by D. W. Vogel
The last Wolf in the pack paused at the base of our tree. Its sides heaved as it smelled the leaf litter where we had climbed up here to safety. I couldn’t see its eyes, but it clicked twice, a questioning sound as it sniffed. An answering click from the leader sent it loping off without a backward glance, and I sighed. This pack must have never smelled humans before, or they would have recognized our scent and latched onto the easy prey. Wolves couldn’t climb, but we would never have gotten out of this tree alive if they had set up an ambush for us on the ground.
The sounds of the forest began again after the pack was out of sight. I holstered my pistol and leaned back against the rough tree bark.
It was time for Brent’s watch, so I woke him and settled in to sleep. I dreamed of gray bodies slinking through the branches, sniffing the air and clicking a warning.
Chapter 14
Brent woke us up as dusk fell. Ms. Arnson looked like she hadn’t slept a bit. This jungle was no place for a naturalist. Had the General had any suspicion of the dangers of this trip, he never would have brought her here. Then again, he wouldn’t have brought me, either.
The mission should have taken less than an hour on the ground. A party of eleven, well-armed and well-trained, in Eden’s fastest remaining shuttle. It should have been simple to find the power core, load it up, and fly home. But Ceti had a way of turning simple into complicated, and complicated into dead.
Our rations were running low. We had some protein bars in each of our packs, and enough canteens. There were plenty of flowing streams to fill them, but without water purifying tablets we were taking more risk with every drink. Sick soldiers would rapidly become dead soldiers out here on our own.
The maps we all carried on our sat trans still worked, even though we couldn’t locate the satellites in the heavy tree cover. Eden base was due west of the bend in the river, the bend Shiro had gone up the tree looking for. The bend that was so close, but would probably cost Shiro his life.
There wasn’t much to see in this part of the world. I could trace the cut of the river through the forest, and I could see the mottled green and brown of a huge patch of land just north of the river, close to where we must have been. The barren hills reflected light brown and gray, mostly devoid of foliage kilometers away to the north. We plodded on through the shadows.
“Just another couple of days’ walking,” Brent muttered from behind me. The General led as usual, followed by Ms. Arnson and me. Now that Shiro was gone, Brent was our rear guard. Could have been worse. The General could have put me right behind him. At least he trusts me enough to have Ms. Arnson between us.
My ears were growing ever more sensitive to the noises of the jungle. When we first crashed on this mission just a few short days ago, I jumped at every sound. Every call of each small lizard in the forest made me raise my pistol, frantically searching the darkness for danger. The days of constant terror dulled my reaction but improved my perception. I noticed the change in the night’s cacophony before we felt the ground begin to soften under our feet.
The trees were growing farther apart here, and they were smaller, heavier. With a sudden high-pitched squeal, Ms. Arnson sank into mud up to her knees. Brent and the General were closest to her and hauled her back onto the drier land where they were walking. Her cry sent a spike of panic through me as I started back into alertness.
“It’s been getting wetter and wetter as we walk,” she gasped, leaning on Brent. She pulled off her boots one by one and poured black water out of them onto the ground. “Let me see the map again.”
Ms. Arnson didn’t have a sat trans, so Brent called up the map of our approximate location on his. The bright glow blinded us for a moment in the darkness and we huddled together to block the glow from anything that might be looking our way.
Ms. Arnson pointed to the mottled patch of green and brown. “That’s where we are now. This whole area. It’s a swamp.”
I vaguely recalled something about swamps from my Earth biology classes on board Horizon, but I couldn’t think of anything specifically dangerous about them.
“What do we know about Ceti swamps?” the General asked her, and she shook her head.
“Not much. We’ve had a few teams do some scouting in the closest part to base, but we haven’t had any reason to penetrate very deeply. I know what lived in Earth swamps. I have no idea what might live here.”
I shivered in the cool night. Even Ms. Arnson doesn’t know what’s in there. Hardly reassuring.
“Maybe we can go around it, stay on more familiar ground,” I ventured. The General looked back to the map, calculating the distance in his mind.
“It would take days. We’d have to cut back east and north almost all the way to the hills to avoid it.”
“How did Shiro say Eden base was doing?” Brent asked. “How long do they think they have without this core?” He was still carrying the power core, the heaviest of all our packs. Shiro’s name hung sodden in the air. I swallowed the lump it brought to my throat.
“They think they have about a week’s worth of power in the two shuttle cores they’re using. After that, the fences will go down. We don’t know how long it will take the ‘saurs to realize there’s no juice anymore, but we can’t count on very long. We have to be back to Eden base within a week.” The General slapped a huge bloodsucker off his cheek. The light of the trans was attracting every insect in the jungle. The bloodsucker left a dark, wet stain on the General’s face. It reminded me of ancient Earth history, primitive people painting their faces before a battle.
“Then we have to go through,” Ms. Arnson said.
“I agree, sir. We can’t take the time to go around.” Brent nodded.
Nobody asked my opinion. I was almost too tired to have an opinion.
“But we have no idea what’s in there,” the General said, not disagreeing. Just a statement of fact.
“No, sir, we don’t. But I don’t see that we have any choice. Straight west is the fastest route back to Eden.” Brent turned off his trans and a few of the bugs flew away, confused.
“Are we sure we can even get through?” I asked.
“No. And I think it would be stupid to attempt it in the dark. I just stepped right into a sinkhole I never even saw,” Ms. Arnson said. “Luckily it wasn’t very deep or I could have just disappeared under the water.”
The General considered that. “Since we don’t know what hunts in a swamp, and we don’t know the terrain, there’s no reason to assume travel at night is any safer than travel by day. Wolves probably won’t hunt in a swamp.” He paused and Ms. Arnson nodded. “Not sure about Gilas. And Rexes are out day and night, but we’ll probably hear one coming even in the swamp.” He came to a decision. “We’ll sleep here on the ground for a few hours until sunup. Then we’ll head into the swamp by day.”
“General,” I said. “There were Wolves.”
“Where?” He raised his gun and spun around.
“Not here,” I said. “Last night. Under the tree. I saw them go by.”
He lowered his gun, peering into the trees. “Heading which way?”
I thought for a moment. My sense of direction was useless in this jungle. “I’m not sure. I think . . . the other way.”
He shook his head. “Wolves. If they find us, we’re done.” He looked up at the tree canopy above our heads. “Everybody up.”
Brent climbed behind me. “Nice going, Squirt. He was gonna let us sleep on the ground for a couple hours.”
“Feel free to stay down there if you want,” I answered. “It’s just Wolves.”
He looked down at the soft, inviting ground, glared up at me, and followed me higher into the tree.
Chapter 15
I got the last watch of the night. Ms. Arnson woke me for the final hours before dawn and I sat up stiffly. My back protested. I felt like an old man. I used a little water from my canteen to rinse my face and felt several new welts where the bloodsuckers had feasted on the wounds from the Buzzer swarm
while I slept. Scratching those bites kept me awake during my watch.
Dawn was hard to judge so deep in the forest, but as soon as I was able to see more than a few feet around me, I woke the others. We had no idea what waited for us in the swamp, but we knew what would hunt us on dry land once the sun heated the air and the daytime predators began to stir.
Ms. Arnson had us each cut a long branch off one of the trees.
“We’ll poke them out ahead of us as we go to make sure we stay on solid ground.” She demonstrated, pushing the stick out in front of her.
“Might keep us from stepping on something we don’t see,” agreed the General. Unlike most of Earth’s venomous snakes, which wore bright colors to warn other animals of their deadly poison, Eden snakes were mostly brown and green. They would usually slither away if they heard a human approach, but you didn’t want to startle one by stepping on it.
I kept looking over my shoulder as we started our day’s trek, alert for the sway of brush, the glimpse of a gray scaled body that might be our only warning that the Wolves had found us. But we trudged on through the squelching mud, and I saw that Ms. Arnson was right. Wolves wouldn’t be able to move quickly through this mire. They wouldn’t have the element of surprise they relied on. There might be other dangers here, but Wolves weren’t among them.
We had spent the past few days sleeping through the heat of the day in the treetops and traveling by night. Sweat poured off my forehead and stung my eyes in the humidity. I paused to cut a strip off the tail of my shirt, which I wrapped around my forehead to stop the drips. Brent was walking behind me, and he smiled.
“Good idea, Squirt.”
I hated when the older guys called me that. My brother Josh had started it, and all his buddies adopted the nickname for me. When Josh was alive it had rankled me because it was silly. Now it just reminded me that he was gone.
Brent tied a sweatband around his own forehead and we followed the General and Ms. Arnson through the steamy swamp.
Brent still had both of his parents and two younger sisters back at base. His engineer dad was injured early in our tenure on this planet, paralyzed when a bullet fired by a soldier pierced his spine. If he’d realized what he’d done, the soldier who shot him would have felt terrible about it. But he’d been shooting at a solitary Wolf, probably a pack outcast, that had snuck up on the team working on the wind turbines. The soldier was torn apart before he could have realized he’d shot one of our few remaining engineers. If there had been more than that solitary Wolf, Brent would have lost his father that day.
Every now and then luck was with us, and Brent was one of the few who hadn’t lost a family member to a bloody death. I stuck close to him, hoping his charmed good fortune would protect me, too.
We moved slowly, poking our walking sticks into the mud ahead of us. The swamp’s mud dissolved into a maze of paths which Ms. Arnson called hummocks, dryer patches of ground with stagnant water all around. Froglike hoppers splashed into the dark pools as we approached. Occasionally we saw ripples farther out into the water as something larger paddled under the surface. Thick algae grew across the surface of the water, making it hard to distinguish our path.
We still walked beneath a canopy of trees, but here and there we could peek through to the deep blue of the sky. I smiled in spite of our perilous location. For the first ten years of my life, all I saw of sky was the black void, sparkling with distant stars, viewed through the thick glass of Horizon’s portholes. Then we landed here and somehow that black sky turned blue when viewed from the ground. And pink in the sunrise, and orange in the sunset. During the day we couldn’t see the stars at all, so bright was the sky. I still hadn’t gotten over the strangeness of the daytime sky with its ever changing cycle of clouds and sunshine.
The ‘saurs here in the swamp had never seen a human. Most of them were small, barely knee high. Some hung from the trees, others basked on downed logs over the water. They weren’t afraid of us and didn’t run, but all of them gave us a wide berth as we approached.
At noon we rested. There was nothing very solid to sit on and I felt my pants growing wet as I sat on the driest patch of ground I could find to eat my protein bar. We only had a few left for each of us. I didn’t realize I was hungry until I started eating. Then my empty stomach woke up and grumbled its discontent. I made the bar last as long as I could, taking tiny bites to savor the bland taste. Ms. Arnson warned us not to fill our canteens from the puddles all around us.
“This is stagnant water. Who knows what kind of parasites live in this? Make your clean water last as long as you can.” I wanted to guzzle it down in the stifling heat, but I sipped as she instructed.
“We can boil some tonight,” Brent suggested.
“That’s a last resort. We don’t even know if boiling kills the stuff that lives here. But if we run out, then that’s what we’ll have to do,” she agreed.
The General had been uncharacteristically quiet since we entered the swamp. I wondered if the deaths of our team members were haunting him. Five gone for sure. Then Shiro, though it hadn’t been long since we left him. He might still be alive. Not for long.
The General sat down next to me now, squinting up into the bright day.
“How are you faring, Caleb?” he asked me.
“I’m fine, sir.”
He sighed and looked down at his lap. “No, really, son. Are you holding up all right? I shouldn’t have pushed your mother so hard to let you come . . .” he trailed off.
“It’s okay, sir. You couldn’t know,” I shrugged. I just wanted to get moving again, but the General suddenly seemed to want to comfort me, though I had not given him any indication that I needed comfort.
“Your mom gave me an earful when I called in back in the hills.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Told me if I came back without you, she’d kill me herself. I believe her.” He smiled.
“Yes, sir. I believe her, too.” I smiled back, because I could tell he wanted me to.
“Whatever happens, stay close to me. We’re not too far away. We’re going to make it through this, son.”
“Yes, sir.”
He stood and offered me a hand up off the damp ground, clapping me on the shoulder with his other hand. I’d seen him use that gesture with Shiro and Brent. It made me feel less like a kid getting in his way and more like a soldier in his command.
“All right, team. Time to move out.” We picked up our packs and weapons and our walking sticks and shuffled on through the steaming swamp.
Chapter 16
The General held up his fist, and we all halted without a word. He crouched down in the muck and we all followed suit, straining to see ahead.
Ms. Arnson was next in line, then me, then Brent in the rear. We all saw it at the same time.
I gasped as the vision of a ‘saur the size of a Brachi unfolded out of the water in front of us. It had two giant humps on its long back, and a neck that let it stretch up to the distant treetops to browse. It chewed lazily, strings of swamp weeds hanging out of its mouth. Because its bottom half was submerged, I couldn’t tell if it had legs or fins, or some kind of combination. It moved gracefully through the water for something so huge. Its green back matched the algae that covered the water’s surface.
It paid us no attention at all and we cautiously stood up. The body of water it was wading in stretched away in front of us.
“Which way, sir?” Ms. Arnson whispered.
We crowded together to look at the map again.
“We’re probably somewhere in here,” the General said, pointing to an area of the swamp that looked the same as all the rest of it. The river curled away south of us. “If we head south, we risk running into the river delta where we probably can’t cross.” None of us wanted to have to swim, either in the opaque water of the swamp or the fast depths of the river. Swimmers didn’t last long in Eden’s waterways.
The General continued, squinting through the trees. “We head north an
d skirt this lake. Hopefully we won’t have to go too far off our path.”
The enormous ‘saur didn’t even mark our passing with a turn of its huge head, which reassured me. On dry land, even a Brachi gave us a glance to make sure of what we were. There were ‘saurs our size that could take down a Brachi on land. But this creature wasn’t worried about anything our size, and I felt my shoulders start to relax.
“I wish I had my equipment,” Ms. Arnson fussed. We had left her piles of equipment on the crashed shuttle, taking only what we thought was most necessary.
“I can take a picture with my sat,” I offered.
“Thanks! I’d love to study that thing. Maybe I can get back here soon,” Ms. Arnson said.
I gaped at her. “Come back here? You want to come back out here? If we make it back to base, I’m never leaving the fence-line again,” I said, realizing I sounded like a coward. But Ms. Arnson ignored that.
“I know what you mean. I’ll be glad to sleep with an electric wire around me again, in a bed instead of a tree. But there’s so much here we’ve never seen before. Most of the animals in here have never been described.”
“Then you get to name them,” I offered.
“I guess I do,” she agreed. “I’m going to call the big one Nessie,” she said with a laugh. I wasn’t sure why that was funny, and it was an odd name for a ‘saur.
“There must be whole families of Nessies out here. There’s acres of swamp.” She found that even funnier.
“Who would have thought? Families of Nessies.” The General chuckled ahead of us.
“What’s Nessie?” I asked.
Ms. Arnson smiled back at me. “There was a lake called Loch Ness on Earth in a country called Scotland. People believed there was a monster in it. A plesiosaur, maybe, left from when Earth had dinosaurs. They called it ‘Nessie,’ and it looked just like this one. Who knew it actually exists?”