by Cara Bristol
“It burned itself out,” he said. “I had a hunch these trees have natural fire retardant properties.”
Pia tipped her head. Thousands and thousands of lights speckled the blackness doming the planet. Each light was a star, each star offered a chance for life on its orbiting planets. “They look so close,” she said. “But they’re not.”
“They’re millions, even billions of light years away,” he agreed. “Some of the stars emitting the light we’re seeing now don’t exist anymore. After they burned up their fuel, the smaller ones probably became white dwarfs, and the massive ones have collapsed into neutron stars or black holes after going supernova.”
“Spewing out stellar material that might someday become new stars,” she mused. “The reincarnation of the universe. The death of a star leads to the birth of another.”
“Unending,” he agreed.
“Vast.” She stared up at the span of twinkling lights, and awe solidified into a knot of dread. “Finding us will be like searching for a speck of stardust in an infinite universe.” She hugged herself.
“They’ll find us,” Brock said. “They don’t have to search the entire universe, just a small portion. The coordinates for our origination and our destination are recorded.” He pointed into the sky. “See that star? That’s Terra’s sun.”
“How do you know that?” she asked. “I’ve studied astronomy,” he said.
“But star patterns shift, depending on where you are.”
“I’ve studied a lot of astronomy.”
“Well, I’m impressed.” The depth of his knowledge and abilities amazed her. With the star and moonlight shining into the barren gouge, she could make out the hulking shapes of the massive trees. “This planet has an amenable atmosphere. It has vegetative life. Why do you suppose it’s on the restricted list? Why hasn’t somebody colonized it?”
“I don’t have the answer to that.”
“Finally—something you don’t know,” Penelope teased. She thought he would smile, but he didn’t. If anything, he looked more serious. Anguished. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m not the man you think I am.” He turned away.
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t be what you want, what you need.”
“And what is that?” she demanded.
“All the usual things.” He raked a hand through his hair. “Listen, I’m sorry I started anything. I acted selfishly. I never should have touched you. Shouldn’t have let you touch me. It was a mistake.”
His words hit her like a punch to the face. Penelope reeled. What had caused such an about-face?
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Let’s go back to the tree. I’ll retrieve our stuff; we’ll have something to eat, and by then it should be light enough to set out.”
Chapter Eleven
With Pia’s bag slung over his shoulder, Brock scrambled from the tree. Pia stood several meters away, ignoring him. His hunger for her had weakened him and caused him to give in to temptation not once, but twice. Fortunately, her innocent observation of his vast knowledge slapped him back to reality. His seeming wealth of information came from his microcomputer’s database. He wasn’t a normal man; he was a cyborg operative who responded to the most dangerous assignments across the galaxy. He had no right to her affection.
Pia needed a man who could love her and who could be there for her. A man with guarantees, not a semi-human whose borrowed time could expire on his next assignment.
If he could keep Pia angry at him, it might prevent him from committing further rash acts of lust and longing. He had never intended to hurt her. “I’m sorry.” The words were torn from him.
She shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. It was my fault. Apparently, when you were fucking me, and then when I was sucking on your cock, I got the wrong idea that we’d put the past behind us and gotten a fresh start.”
The past was behind them; it was the present that caused the difficulty. The urge to correct the misconception leapt to his lips, but he compressed his mouth in a firm line. It would be easier for her if he allowed her to hate him.
“If you’re hungry, we could turn on your emergency light and have some breakfast,” he suggested.
“I wouldn’t call breakfast an emergency,” she said. “We should save the light for when we need it.”
“It’s solar powered; it will recharge.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“All right. Let’s go into the clearing then. It should be light soon anyway.”
Already, dawn had tinted the gouge a deep pink. With the tension thicker than the woods, he set her pack on a large rock and dug through it until he found a NutriSup bar. After unwrapping it, he handed her half.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You have to eat. We’ll probably do a lot of hiking today. You must keep up your strength.”
“Fine.” She grabbed the bar.
They ate breakfast in silence. The NutriSup stuck in Brock’s throat, but he forced it down. His nanocytes could keep him operating for a long time, but to function at peak efficiency, he should continue to nourish his body.
Brock wiped his hands on his pants and stood up. “I doubt there’s anything left of the space shuttle, but we shouldn’t assume. It’s not far, so let’s check it out.” It would be too much to hope that the craft’s communication system would be intact, but perhaps they might salvage something useful.
“Fine.”
They didn’t hike far before they came upon the first shuttle piece: a melted, twisted lump. A meter away, another blackened something. The explosion had scattered bits and pieces of the composite hull probably for kilometers. Anything readily flammable had been reduced to ash, the more resistant elements to an unidentifiable mass. He’d hoped the craft’s flight recorder would have survived the fire, but the melted blobs of metal dashed that idea.
The pieces got larger the closer they got to the crash site, but nothing was left intact. The shuttle had sheared off trees on both sides of the makeshift runway before exploding and setting fire to others, reducing them to charred, leafless stumps. He and Pia had escaped death by only seconds.
Brock compressed his lips, strode to a tall tree that had escaped torching and climbed to the top. When he peered down, he found Pia staring up.
“What do you see?” she called. At least she was still speaking to him.
“Trees,” he said. Trees, trees, and more trees—for as far as his eyes could see, which was a considerable distance given his cybervision. The leafy canopy formed an unbroken verdant barrier between ground and sky. Reconnaissance rescue drones skimming the planet’s atmosphere would never see them. The canopy would render them invisible. He wondered if his emergency beacon could even send out a consistent signal or would if it be broken up by the trees.
“The furrow seems to be the sole significant clearing,” he said.
His computer brain calculated the length of the barren strip of rocky, sandy ground as 5.47 kilometers. From this vantage point, it resembled a runaway, although it hadn’t been wide enough to accommodate their shuttle. When they’d landed, they’d torn out trees.
Of course, there was no such thing as a standard-sized space vehicle. Had the channel been cut as a small private craft runway? Or could the barrenness be a natural phenomenon? Perhaps a natural herbicide in the soil prevented plant life from taking root. But why just this strip?
Surveying the green expanse one more time, he noted an area not far off the end of the gouge where the vegetation appeared to be a bit thinner. That would be the best place to search for water. He fixed the coordinates in his mind and descended.
“What now?” Pia asked.
He tossed a melted hunk from the hull into the woods. “I’m going to clear as much of the wreckage from the furrow as I can, and then we should search for water.”
“Why bother clearing it?”
“Because the strip, while an inadequate runway, is the only place to put down a shuttle.” If a space craft
couldn’t land, they couldn’t be extracted.
Pia strode to a chunk of debris half the size of the one Brock had flung out of the gully. Her eyes rounded when she couldn’t budge it so much as a centimeter. She glanced toward the woods where his piece had landed. “How did you move that?”
“I have a little more muscle than you,” he replied. Not to mention enhancements giving him the strength of five men. He picked up her piece and tossed it.
She didn’t need to task her energy reserves to help him. He could clear the passage far easier than she—but not without arousing her suspicion, so he let her wrestle with the smaller hunks weighing fifteen to twenty kilograms. Hundreds of pieces of debris had to be removed. By the time they finished, Pia was huffing and puffing, but Brock hadn’t broken a sweat.
Faking fatigue, he plopped onto a boulder. She took a seat next to him.
“Drink?” He offered their container.
“Thanks.” She took a few sips, recapped it, and then wiped her brow.
“I saw an area where we might search for water,” he said.
“Can we risk leaving this spot? What if someone comes looking for us?”
Missing the extraction team would be disastrous. Once rescuers crossed the planet off the search list, they wouldn’t return.
“We’ll be on the gouge for most of the way, but it’s soon to expect a rescue. However, the best time to search for water is before it runs out.”
“We will be rescued, though, right?”
“Yes.” Provided Lamis-Odg didn’t get to them first. “Ready to head out?”
“Let’s do it.”
Under a lavender sky, they hiked the furrow, their footfalls the only sound. No squawking birds, no howlers, no buzzing insects. Brock almost wished for an attack by bugs. It might have settled his growing unease. If this planet couldn’t sustain animal life, how would it sustain them?
The Association of Planets and Terran authorities would be searching for its missing ambassador, and Carter would be looking for his MIA cyborg. The Interplanetary Flight Authority would investigate the sudden loss of its shuttle and passengers. But they wouldn’t begin to search for at least two more days, probably three, and with a half-dozen planets between the spaceport and Xenia that could support life, they had a lot of area to search.
If his homing beacon could penetrate through the trees, it might draw in searchers when they got within range—but he had to assume Lamis-Odg would seek to confirm Pia’s death. If the terrorist organization located them first, game over. The only thing worse than not being rescued would be to be found by the wrong people.
“I’m sorry,” Pia said out of the blue. “I didn’t mean to put you in an awkward position.”
What had happened between them was uncomfortable enough without talking about it. Her apology worsened his guilt. “Don’t apologize. It was my mistake.”
“It’s me, isn’t it? You don’t find me attractive.”
Fuck. He gritted his teeth. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Then you haven’t forgiven me.”
He couldn’t let her think that either. “That’s not it. I have forgiven you.”
“Then what is it?”
I got what I wanted; now I’m moving on. A comment like that would halt all of this, but he couldn’t wound her that way.
“Because of things that have happened since I left the Central Protection Office, it’s not in me to care for somebody. I can’t love you. You deserve better than me.” His guts twisted with jealousy at the thought that someday she would meet that somebody.
He leaped to his feet to forestall any more discussion. “We’d better get a move on. The clearing is over this way.” He charged into the woods, leaving Pia with no alternative but to follow.
With the canopy of leaves the size of umbrellas, the woods remained in perpetual twilight, impeding the growth of smaller plants. It made for an easy hike, but without a path or much differentiation between the trees, it would be easy for someone without a built-in navigation and directional system to become lost. One tree pretty much resembled the next. Layers of fallen fronds muffled sound to a whisper.
“I don’t like the woods,” Pia said.
He didn’t either. Damned if he knew what, but something was off-kilter. “It’s a little eerie,” he agreed.
“You feel it, too, then.”
So much so, that if he hadn’t programmed the exact coordinates, he might have retraced his steps to the gouge, but his cybersenses guided him toward the location he’d set in his brain. After a while, trickles of light filtered through small gaps in the trees and isolated smaller plants cropped up, growing thicker as the canopy thinned.
“This is different vegetation,” Pia commented as saplings tangled around their legs and caught at their clothing. She shoved at a branch that slapped her in the face. “How much farther do you think we have to go?”
“Just a little ways,” he said, and, a minute later, they broke out of the woods into an area devoid of all flora. At the center of the clearing lay a placid clear pool.
“Water!” Pia exclaimed.
“Water,” he repeated, and slipped her carryall from his shoulder onto the grayish rocky beach.
Pia picked up a small flat stone, flexed her wrist, and skipped the rock across the pond. It bounced off the surface four times before plunging to the sandy bottom.
He followed suit, but his sank after the second hop. Penelope shot him a triumphant grin before kneeling and slipping a handful of beach rocks into her trouser pocket.
“Why are you taking those?”
“Souvenirs to remember our adventure.” She opened her carryall, rooted around inside, and pulled out their half-empty water container. “I’ll fill the canteen.”
“Don’t fall in. It looks deep.” He tossed another pebble into the pond. It plunked, sent out a ripple, and sank. No fish skittered away. No weeds or algae mucked up the water.
Pia crouched at the edge. Her reflection shimmered on the smooth surface of the pure, clear pool.
Brock toed the pebbles under his feet. The barrenness reminded him of the gouge. The beach followed the outlines of the pond as if someone had drawn a line. Outside the line, dense growth. Inside—nothing but rock and sand. Not a single blade of grass, no moss, no lichen.
He eyed the scum-free pond. No fish. No tadpoles. Just liquid.
Pia leaned over to dip the container into the pond.
“No! Stop!” Brock shot forward. His booted feet slipped on shifting pebbles, and he fell. His left hand broke his fall at the pool’s edge; the right one plunged into the drink. Fire engulfed his arm. He bellowed.
He rolled; reflex jerked his extremity out of the pool. Skin, gone. Muscle, gone. Tendons, gone. All that remained of his hand was the metal phalanges, ulna, and radius of his prosthesis. Burning consumed the right upper quadrant of his body.
Not water. Highly corrosive acid.
Pia screamed and stumbled, dropping the canteen. “What are you?”
“Penelope—” He cradled his skeletal forearm as waves of nausea threatened to double him over. His vision grayed at the edges, but he stepped toward her.
“That’s how you did all those things. You’re not human. You’re not Brock Mann!” She skidded on loose stones, scrambling away from him. “You’re a robot. A machine.”
“I’m still…Brock…Mann.” Nanocytes flooded the injury, but did nothing to block the excruciating pain. He couldn’t think. He shook his head, but his vision continued to fuzz.
She lunged for a heavy stick. “Stay away from me!” she cried, and a whole new kind of hurt shot through him. “Y-you could be with Lamis-Odg!”
“No! Penelope…Pia…”
“Don’t call me that.” Her gaze zeroed in on the metal claw jutting out from his sleeve. “Who are you? What are you? Android?”
He staggered toward her. The pain interfered with his ability to think straight. His right arm was useless, and two fingers of his good hand were bu
rned by the acid from touching his exposed metal forearm.
She brandished the stick. “Stay away from me! Don’t come any closer.”
Consciousness fogged, his computer brain putting his body into protective sleep mode so his nanocytes could repair the damage. He fought it off, shaking his head, which seemed to have doubled its weight. The motion propelled him forward. He tripped.
Pia screamed and ran.
“I…am…a cyborg,” he said before he hit the ground and blackness obliterated everything.
Chapter Twelve
Run. Run. Run.
Saplings snapped at Penelope’s face and tore at her legs. Her breath came in great gasps, her chest aching. Her legs burned, but she forced them to move faster, faster.
The brush thinned, and the forest darkened under the heavy canopy, but she kept running.
Any moment, she expected to be tackled. He’d been injured, but she’d seen what he could do, what he could take. Leaping out of the space shuttle. The burns. The way he’d healed. Not human. He was so much faster, stronger than she.
Go. Go. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.
Had he followed? Was he gaining? She risked a glance behind her.
Her shins slammed into a fallen log, and Pia went flying. She screamed and sailed through the air before slamming onto the forest floor. She lay writhing in the leaves, struggling to breathe. Tears of terror blurred her vision.
What the hell was he—it? An artificial intelligence model? Android, maybe?
No, he was nothing like the baggage, security, or janitorial droids. He’d looked, acted, sounded, smelled, tasted human. Except for those extraordinary feats.
Get up. Keep moving.
Her legs, her body refused to obey. Heaving and gagging, she puked into the fallen leaves. When she had nothing left to expel, she staggered to her feet She wished she could rinse her mouth, but she’d dropped the canteen at the acid pool.
He should have caught me by now.
Not if he’s injured. If? She’d never seen an injury so horrific—in seconds, the tissue eaten away down to the bones. Metal bones. Were his skin and muscle even real?