by D. W. Vogel
The General muttered, “But not in Loch Ness anymore.”
Ms. Arnson’s smile faded at the sobering reminder. Earth was long gone. Scotland and Loch Ness hadn’t existed for almost two hundred years.
As evening fell, the General reckoned we were about halfway through the swamp. We set up a makeshift camp on the highest hummock we could find.
“Do we risk a fire, sir?” Brent asked.
Fire scared the smaller ‘saurs. But the heat sometimes attracted the larger ones. The General considered the request.
“We haven’t seen anything around that posed us much danger. Let’s try and find some dry wood.”
“Maybe I can kill us something to eat,” Brent suggested, and my stomach growled loudly at the thought of fresh meat.
The General agreed. “Good idea. You see what you can catch. Caleb, you and Sara try to find something dry to burn. Stay in sight.” The darkness was falling quickly.
We gathered a few fallen logs that were mostly out of the water. There wasn’t much to use as kindling since even the fallen leaves were squelched in the mud, but we got a few handfuls of brush and piled it up near the water’s edge. I crouched with my back to the water and pulled out my firelighter.
The first few sparks hissed on the damp wood. I tried to light the driest bits, leaning down to blow gently on the tiny, sputtering flame.
The General crashed into me, a flying tackle that shoved me off my feet. I landed hard on my right elbow, with the General on top of me. He jumped to his feet and pulled me by the arm, slipping in the mud.
“What the . . .” I sputtered, dazed from the sudden hit. “What was that for?” I demanded.
The General had pulled his pistol and was aiming at something at the water’s edge where I had just been crouching. I peeked around the stack of logs and saw the gaping mouth of a long, flat ‘saur, half in and half out of the water. It had been lunging at me but got a mouthful of firewood instead when the General shoved me out of its path.
It closed its mouth and stared at us with dark, empty eyes. The General kept his weapon trained on the brown leathery head. Gunfire was dangerous. It could be heard for miles around, and the ‘saurs who had learned about humans knew it was as good as a dinner bell. But not shooting could be just as dangerous.
The ‘saur turned and slithered back into the water. A moment’s ripple disturbed the green surface, then the water was flat and still, with no indication that sharp-toothed death lurked somewhere in the shallows.
Chapter 17
Brent dragged a dark scaled body behind him when he returned, his walking stick impaling the carcass.
“It just sat there. I walked up and speared it. What happened?” he asked, noticing our dilated eyes, our rapid breathing. My heart was still pounding from the nearness of my escape.
“We just found a new dinosaur,” Ms. Arnson said, deceptively calm. “Stay away from the water’s edge.”
Brent looked quizzically at the bank where the saur’s body had left a deep imprint in the mud. We pulled our firewood higher on the hammock and soon had a small blaze going. Ms. Arnson pulled out her sketchbook to make hasty drawings of the new ‘saurs we had seen on this journey, including this small one that would be our dinner.
The General skinned Brent’s kill and the smell of roasting meat made my mouth water. Ms. Arnson warned us to make sure it was cooked through, but we tore into the meat while it was still red in the middle, savoring the crisp edges. Juice dribbled down my chin and I wiped it with my fingers, licking them clean. We ate our fill and hung what remained from a tree branch to smoke overnight. It wouldn’t dry by morning, but at least we’d have breakfast before we set out again.
I was far too keyed up to sleep, the adrenaline of my brush with death still zinging through my body. I took first watch and listened to Brent’s quiet snoring, barely audible over the nighttime calls of the swamp. Every time something splashed into the water that surrounded us, I jumped, but nothing came lunging out of the night. Whether the ‘saurs in the swamp were wary of our fire or just hadn’t learned how delicious humans were, I didn’t know or care.
I woke Ms. Arnson for her watch and stretched out on the boggy ground to sleep. I lay there for a few minutes, looking up at the glimpse of black sky visible through the holes in the treetops. One star shone brighter than the rest, because it wasn’t a star at all. The light of Ceti’s sun glinted off the dead husk of Horizon, drifting in its slowly decaying orbit overhead. Somewhere in its silent halls my father’s body lay, along with all the others who didn’t make it off the ship in the chaos after the explosion. In a few hundred years Horizon would probably come crashing down, burning in the atmosphere and falling in flaming ruin to the jungle below. I hoped it hit a lot of ‘saurs when it fell.
***
We broke camp at dawn, chewing on the semi-dry strips of meat we’d hung out last night. I wanted fresh water, but not enough to get any nearer to the weed-choked edge than I had to. I sipped on the dregs that remained at the bottom of my canteen as I walked along.
“We should be out of this swamp and back onto dry land by late this afternoon,” the General said. I still had no idea how he was reckoning our position. The swamp looked endless to me, and even with the sparser tree cover I still couldn’t see enough stars to get any notion of our direction.
“I’ll be glad to get out of this wet,” Brent said. “My feet feel like they’re getting moldy in my boots.”
“But there’s so much to see in here,” Ms. Arnson said. Even surrounded by danger, she couldn’t help getting excited about science. Most of the small ‘saur faces that peeped quizzically at us from the branches and floating logs were new species no one had ever seen before. I knew she must be itching to photograph them, record them in her notebooks. She would have so much new information to teach the kids back at Eden.
I was mostly just glad to be finished with school. There weren’t enough students in Eden to teach in classes, so we were all kind of crammed together in the same room. And there just hadn’t seemed much point in continuing to teach us advanced math and physics when what Eden really needed was soldiers to keep it safe. Scholars like Ms. Arnson could keep all our scientific knowledge straight, but for me, shooting and tracking and staying alive was a lot more important. It wasn’t like we were going to be flying anywhere anytime soon. We were down to our last few shuttles on the planet, and with no way to power our base, we had no hope of manufacturing anything that might help us get away from this place. When the last of the power ran out, when the metal ships rusted away to nothing and all the technology we brought from Earth decayed away, we’d be a primitive society. If any of us survived that long.
“Will we keep traveling in daylight once we leave the swamp, sir?” I asked.
“Negative. We’ll stay on the edge until nightfall, then carry on from there.”
So this was my last chance to walk in daylight until we made it back to base. Even though it was a lot more dangerous to travel by day, I hated skulking around in the dark. It made me feel like a shrew, skittering in the underbrush, jumping at every noise.
The tree cover began to darken as the ground began to firm up under our feet. After a few yards, the General held up a fist and we all stopped behind him.
“That’s as far as we go. Brent, you and Ms. Arnson find us a decent tree to get up until nightfall. Caleb, you come with me. We need to refill our canteens before we settle in.”
Brent took the heavy pack with the power core off the General’s shoulders and I collected everyone’s canteens. Shiro’s face popped into my mind, holding me fast when I panicked at the sleeping Gila. Of course I was going with the General. Because you don’t trust me out of your sight for ten seconds.
“I can hear water moving up ahead. Should be a clear enough stream for us to risk getting close.”
“Yes, sir,” I answered, hoping he was right. I wasn’t getting anywhere near a body of water I couldn’t see into.
I tried to tra
il behind him, but he slowed his strides, and I had no choice but to fall in alongside him.
The General gave a low chuckle. “Your mom is worried to death. She didn’t want me to take you on this mission. Seems she was right. As usual.” He snorted softly.
“I’m old enough, sir. Josh was out on missions at my age.” I regretted saying it as soon as the words came out of my mouth. The General had sent Josh on that last scouting mission. The one he never returned from.
“I know, son. And that’s what I told her. Back on the ship, a boy your age would still be in school. Your biggest worry ought to be a math test or a literature essay. Instead you’re out here in this scatting swamp. But there’s just not much time for childhood on Ceti.” The General didn’t seem like he was talking to me anymore, but I was the only one around.
He continued, “I promised her I’d keep you safe out here, and I promised it again when I called in from the hills. She’ll have my head when we get back.”
He said it casually, like there was no chance we wouldn’t return to base alive. But I knew better.
“She’ll be so happy to see us, she won’t kill you, sir,” I said.
The General laughed. “I hope you’re right. I’d love to see her happy. You remember back on Horizon before we got here? How she used to sing in that little group and we’d all come out to hear them? Your dad would stand there looking so proud of her. He was a good man, your dad.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your mom and my Amalie were good friends on the ship. Things could have been so different . . .” he trailed off.
His wife Amalie had died within months of our landing in Eden. There were diseases here that humans had never been exposed to. Ms. Arnson said that was why we were so careful in our breeding, why we had brought so many frozen embryos with us. So our population wouldn’t get inbred and some virus wipe us all out. But once all the Earth Children were born from those embryos, we should have enough people to keep our gene pool deep. That was the hope of the scientists who sent us out here two centuries ago. It seemed impossible now. Even if all the women survived the next few decades, we’d barely have enough population to keep us going. All that depended on us getting the power core back to buy us more time. Time to figure out some way to live here, some way to exist on this hostile world.
Chapter 18
“Things will get better when we get back to base with this core, son. It will buy us a little more time.” The General took quiet steps on the damp ground.
“Time for what, sir?” I don’t know why I asked.
“Time to scout farther, find someplace safer. Time to get our people moved somewhere we can plant our seeds, work the land. Somewhere we can be out in daylight to harvest crops without fear of death behind every tree. Somewhere we can really settle and raise our children knowing they have a good chance to live to grow up.”
That was it, right there. The General had two grown daughters with Amalie. They were probably sitting with my mom back at base, worrying and wondering if we would ever return. His oldest daughter was pregnant, and I could see how that weighed on him. How could he be happy for his first grandchild when our lives here were so fragile? If we didn’t get back to base soon, his daughter wasn’t likely to live long enough to give birth at all. And the General wanted more than just this grandchild.
We lived in makeshift housing among our downed ships. Mom, Josh, and I shared rooms in the shuttle that brought us from Horizon, a secure place compared to the lean-tos and cobbled-up shacks a lot of other people had to make do with. When Josh didn’t come back a few months ago, the General moved in with us.
And the General wanted a son. Mom had three kids in the proper order: the first with my dad, the second from the frozen straws of DNA from long-dead men on Earth, and the third our sweet Malia, an Earth Child from a frozen embryo placed aboard Horizon with some doomed couple’s hope for immortality. So her next child, if she had one, could be another natural. The General was trying to convince her to give it a try, but Mom was too afraid, especially since Josh was gone. She held out little enough hope for our future here on Eden that she didn’t want to bring another life into this awful place. I didn’t blame her.
Radiation from Horizon’s nuclear reactor meant that hardly anyone lived past fifty. The General was past forty already, and there wasn’t much time left for Mom to have another baby, even if she’d wanted to.
The three years we’d been here had aged her, constant worry etching new lines around her eyes and mouth. She was still beautiful at thirty-seven, but the hopeful woman who had been in a singing group on Horizon, the happy Mom who looked at our dad with so much love—that Mom was gone.
I stumbled as the General stopped suddenly, pushing with his boot at something half buried in the wet dirt. “What’s this?” he said.
We crouched down to look. Something small and metal protruded from the muck, mostly covered with the creeping ferns that grew everywhere in this swamp. The General cleared the ferns away with his knife, revealing more of the metal shine that had drawn his eye to the ground.
“What is it?” I asked. It was smaller than any of our satellites, and I didn’t think any of the small drones had gotten launched from Horizon before the explosion.
“I’m not sure,” the General said. There were markings in the metal, scratched lines that might have been etched there by the fall to Ceti. But the metal looked so shiny, brighter than any I’d seen. Everything on Horizon was over two hundred years old. This looked brand new. And the more I looked at the markings the more I became convinced it was some kind of writing, unlike any I recognized.
“Can we carry it back?” I asked. I looked around, suddenly struck by the unsettling notion that the ‘saurs might not be the only life on this planet. Who had made this object, and when? It was buried deeply enough in the foliage that it must have been there for years, long before Horizon entered Eden’s atmosphere. We had never found the slightest indication that any other intelligent species had lived here. The hairs on the back of my neck raised and I squinted into the vegetation, searching for some unseen observer. I saw nothing but empty swamp.
The General tapped it with the flat of his knife. It made a soft ping. “Whatever it is, it’s been here quite a while.”
My fingers traced the markings on the object’s face. “These lines look . . . intentional. Like some kind of letters.”
“It’s no language I’ve ever seen.”
We dug at the sides of the metal object trying to free it.
“I don’t think we’re going to get it loose easy enough.” The General glanced up at the darkening sky. “And I don’t think this came from Horizon. I’m not sure where it came from. But it will have to stay here a while longer. Let’s get these canteens filled and get back to the others.”
I hurried to catch up with the General, glancing back over my shoulder at the strange object.
There was no warning rustle, no telltale shape. They sit so still, blending into the bushes around them. If I’d been walking on the left side, it would have been me. But I wasn’t, and when the Gila stood up out of the brush and whipped its tail around faster than we could think, the General took the sting.
It hit him in the thigh, tearing open a great gash in his pants. He fell into me and I caught him, lowering him down to the damp ground. The Gila crouched back in the bushes, content to wait for its poison to work. Four-legged and built low to the ground, they weren’t fast movers, except that tail. They didn’t need to be. When their venom coursed through a body, they could stroll along behind at their leisure until their victim collapsed, gasping for air. The doctors said their venom was some kind of neurotoxin that paralyzed the muscles, including the diaphragm. The General had about twenty seconds left to breathe.
I grabbed frantically at his shoulders, trying to drag him away from the crouching Gila but he reached up and held my arm, stilling me.
“Go while you can!” he gasped.
“I won’t leave you, sir
,” I whispered, clutching his arm, though we both knew it was futile. Hardly anyone survived Gila venom, even if they had a team of doctors and all of Eden’s medical supplies right there. Out here, he had no chance at all.
“Don’t let it get you, too. Get back to the team, get back to Eden. It’s all on you. Tell your mother . . .”
The General’s throat seized up before he could finish the sentence. His eyes bulged wide in panic as he twitched helplessly on the ground, unable to move, unable to breathe.
I backed away from the grisly scene and raised my pistol. At least I could kill the Gila that got the General. I sighted the beast’s neck, the only place soft enough for a bullet to penetrate. But before I could pull the trigger, the General’s voice echoed in my ear, a memory of my training that I hoped never to use.
“If a team member is truly lost, don’t waste a shot. You’ll only accomplish two things: alerting every other ‘saur in the vicinity to your location, and possibly just enraging the ‘saur you meant to kill. If your man is lost, let the ‘saur have its meal and use the time to get the rest of your team to safety.”
He had told us that near the beginning of training, when we’d first landed and started to figure out the dangers that threatened us here. I felt like decades had passed since then.
The Gila slowly emerged from the bushes, paying me no special mind. I backed up farther, unable to look away as it lowered its broad, green-scaled head to sniff at the General’s still body. Its wide nostrils flared, a strand of drool dripping from its fetid maw.
“I’m so sorry, General Carthage,” I whispered, as the Gila opened its mouth to feed. I turned and ran into the swamp.
Chapter 19