New Night (Gothic Book 2)

by van Dahl,Fiona

  The sky was striped with many shades of blue. She had just walked through two feet of cold and into a swath of liquid warm. The breeze where she stood was cool and smelled like spring. It was freezing January back on Earth, so even Fortuna’s crazy air currents were a welcome reprieve. The team xeno-meteorologist theorized that soon, storms would sweep over these plains, bringing with them the lushness of summer.

  Veronica looked back at the three-Humvee convoy and spotted soldiers shucking off their winter jackets, moving smoothly and efficiently under the direction of First Sergeant Drews. Meanwhile, the researchers were crowded into the first Humvee, watching Veronica back.

  She didn’t mind — liked the attention, in fact. She bounced on her ratty, hole-filled sneakers, trying to put off an air of confidence. She’d volunteered to scout ahead and possibly be the first to meet any wild sharps in their path, a task for which few others were qualified.

  I came up the hill behind her on foot, leading the convoy as if with a rope tied around my middle. I reached her side with lungs full of alien air, tired and nervous and yet happier than I’d been in a long time. My throat had taken on the texture of sharp pine needles, so I chugged water from my canteen. Veronica had the same idea, so together, we stood admiring the vista between gulps.

  We wore jeans and t-shirts, maybe to help differentiate us as the only civilians present. I wore Army-issue hiking boots that had so far stood up to all the weird transformations I regularly performed on my feet. My long, brown hair was pulled back out of my face—

  “Eden,” Vee muttered. “You look sour. It makes them nervous. Try to look confident.”

  “We’re on an alien planet where all previous expeditions have encountered at least one hostile lifeform. Excuse me for considering the possibilities.”

  “We’ll be fine. This is the most soldiers we’ve ever brought.”

  “And the most researchers.” I looked back over my shoulder, at the Humvee in which the Director rides. “And both hammers in the same place.” I capped my canteen. “And we’re not making good time.”

  “I could scout further ahead, make sure there’s no big packs of sharps in the way.”

  “Too dangerous. Director would never allow it.” I squint to the east. “Though I wouldn’t mind observing a herd of hippocersus . . .”

  As we started down the hill — we were scouts, so we scouted — I casually added, “Have you talked to Drews?”

  Vee heaved a long-suffering sigh. “It’s so weird, you being the one with guy drama.”

  “This is not ‘guy drama’. Ever since the backpacking incident, he’s been avoiding me. The Director says he’s been asking about ‘containment’. I need to know if he’s serious, or if backpacking just gave him the heebie-jeebies.”

  “If he won’t talk to you, the one who gave him Mjolnir in the first place, I doubt he’ll talk to me.”

  “Can’t you . . . You know . . .”

  “What, seduce him? First of all: Rude.”

  It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d thrown herself at a man who wanted to utterly destroy us. But we’d managed to go eight months without talking about that, so why start?

  “Second, Drews is married to his country. If he wants to keep something secret from us, we’ll only hear about it after.”

  “Wow, that’s reassuring.”

  “Relax, already. The Director isn’t going to let anything happen.”

  As if summoned, an arm settled around my shoulders and drew me closer to Vee in a three-person side-hug. “Did I hear my name? How are my girls?”

  (‘My girls’. My heart thudded.)

  “Enjoying the beautiful day,” Vee answered diplomatically. “How’s it going back in the convoy, Dr. Meer?”

  As the two chatted, I took a moment to admire the woman. She was our height but middle-aged, with soft, wavy brown hair that hung past her shoulders. She was brilliant, having achieved a double-PhD in ecology and disaster management. There were few more qualified to direct the GQZ and all scientific exploration of the alien dimension.

  She finally let go of the hug, but cupped the back of my head comfortingly. “Are you two getting along?”

  I ducked my head, hoping I wasn’t blushing. “Yes, ma’am.” I checked the horizon as we walked. “I wanted to run an idea by you.”

  “Yes?” As always, she was so interested, so sincere, despite the million other things going on. (The convoy crested the hill behind us.)

  “I couldn’t find any biology or ecology materials on the facility intranet, so I was wondering if... Well, I mean, you’ve already been through it all before, at Stanford.” The word almost glowed green, I was so envious. “So maybe you’d know what I need. I was wondering if we could bring in some textbooks, or something, and um—” I trailed off awkwardly, not sure how to make the leap to my true desire.

  “I think I know where you’re going with this. Of course, you know I enjoy teaching you.”

  I fiddled with my canteen, wishing I could disappear into it. Why had I brought this up in front of Vee? “I enjoy learning, and all. But maybe if there were a formal structure to it—”

  “You’d like to earn a degree.”

  I bared my teeth, nervous and frustrated. “Not necessarily. It’d be kind of pointless, right? Not like I’m shopping around my resume anytime soon. But it might help in our studies of this world.” I swept a bony arm, taking in the vista before us. “I could test out of Bio 101 thanks to you, but the more advanced stuff—”

  Dr. Meer threw back her head and laughed, then grinned at Vee. “What about you? Any degree plan you want to go for?”

  And just like that, the whole thing was a joke. And I was sure that if I didn’t play along and start treating it like a joke, too, I’d look like a brat. My fingers clenched around the canteen, and I found myself removing and replacing the cap without taking a drink.

  “I’m not smart enough,” Vee answered, shrugging. “But Eden’s like Dr. Meer 2.0, so she should get a chance to go after the ‘Dr.’ part.”

  I couldn’t help it; I looked across at Vee in shock and reluctant gratitude.

  The Director, meanwhile, pressed a hand to her own chest. “Is that what it is? You want to be like me?”

  “She was always a bio nerd in high school. If not for Gothic U closing down, she’d probably be finding the cure for cancer right now.”

  I almost crushed the canteen in embarrassment. “Shut up.”

  Dr. Meer gave me a long, assessing look, then smiled. “I think we can work something out. Of course, it’s hard to plan for the long-term future.”

  A dark cloud passed in front of the sun; in the dim light, Vee and I each struggled to hide the stress ‘the long-term future’ caused us. We were instantly reminded that we didn’t belong with these people — that we were test subjects allowed to walk among them. For now.

  “—was thinking about writing a dissertation on the ecology of this world,” the Director was saying. “Who knows? If its existence is ever declassified, maybe I’ll be awarded a third PhD.”

  I grinned despite myself. “In what? Xeno-ecology?”

  “Sure!” She walked a little closer to me and added conspiratorially, “I could use a research partner — type up notes, proofread, call me out on theories that make no sense—”

  I must have had every Christmas morning sparkling in my eyes. “I... Really? Just me?”

  “If I remember enough of my internship days to teach you the methods.”

  It was all still so uncertain. This new joy, this excitement, quickly turned to lead in my stomach. “Of course, that’s all a moot point if we end up in ‘containment’.”

  Her expression sobered. “All I can ask is that the two of you be on your best behavior at all times. Don’t take the decision out of my hands.”

  Translation: She knew nothing. After all, she certainly knew me, if not Vee, well enough to be straight with us. If there was a line we could cross, past which we would be forced into containme
nt, Dr. Meer could be relied on to point it out to us. She always had in the past, and we had dutifully kept to the bounded areas — zero aggression, no desire to infect others, no plans to escape on either planet . . .

  “I wouldn’t take it so personally,” she added, trying to pet down our ruffled feathers. “You’re lovely girls, but you’re made of an alien needle material. We don’t know enough about it yet. We can’t predict what it will do to you. Therefore, standard procedure dictates we be prepared.”

  Except Vee had already attained perfect control over her entire body, and I possessed self-control born of profound self-hate. We weren’t time bombs.

  We were about to crest another hill when she broke the silence with a sigh. “All I can say is that you would not be in pain. You probably wouldn’t even be conscious.”

  Vee snorted. “That’s comforting.”

  She spread her hands. “It’s the best I can—”

  I looked ahead, saw movement, and dropped to my belly. “Down!” I hissed.

  They dropped down beside me in the grass and peered forward over the plain. Dr. Meer let out a soft, “Uh oh.”

  About fifty yards ahead, barely visible over the next hill, a swarm of exes was rolling by. It was impossible to count them — one of the perks of having evolved to look like dizzying rolling swastikas — but there were at least a hundred.

  Behind us, the convoy ground to a halt in the valley. Drews whistled twice, demanding a report. I rolled over on my side and made a cross with two fingers, as if warding off a vampire, and then wiggled all ten fingers — ‘many’. Drews started handing out quiet orders, and there came the rustle of guns being readied, body armor adjusted.

  “Any Veronica carnigiraffa?” Dr. Meer asked, shooting their namesake an amused look. “There’s usually one or two traveling with a swarm.”

  “Or a swarm traveling with them,” I pointed out softly.

  Drews came up the hill behind us and dropped down into the grass beside Dr. Meer. He raised a pair of binoculars and examined the swarm. “No big guys,” he confirmed.

  “How long until they pass?” the Director wondered, pointing out their most obvious path to the northeast.

  “Just a few minutes,” I decided. “As long as they don’t notice us.”

  Drews checked his two wristwatches. “We’re an hour in, almost ninety minutes Earth-side. We should report soon.” He squinted up into the many-sectioned sky. “Maybe the planets are aligned and we’ll be able to radio FOB Barlowe.”

  We lay prone for a few minutes, watching the swarm.

  “God, I wish I had a joint right now,” Veronica muttered. I snickered, then shot a nervous glance at Dr. Meer. But she’d brought out a tablet and was scrolling through her notes.

  She squinted at the forested horizon ahead. “Is that the ‘wood’?”

  “We won’t know until we’re closer,” I explained. “This could all be a wild goose chase.”

  “As long as we get to explore, there’s no harm.”

  “As long as we’re not attacked,” Drews added in a mutter. “Put that on my tombstone: ‘Killed because two humanoid sharps told us they had a dream’.”

  “First Sergeant,” Dr. Meer said quietly. “Please quote policy regarding our guests.”

  I could hear his molars grind. “‘Until further notice, all acicular humanoids are to be considered human civilians and afforded all rights granted by the’—”

  “Thank you.”

  I realized that my heart was about to pound right out of my chest. A quick glance aside at Veronica found her very carefully watching the passing swarm of exes as if she couldn’t hear a word being said. But I saw in the twitch of her eyes, the set of her jaw — she was equally chilled. The words ‘until further notice’ had not sounded so foreboding a few months before, when we’d helped draft that policy.

  The swarm was nearly out of sight to the northeast. Dr. Meer got to her feet with a grunt and beckoned to the Humvees to start driving again. Drews marched down the hill, doing a little scouting of his own.

  Vee and I were left lying on our stomachs, gazing into the distance like teenagers.

  “We need to get out,” she whispered.

  The words were like a blade in the gut, and yet I had been thinking the same thing. “On this side. Easier for us to survive. If we need to go back to Earth for supplies, there are portals.”

  Her eyes turned to me, but I didn’t meet them, didn’t want her to see my fear. “Today?”

  “No. First, we see what’s in the wood, what all the dreams were about.” I pointed out a particular area just a few degrees right of center. “There. Where the trees start to fade out toward the floodplains. That’s the bit at the beginning, where I— where we enter the wood.”

  Even then, wide awake, I heard the faint whisper of the eternity wood. Among those dark trees, the air is cold and thick. It flows over my body as I fly down paths no sapient foot has touched in ten thousand years. A great white monster lurks in the dark. It is the guardian of this place. We are its guests, and its enemies—

  “You were right,” Vee said suddenly, getting to her feet and brushing herself off. “About Drews. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you.”

  My jaw almost hit the ground even as I got up. “Can you embroider that onto a sampler for me, please?”

  We started walking, the Humvees close behind us. She put an arm around my waist and gave me a quick side-hug. I tried to pretend there weren’t tears on her cheeks. Better to show nothing, to give nothing away. Still, our distrust of each other ebbed.

  We are not and have never been monsters. As guests of the Director, we were pacifists. But we weren’t stupid. We developed a knack for hiding information. Never anything critical, never something that would get anyone killed — but we kept facts to ourselves if we thought they might be valuable playing chips in the future. Little things.

  For example: After the blue pulse, while our bodies were reconstituting in the bottom of an alley, Dr. Meer was conducting the first official expedition to the other world. Near the mountain, they discovered my ‘amnesia solution’, my hastily-written memoirs. Reading this, they learned that the needles could infect humans under very rare circumstances. When they eventually found us wandering the quarantined city, naked and mindless, they knew exactly who and what we were.

  But a bunch of pages were missing. Dr. Meer didn’t have the whole picture. As far as she and her staff are concerned, Vee was Patient Zero, and I was the only other infectee.

  Little things.

  Like Vee and her total body control. Over the months, I had watched her transform into a tall, very pretty girl with a firm jaw, bright eyes, pointed nose— The researchers had tried to catch her practicing in the mirror, but no luck. She didn’t need to see how she looked. It just eventually felt right.

  The whole thing made me uncomfortable. I hadn’t manifested any amazing powers of my own. I was useless in combat drills and pathetically out of shape. Dr. Meer constantly tried to balance this by focusing on how smart I am, as if creating penny-sized brains that could sometimes visually distinguish between a chair and a rock was nearly as cool as the big things Vee was figuring out.

  Big things.

  At mid-day, we reached the treeline. The research team quickly concluded that the trees were a novel species, with growth patterns eerily similar to those of Earth. They reminded me of birch growing thick and dark as pine.

  I kept my distance, choosing instead to sit on the hood of a parked Humvee. “Huge infestation of Rowling whompa,” I pointed out to Drews, indicating the needle-vine-infested canopy forty feet above. “I wouldn’t send humans in there.”

  “We’ve dealt with whompas before,” Drews answered, looking grim.

  “I know you think I’m some kind of inhuman monster, but I don’t want to sit back and watch you get yourself killed. Besides, Vee and I are the ones who had the dream. We should go in first.”

  “You do not get to decide. Besides, first I’m send
ing up a drone.”

  A shudder ran down my back. “Do you have to? The sound attracts sharps.”

  “That’s superstition. I’m not letting anyone go into those trees until I’ve got eyes in the air. I would have had it up since we left, but the wind has been unfavorable.”

  I leaned against the Humvee’s grill and watched the soldiers work. A minute later, the little white buzzard rose straight up into the air. I waved an arm up at it, maybe hoping to see myself in the footage later.

  Drews watched the feed live on a heavy-duty tablet. Soldiers and researchers crowded around him; from my higher vantage, I craned my neck for a look.

  “We’re good so far,” he muttered, tracing a fingertip over a possible dry creekbed off to our right. “Good insertion point over here, less undergrowth. Hard to spot whompa on this, but—”

  Something huge and black appeared in one corner and then vanished off the edge of the screen. When he didn’t immediately notice, I leaned down, grabbed his shoulder for balance, and pointed insistently at it. “Something there a second ago.”

  Drews called an order to the drone technician; far overhead, the little spy changed course. But it was moving too slow for me. I turned and clambered up onto the roof of the Humvee. Vee joined me, and together we stared south along the treeline.

  “Girls?” Dr. Meer called from the treeline. “Girls, get down from there!”

  “What am I looking for?” Vee asked in a whisper.

  And then we saw them — all of us at once, we saw the bus-sized predators come around the bend of trees to the south.

  “CARNIGIRAFFA!” I screamed, shading my eyes with both hands. “TWO— THREE! FROM THE SOUTH!”

  Drews pulled his hammer from his belt as he roared orders left and right. All around us, men and women picked up weapons, straightened body armor, took positions. Dr. Meer and the researchers hurried in toward the protection of the vehicles.

  “Dominance display!” I warned them at the top of my lungs, as if anyone but me was still listening. “We’re in their territory! They might have young nearby! We—”