by Vicky L Holt
I climbed back in and found the locker with the auxiliary beacon. “So, where do I stick this thing?”
“I sent a map to your IntraVisor. The easiest route has been marked. Instructions will display when it is time to place and activate the beacon.”
“Okay, thanks.”
I took a deep breath and stepped out of the main hatch. The door sealed shut behind me. I didn’t want any surprise guests when I came back.
The first thing I noticed was the torn-up ground surrounding the pile of dead reptile bodies. It looked like a war zone. Huge gashes in the meadow revealed the red dirt. Trees near the area had been uprooted. All the violence had transpired while I was unconscious. I paused, roving my gaze over the mass of bloodied carcasses. Was the armored being in there somewhere? If I dared to go closer, would I find it dismembered? My stomach roiled. Did I owe the creature anything?
I sucked my lips between my teeth. What about a decent burial? I took a step toward the fallen beasts. I looked out over the meadow. Dark birds descended upon the glistening bones to the east, but nothing else roamed. My charted hike approached a berm that fronted the vast meadow on the north. Dark-orange talus littered the bottom of the rise from a long-ago rock-fall, but now green and yellow grasses tufted up between the jumbled rocks. Rising up behind the defile of boulders was a hill topped with leafed-out trees. To the east, where the remains of the reptile battle lay, a hazy shimmer rose above the golden meadow grasses. There must be a body of water over that rise. The south to my right boasted an impenetrable forest of huge trees. It was that wood the land-crosser had disappeared into before the pack attacked. I should check it out later. I turned to inspect my EEP and the landscape behind it, the west. The meadow blanketed three hundred feet or so, and then low brush and bracken tangled the way until the swath of forest curved around to encircle the meadow. An outcropping of dark-orange boulders with black striations interrupted the smooth surface of the ground. The place appeared desolate.
I rubbed my hands up and down my arms, though they were covered fingertip to shoulder in my flight suit. Psychosomatic chills pimpled my arms.
I took another step toward the pile of corpses. I would just check. The dark birds circled above, maybe twenty-five feet in the air. The suns glared behind them when I looked up, so their silhouettes were all I could distinguish. Walking faster, I swallowed a lump. I tried to see past the carnage, into the future a million years when the pile of bones would be fossilized. It helped stave off the nausea. I stole another glance upward, at the dark birds coming to scavenge. I couldn’t hear anything; it gave me chills up my spine. I reached the nearest carcass.
Its flank came up to my shoulder. I marveled at its size but shook myself from the reverie. I just wanted to see if the creature in its red armor was still … alive. A shadow passed overhead. One of the scavenging birds drew closer, unafraid. I swallowed again and felt my face tighten and pale. The dripping slime from the dead reptiles slicked over the bones. Slender bones snapped under my boots as I climbed up the tumble. I cringed when the nano-sensors in my gloved fingertips allowed me to “touch” the mucous-membranes and severed sinews just waiting to be picked apart by the feathered friends congregating above me. I looked up again to see them hover, unsure now that they were close enough to see my eyes.
They resembled larger versions of the turkey buzzards back home, though their rust-colored wattles hung low and heavy from their necks.
Wary but determined, I peered through broken bones and torn scaled flesh, trying to detect the distinctive red armor. There, lodged between two huge but very dead reptiles, I spied a red-armored leg. Praying it wasn’t just a leg, I straddled a limb and reached down between the heavy bodies and touched the ankle. No response.
I frowned. The being had been so confident. Another shadow passed over, and I looked up just in time to see the brisk brush of wings. I yelped and waved my arm at the black bird. Still no noises from them. I scrambled further across the mound and pulled at anything I could lift out of the way. If I could at least see the helmet and decide for myself if it was dead, then I could move on. I didn’t think I would have the strength to move every dead beast off of him and bury him, but if there was the slightest chance …
I maneuvered a bony limb out of the way and reached down into the sticky morass. A giant foreleg trapped the upper body of the being. Grunting, I yanked and pulled until a swath of skin peeled off and went flying over me. I watched with disgust as a bird swooped down and caught it between its purple beaks and flew off, two more chasing it for the treasure. I shuddered. At least I knew how to distract the vultures if they became a nuisance.
I reached down again and managed to scoot the leg off the helmet. The dull armor bore signs of abuse from the battle. Scrapes, stains and scratches told a story of a battle well fought. Even if I laid across the bloody remains where I crouched, I couldn’t stretch my arm far enough down the well to pull the warrior from the pile. I turned on my helmet light for a better view and saw its helmet had what looked like dark solar panels similar to mine.
I toggled my mic.
“Hey,” I said. “Are you alive?”
Nothing. It was a shame. I scrambled back down the mound and flung bits of gore off my gloves and sleeves, swiping at the smears as best I could. I blinked back a tear, not for the death of the armored person, but for myself. I was alone.
I followed the suggested route that lay in a digital readout across the view of the actual terrain. The exo-geologist in me wanted to stop and examine every pebble under boot, or every sharp rock jutting out from beneath the meadow grasses, but the sooner I installed the beacon, the sooner I would be found. Soon being the operative word. I frowned and stepped through the tall grasses, wary.
I let my gloved hands float above the tall weeds, their thistles and feathery spikes reminding me of foxtail barley back home. My suit was crafted from polymers and circuitry, stainless metals and carbon fibers, as well as concentrated pockets of nano-sensors. I was protected from poisonous stinging nettles or any other dangers this planet might have lurking in wait. The nano-sensors allowed me to feel the textures of every leaf or stem I touched while my skin remained unmarred.
My “picnic meadow” was idyllic until that giant wasp returned and started flying around my head. I tapped at my audio controls, because I still heard nothing other than the beat of its big, transparent wings. I tried not to panic. Back home, I wasn’t afraid of bees or wasps. It was spiders that had me tied up in knots. But this wasp was as big as a crow. I ducked but tried not to make overt aggressive gestures. If it was protecting a nest, I would be in trouble until I left its territory. It continued to fly around me. My heart rate spiked. Okay, this was scarier than the half-inch hornets by my woodshed growing up. I cowered, making my way through the tall grass. In an act of desperation, the wasp curved in on itself when it attacked me, and I knew what came next. It was activating some nasty barbed stinger and coming in for the kill.
“Gah!” I shouted. It felt like a punch in the neck. I gasped inside my suit, thanking God, scientists, and carbon-infused polymers. At least there was no penetration and no venom infiltrating my suit. I dropped to the ground and covered my helmet, curling into a ball. The wasp stung my body repeatedly until it exhausted its supply of blue venom and fell to the ground. I was no entomologist, but I wondered if its venom and blood were somehow interconnected, that it would die like that.
I felt like I had been in a car wreck, but all sensors indicated I was injury free. I rose on shaky legs and looked down at the dead thing. It had a black carapace, transparent wings laced with orange veins, and four segments. Its head had mandibles and multiple eyes on either side. It had a bizarre orange sac thing under its head. Its stinger branched out from its butt like a grasping claw. I shivered. This planet was not a nice place. I considered stomping on it but decided against it. Anything could trigger death. Bent over with hands on my knees, I took a minute to recover.
The path I took wandered
between gentle hills. The insects I’d seen before were flies, bright-red and obsidian black. They had long proboscises. I quivered at the thought of them sinking those things into my arm like huge mosquitos, but they used them to siphon nectar out of the spiny featherettes at the end of the grasses.
I trudged on, noting a gradual rise of the ground, and a thickening of the brush around me. I was headed toward a tall canopy of trees above the rocky talus, though possibly their height was the ground swelling beneath them. I had a hard time believing a beacon would be able to penetrate the thick foliage ahead of me, but I was a miner, not a SIG-INT officer. Maybe there was a break in the trees and a “smallish” mountain behind. VELMA was right, though; it was much easier to move around here.
I accessed the calculator and discovered my weight was fifty pounds less on this green world. I huffed a short laugh.
Well, hell. I was here to stay.
6
Shadows surrounded me. Was I in the afterworld then? Maikthevelt, the land of the last true embrace of the Goddesses, death.
If so, the fireside songs were true. The stench of this place was that of planet Ikthe multiplied by every stinking dead fish coupled with the contents of the bowel. The smell crawled into my nose like worms.
Worms.
Yes, I could feel the worms attempting to penetrate my dead flesh. My spirit was unable to leave the armored body, and I was forever trapped within it to suffer the pains of death.
My helmet stuttered flashing green lights.
My life signs appeared in a series of bars. My sight-capture was no longer relaying to the Royal Court. I was not dead. I was alive. I laughed. I was not sensing worms, but rather the tendrils of my armor re-accessing my veins throughout my body. Once again, my armor and I were one.
I realized I was buried beneath the rotting bodies of the rokhura. Their cannibalism knew no bounds, and once the latecomers arrived to attack me, their sensitive noses detected the rot of dead meat. They pounced on each other, and I fought my way to the center of the fumbling pack.
I couldn’t move my limbs, but I used my eyelids to blink commands to my helmet-tech. The sight-capture must have stopped sending once a large rokhura fell atop my helmet. I was disappointed. The Royal Court would have seen my fierce battle, but they would then assume my death upon the ending of my feed. No matter. I would recover my ship and my trophies, and return to Ikshe, my paradisiacal home planet. I would feed the females of the Royal Court, and I would await the abysmal luck of the Lottery to bow in my favor. Though the last fifteen cycles no such luck had shone upon me.
But first, to extricate myself from the pit. The blackness was the overlapping hides of the carcasses. The weight was the enormous bones. My armor’s defenses were depleted from the lack of light. The suns of Ikthe and Ikshe were powerful. Their radiation activated the cells on my armor and those of my ship. Much of my technology was powered by the life-givers, the hallowed Shegoshel.
But beneath the rokhura corpses, my sun cells were useless. The narrowest shaft of light penetrated a gap in the pile mounded atop me, almost as if the Goddesses themselves had poked a hole through the jumble. From that, my cells had livened enough to enervate my armor’s tendrils. A rapid series of eye movements and blinks had my secondary power turning on. Soon, I would be able to push my way out from under the powerful bones of the great predators. Then to my ship, Ikshe, and the Royal Courts.
I heard the screeches of the filthy birds that feasted upon the stringy membranes adhering to the bones. They feinted toward me, but veered away, concerned with the meaty bones, and not my foul, dripping armor. I clambered out from the massive pile, and scanned the meadow noting prey signs. The living rokhura had feasted, mated, and left the torn-up ground to build their nests elsewhere. No other beasts approached the carnage. Once the suns set, they would arrive in droves to lick the bones clean.
I pulled an aching leg out of the hole I had created for my exit and stood at my full height, king of a hill of bones, and surveyed the damage. I had to dig through kathe to find one of my weapons. My satisfied smile told the tale of my victory. A glint off of metal caught my eye.
I leaped off the pile of bones and tough hides and loped a veltik before I could see the source of the glint: a vehicle. I approached it with my raxtheza raised. My scanners activated and attempted to identify the ship. It was small. A single Theraxl would fit inside such a vessel. It must have been designed to travel without passengers. I thought of the enemies of the Theraxl race. Would they have created such a machine to spy on the hunts of Ikthe? Burning flamed in my bowels and blood rushed through my veins. I would send a sight-capture of this vessel and send it to the Royal Court. Before I could press the comm, I spied the curve of a print in the ground.
I knelt and touched the imprint with my gloved finger.
It was the track of a boot.
A child!
What monster would send a defenseless child to Ikthe? Its very name denoted Certain Death.
My nostrils flared, and my lungs expanded. Whoever had done such a thing would pay with their entrails wrapped around their necks. But first, to find the vulnerable child before one of the hundreds of predators that lived on this planet found her.
The boot print was absent of smell. Very strange. I would have to rely upon my tracking skills alone, as well as the knowledge of Ikthe to find the child. The Royal Court would soon curse the damned bad luck of the Lottery. What female could deny herself the desire for Iktheka Raxthel? Bringer of death, slayer of predators and rescuer of a defenseless child? My incisors clipped my lip when my smile grew broader. The Goddesses would smile upon this Lottery. I would bring honor to my family name, and many offspring. I followed the tracks that led into the ikfal. If I felt uneasy, it was because I smelled like the limb-pit of a rokhura. I was sure to attract unwanted attention. The child couldn’t last a tik in these woods. I should move faster.
7
“VELMA, how much farther to the drop-off point?”
“You are less than halfway to the drop-off point.”
I chuckled. “Are we there ye—ah!”
I screamed all the way down the mudslide, but my screams echoed in my own ears. I had turned off my mic when I left the dead reptiles. My suit was designed for stealth on new planets.
As huge green leaves whipped past my vision, I noticed my super nano-infused carbon-polymer suit was now camouflaged by mud. Plant tentacles reached out to stop my slide, but they were ineffective against my top speed.
Indicators in my visor showed an increasing heart rate and blood pressure. I ignored the flashing symbols in favor of trying to steer my feet to avoid jutting tree roots.
The digital overlay was making me sick as the terrain flew by, so I disabled it with a voice command while simultaneously flailing for branches or roots to grasp. My gloves slipped with the viscous mud. I flew faster and faster, and I wished my suit had air brakes or a jet pack or something. The slide below me disappeared into lush green foliage. Was there a water fall at the end? Was I plummeting to my death?
With my heart in my throat, I resigned myself to almost certain death. What a crappy planet.
The greenery broke, and the slide disappeared from under my butt. I fell about five feet and plopped into a pool of bubbling mud with a loud slap. The impact took my breath away. I started to panic when I sank. I struggled against its pull, forgetting the first rule of quicksand: don’t move. When my boots touched bottom, the mud was up to my chest.
Heart racing, I took as many deep and calming breaths as I could. It wasn’t easy. I was terrified I might meet with some kind of prehistoric crocodile in the mud, but if I panicked, I’d get sucked down farther. The edge wasn’t far, so I leaned back to distribute my weight over the surface into a floating position, grateful I weighed fifty pounds less in this place. Then, bit by bit, I tried to raise each of my legs. When I managed to pull them free, I kept them as flat as possible while I wriggled my torso and, inch by inch, snaked my way to shore a
nd rolled onto dry land. I crawled as far away from the mud pit as I could, frequently looking back. No snapping teeth yet, but that meant nothing.
I looked around me at the thick shrubbery, tangled smooth roots and wide-fronded leaves. I was counting on VELMA to alert me to danger, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try and see possible threats myself. A flat dark boulder with lighter stripes in it, gabbro with feldspar, was a good place to take a breather. I climbed up and tried scraping the thicker mud off my pants and sleeves. Once it dried, it would be harder to move around. Most fluids shed easily from my suit fabric.
Mid-swipe I realized I had dropped the beacon somewhere on my merciless slide down.
“Double dammit!”
I slumped on the rock and stared at the mud pit. The bubbles grew and popped. My suit was rated to 500˚ F, so even if the pit was 160˚, I was fine. But when a lumpy head started to rise out of the mud, I realized just how precarious my life was on this god-forsaken planet.
It was tempting to release my helmet so I could experience the life on this world with all my senses, but odds were good I was missing the aroma of sulfur or other similar smells released from the fumarole. The set of four eyes blinked sequentially as it stared at me and continued to rise out of the mud. It was time for me to leave.
Without looking away, I backed off the rock and crept backward into the brush. When I felt obscured by leaves, I stopped moving. Maybe motion would set it off. Maybe it could run as fast as a cheetah and I was playing a dangerous game. I was hoping this planet’s life was similar to the animal life back home. Anything that liked to hang out in a hot mud bath shouldn’t be too quick on its feet, but this was Predator Planet. I didn’t have much hope at this point.
The thing stopped rising, and looked as large as a hippopotamus, but its scaly skin was more like a crocodile’s in its texture. It had a wide flat snout with four nostrils, all positioned at the top of its nose. It blew out a spray of dark-brown mud. It had a broad back and no tail. It looked to have four legs, but they were submerged in the pit.