by Gary Gibson
Irish appeared fascinated by hers, turning it this way and that. Sam slid his out of its sheath and moved it back and forth, testing its balance. It felt good, he thought. Joshua, by contrast, regarded his own blade as if it were a snake intent on biting him.
‘Not bad,’ Sam said with sincere appreciation. The blade looked deadly. ‘Not bad at all.’
Joshua regarded Kevin with a frown. ‘Can we spare this much material?’
‘Sure, if it helps keep you alive. Until we can print guns, or Irish teaches us all how to use a bow and arrow, I figured these would do in a pinch.’
‘Know what would be great?’ asked Irish, her eyes shining as she re-sheathed her knife. ‘If you could print swords. With big-ass scabbards to go with them.’
Kevin regarded her for a long moment, then gave Sam a wry look. ‘Think we’ve got a wannabe warrior princess on our hands.’
‘Damn right,’ Irish said with a grin.
‘Every little helps,’ said Sam, clipping his sheathed knife to a loop on one side of his jumpsuit. It occurred to him that if they were unlucky enough to run into whatever had made all that howling, he’d be happier throwing a spear at it from a good safe distance.
Kim appeared at the entrance. ‘I hear you’re going exploring.’
Sam turned to look at him, still adjusting the knife so it sat comfortably. ‘Yeah, we are.’ He saw Kim’s eyes drop to take in the knife. ‘Mostly,’ he added.
Kim’s eyes rose to meet his. ‘You’re going hunting,’ he said accusingly. His gaze drifted towards Kevin, his eyes narrowing. ‘You said they were going exploring.’
‘They are,’ said Kevin. He paused, clearly searching for his next words. ‘And…possibly doing a little hunting as well.’
Kim’s face turned red, and Sam thought he might lose his temper again. Instead, he appeared to push it back down with a visible effort. ‘I would like to come with you,’ he said, his body stiff and his voice overly formal.
‘Really?’ asked Joshua, his tone dubious. ‘Even if you think we might end up killing something?’
The Korean favoured her with a less than graceful smile. ‘Even then, Miss Wilson. I’m a biologist, after all—survival is one thing, but this is an entire alien ecology, and I want to see more of it. We need to understand how this world works if we’re to survive in it.’
‘He’s got a point,’ said Kevin.
‘He does,’ Irish agreed. ‘Speaking as a geologist, there are a few things about this place I’d like to find out too.’
‘And if we kill something for food?’ Sam asked Kim. ‘Will you try to stop us?’
Kim’s mouth worked for a moment, as if certain words were struggling to escape. ‘No,’ he said at last.
‘Maybe we can try to bag another bungee-bug,’ said Irish. ‘The more of them we kill, the safer the forest around these parts is for the rest of us.’
‘Before you go.’ Kevin stepped over to a tall shelf and lifted something down with care. ‘I was saving this for last.’
He held out his cupped hands. Sam saw a complicated-looking collection of blades and fans resting on his palms.
‘A drone?’ asked Joshua.
Kevin tossed the machine lightly into the air. Instead of falling, it whirred into life, hovering in place. It rotated slowly, tiny lenses glinting from amidst the struts and fans.
‘This should be able to do a much better job of scouting out the surrounding terrain than any number of eyeballs at ground level,’ Kevin explained. ‘I had to scavenge some circuitry from one of the robots, along with some leftover junk from the command deck. To be honest, it’s a bit of a Frankenstein job. But it flies.’
‘How do you control it?’ asked Joshua.
‘With this,’ said Kevin, reaching back up to the shelf and lifting down a hand-control. ‘You can point it in any direction you like, or program it for a specific pattern. But mostly we’ll run it from the command deck.’
‘Can we take it with us?’ asked Irish. ‘We could use it to scout ahead of us.’
Kevin shook his head. ‘I need to make some adjustments and test it properly. The good thing is, it’s small and light enough it won’t use much power. Even then,’ he warned them, ‘I wouldn’t want to fly it further than five, ten kilometres from here.’
‘That should at least give us some idea of what’s out there,’ said Sam. ‘Good work, Kevin.’
Kevin grinned. ‘Once I’ve finished making some tweaks, I’ll run a test flight. Nobody’s explored to the south-west yet, so I might send it that way and see what it finds.’
‘How do we know which way is south?’ asked Joshua. ‘Does this planet even have a magnetic pole?’
‘Well,’ said Kevin, ‘I’ve been calling the direction the sun rises east, and the place where it sinks west. I figured that’s as good as anything.’
* * *
A few hours later, the four of them—Sam, Joshua, Irish and Kim—followed the marked route back to the edge of the cliff and looked out across the river plain. The herd had long departed, but in their place dozens of their carcasses remained, torn and still and scattered on either shore of the river.
‘I’m not sure I’d want to run into whatever did this,’ said Joshua, his face grim as he stared down.
‘Well,’ said Irish, ‘at least we don’t have to try to chase them down. Could be whatever did it left some over for us.’ She leaned out over the edge of the cliff to look down at the ground below, one hand on her knee. ‘Think there’s any way down there?’
‘There’s a path,’ said Kim, coming up beside her and pointing down. ‘See that outcropping?’
* * *
Joshua, who it turned out had no head for heights, bitched the entire way down.
There were, at least, plenty of handholds and weeds which they could grab hold of as they made their long and careful descent. It required less of an effort than Sam had expected: they’d all fallen into the habit of underestimating just how much they could do with their newly young and fit bodies.
Once they were all down, they made their way over to the nearest of the carcasses.
Now he was up close to one of the creatures, Sam could see they were bigger than they’d appeared from a distance: this one, for instance, looked about the size of a small truck. He studied the curved and bifurcated plate of bone atop its skull.
Its throat had been neatly sliced open, and its belly eviscerated. It had also, Sam noted with a chill, been skinned.
‘What do you think we should call them?’ he asked.
‘Squid-heads,’ Joshua suggested, staring at the cluster of tentacles that fronted the creature’s skull. ‘Anyone else got any ideas?’
‘You found them, Sam,’ said Irish. ‘How about you?’
‘I’ve already had that privilege,’ Sam reminded her. ‘And besides, Traynor saw them first.’
‘Did he give them a name?’ asked Kim, his face full of disdain.
Irish shook her head. ‘I’m pretty sure he didn’t. And frankly, I’d rather someone else got the honour.’
Sam studied the bifurcated bone plate for several seconds. ‘Buttheads,’ he said at last.
Joshua laughed uproariously. ‘Now I see it,’ he gasped, ‘I can’t unsee it.’
‘I made a mistake,’ Irish said sadly. ‘We should have stuck with squid-heads.’
Kim, who had gone to kneel by the carcass, looked around at them. ‘Whatever killed this animal,’ he said, ‘was clearly of high intelligence. They skinned it for its hide and cut its throat with some form of implement—the wound is far too neat for fangs or claws.’
‘They also didn’t leave us with much,’ said Joshua, ‘judging by the way the damn thing’s been gutted inside and out.’
‘If there are people out there somewhere spying on us with cameras,’ asked Irish, ‘then it could be they killed these creatures.’
As she spoke, Kim bent down to pick something up from the dirt, examining it closely. ‘If that’s the case,’ he said
, holding up a shard of black, glassy rock, ‘they hunt like cavemen.’
Sam squinted at him. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘This is a tool,’ said Kim, ‘made from obsidian. Volcanic rock.’
‘Just looks like a rock to me,’ said Joshua.
‘Believe me when I say it’s a tool. You can find carefully sharpened rocks just like this all over prehistoric digs back on Earth. If we put the bones of this animal under a microscope, we’d find groove marks left by the implements used to cut it up.’
‘This just makes things even more complicated,’ said Sam. ‘Someone or something’s spying on us for unknown reasons, and now we’ve got the local equivalent of Stone Age cavemen.’
‘Not to mention that if there’s intelligent life here,’ said Kim, ‘we shouldn’t be here at all.’
‘Why not?’ asked Joshua.
‘The Starship Initiative had clearly defined rules of non-interference,’ Kim continued, ‘regarding the possibility of encountering worlds with intelligent life. Those rules mean a world like Aranyani should be strictly off-limits to us.’
‘Just remember, we don’t know what we’re doing here in the first place,’ Sam reminded him.
‘So there’s something intelligent here,’ said Irish. ‘I mean, on one level, that’s incredible news. I’m not downplaying that by any means. But I don’t understand why it means we shouldn’t be allowed here.’
‘The entire history of our species,’ said Kim, a certain stridency creeping into his voice, ‘is the history of mass extinctions and genocide, of slaughtered species and cultures. Martin Tenenbaum wanted to make humanity a spacefaring species, but without perpetuating that ancient historical pattern. History proves we can’t be trusted to share a world with less-developed cultures or species because we inevitably wipe them out.’
‘Wait a second,’ said Joshua. ‘You said we’re dealing with creatures that use tools. Ravens can use tools, and so can apes and monkeys. That doesn’t make them the same as us. It’s not a guarantee of advanced intelligence.’
‘How would Tenenbaum or anyone else have even known whether there was intelligent life here?’ asked Irish. ‘I don’t know much about interstellar probes, but there’s no way they were smart enough to make that kind of judgement call.’
‘I can only assume,’ Kim replied, ‘that whatever ship brought us to this star system was imbued with some means to recognise intelligent life at a variety of stages of development. Amit would know more, of course. And some of those probes were more advanced than you realise, Miss Wilson. There were ones under development that were intended to touch down on a planet’s surface and make extremely sophisticated assessments of its suitability in situ. We know this must be the case, because our bodies have clearly been adapted to this environment.’
‘Sounds like you know a lot about the Initiative yourself,’ Sam said.
‘Well,’ said Kim, with more than a hint of pride, ‘I acted as a consultant on such matters to the Initiative, so I would need to know about such things.’
Someone else with a direct connection to the Initiative, Sam realised with surprise. ‘You didn’t mention this before.’
Kim blinked. ‘You’re right, of course. I should have. The consultancy was brief, however.’
‘Jesus,’ said Irish. ‘I’m starting to think we were all working for Tenenbaum.’
Sam glanced up at the sun. ‘Let’s not hang around here too long before we head back.’
‘We should take more of a look around while we still can,’ Kim insisted. ‘We could discover something vital.’
‘I have to agree,’ said Irish. ‘We have enough time. And if we’re lucky, there might still be some meat left on one of these carcasses.’
‘All right,’ said Sam, ‘but let’s make it fast.’
* * *
Over the next couple of hours, they investigated the corpses of several other buttheads and found them all picked clean of anything that might be potentially edible. Sam took the time to try and hack at the mouth-tentacles of one, but these proved to be even tougher than the bungee-bug’s umbilical, even with the aid of a steel hunting knife.
In the end, they had no choice but to make their way empty-handed back to the cliff. Salt-flats glistened on either side of the river.
Their path briefly paralleled a minor tributary of the river, and at one point Kim dropped suddenly to one knee, gazing intently at a patch of waterlogged sand. ‘I think we found our predator,’ he called over to the rest of them. ‘Come and look.’
Sam came to stand beside him and saw that the damp sand was layered over with multiple animal tracks.
‘How do you know these aren’t butthead tracks?’ he asked.
‘Too small,’ said Kim, tracing the outlines of one print with a finger. ‘Not to mention these have four toes, and the buttheads only have three.’ Kim stood again, looking around in all directions, shading his eyes with one hand. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘They’re everywhere.’
Sam followed Kim’s example, shading his eyes and looking around. After a moment he saw what the biologist meant: dozens of tracks glistened in the water-saturated sand. The sight of so many made his skin crawl.
He turned to look towards the cliff. ‘Looks to me like they were headed the same way we are.’
‘My guess is there were a lot of them,’ said Kim. ‘Dozens, if not hundreds.’
‘The same things we heard howling?’ asked Irish.
I wish you hadn’t said that, thought Sam. He glanced at her, and saw she was staring back the way they’d come, across sand and not-grass that shimmered in the late afternoon heat.
‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Did you see something?’
She blinked like she’d been caught daydreaming. ‘You know when you feel like you’re being watched? I just…’ She shook her head, the words trailing off. ‘Just me, I guess.’
Sam peered back the way they’d come, then back at the dark mass of foliage above the nearer cliff, dense with shadows.
‘Maybe the sooner we get back,’ he said, his voice suddenly tight, ‘the better.’
* * *
Nobody had much more to say as they retraced their path to the top of the cliff and back through the forest. Sam felt nothing but relief when the clearing and the lander’s dark bulk came back into view; it wasn’t exactly home, but it felt a lot safer than just about anywhere else.
The truck looked like it was just about finished: four bucket-shaped seats had been mounted on top of the open chassis, with steel bars curving up and over the seats to offer some element of protection. What looked to Sam like a self-contained portable fusion unit had been mounted on its rear.
Irish let out a sudden gasp, and Sam turned to see she had stumbled to a halt, staring white-lipped at the forest floor.
‘They were here,’ she said, her voice taut. She raised her eyes to look at him. ‘They were right here.’
They clustered around her, looking down and seeing where a multitude of four-toed paw-prints criss-crossed each other on a patch of mud just metres from the clearing’s edge.
Suddenly, the clearing didn’t feel so safe at all.
Angel Hickson came running towards them, looking distraught. ‘Sun!’ he shouted, breathing hard as he came to a halt before them. ‘Any of you see her?’
Sam felt a chill wrap itself around his bones. ‘No. Why?’
‘She and Jess went out to collect wood for the fire. Jess just came back without her. She says something chased them, and they got separated, and that’s the last she saw of her.’
15
THE SEARCH
‘Tell me what happened,’ asked Sam, something twisting deep inside his guts.
‘You need to ask Jess,’ Angel replied, leading them back across the clearing.
Jess crouched next to the campfire, looking tired and worn and her face scratched and dirty. Traynor was kneeling by her side and talking quietly to her while the others stood around watching.
&nb
sp; ‘We just heard about Sun,’ said Joshua. ‘What happened, exactly?’
Sam watched numbly as Traynor handed Jess a printed cup full of water. ‘Go ahead and tell them,’ said Traynor.
‘There wasn’t enough wood left to forage close by the lander,’ she said, her voice heavy with fatigue. ‘We went further into the forest and took a wrong turn somewhere, like a couple of idiots. Then…’ she shook her head, her face twisted up in disgust.
‘You said you thought you saw something,’ Traynor prompted.
‘I can’t say for sure we saw anything, but we sure as hell heard something, like…’ her voice trailed off for a moment.
‘Like what?’ asked Kim.
‘Like something was following us, but keeping far back enough in the shadows we couldn’t see it.’ She kneaded the bridge of her nose with a thumb and forefinger, then abruptly shook her head. ‘Every time we stopped, it stopped. It felt like…like it was playing a game with us. I got us both out of sight behind some rocks and bushes from where we could try to get a look at whatever was trailing us.’
‘How did you get separated?’ Sam demanded.
‘I figure it must have caught our scent or something, because next thing I know, there’s this almighty roar from somewhere close behind us. And I mean really close. Running seemed like the only reasonable option, given we didn’t have weapons. I yelled at her to stay with me, but when I finally came to a halt, I couldn’t see any sign of her. I think she must have panicked or something.’
‘You didn’t try to find her?’ asked Sam, taking a step closer to her.
She regarded him with something like pity. ‘I’d have had to run back towards whatever it was chasing us, Mr Newman. It would have been suicide. And besides, I don’t know I could have retraced my steps even I wanted to. It gets pretty dark in those deep woods.’
‘Is it possible she—’ Sam paused, finding it difficult to get the words out ‘—she got away?’
‘I honestly don’t know. But if it’s any comfort, that girl can run like the wind. I hid for about an hour and heard nothing more. I yelled her name, but didn’t hear anything.’
