by IGMS
Gruber jumped over a couple of fallen trees and kept moving. The San Ysidro glided slowly in pursuit, quick and graceful for its size, coming at an angle. Gruber realized that the thing was trying to drive him into the undergrowth, where he'd be surrounded on all sides by easily flammable material. "What, you had to be smart as well as big?" he muttered to himself. Meanwhile it came on without making a sound, though he could hear the fire building in its throat and chest, rustling like terrible wings.
Gruber knew his tapper was useless against something this large, even if it let him get close enough to try it. The four Winged Monkeys were all he had. He got another one ready, turning it over and over again in his right hand as he watched the D come on, banging its way through the trees as if it barely knew they were there.
When the San Ysidro had a clear path it sped up, closing fast as it prepared to let loose another blast. Gruber got a proper two-seam cut fastball grip on the Winged Monkey and reared back, hurling it dead-center straight into the flames and fangs of the thing's open mouth. He didn't wait to see it go down the San Ysidro's gullet, being far too busy hurling himself to one side. Flames shot over him as he tumbled backward down the hillside, trying to spot some cover somewhere as he rolled. He fetched up hard against a tree and sat up slowly, struggling to catch his breath. He'd lost his helmet somewhere, and one of his overall sleeves was on fire. He rubbed the yellow fabric in the dirt until it was out, barely noticing what he was doing. Other things had his attention.
The whump, when he heard it, was barely audible. He saw the San Ysidro stop still, not dead or disabled, by any means, but definitely looking puzzled. It hacked once, like a cat with a hairball, then bellowed in decided discontent. The trickle of fire that splashed out this time had a flickering green streak to it.
Gruber pushed himself to his feet and let the tree trunk keep him there. His shoulder hurt like hell. He whispered "Hold still, you bastard," and threw two more Monkeys, one after the other, as fast and hard as the pain would let him. The first bounced off when the San Ysidro raised its head, and blew uselessly when it hit the ground; but the other one played crazy pinball in a nest of cranial spikes and burst right above the thing's left eye, surrounding its whole head and torso in a thick grey-white fog. The San Ysidro started to take a step, but didn't finish; instead both hind legs jerked stiff and stopped moving, causing it to fall over on one side. The spikes on its right hip and shoulder plowed deep furrows in the soil, and it shook its head up and down, rumbling to itself. Gruber had seen horses in pain do the same thing.
For whatever reason the Heap was still parked where he'd left it, so he began to circle back through the trees, hoping to get there without being spotted by any of the meth-heads standing around the wrecked and smoking veranda. No such luck; fifty yards short of his goal he heard the jagged tear of a semiautomatic rifle firing, and sprays of dirt and splintering treebark stitched a line between him and his goal. Gruber found himself pinned down behind a fallen sapling that wasn't nearly big enough to be good cover. Every time he moved, every time he showed so much as his bald spot, the chips flew; and that log couldn't afford to lose too many chips. He had one Winged Monkey left, but bitterly concluded that it was no help. He couldn't have reached the gunmen from here anyway, even if his shoulder wasn't screaming; and standing up to try would be suicide.
"Quit firing, already!" he shouted. "The Sheriff knows I'm here! You want to get the needle for a murder charge, instead of six years on some punkass meth conviction?"
"Go to hell, asshole!" It was the Watkins kid shouting. "You wouldn't even be my first today!"
Gruber thought about meth paranoia and burned-down houses, abruptly certain that Johanna and Eddie Watkins were never going to see the inside of the Trinity County Courthouse. He shivered.
Then he heard the Heap's engine suddenly rev to a roar, and had his mouth open to yell to Connie not to try and pick him up, that they'd both be exposed the moment she opened the door for him. But in a moment he realized that wasn't her plan.
The nerve-rending wail of screechers came on as she gunned the Heap straight for the house, picking up speed fast. The tweakers fired at it, of course, but the Heap had been built to stand off flames, claws, fangs and pretty much anything short of an RPG. When the guys with the walrus mustaches realized the howling metal monster wasn't slowing down, not even a little bit, they threw away their guns and bailed, running for the trees. The Latino followed a moment later. Only Larry Watkins kept firing, his eyes wide and insane.
With nobody paying attention to him anymore, it was safe for Gruber to stick his head out: even at this distance the screechers were so loud he had to put his hands over his ears. He watched the whole scene in disbelief, tensing at the inevitable collision. Then -- not twenty feet from the house -- Connie must have braked hard and spun the steering wheel all the way to the left, or nearly so, because the Heap suddenly went into a great skidding turn that almost tipped it over, trading back for front as the rear end came round and three tons of reinforced metal hammered what was left of the veranda into kindling. Watkins vanished somewhere in the debris.
The Heap came to a stop. So did the screechers.
Gruber jumped to his feet and ran full-tilt toward the house. He couldn't see Connie through the fissured, pockmarked glass of the Heap's front window, and for a moment he was certain that one of the bullets had gotten through, that she was lying dead on the floor of the cab and it was all his goddamn fault. But before he got there the Heap lurched once, then again, and finally detached itself from whatever piece of the house it had gotten caught on, moving forward smoothly. In a dim, distant way he realized he was shouting.
Connie slowed the Heap to a crawl when she spotted him. As Gruber pulled open the driver-side door and jumped in she moved over, making room for him to take the wheel. He stomped on the gas without bothering to belt himself in.
"You better be okay to drive, and not in shock or anything," she said. "I've got something to take care of here."
He turned to look at her and ask what, but a shadow at the corner of his eye made him pull his head back just in time to see the San Ysidro standing smack in the middle of the flattened dirt road they'd driven up, a century or so earlier. It looked profoundly pissed-off, and if it didn't know that Gruber was the human being responsible for its pain and confusion, then he was in the wrong line of work.
Two seconds, three choices. He could jam on the brakes and pulp both of them against the windshield -- Connie wasn't belted in, either -- or he could ram the D and make it even angrier, or he could veer round it one way or the other and pray not to front-end a tree before he managed to pull the Heap back onto the road. Connie had the McNaughton on her lap, messing with it, doing something he couldn't figure, but Gruber knew she hadn't seen the San Ysidro yet and there was no time to shout an explanation. He picked Door Number Three, threw all his weight on cranking the wheel to the right, crashed into a blackberry bramble and came out the other side just as a blast from the San Ysidro sent it up in flames. Gruber had the wheel to hold onto. Connie didn't. She screamed as inertia threw her against his aching right shoulder, and he yelled as she hit him, the pain causing him to white out for a moment. His foot slipped off the accelerator and the Heap slowed down, half on the road and half off.
When he could focus again the Heap had stopped, and the San Ysidro had climbed on top of it. The D was hammering on the cab with everything it had -- wings, spikes, tails, and claws -- trying to get in. It brought its head down even with the side window, and Gruber found himself staring straight into one of its glaring yellow eyes from ten inches away.
It knew, all right. It knew who he was, why he was there, what he had done to it, how he had felt about doing it; and it knew he wasn't going to get away. Not this time.
It reared its head back, opened its jaws, and let loose hell.
The Heap was completely fireproof, of course, like every D-retrieval vehicle -- flames couldn't even get under the door, normally -
- but the designers hadn't done any tests after shooting one all the hell up, slamming it into a house, and driving it through a bunch of scrub and fallen tree limbs. Gruber saw tiny fingers of flame squeezing through cracks in the windshield, and smelled insulation and wiring burning inside the dash. The air in the cab was so hot it hurt to breathe: Gruber couldn't guess what was going to kill them first, roasting to death or smoke inhalation. He turned the key in the ignition, but couldn't even hear the starter motor turning over. If the San Ysidro' fire had gotten through the engine compartment seals, it was all over.
For a single moment, he rested his head on the wheel and -- only for a moment -- closed his eyes.
A sudden raw blast of heat on his face made him aware that Connie had opened the window on her side. He looked and saw her leaning out through it, hurling wyvern eggs at the San Ysidro as fast as she could pull them out of the keeper. No, not eggs -- blazing orange hatchlings, literally biting at her fingers as she scooped them up and threw them. Gruber screamed at her to get down, but she paid him no heed, not until the McNaughton was completely empty. Then she slumped back onto her seat and tried to roll the window up, but couldn't get a grip on the handle. Despite the D-schmear, her crabbed-up fingers were a mass of red and blistered burns, and both hands bled from a dozen bad nips and slices. He reached past and rolled the window up for her, certain that any second they were both going to be incinerated by the San Ysidro's fire.
Only that wasn't happening. Something else was.
The San Ysidro was howling. The cab shook hard as it lurched away, letting go. Gruber saw it rolling and thrashing on the ground, speckled with bright moving sparks, as if its own fire was leaking out from the inside.
Connie was laughing hysterically, her wounded hands curled in her lap. "How do you like being on the receiving end for once, hey? You like that?"
Gruber finally understood what she had done. D's -- all the D's -- were as fiercely territorial as different species of ants . . . and newborn wyverns had teeth that could puncture Kevlar, a mean body temperature hotter than boiling water, and a drive to eat that wouldn't stop until they'd consumed five or six times their own body weight. One of them, the San Ysidro could have handled. Seven or eight, even, with some permanent damage. But more than sixty, and every single tiny mouth eating its way straight in from wherever it started?
Gruber and Connie sat in the Heap's cab, saying nothing, and watched the San Ysidro die by inches. It took nearly an hour before it stopped moving. Somewhere in there Gruber got out the first aid kit and did what he could for Connie's hands.
It was full night out by the time it was over. Connie was slumped beside him, almost bent double, her arms crossed palm-up in front of her chest. They both felt hollow, still half in shock and no longer amped on adrenaline.
She mumbled, "Nobody should be allowed to have them."
"Nobody is," Gruber said. "But they have them anyway." Connie did not seem to have heard him.
"You're a walking mess," he said with weary affection. Her dark-brown hair was scorched short on the right side, just as her right cheek and ear were singed, and all of her right arm had a first degree burn inside her coverall sleeve. He didn't want to think about what was under the bandages on both her hands, but for now the kit's painkiller was keeping the nerves properly numb. That was good. "Thanks for saving my dumbass life. Twice, even."
Connie gave him a wary sideways glance. Most of her right eyebrow was gone too. "Trick compliment?"
"No trick. That was smart, cranking up the McNaughton so the wyverns would hatch out faster. I wouldn't have thought of that one." He rubbed his right shoulder, which was out-and-out killing him, now that it had regained his attention.
"I had to do something when the San Ysidro showed up. It was the only thing that occurred to me."
"You could have peeled out of there, like I told you to."
She shook her head. "I'm not actually so good about following orders. I was going to tell you that tomorrow."
He thought for a silent while. Then he said, "Consider the message conveyed."
A minute later he pushed the door open and stepped out. "Come on. The Heap's not going anywhere, and we've got a job to finish."
"What, we're going back?" She stiffened in the seat, leaning away from his extended hand.
"Not a chance. I think you must have creamed Junior pretty good, or else we'd have had company by now. But it's anybody's guess whether those other idiots came back or not." He made a brusque hurry up gesture, and turned away once he saw she was finally starting to move. "So no, we're not going back. What we're going to do is hike down to 299. Somewhere around the turnoff we're going to find Trager or one of his guys. They were expecting us hours ago, they'll be looking. After we tell them what went down we can get you to Mountain Community Medical."
"You too," Connie said.
"Yeah, me too."
He stood where the San Ysidro had finally ceased thrashing, and looked down at the bloody, riddled corpse. Somehow it looked even bigger, splayed out dead in the darkness. Connie stopped a few feet behind him.
"Hey, trainee. How long before the baby wyverns wake up and start eating their way back out?"
"I have no idea," she said, looking a little worried.
"Good to learn there's something about D's you don't know." Despite the pounding snarl in his shoulder, he realized he felt happier than he had in months. Maybe years. "The answer, for your information, is twelve to fifteen hours. Plenty of time for somebody else to come here and handle this mess, and good luck to them."
He started off the way they'd first come, hunching forward slightly as he walked to keep his torso from swinging too much. Connie caught up with him, matching his pace. The stars were out, and it wasn't hard to find their way.
Neither of them said anything for more than twenty minutes. Then Connie spoke up. "They had a San Ysidro black. Can you believe it?"
"There's a lot of people who'll be asking that one," Gruber nodded. "From the Feds on down. Get ready to star in one hell of an investigation."
Connie stopped walking. "Oh my god" she whispered. "Oh no. What are my parents going to say? I can't tell them about this! I mean --"
"Nice try," Gruber grinned at her. "Parents or no, hands or no, you're still writing up the report. If you can't type, you can dictate."
She tried to kick him in the shin, but he managed to get out of range. The first time, anyway.
The Mystery of Miranda
by David A. Simons
Artwork by Scott Altmann
I learned about the canyon from Shelley, an ex I hadn't seen or thought about for fifteen years.
I almost deleted the message unread when I saw who it was from. But Shelley being Shelley, she'd known just what to say to get my attention.
"I've found something," she began, "which might interest you."
She sent the message from the surface of Miranda, one of Uranus' inner moons, where she was trailing a team of miners on a geological survey. Deep inside Miranda's Chevron Valley, they'd stumbled upon the rim of a previously uncharted canyon. It was narrow, crescent-shaped, mostly obscured by shadow, missed by both the Voyager and Bard probes. The miners scanned a few rock samples at the lip, found nothing which interested them, and moved on.
But Shelley had lingered. She'd dropped in a stream of radar balls, constructing a crude map of the canyon's interior. When she saw the results, she didn't share them with the miners. She sent the map directly to me.
It was the deepest canyon in the solar system. Twenty-three kilometers, straight down, from surface to floor. Three times deeper than the Hebes Chasma on Mars, twice as deep as the Herschel crater on Mimas, deeper even than the ice rifts of Tethys. A dark void in the ground, like an open mouth, plunging to depths never encountered by man.
The moment I received Shelley's message, I began making plans. I would be the first to reach the canyon's floor.
"Ready whenever you are, boss," said Wil. He and Katherine stoo
d ten meters back from the canyon's rim, decked out in the latest UltraThins, kicking at the dusty ground impatiently.
It was morning, if there is such a thing in the outer solar system. Uranus hung low in the sky behind me, casting a green glow over the jagged peaks of Chevron Valley. To my right sat our lander, its feet braced against the icy ground, the climbing rope extruding from its belly, drawn taut over the white-gray surface rock. And directly in front of me, the canyon beckoned -- a thin black ribbon, snaking across Miranda's ragged landscape.
I was ready, too. I'd tossed the rope's weighted free end over the rim fifteen minutes ago, double-checking the connections as they slid by; it should now be settled at the bottom. But Wil's announcement wasn't meant for me, it was meant for the fourth member of our party.
Shelley.
As a quid pro quo for telling me -- and only me -- about the canyon, I'd agreed to bring her on the climb and let her collect rock samples for her lab. As I'd feared, she was already slowing us down.
Shelley's pressure suit was one of the old, clunky beasts I'd given her on Mars fifteen years ago. She'd loaded it up with a belt full of terrestrial geology tools -- chisels, sonic scanners, and portable mass specs -- and now she strapped two enormous sample bins to her air tanks, tripling her width.
"I wouldn't carry all that mass," I said mildly.
"The gravity here is less than one percent g," she retorted. "I weigh one pound. I think I can handle it."
True, but if she filled those bins with rocks, her lateral momentum would be unwieldy. I shrugged. I had my diamond knife. If she slowed us down, I'd just cut the sample bins free.
I switched to the group frequency. "Shelley's radar map shows nine ledges on the north wall. We'll rappel down the rope, single file, ledge to ledge. Stay above me, and don't let your speed exceed three meters per second. Clear?"