Project U.L.F.

by Stuart Clark

  He tapped Byron once on the shoulder and the other man spun round in alarm, his weapon ending up right under Par’s nose. Par turned his head away, not only to get it out of the line of fire but also to silently indicate where they should go. Byron looked and saw an ancient tree. At its base, a vast and sprawling network of roots grew nearly ten feet above the ground, some as thick as the branches high above. Without a spoken word between them and without making a sound, they crept towards it.

  Whatever it was that moved beyond their vision below the ferns, it made no move to attack them. Both men could hear the sounds behind them and then see the ferns twitching to their right and left as the thing raced around out of sight. Both had the same ominous feeling that they were being toyed with, that they were being shepherded toward the tree and it was there that they would be finished. For a moment Par had the horrible feeling that he’d made exactly the decision that whatever it was that zigzagged behind them had hoped for. The pair of them exchanged a glance and the look he got from Byron told him the older man was thinking the same.

  To their relief, when they reached the gnarled and twisted ash-white roots nothing happened. Nothing took their legs out from underneath them. Nothing reached down from above to carry them away. They looked at each other in surprise and then, remembering why they had come here in the first place, scrambled quickly up the sinuous growths.

  As they climbed a part of whatever had followed them appeared above the ferns behind them. It was a single slender projection which moved with a swaying, serpentine seductiveness and it looked to the two men like a single black billiard ball had been set in the tip. Beneath this there were two small orifices located over two flanges of flesh which wiggled in the air like fingers.

  Byron, who had seen some exotic creatures in his time leaned forward for a closer look. “What the…?”

  “Be careful,” Par had warned him. “We don’t know what that does.”

  A membrane blinked over the billiard ball. It was looking at them, probably asking itself the same half-question in its own head.

  Whatever owned the fleshy periscope squeaked in exclamation and then the eyeball, the nostrils, the whole strange appendage withdrew quickly out of sight and the creature streaked away from them, twitching ferns as it went with comic results. Byron and Par looked at each other, astonished, and then broke into fits of laughter.

  The rest of their day had been quiet as far as encounters were concerned. However, quiet was not a word that Par would use to describe their movements through the forest. Perhaps the reason that they had seen so little alien life was because, with the amount of noise they were making as they double-timed it through the brush, anything in their path would have heard them coming a mile away and fled. If it had not, then the look of grim determination on Byron’s face would have been a good reason to reconsider.

  Now they stopped to satisfy the most basic of human needs, hunger and thirst. Par was grateful. He had been hungry since mid-morning. Now he was famished. “How much further?” he mumbled through a mouthful of food while reaching for a water bottle.

  “Not far,” Byron said dispassionately, sliding his jacket sleeve back over the wristwatch.

  When he was finished, Byron stood and swung his small pack onto his back, indicating it was time to leave. Par said nothing, just followed his lead and fell into step behind Byron when he brushed past him and set off through the trees.

  They continued at a more sedate pace, knowing they would make their objective by dusk. Once there, they would have a safe haven for the night. Exactly when they stripped the ship’s hyperdrive would be up to them. Byron was just pondering that dilemma as they began to make their way out of the forest. Through the thinning trees they could see the two suns low in the sky, dropping back to the horizon like flares, but on a planetary scale.

  Byron’s estimated time of arrival at the ship had not taken into account what he saw in front of him now. For the last fifteen minutes the terrain they had covered had been relatively flat and Byron had no reason to expect anything different. He had no idea how wrong he could be. In front of them stood a colossal mountain of earth. Not just a mound of earth, a mountain, in the literal sense of the word. Byron looked at his watch, thinking he must have made some mistake, but the coordinates he had for the mining ship suggested that he head directly toward, and up, that mountain.

  “Can’t we bypass it? Go around it?” Par asked, looking at it in disbelief.

  Byron checked the suns in the sky. “Take too long,’ he said. “It’ll be dark by the time we get to the other side. Besides, if we go over it we’re close enough that the view from the top will show us exactly where the ship is.”

  Par couldn’t argue with that. “I don’t think there’s a lot in it if we go around it or over it anyway,” he said in a lame attempt to convince himself that going over the top was a good idea. Annoyed at this new obstacle, the pair of them broke from the trees with a new determination.

  There was something strange about the mountain. Byron registered it immediately. It was unique, not only in its appearance but also by its presence. It was the highest point of land for miles around. He felt his stomach knot inside him. The unnaturalness of it spooked him.

  The mountain was covered in plants. Bushes and ferns packed together so densely that it was difficult to see a clear path through them. The going would be difficult. Reluctantly, Byron unsheathed his knife and pressed on.

  His feeling of uneasiness never left him. As they climbed, they found their feet constantly falling into divots and ruts. There was no way this structure was natural. Years of weathering and erosion would have reduced the moguls and imperfections in the surface to a different, smoother relief.

  Despite their reservations, the coordinates stored in the wristwatch suggested that they were close and that they should continue climbing. The foliage closed in on them, making progress slow and robbing them of sight of the summit. As they hacked their way through it, dusk was succeeded by twilight.

  “I’ve gotta take a breather,” Par said, throwing his knife so that it stuck blade first in the ground, handle quivering. Byron looked at him. Despite the rapidly falling temperature, dark patches on Par’s jacket indicated that he was sweating profusely. His forehead glinted with moisture as it caught the pale starlight. Byron sheathed his own knife. They would rest for a while. It would give them a chance to catch their breath and attack the vegetation with a new vigor, vegetation which was now so thick it had brought them to an almost standstill.

  Byron pulled back the sleeve on his jacket to check the co-ordinates again.

  “Are you sure that thing’s right?” Par asked him. “This whole thing just doesn’t feel right at all to me.”

  Byron looked at the watch and said nothing, just frowned. Par looked at him expectantly and then, realizing he wasn’t going to get an answer, turned his back. He was sure they were close, they’d been climbing for over an hour and a half. He began to weave and wade his way through the bushes to their left on a course perpendicular to their ascent. Maybe there was an easier way to the top just a little way around.

  “That’s odd,” Byron said behind him. “According to this we’re right where the ship should be. Which means that…”

  “Oh, I’ve got it,” Par joked back at him. “It’s hanging in a tree right above our heads…like the shuttle was!”

  The idea was preposterous. The deep space mining ships were gargantuan in their dimensions. So large that they had to be constructed entirely in space, their size would not permit take-offs and landings. They parked in stationary orbits above the planet surface to allow smaller ships to load or unload their cargo.

  In much the same way as the early ship-builders would never comprehend the scale and the sophistication of the vessels to follow, so the early pioneers of space travel would marvel at the enormity of a deep-space miner, or DSM as they were called. A common statistic often quoted was that the Saturn V rocket, the rocket that had first carried man
to the moon and the largest spaceship known in the twentieth century, would fit in the cargo hold of a DSM two hundred times over.

  Byron didn’t hear Par, “…We’re right on top of it,” he finished in whispered disbelief.

  “Is that it, Byron? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? That it’s hanging around here somewhere.” Par was now out of sight, only the sway of plants marked his passing.

  No. That wasn’t what Byron was trying to tell him at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.

  Spurred into action, Byron dropped to a crouch. His answer, if his suspicions were correct, lay down here, on the ground.

  He reached out with a hand and noticed he was trembling. Grabbing the stem of a nearby fern, he ran his hand down it in the darkness until he touched the ground. He tried another, and another, to confirm to himself that his finding was consistent, not some fluke of nature. They were all the same. The ferns were growing out of the ground at angles, all different kinds of angles. Byron knew this wasn’t right. One of the first things a U.L.F. trapper noticed, simply because it was glaringly obvious, was that no matter what planetary system you were in, regardless of how exotic the flora and fauna was you encountered, plants followed one basic rule. They grew straight up out of the ground. They might then creep along the floor or take on some elaborate shape as they twined themselves around something else, but that basic fact remained, the point at which the stem entered the soil, the stem was always in a vertical position.

  Not here.

  In Byron’s head the pieces all began to fit together. The reason the mountain looked unnatural was because it was unnatural. It had been created when the DSM Nebula IV, or a part of it at least, had crash landed here. Being of such a huge mass with such inertia, it was unlikely that the ship would have come to an instant halt. The impact would have created a huge crater and the ship would then have carved its way through the earth, sloughing it off like a strip of green carpet.

  It was unfortunate for the pair that their approach had brought them this way. The mountain on which they now stood was all the earth the ship had churned up as it had ground to a halt. That accounted for the ripples under their feet and the fact that the vegetation was so dense. The plants had literally been forced next to each other as the earth that they grew on was shifted and packed together. Had they come from any other direction, Byron was sure they would have seen the tail end of the DSM long before they reached it. If all of his assumptions were correct, then that ship was just over the peak of this giant mound of earth.

  In utter frustration, Byron began to push the stems away with his hands and found that he could clear a space wide enough for his head. Encouraged, he forged forward, putting his head and then his shoulders into the opening he had created. It was hard work but slowly he managed to crawl through the undergrowth.

  If someone had told him how far away they had been when they had stopped he would not have believed them. The distance was only a few feet, but the foliage had been so dense that they could see nothing beyond it. After not even a body length of crawling, he was through. In front of him lay perhaps a foot of grass and then a lip, and beyond that lip, he was sure, lay their prize.

  He pulled himself up to it and what he saw overawed him. It was exactly how he had envisaged it, but the devastation was almost beyond his comprehension.

  Perhaps a hundred feet below him was the roof of the DSM. It was not the whole ship, the cargo hold had obviously been jettisoned in space, but regardless, it dwarfed the Santa Maria in comparison. It had ploughed straight through the surface soil and deep into the bedrock below, a white stone that looked much like chalk. A scree of the rock had formed under the precipice Byron peered over. Collected together as the ship had surged forward and then smashed into boulders, rocks and pebbles under the crushing weight, the stone now formed a halo of white around the nose of the ship which was buried deeply in its center. But the thing that caught Byron’s eye most was the trail of destruction the ship had left in its wake as it had slid, to this, its final resting place. The channel it had carved out of the earth ran as far as the eye could see and the exposed rock beneath gave it the appearance of a giant white scar on an otherwise untouched savannah. Byron stared at it in wonder. It was a miracle that anyone had survived to contact the CSETI in the first place.

  “Hey Par!” he yelled. “Come here and take a look at this.”

  From above him came a croak and a throaty clicking. Byron’s mouth went dry. He realized in that instant, that in being so intent on the objective, he had made the most basic of mistakes.

  * * * * *

  Par heard the shout and wondered what Byron could have done in his absence that was so important. For the briefest of moments he thought about continuing with his own explorations but Byron rarely called unless he had good reason to. Reluctantly he turned on his heel and began trying to figure out the way back.

  “Come here and take a look at this,” Byron yelled again.

  “Yeah, alright,” Par shouted back. “I’m coming.”

  Finding his way back proved to be difficult. In the moonlight, the plants seemed to look the same whichever way he turned. The only way he was sure that he was back where he had started was that his blade was still stuck in the earth where he had left it. Byron was nowhere to be seen. “Byron?” Par called.

  “Come here and take a look at this,” the familiar voice came again.

  “I would if I knew where you were. Where are you?” he asked frustrated.

  “Come here and take a look at this.”

  Par rolled his eyes. “Where the hell are you?” He started to look around and then spied the ragged hole in the undergrowth. Getting down on his knees, he peered through and saw the soles of Byron’s boots. “There you are,” he cursed under his breath. “What are you doing down there?”

  Byron may have heard him but he couldn’t tell. He just got the same tiresome call in reply. “Hey Par! Come here and take a look at this.”

  With a sigh, this time hopefully loud enough that Byron would hear, Par crawled into the tunnel after him. Byron made no attempt to move out of his way so Par had to climb over his legs and force himself a new path through the compaction of plant stems. When he got clear he pulled himself up alongside Byron and then he too was stunned by the sight before him. He let out a whistle. “Wow, man, you did it,” he said quietly, not taking his eyes off the ship and its trail of destruction. “You found it!” he said, his voice full of excitement. He playfully rubbed the back of Byron’s head who lay next to him, face down in the grass. Par thought nothing of it, maybe Byron had just closed his eyes and buried his face in the grass, either from exhaustion or relief or a combination of both. Maybe he was just saying a silent prayer of thanks.

  “Look at the way the rock…” Par began, pointing. He brought himself up short. There was blood on his hand, the same hand that he had used to ruffle Byron’s hair.

  “Byron?” he asked, nudging his colleague. There was a quiver of fear in his voice. “Byron?” he said again, this time giving him more of a playful shove. Byron didn’t move. “Quit joking around,” Par said nervously, trying to laugh but failing. There was still no movement from Byron.

  Par put a hand on Byron’s shoulder and attempted to push him over on to his back to see what was wrong with him. He only got halfway.

  Byron’s face was just a mass of tattered flesh. His eyes were gone, the sockets just empty, hollow holes in his head. Par recoiled quickly, horrified and repulsed. It was then that the call came again.

  Hey Par! Come here and take a look at this.” The voice had come from over his head. Slowly he rolled over onto his back.

  Hanging about four feet above him was what looked like a black chrysalis. As he watched, stunned, the outer layer began to peel off until he realized what he was looking at was actually a pair of huge, leathery wings. The wings opened wide and a crested head, which so far had been tucked away inside the cocoon, swung down to bring the bloodied tip of a long, narrow beak in
ches from his face. A pair of eyes flicked open and regarded him with cold, avian malice.

  Par’s mind raced. He had seen something like this before, but he couldn’t remember where. Then it came to him in a flash. He knew this monster, or its relatives, at least. He had read about them as a kid. The thing that faced him now could be one of their kind—a relic from a bygone age. It was the closest thing to a real live Pterodactyl that he had ever seen, but it hung itself upside down like a Catchida.

  The beak moved slightly, revealing two rows of tiny sharp teeth, and Byron’s voice came out. “Come here and take a look at this.”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus, no!” Par screamed, and without thinking he pushed himself away from it. He put a hand behind him and found nothing but air. With that he was sent tumbling and cart wheeling down the rock face, creating an avalanche of stone that followed him. He glanced off the top of the DSM and heard and felt his leg crack. The excruciating pain told him it was broken. He saw sky, then stone, then crashed into the side of the ship again before starting off on another tumble.

  He thought that he would lose consciousness but the pain in his leg prevented him from doing so. When he eventually came to a stop he immediately sat up to cradle the injured limb in his hands. Despite the pain he looked up to make sure that the thing had not taken flight to pursue him. It hadn’t, but something else had. The stones and rocks that he had dislodged now all tumbled towards him with frightening speed. They fell erratically, rolling, then catching an edge and being flung high in the air as they descended towards him. He watched, helpless.

  For a fraction of a second the pain in his leg was forgotten, and then a fist-sized rock struck him on the temple and the stars disappeared from his night.

  CHAPTER

  14

  Night came early to the small party who had stayed with the shuttle. Storm clouds swept in from the east, their black faces grumbling with the thunder they carried inside them.