“Every skyfort will be scanning for us,” Dellian replied, trying to quash his own concern. “It won’t take long.”
“We need to gather branches and bushes,” Yirella said. “Build a fire.”
“A fire?” Orellt said skeptically. “What use is that?”
“First, it’s a strong infrared signature, especially at night.”
“Night? It’s only just past midday. We’re not going to be here that long.”
“You hope. Face it, nobody’s searched for a crashed flyer in our lifetime. We need to be ready for any eventuality. That includes protection.”
“Protection from what?”
“Yirella’s right,” Dellian said. “We have no idea what beasts live in these mountains.”
“After sunset, our best tactic is to retreat back into the fuselage and have a fire burning in front of the gap,” she said.
“Oh, for Saints’ sake,” Orellt protested. “We’re not going to be here at sunset! The rescue crews will arrive in an hour.”
“I don’t mind you betting your life on that wish,” she retorted. “But my life isn’t yours to risk. We need a fire.”
“We do,” Ellici agreed. “This is an exceptional situation. We have to adapt to it.”
“There must be an axe in the emergency kit,” Dellian said quickly; he could see Orellt gathering himself to argue. “Janc, Uret, Xante, you’re with me. We’ll fell some of those sleeper trees. The rest of you, start gathering the bigger bushes. I’m going to check and see what else we’ve been left with, especially water.”
They started moving—reluctantly; nobody wanted to consider they would be here for any length of time—but they did it.
Dellian found two emergency cases in the rear of the fuselage. One was a medical kit, which he handed to Ellici to treat Tilliana’s eye. The second contained basic survival equipment. It was mainly thermal blankets and ropes, a couple of knives, torches, and ten flasks each filled with a liter of distilled water, along with a hand-pumped filter. He was disappointed that was the total, but the case did have a small axe.
“Not much water,” he said quietly to Yirella as he walked away from the flyer.
“No rainfall here, check the ground,” she replied, equally subdued. “And the flyer is totally dead. I don’t see how that could happen; everything is supposed to have multiple redundancy.”
He glanced up at the empty cobalt sky. Far overhead, the bright specks of the skyforts shone with reassuring familiarity. Even Cathar, the system’s gas giant, was a sharp spark just above the horizon. “Do you think…”
“The enemy? No. If Juloss was under attack, we’d see the skyfort weapons firing. They’d be as bright as the sun—at least. It’s not that. We’re living in the last days of this world’s human civilization; things are bound to go wrong. I just never thought it would be this bad. I guess we’ve lived very sheltered lives.”
Dellian scanned around to assess the sleeper trees. There weren’t many on the bleak hillside, but at least they stood out.
“I don’t want anyone to go more than a couple of hundred meters,” he told his friends as they walked toward the closest tree. “Once we chop them down, we’ve got to break them apart to drag them back.”
The sleeper trees were never more than four meters high, rising up to form twisted hemispheres of densely tangled twigs that bulged up out of five radial boughs. Dellian remembered from interminable boring botany lessons that they were desert plants native to a planet hundreds of light-years distant, with huge tuber roots that could hold precious water for years if necessary, while the branches and thick finger-leaves slumbered through the long, hot days of baking sunlight between the rains. Given the scarcity of water they received, their trunks were surprisingly hard. It took the boys a good thirty minutes to chop through, and they had to take turns. It was tough work in the cool, thin air.
They’d just felled the first one when they heard it—a high-pitched braying sound coming from farther up the mountain.
“What amid the Saints was that?” Janc asked nervously, scouring the ragged slope above them.
An answering cry came from the west.
“You mean them?” a badly perturbed Xante said. “Saints, how many are there?”
Dellian silently noted how easily Xante was spooked. A petty satisfaction, but the Saints would understand and forgive.
“A whole planet’s worth,” Uret replied grimly. “This is why the estate is fenced in.”
“They sound like morox. I thought they only came out at night?”
“We’re too exposed here,” Dellian said. “Let’s get this tree back to the flyer. Come on, we can do it if we all drag it together.”
They each took hold of the trunk and started pulling. Around them, they could see the other clan boys towing bushes through the boulders.
“We need a weapons inventory,” Yirella said when everyone had gathered next to the fuselage.
“Axe,” Dellian said, holding it up.
“Two knives,” Falar announced. “They’re not the best for throwing.”
“Bind them to the ends of poles,” Ellici said. “That’ll give you the advantage of reach if those beasts come close.”
“Where the Saints are the rescue crews?” Janc shouted.
Dellian lined an accusing finger on him. “Stop that. Panic just makes things worse. Help get the fire ready.”
“Wasn’t panicking,” Janc grumbled, his gaze downcast.
The boys set about preparing the fire, building a core of the driest bush twigs, then fencing it in with some of the smaller branches of the sleeper tree to work as kindling. The rest was broken apart and piled up ready to throw on once the flames were established.
Rello and Tilliana were helped back into the fuselage, where Ellici and Orellt did what they could with the small medical kit.
Dellian watched Yirella scramble onto the top of the largest boulder and slowly scan around. Once he’d finished chopping one of the sleeper tree boughs, he handed the axe to Hable and went to join her. “Keeping watch?” he asked.
“Yes. I can’t see anything moving.”
“The morox won’t come close until dark, and even then the fire will keep them at bay.”
“We’ve heard several now.”
“Yes. Don’t worry, they’ll never get into the fuselage. Even I have trouble squeezing through that gap.”
“What do they eat?”
“Well, not our clanmates tonight, that’s for sure.” He smiled, hoping it would help ease her.
“I don’t mean tonight. I mean every other night.”
“They’re predators. So whatever they can catch. Rabbits, wild dogs, birds…I dunno. Whatever else lives up here?”
“Exactly. That’s my point.”
“What is?”
“We’ve heard probably four already, right? Yet do you see anything else living up here? The bushes are all dead, and there’s no grass. What do their prey live on?”
“Well…” Dellian scratched his head, swiveling around to search the forlorn hillside.
“This entire hill can’t support one morox, let alone four.”
“They’re passing through? Could be a seasonal thing, heading for a fresh hunting ground.”
“Seasonal?” she scoffed. “This is the tropics.”
“All right! I don’t know. Happy?”
“Very much not.” She gave him a nervous smile. “I wasn’t getting at you. I just find all of this weird. The odds of each event that’s hit us today are pretty near improbable, but together they’re impossible.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m not sure, but this really doesn’t feel good.”
“Yeah, I figured that for myself. Come on, let’s get back to the flyer.” He held out his hand. After a moment, she took it, an
d together they slipped down the boulder.
“No water, either,” she said. “That may be worse for us than moroxes.”
“Let’s get through the night before we start worrying about that. Besides, if the water situation doesn’t improve, we can drain the sleeper tree roots. I’m sure I saw that being done in a text or a video or something.”
“No, that’s a myth. The tubers are all too deep. You’d expend too much energy digging down to them.”
“There’s no water up here.”
“I know. It means that we have to leave first thing tomorrow and get to the bottom of the hill. There should be water there, even if we have to dig for it.”
“Okay. For a bad minute there I thought you were going to rig up something that’d filter our own pee.”
“That’s not a bad idea, actually. Usually in this kind of climate, survivalists evaporate it and catch the condensed vapor. But maybe there’s no need. The filter pump should be able to handle urine. We should all pee into a container, and save it in case.”
Dellian groaned in dismay.
“It’s not funny, Dellian. Dehydration is dangerous.”
“All right. But I can’t see anyone doing that.”
“They will if you and I carry on doing what we have been doing.”
“What’s that?”
“Combined authority.”
“Huh?”
“My knowledge and your leadership. Together it makes the rest do what we want.”
He opened his mouth to protest, then realized what she had said was right.
“What?” she asked with a sly grin. “You hadn’t noticed?”
“Uh, no, actually.”
“Classically, a good leader has the ability to issue orders that people don’t argue with. I don’t quite know what category a good-leader-who-doesn’t-notice-he’s-giving-orders falls into, but it certainly seems to be successful.”
“I’m not the only leader. Janc and Orellt, they’re good captains, too.”
Yirella lowered her voice as they approached the flyer. “In the tactical games, you’ve been team captain for thirty-two percent of this year’s total. Janc was second with sixteen. You’re the clear leader in our year, Dellian. So be a proper Saint, and don’t let us down. We’re going to need your skills to get through this disaster.”
“Great Saints,” he muttered.
He made a show of examining the filter from the survival case and asking for Ellici’s opinion. She agreed with Yirella that it would filter urine.
“Just in case, then,” Dellian said, and peed into a collapsible plastic carton, much to everyone’s amusement. He played along with the joshing, then passed the carton to Janc, fixing him a level stare. Janc took a moment, then undid his fly.
They lit the fire as the sun fell below the horizon. The general mood was subdued. In their hearts, everyone had expected rescue within the first couple of hours.
“We have to keep the fire burning as long as possible,” Yirella said. “That’ll give the skyforts their best chance to spot the thermal signature.”
“Three of us on one-hour duty outside to keep feeding the fire,” Dellian said quickly. “Each with a weapon, that way we can watch each other’s backs. No one else is to leave the flyer. I’ll take the first watch with the axe. Falar, Orellt, fancy taking it with me?”
Both boys nodded without noticeable reluctance. The mountain air was a lot colder now that the sun had gone. Even with the modest fire burning three meters from the fuselage, the boys wrapped thermal blankets around their shoulders.
The moroxes began calling to one another. Dellian was convinced there were now at least six of them out there in the darkness beyond the firelight. Yirella’s right. What do they eat?
Dellian flung some more logs on the fire. Sparks skittered up into the night, swirling like orange galaxies. Boulders glimmered yellow, transforming to dusty moons in a frozen orbit around them. The moroxes were closer now, the cries lower, more intense. Something moved in the gloom between boulders, a deeper shadow eclipsing empty air.
“Come back in,” Yirella said from the fuselage split. “Pile some more logs on, and get safe.”
Dellian was inclined to agree. Looking at Falar and Orellt, he couldn’t see any argument. He bent over to pick up a couple of logs.
“Look out,” Falar yelled.
The morox came hurtling out of the dark, skipping onto a boulder and leaping. The beast had pale gray skin like wet leather, mottled with green webs. The forelegs had huge paws, with seven knife-like talons fully extended. Its head was slim and streamlined, almost aquatic somehow, with wide white eyes and fangs longer than a human hand.
Some deep xenophobic instinct told Dellian this rapacious creature had never been born on Earth, adding to his fright. It was the fear of the other. He dropped to one knee, swiveling as he did so to bring the axe around in a powerful arc. On either side of him, Falar and Orellt were assuming a lunge pose, their knife poles stabbing forward. The three of them acted in unison as they’d done so many times in battle games, coordinating as fluidly as any munc cohort.
Too late, the morox tried to turn from the trio of deadly blades. Dellian’s axe caught its flank, ripping open a huge cut. Dark purple blood squirted out. The morox howled and landed badly, legs scrabbling for purchase.
“Fall back,” Dellian shouted. “Falar in first.” He could see another two black spectral shapes circling the fire’s radiance, biding their time.
“I’m in,” Falar called. Then: “Danger left!”
Dellian and Orellt faced the new morox as it sprinted toward them. This time Orellt dropped to his knees. Dellian instinctively knew what he was doing—thrusting the knife blade ahead and low, forcing the morox to leap. Orellt began his swipe. Sure enough, the creature saw the blade solid and unmoving at its own head height, and sprang—
The axe hit it directly on the side of its short neck, penetrating so deep Dellian could barely wrench it out. Only the inertia of the creature’s falling corpse helped free it.
Orellt was squirming backward through the gap. Dellian took two fast paces and saw the next morox appear on the top of the fuselage. No time. He flung the axe, sending it spinning through the air as the morox leaped at him. It hit the side of the beast’s forelimb and bounced away, clattering off the rocks. And Orellt was standing in the gap, the knife pole ready to throw like a spear.
The creature smashed into Dellian, its forelimbs lashing out. He felt talon tips slash down his left arm, then it juddered, a knife pole sticking out of the back of its neck. Its weight was on top of him, carrying him to the ground. The fall dazed him, and all he knew was the mass of the dead carcass pressed unmoving against him, pinning him down. Then boys were yelling all around. Hands dragged the dead creature off him. He glimpsed Orellt and Falar back in the open, their knife poles jabbing into the darkness. Hable retrieved the axe. Xante, Janc, and Colian were holding burning branches, scything them about furiously. Uret picked him up and manhandled him through the gap, where Yirella half carried, half dragged him to a seat. She and Ellici were immediately busy with antiseptic sprays and long strips of a-skin while behind them the boys performed an orderly withdrawal back into the flyer’s cabin.
“You’ll be fine,” Yirella was saying loudly as torch beams wobbled about, shining on his arm. There was plenty of blood. “The cuts aren’t deep at all.”
Orellt’s face loomed up in front of him, grinning wildly. “We got another one! And we reset the fire. It’ll burn for another hour at least.”
“Terrific,” Dellian gasped, and winced as Ellici applied a strip of a-skin to his bicep. It stung as it adhered.
“Drink this,” Yirella ordered, shoving a flask at him. “You need fluid.”
“It’s not piss, is it?”
“No.” She grinned. “I’m saving that for brea
kfast.”
* * *
—
The surviving moroxes howled to each other for the rest of the night. One even ventured up toward the gap in the fuselage again, only to have Xante and Colian ward it off with the knife poles.
Dellian dozed for most of the time, falling into a deeper sleep sometime well past midnight, only to be dragged from slumber by a fresh morox howl. He saw Colian in the gap, holding a knife pole ready, but not jabbing or shouting for help.
The next thing he knew it was dawn, and the cabin was full of his yawning friends. A wan gray light was shining in through the small windows, and the smell of smoke was heavy in the air.
“Decision time,” Yirella said as she inspected the strips of a-skin on his arm. “We can’t hang around here if we’re going to make it to the foot of the mountain before nightfall. We either set off now, or we don’t do it at all. If the satellites didn’t see the fire last night, then they never will. And if we leave it another day, we’ll be a lot weaker.”
“And an easier target for the moroxes,” Dellian said. “We won’t have the fuselage to shelter us, either.”
Her face crumpled into a puzzled frown. “That’s another thing wrong. They should never have ventured so close to the fire.”
“But they did,” Xante said. “Wishing they did what they’re supposed to isn’t going to help us.”
Yirella gave him a long, disappointed look and shrugged.
For a moment, he thought she was going to say something else. “So what do you think we should do?” she asked.
“You tell me,” Dellian said urgently. “I’ll back you up.”
“I don’t know. In situations like this, you’re normally supposed to stay at the crash site and wait for the rescue teams. But this isn’t normal, is it?”
“Let’s take a look outside,” Dellian said reluctantly.
The fire had died down to a mound of embers that was barely warmer than the sand. Thick rose-gold sunlight was pouring over the tops of the hills, casting long, sharp shadows from the boulders.
Dellian carried the axe, scanning around cautiously. “I can’t hear the moroxes.”
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