Third Rock

by S E T Ferguson

“Camp. He can track Whit and Poydras through the woods.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “I’m just saying, you know what sort of animal wouldn’t be a help in this situation? A cat,” Iris said, arguing with Beryl. Beryl wasn’t quite sure how their conversation about what sort of animals they could expect to find in the jungle around them had turned into a conversation about Iris’s hatred of cats, but it had.

  The group moved through the woods slowly. There seemed to be something of a path that they were following, but it was not much of one. Heming was currently leading the human part of the contingent, a large, machete-like knife in his hands as he cut back particularly annoying branches. Vlad followed Camp, who had taken to tracking like he had been doing it his entire life. Whatever little training Beryl had given him on this back on Columbina seemed to have worked extremely well.

  Heming had long ago started complaining that they should have found a drone to cut a path through the woods. Iris kept reminding him that either they had to find one already programmed to do the work, or she would have to spend a lot of time making or modifying one able to cut through the woods. The longer they waited at Whit’s compound, the more likely it was that the Civitians would arrive there. In the end, Iris had won the argument, as was apparent from Heming’s slashing through the jungle.

  “I’m just saying, I would like to see what a cat is like. You telling me that they are horrible creatures doesn’t change that,” Beryl argued. “If anything, it makes me want to find out for myself even more.”

  “But a cat could survive out here alone. I bet even out here on planet that isn’t Earth, a cat would survive,” Fawn suggested. Apparently, Beryl was not the only one who had at least some level of knowledge about cats.

  “So would a cockroach. But that doesn’t mean I want them around.” Iris brushed a branch away from her face.

  When Vlad had suggested they track Whit and Poydras through the woods, it had seemed like a good idea. Heming had initially been wary of the idea, suggesting Whit would have just flown wherever he was going. Iris, though, had suggested whatever he used for a vehicle to get where he was going would be large and therefore much easier to spot than a man traveling through the woods with only a dog as a companion. Even worse, their ships left faint traces that were fairly easy to track, even hours after a ship had passed.

  “How much longer?” Heming asked, sounding like a whining child. Beryl would have been more upset with him, but even she was feeling the same way and she was used to trekking through the woods, unlike Heming. If they had been on a day hike in the woods, she would have been fine. But they had been walking through dense woods with large packs. The packs weren’t particularly heavy, but they weren’t particularly light, either. And Heming had the added trouble of hacking away at the bushes and trees lining the path.

  At least they weren’t wearing the armor Iris had made them back when they were fighting the Earth AI. Although it was fairly light, it was still heavy and bulky enough that it would not have been pleasant to wear during this hike. Despite Iris’s protests that it would protect them if they got into a shooting match with the Civitians, the humans had won that particular argument.

  “I have no idea. If you recall, we’re tracking someone who doesn’t want to be found.” Beryl watched Iris look at all four of the humans with her. “How about this. At the next clearing of any size, we’ll take a break.”

  Heming whooped and Beryl felt her shoulders ease. The only one, other than Iris, who didn’t seem in need of a break was Camp. He was trekking through the woods, tracking his mother as if it was what he had been born to do. His tail wagged as he led them and his tongue lolled out the side of his mouth. Beryl thought it looked like he was smiling. If he was still upset from not having a translator, he was no longer showing it.

  The group marched in silence up a slight slope. Beryl remembered these hills from her childhood, at least in a general sense. Then, they had been rolling hills that stretched as far as the eye could see from oceans to mountains. Then, their round tops had been covered by grasses bending and bowing in the wind. Now, those same hills were covered in a jungle-like forest, as if the grasses that had been there only a few years earlier had never existed.

  As they walked, the sounds of Heming cutting the foliage, Camp’s panting, and their own footsteps were the loudest sounds around them. The woods on Libertas seemed much quieter than those on Columbina, even though Iris had told them they were teeming with animal life—and the fence surrounding Whit’s compound suggested the same. Beryl had seen a few insects and heard a few distant birds, but the other animals around them were either very quiet or didn’t exist. She suspected the former, either because they were wary of the humans traveling through their woods, or because there was something else in the woods with them that they were trying to hide from.

  Beryl hoped it was the former, but she highly suspected the truth was that they were not alone in the woods, and whatever was out there with them was something no other animals wanted to mess with.

  While the woods were quiet around them and thus entirely unlike the woods on Columbina, the foliage around them was remarkably similar, though it seemed somehow less developed on Libertas. The flowers were larger and simpler than their own, and the trees seemed shorter and their leaves blunted. If Columbina’s jungles sometimes felt like a trip back to the time of the dinosaurs, this jungle seemed like a trip back to an even earlier time, long before even the dinosaurs existed.

  Beryl decided not to think about what would have lived in the woods before the time of the dinosaurs back on Earth. She didn’t think it was anything she wanted to run into in the woods.

  After what seemed like an hour, but was probably closer to twenty minutes, Beryl saw a light coming through the dense trees ahead. Camp continued his tracking, his path clearly leading them around the clearing. It almost seemed to Beryl like her father had purposely circled around the clearing, but she couldn’t tell for sure.

  “Hold up, Camp,” Beryl said. The dog stopped, though the look he gave Beryl suggested it was not what he wanted to do. Heming stopped cutting through the woods and looked relieved to have the break. “Iris, there is definitely a clearing over there. Perhaps we could take a little detour off of the path and take a break there.”

  “I’m seconding Beryl.” Vlad unnecessarily raised a hand. “I’d like to see some sun again. These woods are awfully dark. They make the jungle back on Columbina look downright inviting, Vos and all.”

  “Fine.” Iris motioned toward the clearing. “But it’s not going to be a long break. Every minute we rest puts us that much farther behind Whit.”

  Camp refused to lead the group off of the scent he had been following, so Heming took the lead, everyone following him as he pushed through about twenty feet of jungle before reaching the clearing. Beryl had to ask Camp to follow her several times before he would, and he only did so after her second offer of a treat to him.

  Beryl lifted her hands to her eyes as she emerged from the woods. After the dim light under the trees, the sudden sunlight momentarily blinded her. When she could see again, the clearing that she found herself in stretched several hundred feet in front of her, almost perfectly circular in shape. It was so circular, Beryl thought it looked like it had been created there, instead of being the natural formation it surely was.

  The ground stretching in front of her in the sunlight was covered in some sort of vine-like plant. It creeped very low to the ground, almost like mowed grass. Beryl leaned over to feel it, and it felt like the soft fur of a puppy’s ears, not at all like any other plant she had ever felt. There appeared to be nothing else growing in the clearing, just the vines. There weren’t even any rocks or sticks that she could see. Between its perfectly round shape and the lack of anything but vines, Beryl would have assumed it was anything but natural. Something this perfect where there were humans would have been assumed to have been made by those humans.

  The group made their way to the center o
f the circular clearing, all of them seeming to agree without saying anything that they didn’t want to be near the woods during this break. Something about their silence and darkness was unsettling, even to those who did not regularly spend much time in the woods.

  Beryl pulled her backpack off and dropped it to the ground before settling herself next to it. The vines had been soft on her hand, but sitting on them was luxurious. Something about the silken vine and the slight give of the ground beneath it almost enveloped her, like the most comfortable couch she had ever sat in.

  “Oh, that feels amazing,” Fawn said, settling herself onto the ground. She shut her eyes, obviously enjoying the experience.

  Beryl opened her backpack as Camp settled next to her. The dog still looked slightly upset at having to leave the trail, but as Beryl pulled a small bag of dog treats out of her bag, his mood seemed to brighten slightly. He probably needed the break as much as anyone, even if he didn’t want to take it. Without his translator, though, Beryl had no real idea what the dog was thinking. She scratched his ears as he crunched on the dog treat, hoping to reassure Camp about everything going on. She hesitated to admit that feeling the soft fur of her dog’s ears in her hand made her feel better about everything going on as well—it was something familiar and comforting.

  Nearby, Heming had not just sat down on the grass, but had laid down, probably a combination of the softness of the ground and his needing a break more than the rest of them. Even though they had all been working on their physical fitness during the long trip from Columbina to Libertas—after having discovered they were all in bad shape after the arrival of the Earth AI on Columbina—the heat and humidity of the woods around them was far different than the temperature-controlled environment of Rediviva. Iris would probably take this into account if they ever found Whit and got off of this planet. Beryl tried not to think about how much more difficult their workouts as they headed toward Earth would become. As bad as this was, Iris would make their workout weather twice as bad back on Rediviva.

  Looking up at the clear, blue sky of Libertas, Beryl remembered that much of the inhabited portion of Earth was cold and snow-covered for much of the year. She didn’t relish the idea of Iris putting them through their paces in that sort of climate. Perhaps Iris would somehow forget about this, and they would be spared the ordeal.

  Beryl certainly wasn’t about to tell her they should train in those sorts of conditions. Perhaps they could just time their activities on Earth for when it was warm and pleasant in those cold areas.

  Beryl was considering whether Iris could somehow create snow on Rediviva when Camp growled and her attention snapped from the sky to the dog.

  His translator may not have been working, but Beryl didn’t have to hear her dog a second time to know what that growl meant.

  “Vos,” Beryl said. Camp looked up at her, recognizing the word. Beryl realized that his growl had probably been, to her, imperceptibly different than his Vos warning. But to Camp, he knew the difference between the growl he had just made and that for a Vos, and the look he was giving Beryl suggested he was frustrated with her inability to tell the difference between the two.

  “Are you shitting me?” Heming sat up from where he had been lying and pulled his gun from where he kept it holstered on his hip.

  “No,” Beryl replied, watching as everyone else dropped what they had been doing and pull their own firearms out, all of them quickly standing up to scan the woods for any sign of the giant, dinosaur-like creatures they all knew too well. “Well, actually, I don’t think it’s a Vos. Without the translator, I don’t know exactly what it might be, or what Camp thinks it is. But that was definitely a warning growl. Besides, it’s unlikely that this planet has developed anything like a Vos.”

  “I hope you’re right.” Vlad and Beryl had seen and dealt with enough of Columbina’s Vos to last a lifetime.

  “I hope you’re wrong.” Iris, too, had her firearm out and aimed at nothing and everything around her. “At least we know what we’re getting with the Vos. Did you see those fences back at Whit’s compound? There is something in these woods that might be worse. No, scratch that. There is something in the woods that is worse than our Vos. We never had to put up fences to keep the Vos out. They learned on their own to stay away.”

  Outside the clearing to her right, Beryl thought she heard a rustling of leaves, though it could have been the wind blowing through the junble. Then, she heard something similar to her left, then her right. It seemed like the noise was coming from all around them.

  As much as she wanted to, Beryl couldn’t deny that there was something in the woods around them.

  Probably several somethings.

  Camp ducked to the ground and continued growling, though it was a quiet growling. Whatever was out there, he did not want anything to do with it.

  And then, a soft hum began in the woods in front of Beryl.

  It almost sounded like a very quiet blender from an old television show. It was low and steady, but still had some sort of controlled violence behind it.

  “Do you hear that?” Beryl asked the question, even though she could see that everyone else around her had now turned to where the noise was coming from and pointed their weapons that way.

  “I feel like this is how you start a horror movie.” Fawn still looked the most uncomfortable of them with a weapon. She had spent a lot of time practicing firing her small handgun on the ship, but she was still not the one you wanted defending you, if you had any other option.

  “Let’s hope not.” As Iris spoke, another hum began to the left of where they were all facing.

  Then the noise rose to their right and then behind them.

  Almost immediately, the sound was all around the clearing, and seeming to get louder. Or, Beryl realized, the sound was getting closer.

  “Iris,” Vlad said above the sound that had now gotten so loud he almost had to shout to be heard, “what are the odds that whatever is in the woods is friendly?”

  “I don’t have enough of a basis to calculate those odds. But with what little evidence I do have, I am guessing the odds of friendliness are slim to none.”

  “Remember when Columbina was attacked by drones from Earth and we all almost died?” Heming shouted. “That was such a nice day compared to this.”

  Beryl saw an unnatural rippling of leaves where they had entered the clearing not five minutes earlier. She carefully leveled her gun at the path, waiting for whatever was just out of her sight to appear.

  She guessed she wouldn’t have to wait long.

  Chapter Seventeen

  To Vlad, it seemed as if the first of the creatures appeared by magic. One moment, the woods in front of him had been entirely peaceful—other than the humming noise—and the next the creature had emerged.

  One thing was immediately obvious.

  Whatever the creature was, it was definitely not a Vos.

  The creature came slinking out of the woods, its long, segmented body moving in the same way he had seen centipedes move in old videos he had watched from Earth, though he had never seen one in person. In person, the bug looked something like an undulating, white worm. Its dozens of sets of legs moved in a carefully choreographed dance, never tangling and always purposefully propelling the creature wherever it was going.

  Except, unlike the insect-sized creatures on Earth, this one was about thirty-feet long, its two-foot-long legs making it appear at least five or six feet tall.

  The creature’s head, which was the part Vlad assumed had come out of the woods first, didn’t seem too much different than the rest of it. He couldn’t discern any eyes on the creature, but it did have what looked to be two sets of antenna, with several antenna-like structures coming out of each, extended eight or nine feet into the air.

  On the other end of the creature, what seemed to be its tail whipped around at the end of its body like the end of a long chain. At the end of the tail, the creature appeared to have some sort of stinger or spike that
was at least two feet long. It was the sort of appendage Vlad would not have wanted to see on any animal. And he definitely didn’t want to see it anywhere near him.

  “Holy shit,” Heming yelled, loud enough over the humming sound the creature made that everyone could year him.

  The sentiment was one Vlad—and probably everyone else—shared. At least Vlad had experience dealing with giant, horrifying creatures, though. Heming and Fawn rarely saw the Vos. This had to be even worse for them.

  “Maybe it isn’t here to hurt us.” Fawn’s voice sounded almost upbeat, even though she was shouting, as if she truly believed what she had just said.

  Unfortunately for her optimism, just as she finished her statement, the creature whipped its tail around and shot it toward Heming. Heming dove to his right, just missing being impaled by the spikes as it hit the ground with a thud.

  The creature yanked its tail out of the ground, pulling some of the soil with it and opening up a small hole.

  Almost immediately, hundreds of smaller, insect-sized versions of the giant creature in front of them poured out of the hole. Had this been Columbina, the smaller bugs would have been some of the largest insects on the planet.

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me!” Heming aimed his gun at the ground and pulled the trigger. Whatever the smart bullets in the gun had sensed, it was not good for the small insects. They started bursting into little flames, dozens at a time.

  To his right, Vlad heard a gun blast from the vicinity of where Beryl was standing, and the giant, centipede-like creature that had nearly just impaled Heming exploded into millions of pieces. As it did, a sickly sweet smell, like an infection, spread across the clearing. Vlad had no doubt it was the smell of the newly-dead creature.

  “It’s a fucking nest of the things!” Heming shouted, frantically pushing dirt into the hole from which the insects were still emerging. They were coming out slower than they had before he had shot them and set them on fire, and the tide stemmed as Heming shoved the dirt down into the hole. Heming took a final shot at the hole, though, apparently just for good measure.