I stared up into the darkness and sighed.
I was destined to live out my days in the distant analog of the Stone Age. But at least I wasn’t alone.
For the next two days, I watched Bassin enjoy life. Morning consisted of a bracing breakfast of brown rope cakes, followed by standing ankle-deep in the muddy midstream bars below the rapids. I supposed the job was easier because his wooden leg didn’t feel water that had been snow forty-eight hours earlier.
Over and over, Bassin bent down and sifted silt through a round twig basket. At most once each day, he would pluck a muddy ball as big as a walnut or an egg from the basket, examine it with his good eye, then toss it on the stream bank.
After a zesty lunch of rope cakes and water, Bassin gathered his day’s take, if any, then buried it in a hole he had scraped alongside his hut, which he covered with a flat stone. Seven identical muddy stone balls defined his life’s work.
After that, Bassin the Assassin got his sharp stone, and hunted the always-tasty brown root balls. These he located by crawling, nose an inch above the mud, sniffing. After washing the balls in the creek, he strung his harvest from tree limbs to dry, so he could make more rope pancakes. Apparently, the secret to zest and tenderness was proper aging.
Then we slept in the dark.
On the morning of the third day, I pointed upslope. “You’ve got a great career here, Bassin. But the prospects for advancement? Not so great.”
He stared.
I told him, “I’m gonna go prospect for flint. You will absolutely love fire.”
I walked toward the trees that bounded Bassin’s valley.
“Jason!”
I looked back. Bassin shook his head, and made the chomp sign with one hand.
I made the chomp-chomp sign back. “I know. I’ll be careful.”
He pointed at the sun, then pointed at the sky’s midpoint, where the sun would be at noon, then raised his eyebrows.
I nodded, and patted my belly armor. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back by lunchtime.”
He frowned and watched me all the way into the woods, crooked on his leg and stump. His stone-sifting basket dangled from one hand.
Two hours later, I had retraced the path Bassin and I had followed to his hut. The breeze was in my face, I carried a spear I had fashioned by sharpening a fallen branch against a rock, and now I knew what to watch out for.
I resumed my search along the debris perimeter, marking my trail as I went, increasingly sure that no Earthling would ever follow it. It had now been more than three days since the crash. But I had survived. I persuaded myself that the others could be hunkered down somewhere, too.
At eleven hundred by my ’Puter, I had circled around to the point where the debris field arced back upslope. So far, I had found no sign of life more advanced than a dung beetle, not even a monster turd.
To traverse the remaining unexplored perimeter would take until well past noon. But if I shortcut the search, I’d just have to come back after another frigid night.
I sighed.
Bassin had eaten lunch alone before I got there, apparently forever. One meal without me wouldn’t kill him.
I started on around the crash site’s remaining unexplored quadrant. The visibility was as bad here as it had been everywhere else.
Brush crackled.
I froze. This sound was no whisper, it was crash-crash- crash.
I clutched my spear, no thicker than a pool cue, and wondered how it would work on something hungry and forty feet long.
My heart racing, I retraced my steps for a hundred yards. Then I mounted a low boulder cluster and scanned the area.
All I saw was a gray-green brush sea, ten feet tall, quaking in the wind that blew toward me, and split by rare clearings.
Again the wind carried the crackle of snapped branches.
I knelt, froze, and stared toward the crackle. It came from the clearing from which I had retreated.
Something bigger than a backhoe bucket rose above the low treetops. It was an animal head on a thick neck, white and ochre, like a pinto pony.
The head dipped out of sight.
I leaned forward and squinted as the head rose again. It had big, brown eyes, and a broad duck’s bill. Leaves and branches mustached from the bill, and the animal’s lower jaw ground side-to-side as it chewed. Its skin was hide, tufted not with hair so much as with coarse down. Based on the length of the neck above the trees, this animal fit my size estimate of twenty to forty feet long.
The good news was this giant ate plants. The bad news was whatever left the spoor I had found didn’t.
The duck-billed pinto swallowed the last of its mouthful, except for two long, stubborn tendrils.
I stared at them. And blinked.
The tendrils didn’t hang from the animal’s mouth. They dangled from its nostrils, brown, artificial, and secured with rings. The straps disappeared down behind the brush that screened the creature’s body.
I stood, and peered over the brush to see what lay beneath.
Twenty-Three
I stared. Then I blinked. Then I shook my head.
What I saw remained. The pinto stood on massive hind legs, but bent forward on shorter forelegs, with a tail as long as its body balanced behind. I guessed the thing measured twenty-five feet, nose-to-tail.
To dodge calculus, I satisfied the science requirement of my mail-order Masters’ with Paleontology. The animal looked like a teaching-holo reconstruction of a duckbilled dinosaur.
In a world becoming loonier by the second, that almost made sense. The flora I had seen, conifers, angiosperm plants, was analogous to what existed on Earth during the late Cretaceous. This planet fell within the same sliver of cosmic creation that Earth did. Similar mass, and close enough to its star to liquefy water, but not so close as to boil it away. It was not so strange that parallel life would evolve in two identical petri dishes.
One fact was strange, however. Men like Bassin hadn’t evolved on Earth until more than sixty million years after the last duckbilled hadrosaur died off.
The puzzle grew stranger as I looked below.
Beneath the pinto’s great head a figure knelt, head down alongside the path I had just followed, clutching the dangling straps in one hand.
Hand. It was a man. But a man unlike Bassin. This man was black-bearded, booted, and his shoulders and chest were plated in coppery armor. But unmistakably he was another man.
I staggered back against a twisted tree trunk.
The man tugged off an armored gauntlet, then reached down, and rubbed the soil with bare fingers. Where some idiot had industriously left broken twigs, stone cairns, and Eternad bootprints.
The man stood, hands on hips, and rubbed the chin beneath his beard. Six foot six, he wore brown leather trousers thick enough to deflect modest battle axes, and a matching tunic beneath his armor. From each hip hung a holstered pistol so large that its muzzle nearly reached his knee. Two more pistols just as big were strapped to his chest, cross-draw, over his breastplate. A sword hilt diagonaled from a scabbard strung across his broad back. A scar as fat and brown as a nightcrawler creased his nose bridge, and he scratched it with three fingers and the stub of a fourth.
Tough neighborhood.
Blackbeard patted his monster’s flank, then drank from a skin bag hung from the beast’s saddle. All the while, his eyes traced up the hill, along the path I had followed back to these rocks.
I ducked behind the tree, and peeked out from behind it to watch him.
He stared at the outcrop that hid me. Then he threw back his head, cupped his hands, and bellowed.
Small and distant, another duckbilled head rose above the brush, this one dappled gray. Then another, and another. Human bellows answered.
One minute later, thirty duckbills and riders thundered toward the big bearded man, crashing through brush like armored personnel carriers.
I slid down the outcrop’s rear slope, then sprinted, away from Bassin’s valley. If these
guys turned out friendly, I could always find my way back to Bassin. If they were unfriendly, Bassin didn’t need me bringing them home for lunch.
My breath grew ragged as I picked my way over boulders, and wove through brittle trees.
A middling tree to my front splayed flat beneath a monster’s foot.
I skidded to a stop, spun left, but that way another tree rustled.
I ducked right, and the barrel-chested, black-bearded warrior on the pinto crashed into sight ten yards from me. His mount reared. He reined it with one hand, drew one of his chest pistols, and I stared down a bore as wide as a carrot.
Blackbeard shouted at me.
I had no more clue what Blackbeard said than I had when Bassin spoke, but by Blackbeard’s tone and gestures, “Drop your spear” was a fair guess.
In that instant, a half dozen mounted warriors surrounded me, pistols drawn. Their mounts pranced, snorted, and stomped feet big enough to squash me.
I held my little sharp stick between my thumb and forefinger, away from my body, knelt, and laid it on the ground. I raised my empty hand, palm out, and said, “Friend.”
Six pistols fired as one.
Twenty-Four
Few rounds can penetrate eternads. But armor doesn’t insulate the wearer from physics like a Firewitch does. Six outsized bullets whacked my chestplate like a blindsiding linebacker, and the impact whiplashed my head forward. Without my helmet, my chin struck my helmet-connection ring, and I dropped like a boxer KO’d by a hard right.
I awoke strapped like a bedroll across a duckbill’s butt, face-down behind its rider, with my hands bound at the small of my back. This new guy had hair as coarse as Blackbeard’s, but as gray as the plain armor he was wearing—I’d been handed off to one of the lower ranks. He and the rest of the cavalry rode their mounts in unornamented, stirruped saddles. I was still in my armor, my face against the beast’s dapple-gray flank.
Branches slapped my face. The animal was lumbering through the foothills’ thick brush.
If you ever vacation here, bring nose plugs. Whatever I might estimate as a duckbill’s gut diameter, it’s big enough to ferment gas by the blimpful. And bring bug repellent. Ticks as big as quarters crabbed beneath my ride’s feather-like fur, inches from my eyes. I shuddered at what might already have crawled down my armor, then tried squeezing my sore chin against my suit’s neck ring to close the gap—but gave it up as a bad deal.
I craned my neck. The sun had sunk so low that hours must have passed.
The duckbill that carried me stopped, but I could hear others crashing through brush, and I heard rock slide.
I was warm enough under my armor, but I shivered at the sound. The cavalry had followed my trail back to Bassin’s valley, and now they were descending the scree slope into it.
Bam.
One gunshot.
I squeezed my eyes shut.
Bassin had warned me not to leave his valley. But I was smarter than he was. That simple little man had saved my life, and now my stupidity had cost him his.
An hour later, I heard shouts, then the sounds of snorting duckbills. I craned my neck.
Four cavalrymen spurred their mounts, as they scrabbled back up the valley’s steep slope. One man held high a lunch-bag-sized sack that dripped muddy water. They had pillaged Bassin’s pitiful homestead, killed him, and had even stolen his meager life savings.
I hung my head and felt a lump in my throat.
Whup.
Something pliant and heavy got slung across my duckbill’s back, forward of me, hard enough that the beast snorted. Probably a sack of muddy stones.
“Jason!”
I twisted toward the whisper.
Bassin lay belly-down across my duckbill, his hands bound behind his back, like mine were, his face a foot from mine. He smiled.
I could have kissed his muddy lips.
I said, “I’m sorry. This is my fault.”
One of the quarter-sized ticks crawled across the duckbill’s hide, toward Bassin’s chin. Before the bug could sink claspers into him, Bassin stretched his neck, bit the insect in two, then spit the pieces into the brush.
I said, “Suit yourself. But protein’s part of a balanced diet.”
He stared at me. Wherever we were going, it was going to be a quiet trip.
Two hours later, the posse had ridden down out of the hills, and made camp out on the plains.
My rider hefted Bassin off the duckbill, carried him like a flour sack to a flat rock, unbound Bassin’s hands, and handed him a water bag.
Then he did the same to me, but staked me down so far from Bassin that we couldn’t talk to one another. Segregating prisoners was standard procedure, but our captors evidently didn’t know that Bassin and I didn’t communicate well enough to escape if we had Houdini’s own lockpicks.
Our minder looked older than Blackbeard, and his bushy eyebrows were as gray as his long hair.
I drank, wiped my mouth on my gauntlet’s snozz pad, and said, “Thanks.”
He scowled, and tapped the sword hilt at his shoulder. “Friend” evidently translated in their language to fightin’ words. “Thanks” seemed little better. I shut up rather than press my luck.
He pointed at my leg armor and pantomimed.
I dropped trou and peed, as instructed. I watered the brown grass, inspected my tackle for giant ticks, then buttoned up. My minder re-bound my hands, slung me back on the rock like a duffel, and roped my leg hobbles to a driven stake. I sat up and looked across the twilight at the endless prairie. If I could get untied, where would I go, anyway?
Something flicked across the darkening sky. A bird? I looked closer, and my heart leapt. Jeeb hovered twenty feet away, barely visible, his carapace chameleoned to match the gray clouds.
I whispered, “Return after dark.”
The cavalry unloaded their mounts, hobbled them, then set them to graze. Downwind, mercifully.
Someone made a fire, from what looked like dried dino dung patties. The men sat around their fire, talking, laughing, and eating while sparks spiraled up into the cold night. A half dozen hide bags, which one of the animals had carried, the men kept close beside the fire.
Blackbeard tapped three men’s shoulders, pointed, and set them out as perimeter pickets.
The smell of roasting meat drifted to me and my mouth moistened. Evidently prisoners got water. Period.
Jeeb’s emergency default setting was to track me. But without my helmet antennae to boost my suit transponder’s signal, it was little wonder finding me had taken him days. Especially since my transponder had wasted days broadcasting straight up from the narrow funnel that was Bassin’s valley.
A TOT chassis will survive a Brilliant Bomb near- miss that would vaporize a GI in Eternads, and TOT electronics withstand even a nuke’s electromagnetic pulse. Still, Jeeb had survived, so the others could have, too.
Finally, Jeeb tiptoed to me through the dark on four of his six legs, and cocked his optics.
How to use him? Tomorrow, when the others might be active, I would send him to search for them.
But for now? A TOT’s manipulators couldn’t untie knots, even if I had somewhere to go. But a J-series TOT has many talents.
I pointed my hands toward my ear, then nodded toward the conversing horsemen. “Listen. Learn.” I pointed at my earpiece. “Teach.”
Jeeb scuttled toward the circled men, then hunkered down just beyond the firelight.
I lay on my back, not on my six-shot-sore chest, popped a Sedtab out of my breastplate dispenser, and swallowed it dry.
Within minutes, I felt my eyelids droop. I haven’t drugged, not even Sedtabs, since one terrible day, light years away, in Basic Training. But I had a busy night ahead.
By morning, Jeeb squatted six-legged alongside my head. He unplugged, then shut down in the grass, impersonating a local rock.
My minder rolled out of his bed robe, cocked a shaggy-browed eye my way, and muttered, “Sleep well, Fisheater?”
&n
bsp; Overnight, Jeeb’s Nano’Puters took in, then decrypted, my captors’ language, based on frequency and recurrence of eavesdropped sounds and word groups. Then Jeeb had plugged into my communications ’Puter, and force-fed me the download through my earpiece while I slept.
My jailer walked five yards into the grass, turned his back, and peed.
I rolled onto my side and tasked Jeeb. “Find Ord. Bring Ord.”
Jeeb telescoped his wings from beneath his carapace, and spiraled up into the clear morning. In a blink, he became a speck indistinguishable from a bird.
I glanced over at Bassin, who sat hobbled to his distant rock, his good leg crossed over his stump. He stared at me, head cocked, like he was making mental notes. When he noticed I was looking at him, he smiled and waved.
Bouncing across the frigid grassland of Bren—that’s what these folks called their garden-spot planet—tied to a farting dinosaur’s butt is better when you’re eavesdropping.
After an hour’s ride south, Blackbeard dropped back from the column’s head, and brought his pinto alongside my minder’s dapple gray.
Blackbeard leaned out of his saddle, rapped my shoulder plate, and said, “What did this Fisheater offer last night, Yulen?”
I twisted so I could watch them talk.
My minder shrugged. “One word, Captain. Gibberish.”
“A Fisheater who doesn’t bargain? Even when a Casuni may take his life?”
Life? I twisted my wrists inside my bonds.
Yulen, my minder, threw back his head and boomed a laugh. “Scratch a Marini, find a haggler.” He paused. “He is peculiar. I’ve never seen such armor.”
“He’s Marini, all right. Only a Fisheater magazine train could make such an explosion.”
Now that I understood their language, I still wasn’t understanding much of what these two were discussing. But I understood that the explosion when we crashed was what had attracted these guys. And I understood that they might kill me.
Yulen fingered his reins. “Fisheater wagons would need a month to travel from the Frontier to the Stone Hills. And where’s the rest of this one’s Legion? Where’s their gun peloton?”
Blackbeard shrugged. “Maybe the explosion sent his Clan mates back to hell.”
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