by GARY DARBY
A STAR RISING
by
Gary J. Darby
Book One
In the Star Scout Saga
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter One
Star Date 2433.055
The Planet Alistar, the Borman, Lovell, and Anders Training Grounds
“Move it, Pud, move it!” Sami’s voice was like a blaring, harsh bull horn in Dason’s earpiece. “You’re falling behind and I’m not losing this goldie ‘cause of you Pud man so put it in hyper drive!”
Dason sped up and crashed through a thicket of purple-laced bushes. The small branches scratched at his cheeks and camo uniform with a raspy, vibrating sound.
He barely saw a small and very scared shrew like creature that scuttled away from his pounding boots just as Dason hurdled over a fallen waist-high tree.
Stumbling, he almost tripped over his own feet before regaining his balance and dashing forward.
The young novice Star Scout tried to push himself even harder. He didn’t want to be the reason the team failed—again.
His heart pounded and his legs felt like someone had taken a mallet and beaten out what little strength he had left.
Dason was sure that his loud, grating breathing, coupled with his mad dash through the thick underbrush would scare off every extraterrestrial animal within a ten-kilometer radius.
But unless he wanted to hear more of Sami’s berating in his ears, he’d better catch up with his teammates—and fast.
He dashed around a clump of slender bamboo like vegetation and slid to a halt. Four sweating, frustrated faces turned at his approach.
“Glad you could make it,” Sami snapped. If Sami’s eyes had been a laz-gun, Dason would have had two extra holes, on one side of his belly button.
“We lost the goldie. If you had kept up, we—”
“Aw, c’mon, Sami,” TJ groused and held up her Life Sensor. “It’s not his fault. We lost the thing because it zipped out of sensor range.”
She took a breath, blew it out causing her blonde bangs to flutter. “Again.”
“Yeah, well, if he hadn’t lagged behind,” Sami retorted, “we might’ve been able to run it to ground.”
Dason kept quiet, as usual, though he badly wanted to point out that he’d had to sprint twice as far as the others and through heavier brush. He screwed his mouth to one side and sighed to himself.
It was typical of Sami to forget those minor details when it concerned Dason.
He glanced at Shanon to see a disapproving frown curve her perfect lips downward. Did she scowl because of his late arrival or Sami’s unrelenting disapproving comments?
He didn’t know and what’s more, he didn’t dare ask.
Though it deeply mattered what Shanon thought of him, Dason had never and would never start up a conversation with her, except in the line of duty and then only with a bare minimum of words.
Dason had faced any number of frightening experiences as a novice scout, but Shanon scared him far more than any of those encounters. Far more.
While Sami fidgeted with his Life Sensor trying to find a bearing on their target quarry, Dason stood to one side, remaining silent though like the others he kept a wary eye on their alien surroundings.
That was his specialty—keeping quiet and out of the spotlight. He didn’t want any questions, anything that would arouse suspicions, not when he was so close to achieving his goal.
If he could hang on just a little longer, make it to the point where they pinned his Star Scout Arrow of Light on his collar, then they could ask all the questions they wanted.
Not that he would answer.
Until then, Dason would keep his mouth shut and not draw any more attention to himself than necessary. Not around his fellow novices, not around the instructor Star Scouts, and most of all, not around the Scoutmaster.
Shanon, who, like Sami had her LS out and was scanning the neighboring violet colored brush and slender palm-like trees whose leaves shimmered in an orange tint, said over her shoulder, “You do know Sami, the idea isn’t to run it down, the idea is to get a vid of it giving birth. Right?”
“I heard the mission-complete criteria, same as you,” Sami snapped at her. “But unless we can at least get a visual, we won’t know if we’ve got a daddy or a mommy, now will we?”
“True,” TJ answered, “but this constant sprinting through the jungle is a bad idea. Alistar may be a training planet, but there are way too many unknowns, too many dangers for us to keep doing this.
“One of us is going to run right smack into something that’s big and hungry and not get out of its way in time.”
“What would you suggest?” Sami asked, clearly irritated. “We tried two days of slow sneaks and stalks and where did it get us? Other than hot and sweaty, nowhere. So, you got a better idea? Let’s hear it.”
TJ giggled while saying to the group, “I read somewhere that if you sneak up on a bird and put salt on its tail, it will hold still.”
She elbowed Shanon and asked, “Got a salt shaker in your torso vest? I’ll hold the goldie’s attention and you sneak up on it from behind.”
Shanon smiled back at her. “Sure. Just make sure it’s a female or it’ll be a waste of perfectly good salt.”
“That’s nonsense,” Nase stated. “If you’re close enough to put salt on its tail then it’s obvious you’re close enough to catch it or in our case to video the thing.”
“It’s a joke, Nase,” Shanon muttered, shaking her head. “Don’t take everything so serious.”
“Enough with the chatter,” Sami ordered.
Deliberately turning his back to Dason, he said to the other three novices, “Let’s hear your ideas—good ideas, since you don’t seem to like mine, and no, we’re not going to try and put salt on its tail.”
TJ, Nase, and Shanon glanced at each other but remained mute. Obviously, they didn’t have any thoughts to offer up. Sami was right; their usual method of slow stalks had not worked with this particular elusive and secretive extraterrestrial animal.
An avian like creature who gave birth to its young alive and not in an egg, the Golden Seer-Roc was proving to be an elusive quarry to track down.
After a few seconds, Dason decided that while keeping quiet would help his own personal situation, it didn’t help the team right now and
he felt certain that he had an worthwhile idea to offer.
He cleared his throat and murmured, “Food.”
Sami pretended that he didn’t hear and continued to stand with his back to Dason. The other three looked at Dason with puzzled expressions. Shanon furrowed her eyebrows and asked, “Food? As in?”
Inhaling deeply, Sami slowly let it out and turned with a corner of his mouth upturned in a sneer. “The Pud man speaketh, he’s hungry. He thinks we have nothing better to do than to stop for a meal break.”
Sniggering, he mocked, “What else would you like? Maybe a hot shower and some nap time at the local Milky Way Inn?”
“Hey, naptime on a real bed?” TJ responded. “Count me in. I’m tired of sleeping in a tree.”
Dason gritted his teeth but didn’t rise to Sami’s verbal bait.
Sami was the current team leader. Though just a novice like Dason, on a Seek and Locate mission his commands and authority carried the same weight as if an instructor Star Scout or the Scoutmaster himself had given the order.
To get into an argument or to defy his team leader would only bring down trouble on his head, and the last thing Dason wanted was to be in the Scoutmaster’s spotlight.
Dason had too much riding on his status as a novice. Becoming a full-fledged scout was the only way he knew to get the answers to questions that burned within him as if he carried a blazing torch inside his gut.
Now he was so close, so very close, and he couldn’t do anything foolish to jeopardize his chance of solving his own personal mystery.
In a slow and respectful tone, Dason said, “No, I’m not asking for food or a break. We’re searching for a Golden Roc that’s about to bear young. That means that it’s going to be hunting for food more often than not.”
He brought out his hand-held compu and with quick touches to the tiny keyboard brought up a holomap of their search area. With quick swipes of his finger to the glowing picture that floated midair, Dason outlined several areas.
“We know that the avian is a ground dweller, they don’t fly, carnivorous, and they’re only about the size of a Terran eagle. The mission specs didn’t say, but since they don’t fly, I suspect that they hunt small game by running them down.”
“So,” Sami snorted, “are you suggesting that we should pretend to be small game and have the goldie hunt us?”
“Sami, quit being ridiculous,” Shanon declared while she studied the holomap. “I think I know where’s he’s going with this. Go on Dason, we’re listening.”
“We keep losing the Rocs,” Dason offered, “because they’re so fast in the dense underbrush and we’re not.”
“Plus, they’re smart and extremely wary,” TJ muttered. “Every time we try and do a drive, they slip out of the net.”
“That too,” Dason replied.
He took a breath, not wanting to give Sami credit, but he needed Sami’s buy-in or his team leader would reject his idea outright.
With a hand, he motioned to Sami. “Your idea of encircling the target is the right tactic, we’re just going about it the wrong way.”
Pointing to several savannah-appearing areas on the holomap, Dason noted, “According to the mission eco-specs these small prairie-type meadows are full of rodent like animals.
“In fact, this one area has a colony that resembles prairie dog towns on Earth.”
He glanced up at Alistar’s sun with its crimson tint. “Sunset is about an hour away, so my guess is that the Rocs will start hunting in these areas pretty soon.”
“Go where the food is,” Shanon nodded approvingly, “let them come to us, instead of us chasing them. I like it.”
Sami took a few steps to study the map carefully. Dason had eliminated all terrain features save savannas, and now Sami traced a finger from their current location to the nearest prairie meadow.
“Closest,” Sami murmured, “is five kilometers on a bearing of fifty degrees off the zero marker.”
Glancing at Dason, Sami scowled, “We’ll try it.”
Leaning a little closer to Dason, his lips curled up in a sickly smile, Sami sneered, “But if it’s a great big waste of time, I’ll make sure that you get full credit in my after-action report.”
Turning to the other novices, he ordered, “Nase, take Path Finder. The rest of us single file, no need to spread out until we get to the target area. Life Sensors on free search. Let’s move.”
“Hold it, Sami,” TJ piped up. “Just because it’s closest doesn’t make it the best search area. Some of these grasslands are larger in size, which might mean more Rocs out hunting.”
“She’s right,” Shanon chimed in. “A bigger area would translate into more hunters, increase our chances of snagging and tagging the right one.”
“Maybe,” Sami replied in a frustrated tone, “but those bigger areas are twenty, thirty kilometers out. Why waste our time going that far when Pud Man’s idea is not going to work, anyhow? Besides, we don’t know if the Rocs hunt meeses.”
“You mean rodents, Sami,” TJ stated.
“Yeah,” Sami answered, “them too.”
In his usual thoughtful manner, Nase remarked, “That’s only because Seer-Rocs are a transplanted XT species to Alistar and brought here for training purposes.
“The instructor scouts purposefully keep their feeding and habitat interactions off the mission specs. But given that they’re so close to Terran raptors in a biological sense, it’s a safe assumption that the local populace of rodents would be part of their diet.”
“Thank you sooo much, professor, for the lecture,” Sami replied. “But I still say it’s not worth our time to go so far out.”
“No, Sami,” TJ responded with a shake of her head. “You’re not thinking straight. It’s a matter of odds.”
Dason stepped away from the group while the four bickered among themselves. He listened to the back-and-forth, thinking that this was how it had gone the first time that he and these particular four novices had teamed together.
It seemed that the only thing pleasant then, like now, was that he was in the company of Shanon Hsu, the beautiful, willowy brunette with the striking almond-shaped green eyes.
The debate between the four grew more heated, with Sami standing firm in his belief that they should start with the closest target area.
“Stop!” Sami yelped. “I’m the team leader, and I’m telling you what we’re going to do. We start with the closest and work our way out from there.”
Dason, who had grown tired of listening to the squabble and had been studying the map, spoke up to say, “We can do that and still increase our odds. Look.”
He poked his hands into the hologram and spread them out, like he was opening shuttered windows. The enlarged hologram, five times its size before, now showed even more detail as if the scouts were on a hover craft several kilometers up and looking down.
With his finger, Dason drew a rough circle over the map with their location as the center point. He split the circle into four pie-shaped sectors.
“We’ve got twelve possible sites within a sixty-kilometer radius,” he observed.
Gesturing toward several, he noted, “These five, including the closest, fall in the sector that’s almost planetary due north of us.”
Over his shoulder, he said, “Odds are we’ll hit at least one that has our quarry target, and we can set up shop. If not, we then go to this area that has three sites.”
Sami eyed the map, opened his mouth, and then closed it without saying a word. Nase nodded and observed, “Five of twelve gives us excellent odds.”
“And eight of twelve gives us even better odds,” Shanon stated. “It’s logical and provides for economy of effort.”
“Works for me,” TJ commented.
“Yeah, well,” Sami grumped, “that’s what I had in mind before you three jumped me. Let’s go. Same orders as before, Nase, you’ve got the lead, Pud, you cover our six.”
“Oh, stop!” Shanon snapped. She stood with both hands on her h
ips, eyes flashing.
“Enough with the name calling, Sami. You’re the TL, but that doesn’t give you the right to call Dason, or any of us, names.
“You may not like him, I may not like him, but he’s made it this far in the program, along with the rest of us. He’s a member of our team and that at least deserves your respect.
“So, enough with the ‘Pud’ business. His name is Dason or Novice Scout Thorne.”
Sami and Shanon stood facing each other as if they were about to squared off in a Pummel Stick bout. Sami’s face held a stern expression, while Shanon’s eyes fairly flashed, never blinking.
Dason was taken aback by her defense of him, but he had caught her words, “I may not like him,” and felt like someone had speared his heart. He’d much rather take Sami’s verbal berating’s than to hear Shanon say she didn’t like him.
Taking a deep breath, Dason cast aside any dreams that he might have had regarding Shanon.
He was torn between telling Shanon that he could defend himself and keeping to himself when Sami snapped, “Whatever,” and jabbed a finger at Dason. “Like I said, Thorney—cover our six.”
The others began to follow Nase, but Shanon hung back with Dason. She eyed Dason while saying firmly, “You can’t let him keep doing that, you know.”
“Doing what?” Dason hedged.
“You know what,” she answered. “Push you around, call you names, like ‘Pud.’ You know what Pud means, don’t you?”
Dason knew exactly what it meant. He’d looked it up in the Galactica after Sami had thrown it at him the first time.
“Pud” was short for Macon’s Split-Tail Pudu, a solitary nocturnal mammal found on Alistar.
The size of a domestic cat, it moved more slowly than a Terran sloth, exuded a foul scent that made a skunk’s odor smell like a rosebud, and had the obnoxious habit of regurgitating its food and then slurping up the vomit.
Dason’s eyes flicked from Shanon’s face to the ground and back. “I know what it means,” he rasped out and shrugged. “Been called worse.”
Shanon’s eyes blazed before she turned on her heel and walked away. Over her shoulder, she called out in a brisk tone, “Suit yourself.”