Wildcatter

by Dave Duncan

  He struggled to his feet again. “Now to look inside.”

  “Watch you don’t get shot at,” Jordan said.

  Wise advice. Seth decided he was already close enough to open negotiations.

  “Ship ahoy!” He shouted as loud as he could, knowing how his mask would muffle his voice. “Hello, Galactic! Anyone home? Anyone looking for a ride back to Earth?”

  Nothing happened except that the sun went out. The storm had now spread from horizon to horizon, but the wind had dropped, for the first time since he arrived on Cacafuego. The ferns were barely moving. He walked closer to the shuttle.

  There was a dead fish lying outside the opening.

  This time his voice definitely quavered.

  “Now that fish is odd. The position looks too deliberate to be just chance. There are no other dead fish anywhere, not that I can see. Is this one meant to be bait, placed there to lure some animal closer? Or has someone left an offering to the gods who live inside? Any new planet is interesting, but this one is starting to look bizarre.” Also scary, even for him.

  He shouted again. Still no response.

  “I’m going closer.”

  The opening in the fuselage marked where the shuttle had almost broken in two, a great wound like the mouth of a cave. The entrance was low enough that he had to stoop to see in.

  He clattered his stun gun against the side and turned on his helmet light to scan the shadowed interior. He was looking through the former underbelly into a shambles that had been the biosafety laboratory, now lying on its side. Much sand had washed in, largely burying the heaps of smashed equipment and furniture on what had been a wall and was now the floor. The sand had retained many footprints, some human, others … not. About human length, but broader and webbed. Giant penguins?

  There were bones mixed in with the debris. Although they looked more like fish bones than human, they suggested that this might be something’s lair. What something other than humans used a spade—which he now saw standing upright in the sand just inside?

  There was a table, too, that had either landed almost exactly right way up or been placed in that position later. A drawer from a desk or chest stood upright on the table, handle at the top. Drawers in spacecraft did not fall out by accident, no matter how rough the turbulence, and he knew of no way that this one could have ended in that position unless it had been placed there by a sentient being.

  The only exit from the lab had been in the forward bulkhead, now turned sideways so that the door hung open. He shouted again, and this time he heard a faint noise, more a groan than a cry. And tapping!

  “I’m coming in!” An obstacle course in 1.6 gees with an unknown carnivorous species at the end of it was every boy’s dream. Stun gun in hand, he ducked inside. A workbench against the former forward bulkhead was now turned sideways with its cupboard doors open. It made a practical ladder leading up to the door, but would it hold his now enormous weight?

  “I’m coming!” he repeated.

  More tapping, faster this time.

  He clambered up to the door without trouble and scanned the next room with his lamp. Predictably it was the decontamination chamber required by all high-level biosafety labs, equipped with evacuation fans, showers, and UV sterilizers. He was still as dangerously far from the new floor on that side, but the shower doors were just below him, like a platform. He lowered himself warily. They groaned, but took his weight.

  He walked across to the far door, which was hinged on what was now the upper edge. Normally Control would never allow both doors of a decontamination chamber to be open at the same time, but here Control was dead. With the hinges at the top, the flap hung ajar, prevented from closing by a strip of scrap lithium alloy bent over the jamb.

  He gently pushed the door wider and peered through. The next room had been the biologists’ dorm, equipped with foldaway bunks and a few more conveniences. Linen, clothes, and mattresses had fallen in heaps against the starboard side, and on this clutter lay a dying woman. She was understandably naked in the heat, but had pulled a towel over herself in an attempt at modesty. One hand covered her eyes to shield them from his lamp, and the other held the bottle she had used for tapping. It was empty, of course. Her effort to speak made only a croaking sound.

  He turned the lamp so it shone upward. “Hi.” Careful to prop the door behind him, he climbed down one of the foldaway bunks, which was still chained to the wall and served as a ladder.

  “My name’s Seth Broderick. I’m from Mighty Mite’s Golden Hind, and we’re going to take you home.” He knelt, pulling his spare water bottle from his pouch. He needed that water himself. It would fit safely to his drinking tube, but once he broke the seal to let this woman drink from it he would not be able to use it without being exposed to biohazard. He broke the seal, lifted her with an arm under her shoulders, and put the tube to her mouth.

  She was either the master or the astrobiologist. She had been marooned down here for more than two weeks and he was going to rescue her. Cacafuego’s perils now seemed less dangerous. According to Duddridge, she had been hallucinating and suffering from a high fever, but she did not look fevered now. The killer planet might still be a serpent with two heads, but it had a weak bite if this woman had survived so long in these conditions. She must be a very tough lady.

  “That’s enough for now,” Seth said, removing the bottle and letting her lie down. “Have you been drinking the muck outside, or has the shuttle’s supply just run out?”

  She mumbled, “Two days ago.”

  “Are you Mariko or Meredith?”

  “Meredith.”

  That was often a herm name and she was large, with curves that suggested muscle more than fat, but Seth decided she was probably trad female. That instinct to cover her nudity was not herm, and she wore her hair longer than most herms did. He spread the towel better and grinned through his vizor at her. She smiled back. He opened the first aid packet on his suit, loaded the injector with a stim shot, and squirted it into her arm.

  “We named the river after you. Galactic ran away, you know?”

  “So… should you. Go! Virus…”

  “No.” He did not believe in infective agents that could slip through modern biosafety barriers. No virus particle or bacterium would penetrate his suit.

  “Prospector to Golden Hind. Can you read me?”

  Silence. The metal skin of the shuttle was blocking the feeble signals from his helmet. He wanted to know how the storm was progressing. He needed the shuttle more urgently now.

  “You haven’t starved, though,” he said. The galley would have held emergency rations, but could she have reached it? The corridor door, the original exit, was three meters overhead, and closed. She must have been confined to this room and the laboratory. The decon showers might have let her access the water store.

  “The centaurs bring me food,” she whispered.

  Pause for thought. Wildcatters were always inventing weird names for new things, but he could not help wondering if her hallucinations lingered on. After three weeks in this atmosphere she must have serious nitrogen narcosis, at least, even if she had recovered whatever virus or bacillus she had caught before. Anything she said might be delusion.

  Six-toed footprints with talons?

  “Centaurs?”

  “Amphibious creatures. Like otters.”

  “Sentient?”

  She nodded.

  Something had laid a dead fish at her doorstep. Damn! First contact and Mighty Mite would be ruined by it.

  “Friendly?”

  “They don’t like clothes.”

  Seth decided to leave the sentience question until later. It raised far too many questions and no answers.

  “Apart from thirst, how are you feeling?”

  “Weak, hungry, and so glad to see a human face that I’m about to have hysterics.”

  “I often have that effect on people.”

  “It’s against my religion. I was so sure I was going to… I can f
eel that stim shot working.” She took the water bottle from him and drank.

  With her solid build, blond hair, and fair skin, she was a Brunhilda, not a Venus. Women were rarely prospectors. The thought that he might have met a female Seth Broderick amused him. As far as he could recall the legends, neither Brunhilda nor her boyfriend had ended happily.

  “There’s a storm brewing outside. Will we be safe from it in here?”

  “Safe as anywhere.”

  “We have only one shuttle and it can’t land until the weather improves. You will have to put up with my company for a few hours.”

  She smiled for the first time. Under normal conditions, that smile would rank as thrilling. “You won’t get very far in that armor, Sir Knight.”

  “No offense intended, but I wasn’t planning any heavy moves just yet. I’ll take a rain check. Will you be able to walk to the shuttle when it comes? I doubt I can carry you in this gravity.”

  “You ought to rescue smaller maidens.”

  “Or maidens in less distress. How long have you been here?”

  “Nineteen-hour days or twenty-four hour? I have no idea.”

  Why shut herself up in this dark oven? Perhaps because vermin would have trouble getting in. Or perhaps she had just crawled in here at the end to die. Only one hell of a strong-minded woman would still be anywhere close to her right mind after such an ordeal.

  “Our ship’s calendar won’t be yours, of course, but we reckon it’s been eighteen days since Duddridge posted his beacon.”

  “I’d been here five or six days by then,” she said.

  That was longer than Duddridge had implied in his beacon message. The more lies Seth identified in that, the more he agreed with JC’s suspicions that Galactic must have found something worth a double or triple murder. If so, Meredith Tsukuba must know what that something was. This might be a very profitable rescue. Except for the sentience problem.

  “And he just pissed off, abandoning you?”

  “It was the right decision. I told him to. I confirmed what Mariko had told him; that the infectious agent had bypassed all our barriers and couldn’t be contained. We were contagious and too sick to help ourselves. An unmanned shuttle wouldn’t be able to rescue us from the wreck, and a manned mission would put other lives at risk. Even if he could get us back upside, we’d endanger the ship’s crew.”

  “It was your idea that he abandon you?”

  “Mine and Mariko’s. And you should get away from me, too.”

  This was insane. “You really think that bug of yours can penetrate a K333 suit?”

  “Yes. It got through all our defenses. Dylan caught it first. Granted, there’s a very slight chance his suit was compromised in the centaur attack. But it didn’t say so, and we’d kept him quarantined in the infirmary. Then Mariko came down with it. Then I did.”

  Seth shifted to a more comfortable position and thought some more about sentient centaurs who left offerings of dead fish. Meredith might still be hallucinating; nothing she said could be trusted. “Whatever it was, you survived, so it isn’t fatal. Did it kill the others?”

  “Something killed Dylan, but it could have been a combination of the infection and trauma from his fall. I was suffering from muscle spasms and blackouts, so Mariko had strapped me into a bunk. That saved me when the storm waves rolled us. I came to my senses eventually, hung on a wall in here, in the dark. I managed to free myself, but I couldn’t find a way to her, wherever she was when it hit.” She glanced up at the door that was now in the ceiling. “The outside port hatch won’t open and the starboard one is jammed or locked.”

  “You mean their bodies must still be somewhere in the shuttle?”

  She nodded. “I thought I heard knocking for a day or two, but it might have been the wind.”

  JC would have said “flaming shit!” at that point. De Soto’s telemetry must have told Duddridge what had happened to the shuttle, but he hadn’t mentioned it in his beacon message.

  Meredith had survived the rolling, Mariko Seidel might have. If De Soto had sent down another manned shuttle with tools, both women might have been rescued. Duddridge was going to be hung, drawn, and quartered in the public media when ISLA released his report. He couldn’t edit or suppress his ship’s records. Why had he thrown away his career like that? Just because a pair of terrified, delirious women claimed they had succumbed to a virus that could bypass modern biocontainment precautions?

  Or was JC right when he said Duddridge had found something on the planet that justified so much treachery?

  Seth heard a faint roll of thunder, much muffled by the shuttle walls.

  Meredith heard it also. “How long until the storm hits, Prospector?”

  “Seth. Seth Broderick. It must be due soon. Can you walk?”

  She nodded. “I can crawl. Go and report to your friends.”

  “What I ought to do is go and find my baggage. It has three more water bottles and we’re going to need them. But it will take me a couple of hours, there and back.”

  “Don’t tell me you walked that far over the boulder flats?”

  “We didn’t know it would be such hard going.”

  “We did. We had close-ups from the drones. That’s why we landed beside this distributary channel. It makes for easy walking all the way to the flower pots.”

  “Golden Hind doesn’t carry atmospheric drones,” Seth admitted. Drones or not, the fact that Duddridge had ordered the shuttle to set down a good kilometer from the chimneys showed that even Galactic had not been certain that those were natural and not artifacts.

  “You mustn’t risk it again,” Meredith said firmly. “You’ll break a leg for sure, or get caught in the storm. And the water you collect won’t cover the sweat you’ll lose, there and back.”

  The mere thought of water made Seth thirsty. “What choice do I have?”

  “We can collect rainwater, but you’ll have to boil it with your blazer, and I honestly don’t believe that will sterilize it.”

  He hadn’t brought a blazer.

  “That’s a last resort. I can dehydrate a bit longer.” This shuttle would still contain everything they could possibly need, but they couldn’t get at it. Niagara would be hours away yet. He stood up, weary all over from the constant gravity overload. “I’ll go and report.”

  “Shine your light around for me. There’s a bra about somewhere.”

  He laughed. “Modesty at a time like this?”

  “Necessity in gravity like this.”

  He apologized and found the bra for her.

  * * *

  As soon as he clambered through into the laboratory he heard almost continuous thunder. Gusts of rain sweeping across the plain had cut visibility down to a hundred meters or so. His external thermometer told him that the temperature had dropped twenty degrees. He had estimated that he could stand three hours on the surface, but now that seemed hopelessly optimistic and he had a lot more of this ordeal to look forward to. Even after the storm passed, Golden Hind might have to wait an hour or two for its orbit to line up with Sombrero before it could launch Niagara.

  “Prospector to Golden Hind. Do you read?”

  “Yes!” JC bellowed. “What the flaming shit have you been doing for so long?”

  “You know how time flies when you’re with a pretty girl.”

  “They’re alive?”

  “Meredith Tsukuba is. She’s suffering from dehydration, malnutrition, probably nitrogen narcosis. Perhaps emotional trauma, but she’s a very tough woman.”

  “What about the comas and hallucinations?”

  Seth hadn’t made up his mind yet. “Nothing obvious. She’ll need a long decompression after this and certainly quarantine.”

  “Master, this is Jordan.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Bad news. Prepare for a major storm surge. That hurricane will make landfall right at high tide.”

  “No problem,” Seth said. “Let me restate that: I mean, no decision needed. We’re in the
shuttle and that’s as safe a place as we’ll find. Our problem is going to be drinking water. We have none left. We’ll try collecting rain; the air is wet enough to swim in right now.” If he opened his vizor to take as much as one sip of rainwater, he would be exposed to biohazard and faced with a long quarantine.

  He uploaded his plog, bringing Golden Hind up to date on his situation and what he had learned. He didn’t ask how long the storm would last because he didn’t want to hear the answer. The rest of the team came on to wish him luck, or prayer in one case.

  The drawer he had noticed earlier was now explained. He dragged it behind him as he crawled out of the cave on hands and knees—the storm had barely started and already he did not dare try to stand up in it. He scooped a hollow in the sand to anchor the drawer; he packed sand in around it. The rain was almost horizontal, but enough was going in to fill it fairly soon.

  A good prospector should never miss a chance to sample. Back in the shuttle, he wrapped up some fish bones, a couple of beetles, and some more fecal pellets, larger than those he had found earlier. Those took him past the total of twenty he had promised JC. Now he just had to deliver them.

  He headed back to find Meredith. She had reached the decon room, crawling out on hands and knees. She was doing fine, but did not object when he steadied her as she climbed down into the former lab. In addition to the bra, she wore a bed sheet as a sort of sarong.

  “I have always believed that women look sexiest in garments that promise to fall off at any moment.”

  “Sexy? If you think I look sexy in my present condition, you really are deprived. Close your eyes.”

  “Not likely!” He turned his back instead.

  Meredith draped the sheet over him in case he cheated. She crawled outside for a brief needle shower. Once she was dressed again, still wet but not chilled in the muggy heat, they made themselves as comfortable as possible, sitting on the lab table that stood half buried in sand. As a bench it was awkwardly tilted and not high enough for Seth’s legs, but it beat standing.