Horizon Alpha: Predators of Eden

by D. W. Vogel

  All the men trained for the army. Women were deemed too valuable, since the future of our species depended on having enough babies to continue our population. With the frozen embryos that made it safely off Horizon, men weren’t as important, so we were the ones who took the risks. We scouted from the air when we could, hunting for food and trying to learn more about the area. But our heavy shuttles flew low over the treetops, their range limited by Eden’s more intense gravity.

  My brother Josh went out on one of those missions. The soldiers took enough ammunition and supplies on their mission to be gone for a week. None of his team made it back.

  My first mission as a soldier was heading to a crash site, a transport that hadn’t survived the escape from Horizon Alpha. It carried a reactor fuel core, and Eden needed the power desperately.

  Eden had solar cells, but we didn’t have room for enough panels in our tiny wired enclosure to supply the electricity required to keep the base safe from the huge predators intent on eating us. Since we landed, our few engineers had also been trying to harness the power of a fast-flowing river at the base of the mountain range in Eden’s backyard, but every time they thought the hydropower turbines were foolproof, something knocked them out.

  The reactor core was the only thing powerful enough to keep the fences charged while we figured out some kind of long-lasting energy source, or found somewhere else to live on this planet, somewhere that wasn’t overrun with dinosaurs. In theory, there were five more fuel cores scattered around the planet, but this was the only one we knew of in flying distance, and without it, Eden’s power wouldn’t last another month. Once we returned with the power core, we’d have a few months more to figure out a long term solution.

  “How’s Jack doing up there?” Shiro asked from behind me. He was bringing up the rear and kept whipping his head around to check the trail we were making.

  “I’m fine,” Jack answered through gritted teeth. “You don’t have to talk about me like I’m not here. I’m not dead yet.”

  “Will you two shut up?” Brent mumbled from in front of us. He was creeping through the forest so close to the General’s heels I thought he might crawl right into the General’s faded uniform with him. The image of that, of Brent and the General buttoned together in one set of fatigues, made me smile. Jack clutched my shoulder and I focused on the path they blazed in front of me.

  We jumped at every sound. The forest was loud with the screeching calls of the smaller reptiles that lived here. That was a good sign. If a larger predator were near, the little ones would fall silent. But every bush that rustled and every little creature that raced away from us made us tense up and raise our weapons. I peered into the dense underbrush, my palm slick against the butt of my pistol.

  Nobody here, just ignore us, I silently willed to any ‘saur that might be nearby. My hand was shaking so badly I doubted I would be able to pull the trigger if anything burst through the forest into our path. Big brave soldier Caleb.

  The General kept trying his satellite transmitter as we made our way through the steamy forest. We paused at a swift, flowing stream to fill our canteens and wash some of our smaller abrasions. We kept Jack out of the water, not wanting to reopen his seeping leg wound.

  It was weird to see him struggling. He’d always been first for everything. Three years ago when our long space journey was over and we finally saw solid ground for the first time, Jack couldn’t wait to get off the shuttle that brought us down from the Ark. He’d pushed through the crowd of adults straining toward the first breath of non-recycled air any of us had ever smelled; the first generation in two hundred years to stand on an actual world.

  Jack leaned on my shoulder now, heavier with each step we took.

  As the light began to fail, we found the crash site we had come for. Three years in the foliage had nearly covered the remains of the huge transport, but we hacked at the vines with our knives until we found an entry door. The metal screamed a protest as we forced the door open on rusting hinges. The interior of the transport was pitch black, but we all piled in, closing the door behind us. I turned on my flashlight and aimed the beam around the space, making sure we were alone. No red eyes reflected back at me and we all relaxed.

  We set up this mission with the hope that the original passengers, if they had survived the crash, hadn’t taken the reactor core with them. If they had, it was lost forever. Which meant this mission, already a disaster with five dead soldiers and a crashed shuttle, would be a total failure.

  Chapter 4

  Even though the door on the transport had been rusted shut, the smell told us that something lived in here. The smell took a moment to identify, but when Brent identified the warm, musty scent as wet fur, we all relaxed. Shrews lived here, not dinosaurs. The mammalian inhabitants of this world weren’t really shrews, but they were small and furry and darted around the jungle at night. And they wouldn’t nest anywhere a dinosaur could get inside.

  The air was thick with insects. I slapped ineffectively at the bloodsuckers who thought my neck was a feast.

  Jack sat on a decaying crate near the closed door, and the rest of us spread out, searching in the dark for the fuel core. I started my search in the cargo hold.

  My light danced around the boxes strewn all around the hold as I climbed over and under them. Most of the boxes were helpfully labeled with their contents, but I wasn’t interested in bolts of canvas or computer chips. Shrews had chewed through some of the crates of grain and eaten the seeds inside, but Eden base would certainly want the huge spools of wire and the crates of ammunition. I made a mental note of their location.

  “I think I have it!” Brent’s excited voice called through the dark ship.

  I grabbed one of the nearby crates of ammo and hoisted it onto my shoulder, rejoining the group congregating around the closed door.

  “Good work, Brent. Primary objective attained,” General Carthage said.

  Brent held the precious power core in his arms, his light gleaming off the smooth metal cylinder of its casing.

  I set the crate of ammunition on the floor and shone my light on the label.

  “Excellent, soldier,” the General praised. My face warmed at his approval and I was grateful no one could see it in the dark.

  “We’ll take as much as we can carry now and load up the shuttle when it arrives to pick us up,” he continued.

  “There’s wire and cloth and computer parts up there as well, sir,” I reported.

  “Good. We’ll take an inventory while we wait for transport back to Eden base. We need all the supplies we can get,” he added unnecessarily.

  “Oh no,” Ms. Arnson said softly from nearby. I climbed over to where her light glowed.

  “What is it?” I asked her.

  “Embryo storage.” She crouched down next to an enormous crate that had split open when the transport ship crashed. I recognized the big metal cylinder inside; we had one at Eden base. This one was silent, dependent on power that had not run for three years. The frozen contents must have thawed out and spoiled long ago.

  “That’s a real shame,” I agreed. I knew how valuable each of those little tubes had been. All that DNA wasted. All that diversity for our future destroyed.

  Ms. Arnson laid her hand on the still metal side of the container, as if hoping that somehow it would still feel cold, that the embryos inside might somehow be saved. But the surface was as hot as everything else in this stifling hold, and she drew her hand back, disappointed.

  “We’ll be okay without them. We have plenty at Eden,” I tried to reassure her.

  “Maybe,” she answered. “But it’s still sad.”

  The Horizon ships had only been equipped to carry five hundred people. Not enough genetic diversity for a species to survive. So we’d brought thousands of frozen embryos with us. Some children were “naturals,” like Josh. Josh was my dad’s real son, conceived naturally when my parents fell in love. A woman’s first living child proved she could carry a baby, so the
next one was always born of one of the frozen straws of DNA from Earth men long dead. That meant Josh was my half-brother, and our dad wasn’t my real father at all. My biological father had been dead for two hundred years, but he’d sent the seed of his DNA to be frozen and shipped across the galaxy. We brought the DNA of thousands of men with us, and frozen embryos from thousands more couples who sent their genes into space, into the future.

  A woman’s third child comes from one of the precious embryos in storage, so my little sister Malia isn’t technically my dad’s or my mom’s. She was an Earth Child, a pale girl from the time of pure races, a time long gone as we carefully maintained our genetic diversity through generations in space. She looked nothing like us, but we loved her fiercely. I remember how excited I was when she was born, just three years before landing. The memory made it more painful to imagine all these Earth Children who would never be born.

  Back at the closed exterior door, the General was giving orders.

  “Shiro, Brent, you head aft to the cockpit. See if any of the communications gear can be salvaged. Use your sat trans to plug in and try to get some power flowing. If you can, send a mayday to Eden base and give them our coordinates.”

  “Aye, General,” Brent said, and the two of them disappeared toward the front of the ship.

  “Caleb, you stay here with Jack and Sara; check the bandage on Jack’s leg. I’m heading back outside to see if I can get any sat signal from on top of the ship.”

  The door squealed a protest that momentarily silenced the jungle around the ship as the General slipped outside. I held my breath, waiting to hear the familiar hum and chirp of the smaller reptiles pick back up, indicating a small degree of safety. The high-pitched background din began after a minute, and I blew out my cheeks. Night had fallen and only the forest’s green phosphorescent glow streamed through the open door. My instincts screamed for me to close it, but if the General wanted it closed, he’d have done it himself. I reassured myself that only T-rex and a few of his large cousins hunted after nightfall, and none of them would be able to fit through the small opening. Still, I kept glancing through it, alert for any movement.

  “It’s the silence I can’t stand, you know?” I said to Jack.

  “Yeah, you get really used to the constant noise. You don’t even notice it until it’s gone,” he agreed quietly.

  His pale cheeks looked ghostly in the glow of my flashlight. I looked down at his leg. The bandage was soaked, bright red blood flashing through the white wrapping and the danger of his injury finally hit me.

  Neither of Jack’s parents had survived the first year on Ceti, so Mom had unofficially adopted him into our family a long time ago. And when the General broke the news that my older brother’s scouting team had failed to report in, it was Jack who caught my mom as she collapsed, sobbing. Now he was the closest thing to an older brother I’d ever have. I couldn’t let anything happen to him.

  “So what did Sara find up there?” Jack asked.

  “Embryo freezer,” I answered. “Listen, I think we need to get your bandage changed, buddy.”

  “Okay,” he said and I stuck my flashlight under my chin to paw through my pack. There was ammunition and a spare charge for my sat transmitter, and my half-full canteen. I had a sparker and a folding knife but nothing I could use for bandages.

  “Wait here,” I told Jack. “I need to find some first aid stuff.”

  He didn’t reply. Ms. Arnson was rummaging through more boxes toward the stern, and I picked my way over to her.

  “Have you seen any medical supplies? We need to get Jack rebandaged,” I said.

  “Not here. Try over there,” she indicated with her flashlight. She was still talking in that strange, clipped, emotionless voice. It unnerved me more than a breakdown would have. She must have been holding her shock and fear inside, but whether she was trying to put up a brave front for us or just mentally denying the position we were in, I wasn’t sure.

  “Thanks, Ms. Arnson.” I wasn’t really sure if I should still call her Ms. Arnson. The other guys all just called her Sara. And I was an adult now. But somehow I just couldn’t bring myself to use her first name. I wanted to say something more, something adult and soldierly, but the only things that came to mind were stupid.

  I was heading in the direction she pointed me when the night fell silent and the ship vibrated slightly. The floor trembled through my boots, and a shiver traveled straight up my spine. Only one ‘saur was heavy enough to make the whole ground shake at its step. T-rex, king of the darkness, was heading our way.

  Chapter 5

  An image from one of my favorite movies from Horizon’s vaults flashed through my brain, of water in a cup on the dashboard of a car vibrating at the step of a giant predator.

  Hardly reassuring.

  I crept back toward Ms. Arnson and together we moved Jack farther away from the opening, sitting him down on the floor with his back against the hull’s interior wall.

  We switched off our flashlights and waited. My ears were so attuned to the usual night noises that the silence echoed inside my skull. Tiny scurrying sounds indicated that whatever variety of shrew had made this ship home had realized danger was approaching. I stifled a scream as one ran across my boot on its way to a safer nest.

  Dim light from one of Ceti’s moons filtered in through the door, and my eyes adjusted quickly to the gloom. I sucked in a breath when a shadow darkened the open doorway, but it quickly resolved into the shape of the General, who had wisely turned off his own light.

  “Did you reach base?” I asked him in a whisper.

  “Negative. Too much tree cover. If we can’t get the ship’s communications working we’ll have to find a clearing.”

  The Rex’s footfalls were getting closer, dust sifting through the air as the hold’s contents shifted slightly under the tiny quakes. We crouched down next to Jack.

  Compared to the ‘saurs that went cold at night, humans stood out like stars in a black sky, warm all night long. To a Rex’s heat sensors, we were easy prey outside the fence.

  Movement in the front of the ship made my heart skip a beat, but it was only Brent and Shiro feeling their way blindly back from the cockpit.

  “Report,” the General whispered when they found us.

  “Negative, General. The cockpit is smashed to bits. We couldn’t even get in. This ship is dead.” Shiro sounded dejected even in a whisper.

  My stomach turned over. We were trapped out here in the black jungle. And the approaching footfalls told us we were already being hunted.

  The ship rocked slightly and we smelled the sour scent of the Rex. We all froze and held our breath.

  The forest light illuminating the open door was abruptly darkened by an enormous shadow. Ms. Arnson gripped my arm.

  The Rex’s nostril filled the doorway and sniffed inside. I gagged as it exhaled, filling the small hold with its fetid stench. None of us made a sound.

  It sniffed again. They had learned fast what we smelled like. No doubt it knew we were here. Its heat sensors couldn’t pick us out inside the warm metal hull, but it could smell us right through the doorway. A bloodsucker bug landed on my face and started to feed. I stayed motionless, barely breathing.

  The Rex lifted its head back up and dim light entered the doorway for a moment. I dared to hope it had somehow missed our scent over all the other smells in this ship.

  Its shadow fell across the doorway again, and the Rex’s front leg thrust through, clawing blindly at us. Its reach was longer than the reach of its real dinosaur namesake, and ended in a three-fingered hand tipped with razor sharp claws.

  We threw ourselves backwards, knocking down piles of crates as we scrambled away from the grasping talons. I fell over something sharp and landed hard on my back. Shiro’s knee connected with my jaw as he climbed over me in his panic. I tasted blood but felt no pain.

  A scream shot through my nerves like an electric current. I sat upright, squinting through the darkness to see w
ho had made that awful sound.

  One of the Rex’s claws had found Jack propped up against the hull. In our frenzy to get away from the open door, none of us had pulled him to safety. He screamed again as the Rex dragged him toward the opening. I froze, unable to move, unable to think.

  A shadow dove out from behind me, the General launching awkwardly toward the screaming soldier. The General grabbed Jack’s foot and pulled, starting a deadly tug-of-war between man and ‘saur with Jack’s body as the rope. But even the General was no match for a Rex. Jack’s final scream ended with a gurgle as the Rex’s claws punctured through his chest and the Rex dragged his limp form across the transport’s floor. My almost-brother disappeared through the doorway in a smear of warm blood.

  Chapter 6

  We huddled in stunned silence.

  Jack was gone.

  My brother’s best friend who’d teased me aboard the Horizon, the first kid to set foot on this hostile planet, was dead. I could hardy get my brain around it.

  “Stay down and plug your ears,” the General said.

  The Rex still crouched outside the transport’s open hatch. There was a small clinking sound, then a huge explosion thundered right outside the door. The General had thrown a grenade. I didn’t know he had one.

  The heavy footfalls vibrated the ship as the angry Rex pounded off into the forest. We stayed frozen on the floor until the night sounds started up again and we knew it was gone.

  The General sat up.

  “Count off,” he said, and we did. I think he said it by habit. We all knew who was missing. I swallowed hard and squinted my eyes against tears that threatened to fall.

  We gathered around him, too near the open door for my liking. My lip was starting to swell where Shiro had kneed me in the face while climbing over me. My brain felt numb.

  In the three years since we landed on Ceti, I had never been so close to a Rex. I never wanted to be that close again.

  “We need to contact Eden,” the General said. “By now they know we’re missing, but they won’t send a rescue shuttle unless they hear from us. We’ll find a clearing where we can get a sat signal and then get somewhere safe until they arrive.”