“Ah.” Hariyadi squared his shoulders. “And here we come to it. Precisely how do you intend to stop me?”
Daisuke’s back teeth were pressing together painfully. His hands drifted toward his belt. Feeling for his knife. If Hariyadi were a wild boar, he would be lowering his head, pawing the ground, his bristles ruffed. Preparing to charge. If he were a boar, my knife might do me some good.
“Take your hand away from your gun, Hariyadi.”
“You first, Pearson.”
Daisuke remembered a duel between two rival male baboons he’d seen in South Africa. We are all primates out here, stranded so far from the savanna that gave us birth. The only way we can possibly survive is by remembering that we are more than animals.
“Colonel Pearson,” he said. “Colonel Hariyadi. Remember we depend on one another to survive. Now is not the time for mistrust.”
“Quiet, kid,” said Pearson.
Daisuke was careful not to get angry. “What do you think will happen if you shoot?” he asked.
“You can’t threaten me,” said Pearson.
Hariyadi turned his head, never losing eye contact with Pearson, and said something to Rahman. The cameraman shook his head, eyes wide and frightened.
“Of course Rahman’s not going to ‘take Daisuke down,’” said Anne, who had apparently understood Hariyadi’s order. “What the bloody hell is going on here?”
“What does it look like?” Misha said. “They are trying to figure out whether they should shoot each other.”
Anne flung up her arms. “Well, maybe we should fucking let them.”
“Be quiet, Anne,” growled Pearson. “You have no idea what’s going on.”
“No!” Anne walked toward him, either having forgotten the man had a gun or else horrifically brave. Daisuke wished he could tell her so. “You have no idea. You think you’re the colonel of a bunch of soldiers in enemy territory, and you’re not. You’re a mad old codger with a gun, squaring off against another mad old codger with another gun as if you’re in a Wild West saloon. None of us are your soldiers, and we don’t take your orders.” She grabbed his right arm. “Now stop this.”
Anne was large and solidly built, but Pearson was larger and heavier and better trained. Daisuke knew the only reason the soldier did not smash the biologist to the ground was because he couldn’t afford to take his eyes off Hariyadi.
Pearson’s voice trembled from between gritted teeth. “Ms. Houlihan, let go of me.”
“Daisuke,” said Anne. “Go restrain Hariyadi. Misha, come help me with Pearson.”
“No way.” Misha backed away as Nurul stepped forward.
“Anne, stop,” she said. “You’ll get shot.”
“Nobody’s getting shot,” said Anne. “Daisuke.”
Maybe Anne was right. Maybe they could really pull off this…mutiny?
Daisuke walked toward Hariyadi. Slowly, with his palms out so as not to spook the dangerous and skittish beast. “Sir,” he said, “I think Anne is right. If you will please take your hand away from your weapon….”
“Enough of this!” Pearson twisted his arm out of Anne’s grasp, shoving her away from him. Breaking eye contact with Hariyadi.
The Indonesian’s lips stretched, his shoulders squared, his fingers clenched around his pistol.
Anne shrieked. Rahman cried out and dived at Daisuke, but too late to stop Daisuke from hitting Hariyadi.
Daisuke hugged Hariyadi with arms and legs, throwing his weight to the side. He should have overbalanced the smaller man and brought them both to the ground. Instead, Daisuke found Hariyadi’s arms around him. Now he was flying through the air as before, but upside down. The glass ground slapped all the air out of his lungs.
Daisuke had once spent a very lucrative two weeks in the Philippines learning how to wrestle crocodiles. He remembered now how much fun that had been, and how trained soldiers were not crocodiles.
Hariyadi stood above him. His gun was out. Daisuke’s mouth was open, but no words could come out. His lungs spasmed in his chest. A broken vessel in his eye bled red across his vision. A gunshot reduced his world to whining, throbbing darkness, and it was almost a relief.
Something wet splashed on his face. Something warm. Salty tasting. Sulfurous. And…itchy?
“You fucker,” Anne screamed. “Who has a canteen of water? Pour it on him before—”
“I know, damn it.”
Water gurgled, but not onto Daisuke’s face. He had to wait, face heating and swelling, until finally cool water trickled down his hair, as welcome as rain in a desert. Daisuke’s eyes stung and itched as if he’d taken a face full of powdered mustard, but he knew that if he touched them, things would only get worse. All he could do was lie there, water running down his face, weeping the allergens away.
“I could have shot you instead of the ground,” Pearson was saying. “I could have. Don’t forget it.”
Hariyadi made a furious choking sound.
“Is he going to live?”
“How should I fucking know?” came Anne’s voice.
“I think so,” Misha said. “Hariyadi got smaller dose than Nurul, and she is still living.”
Daisuke blinked the tears out of his eyes. His face still itched horribly, but he could see Misha kneeling over Hariyadi’s prone form, Anne red-faced and Nurul livid. Pearson standing over them all. The American soldier had shot a tile between Daisuke and Hariyadi, splashing both of them with alien goo as debilitating as pepper spray.
“You fucking psychopath!” said Anne. “You could have killed him.” She jabbed a hand at Daisuke. “You could have killed both of them.”
“But I didn’t. I’m not the bad guy here.” Pearson looked out over the glasslands. “You’d better remember that the next time an alien attacks.”
* * *
“Would you please speak English?” Colonel Greg Pearson told his charges.
The Astarinas, who had been gossiping in Indonesian, fell silent. Houlihan, though, dug her heels in.
“This is insane. What you’re doing is insane.”
Pearson looked off into the distance so he wouldn’t have to look at her face. Tiled purple folds of land stretched to the western horizon. Sing, the native girl, walked ahead of them, scouting for danger.
Once Pearson had gotten control of his anger, he asked, “What’s insane? Looking for weapons? For other supplies we might use?”
“There won’t be any supplies,” Anne said, blunt as a mallet. “We got water, sort of, and heat, and that’s all this ecosystem is going to give us. That and a case of anaphylactic shock. Or something else. Something we don’t even know about yet.”
Pearson didn’t ask her what she thought they should do, but she told him anyway. “Hariyadi is right, Pearson. We have to get out of here. Hike back to Imsame. If we leave today, we can get there—”
Too soon, Pearson knew. And even if he didn’t, he had his orders. “No,” he said.
Anne stopped walking. “What? Just ‘no’? Fuck you.”
Pearson lowered his head. Prayed to God for strength, not to mention forgiveness. Small shmoos and candy-bugs rolled between his boots. Other creatures swarmed under the glass. When he turned, he could look at the scientist without wanting to shoot her.
“Or maybe, Ms. Houlihan, you don’t know everything about this situation,” he said. “Maybe, if you had all the facts, it’d be your actions that’d seem insane.”
Anne folded her arms, squinting in the sun. Nurul and Rahman were looking at him too. “And what facts would I need to make sense of dragging along a cameraman to film your gloating?”
“I am not gloating,” he told them. “I am separating Hariyadi from his countrymen while he has a chance to cool down and consider the situation. I am trying to prevent him or any of the rest of us from coming to harm.” Or anyone back on Earth, alth
ough these civilians couldn’t know that. If only they would let Pearson protect them!
“Also,” he said, “I actually need you to scout for actual danger,” – Pearson swept his arm across the rumpled horizon – “so the next thing that nearly kills someone—”
“ – isn’t an accident?” interrupted Anne. “You want me to scour this pristine world for new weapons for you, Colonel?”
Nurul whispered something to Rahman, who aimed his camera at Pearson. They were plotting something, weren’t they? God above, were they trying to force him to shoot them?
“We need to know it all,” Pearson said, ignoring the camera as best he could. “Weapons, food, dangerous predators….”
“…shmoos of unusual size….” said Anne.
“We need to gather as much intelligence as possible about this place,” Pearson said as reasonably as he could. “We’ll be staying here for quite some time.”
“Yes,” said Nurul, walking toward them. “So. Do you see anything dangerous around here?”
“I wish I wasn’t the only person you could ask that question to,” Anne said. “Sing is a better wilderness survivor than I am, I’m sure.”
The native girl looked back at them, expression and motivations impossible to read. They weren’t in land she knew.
It had been a good idea to let Houlihan bring Sing and her aggravating husband on this trip. Not that it would have been difficult to neutralize Hariyadi’s lieutenant, but every advantage Pearson could gain, any dirty trick he could play, would be worth it if he could prevent the coming war. Even if no rescue came and he died out here, even if everyone in this party died, it would be worth it if he could just keep Hariyadi away from his people back in Imsame.
“Since we were stranded here yesterday, our lives have already been at risk twice,” said Nurul, apparently to the camera her husband was swinging around. “Once, when the ground exploded under us. Another, when we were attacked by a strange and savage creature.”
“And once again when we were menaced by killer apes,” Houlihan muttered at him.
Pearson gritted his teeth. It was like the woman was missing part of her brain. Even a dog was smart enough to roll over once you established dominance, but the biologist just kept pushing, even when she was clearly in the wrong. Who had nearly killed half their party and wasted their entire water supply by failing to do her damn job.
The thought made Pearson look down at the ground, suddenly nervous it might blow up under him.
“Don’t worry,” said Anne. “No yellow tiles here.”
“Assuming yellow tiles are the only thing dangerous out there,” Pearson said.
“We can’t assume any such thing. Which is why we can’t stay here.”
Maybe that was her problem. Scientists were like lawyers and politicians and other people who thought that words mattered. That if you just talked about something long enough, you’d accomplish something.
Well, Pearson had tried that. He’d tried words and explanations and that lunatic Hariyadi had nearly shot him. They were going to stay here because Pearson was under orders to kill anyone who tried to leave. He couldn’t tell the civilians that, of course, because then they’d try to figure out where the orders came from, and why. Which would blow this operation’s deniability all to hell and probably get Houlihan and the rest locked up in some federal prison. But Pearson couldn’t tell them that, either. So, just don’t engage. Don’t talk. Act.
“You know what I’d like?” Pearson stopped walking. “I’d like a spear.” He pointed to one of those weird twisted glassy structures they called ‘screw-trees’. “Maybe if we chop down one of those?” Scrupulously, he added, “Would that be safe, Ms. Houlihan?”
She looked at him levelly. “I don’t know.”
Pearson ground his teeth. “So find out.”
One thing he could say about her, the woman was no coward. She stomped right up to the potentially deadly screw-tree and knelt close to its base. “Okay,” she said in lecture mode. “This thing is a helix, a flat double sheet of glass that grows in a spiral. It’s slightly wider at the bottom, but not by much. Separated into wedge-shaped segments. Each one has its own internal reservoir of purple goo. Some structures on the edge of the screw…little yellow fruits? Flowers? Hmm. Oh! And look at this little beauty, like a Life Saver, rolling around. And here’s a bumblesnail we haven’t seen before….”
All right, that was enough technical chatter. “Is it likely to explode if I cut it down?” Pearson asked.
“No,” said Houlihan with admirable certainty. “But I don’t think you can carve the tip into a point. It’s all hollow glass.”
Damn. “Any other way we can use it for a weapon?”
Anne shrugged unhelpfully, but Sing, who had climbed to the top of the nearest ridge, had begun to point and yell.
Pearson’s head whipped around. His hand went to his holstered sidearm. “What’s that?”
“Urchins!” shouted Nurul, as Rahman squatted and focused his camera between two outcroppings of forest-reef. There were two creatures there, like glass medicine balls suspended on six-foot spines. Spines that would make excellent weapons.
Mottled purple viscera squelched around the inside of the glass balls, crawling up the inside of the central balls like giant amoebas. Overbalanced, the balls tipped forward, and the urchins rolled closer to the humans.
“They must be high browsers,” Houlihan said. “I wonder….” and she trailed off into irrelevant speculation. Pearson didn’t much care about what the urchins ate, as long as it wasn’t people. All he cared about was the spines these things carried, which would make excellent spears. He drew his gun.
“Don’t shoot it, dipshit!” Houlihan cried. “We have no idea what will happen.”
He was getting real tired of that word. But Pearson controlled his temper and lowered his gun. “Do you think it will explode, Houlihan?” Better keep the questions simple.
“Probably not,” she said, “but still.”
“You have a better way of killing it?”
“Why don’t we just watch and learn a little before we start killing?”
Sing squawked something in her language. She was looking at the ridge behind the urchins. Had she seen something? Was that look on her face fear? It was hard to tell, she was so damn stoic. Pearson kept his gun out.
The urchins made another laborious, rolling ‘step’ toward the humans.
“Do you think they’re attacking?” asked Nurul. “Are they dangerous?”
“I doubt it,” Houlihan said. “It looks like it has a top speed of maybe three centimeters per second.”
Sing yelled, and this time there was no mistaking her fear.
“What?” said Houlihan, looking around, but Pearson had already seen it.
From behind the ridge emerged a purple-green, lozenge-shaped object about six feet long. Glassy spines glittered on its surface, those down the center axis flowing from aft to fore with the smoothness of a conveyor belt. As Pearson watched, it stopped, bunched its sacklike body and turned its forward end toward him. Rosettes of prismatic spines opened like two eyes, shimmering glossy black.
A giant shmoo.
Pearson already had his gun centered between those weird, flowerlike eyes. “Don’t worry. I won’t let it get too close.”
Houlihan drew breath like she was about to protest, but the shmoo had even less patience for her than Pearson. It blurred forward in a shocking burst of speed and smashed into one of the urchins. The plant-eater threw itself, not away, but toward its attacker, maybe trying to pierce the shmoo’s body with its spines. Glass screeched off glass, and a shattered spine as long as Pearson’s leg went spinning across the tiles.
“No need!” Nurul picked up the spine, provoking nothing from the shmoo but a subtle change in color and a sucking noise.
Sing was yelling s
omething, which nobody present could understand. Did she know something about these aliens? Did she see some other danger? Where the hell was that useless slob Tyaney the one time he might be useful translating?
Now the shmoo was on top of the urchin, pushing its head into the hole left by the urchin’s spine, its body shimmering and flashing the artificial blue of an ice slushie.
“Whoa,” said Houlihan. “Some kind of optical effect there. Prismatic spines?”
“It’s smoking,” Nurul observed, her voice quiet and awed. She was right. Foul-smelling steam bubbled up around the face of the feeding predator and the tips of the urchin’s still-intact spines.
“More sulfuric acid,” Houlihan said. “The shmoo is pumping the acid up into the body of the urchin. Dissolving all those clever silicone valves. And incidentally digesting all the flesh inside.”
The feeding predator was oddly beautiful. And it wasn’t just the rainbow colors that shimmered along its body. There was a purity to its purpose there. Eat or starve. Live or die. Do what you must. None of the compromises you have to make as a human, as a soldier, as a good man.
The urchin’s guts had gone from purple to bubbling black. Witch’s brew in a cauldron. Another spine broke off and fell to the glassy ground with a clang.
The shmoo shifted from blue to yellow and looked up. Those sunflower eyes scanned across the dropped spine, then the journalists, then Pearson.
“Ah!” said Nurul. “The spears you wanted, Colonel. Shall I get them?” She reached out toward the dead urchin and the living predator.
“No. Stay back, Astarina.” Pearson strode toward them, pistol ready to defend the stupid civilians. Why couldn’t just one of these people have the self-preservation instincts God gave a fruit fly?
“We can wait until that thing is done eating,” he said.
“Not if the shmoo’s digestive juices break the spine apart,” answered Nurul. “Then it will no longer work as a spear.” She grabbed the spine and pulled it toward her, knocking it against one of the other spines as she did so. The urchin twisted under the feeding shmoo, smoke pouring from cracks in its armor.
Junction Page 10
