by Samuel Best
She handed two of them to Leera and tossed the others aside, then peeled off another section of netting. More spikes tumbled to the crates below. Uda picked out the ones that would repel the gray crabs and bound them together using a nylon strap she found nearby. She fastened a carrying strap out of the two loose ends of the nylon, then handed the entire bundle to Turner.
He slung the bundle over his shoulder, and asked, “Ready?”
Uda picked up her three spikes. “All set.”
Turner climbed up the ladder leading to the twisted ramp and disappeared through a jagged hole in the hull. Leera climbed up slowly and awkwardly, carrying two of the radio spikes. Turner reached back into the ship and helped pull her up onto the upside-down belly of the craft.
Uda climbed up after her, blinking in the bright sunlight.
The three of them stood on the shuttle, looking past the large boulder near the crumpled nose. Beyond the broken trees and short, black scar where the shuttle had slid to a stop, a thin trail of clear ground extended toward the two mountains to the west. An ocean of gray, interlocked crab shells smothered every other inch of land.
Leera looked to the east, in the direction of the colony. The front line of crabs was less than a hundred meters from the shuttle’s crash site, progressing slowly over low hills, like a gray blanket being drawn across the world.
“Do you think they cover the entire planet?” Uda asked.
“Not yet,” Leera replied. “We need to get to the colony first. We’ll use the radio spikes to leap-frog to the front of the line, then we run.”
“I’m going back,” said Uda.
Leera turned to look at her, confused. “What?”
“For the people we saw in the mountain pass, and for Walter. I’m going back.”
She handed Leera one of her radio spikes, keeping two for herself.
“We have to warn the colony!” said Leera.
“You go,” said Uda. “Once those people leave the pass, they won’t be able to get through the crabs.”
“Uda…”
“I don’t want to start my time on this planet by leaving someone to die,” she said. “There’s an open pathway back to the mountains…for now. I can get there if I hurry.”
“Be careful,” said Turner.
Reluctantly, Leera added, “We’ll be waiting for you at the colony.”
Uda scrambled down the side of the shuttle and jumped to the ground. She ran in the direction of the nearby mountains without looking back.
Leera and Corporal Turner spent the next hour leap-frogging two radio spikes to the front line of the crab migration. As soon as they were clear, Turner broke into a fast jog eastward. Leera limped behind him, her shin hurting where it had healed.
He glanced back briefly and she concealed her limp with obvious effort, clenching her jaw and breathing hard through her nose.
Turner slowed his pace.
“Don’t,” said Leera. “No time.”
He nodded reluctantly and jogged faster.
They stopped to drink from a small, clear spring ten minutes later. Leera sipped from her cupped palms in between heavy breaths, but Turner barely seemed winded at all.
“Training,” he said simply when she asked how he managed it. “Lots and lots of training.”
Leera wiped her brow with the cool water and stood, surveying the eastern horizon. The sun was dipping slowly behind her, and a faint hint of orange was infusing its brilliant yellow light. Leera’s gaze swept over the bare tree trunks and the rolling hills.
Simple, she thought, but beautiful. I miss my family.
That last thought snuck in at the end, unbidden and unwelcome. She was trying to force herself not to think about Paul and Micah before she could rest — before she could be alone to mourn.
“Do you have anyone back home?” she asked the corporal.
Turner readjusted the bundle of radio spikes on his shoulder and swiped a wet hand over his short hair as he stood. “Couple of girlfriends,” he said, grinning sheepishly. “Mom, sister, cousins.” He studied Leera’s face carefully. “They’ll send another ship.”
She nodded, even though she didn’t believe him. As she looked away, a smear of red on the ground behind a tree caught her eye.
“Is that…?” she asked hesitantly.
“It’s not blood,” Turner replied.
He gripped his rifle and walked forward slowly, toward the red patch of ground.
“It’s the red moss,” Leera said as she hurried past him.
It covered two square meters of the ground past the tree like a thick carpet.
“I think it’s moving,” said Leera, kneeling next to it and trying to peer beneath the flat, tightly-woven patch of moss.
Turner shouldered his rifle and knelt next to her. “How? I don’t see any legs.”
“Watch closely,” Leera told him, pointing.
A crinkle on the top layer of moss undulated from one end to the other, like a wave rolling toward an ocean shore. A new wave started once the previous one ended, carrying the moss forward, a fraction of a centimeter at a time.
The wave of movement on its top layer stopped when Leera reached out to touch it. Thin tendrils of wet brown root-like material seeped from the moss, flagellating in the air as they slowly extended toward her hand.
Turner grabbed her arm and pulled her back.
“It healed me before,” she said.
“And it died,” Turner reminded her. “I don’t know anything about biology, but that’s a big trade-off.”
The tendrils retreated back into the moss, and the slow, steady wave of movement on its top layer resumed.
“You’re right,” said Leera. She smiled at Turner. “Thank you for reminding me. There might only be a few of these creatures on the planet.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said the corporal.
He nodded behind her, and she turned to see another patch of moss on the ground a few meters away. It was at the edge of a natural clearing between a lopsided ring of tree trunks. The trees leaned inward at their tops, their three massive branches nearly touching to create the impression of an open-air dome.
Leera walked into the clearing and stood amongst a dozen patches of red moss. Several were attached to tree trunks, hugging the brown bark.
“Something about this place has drawn them here,” she said.
Before Turner could warn her not to do it, she peeled up the corner of a patch of moss. Root-like tendrils popped free of the soil and flagellated wildly, flinging dirt. Leera let go and stepped back, brushing off her hands. Then she knelt down and stuck her finger in the ground until she felt a mild shock.
“I think they feed off the electrical field in the ground,” said Leera. “Or maybe the shock stimulates smaller organisms, and that’s what they eat with their tendrils. The crabs do it with their legs.”
Turner looked up at the inward-leaning trees. “What’s so special about this place?”
“There might be a particularly strong current beneath us. Maybe they were born here.”
“Born?”
Leera smiled. “Or grown. Spawned. Seeded. Who knows? We have a whole world of questions and no way to answer them.”
An image of her son flashed through her mind, and her smile faded.
“But we have plenty of time to find out,” she said. “I’m ready to get moving if you are.”
The hills grew steeper the farther east they jogged. Leera was expecting to be on the move all day, but a short ten minutes after leaving the clearing full of red moss behind, she and Turner climbed a hill to see a narrow river snaking from north to south, and sprawling farmland stretching eastward beyond.
“We made it,” said Leera, only half-believing her eyes.
In the fields below, farmers worked their land, tilling their soil with trowels and shovels when they weren’t using small, hand-drawn ploughs.
One of the farmers saw Leera and Turner atop the hill. He pointed and shouted. Another man
saw them and dropped his shovel, then ran away, waving his arms and calling out to others as he passed.
Leera walked down the hill, gripping her three radio spikes, with Turner close by her side. They forded the shallow river, its cool, slow-moving waters swirling around their shins.
An aging man and a woman a few years his junior approached them at the edge of the water. He eyed the corporal’s gun warily, then looked at Leera.
“Bet you’re hungry,” he said.
“Welcome,” said the woman.
She handed Leera and Turner each a packet of freeze-dried apples.
“Thank you,” said Leera graciously. “We didn’t know—”
“Shh-sh!” said the man urgently, tugging at the woman’s elbow and looking east. “Here he comes!”
The woman said, “Oh!” and hurried in the opposite direction, the man close on her heels.
Leera and Turner shared a confused glance before they realized what the older farmer was talking about.
A man in a long, oversized jacket was approaching them from the east, strolling casually across the neighboring farm, heedless of the carefully tilled soil underfoot. Afternoon sunlight glinted off his sweaty, bald head. Farmers gathered on the hills surrounding the border farm, watching the scene unfold.
The man in the oversized jacket was big, Leera saw as he drew nearer — taller than most, and with girth to spare. He spread his arms wide as he approached, and offered a welcoming grin of yellowing teeth.
Warning bells chimed in Leera’s brain. Something was off about that man. He struck her as a backward scale on fine snakeskin.
Turner must have shared her sentiment. He set his bundle of radio spikes on the ground and stepped past her, one hand calmly moving toward the grip of his shouldered rifle.
“Welcome!” the large man boomed for all to hear. “Welcome to my colony.”
TULLIVER
He was on his way to visit the Alder boy when he heard the shouts. Tulliver paused at the top of a low hill and dabbed sweat from his bald head with a wet rag. He squinted in the bright sunlight, trying to find the cause of the excitement.
Several colonists were running west, toward the river. It was too far to make out the details, but Tulliver thought he could see two people approaching from that direction, wearing the white-and-black body suits of those who had passed some of the voyage from Earth in a hypergel tank.
He grunted and set off down the hill, mildly annoyed to delay his trip to the Alder farm.
Word of his newfound authority had spread quickly. As Tulliver trudged up and down the rolling hills at the border of the colony toward the river, he was pleased to encounter meek farmers who nodded at him deferentially or dropped their gaze and avoided him altogether.
He figured it didn’t matter to them who was in charge, just so long as they could grow their food in relative peace.
Warden Cohen’s wife was another story.
Tulliver thought back to the meeting he had with her only an hour ago. She had come pounding on one of the landing arms of his shuttle, her two whelps at her side, yelling at the top of her lungs for Tulliver to show his face.
He did so wearing a dreadful scowl, but she was unfazed. She demanded an audience. After a brief stare-down, he growled an order that she leave her children outside.
The woman marched up the ramp without so much as a word to her young son and daughter. Once inside the shuttle, she made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that she was no farmer. The big warden’s wife hadn’t followed him clear across the galaxy to play in the dirt. She and her children were never supposed to go down to the surface in the first place, and she wanted to know what Tulliver was going to do about it.
“No work, no food,” Tulliver said simply.
Her shoulders drooped, and she sighed.
“I’ve just been so lost without my husband,” she said quietly.
“Ha!” Tulliver barked, making her jump. “I don’t buy it.”
The woman stomped her foot in frustration and wiped away a tear.
She’s clever, thought Tulliver.
He could use someone like her on his side.
“Tell you what,” he said. “You wait a few days for things to settle down, then come back and see me. You might be useful after all.”
Tulliver grinned as he recalled the hungry gleam in her eyes. That’s what he liked to see. Those were the people he liked to deal with: hungry and ambitious — happy for a slice, but not independent-minded enough to grab for the whole pie.
He came within clear sight of the western river. Two farmers, a man and his wife, were speaking with the two new arrivals, a younger man and a middle-aged woman, who wore torn and stained black-and-white body suits. The younger man carried a bundle of metal rods on his back, lashed together with a thick nylon strap.
As Tulliver approached them, he spread his arms wide and shouted, “Welcome! Welcome to my colony.”
He hesitated for the briefest of moments when he saw the rifle slung across the younger man’s back, but he bulled through the hesitation and offered the woman his hand. She shook it, and said, “Dr. Leera James,” but did not return his wide smile. She carried three metal rods, nearly as tall as her, with one spiked end and a bulging cluster of electronic doodads on the other. They didn’t look particularly effective as weapons, so Tulliver disregarded them.
“Corporal Turner,” said the younger man, emphasizing the Corporal. His handshake was overly firm.
Something to prove, thought Tulliver.
He turned his left shoulder toward the two of them to show off his warden’s patch, which he had found on a jump suit in the shuttle and hastily stuck to the sleeve of his own jacket.
“I’m Tulliver Pruitt,” he said. “The new government rep for the colony.”
“What happened to the wardens?” asked the corporal. “We were supposed to be dealing with them.”
“They didn’t make it,” he said with a requisite amount of sadness and regret.
“So who put you in charge?” asked the woman.
Tulliver turned toward her. “I did.” Then he smiled and jabbed a thumb behind him. “The colony is a short walk that way. I’ll fill you in.”
He turned his back on them and started walking, wondering if they would follow. A moment later, they appeared on his left, walking close together.
“Almost sixty survivors,” said Tulliver as he descended a long, sloping hill.
He waved at a farmer in dirty clothing, but the farmer did not wave back.
Need to find those crates of new clothes, thought Tulliver. Get these people something clean to wear.
“There are more out there,” said Leera. “We saw three survivors walking through a mountain pass, making their way toward the colony. One of our group went back for them after we crashed.”
Tulliver glanced at her. “Crashed?”
“In the shuttle,” said the corporal.
The woman slapped his shoulder quickly and shook her head. Tulliver smirked and pretended not to notice.
Secrets on secrets, said the ghostly voice of Ivan in his mind. Just like on Earth. Just like on the ship.
I told you where to find another ticket, thought Tulliver, swiping his brow with a sweaty hand. You’re faster than me. A better runner.
And yet there you are, and where am I?
“—like to see what you have set up for the injured,” the woman was saying, jogging to keep up with Tulliver’s long strides. “I’m sure medical supplies were delivered before the crash.”
“What?” said Tulliver irritably.
“I said I want to make sure you’re all set up for injured survivors. We…we lost our doctor in the shuttle crash.”
“You’re a doctor.”
“Of systems biology. Not medicine.”
Tulliver grunted. “That’s unfortunate. We have almost no science equipment. No microscopes, no scanning-whatevers. But we do have broken bones. Cuts and bruises. Concussions. We need a medical doctor. Someone us
eful to the colony.”
From the corner of his eye, Tulliver saw the corporal rest his hand on the woman’s shoulder to get her attention. He nodded in Tulliver’s direction and patted the side of his rifle. Tulliver balled his fists and took a deep breath.
The woman shook her head and pushed the front of the corporal’s rifle back toward the ground.
“Mr. Pruitt,” said the woman tightly. “The colony has bigger problems than dealing with cuts and bruises.”
“Oh?”
“There’s a mass migration of animals heading east, right toward us.”
He stopped walking and stood in the bright sunlight, chewing his lip and breathing heavily.
“Migration?” he said at last.
“Gray crabs,” said the woman. “All moving together. There was another colony before this one.”
“That’s where we found the shuttle,” said the corporal.
“We think…I think the crabs killed them.”
“I saw them when my pod landed,” Tulliver said, repressing a shudder. “It was a small patch, heading away from the colony.”
“There are more,” she told him. “Enough to cover this continent, and they’re headed this way.”
“You’ve seen them?” he asked quietly.
She nodded.
“Where are they?”
“If they hold their current pace,” she replied, “they’ll be at the edge of the farmlands by nightfall.”
“Maybe they’ll go around,” said Tulliver, the words sounding ridiculous even as he spoke them.
“They follow an electrical current in the ground,” said Leera. “The current runs near trees, and I’m guessing the colony is right in the middle of a forest. The crabs aren’t going to ‘go around’.”
“What about the river?” asked Tulliver. He stuffed his shaking hands in his jacket pockets to hide them. The warm sweat covering his body turned cold, and he shivered. “Can they swim?”
“I have no idea,” the woman said. She held up her three metal rods and pointed at the bundle of identical rods on the corporal’s back. “These radio spikes will repel them, but we don’t have enough to surround the entire colony. Where’s the shuttle the wardens brought to the surface?”
