“I think you came here to look at aliens,” Daisuke said.
“Well now I can’t, can I?” She hadn’t been able to concentrate during her brief walk with Turtle, she’d been worrying so hard about Moon. Worries that had been more than justified, it turned out. “Some prison wardens we turned out to be. We couldn’t keep track of Moon for thirty minutes!”
“Look at it this way,” said Misha. “Maybe he blew himself up.”
“Or got eaten,” Anne said, then considered. Based on the critters she’d scared up on her morning hike, this biome’s animals had evolved from a segmented ancestor like a centipede or polychaete worm. Nothing large enough to harm a human, unless venom was involved.
“Hm,” she said, watching the grass rustle. “More likely poisoned.”
Misha made his own thoughtful noise. “If he is dead, it might be tricky convincing Farhad we didn’t kill him.”
“But we all have alibis.” Anne laughed bitterly. “Farhad made sure we each had something to do when he sent that dipshit physicist sneaking off into the bush, didn’t he? Committing unspeakable acts with wormholes. I almost do want to kill him.”
“If we rescue him, maybe he’ll listen to us,” Daisuke suggested.
“Ha,” said Misha. “I know how to make him listen. I hold him and you two punch and kick.”
Anne was in the mood for neither optimism nor humor. She watched the squat, menhir-like trees pass, close enough that she could see the green whorls on the red clay. How had that clay gotten into that shape? She wished she could get out of the ATV and touch a tree. Run her hands through the ammonite-grass again. Figure out what it was.
“I think I can talk to Moon,” Daisuke said.
“Contrary to all evidence thus far collected,” said Anne.
“You know,” Misha said, “if we make it look like an accident—”
They rounded a flat-topped tree-wedge and Anne said, “Shit.”
The other ATV sat in the grass ahead of them, facing them. It was unoccupied.
Misha braked and turned the wheel, bringing them up alongside the abandoned vehicle. An animal the size of a python uncoiled from its resting place on the driver’s seat and reared, legs along its sides rattling against each other like clapsticks.
“Maybe it bit him?” Daisuke hypothesized.
“Let’s see,” Misha said, and the joking tone he used when merely talking about assault and battery was gone. “Come with me. Anne, stay here.”
Anne popped open her door. “Don’t go all macho on me. It may be that that…clapstick-python just found a nice place to bask after Moon left the ATV so we couldn’t track him.”
“Track him where? The ATV is facing toward us. Back toward the caravan,” said Misha. “That means he was on his way back from wherever he went when he was attacked.”
“How do you know he was attacked?” Daisuke asked. “I don’t see blood.”
“Look for footprints. Careful of the python.”
Anne ignored the men. The hairs on the back of her neck were standing up, and it wasn’t because of the articulated python. The air smelled oily and sharp. Tertiary amines and regular old ammonia. Something whistled just on the upper edge of hearing. The animals rustling in the grass had gone silent.
She looked down the trail behind them where the flat, wall-like trees concealed so much. “You think whatever attacked Moon is still…oh.”
Something moved behind a wall-tree on the hill to the north. Something else cast a shadow from behind a tree to the east. Anne cursed.
Misha whirled on her. “Quiet!” he whispered. “You’ll— Oh what the fuck is that?”
The animal undulated lazily up the trail behind them, cutting off their means of escape. Its forward end split in two, the upper half curving up like the tail of a scorpion while the lower one wagged from side to side. Meter-long hooks spread. The ammonia smell was like a spike to the nose.
“Shit,” said Anne, “I was right.”
A piercing, teakettle shriek shattered the air, and the ambushers fell on them from all sides.
Anne tried to jump out of the ATV, but only got as far as unbuckling her belt when something that felt like a serrated tusk smacked into her back. The force of the blow knocked her into the other tusk, which dug into her front. Anne looked down at sharp little saw-teeth, snagging in the tough material of her jacket.
Pincers, she had time to think before a terrible force yanked her up and sideways.
A gun went off. Another whistling scream. Was Misha armed? Or Daisuke?
The air was full of a complex, acrid smell, like burning lime juice. Anne grabbed the pincers around her torso and held on as her feet were pulled over the passenger-side door of the ATV. There was no way she could force the jaws to open. And there was a horrible pressure on her right arm, as if someone were pinching her biceps between gardening shears.
The world shook around her. When she twisted her neck, all she managed to see was another set of shorter, sharper mandibles and the narrow, axe-shaped skull of the animal’s…upper head? Her arm screamed in pain as she was hefted higher, turned sideways, and wrapped in spiked segments like a mouse in an iron gauntlet.
Anne leaned, trying to get a look at these things. What she got a look at instead was the nose of the ATV and Misha’s back as he grappled with the mandibles of another ambusher. Its head was a meter tall, but only ten centimeters wide, protected on each side by scratched, mottled brown carapaces. An eye like a bunch of black grapes stuck out and up from the top edge of the head, with another bunch sticking out and down from the other. Below that….
The other head?
Misha kicked it, and the second head, broad and platelike on its own segmented neck, curved away. Three pairs of sickle-shaped mouthparts gaped and it gave a low hoot of pain.
Anne’s captor swayed under her. It moved as if on stilts, making little forward-and-backward motions as it turned. Its broad, sickle-jawed second head swung back and forth under Anne, as if panicked. The lime smell was eye-watering. The narrow, hook-jawed first head remained steady, however. It had coiled Anne up within its neck, squeezing her no harder than necessary to keep her motionless. A gentleman. Chivalrous.
Chivalrous? What was Anne’s subconscious telling her? She watched reflections of sky and hills sweep across its black grape eyes, thinking of what wasps did with the insects they captured.
Anne twisted her head the other way, looking down the length of the animal. Its body was made of vertically flattened segments. Pale wrinkled flesh pulsed between vertical plates of shell, as if a chain of giant clams had been set on their edges. From the top of each segment grew a short spike, while from the bottom protruded a long, smooth limb, jointless as a tent pole. Alternating limbs curved out to the right and left, creating a cage that could support the animal against the ground. Anne remembered her first look at her ambusher. How it must undulate its body, galloping across the ammonite-grass like a serpentine, segmented…horse?
Light dawned. The worm under her was like a horse. The sort of animal ridden by a chivalrous, castle-dwelling, ambush-setting knight.
Anne bunched herself up within the cavalier’s mandibles. She tucked in her legs and twisted her spine. The grip stayed tight around her, but Anne’s weight was now entirely off the edge of the mount, along with most of the rider’s coils. The mandibles squeezed at her and the animal – both animals! – puffed and scrabbled as they tilted farther sideways.
The mount swayed under them, unsure what to do. Anne waited until it swayed away from her, then kicked her legs out and torqued herself and the rider right off the side.
They hit the ground with nearly identical oofs, the air knocked out of what must be two fairly similar respiratory systems. Now, it was possible that the rider would scissor her in half with its mandibles, but Anne bet that it would be more interested in remounting.
She was right. The pressure around her torso vanished. She rolled out of the way as the cavalier raised its axe-shaped head, waving stubby, useless peg-legs. This creature couldn’t walk without aid. It let loose a piercing whistle.
The mount wheeled around, graceful as a swimming otter. Its peg-legs hit the ground, flexed, and bounced back as it undulated up to its rider. The platelike head lowered, and the rider reached out with its own little legs. Anne had bought herself about a second and a half.
She spun around to see the ATV and the men. Misha was trapped between the jaws of another cavalier, but the animal was having trouble lifting him. The mount strained under it, stilt-legs bowed so far it seemed they might snap. Daisuke, probably remembering his crocodile-wrestling experience, had grabbed the mandibles of his assailant and forced them together. The worm shook its head, but its muscles were designed to powerfully close its jaws, not force them apart or pull them from the grip of an angry human. Its mount could have sliced open Daisuke’s legs with its mandibles, but didn’t seem to want to.
“Daisuke!” said Anne. “It’s like a man riding a horse! Twist it off the big worm underneath!”
Another whistle from behind her.
Daisuke turned around, saw Anne, and gave a whoop. It was much too happy a sound for a man seeing a bloodthirsty predator bearing down on his fiancée.
Anne spun and put up her hands just in time to catch the scissoring mandibles of the knightly worm whom she had so dishonored. The mandibles clacked together between her hands.
And stayed there. Immobilizing the cavalier took much less effort than Anne had expected. Like arm wrestling a ten-year-old. The creature squealed, wriggled in her grip, but could do nothing more.
Anne let out a whoop of her own.
It was answered by more teakettle shrieks from the castle up the hill.
***
Daisuke let out another whoop. It wasn’t just because he’d had no idea what to do with the horrible screaming centipede creature once he’d forced its mandibles together. It felt so good to work together with Anne again. To help her figure out what made this or that crazy biome work.
He had wondered what to do if the lower head attacked him, and had been ready to stand on one leg and kick it. Thank goodness for Anne, who had realized the heads belonged to two separate animals. Thank goodness she had stayed calm while being almost bitten in half.
Daisuke’s heart thudded. It felt like he’d been shot there with a crossbow. He could actually see those enormous mandibles as they scissored through her body, cracking ribs and spinal column, forcing out an explosion of blood that would be the last thing to come out of her mouth—
Roaring, he wrestled his worm to the ground, then abandoned it as it cried for its mount. Even now, more of those things were slithering down the hill toward them.
“Anne! Misha!” he shouted. “Into the car. Let’s go!”
“Shut up,” said Misha, although he was probably talking to the centipede he had unseated. It waved its head back and forth and whistled when he kicked it. “I’m fine, by the way,” Misha grumbled as he slid into the driver’s seat.
“I bet we can outpace them,” Anne said, sliding in next to him.
Daisuke stopped himself short from ordering Anne to come sit with him in the back seat. He wanted to put his arms around her and never let go. He compromised by grabbing her hand as Misha put his foot down on the accelerator and slewed around Moon’s abandoned vehicle.
“Anne, are you all right?” he asked.
She breathed out and nodded. “I seem to be. Bruises on my front and back.” She rubbed her right shoulder. “Probably a blood blister over here. I don’t think it punctured the jacket though.”
Daisuke envisioned punctures in her skin. Poison. Injection. Allergic reaction! All Anne needed was for the centipede to breathe on her, to shed its skin-flakes on her. He shuddered. “Anne, do you feel allergic? Itchy?”
Misha scratched himself. “Of course I do, now that you say it. Shit!” He hauled on the steering wheel and jerked them out of the path of a gaping rider-centipede. “Thank God these things don’t have spears to throw at us.”
“Anne,” Daisuke insisted. “Are you allergic?”
“Steady on, Dice. We have more important things to worry about,” she shouted over the enraged whistling. Mandibled heads writhed in the grass behind them.
He let go of her hand. He would hurt her if he squeezed too hard. Daisuke wanted to bundle Anne back into the caravan. This adventure wasn’t supposed to get dangerous!
They were still traveling north-west, following a double trail of tire tracks that wove between the slab-topped hills.
“We should turn around,” Daisuke said.
“Wait, Dice’s right,” said Anne. “Moon was captured by those cavaliers on his way back from whatever jiggery-pokery he was up to with the wormhole. Which means we’ve got to turn around and find out where they took him. And I bet I know where.”
She pointed back the way they’d come, at the hill where they’d been ambushed and its crown of slab-like trees.
“You mean that stone henge thing?” Misha turned them in a wide loop, sweeping Daisuke’s anxious vision across the landscape to the north. More slab-trees dotted the slopes. On the tops of hills, the sides of gullies, and other defensible positions, they grew in rings. Daisuke remembered the medieval fortresses he had seen in Spain. Squat, blunt, ugly buildings designed by people who lived in continuous war for a thousand years.
He rubbed Anne’s shoulder and she said, “Ow! Damn it, Dice, I said I had a hurt shoulder.”
“Sorry.” Daisuke cursed himself. He wanted to grab Anne somewhere, but he contented himself with squeezing the back of her seat. “Do you think the cavaliers are intelligent? They have horses, and castles.”
“Lords and ladies?” Anne snorted. “Naw. I mean, who knows what’s intelligent, but no spears, like Misha said. No tools at all. No language. I mean, maybe they were reciting intricate ballads with smell or something, but I don’t think so.” She spoke animatedly, happier than he’d seen her since their disastrous date on the glasslands. “You don’t have to be a genius to evolve into mutualism with something. Ants have ‘domesticated’ aphids, after all. So, yeah, I don’t think they took Moon for an audience with their liege lord. I think they took him to the same place they were trying to take me, like adult paper wasps carry prey back to the nest for their grubs to— Ow!”
Daisuke snatched his hands back from her shoulders. “Sorry. Sorry.” He forced his hands into his lap and his expression blank.
“Hell, you’re doing it again, aren’t you?” She was turned around in her seat, frowning at him. “You’ve got your mask on. Stop it.”
Daisuke took a shuddering breath. “Yes. Sorry. I am….” He tried to pin down the frantic, scrabbling thing in his chest and dissect it into words. “Scared. I’m scared, Anne. It almost killed you.”
“Me?” she said. “You big men are the ones who almost got killed.”
“I had everything under control,” said Misha.
“Yes,” Daisuke said. “You understood that the cavaliers ride the other worms. But only after you were bitten. What if that first bite killed you with an allergy?”
She looked at him. “I don’t know what to tell you, Daisuke. Yeah. We’re on another planet. It’s dangerous.”
Daisuke thought of how Anne had torn her heart apart back in the glasslands because she was afraid she might hurt the aliens. That couldn’t be a healthy attitude, but before he could figure out a way to say so, Anne said, “Give me cavaliers over Farhad any day of the week. Frightful alien beasts at least I have a chance to understand.”
“Misha and I can go to the castle and rescue Moon,” Daisuke pleaded.
“How about we don’t and say we did?” Misha said. “With luck, the cavaliers will take care of our Moon problem for
us.”
Daisuke opened his mouth to argue and closed it, wondering if maybe Anne would agree to go back to the caravan if Moon was dead. He shook his head, disgusted at himself. He had to rescue the physicist. He had to keep Anne safe. How could he do both?
“It’s a lovely thought,” said Anne, “but it just wouldn’t be right, inflicting Moon on those innocent alien worms. We’ve got to rescue him, gentlemen.”
They rushed toward the castle, and Anne’s grumble became a shout. “Full speed ahead, Mr. Alekseyev! Let’s move fast and break things!”
***
Anne held on as Misha weaved the ATV around the henge-trees.
A creature like a fat butterfly the size of a basketball launched itself backward off one of the plants as they passed, and flashed by too fast for Anne to tell if it was gliding or flying or jet-propelling or what. Damn it!
“You want to drive right into the castle?” asked Daisuke. “That’s dangerous!”
“Well what do you want to do, abandon Moon?”
“Shut up, both of you,” Misha said. “You’re not military historians.”
“What the hell does that— Argh!”
A cavalier worm lurched out from behind a henge-tree and snapped its hooks together on the space where Anne’s arm had just been. It withdrew, neck coiling into a heron-like S-shape, aiming for her torso. Before it could make another strike, Daisuke reached out and grabbed its mandibles.
“Turn left!” he shouted, and Misha turned, yanking the cavalier off its mount.
Unfortunately, this maneuver put their ATV broadside to another cavalier, which snapped its hooks around Anne’s shoulders.
Terrible pain sawed at her deltoids as the cavalier heaved her from her seat.
“Oh no, you don’t,” said Misha, and accelerated them forward. The cavalier squealed as its mount fell out from under it. Legs like curved ribs grasped in vain at the side of the ATV, trying to find something it could ride.
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