The Knackers approached the partly open shed doors, scanning the area warily with weapons at the ready. Apparently nothing alarming showed on their sensors, and the yard was utterly still. Finally two of the aliens pried the doors wide and rushed inside the shed. Within seconds the thud and clunk of boxes being overturned echoed out the shed doors. When nothing untoward happened after a few moments, the remaining two Crabs slowly crept inside to help search for the paralyzed human.
“Go!” Tyrus spat into his communicator. In that instant Simon lunged for the escape hole in the wall. A Knacker was within three meters of him by then, and only one row of boxes separated them. It heard his movement, and fired an energy bolt blindly in his direction. It glanced off the plastalloy just inches from his right shoulder, and then he was through and out of the building.
“Now!” Simon yelled at his wrist, and in the house above him, Tyrus punched yet another button on his master control panel. Then the sky came falling down.
EasyFab sheds were originally designed for the military, though a market for them had quickly sprung up in the civilian sector as well. The main design combined strength with easy assembly—and disassembly. To that goal, the sheds used by the military had been fitted with explosive bolts at the four upper corners. Once the reinforcing connectors had been removed along the wall and roof junctions, all that was needed was to blow the four bolts, and the entire thing came tumbling down in a controlled fall. The walls were weighted, so that they fell inward, sliding inside the roof and landing flat, one on top of the other, like neatly stacked cards. The roof came last, topping off the pile. Then a lifter could slide its prongs under the stack and easily hoist the entire shed onto a waiting truck or shuttle.
The civilian version lacked the explosive bolts and had to be disassembled by hand. But Tyrus had obtained this shed, like so many of his possessions, from military surplus. Simon had noticed the bright red warning stickers on the shed’s interior that first day he had met Tyrus, and he knew that the shed was the quick-drop version. That had planted the seeds of an idea, and now he was seeing it come to fruition.
The warning labels were there for good reason: it was not conducive to a person’s health to be inside a shed when the bolt charges were triggered. Besides serious damage to one’s hearing, there was the other problem encountered when a three-dimensional body was forced to become two-dimensional.
Military EasyFabs were sturdy in part because they were heavy. Really heavy, in fact. With a shed this large, the combined mass of the walls and roof approached two metric tons. As Simon leapt through the escape door in the shed’s wall and desperately rolled clear of the building, Tyrus detonated the explosive bolts. The sharp crack of the small charges echoed around the courtyard, and smoke puffed out from under the roof corners. The Crabs had just enough time to look upward before the entire shed collapsed upon them.
The weight of the structure instantly drove the aliens to the ground and fractured their exoskeletons in multiple places. The impact was so fast and so heavy that only one Knacker had time to discharge a weapon, and the brief energy flash that lanced out from under the falling sections was just as quickly extinguished. Crabs had incredibly fast reflexes, however, and one had actually managed to dart for the door before being struck. It now lay half in, half out of the shed, its body critically injured but the protruding limbs still flailing weakly. Red and yellow fluids oozed out of the cracks in its shell, and it was only a matter of time before it died. Simon rounded the shed and emptied a few dozen armor-piercing slugs into the creature’s head just to be sure.
By the time the rest of the family had arrived at the flattened shed, it was all over. More Crab bodies to burn, and more weapons and equipment to add to their collection. All in all, not a bad day’s work.
Once the adrenaline had worn off, Simon became aware of a gradually worsening pain in his right shoulder. A glance revealed a black scorch mark on his shirt, and he smelled a whiff of burned cloth. Gently pulling the fabric up, he found a nasty-looking wound covering nearly the entire shoulder. It appeared shallow, but the skin was an angry red, badly blistered, and was already starting to split open in several areas. He had to tend to it, or infection could set in.
Tyrus saw the damage and instructed him to have Katherine look at it. “She’s the closest thing to a field medic we have; she’ll get you patched up fine.” Simon nodded and went to find her.
For her part, Katherine felt more than a little uneasy tending to this Spacer who had dropped out of the sky and into their lives. Oh, it wasn’t that she distrusted him. For all she could tell, he was a good sort, fierce when it came to combat, but capable of kindness when the fighting was over. She had seen it in his interactions with Jessie. But his weary eyes hinted of horrors witnessed and pain endured, things that could scar a person for life. Whether such a man could ever be whole again, she didn’t know. And when he looked at her with those eyes, looked into her...no, she definitely was not comfortable around him.
Nonetheless here he was, and he had just endured injury while protecting her family. She owed him whatever care she could provide, so she bit her lip and determined to do her best. Simon was sitting on a stool in the main bathroom, stripped to the waist, when she came in, and she almost halted involuntarily when she saw him. Mustering her resolve, she continued into the room with barely a pause, and approached her patient. Smiling nervously, she said, “Hi.”
He grinned back and said, “Hi” in return.
This was feeling more uncomfortable by the moment, so she tried to keep up a conversation while she assessed his wound. “You’ve got quite a burn there,” she noted as she gently palpated the area. He winced, but didn’t flinch away from her touch. He had courage, that much was certain. She continued, “How did you get this?”
“I was shot as I left the shed,” he replied. “I saw the beam hit the wall and thought it had just missed me; guess I was wrong.”
“No, you were right,” she assured him as she rinsed the wound with fortified saline. She found comfort in the reassuring familiarity of medicine, and she kept her tone deliberately clinical. “If you had been hit directly, we’d be talking about a prosthetic limb right now. The wall likely reflected the energy back at you, and even an indirect hit can do damage. You were really lucky.”
“I guess so,” he remarked. “It doesn’t feel so lucky right now, though.”
“Burns never do. The pain will get worse before it gets better. I’ll give you some numbing cream for it, and some analgesic pills in case you need them. Now hold still while I clean this up and debride the dead tissue. First I’m going to spray some topical anesthetic on. This will sting a bit.”
He hissed as the spray hit the raw wound, and she winced sympathetically. At this proximity she was exquisitely aware of his masculinity, the width of his shoulders tapering down to his narrow waist, the hard defined muscles of his back and chest, the faint male smell of him. It had been a long time since she had been this close to a man, other than family. Her hands seemed clumsy and inadequate as she worked, and she felt flushed, her breathing coming faster than she wanted. She was certain that he would notice her discomfiture and question her as to what was wrong, but thankfully he remained silent.
She proceeded as fast as she could without being careless, trying to ignore his half-naked body as she focused on the wound. She heaved a sigh of relief when at last the area was cleaned and debrided. She spread some NueSkin over the lesion to speed healing, and slapped a bandage on top.
“Done,” she stated as she backed away, picking up her supplies. “You’ll need to change the dressing daily and put antibiotic cream on it. Here’s your medications; let me know if you need anything else.” With that she practically flew out of the room, leaving her patient sitting bemused on the stool as he tugged on a new shirt.
Chapter Five
Simon anticipated an immediate response to the latest skirmish. Even with their communications jammed at the homestead, the alien scouts had
doubtless reported their whereabouts and intentions prior to approaching. Their command hierarchy had to know where they had gone incommunicado. But day after day, indeed week after week, passed without incident. The family cleaned up the Crab bodies and reconstructed the shed, preparing for the next incursion. Then they waited, each of them fighting a growing feeling of dread. Something was bound to happen, and they sensed that the longer it took for the aliens to respond, the bigger the response was likely to be.
As the weeks passed, Simon gradually came to know his adopted family, and they him. Jessie followed him around like a puppy, and he found it a bit embarrassing at times. The three brothers were quite the jesters, somehow finding time for fun despite all they had been through. Simon often caught them trading friendly barbs or laughing themselves silly over an inane joke.
The youngest son, in particular, was an unrepentant prankster who delighted in tormenting his mother and aunt. One day T. J. rigged a toy Knacker about the size of a human head, complete with wiggling legs and clicking vocalizations. It dropped on a string when Amanda opened her bedroom door, hitting her right in the face. Simon heard the screeching from across the house. “Arrgghh! Tyrus Junior, you get back here this instant! If I ever catch you, boy, you’ll be sorry! What are you trying to do, put your mama in an early grave?” Such was life in the McKinley home.
Sarah continued to question Simon about his travels, SpaceForce, and life in the Service. She had never been off-planet since the family had moved to Eden ten years earlier, and her imagination was captured by images of interstellar flight and far off worlds. She had a good head for tech stuff, too, and he wondered if she might find her way into an engineering curriculum. If she couldn’t afford a private institution, there was always military-sponsored education, with the possibility of a non-combat assignment after graduation. They sure needed engineers right now.
As he became more entwined in the daily lives of these people, he gradually began to feel a sense of belonging. It was something that he had long since forgotten, but had desperately missed nonetheless. His personal life had been so barren these past years, so lacking in meaningful human contact outside of his squadron, that what he was experiencing now felt like awakening from a deep coma. He had spent long years fighting, and only at this late hour had he found something worth fighting for.
His new friends seemed to accept him without reservation, and he spent time with each as he became comfortable socializing. But most of all, he tried to learn more about Katherine. Something about her drew his attention, he had recognized that from the start. Maybe he was overthinking it; after all, she was the only single female close to his age in the family. And she was damned attractive; he found himself watching her just for the sheer pleasure of it. The graceful way her body moved, the snug fit of her clothes on her slender frame, the supple lengths of her arms and legs, they had him mesmerized whenever she was near. And her face possessed an ethereal beauty that he could die for.
But no, it was more than that. Maybe it was the story her eyes told, the depth of experience they hinted at, some of it tragic, yes, but not so different from his own. That sense of melancholy he got from her, which his instincts told him was not her natural state, made him want to hold her, to wipe the sorrow away, to see her laugh with joy. And maybe if he could make her whole, he would somehow heal himself as well.
Damn it, he had vowed to not get involved with a woman again, not while this accursed war was still being fought. There was too much potential for loss, he knew that all too well. It was better to have nothing than to hold everything in his hands and lose it. He could not go through that again, nor could he ask someone else to chance going through it with him. He could see how personal tragedy had already injured Katherine; it would be cruel to risk involvement of any kind now. The only problem was, he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
* * * *
One hot midsummer day Sarah took Simon with her in one of the family floaters to inspect the defenses. Unlike the open tractor she had retrieved him in, this vehicle was fully enclosed, so they rode in air-conditioned comfort. There was a lot of area to cover, and they moved at a fast clip through the open terrain. The homestead lands were bordered by the main highway to the east, and by a large, meandering stream to the north. A line of hills formed a natural barrier at the property’s western extent, and a small extension off the hill range cut east across the family’s lands just a couple of kilometers south of their dwelling. That finger-like extension of high ground included Roxy Knoll, and it divided the property into two sections, with about a third of their acreage lying to the south of the ridgeline.
Sarah and Simon surveyed the perimeter of all the homestead lands north of Roxy Knoll, carefully avoiding the area south of the hills where Simon’s ship lay. The border fencing and sensors appeared to be intact, and they turned at the north limit of the family property, following the stream due west.
As they headed toward the rolling green humps of the western hills, Simon spied something on the plains in the distance. He recalled having seen what looked like an animal herd when Sarah had first brought him to the house, but it had been too far away to clearly identify. This looked similar. He squinted against the heat waves rising up from the sun-baked land. “What are those dark objects near the foothills?” he asked Sarah.
“Those are what I was hoping to find, when we got done with the security checks,” she replied, grinning over at him. “You’re gonna like this.”
They flew toward the cluster of dark dots far ahead, and as the distance shrank, the objects grew larger and more clearly defined. And the better he saw them, the more bizarre they appeared.
What Sarah had chosen to show him was a herd of wild Dire Bucks. She slowed the vehicle as they came within one hundred meters of the herd, and they eased forward carefully. “They’re skittish and can easily be induced to stampede,” she cautioned. “Even though they’ve grown accustomed to seeing us, their instincts are to run first and ask why later.”
The animals were unlike anything Simon had ever seen. Modified cattle were used for food and milk on many human colony planets, so those were quite familiar to him. And he had seen vids of many of the famous animals from the core planets, including kangaroos. Although Katherine’s description of Dire Bucks as a cross between those two species was vaguely appropriate, it did not begin to capture the reality.
They stopped the vehicle and the animals gradually drifted toward them. One came up alongside the floater, and Simon’s eyes drank in the exotic sight. Viewed this close, the animal was impressively large, and it had rich brown fur marked with vertical white pinstripes over the abdomen. Most of the animal’s bulk seemed devoted to the massive rear legs and hips, which looked as if they could propel its body into orbit. A fat, kangaroo-like tail protruded from the rounded rump, the tip just touching the ground as it grazed. The narrow head tapered to a protruding nose framed by two small horns. Golden eyes with horizontally slitted pupils watched them warily, and mobile ears flicked constantly this way and that, listening for any sign of danger.
Simon saw a long tongue darting in and out of the pointed snout as it sucked in vegetation close to the ground. The forelimbs were comparatively small, and seemed to be used partly to sift through vegetation, pulling choice shoots toward the eager mouth. Perhaps the oddest aspect of the creature was the rear foot, which had three large clawed toes and looked more bird-like than mammalian.
“See those feet?” Sarah said, pointing. “Those are their most dangerous feature. The rear legs are very powerful, and when threatened they can trample you, or leap up in the air and kick out forward, disemboweling an attacker with one stroke. You do not want to stand up to a Dire Buck; lie down if they attack you and take your stomping; at least that way you might live.”
“I’ll try to avoid having to make that decision,” Simon assured her. “They don’t look like animals to be messed with.” Which begged another question.
“What makes them so shy?” he
asked his tour guide. “I can’t imagine anything posing a threat to the herd, if they’re protected from human hunting.”
She gave him a fierce grin. “Trust me, there are predators here that can take down a Dire Bock.”
“Oh? Like what?” Simon asked, intrigued.
“Well, the dominant carnivores in this region are called Groons.”
“That doesn’t tell me much,” he chuckled. “I don’t know anything about Eden’s flora or fauna.”
“All you need to know about a Groon is that it’s very big and very nasty,” Sarah said. “It’s a solitary hunter, and nocturnal. They stick to the forests by day, but will venture out onto the plains at night.”
“What do they look like?” he asked.
“Solid black, long muscular frame with a forked tail, clawed feet the size of dinner plates, and a head that’s all teeth and eyes. Nearly invisible at night.”
“I’m sorry I asked,” Simon said dryly as he contemplated the unpleasant image.
Sarah nodded. “They’re the main reason we don’t venture far out at night, unless we’re in a covered floater. Groons usually avoid humans, but have been known to attack people when hungry. And they’re always hungry.”
“I’m surprised they let them run wild, if they’re that dangerous,” Simon commented, shaking his head.
Sarah shrugged. “This area is designated national sanctuary land, other than the private homesteads out here. The animals are protected, even the large predators.”
They watched the herd awhile longer, and then Sarah slowly backed the vehicle until they achieved some separation. Suddenly she tooted the floater’s horn, and the animals broke into a headlong run away from them. Simon stared in surprise, and turned to Sarah, asking, “Why the heck did you do that?”
She giggled, saying, “We weren’t just here for fun. The herd has grazed this area for days, and the vegetation needs a break so it can recover. I’ve got to move them to a different section.” So saying, she gunned the floater and followed the galloping animals, herding them with the vehicle. She used the horn sparingly when needed to adjust their direction of travel. In full flight their locomotion was unexpected; they raised up and ran primarily on the large rear legs, but did not hop like a kangaroo. Rather, their limbs moved similarly to those of a sprinting human. The forelimbs were carried mostly aloft, although they touched them to the ground occasionally, especially when changing direction abruptly. Honks and snorts echoed between the animals as they loped effortlessly across the grassy savanna, gracefully leaping small bushes and darting around trees. Simon was amazed at how fast they could move; he’d hate to get caught in front of a stampeding herd of those things.
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