by A. A. Ripley
‘That is the thing you’re good at, right? Talking people into things?’ Alan continued, his voice rising a bit and trembling as a floodgate during the high-water season.Was she? She remembered her desperate attempt to save their lives at Napoleon and defusing the anger of Yarg’s heavyworlder employee. But then she realised that was not what Alan meant.
‘I told you he was no good. So did Yarg. And Hijinks too, but you never listen to anybody, do you? You just knew better, you worthless, miserable, little lizard!’
Inan was taken aback by this torrent of alien anger, bursting from his mouth as if the floodgates had finally given way under the strain of furious water. Alan’s face was no longer unreadable. His face turned red, the cherry-red of an overheated furnace.
‘We are stuck and you have nothing to say now?’ his voice suddenly quiet and hoarse.
Inan wanted to answer him, but he was correct. She had nothing to say in her own defence. She stood dumb now, without any logical thought in her mind.
‘Yes,’ she responded finally, feeling as if her tongue belonged to somebody else. ‘I shouldn’t have trusted a human. Humans are trouble.’
Alan didn’t respond.
‘Get back to base,’ said Hijinks, stepping between them. Inan wasn’t sure if Hijinks was stating her intentions or issuing an instruction. But without a word more, Alan turned around and walked towards the base, not looking back once. Hijinks followed him, tossing a final look towards Inan.
Inan wanted to go too, but instead she stood there as if she was a mute object, a rock as insensible as the other rocks that littered the now empty mesa.
*
When she finally returned to the base, it felt even stranger to Inan, since they knew now what had happened to the researchers that used to live there. A shiver passed through her when she remembered the words of the Hidden Dwellers. Removed from existence – the very idea of being removed, not just killed, but completely erased from the universe, filled Inan with unspoken dread.
Inan wandered around the base for a bit, not wanting to go in between the buildings, or inside. Not wanting to face Alan, undoubtedly still angry at her for making them trust Ure. She found a place where the base took drinking water from a well sitting on top of a spring, reaching its steel pipes deep into the current. The moisture-proof control unit sat next to it, monitoring the flow and applying filters so the water would not carry alien microbes or toxins.
Inan sat on a stone and dipped her feet into the stream, letting dark and dry thoughts run loose in her head.
The explosion of the liner starship didn’t kill her, nor did the haphazard escape from the pirate ship. She got into a bar fight, went unscathed and unarrested, but now she would end her days on a forgotten planetoid, either starved to death or eaten up by whatever creatures were hiding in the jungle below. She should have listened to Matriarch Salrran! She should have gone home. She wouldn’t be a great asset as had been planned, but maybe she would be training under one of the Mothers, learning how to manage House property, or maybe how to invest resources or some other important role. Alan was right; it was because of her that they had wound up stuck on this planetoid and no one would ever know what had befallen them. And all of it because she didn’t want to act like a good izara female should.
Hijinks came over, sliding into darkness from the ring of light surrounding the base. She sat on the water pipe, one foot dangling carelessly from the steel brace, one arm resting on the pipe’s bend. The marsupial said nothing, silently keeping Inan company.
‘Enjoying the view, Inan?’ said Hijinks after a longer while.
‘You are not angry, Hijinks?’ said Inan, feeling a small relief trying to sneak into her core.
‘Angry,’ Hijinks said. ‘Angry doesn’t help.’
‘But Alan is pretty angry with me, isn’t he?’ said Inan, finding that this alien male being angry with her was bothering her as much as being stuck on the all-forsaken planetoid.
The control unit for the pump beeped once, signalling a change in the water’s temperature.
‘Cool down,’ said Hijinks.
Inan wondered if she meant the water temperature or Alan’s anger. Do warm-blooded creatures overheat when they are angry?
Inan shook her head – such useless thoughts.
‘Hijinks, what do we do now?’ she said.
Hijinks looked at Inan and it was a familiar look. She thought that sometimes Hijinks could look at someone just as Matriarch Salrran would at a hatchling asking a silly question.
‘Look for solution,’ said Hijinks, as though they were about to solve a simple equation.
‘But it’s just as Alan said, we are stuck,’ said Inan, slowly losing patience with the marsupial.
‘Linai-Linai,’ said Hijinks, swinging her dangling foot casually. ‘And the expedition. How they came here?’
Inan paused. There was no spaceship on the mesa when they came, nor was there any indication that one had landed there before. The vehicle from the garage was missing too, where did it go? Inan looked back at Hijinks. The marsupial tilted her head in recognition that she was finally able to reach Inan.
‘Alan is looking for way out,’ said Hijinks, standing up from the pipe. ‘Come.’
They went into the makeshift laboratory, the same place where Alan and Ure had been looking for the trace of the missing xenoarcheologists. The place was dark but for the glow of the computer Alan was working on. The screen was an incomprehensible jumble of symbols, swimming to and fro like a shoal of digital fish.
Alan did not look away as they came in, didn’t even seem to be aware of their appearance. His back remained turned, hunched and tense. His fingers were busy entering adjustments into the corrupted data.Inan gathered her courage about her before speaking.
‘Alan?’ she said carefully, as a swimmer would proceed before plunging into unknown waters.
Alan spared Inan one sharp look before going back to the screen.
Inan noted how warm it was in the lab. The air-cooled computer system blew hot air from the vents, filling the air with the smell of warm electronic components. She thought that it was the worst possible environment for Alan to “cool down” as Hijinks said he would.
‘Found something?’ asked Hijinks.
‘Maybe,’ he responded. ‘Give me a second to clean up this bit.’
After a few seconds, Inan realised that the screen was no longer showing strange symbols and lines of raw code. Now it was showing a map, incomplete and with patches of black at points where the data couldn’t be restored, but it was clearly a map of their surroundings. Inan recognised their mesa and the long path down towards the Hidden Dweller ruins. There was something else too. It seemed as though the path extended further than the ruins, leading into the jungle towards another, smaller, mesa.
‘There!’ he said, zooming in to the smaller mesa. In the middle of it there was some structure.
‘Yes,’ said Hijinks, putting her face closer to the screen.
‘What is it? Is it alien?’ asked Inan. ‘Did the Hidden Dwellers put it there?’
‘A planetary transit set-up,’ said Hijinks. ‘Expedition’s supply line.’ Inan knew about planetary transit set-ups. They were used to move cargo from orbit to the planetary surface where building a spaceport was not possible or too expensive. They usually consisted of a small station in orbit and a space lift, or a particle fountain, on the surface.
Inan’s heart leapt. They could use it to escape! And with a little bit of luck, there might be a way to call help from the transit station, maybe there was even a spaceship tethered to it.
But there was a jungle between them and the space lift. Even if they followed the path, it was a long distance to walk. If only they had a vehicle of some sort. But the garage in the expedition base was empty, the vehicle inexplicably missing.
‘It is far, isn’t it?’
she said finally, hoping she didn’t sound too discouraging.
‘If you have a better idea I want to hear it,’ said Alan curtly.
Inan looked again at the map, and the thin line of the path bisecting the purple mass of the jungle. With no ship, and no one coming to help, the uneven trail was their only lifeline. But was it really? Would there be anything at the transit station to help them to get out of here? And if so, there was still a trek through the alien forest. Inan’s mind filled with grotesque monsters, venomous beasts, poisonous plants that fed on meat, hidden behind every trunk and lurking in the undergrowth.
Hijinks, who until now had been standing next to her, turned around and headed towards the door.
‘Where are you going?’ said Inan.
‘To get prepared,’ said Hijinks.
*
Inan looked at “provisions and equipment” spread on the laboratory table and thought that they were most definitely the things that only complete fools would take on a trip through the jungle. On one end there was a rope that had started its life as a spare power cord for the light set-up outside. Next to it were two small boxes that Alan brought from the garage. Inan looked inside and groaned. Hijinks squealed with mirth.
‘What? What is it?’ said Alan, looking over Inan’s shoulder and into the box.
In the box there were emergency rations, tucked neatly into their separate containers. Inan could swear that they came from the same supply line as the ones in the escape pod which took her and Hijinks away from the doomed spaceship.
‘Following you, Inan,’ said Hijinks, still guffawing.
Next were a few pieces of material which Hijinks had pulled out from a forgotten crate in the corner of the storage room. The material had a strange texture. It looked smooth, but when Inan touched it, it felt like the skin of a leaf – armed with tiny hairs.
‘Hydrophobic,’ said Hijinks, shaking a few drops of water onto it. The drops didn’t sink into it, but rolled off it like round, shiny beads.
*
Before they left, they filled three canisters with water from the pump. This world was lush and full of streams running with water as clear as glass. But the microbes that made their home in every drop of moisture could make them sick, if not poison them, as their bodies were unused to local life. For the same reason Inan resigned herself to the bland taste of the emergency rations instead of looking for fresh meat or trying to catch the small, fishlike creatures gambolling between the stones of the stream.
They started their trek by going down the mesa again, past the ruins of the Hidden Dwellers. The black strands, filtering the light through the miniscule gaps between them, stood silent among the trees, unchanged since their arrival. They were now the only witnesses of the disappearance of the La-Abian xenoarcheologist and her colleagues. Inan thought of the questions that would now remain unanswered, as the capricious creatures which made the underground structure had left the universe.They found the road that curved away from the alien structures towards the mesa on the horizon. The “road” was just a lane cut and burned free of the local flora. Two furrows marked the way the all-terrain vehicle had driven over it from the dock to the dig site and to the base camp on top of the mesa. The passage stood in stark contrast to the mass of mauve and plum vegetation, but the jungle had already started to reclaim the space lost to the laser cutters and plasma torches. Dark small vines, no thicker than Inan’s fingers, were creeping over the soil from both sides, like veins full of rich blood. Inan tried not to step on any as she walked. They crunched under her foot if she missed a step and it filled her with a strange revulsion, as though she had just crushed the spine of a small snake.
They had walked some distance before Inan realised that something was beginning to change in the jungle. The brave sun rays, that penetrated below the purple canopies of the trees, grew weaker and cooler and a bluish tinge crept into the air.
Something fell from above and hit the dirt with a plop, like an insect killed in flight. Inan looked at the spot, but the only thing she could see was a small patch of moisture. Then another one landed on her arm, a drop sprayed her neck. Those two drops were followed by others, large and slow drops of starting rain. More and more followed and, in a second, the slow descent of heavy drops turned into the curtain of a downpour. The visibility dropped down to half as the small world became obscured by a film of falling water. Inan screamed when a sudden, full-force gale hit her in the face, but her screams were forced back into her throat by the wind. Suddenly she was alone, separated from her companions by the onslaught of the rain.
‘Hijinks! Alan!’ she called out, but instead of her voice she could hear only the raging wind and rain. A lake seemed to be falling from the sky, drowning her senses. Not knowing where to turn, she stopped. Ankle-deep in a freezing stream she felt her limbs starting to go stiff.
Something approached. A hunched shadow was moving, entangled in the curtain of rain. It emerged close to her and grabbed her by the wrist. She opened her mouth to scream again, but then the shadowy face came into focus.
‘Hijinks!’ she called, relieved. The hunched shadow morphed into the familiar silhouette.
Hijinks pulled her hand, leading her behind. It was just a few steps, but amid the rain it seemed like a lengthy trek.
Hijinks lead her to a small mound. It was not much more than a rise in the terrain, but a tree that stood atop it seemed unmoved by the gale around them. Its giant leaves were striped mauve and black like the backs of herding animals. She crawled under the interlocking umbrellas of the leaves, trying to feel the ground before her. In the hiding place, close to the trunk of the tree, a soft and mauve-tinted half-light was filled with the percussion of the ever-falling rain and dripping of stray droplets. Inan was relieved to see Alan’s heat signature hiding among the vines drooping from above. She relaxed a little and looked around to find a comfortable spot to lean on the smooth bark of the trunk.
‘Do not move,’ said Hijinks suddenly, looking somewhere over Inan’s shoulder.
Despite the warning, Inan turned her head as slowly as she could. On the bark, just above Inan’s head, a thing was sitting. A large insectoid, with eyes reflected yellow even in the shadows, was looking back at Inan as if it wanted to bore into her very soul. It was small, the size of Inan’s palm, but its elongated legs made it seem bigger. Its mandibles were moving, chewing the air and making a scraping noise like a rusty piece of metal being dragged over a stone. Slowly, a carapace on its back parted and an array of limbs appeared, each tipped with a serrated claw.
For the longest moment they stared at each other. Inan was paralysed by terror and disgust, wondering if the slightest movement on her side would provoke the beast to attack. The creature hung there, unmoving, looking down from its elevated position. Then the clawed limbs retracted under the carapace. Slowly, one leg at a time, the beast retreated, climbing backwards until it disappeared between the bulging features of the trunk.
‘What was that?’ croaked Inan, barely finding her voice again.
‘A refugee from the rain,’ said Hijinks. ‘Same as us.’
*
The rain stopped as suddenly as it had started, the force of the water coming in torrents from the sky, transitioning from torrential assault to almost nothing in mere seconds.
They crawled out from their hiding place. Inan emerged first, squinting her eyes under the barrage of sunlight that pushed through the broken clouds. She turned around just in time to witness two waterlogged and muddied creatures stepping out from among the foliage. They wore mud-like uniforms, decorated with stray twigs, like characters from an ancient farce. Inan almost expected them to throw verses at each other about the joys of hunting bog-fleas in the afternoon. Inan couldn’t hold back the laughter anymore and roared.
‘Not funny, Inan,’ mumbled Hijinks, but covered her face with both hands, stifling a welling-up giggle.
Alan said nothing. Suddenly, without any warning he jumped up and pulled down a wide leaf directly over Inan’s head. She howled as the leaf dumped on her all the water it had collected during the storm. Unpleasant as it was, the unexpected shower washed off the mud and fallen leaves that clung to Inan’s scales. All that was left was to clean off the muck embedded under her talons.
‘You have… something…’ said Alan, clumsily motioning towards her head. Inan reached around her horns, only to find a dead clump of vines entangled around them like a limp snake. She grabbed the vines and pulled, only managing to entangle them more. She clawed at them, but the slippery stems refused to get caught, the soaked plant matter squelching revoltingly under her fingers. Finally, she managed to pick them from her head and throw them in the bushes with a groan of disgust.
She thought she heard something. She turned around just in time to catch a glimpse of a smile on Alan’s face.
They were able to save most of their supplies; the rations were dry in their container and only one water canister was lost. Inan had dropped the hydrophobic cloth, but she soon spotted it caught in the exposed roots of a nearby tree. When she picked it up the water residue rolled off it, leaving the surface as dry as if it was freshly taken from storage. Inan thought that she should have used it as a cover, saving them from becoming soaked through.
*
They continued on the path until the shadows of the trees started to grow, consuming the little light that still reached them under the canopy of the forest.
Inan kept walking, but now every step she took needed more effort. She forgot completely about keeping her tail off the ground and now it was trailing behind her, catching every bump and stone along the way. She realised that she had lost track of all the brief days that had passed since their arrival, neither had she counted hours to a cycle as they had done while in space. They stopped briefly a couple of times to drink and consume some of the rations, but driven by the desire to escape this planetoid they never stopped for a proper rest.