art.
“No,” she said. “But I can’t exactly stop them from walking me home, can I?”
Behind her, two of the Locari spread their pseudo-wings and flickered up the slope, vanishing into the deep shadows of night.
Toner stepped to the side, making room for Jaeger to join him in the hold beside the massive pile of rubble. The ramp had already retracted so he held down a hand and hauled her up, eyebrow arching when she put weight on her left leg and sucked in a gasp.