by J. S. Morin
For once, at least, Carl didn’t feel foolish for owning a sword. The enchanted blade was sharper than it looked and had little trouble hacking through the rubbery, chest-high tangles of vines that choked the jungle floor. Each cut left the blade wet with a gooey translucent sap, but thanks to whatever enchantment kept it sharp, a flick of the wrist was all it took to shake away the residue. At first Carl had thought nothing of it, then it had occurred to him to worry whether it was toxic to humans. But after brushing against enough cut ends to leave his skin smeared with the substance and feeling nothing more than annoying stickiness, he concluded that it wasn’t life threatening.
Kubu and Mriy had less trouble marching through the jungle than Carl. Mriy was able to pick her way through the vines, and Kubu bounded through, trampling them down beneath his bulk. It would have been nice if the vines stayed trampled, but they sprang back up instantly as if spring loaded. Taking up the rear, Carl was forced to hack his way through just to keep them in sight.
“Any chance we can stop for a rest?” Carl called out as the pair threatened to disappear from sight ahead of him. He had realized shortly into the hike that he was no longer in command. This was the wilderness, and he needed Mriy’s instincts to survive. On his own, he’d be lost, clueless, and generally bait for whatever creatures inhabited this world.
Mriy stopped and turned. “Again? You waste your waking time on holos. Sleep more and be rested when you need to be.” But she stopped and waited for him, and that was all that mattered to Carl right then. He didn’t need a lecture on human physiological shortcomings or his own lack of conditioning.
“Hey,” he said, bending over and resting his hands on his knees. “Remember, when we find the survivors, they’re Earth Navy personnel. You need me to talk to them. I die out here, and you don’t stand a snowball’s chance in—well… this place—of having them deal level with you.”
“You may think I am trying to kill you, or leave you behind,” Mriy said. “But I am forced to remind myself every few minutes that you aren’t trying to announce us to whoever is out there and walk us into an ambush. This would have gone more smoothly if you had stayed back at the ship until Kubu and I located the Odysseus crew or found their remains.”
“Someone buried the ones back by the crash site,” Carl countered. “There are survivors.”
“There were survivors,” Mriy replied. “That much seems certain. But what if disease or famine took them? What if nothing here is edible for your kind?”
Kubu’s jaws snapped shut and some small flying creature disappeared; its only sin was veering to close to a hungry mouth. But there was a key difference between Kubu and a human in the breadth of omnivorousness. Time and again he had displayed a gastronomic resilience that made vultures look like picky eaters.
Never one to give in to a logical argument, Carl pushed back. “There are survivors. My kind don’t die off easy. You’d never know it nowadays, but scratching and clawing for existence was all we knew for thousands of years.”
“Carl-people had claws?” Kubu asked, licking his muzzle to clean up after his airborne snack.
Carl rolled his eyes. “Your English is getting better, but you’re going to have to pick up on figures of speech.”
“Kubu is young,” Mriy chided him. “He’s learning quickly, but you lack patience. I can hear his words improving day by day.”
“Not as fast as he’s growing,” Carl muttered. He realized instantly that both of his keen-earned companions must have heard him. “I’m just… never mind. Can we get on with this? I’d like to negotiate with these survivors before I sweat out the last of my bodily fluid out here in this oven.”
“Will they smell like Carl-people?” Kubu asked.
“Yeah.”
“Then we don’t need to go anywhere,” Kubu said, raising his nose to sniff. “They’re finding us.”
# # #
The mountain, like every other feature of the moon, had no proper name. Mort had christened it “Olympus,” having fixated on the classical theme of the crashed ENV battleship embedded halfway up its slope. The name reminded Tanny of Olympus Mons, the tallest peak back home. Like most Martian natives, she had taken the school trips up the ground tram, gawking out the window as her car exited the atmosphere with yet more mountain to go above. This new Olympus was a pale imitation, and for that, she was thankful.
She hadn’t been able to find a proper dose of Recitol since the Mobius went on the run. There had been some left in her reserves at the time, but since running out, she’d been forced to rely on black market copycats. The stuff worked, and the mercenaries and goons who bought it to get an edge on the competition probably thought it was the best shit ever. But to a marine who’d been on Recitol for most of her adult life, it was an adhesive bandage over a gut wound.
“We don’t need a rear guard, Rucker,” Charlie called down from the head of the procession. It was a small blessing that they’d found a clear path up the mountainside, marked by numerous scuffs and gouges where objects had been dragged down from the ship. “Let’s pick up the pace. We’re only guessing when nightfall’s coming on this crazy moon, and I don’t want to camp here or trek back in the dark.”
“Those ribs still giving you trouble?” Esper asked. She was having no apparent problem keeping pace. There wasn’t even a slick of sweat across her bare shoulders. “I can take another look if—”
“I’m fine,” Tanny snapped, pushing to increase her rate of ascent. It wasn’t quite a climb, but it wasn’t exactly a staircase they were hiking up the side of Mount Olympus. She lowered her voice and addressed Rhiannon. “You holding up OK, kid?”
Rhiannon was Tanny’s saving grace. No one mentioned the obvious difficulty she was having with the hike. Without proper attire of her own, she had borrowed jungle-friendly clothes from Charlie—they were nearly the same size. But the loaner tank top she wore was drenched in sweat, no longer the same color as when she put it on. Her pale, nightclub skin already showed signs of sunburn. As she labored up the mountainside she panted for breath but refused to give in and stop.
Rhiannon grunted and gave a firm nod. She’d hardly said a word since their trudge through jungle underbrush turned into a rocky, uphill trail.
The four women passed into shadow. They had reached the point in the trail where the Odysseus hung over them, blotting out the alien sun. Tanny was no expert on Earth Navy capital ships, but much of the hull appeared to be intact. Score one for human material scientists and military engineers. A hangar bay, flanked by two massive main engines, pointed out of the mountainside. The side facing the climbers bristled with turreted gun emplacements. Carl’s long distance estimate was that two thirds of the ship was exposed, but Tanny guessed it was more half and half. There was no sign of the capital ship docking rings, the midship scanner array, or the observation deck. But the major clue was the ventrally mounted Zeus Particle Cannon. Running most of the length of the battleship’s underside, the main armament for the Pandora class was its most distinctive external feature. And while Tanny was no expert on ships, she was familiar enough with the ZPC from action holovids and news feeds to judge just how much of the weapon was buried in the rock.
“Almost there,” Charlie announced. “I can smell the leaking coolant.” She took a deep, long breath, then released it with a euphoric gasp.
Tanny hoped she was joking. Depending on the coolant, it could be toxic or combustible. Years after the crash, any ruptured lines should have vented completely, but that didn’t mean new damage hadn’t befallen the Odysseus. Rock slides, storms, wind, or tectonic activity could have shifted the wreck, causing havoc anew with each event.
Just as the mountain itself had, the ship just grew and grew as they approached but seemed forever the same distance away. From the point that they entered the ship’s shadow until the end of the trail, hours passed. Breaks grew more frequent. They stopped for a brief meal. But eventually they made it to the point where the survivors of the Odysseus cra
sh had broken free of the vessel’s hulk and clambered down the mountain slope to whatever fate lay in the surrounding jungle.
A makeshift bridge had been constructed. By the look of it, the survivors had used a pair of inert grav sleds to span the gap from egress to rock. It was a rickety contraption, lashed together with high-tension cables and braced with a compressed hydraulic ram, but the survivors must have traversed it. Signs along the mountain trail indicated that equipment had been carried down as well.
“Not me,” Rhiannon said, declining the offer of being first to enter before it was ever voiced.
“Esper, you got enough non-magic in you to keep a light on?” Tanny asked, pulling a hand lamp from her knapsack.
“I’ll do you one better,” she replied and rummaged through her own provisions. The glass sphere she withdrew appeared ordinary, but Tanny suspected otherwise; what would have been the point of a plain old hunk of melted silica? “Ta-da!” Loosening her grip with a flourish, the globe perched in her upturned hand.
“What did that do?” Rhiannon asked.
“Yeah, I really expected more after the build-up,” Charlie agreed, crossing her arms. “We got anything to make a torch?”
Esper gave them all a quick glare before squeezing her eyes shut, renewing her grip on the globe and holding it up to her lips. Her mouth moved but made no sound. This time, when her fingers snapped open, the globe flared to life with a blue radiance and rose from her hand.
“That’s more like it,” Esper said to the globe, which drifted to hang in the air just over her shoulder. “It’s Mort’s, and it didn’t want to listen to me. I had to promise it we’d show it some interesting sights if it lit the way.”
Charlie shot Tanny a worried glance. “She just bargained with a magic hand lamp?”
But Tanny had heard weirder stories of the inner workings of magic. She’d spent an afternoon that felt like weeks trapped inside a wizard’s head not long ago. No, she was more concerned about the secrets that wizards loved so dearly. Esper was catching Mysterious Mort Disease. “What else have you got in there?” she demanded.
Esper gave a sheepish smile. “Nothing.”
Shutting her eyes and pinching the bridge of her nose, Tanny fought off the rising anger that a rationed dose of Sepromax was having trouble regulating. “Esper, we work with some of the top liars in the galaxy. You don’t crack the top billion. Spit it out.”
With a swallow and a quick nod, Esper opened her knapsack in front of everyone. Her sigh of relief after being caught in such a simple lie made Tanny smirk. “Mort said it would do me good for everyone to think I was mysterious and had all the answers. But really, he just stuffed some things from a drawer into my pack with a quick rundown on what they did.” She pulled out a metal bar the length of a hand. “This thing separates the yuck out of water; Mort uses it before making coffee on the Mobius. He doesn’t trust—and I quote—’that doodad that squeezes the water out of everyone’s piss.’ He does it when no one’s looking, and I’m starting to wonder whether I should be using it in the mornings, too.”
“How do you work it?” Rhiannon muttered. Tanny had always considered the coffee on the ship to be swill—oddly tasting faintly of beer—but had never ascribed it to anything unsanitary before. Rhiannon must have been thinking along the same lines.
“This little book can hold as much as we need to write in it,” Esper said, holding up a leather-bound volume that fit in the palm of her hand. “He was so proud of it I didn’t have the heart to tell him that’s one thing a datapad can do. But since we don’t have a working datapad, we’ve got something to take inventory with.”
“Those things need an input stylus, don’t they?” Charlie asked.
Esper held the knapsack up to her face. “I think there’s one in here somewhere,” she said, her voice muffled.
“Forget it,” Tanny said. “Is there anything in there we need to know about before we head inside? Protective magic, weapons, scout drones, that sort of thing?”
“There’s this little guy,” Esper said, pulling out a wooden doll with a mop of yarn for hair.
“What’s it do?” Tanny asked. Some magics made a certain amount of sense. Book—write in it. Globe—light source. But what was a doll good for?
“It just sings, but I thought it was adorable that Mort packed it,” Esper said. “He really does have a soft side, you know.”
So did a rotten apple, but Tanny didn’t want to start another argument. “Go on. Forget the rest of it. Just get in there and lead the way.”
Stepping tentatively across the ramshackle bridge, Esper was the first to enter the wreck of the Odysseus.
# # #
“Hey, my plasma torch is cutting out,” Roddy griped from beneath the secondary power conduit to the thorium reactor. “How about a little less daydreaming and a little more working science down here?”
“Confound it,” Mort snapped. He scattered his game of solitaire across a crate of bread cartridges—worthless, dry packets of carbohydrate platters unless Roddy got the food processor working. “I can’t set my mind thinking cross-ways ‘round the clock.”
“You better find all those cards,” Roddy warned. “Poker’s about the only P-tech entertainment we’ve got around here. Now steady this place so I can weld.” He held up the plasma torch and squeezed the trigger briefly. The jet that exited the nozzle flickered like a candle flame caught in a draft.
Mort squinted. “Looks fine to me.”
“How am I supposed to aim this thing when I don’t know which way it’s pointing from one second to the next?”
“Predictive clairvoyance?”
“Knock it off!” Roddy shouted. “God dammit, why couldn’t you have gone battleship spelunking and left Esper here to help?”
“She couldn’t keep a self-drying sock dry in this place.”
“What the hell’s a self-drying sock?”
“Don’t they make those? I can never tell. There’s a self-something-ing somethingorother for everything, it seems. Dry socks was probably too sensible an idea for those gelatin-brained engineer types, though.”
Roddy let loose a long, exasperated sigh. “Can we please just get going on this? You’re almost making me wish I was out in the jungle with Carl.”
Leaning back on his duffel bag seat, Mort sniffed. “Breathable atmosphere on a non-Earthlike. Always makes me suspicious. Anywhere in ARGO space, I’d blame my kind.” Roddy knew Mort meant ‘wizards,’ though he could have meant his own family. They were notorious for churning out terraforming specialists. “But here? Unless renegades ventured out this far beyond the comforts of home and settled beneath a dying star, I can only presume some other species created this world.”
“What? You think some percentage of rock-balls ain’t just going to randomly have Phabian-like atmo’?” Roddy asked, setting down his useless plasma torch and crawling out from the engines for a break. “Shit happens, and coincidences just make people believe in bad statistics.”
Mort cupped a hand to his chin, staring off into the bowels of the engine room. “You know, Esper’s been filling my head with theological questions lately. I’ve gotten her to look at the One Church more or less the same as any other viewpoint, and she’s taken hold of a number of disparate notions and wrangled them together. But the one she comes back to most often is the God’s Seeds premise.”
“That’s nice,” Roddy said. Maybe if he played along, Mort would get all the shit scraped into one corner of his brain and get back to work.
“If all the Earth-likes were created by the same being, what happened to the other worlds?” Mort asked. “Failed experiments, less beloved works not worth coping, or was it something else? What if it wasn’t God, but a race of gods, terraforming worlds until they were identical?”
“What’s the diff?”
Mort stood. “What if we’re making our homeworlds out to be grander than they were meant? What if, instead of cradles to birth new species, they were zoo exhibits or one
of those little scientific platters for looking at in a microscope? What if Earth was a vacation home for wealthy godlings?”
Roddy shrugged. “What if it was?” He pulled a can of beer from his coveralls and popped the top.
“We don’t terraform Earth,” Mort said. “Why? Because it defines us. We make other worlds resemble it.”
“This going somewhere?” Roddy asked. Mort had until the end of this beer to get the philosophical bullshit out of his system. Then Roddy was going to cut power on the whole discussion.
“What if this is where they’re from?”
Roddy paused mid-sip to stare at Mort. He swallowed, then slowly lowered the can. “You mean to tell me that this armpit of a moon… is the home of the creators of half the fucking galaxy?”
Mort cleared his throat. “Well… no. I just meant to entertain the possibility. It’s been gnawing at me since we discovered breathable air and standard gravity on this moon.”
With a gasp, Roddy finished the last of his beer. “Well, glad that’s off your chest, big guy. Now suck it up and get back to twisting magic by the britches. I got work to do.”
# # #
They waited in a small clearing Carl had hacked out of the jungle with his sword. As much as the thought of being surrounded and ambushed nagged at the instinctive part of his brain, Carl preferred it to the relentless slog through alien underbrush. For all he knew, he’d been splattered with slow poisons and inhaled spores of a dozen diseases already on this trip. Time to meet something sentient.
“How close are they?” Carl asked, reclining against Kubu’s flank as the huge canid lounged, panting.
“A little closer than the last time you asked,” Mriy replied with as much snap in her voice as a cautious hush allowed. “Have you come up with a plan yet?”
“I’m a little closer than the last time you asked,” Carl replied, fighting to keep a straight face. Mriy was in no mood for jocularity, but he couldn’t help himself. And it wasn’t that he didn’t have a plan, it was more that she wasn’t going to like hearing it. Better that it be a surprise.