by Nathan Dodge
He shook his head, then stared at the unresponsive PA. “The only chance we got is to get to the station, but it’s a lot of klicks to the west. Traveling at night, I don’t think we can make it before the sun comes up.”
She looked out over the purpling sky, then back at Dante. “Only chance we have, Dat. Stay here and we run out of power for the porta-pak and the kill-field, and eventually out of food. I don’t think we could even survive in a deep cave without the pak.”
“I hate it when you’re right.” He grunted, turning one last regretful look at the blanket covering Cate’s form. He would mourn Cates later, Dante decided, if they survived.
Rummaging in the junk pile for the next twenty-odd minutes, Dante found little worth taking. In retrospect, he couldn’t understand why he had brought most of the parts and pieces in the first place. The events of the night before had blurred, some of the worst moments mercifully softened.
Some of them.
Nausea attacked again and his head swam. He closed his eyes, bracing himself with both arms on the cave floor.
A wrenching impact; instrument consoles shattered and flew through the cabin; a seat passed in front of Dante’s eyes, body still partly attached. Someone screamed.
Gradually, his head ceased to revolve and Dante opened his eyes. He wondered vaguely if, like Cates, his body was also quietly collapsing inside. His hands ran along his sides, and he winced at the soreness.
He spied two bottles of water amid the miscellany piled in the corner. Snagging both bottles, he pawed through the other items, rejecting all but an additional heater, an emergency medical kit weighing less than a kilo, and the meal packs.
Cautiously, he tried to stand. Returning to the backpack that had been his pillow, he stowed the water and food and attached the holster to his belt. An extra heater was good news. At night, a vipret attack could be quick and nearly silent. He would have to be alert. He finally decided to carry one heater in his hand.
Maria sat outside, surveying the floor of the desert. The sky was fading now to a scabby red. Starting to leave the cave, he saw the barrier-active light flicker. He leaned over to turn the controller off, then stumbled outside toward Maria.
“You turned the barrier back on. If I hadn’t noticed the On light, I’d have gotten a nasty surprise.” His words might have been furious at another time, but Dante found himself eerily calm. Maria said nothing, simply surveying the sky and the slopes behind them. The rising breeze whipped and tousled her hair, but Dante’s buzz-cut left little for the wind to grab. The oppressive heat shocked him like a slap in the face, although the desert would be chilly by dawn. Dante ached for that cooler time. He did not anticipate marching across the desert at one hundred twenty degrees with any relish.
“Let’s wait a while longer,” he suggested.
She turned, favored him with a wry smile. “We have two chances of finding another cave tomorrow morning: slim and none. If we can’t make it to the station tonight, we are going to be in trouble.”
Maria turned away, staring again into the distance. She wasn’t even sweating. He swore under his breath. “We have to make fifty klicks before sunrise with two bags of water. I guess at least it’s flat.”
“No. The station is at about two kilometers elevation. Once we manage the first forty, unless we raise somebody, we have ten more kilometers, climbing two in the process.”
Dante invoked every deity he could think of, including a few he was pretty sure hadn’t been worshipped since humanity was Earthbound.
“Sorry, Dat. It’s why I want to get started. We need the extra time. We need the edge.”
He nodded slowly. “Okay, okay. We can start in a few minutes.” He scratched his head, eyes mere slits, as he regarded the landscape and did mental calculations. “A casual hike is three kilometers per hour. Back when I was in boot camp, we quick-timed a lot at six. But that was twenty years ago.”
“It’s a historic event, then.”
Dante went back into the cave without bothering to argue. Filling the backpack didn’t take long, but fully packed, it seemed to weigh tons. He had to carry the kill-field generator, the porta-pak, the heaters, one of which he strapped on and one that he carried in his hand, and the water, no small load in itself. He decided to lighten that part of the load by taking a healthy drink. Moving to the front of the cave, he proffered it to Maria.
She shook her head. “Maybe later.”
Shrugging, he stowed it, shouldered the backpack, groaned softly at its weight, and left the cave.
“Can you help with this? Carry it a bit later on?”
“No.” She seemed to hesitate. “Four marathons over the last year, God knows how many in all—you’d think I’d be excited.” There was something strange in her face as she said it, something that might have escaped someone else. But he’d known her too long.
“It’s your leg, isn’t it? Here you were, hinting at shock, but it’s sprained, isn’t it? We should stay here, see if rescue comes. Or you wait and I’ll make it. I’ll bring back help.”
Maria considered, eying him with unblinking consideration. “No. They have no idea where we landed, and it’s a big planet. Two have a better chance of making it than one. My leg’s good enough to walk, I just can’t carry anything besides a heater.”
She stepped out ahead of him, hips swaying, no limp showing. “Let’s get going.”
He followed as energetically as he could. The temperature already felt lower, although probably still north of a hundred ten. His personal unit had a temp sensor, but he decided checking it would only depress him.
They did as Maria had suggested, moving south half a kilometer or so away from the ruts, rock piles, and irregularities at the base of the foot hills. Once headed west, they made better time than Dante had estimated. The temperature began to fall rapidly, and a breeze out of the southeast was pleasant within an hour or so. Maria walked easily and stayed ahead, her slender hips moving sinuously as she stretched her long legs into a kilometer-eating stride.
The ground before them was brown, flat, and dusty, soil so dry and compact that it seemed as hard as the rock that surrounded it. There was little plant life excepting a few bushes that resembled something like burned cacti back on Earth, albeit a lavender color. He realized that he could detect almost no odor in the air. Perhaps a bit of musty weed-smell from the dead clumps of grass they encountered, but nothing else.
The sky evolved from purplish-gray to charcoal to inky black, stars emerging in a flourish of bright colors. The system in which Lomai and its sister planets circled their sun was at the edge of a loose cluster of some eighty thousand stars, a few of which were visible in the daytime. Nights were multicolored displays of fireworks, the light brighter by far than a full moon back on Earth, despite the fact that Lomai had no satellite. They had no trouble picking their way across the landscape, although a bit slower than Dante wished. The plain appeared deserted, but Dante knew better. Stretched before him, behind rocks or bushes or in uneven cracks or crevices, were a thousand hiding places for the many ways to die that this world offered.
Somehow, Dante was able to keep up for more than an hour, his perspiration gradually dropping in proportion to the temperature. Still, his mouth was soon bone-dry, and after ninety minutes by his PA, he called a halt, perching on a flat rock after carefully inspecting it. He waited until Maria, still ahead, turned to look at him.
“I gotta take a break.” He pulled out the open water bottle and took a long pull. Maria came back to stare at him, still standing. He held up the bottle.
“No, thanks.”
Dante gestured with the bottle. “You got to take it some time. Don’t want to get dehydrated.”
“I snuck some out of the pack when we were walking side-by-side a ways back.”
He stared at the bottle. “You didn’t take much.”
“Dante, if I want more, I’ll take it. Don’t worry about me. We’ve come maybe five kilometers, but we’ve got forty-five to go.
Take another minute and then let’s fly.”
Let’s fly. He smiled up at her. “You always used to say that.”
“Sorry, I hate repeating myself.”
“I don’t mind. Do you remember—remember when we were first dating? That first night.”
“Why would I forget that?” Dante blinked at her response, wondering if he should say anything in return: that it was a long time ago, that she’d dumped him, that he’d never seemed as important to her as she’d been to him.
“I don’t think I slept any at all.”
“And in the morning we ate, you kissed me, and said, ‘Dat, see you later. Got to fly.” And nothing had ever been the same again.
She laughed, a melodious tinkle, almost like chimes. “Come on, Dat. Let’s fly.”
* * *
Dante estimated that they had come twenty-five kilometers, more or less. The backpack had somehow grown in weight from tons to tens of tons. His breath came in spasms and, despite the chill that now lay in the air, his side ached and his lungs burned with every breath.
“Another stop,” he gasped, dropping to the ground. A good twenty meters or so ahead, Maria turned and slowly walked back to him. “We can’t stop, Dat. We’re losing time.”
“I got to take a ten-minute break.” He took a long draw on the bottle, and realized that it was empty. Tossing it away—no use carrying a single ounce extra—he fished in the pack for the second bottle and took a swallow.
“Here.” He held out the bottle.
“Later. I haven’t sweated much; you’re carrying the load. At least now it’s cool enough that we won’t use water so fast.”
“What time is it?”
“You’ve got the only personal.”
“Oh, yeah.” He slipped it out of his pocket and tried to focus on the display; he was so tired that everything seemed fuzzy. “It’s about an hour past local midnight. We got a good eight hours of darkness, maybe another hour of minimal heat and sun. It’s going to be close.”
“Then don’t rest too long.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not carrying the pack.”
Maria frowned at him a moment. “What weighs the most in that load?”
He shrugged, “The porta-pak, of course. It’s probably half the weight I’m carrying.”
The frown intensified. “Ditch it.”
“Are you kidding? If we have to hide in a cave again, or even under a ledge, it’ll keep us cool enough to save our lives.” Maria stilled, a look so calmly cool and competent it frightened him. He recognized that look, one of clear determination.
“Dat, by the end of this night, we’ll have little water and probably no place to hide. If we can’t find the station, we won’t last another day. Ditch it.”
Dante thought about it. Opening the backpack, he got out the porta-pak, its battery, and the charger. “The battery has about fifteen hours on it, enough for another day. The charger, though, is all but out of fuel. And it weighs more than the battery or the pak itself.” He tossed it onto the rough, sandy soil. “We can always get another charger. That subtracts more than six kilograms. Good idea.”
“I’d toss it all, but at least that’s an improvement. What else can you ditch?”
He strewed the contents of his backpack across the ground in front of him. The kill-field generator was relatively small, maybe a kilogram. He had brought all the food, which on sober reconsideration made no sense. A couple of meals for tonight and maybe something for tomorrow, if they had to hole up again. The rest, ten meal kits, were superfluous. He repacked and stood up, surprised to find the backpack was almost bearable. He waved Maria off.
“Let’s fly.”
Maria hadn’t even sat, so she merely turned and strode away, her long legs eating up the distance.
The kilometers slipped slowly by. It was nearly chilly by the time they had walked another hour. Dante tried to increase his pace, but his body had begun to rebel, and he found himself stumbling and staggering forward as they neared the thirty-five kilometer mark. Twice he took out his personal and scanned for signals. Nothing. The station was high enough in the first range of mountains that it was well hidden from both visual and radio view. Maria had never cared for profanity, so he kept his stream of curses to himself.
After another half hour, Dante’s exhaustion was nearing what he could tolerate.
He abruptly found himself on his hands and knees, head spinning. Struggling drunkenly, he managed to get to his feet; on the ground, he was vulnerable to any number of dangers. Glancing around, he spied a sandspider crawling toward him. He fired and missed it, but behind him came another shot that turned it into a brown crisp, legs vibrating in death spasm.
“Are you okay?”
Dante’s tongue stumbled on itself, but Maria didn’t seem to mind. She seemed to assume some tacit confirmation and patted his shoulder before she turned once again toward their goal.
* * *
Dante stood, gasping, looking up at the first of the foothills that loomed so near as to block out the larger peaks to the north. The backpack, now on the ground beside him, was much lighter than before he had ditched the power supply, but in the last two hours it seemed to have doubled in mass. The straps had dug into his shoulders for so long that now he could feel welts where each strap had abraded the skin.
“The station is due north?”
“Yes, maybe ten to twelve kilometers away, a good fifteen hundred meters or more higher. It’s there, we just can’t see it.”
Dante sat stubbornly, looking resentfully at Maria as she stood, seemingly unmarked by fatigue. “How can you look so fresh when I can hardly stand?”
Maria snorted. “Four marathons last year. Didn’t I tell you a million times to quit reading and working on the ship so much and get outside? Didn’t I ask you to join me in the gym? If you’d ever listened to me, you’d be fifteen kilos lighter and you’d have run this whole way.”
“You never did believe how busy I was,” Dante said. It wasn’t an accusation, precisely, but the words seemed to curdle in the air. And yet he wasn’t precisely sure he’d have taken them back if he could.
“No,” Maria said. She seemed thoughtful. “I guess I didn’t.”
They were silent for a while, Dante’s breath slowing, his heartbeat gradually slipping back from racing to simply fast. Too bad, he reflected, that he had sat down. Now he wasn’t sure he could manage to stand again.
But he did, shifting the pack onto his aching shoulders. “So, let’s—”
“No, Dante,” she interrupted. “You can’t fly anymore, I know that. Let’s just keep moving.”
He nodded, silent, adjusted the straps of the backpack, and began to trudge up the first gradual slope.
In fifteen minutes, he was gasping for air, his lungs aching so that he had to stop. Looking downslope, he could see that they’d come a half-kilometer at most.
“Maria, I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up. It was bad enough on the level, but now every step I take seems like it might be my last.”
For once she wasn’t flippant. “I know. It’s hard—but we don’t have a choice if we still want to be alive tomorrow night.”
“Staying alive seems a little less important than it used to.”
“Just keep trying, that’s the main thing.” Dante was surprised at the expression on her face. Not sympathy for him, not fatigue. Her face had a look of deep seriousness, as though she were thinking, pondering hard, assessing alternatives. Not like Maria at all.
Finally, he said, “Could you carry the pack just a little while? Just a half-kilometer or so?”
“My foot is broken.”
Dante slumped to the ground. “You’re walking on a broken foot?” he whispered.
“Fractured. In a few places, actually. I wasn’t going to tell you, but—that’s why. I’m not in much pain. I made sure of that. But it’s getting worse. Before too long, it won’t hold up, not even with the boot’s support.”
“Wh
y did you come? I could have gone myself.”
“I want you to live.” She said it so quietly he might not have understood if he hadn’t seen her lips move. His hand reached out, fingertips aching to touch her mouth.
“If I could take it all back—”
“It’s not like that,” she said, and his heart hurt the way it had when she’d dismissed him so casually, all those years ago. “Dat, I don’t know why you won’t let it go, that part of it. But just because I don’t want to sleep with you anymore doesn’t mean I stopped caring.”
“Why wasn’t I good enough?”
“Sun in desert, sky above,” she said. “She … I wasn’t good enough. Once the intercourse ended, you left. You abandoned ship, not—not me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“We have to go,” she said.
* * *
Dante made maybe another half-kilometer before his determination seemed to melt away. Heart pounding, legs like rubber, he was about to collapse when he heard Maria shout.
“Vipret! Dante, look out!” He swept his gaze up to see the monstrous creature, fully five meters long, streaking downslope, heading dead on toward them both. Its scales a shiny silver, its four monitors lava-like, it moved with otherworldly speed, the frenetic, irregular side maneuvers leaving him uncertain where to aim.
The heater had never left his right hand. He raised it and fired, the beam so close to Maria’s head he was afraid he’d hit her as well. The snake angled to the left, a gaping hole along its side, its body barely slowing. He fired again, and again, aiming for the head. It slowed, but the head still struck at Maria. Frantic, he leveled a long blast at its head, severing it cleanly from the body, which cork-screwed in spasmodic death tremors until it collapsed at Maria’s feet.
Maria stumbled two paces and sat down hard. He rushed toward her, the adrenaline flooding through his body giving him a burst of strength. By the time he reached her, she had lifted up her pants-leg. He could see two long, horizontal scratches just above her knee.
“Dear God, did it …?”
She looked up, face calm. “You saved me, Dante. It didn’t get a clean bite—just raked the flesh.” She grimaced. “The way things are going, I’ll be a double amputee. Think the company will pay for full replacement?”