“Somewhat,” Nolan admitted.
“Come with me, then.” Owen rose with some effort and led them back to the cave. This time, he leaned against a shaped cabinet, its orange surface crackled with age. “A little something for the road.”
“Ahh. Now this is much more interesting than dried apples. With apologies to dried apples, of course,” Nolan said.
A small room yawned before them, hewn into the rock by hand. Inside were guns. To be more specific, weapons. There were long rifles, pistols, riot guns, blades, a leaf-bladed spear that looked like it could kill anything that breathed, and every kind of mine, grenade, and personnel deterrent Nolan had ever seen.
And some he hadn’t.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Nolan said, adding a long rifle, ammunition, and a wicked sawtooth knife with a leg holster. Avina was hardly less aggressive, picking a riot gun, two throwing knives, a bandolier of small, shaped charges, and—to Nolan’s complete surprise—a thin bladed sword that whined as she cut the air with it.
“Really?” Nolan asked her as she slid the scabbard on her back.
“I like the idea of poking things,” Avina said.
“Good enough for me. Owen, you’ve made us quite happy. We’ve got food and water and a medkit, and we’ll leave the Loop here. On foot for us. Can we make it?” Nolan asked.
“Can you? Yes. Will you?” Owen looked doubtful. “Not sure you’re ready for the upper plains, but you’ve got the right gear. You’ll hear the chimegrass before you see it, but it’s what you won’t hear that’s the problem.
“What kind of things?” Nolan narrowed his eyes, curious.
Owen’s expression grew serious. “Everything that lives among it is a problem. Eyes open, you hear?”
“Yes, sir.” Nolan touched his shoulder, and they said their goodbyes. In moments, Nolan and Avina were striding up the incline toward a future they hadn’t imagined a few hours earlier.
“You watching the skies?” Avina asked.
“Me and Cherry. I don’t need any surprises this early in the game,” he said.
“If I see anything, I’ll enhance and alert,” Cherry said.
“Cherry’s got anything distant. I think we’ll have our hands full with whatever lives among our building material. Not quite sure how this works, but we’ll see,” Nolan said. “But I already like the look of the land.”
“Me too,” Avina said. “I smell water, too.”
“Good sniffer on you. I don’t—ah, okay I smell it too. A creek? A spring?” Nolan said, craning his neck as they continued to climb. The rise was gentle, but with each passing moment, they gained enough height to see ever further until something began to come into focus to the west, a few hundred meters away. It was a smudge, waving in the breeze, tan in color, and with hints of purple running upward.
“Listen,” Nolan said. “Bells.” He couldn’t help but smile. A chorus of tiny bells came to them on the wind, their silvery notes high and clear.
“I’ve heard that noise before but thought I was going crazy,” Avina said.
“I imagine a lot of things sound like you’re losing it if you live on this planet long enough. I’ve never heard of anything like this, but I didn’t exactly grow up on a forested world,” Nolan said.
“Give you mining equipment and processed food?” Avina said.
“And tunnels and domes and the fear of decompression. That’s my idea of wilderness,” Nolan said, and it was, or as close as you could get to the wild on Brightline. “Do you hear something else?” He cocked his head, listening.
“Turn your head to the right,” Cherry said, so Nolan rotated his view and seized upon a flash of movement.
“Avina, eyes open,” Nolan said, pulling his sidearm. She did the same in a smooth motion, and they stood between the distant chimegrass and a small, moving patch of something unknown, forming and reforming about thirty meters to their right. Nolan crouched, watching, and Cherry gave a magnified view. “Insects?”
“Unsure,” Cherry said. “Not moving toward you, but it looks like—yes, it’s the equivalent of insects. Can you hear them yet?”
Nolan listened, and then, under the chimegrass, came a second sound, odd, but not to Avina, judging by the look on her face.
“Flies,” Avina said. “Carrion flies.”
“Dead things,” Nolan said with disgust, because dead things usually had help getting into that state. “Let’s go look.”
“On your left,” Avina said. They began eeling through the arrays of grasses toward the buzzing cloud, a metallic blur above something slumped in the grass. “Animal?”
“I don’t think so,” Nolan said. “Not unless animals wear pressure suits.”
The suit was dark with scorch marks and char, its arm torn away to expose what was left of the spacer inside. Above it, a blur of insects moved in frenzied hunger, their fat gold bodies colliding with each other as they whirled, blood drunk and buzzing as they reduced the skin of the man’s arm in mere seconds.
“Aggressive little fucks,” Nolan said, watching the plump bugs jostle each other to eat. He was in the grip of fascinated disgust when Avina put her hand on his arm.
“Might not be a good idea to get much closer. They’re going to eat that poor bastard pretty quickly. Then what?” she said.
“That’s why I’m doing this now while there’s some of him left,” Nolan said. In quick steps, he walked to the downed spacer, grabbed at his leg’s storage bag, and tore it away with a quick jerk. Before the golden insects could even rise from their feast, Nolan was already stalking away, the heavy thigh pouch swinging in his hand. He took a look over his shoulder as the bugs settled in again, their attack just getting started.
“Wonder when he came down?” Avina asked. “I didn’t hear anything in the past few hours, and we would’ve seen his suit armor ablating as it cooked off.”
“Last night. He might have come down frozen, already dead in his suit, and it took that long to thaw. The poor bastard was in hard vac before he hit the dirt. Took those bugs a while to sniff him out.” Nolan worked his mouth and spat to clear the presence of death, but it only worked for a second, then the stink was back. “Let’s get the hell away from here. I don’t like those bugs, and I don’t like the idea that something bigger might come looking for an easy meal.”
“No argument here,” Avina said, casting a sour look back at the buzzing corpse. The suit was actually moving now as the insects burrowed into each leg, giving the impression the man was trying to stand up. Avina shuddered and turned away, her eyes dark with revulsion.
When they’d gone higher and far enough away that the corpse was out of sight, they found a fractured boulder jutting through the soil, covered in small plants and warmed by the sun. “Good place to look this stuff over,” Nolan said, swinging the thigh pouch from the dead spacer. Avina took up position beside him and watched as he slowly unzipped the heavy fabric to reveal what had survived a fall from space.
“Deck crew,” Nolan said as his all-tool fell out, followed by a good knife, a pack of rations, an array of bolts, and a hardcase picture of a smiling woman and three kids, their faces lit up from a pair of moons. The picture was taken in an orbital station, ships hovering at dock behind the woman and her nimbus of curly hair. His ID was the last item, showing a man in his thirties with dark eyes and the short hair of a career spacer. “His name was Poul,” Nolan said. “Three-dee printer on the deck crew of a heavy cruiser.”
“What ship?” Avina said softly. Seeing the man’s ID made him into something more than a frozen corpse being eaten by insects. He became real. A father. A spacer. A life lost.
“The Tannhauser. Nine hundred meters of ship, gone. All those people,” Nolan said. He fought the urge to spit again as a new kind of sour filled his mouth—the taste of senseless loss.
“Never heard of it, but it’s a big galaxy.” Avina dropped a hand on Nolan’s shoulder and squeezed. “I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“Be
cause I know it bothers you.”
“It does.” Nolan thought about that for a minute, then sealed the pouch back up and kept it. Useful things were hard to come by in a backwater where ships died. “It always will.”
“That’s why I’m going in your direction, Nolan.” Avina held out a hand. “Come on. To the chimegrass and whatever lurks underneath it.”
The shriek of an animal ripped through the distant air, giving them pause. “Above it, too,” Nolan said.
“Of course, there would be flying things,” Avina said. Her full lips were a grim line.
“You don’t like, ah—birds?”
“I don’t like things that can attack me from a blind spot,” she said.
“Then you look down, and I’ll look up. Deal?”
“Deal.”
They climbed into the day, and in an hour, the swaying chimegrass began to fill the sky. It grew in the bottom of a small ravine but was still taller than the odd trees and brush that dotted the landscape around them. Each stalk was straight, with occasional flat leaves every two meters or so, tinged with purple lines on a green background. And then, there were the bells.
The noise began as they approached and grew more intense with each step. First, it was a distant tinkle, as if someone had broken a glass, but then the sounds began to merge into—
—music.
“The breeze is making music,” Avina said in a wondrous tone.
“Chimegrass lives up to its name, I see. I don’t see how the—oh, up top. Look around the rings, where the plant has a segment,” Nolan said. Cherry took the initiative and increased the magnification in his sight, bringing the nearest stand of chimegrass close enough for him to examine. There were tiny limbs hanging from the stem, and along each limb was a line of gleaming ovals. “Little bells.”
“Bells. In nature,” Avina said. “I’ve seen some exotic things, but this is the weirdest. It’s beautiful. What’s the purpose?”
They kept getting closer to the grove, the ringing stalks soaring up and out as they reached for sunshine. The entire grove was alive with sound and movement.
And then it all stopped. A silence so thick it had weight crept over them.
Nolan put a hand on Avina’s arm. “Stay absolutely still.”
“Okay,” she said from the corner of her mouth.
He drew his sidearm, nodding slowly toward Avina’s. She pulled her weapon, and then they both drew knives, too, all four hands filled, waiting, watching over the silent bells and the swaying alien forest.
The creatures erupted from the ravine in a flurry of claws and fangs, six-legged animals flashing through every color in nature, from sand to mud to dried grasses. They phased in and out of Nolan’s vision, so perfect was their camouflage, and it took Cherry to give him enough focus to clarify just what the hell he was seeing.
Twice human size but leaner, the creatures were a combination of feline and reptile with a healthy dose of raw anger. Their necks were long, their heads small, the mouths impossibly wide and bristling with needle-like teeth that pointed inward. A grasping mouth, meant to grab and hold. Their legs were slender but ropy with muscle, and a whip tail lashed the air behind them as they boiled toward Nolan and Avina through the grassy underbrush.
“Sh-sh-shiiiii—” Avina stuttered, backing away in animal haste.
“Exactly,” Nolan said, staring at the emerging beasts.
Their eyes were round, covered with a thick membrane that flickered in and out, and gleaming green in the light. There was a single nostril on their snout, and Nolan fired his first round, taking the left creature high in the meat of its forward shoulder. A wicked crack revealed the shot hit bone, and the beast listed to one side as its back legs continued to drive it on, a high keening erupting from its throat. It sounded like a demon caught in a trap, and when Avina’s gun roared, her shot took the right beast on the bony ridge of its chest, spinning it to the ground as gouts of blood streaked away into the sky.
The creatures weren’t done. The first target surged forward, legs churning dirt and grass as it coiled for a strike, the jaw opening wide enough that Nolan could see deep into a throat the color of wine. He shot twice, both rounds tearing into the maddened animal who was killed instantly but kept coming, its brain not sending the message in time. The body hit Nolan full force, crunching into his chest like a comet strike, and then the world was a spinning series of visions that only ended when Nolan, spitting and wheezing, rolled to stop.
He lifted his head to see Avina dodge her chosen monster, and since Nolan was still holding his gun, he fired again.
The bullet smashed into the beast just between its back hips, sending it sliding in the dust as it whirled for another charge. Calmly, Avina walked up, sighted, and put a round it the thing’s head, ending all sound except for the rhythmic scratching of a hind claw digging a small trench as the death spasms worked their way through the alien nervous system.
Nolan sat up, groaning and putting a hand to his chest. “So much for pretty music.”
“I wonder if they’re . . . guardians or something? Or maybe their nest is down there. Fuck me, that would be bad news. Not sure we can kill two dozen of them just for some magical building materials.”
“Guardians. Huh.” Nolan stood, took an experimental breath—that was a bad idea—and nudged the closest animal with his boot. It lolled to one side, blood draining away into the soil. “Only one way to find out.”
They peered over the incline where the chimegrass spread, swaying lightly in the wind. The soft music of bells surrounded them, along with a clean, living scent, but underneath it all was something sour.
Something dead.
“I know, I smell it too,” Nolan said to Avina, whose nose wrinkled as the stench wafted up with a freshened breeze. “It’s all the way at the bottom, whatever it is.”
“Do we need to go all the way down?” Avina said.
“I don’t think so—we could cut one of these nearby stalks and get it drying, but eventually I’ll have to know what’s down there. Might as well do both at once,” Nolan said, pulling his knife even as his eyes flicked about, alert for danger—or more creatures.
“Got it,” Avina said, grabbing a chimegrass stalk that swayed close enough to catch. She bent the thick plant close, but in a slow, gentle tug, then got both hands around it and smiled. “Ready for you, sir.”
“Turn your head,” Nolan said. He scored the plant on one side, then the other, then made a divot in the spongy surface with relative ease. “Is Owen sure about this stuff? Feels way too soft to base a fort on.”
The stalk gave way with a crack, and ten meters of stem as wide as Nolan’s leg fell between him and Avina, rattling to a stop in the grasses. The top leaves brushed the dead creature where it had fallen, and with a final, merry ringing, the bells fell silent.
“Guess we’ll find out. Let’s get it in the direct sun, away from the shadows,” Avina said. “Owen seems to know what he’s doing. He said it would happen fast, so . . .” She trailed off with a shrug.
They dragged the chimegrass into the light. It was heavier than it looked, with a bright yellow sap running from the cut. When it was positioned to catch as much light and heat as possible, Nolan turned back to the moving grove and narrowed his eyes in thought.
“Time to go to the bottom and see what’s waiting,” he said. The sides of the grove were too steep to descend without rope, so he unspooled a length of rope, tied it to an exposed boulder, and drew his sidearm with a sigh of resignation.
“Eyes open down there, Nolan. I get the feeling those two beasts might be working alone, but you never know,” Avina said.
“We’ll see. Be right back,” he said, stepping over the edge with the rope around his forearm. The chimegrass rustled again, bells ringing in a delicate symphony that filled Nolan’s senses to overload. The smell of death grew stronger as he descended, and in a moment, he saw pale stones that revealed the bottom was near.
“You okay?” Avina cal
led.
Nolan’s feet touched the ground and crunched under his boots. It wasn’t soil. It wasn’t stone.
It was bones.
“Um—yeah. I think I know why it stinks,” he called up.
“Why?”
“It’s—” Nolan swept the shadowed place with his gun, eyes drawn to the center, where there was almost no light. A pit yawned there, a meter across and inky black. The chimegrass stalks all bloomed out from rings around the pit.
Like a mouth.
“It’s not just a plant,” Nolan called. From within the dark center, an animal’s leg jutted, stringy flesh clinging to the dull bones. “It eats things. The center is a mouth.”
“Bet that explains why the stalks harden. There’s calcium in them,” Avina said. “Those creatures aren’t just guardians. They’re partners.”
The ground tilted, and Nolan staggered. The bells were ringing again, this time in a song. It was a song. Just for him.
The bells were Nolan’s friend. They wanted him to rest.
“Of course they do,” Nolan muttered thickly. “It’s for me. They just want me to be well. To not be tired.” He lowered his gun and smiled. He could finally rest. “The mark of a true friend. I can sleep. Amazing. Don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”
Nolan began to walk, robotic, to the middle.
It isn’t anything to fear. It is a place for—for me. I can sleep, let my body recover. My clothes feel tight and I know what I have to do. It makes no sense to wear a flight jacket, not when I am among friends who just want what is best for me, Nolan mused, sleepy, cheerful, and breathing more slowly with each passing step.
He started to undress. The air was fresh on his chest. Like being born all over again. He felt tired, but—it felt like a reward. Nolan was being rewarded with a soft place—
“NOLAN!”
“Gotta get these pants off.” Nolan laughed. How ridiculous. Pants. Who needs pants? He had to have naked skin in order to rest. He looked down, and soft green filaments tickled at his feet, reaching out from the place he was going to sleep. One of them wrapped around Nolan’s toe and began to look for a place to connect. They were friends, so he spread his toes, where the flesh was softer. It was the right thing to do.
Lost Kingdom: Book 1 in the Lost Kingdom Series Page 13