Orphan Tribe, Orphan Planet

by Jonathan Vick

  They clambered over the pile of roots, crackling and hissing in the warm clinging liquid. It attached itself to them as they crawled over it, around it, through it. They dragged it through the clay, leaving streaking trails of heat behind them. Soon, the wall of roots was moving toward Thurl, hissing a painful warmth as it approached, still snapping pincers and lobbing quills.

  Iassa ran past Thurl, pulling the chunacat cloak off his shoulders. She covered Sohjos with it, tucking it tight beneath his body, wrapping his body in a tense cocoon. Sohjos didn’t struggle or wake. She covered his head and face and pressed the sled against the wall.

  “What are you doing to him?” Thurl asked.

  “There’s too many!” Iassa shouted. “They’re too fast! We can’t outrun them! We can’t kill them all! Just hide! Lay down! Close your mouth; your eyes; your ears! Don’t let them get inside you! They’ll eat you from the inside out!”

  She pulled a small pelt out of the pack on her back and wrapped it around her face, leaving only her eyes uncovered. She pulled it tight around her nose and mouth, then shoved Thurl to the ground, pushing loose mud and clay over him as best she could while trying to cover herself. Thurl closed his ears and folded the flaps of flesh over his nostrils. He took a deep breath and clamped his mouth shut.

  The barrasc crawled over them; hundreds, millions of horrid little legs clattering over their flesh, burying them in a sea of insects. Thurl wanted to lift his head but he was afraid of them prying his mouth open and crawling inside; down his throat; laying eggs in his stomach like the ice worms near the sea had been known to do to unwary fisher teams.

  He held his breath until his head pounded and his lungs ached. Finally, when he didn’t think he could last any longer, he felt Iassa stand up beside him. She was crawling with barrasc. They clung to her body, digging their sharp legs into her flesh, grasping her with their pincers. She waded through the tunnel.

  Thurl lifted his head. He cracked open his nostril flaps and tried to breath. The barrasc covered him so thickly that his head felt heavy; like a strong weight were holding it down. He grunted but the echoes that came back were small, incoherent nonsense. The tunnel was tiny; occluded with the shifting mass of insects. Many of them pulled the clinging liquid with them, and what little air remained was quickly filling with some choking, itching mist.

  Iassa was grasping at her throat, her lungs, pushing her way through the sea of barrasc, trying to get back into the cavern where there was air to breathe. She fell, and the barrasc covered her again.

  Thurl pressed his hands against the clay and lifted his body. The weight of the barrasc hanging from him doubled his own weight and he struggled to stand, to push forward through them. He plunged his hand into the writhing mass and found Iassa beneath. Wrapping his arm around her waist, he lifted her and shoved forward, toward the mouth of the tunnel, toward the pile of roots and the clinging liquid.

  He could feel an insect pulling at his nostril flap, trying to pry its way inside. He clamped it shut, then quickly shot a gust of breath through it, hoping to dislodge the bug.

  His chest felt like it was about to burst. He groaned, dragging Iassa beside him, desperate for breath. The muscles tore at his legs, aching and pulling as he pressed through the swarm.

  He reached his free hand up to his face and wiped it clear, but it only took a moment for the bugs to envelope him again.

  Thurl reached the wall of roots and the clinging liquid. It scratched at his flesh, biting him, tearing at his follicles, razing him with a heat more intense than the water at the very top of the waterfall in the Racroft village. He ignored the pain and pressed through the wall.

  Then, slowly, one by one, the barrasc began to fall. They would writhe for a moment in the clinging liquid, then pop and split open with a shrieking, screaming squeal, and then they would stop, and more barrasc would climb over them, still advancing, spreading the clinging liquid with them, dragging it further down the tunnel until they, too, would scream and split open and die.

  A few more steps; a few more aching, painful thrusts through the roots and the clinging liquid and he was in the abandoned narvai-ub cavern. He held Iassa’s limp body upright and wiped the barrasc off her face with his huge hand. She opened her mouth and gasped and choked and screamed.

  All around them, throughout the immense cavern, the barrasc were clattering over one another. Thurl grunted, but the information was too difficult to process. There were still millions upon millions of them, blocking every tunnel exit, covering every surface.

  Thurl tried to get to the center of the cavern; to pull himself onto the top of the writhing floor of live exoskeletons. Somewhere behind him, still in the tunnel, his father was wrapped in a chunacat cloak, likely suffocating with the weight of the insects atop him.

  Then, Iassa was running toward a large barrasc near one of the larger tunnel mouths. It was twice the size of the others. The barbed tail was as large as Thurl’s fist. As it detected Iassa, it hurled a burst of stingers at her.

  Iassa ran past it, dodging the stingers so fast Thurl couldn’t detect her movement. She reached down and grabbed the huge barrasc. It squealed: a high-pitched drawn out clicking noise. Even with his ear flaps closed, Thurl could hear it like it was inside his head.

  With the sound of the clicking squeal, the barrasc horde stopped, and turned toward the noise. Suddenly, they were advancing on Iassa. She had found the swarm queen.

  The queen barrasc chattered and clicked her pinchers. She swung her barbed tail, trying to hit Iassa, but Iassa wrapped it in a pelt from her shoulders. She ran toward the central pit, slowly, painfully, as the barrasc swarmed her and tried to pull her down; tried to rescue their queen.

  Without thinking, Thurl chased after her. His large feet crunched the barrasc and they began flinging the quills at the end of the tails toward him. He could feel the little barbs sticking into the thick hide of his skin.

  Iassa held the barrasc queen over her head and tossed it down into the central pit. The queen clicked and screeched as it fell. Thurl didn’t hear it hit the bottom. It was far deeper than Thurl expected, littered with the bones of hundreds of animals, stripped clean. The barrasc swarm followed the queen, chased her into the hole, streaming from the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the tunnels, until the central pit was filled with barrasc.

  Iassa ran at Thurl, stomping with each step, crunching as many barrasc as she could and trying to shake them off her legs as she ran. She brushed past him, heading for the tunnel where Sohjos was still trapped beneath the chunacat pelt. She grabbed a large root with a huge cloud of the warming liquid clinging to one end. She was trying to drag it to the central pit, but it was too heavy.

  Thurl ran to help her. He picked up the root and put it on his shoulder. The warming liquid bit and itched and made his flesh smell like warm death, but he dragged the root to the central pit.

  He shook the barrasc off his face, plucking them off his flesh with his free hand until he felt like he could open his mouth. Then, he shouted to her:

  “What do I do with it?”

  Iassa shouted back, “Throw it in!”

  The tunnel seemed to be clear of barrasc; just the split carcasses of dead insects and the hundreds of injured or sick abandoned ones trying to claw their way out.

  Iassa was running back toward Thurl on the lip of the pit. She was pulling some sort of bladder out of her pack and yelling at him.

  “Throw it in!” She was saying, frantically. “Before they come back out! Throw it in!”

  Thurl humped the heavy root off his shoulder and flung it into the pit. The pit was a writhing nightmare.

  The root pounded onto the swarm and rolled over their hard exoskeletons. Thurl could hear the barrasc scream and pop in the clinging liquid. The liquid spread over the swarm as the root rolled.

  Iassa stopped next to Thurl. She held the bladder over the pit and squeezed a thick stream of some foul smelling juice onto the root, deep in the pit. The clinging liquid expanded
and flowed over the entire swarm. They popped and screamed and clattered in a hideous cacophony. The scent of blood and pus was overwhelming. The warmth that rose up choked Thurl, and pushed him back with a suffocating air.

  Iassa grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the tunnel.

  “Check your father,” Iassa said to Thurl. “Bring him out here if he’s still alive. We have to go after them.”

  Thurl smashed through the remnants of the pile of roots Iassa had built at the entrance to the tunnel and ran to the shield where his father slept. He yanked the chunacat pelt off him and clicked frantically.

  Sohjos was still breathing, but quickly and heavily. He didn’t seem to have been attacked by the barrasc, but the warmth of the tunnel, the warming liquid and the pelt were making him sicker.

  Thurl grabbed the leads on the sled and pulled his father into the great cavern, sliding the shield over the broken shells of the barrasc, slipping it through the guts and pus of the dead.

  The barrasc in the bottom of the pit were scrambling through the dead, avoiding the clinging liquid and escaping the pit. There were still hundreds of barrasc, but they seemed a far less threat than the swarm had been.

  “The barrasc that survived will lead us to the surface,” Iassa said. “Some of them are still on fire. The heat will crack their shells. They’ll try to get into the snow on the surface to cool off. We just have to follow them, and they will lead our way out. We have to move quickly, though, before this chamber fills with smoke!”

  Thurl wanted to ask her what she was talking about: ‘fire’, ‘burn’, ‘smoke’; all these alien words; but he didn’t have time. Iassa was running after the barrasc.

  Thurl’s flesh ached where the clinging liquid on the root had touched him. He had been stung multiple times by the barbs from the wicked little insects. He was sweating and his follicles clung to him and he couldn’t breathe properly. But he wasn’t going to stop until his father was safe. He followed Iassa.

  The carcasses of split barrasc littered the cavern. The sled moved more easily over their cracked hard shells and slimy spilled guts. Thurl tried to find the path across them toward the tunnel on the opposite end where the living barrasc and Iassa were disappearing around a corner.

  As he ran, slipping in the mud and guts, straining against the rope of the sled and the pain in his shoulder, the air in the cavern became heavy and thick. He gasped for breath, not even half way to the tunnel where Iassa had gone. His head swam. He choked. His throat clogged and closed and before he could understand what was happening, he dropped to his knees, unable to breathe, and passed out into the mud.

  CHAPTER nineteen

  There was a crackling, popping sound, like the shells of the barrasc, but louder. Thurl sat up and grunted.

  Iassa was sitting beside him. She was pushing some animal carcass into the center of a pile of roots; the roots were covered in the clinging warming liquid. The crackling, popping noise was coming from the roots.

  Thurl clicked around the room, searching for Sohjos. He was still asleep, packed in fresh snow a few steps away.

  “Where are we?” Thurl asked.

  “Still in the narvai-ub lair,” said Iassa. “The barrasc are gone. I caught a pocasta. Do you want some?”

  She pushed the skinned pocasta meat further under the roots.

  Thurl didn’t answer. He clicked and grunted. The cavern was still littered in barrasc shells. Iassa had cleared paths through them, but the central pit was a mound of dead insects. The stench in the cave was nauseating: the smell of blood and pus, decaying meat, sweat and death and desperation; and some heavy, stinging scent that Thurl didn’t recognize; some thick, choking musk that itched his nostrils and scratched at the back of his throat.

  Thurl stood up and went to his Father. Sohjos seemed to be sleeping calmly. His breath was slow and measured. With the snow packed around him, his body temperature had fallen to more normal levels. Thurl could feel a few welts on Sohjos’s skin, no doubt where the barrasc had pinched him, or launched their stingers into him. Otherwise, he seemed alive and well.

  Thurl walked back to Iassa.

  “What happened to me?” He asked. “I was running after you and then, suddenly I couldn’t breath and everything disappeared.”

  “I think you got choked out by the smoke,” Iassa answered. “And I’ve never seen anyone take that many barrasc stings and survive. Your hide must be tough as stone.”

  Thurl hadn’t noticed before, but there were welts all over him. The barrasc had launched thousands of little stingers at him. Only a few hundred actually stuck into his flesh, but their poison hadn’t been able to penetrate deeply enough to affect him. He had raised bumps where the spines had fallen out, and hard spiny follicles where they still protruded.

  Thurl plucked out a few, then sat down near Iassa. “Why are we still here?”

  “I couldn’t carry you both,” Iassa said. “I may be faster than you, but you’re a lot stronger.”

  “The snow?”

  “The barrasc led me to an opening,” she answered. “Like the one we found before, but closer. We might be able to climb through it to the surface, but the barrasc kept going. I think there is a tunnel out.”

  “If you found the way out, why did you come back?”

  “I live down here,” Iassa said. “You’re trying to find the surface. I came back to help you.”

  The smell of the pocasta was intense. It made Thurl hungrier than he wanted to be.

  “What are you doing to that pocasta?” Thurl asked. “It never smells like that at home.”

  “I’m cooking it,” answered Iassa.

  “I don’t know what that means,” said Thurl. “Sometimes we catch pocasta at home. They have burrows near the warming river and sometimes we can lure one out with kanateed seeds. If we catch one we eat quickly, before the blood chills, and before anybody else finds out.”

  “You don’t cook your food?”

  “I don’t know. What does ‘cook’ mean?” Thurl asked.

  “To put it in the fire,” said Iassa.

  Thurl shook his head.

  “All these words,” he said. “We have a similar language, but you use words I’ve never heard. We lay the meat and roots on warming rocks to thaw them, or we eat what we have killed where it died. We don’t get much that hasn’t frozen, though. There isn’t much that lives in our village. The ranchers have horvill sows, and we grow a lot of leaves and berries. But, for most meat, we have to wait for the hunting parties to return, unless we want to go into the tunnels behind the waterfall and search for soft-shelled floucraws. They don’t taste very good, though.”

  He clicked around the room again, to make sure there was no danger. His Father was sleeping, breathing slowly, packed in snow. Iassa noticed him checking.

  “How is your Father?”

  “He’s breathing,” said Thurl. “He’s stronger than I thought; the strongest of the warriors. That’s why he was chosen as Leader of the Hunt. He’ll survive. Either he’ll survive, or I’ll die trying to save him.”

  “You’re close with your father?” Iassa asked.

  “No,” Thurl said, and dropped his head, grunting softly while making designs in the mud with his finger. “This was supposed to be my first hunt. He let me come, but he didn’t trust me to go into the hunting fields. He left me behind to ‘learn’. Just because I’m the youngest son, he thinks I can’t do anything.”

  Iassa put her hand on Thurl’s arm, but he pulled away. It startled him. He didn’t expect her to touch him. After he pulled away, he was sorry he’d done it.

  “Maybe he was just worried about you,” Iassa offered.

  “I also made a huge mistake before we got to the hunting grounds,” Thurl admitted. “I was just trying to show him I could be part of the team.”

  He didn’t want to tell Iassa about the chantimer. He didn’t want her to think of him the way his father thought of him.

  He could feel himself sweating again. The warmth from
the clinging liquid was uncomfortable. He had never known warmth to be uncomfortable before. It choked him and made his throat itch . He was tired of feeling wet and his follicles drooping and being unresponsive to vibrations and currents in the air.

  He stood up and stomped away, closer to Sohjos. He grabbed a handful of snow and pressed his face into it.

  “What is that warming liquid?” He asked, angrily.

  “What warming liquid?” Iassa said. “Do you mean the fire?”

  “What is fire?”

  “You don’t have fire on the surface?” Iassa was stunned. “How do you keep warm?”

  “We have the warming river that comes from the waterfall. We soak warming rocks in them. The rocks hold the warmth, and we put them in our huts.”

  “Wow,” Iassa said. “I never thought about life on the surface. I wonder where the river comes from.”

  “The Elders tell us there is a geyser near the top of the mountain. The mountain is an old volcano. They say the warmth comes from deep inside the planet.”

  “The fire caverns,” Iassa nodded. “It’s probably one of the steam chasms from the fire caverns. That’s amazing.”

  “What is fire?” Thurl asked again.

  “It’s … I don’t know,” she answered. “It’s fire! I guess it is a little like a liquid, but it gives off heat and light. And it cooks meat for us. And it burns if you touch it. And it makes smoke that can choke and suffocate you if you don’t vent it out of the caverns. That’s what happened to you. That’s why you passed out when we set the barrasc swarm on fire. That’s why this fire is so small.”

  Thurl didn’t say anything. He didn’t understand. She was using too many words he didn’t know.

  “The pocasta is done,” she said. “Do you want to eat?”

  Thurl nodded. He took the meat in his hands. It was so warm it itched his palms. He sunk his teeth into the meat. He didn’t have to tear through it; didn’t have to pull the sinew and grind the bone. The meat was soft and wet and slid off the bones into his mouth and dissolved on his tongue. It was sweet and supple and some bloodless juices ran down his chin. He’d never eaten anything like it before. Even their freshest kills, when the blood was still warm, didn’t taste as good.