by John Shirley
Zac glanced around the vast, dust-swirling desert around him. He heard the grunt and snarl of skags in the distance.
He sighed, and hurried to follow after Berl and Bizzy.
Marla woke in the lifeboat—and was surprised to find that she was alive, and the lifeboat was still moving. It was warm in here, stuffy. She smelled her own sweat, heard a throaty machine rumble from outside.
She could see blue sky through the transparent hatch, and gaunt flying creatures soaring and dipping, high in the sky—rakks.
She was being carried along, somehow, inside the lifeboat. She had just room enough to get up on one elbow and peer over the edge of the compartment, through the curving pane of the hatch. She saw helmeted heads, each with its red stripe, jogging beside her.
Up front was the back of a truck of some kind. They were jogging along behind the slow-moving vehicle, their goggled heads turning this way and that. She saw rifle muzzles lift into view from time to time.
Armed men. Probably the notorious bandits of Pandora’s arid outlands.
They’d found her lifeboat crash landed and had taken her, and the emergency craft, as a single prize. Judging by their discussion it seemed they were so far unable to get it open.
“I don’t see why we can’t just blast it open!” growled one of the bandits. “So what if she loses an eye or some such, the useful parts’ll still be there!”
“Because Grunj says no, that’s why!” piped up another bandit. “Vance called, gave us Grunj’s orders clear as day! He intends to get a good price for her! Fine slaver you’d be if you blew off a girly-slave’s face and hands! Price goes way down!”
“But if we got her out of there she could walk on her own and we could ride on the truck!”
“Stop your carpin’! We’re almost to the Coast! Look—there’s the Big Wetty, not more’n half a klick!”
The Coast? Slavers? Was she being taken to sea?
Marla lay back and hugged herself, biting her lip because she didn’t want to give the bandits the satisfaction of hearing her sob. Then she thought of her shoulder bag.
She found it, jammed into a corner of the lifeboat, the strap broken. She looked through the bag—it contained only a holo ID, some brochures for Xanthus, a smartcard explaining about the Homeworld Bound, a few tampons, and the uni. Would it transmit far enough from here?
She flicked the uni on and tried Local Emergency Services. The signal roamed—and found nothing. Working transmission towers were few and far between on Pandora.
She tried calling Zac, in case he was near enough for direct transmission. She watched the screen, and chewed a knuckle as she waited.
Call failed. But that didn’t mean he was dead.
Cal. Was her son alive? The bandits hadn’t mentioned another lifeboat. In the explosion of the Homeworld Bound, they must both have been blown way off course. They could be thousands of kilometers from each other.
And if these bandits sold her into slavery, she might never know what had happened to her family… .
Cal was afraid he was going to burn to death right here in his lifeboat.
Through the transparent hatch he could see a furrow of stony dirt to his right; to his left, flames curled up over the lifeboat. Its pulsers had probably burned up with the friction of the long skid after impact. He’d seen the energy parachute flicker out not long before he’d crashed. The parachute had gotten the space capsule tilted to hit the ground at a shallow angle. He must’ve skidded at least a hundred meters before sliding to a stop.
But the hatch didn’t seem to want to open. And it was getting hot in here.
Trying not to panic, Cal fumbled around the inside of the capsule, looking for an emergency hatch release. Nothing.
“Dammit!” he yelled. “Mom! Are you out there? Is anyone out there? I’m stuck in here!”
“Could you state your needs more specifically?” said a calm voice at his ear.
“What?” After a moment he realized it was the lifeboat’s computer. “I need to get out! Hatch release!”
“Hatch release initiated.”
The hatch whined, shivered—then hummed open. Cooler air, and smoke, wafted in.
Cal scrambled up, and out, away from the lifeboat … just as flames closed over it.
But now what?
He looked around, feeling numb. It looked to be near sunset. The lifeboat had come down in a surprisingly pleasant little canyon. Water from some recent rain puddled in the outcroppings, reflecting a blue sky streaked with orange. Bushes growing from stony crevices were bright with violet and blue blossoms. A thin stream ran through the middle of the gulch. Behind him, flames burnt up his lifeboat, with any resources it contained. Ahead, a little stream chuckled.
The big question was, where was his mom? He couldn’t see the other lifeboat. Shouldn’t they have come down together?
And his dad might be anywhere on Pandora. Might have crashed into an ocean. Might be drowned and dead; might have burned alive. And his mom …
He couldn’t think about what might have happened to his mom.
Still, there was a chance she had come down somewhere around here. A chance she was alive.
“Mom!” he called. His voice echoed mockingly back to him. He opened his mouth to call her again, but thought that the sound might attract someone or something unsavory.
He decided to go in search of her. Shouldn’t stray far from the crash site. The lifeboat might have sent out a mayday. Someone could come down from the Study Station to rescue him. Or maybe they’d fly over from one of the settlements.
Cal climbed an incline to a low ridge, and scanned the sky, seeing nothing but clouds and a few distant flying creatures. He saw no sign of his mother’s lifeboat; no other smoke, no human habitation. The lowering sun cast long shadows, from plants that were something like barrel cactus, across the desert landscape. He walked over to one of the plants and stared at it. It wasn’t a cactus—there were what looked like big, crude gemstones set in the side. For all he knew, it might be an animal that only looked like a plant. He stepped back from it and shaded his hand to look toward the lowering sun.
Maybe forty minutes till darkness, if that long. If no one came for him—what then? Could he find a cave to hide in?
Better stay close to the gulch—at least there was water there, and that’s where the lifeboat had come down …
He set off along the low ridge edging the gulch, following the stream. He walked another forty meters and then stopped, listening. Sure was quiet out here. Should he call to his mom again?
The ground was shaking, every so slightly, under his feet. He looked down—and the ridge crumbled under him, so that he went down it on his rump like a small child on a slide, landing in the gulch.
“Shit.” He got to his feet and felt the ground shaking again. Then he could see it shaking.
And see it erupting—with a man-sized, chitinous creature rearing up from beneath it, shaking off a cloak of dirt and sand. Cal recognized the thing instantly from the picture his mom had showed him. He remembered a caption: Spiderant, vicious predator of Pandora.
Emerging from hidden tunnels, the spiderant seemed a fusion of bug and scorpion. Unlike a scorpion, the creature had only four legs, its front legs shaped like down-cutting pickaxes. Its shiny, gray-black carapace, seeming eyeless, swept back to a spiky crest. Even if Cal had a weapon, it would be hard to kill something that fully armored.
The thing was at least as big as he was—it was armored and coming fast. Cal knew just what to do.
He turned and ran like hell.
Cal sprinted down the gulch alongside the thin little stream. He heard clattering, shrilling noises behind him, looked back to see now three of them in pursuit, the nearest almost in reach. It struck out with its pickaxe forelimb, slashing down into the soil just behind him. He felt the wind of it on the back of his neck and the ground shuddered under him. If that stabbing forelimb had connected, it would have punched right through his spine and out his f
ront …
That thought gave his legs new energy. He sprinted faster, gasping for air, heart pounding in his ears, looking desperately for escape.
There, to the right—a low boulder, and another above it, almost like a stairs out of the gulch. His only hope.
He leapt onto the lower boulder and, without hesitation, up onto the next one, bounding up the stairlike stones.
The creatures behind him shrieked and hissed and clattered up after him. They were only slowed a little by the rocky stairs.
Cal ran onward, dodging between boulders, and around the pole-like green plants, hoping to lose the spiderants. His breathing was a wheeze now, his eyes blurry with effort. Should have taken track in Phys Training. Instead he’d spent PT sneaking off with his VR helmet.
Maybe this wasn’t real. Maybe he was lost in a VR game. He jumped onto a rock, turned, gasping—and saw the spiderants just four meters away, smashing through a clump of intervening pole-plants, knocking them to flinders with no effort at all.
This was real.
He turned at a roar behind him—and saw three skags clustered near an opening in the side of a low hill of layered gray stone, about five meters away. One of the skags screamed, its mouth splitting into its three jaws, trumpeting like an obscene toothy blossom. And then it charged—
While the spiderants closed in from the opposite direction.
One chance. A rock, no bigger than his fist, under his shoe.
Cal reached down, grabbed the rock, threw it hard at the skag, to make sure it came after him—then turned and jumped right at the carapace of the spiderant just as it rushed him.
He timed it right—jumping past the spiderant’s slashing forelimbs, he came down on its head, used the carapace as a springboard, leapt past the creature’s middle parts—landed in the dirt. Another spiderant was climbing a rock to loom up right in front of him.
Cal dodged to the right, sprinting toward an outcropping, where he ducked down under an overhanging shelf of stone—crouching, he turned to see the skag pack leaping headfirst into the spiderants, the spiderants cutting at them with their pickaxe forelimbs, skags lashing with their claws, blood flying …
Cal turned and crawled away under the overhang, slipped around another rock, ran to the rim of the gulch, dropped down, and ran upstream.
Panting, wiping sweat from his eyes, he stopped after about a hundred meters, and looked back—to see no pursuit. There was a distant squealing of beastly combat.
It worked. He’d turned one group of predators against another. He stood there, breathing hard, his heart still thudding, swept with a feeling of giddy triumph.
But what about the next attack? And it was getting dark out … The long shadows had joined one another, had multiplied into pools of darkness, and the sky had grown indigo and purple, red at the horizon. Night was coming.
What chance did he have to survive it?
“Sure I saw it,” said the old man. Berl ran a filthy hand under his beaked nose, wiping it on his knuckles, and went on. “A white flash in the sky, it was. Not so long after you come down. I’ve seen it before. We’ve had other vehicles explode in orbit …”
Zac felt his heart shrivel in his chest. “You really think that was a big enough flash—it could’ve been a starship?”
“Hell yeah it was a starship,” Berl sniffed.
They were sitting across from one another at a campfire, in a loop of corrugated metal slats tucked into a high narrow notch cut by nature into a butte. Flames painted the old man’s face ghastly yellow and made shadows dance like devils on the rusty walls.
This was Berl’s camp. The ring of metal was what was left of an old mining expedition’s outpost. A spring bubbled up nearby from the ground, and a thick encircling copse of plants offered coolness in the heat of the day. Metal boxes, rusting weapons, odds and ends were piled up, scavenged by the old man from the wastelands.
“Ought to know a starship burning up when I see one,” Berl went on. “I served on ’em. I was crystal feeder for one of the old wormhole jumpers. Mighty hairy, going through them wormholes. You had to take a strong drug, make your mind all hypnotized, to get through it. You didn’t take the drug, why, the wormhole showed you the guts of the universe, and you went crazy mad outta your gourd for real and true. Once we come outta the travel trance and find a couple guys gibbering, and lickin’ the walls. These new starships, with that alien tech, why, you got it easy … Sure I know a spaceship when I see it …”
Old Berl had been alone out here for a while, except for Bizzy, and he’d built up a lot of talk. It was hard to get a word in edgewise. Zac didn’t want to talk about that spacecraft blowing up in orbit anymore. He was going to believe that what the old geezer had seen blowing up wasn’t the Homeworld Bound or, if it was, his family had gotten out in time. If he thought anything else he’d go “gibbering” like those early starship travelers. “You didn’t see any other vehicles come down?”
“Naw—well, I ’spec I saw a streak but it could’ve been burning debris.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Off to the west at least a hunnerd klicks or so.”
“Hmm. You don’t have a radio I could use, at all, do you?”
“Don’t have any such thing. Have something like that, people use it to find you. Steal from you. And worse!”
They were quiet for a while as Berl took a spitted skag flank out of the fire and bit into it while the meat sizzled and popped.
Berl chewed ruminatively, his mouth open, his small reddened eyes never straying long from Zac. He swallowed a big mouthful of meat, drank from a plastic jug, then lifted his head, whistled questioningly to Bizzy, who was crouched at the entrance to the old outpost. Bizzy made a reassuring clicking noise back. “Bizzy says we’re all clear. I was afraid some shit-heel of a bandit spotted us, followed us back. They’d love to cut our throats in our sleep. Anyhow, Bizzy’ll keep watch.”
“You know me well enough yet to tell me how you tamed that Drifter thing?” Zac asked.
“Oh …” The old man touched the strange, alien-tech metal collar around his neck. “Not yet. Tell you someday maybe. If’n I decide I trust you. Which ain’t likely.”
He controlled the beast through that alien collar somehow, Zac guessed …
“You want some more skag meat, boy?” Berl asked.
“No. No that was enough, thanks.”
“Skags’re as much lizard as anything else. Tamed me a skag pup once. But it got hungry and bit off one of my fingers.” He held the maimed hand up for Zac to see—the index finger was just a stump. “So I shot him.”
He patted the shotgun by his side. Behind him, within reach, was the rocket launcher.
Seeing Zac look at the guns, Berl scowled. “Wonder how’m I gonna sleep with you around …”
Zac shrugged. “I don’t snore much.”
“Not what I meant. You might slip over here and choke me dead, so’s you can take what’s mine. I don’t know you. Took a big chance takin’ you in.”
Zac tossed a stick onto the fire. “Berl, I’m a family man. I’m an engineer. I’m not a bandit. You saw what I came down in. I’m an offworlder.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better? Most of these sons of bitches was offworlders once. Some of the worst I met are offworlders. That bastard Crannigan—he’s an offworlder. He’d feed a baby to a skag if it made him a nickel.”
“Who’s Crannigan?”
“Skunk mercenary got a job from the Atlas bunch to locate a … well, somethin’ out here. He ain’t found it yet. He’ll murder to get there too, mark my words.” He grinned, showing gapped teeth. “But he’ll find more than he bargained for. Oh yes. Something’ll be laughin’ at him as it chews him up an’ spits him out …”
Lying on her back in the sealed lifeboat, Marla decided that they’d camped for the night. The bandits were sitting around campfires, laughing, talking, cursing one another, drinking, arguing, giggling, jeering—just out of her line of sight. She
could see the enormous rapacious moon of this hungry world hanging over them, as if it were waiting for a meal. Flamelight fluttered to the right; to the left was darkness broken by patches of moonlight.
It was difficult to see much more from here, with the lifeboat’s hatch shut. It was like a coffin with a transparent lid. The lifeboat was giving her air, somehow; it had given her water from a tube, and another device allowed her to eliminate urine. She’d found a compartment close to her right hand, with several packets of food mash. She’d found a mayday beacon too, in the same compartment—but it appeared to be dead.
Still, she ought to be able to get out of this space tomb. There was a computer that would let her out if she asked it to. But she didn’t want to leave with these thugs surrounding her. The only thing that had kept them from raping her, maybe killing her, was that they couldn’t get in.
Sooner or later, though, they’d sell the lifeboat, and her with it, to someone who’d force it open somehow. And that would be the beginning of the end …
She turned on her side, lifted up on her arms, pressed an ear to the cool transparent hatch, listening. The gruff voices came through now. Some of the men seemed to be singing:
Oh I’ve got a very good friend, a very good friend he’ll be
He’s my best friend now for I’ve run out of meat
He’s got strong legs, does he, and fine strong arms too:
Got fine good meat upon him, go real fine in a stew!
For I’ve run right out of food and he’s
Looking good, awfully good, mighty good … to …
eeeeeeeat!
Much hooting and hilarity at that. “Sing another one!”
But an argument sprang up instead of a song.
“I told ya, you gamble, you lose, you pay, Snotty! Now cut off that fucking testicle or pay me the fucking money!”
“That wasn’t no way a fair one! You rolled the bones, you cheated on it!”
“You gonna pay up or not?”
“I ain’t paying no skagbuggerin’ cheater!”