by Gary Gibson
Much of the clearing’s not-grass was hidden beneath a layer of scattered white stone that reflected the sunlight brilliantly. Kevin reduced the speed as they rolled forward, and Irish jerked upright, gripping the overhead bars with one hand as she stared around.
‘Pull over,’ she ordered Kevin, her voice flat and terse.
Kevin gave her a strange look, but did as she asked. The truck had barely rolled to a halt before she’d jumped out, bending on one knee to examine the nearest of the rocks.
But by now Sam had realised they weren’t rocks at all.
‘Bones,’ said Irish, standing back up with a large fragment of animal skull held in both hands. ‘These are all bones.’
The two men disembarked, stretching their legs after the long drive and looking around. There was such a profusion of remains that the not-grass on which they lay was hardly visible in places.
‘It’s almost like an elephant’s graveyard,’ Kevin mused, kicking idly at what might have been an alien femur. ‘How long do you think all this has been here?’
‘Decades, at a guess,’ said Irish. ‘Could be even longer. See how they’ve all been picked clean and bleached by the sun? But I don’t think it’s a graveyard—at least, not in the sense you mean.’
‘How do you figure that?’ asked Sam.
She spread her hands as if to encompass the whole clearing. ‘If it was an actual graveyard, we’d see bodies still decomposing, or at least some more recent remains. But…this looks to me like they all died at about the same time. And God knows how many thousands of them there were.’
‘You mean…like a massacre?’ Kevin asked her.
Sam used the toe of his shoe to push at a skull that appeared to be almost entirely intact. He wondered for a moment what it reminded him of, and imagined it wrapped in dense black fur, with eyes that shone green in the dark…
‘Howlers,’ said Irish, before he could say the same thing himself. ‘I think these are all Howlers.’
‘Question is,’ said Sam, a chill deep in his bones, ‘what happened to them?’
Nobody had an answer. They picked through more bones, wandering around the part of the clearing closest to the truck. Something with long, segmented wings circled on a thermal high above the hot spring.
‘Kim should be here,’ said Kevin at last. ‘He’s the exobiologist. Perhaps he’d be able to explain all this.’
Sam moved back towards the truck, bones crunching and rolling under his feet. ‘Maybe it’s the site of a battle,’ he suggested.
‘Okay, so who was fighting who?’ asked Irish.
‘Intelligent or not, they’re definitely aggressive,’ said Kevin. ‘This might have been the site of a turf war or some kind of religious conflict. Or maybe they disagreed over which side of the bed to get out of in the morning.’
Something caught Sam’s attention, and he knelt, picking up an intact Howler skull. He turned it this way and that and stared at it for a long second.
‘Looks to me,’ he said, something shifting in his chest as he stood back up, ‘like it was a shooting war.’
Kevin looked at him like he hadn’t heard him right. ‘Come again?’
Sam lifted the skull so they could both see it and pushed a finger through a hole that had been neatly drilled through it. ‘Alien critters or not,’ he said, ‘trust me when I say I know what a bullet hole looks like.’
‘That’s not possible,’ Irish said numbly.
‘We’ve been here six days,’ Sam reminded her. ‘We can’t even begin to guess what might or might not be possible.’
‘Maybe it was done by bows and arrows,’ said Kevin.
‘If you see any arrowheads,’ said Sam, ‘fine. But I haven’t seen a single one. Have you?’
He paced back and forth, sudden irrational anger flowering deep inside him. He threw the skull away from him as hard as he could.
‘What in hell is going on?’ he shouted into the empty air.
‘Take it easy,’ said Irish, looking distraught. ‘Let’s try to work this out logically. There’s got to be some way to make sense of all this.’
‘Look around you,’ said Sam, unable to hide his agitation. ‘Someone herded them here before mowing them down with automatic gunfire.’ He kicked at more bones. ‘There are more with bullet holes in them. Can’t you see?’
‘A couple of flying gun-drones could do the job,’ Kevin agreed. ‘Assuming there’s any such thing anywhere on this planet.’
Sam’s anger faded, replaced by exhaustion. ‘We know from the camera someone must have got here before us,’ he said. ‘More than likely they killed all the Howlers.’
‘The jury’s still out about that camera,’ said Irish. ‘That could still have been one of us. Let’s not jump to assumptions until we have all the facts.’
‘Perhaps Vic had something to do with it,’ said Kevin. ‘Or one of the military types, now we know they’re not supposed to be here.’
Irish stared at him, then back at Sam. ‘What’s he talking about?’
Sam sighed heavily, then told her about the crew manifest and the missing crew-members.
Irish listened to him with an expression of wounded betrayal. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me all this before?’ she shouted as soon as he had finished.
‘We didn’t know what it meant,’ said Kevin. ‘And we didn’t want Vic and the others who aren’t on the manifest to know. Things are hard enough dealing with them as it is, so keep it under your hat for now.’
Irish nodded, her mouth set in a thin, hard line.
‘I think we ought to take more of a look around here and see what we can find while we still have time,’ said Sam.
Kevin glanced up at the sky. ‘We’ve got a couple of hours of light left to get to the mesa and see if there’s some way up top. We should go now.’
Sam sighed. ‘I take your point, but this is too important. We have to at least try to figure out what happened here.’
* * *
Kevin relented, and they drove the truck closer to the hot spring, hearing bones crunch and snap under the heavy tyres. Then they disembarked and spread out, keeping an eye on the sun as it tracked its way inexorably towards evening.
It wasn’t long before Irish let out a yell, something held high in one hand.
They hurried over. ‘Let me see,’ Sam demanded.
Irish dropped a corroded bullet casing into his hand.
Kevin stared down at it from beside him. ‘Well, that pretty much settles it,’ he said, a tremor in his voice. ‘I have absolutely no fucking idea what is going on here.’
‘You know,’ said Irish, gazing out across the clearing, ‘maybe there’s a reason the Howlers want to kill us all.’
21
THE CASING
They were considerably less chatty when they boarded the truck once more than they had been only a few hours before. Irish sat in her seat, staring at a chunk of skull in her hands as if, through some process of divination, she could find the answers they all sought.
Kevin negotiated the truck across the narrowest and shallowest part of the river, after which they entered a patch of denser forest. The terrain became much less even, and Kevin had to drop their speed considerably to keep them from getting stuck in sumps or caught up on boulders and loose scree. The mesa itself was intermittently visible through the trees, close enough now that it looked almost like a wall across the world.
At last, Kevin brought them to a halt, switching the engine off before disembarking. He strode ahead, making his way up a steep rise, the air all around them filled with a steady, unvarying roar. He stood at the top of the rise for some seconds, peering down at something below his feet before, at last, turning to wave them over.
‘You’d better take a look at this,’ he shouted to them through cupped hands.
Sam and Irish went to join him. Kevin was standing on the edge of a deep chasm, cutting off their access to the nearest side of the mesa. Far below, and barely visible through a veil of m
ist, a torrent of foaming water rushed between steep granite walls.
‘So that’s it?’ Sam shouted over the roar. ‘There’s no way we can get any closer?’
‘Not today, by the looks of it,’ Kevin shouted back. ‘If I’d been able to fly the drone this far, we would have known about this.’
‘This river must run into the plains north of here,’ said Irish. ‘I’m guessing it’s mostly run-off from the mesa. It’s probably swollen from the rain we had the other day.’
‘Say we drive parallel to this chasm,’ Sam asked her, ‘either up or down river. Could we find a way across?’
‘Sure,’ she agreed, ‘but as Kevin said, it won’t be today. We’d run out of daylight long before we could find our way back to the lander.’
* * *
After that, returning to the lander was precisely what they did, although the journey back needed nearly as many stops and starts as the journey out had required: their map, being only a crude representation of the terrain, didn’t show land features hidden beneath the forest canopy.
By the time they finally returned to their own clearing, the sky had darkened. However, it soon became clear that those who’d remained behind had been far from inactive during their absence.
The air was filled with the sound of industry as Kevin pulled up next to the lander, which was now, Sam was astonished to see, part-surrounded by a wooden palisade. Amit came over to greet them, explaining that he’d programmed the robots to cut down trees: doing so required two of the machines to work in tandem, one on either side of a tree trunk, with a wire-like blade strung between them that levelled trees faster than any pair of humans could. The operation had worked well enough that the clearing had already expanded somewhat around the lander’s immediate vicinity, with much of the resulting timber piled next to the remains of the prefab shelters.
Jess, Ethan and several others were meanwhile engaged in the hard work of digging holes in a circle all around the lander, into which the freshly cut and trimmed logs were placed upright. Sam saw Wardell and Joshua guiding a huge spool of what appeared to be metal filament down the ramp.
‘Aluminium,’ Amit explained when Sam asked about it, ‘scavenged from a bay we cleared out yesterday. We ran it through the printer to turn it into wire. Aluminium makes nearly as good a conductor as copper.’
Sam stared at him. ‘You’re building an electric fence?’
‘Electrified wooden fortifications, to be precise,’ said Amit.
Kevin laughed in delight. ‘You managed all this while we were gone? This is incredible!’
Amit beamed under the praise. ‘Two robots and six healthy young bodies in peak condition can achieve a great deal,’ he declared, as if giving a speech on business management.
‘And the power for the palisade?’ asked Sam.
‘Routed directly from the lander’s primary reactor,’ Amit said proudly.
‘Enough current to kill the Howlers?’ queried Irish.
Amit’s smile faded a little. ‘I wish only to dissuade, Miss Wilson, not kill. But it’ll carry enough current, I hope, to reduce the threat of further attacks.’
Sam had little doubt the others would be more than happy to push the current well past lethal levels if the Howlers attacked again, but said nothing. He wondered how much resistance Amit would put up, were it to come to that. But then again, Amit was smart enough he’d probably already considered that possibility.
Amit glanced at the truck. ‘So, did you find a way to the mesa?’
‘I’m afraid not.’ Sam explained about the chasm. He glanced around at Irish and Kevin and caught both their eyes. ‘There’s a few other things of interest we came across, but we’ll save them for later.’
‘I made some hand-corrections to the map,’ Irish added. ‘That should make it a faster trip next time.’
Amit nodded. ‘We still have a lot of work to do,’ he said, nodding towards the pile of logs. ‘Your help would be appreciated if you’re not too exhausted.’
‘Seeing everything they’ve done,’ said Sam as Amit hurried away to deal with some problem, ‘makes me think I should take more trips away from the lander.’
‘So aren’t we going to tell them about the bones?’ Irish asked him bluntly. ‘And the bullet casing?’
Sam hesitated. ‘Of course.’
She studied him carefully, her expression defiant. ‘But why not now?’
‘The more questions we give everyone,’ he said, ‘the more they’re going to get to fighting over what it all means.’
‘Is that why you didn’t want to tell me about the manifest?’ she asked, ‘because I’m still pissed off about that.’
Kevin nodded. ‘We already told you why. And we’ve got enough to worry about just staying alive without having to deal with anything else.’
‘There are too many people keeping secrets around here,’ said Irish, her eyes blazing. ‘It doesn’t sit right, you hear me?’
‘Please,’ said Sam, ‘hold off about the bones until we can figure out how it fits with everything else.’ If it ever does.
There was little opportunity to do much talking after that, since it took all of their combined effort to complete the palisade by sunset. Each of the cut and trimmed logs measured three metres in height, and the work involved in lifting and placing each one upright into its allotted hole was tremendous.
Even that was only half the work: Kim and Amit had also set one of the robots to cut shorter logs that could be pushed into the ground at an angle inside the palisade, to shore up the taller ones. Then came the work of digging up more soil and packing it in mounds around the poles to further steady them.
By then the light was fading fast, and Sam was far from the only one casting frequent glances towards the edge of the clearing. There was still no sign of either Traynor, DeWitt or Joshua.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Jess, taking a ration of water from Sam when he handed it to her. They had finished guiding the truck up the ramp and into the lower cargo bay, and she sounded calm and unconcerned. ‘They’ll be back, with time to spare.’
But by the time night came, there was still no sign of the three men.
* * *
‘Try again.’
‘You think it’ll hold up?’ Wardell asked nervously, eyeing the palisade from beside Sam at the top of the ramp.
They’d heard the howling start within minutes of the first stars coming out. Sam could hear the Howlers even now, circling through the trees past the edge of the expanded clearing. Power cable snaked over the lip of the ramp, which had been raised halfway, and the aluminium wiring wrapped all around the palisade clicked and hissed faintly. Jess had doused the campfire to prevent the creatures from making further use of it.
The palisade had already proven its worth: several Howlers had been forced into a hasty retreat when they made the mistake of grasping the electrified wire wrapped around the logs. And even though something in Sam’s gut insisted this was only a temporary victory, the subsequent shower of sparks and cries of pain had given him a powerful sense of satisfaction. It was the first time they’d successfully pushed back against the creatures.
As he’d known they would, both Kim and Amit voiced considerable misgivings over the amount of current being run through the wire. However, a compromise of sorts had been forced by necessity: run the current too high, the two men had warned, and there was a real danger the aluminium wire would melt. Run it too low, and the Howlers could force a breach in the fence.
‘Okay,’ said Sam, stepping back from the ramp, ‘let’s close it up a little more.’
Wardell nodded and operated the controls. The ramp hissed upwards until only a narrow gap was left between it and the hull—just enough room for the power cables to pass through, and no more.
* * *
Sam made his way back up through the ship, ignoring Kim’s glare when he arrived on the command deck.
‘Got some bad news,’ said Jess, glancing over from where she stood by a conso
le. The light from a screen displaying a composite view of the clearing flickered against her face. ‘They’re starting to collect more wood, and they’re piling it up next to the palisade at one specific point. I’m guessing dousing the campfire won’t have made much difference.’ She shook her head, her eyes heavy with fatigue. ‘They’re determined, I’ll give them that.’
‘Two more nights,’ said Kim from where he sat amidst a mess of wiring. ‘That’s how much air we have left.’
‘And that,’ Sam reminded him, ‘is why we need the current as high as—’
‘I wanted to go to that building,’ Kim interrupted him, a touch of venom in his voice. ‘Being able to run fast is not a suitable qualification for a first-contact scenario.’
‘We needed you here,’ Sam replied.
Kim’s nostrils flared. ‘The only good thing about this whole mess is Vic’s almost certainly dead by now.’
Sam glanced sideways at Jess and saw her mouth form into a thin, angry line.
Sam shot the exobiologist a warning look. ‘They’ll be back.’
‘Perhaps they’re inside that building right now,’ said Jess, ‘chatting with the locals.’
‘If they don’t come back,’ said Sam, ‘I’ll go out there myself.’
‘And this time you’ll take me with you,’ said Kim before pointedly turning his back on them both.
* * *
Sam asked Wardell to wake him if there were any major developments and crawled into a corner to get some much-needed sleep. Wardell indeed woke him several hours later, informing him that the Howlers had breached the palisade: the wire was still intact, with current flowing through it, but the creatures had been smart enough to dig the earth out from under several of the logs, sending them toppling. Kim had taken the step of disconnecting the cables and pushing them outside the ship so they could close the ramp all the way.
