Savage Horizons

by CJ Birch

  He raises his hands in surrender and slumps back against the bark wall.

  “Are you injured anywhere?” I ask Mani.

  He shakes his head and hugs his knees to his chest. “What are those things?”

  “Doesn’t matter what they are.” Fossick begins to pace. “When we come back with the Posterus, those things won’t stand a chance.” He kicks the door. “We’ll wipe them off the planet.”

  I’m struck dumb by the comment. Even if it was from Fossick. I can’t believe one of my crew could even think like that. Worse, say it out loud. “The Posterus is not coming back here. In fact, we keep this planet to ourselves. If anyone ever mentions a word about it, I’ll make sure you spend the rest of your life locked up in the brig,” I say.

  “Why? We’ve found exactly what we’ve been looking for—a habitable world. Why would we turn our backs on that? Because there’s another species here?” Foer asks.

  Fossick snorts. “An inferior species.”

  Foer leans forward. I can tell how much he wants this to be the end of it, the end of our searching. “We can find a quiet continent and make our home there.”

  “Yeah, Captain. We don’t have to harm them. It’s a big planet. We could find another section to inhabit, they wouldn’t even have to know we were here,” Mani says.

  “And what happens when we outgrow that little section of land and we want more? You don’t think we’ll find enough justification to take it away from them? Fossick’s already given us the best excuse. They’re inferior. Right, Fossick? So what does it matter if we push them out of their homes? Besides, it wouldn’t be like we were kicking them out. We would give them something in return. We could show them how to shoot their enemies instead of clubbing them over the head.”

  “You’re going to side with them? Even after what they did to you? What they did to Yakovich?” Fossick asks. If it had only been Foer, I know I could have crushed these ideas right here and now. But Fossick never lets anything go. He’ll hold on to this long after everyone’s forgotten. But I still need to try. The other crew members will at least consider what I’m saying.

  “We’re the intruders. We don’t belong here. No matter how many platitudes we tell ourselves, it would still end the same. We’d force them out, and we have no right to do that.”

  I hear a loud commotion outside and motion for everyone to be silent. The door opens again. The soft sunlight filters in, silhouetting the shape of a large avian. I hope again to see Sarka’s smug face, but instead I hear a shrill squeal. Two muscular avians shove Chloe through the door. She tears at their arms, screaming, kicking, lashing out at anything she can dig her nails into. They drop her on the ground with a loud thud and slam the door shut.

  She takes a moment to breathe. Then she’s up again, pounding on the door. She screams every expletive she knows, and a few creative ones I’ve never heard before in Spanish.

  No one moves, too afraid they’ll be collateral damage. After a few minutes, when I realize she isn’t going to relent any time soon, I lay a hand on her shoulder. She whips it off and goes back to hammering at the door.

  I grab both her arms and pin them down at her sides. “Chloe, calm down. If you use all your energy banging on solid doors, you’ll have nothing left to help us escape.”

  This last word has an effect. “Escape?” Her voice is hoarse and small. She looks up at me with fear, pain, and anger, then collapses at my feet. “Good. I hate jungles.” She rubs her hands together, trying and failing, to clear them of the dirt they’ve accumulated. “I hate heights and I especially hate dirt.” She looks at each of her crew mates until she finds Ash, who’s lounging against the back wall, watching the show with a hint of amusement in her eyes. “Why did you have to bring me? I didn’t want to come. I told you I didn’t and you still insisted. You said it would be like a walk in one of the parks on Alpha. This is nothing like Alpha.” She lifts her arms. They’re covered in grass stains and scrapes and there’s a large gash along her left elbow. “Alpha doesn’t have animals walking around trying to kill you.” Her crisp blond hair hangs stringy and greasy. “Why couldn’t you have brought Len?”

  “I couldn’t leave the ship without a doctor. You were the next best thing. It was unlikely that we’d need major surgery out here.” She bites her lip to stop from laughing. “Besides, you’re handling it like a champ.”

  “Fuck you, Ash.”

  “Okay.” I hold up my hands. This is going tits up real quick if I can’t get them working together. We need to focus on getting out of here instead of tearing each other apart. “Chloe, did you manage to hang on to any part of your kit?”

  She shrugs and rummages around in her utility belt. She pulls out a few ration bars, a med kit and a flashlight. Hartley pounces on the flashlight.

  “Now this I can work with.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The mood is somber after my little speech and Chloe’s arrival. Fossick is off in the corner talking with Mani. I know I didn’t get through to Fossick. He’ll be dreaming of cities and wealth long after we leave this planet. I hope he doesn’t manage to infect anyone else with his ideas. Mani is pretty affable and tends to go along with the crowd. I’ll have to keep a close eye on Fossick, see who else he talks to. It makes me wonder if he’s what the conquerors of Earth were like. It’s one of the only constants from our history.

  Humans are takers. We see something we like and we take it, by force if necessary. I don’t want our legacy in this solar system to mirror that. Part of the reason I signed onto the Posterus mission was to start fresh. And not only my own life, it was human nature I wanted to erase and begin again.

  “God, Mani, you’re making me hot looking at you. Aren’t you boiling in that thing?” Ash tugs at the arm of Mani’s enviro-suit, who looks down at it as if he’d forgotten he was wearing it and shrugs.

  Cooped up in this tree hollow, it’s like forty degrees, it must be over fifty in that suit. He unzips the front, like it’s a favor to Ash and he couldn’t care less if he boils to death.

  “Hey, Mani, what supplies do you have left?” Hartley asks as he disassembles Chloe’s flashlight.

  Mani begins to empty out his cargo pockets. There isn’t much. Another protein ration and a spare canister of compressed air.

  Hartley snatches up the air canister. Most of us ditched our spare when we removed our main tanks before heading out. His face is pure glee. “Now if only we had kindling for a fire, I could rig a blow torch of sorts and cut through the hinges on the door.”

  “Use some of the tree bark the Captain’s been shredding. If you can find some hard sap that’ll help. Pitch is a great fire starter,” says Mani.

  “Will that work?” I ask as I lean over to inspect the hinges on the door. They are made of a tough looking braided twine.

  “If we’re lucky and I can actually get a fire started and the canister has enough air in it to weaken the hinges, then maybe.”

  “There’s a guard outside, maybe even two. We need to think worse-case scenario. Without a weapon I don’t know if the six of us could overpower two of them at the same time. That’s three on each guard.” The way Ash’s mind works impresses me. I can almost see the calculations in her head as she weighs the odds of each scenario. “But if we can get the door open and then lure them in one at a time, then it’s six on one and those are much better odds. What do we have that we can use as a weapon?”

  Fossick picks up the flashlight. “We can hit ‘em over the head with this.” He whacks it a couple times against the floor to demonstrate.

  Hartley yanks it out of his hands. “Give me that, you idiot. How do you think we’re going to start the fire? If you’ve damaged the filament in the bulb I’m going to shove this thing up your—”

  “Okay,” I cut him off. “Let’s start collecting hard sap and any scraps of bark we have. Mani, take your enviro-suit off, we’re going to rip it into strips to use as garrotes.”

  We spend the rest of the afternoon prep
aring and waiting for dark to fall. If we’re going to escape then our best bet is to wait until everyone’s asleep. We manage to collect a good selection of pitch along with a pile of shredded bark.

  Before we lose all light for the night, Hartley removes the bulb from the flashlight. He carefully chips away at the glass before screwing it back into place. We surround Hartley, fascinated, as if he’s the fire and we’re mesmerized by his flames. He packs the space around the filament first with pitch, then with the shredded bark and sets it aside.

  Now we wait.

  “Was Sarka with you, Mani?”

  He shakes his head. “Sorry, Captain. I haven’t seen him since we all separated.”

  Figures. Unlike the rest of us, Sarka was trained to survive in this type of environment. As I look around the room, I realize most of our survival instincts are primal. We weren’t raised in the wild. We’ve only ever been in controlled atmospheres. Synthetic air pumped through pipes to mimic Earth’s lower atmosphere. LED lights designed to simulate artificial sunlight. Even on Delta, we pretend we’re living on a planet and not trapped in biospheres on giant rocks orbiting the sun. But it’s all fake. The real thing is much scarier than I imagined. I’m more impressed our ancestors made it out of the ice age.

  Now, we huddle in fear on our four main colonies. A species ostracized. I can’t imagine the possibility of billions. Our two thousand kilometers of land mass is laughable compared to the five hundred million we once had. It’s no way to live. But neither is kicking an indigenous species out of its habitat so we have somewhere to fuck up again.

  As the last of the light seeps out of the room, we crouch in anticipation. Everyone has their task. We’re all just waiting for the right moment before we implement them. I wind the strip of Mani’s environmental suit around each of my fists. It cuts into my wound, causing a sharp pain, but I don’t care. I have one goal: wrap this strip of fabric around the neck of the first avian who enters.

  We wait another hour before deciding the time is right. We want to take the guards out as quietly as possible. Hartley picks up the flashlight. He’s arranged himself by the door with the canister of compressed air. He flicks the flashlight button on. There’s a quick burst of light, our anxious faces imprint on my mind, then nothing.

  “That’s it?” Fossick whispers. “I thought you said it would start a fire.”

  After the flash of light I can’t see anything. I can only hear rustling over by the door.

  “I’ll try again, it’s not an exact science, you know? There’s a lot of luck in starting a fire this way.” More rustling, then the click of the flashlight again. The room is briefly illuminated before going dark again. And then, so slowly I might be imagining things, a tiny glow begins to emerge from the top of the flashlight. Hartley adds more shredded bark to the small fire until there are tiny flames curling up pieces of bark. He lifts the canister of air and positions it near the fire. The first spurt creates a tiny fireball that wafts into the air before extinguishing. He adjusts something on the canister and sprays again, this time lifting the fire into the flow of air. It creates a harsh stream of fire, which Hartley adjusts to narrow it. He hands the torch to Mani, whose job it is to keep the fire going in case Hartley needs it again.

  Now that he has a steady stream of fire, Hartley gets to work on the hinges. Ash is beside him, ready to cut through the hinges as soon as they begin to weaken. She’s using the only sharpish edge we have, the lid of an empty water canister. She tried cutting with it earlier, but there’s a hard layer on the twine and she couldn’t get through it.

  “Crap.” Hartley leans closer into the hinge. “It’s taking longer to cut through the rope than I planned. I was kind of hoping it would catch and burn away, but this braided twine doesn’t seem very flammable.” He wipes the sweat from his forehead and stands to cut the second hinge. “Try to pull the braiding apart, Ash. I’ve gotten the top layer, that might make it easier to unravel.”

  Hartley starts on the top hinge while Ash works away at the first one. The rest of us sit useless in the background, watching them work, waiting for our turn at action.

  After a few more minutes the canister of air sputters and dies. Hartley lets out a soft expletive. “Sorry, that’s the best I can do.”

  “Give me some more light. I’m almost through.” Ash grabs Mani’s hand and positions it closer. I can’t see around her, but when she gives a tiny cry of triumph, I know she’s made it through. “One more to go.”

  Mani and Ash stand to work on the top hinge while the rest of us sit and wait. The waiting is the worst part. The back of my neck prickles from the heat, my palms are sweating and I have an unrelenting urge to start pacing. Even though I want to, almost need to, I can’t. It will make everyone else anxious, more so than they already are. Instead I ask how it’s coming, in return, Ash grunts. I’m not sure if that’s a good sign or not, so I leave her to it.

  Finally, after what feels like hours, Ash lets out a soft, “Ha.” She looks at me, her smile elated. Even through all the dirt and the small bruise now forming on her cheek, she’s beautiful. I smile back. The moment stretches.

  Hartley coughs beside me, breaking the moment. “What now, boss?”

  I shake my head a little to refocus on our task. “Now we lure the first guard in.”

  Foer and Fossick lift the door from the frame. Without the hinges it comes away easily. Standing in front of the door, his back to us, is one of the avians. He holds a large spear in one hand and what looks like dinner in the other. At the noise, he turns, his face scrunched into a scowl.

  This is the moment our plan can all go wrong. His next action determines our fate. If he calls out to the others, we’re done, but if he comes into the room, we have a chance.

  Foer and Fossick back into the room. They’re still clutching the door, leading the avian inside. Chloe pokes her head out the door, acting as lookout. As soon as the avian’s across the threshold, Ash kneels on the floor behind him. I use her back as a springboard to toss the homemade garrote over his head. I jump off and pull down with everything I’ve got. His wings flap out, knocking Ash and Hartley to the floor. He thrashes about, catching Mani in the head with his spear and Fossick in the stomach with the tip of his wing. I pull tighter on the garrote. My ribs howl in protest and the sweat on my palms makes it slip.

  I want to scream with the effort, but quiet is essential if we want to escape unnoticed. His sputtering changes to a guttural coughing and he falls to his knees. Foer grabs the arm with the spear. Ash pulls the spear, trying to wrench it free, but his grip remains firm. I tug harder, but it does nothing to ease his grip.

  Then, Foer bites the avian’s wrist and he drops the spear. His wings flail out in furious motions. My crew dodges the attacks until everything goes completely still with one loud thwack. Ash holds the spear above her head, ready to strike again if he moves. But he crumples to the floor.

  Breaking the sudden silence is our chorus of heavy breathing. Everything’s stopped. I let loose the garrote around his neck and slide to the ground, exhausted.

  Ash does the same. Between breaths she says, “Thank fuck there weren’t two of them.”

  Hartley and Foer laugh, but it’s weak given the circumstances.

  “I say we use the rest of the environmental suit and tie his arms and legs,” Ash says.

  “Good idea. Then we’ll replace the door and make our way back to the lowering platform.”

  We make quick work of our tasks, not willing to hang around any longer than necessary. As we creep along the rope bridges, I’m reminded of a similar night over twenty years ago. Only this time, I’m in charge of the escape. Is this how my mom felt leading people into the unknown? Terrified she’d fuck up somehow and lead them all to their deaths?

  Chapter Twenty

  The moment my feet touch the hard, solid ground again, I almost faint with relief. I resist the urge to bend down and run my hand through the loose soil to confirm I’m back where I belong. Although
I guess that’s not accurate either. I’ve spent my life in space. The gravity on asteroids isn’t the same, not even with the help of simulated gravity. Now that we’re on a planet, it’s not exactly what I was expecting.

  Living in space is easy. We don’t have most of the things that can kill you on a planet. Is this what life on Earth was like? Before we’d mastered our environment with cities and civilization? At one point, we weren’t the top of the food chain. We were one of the links, making our way through the world much like the rest of the animal kingdom. But at some point we adapted and moved our way up the food chain. Now, confined to space, we’ve learned to adapt yet again.

  Far from the village, Ash lets out a whoop of celebration and does a fist pump before high-fiving Hartley. I wish I could celebrate with them, but the cost was too high. We’re a strange bunch, stomping through the jungle, flanked by soft neon leaves. We’re all down to our undershirts and those thin shorts that always ride up your backside. The ones they give you for space walks. Each of us sports more than a few scrapes and bruises. We haven’t showered in days and judging by the wide berth the avians gave us, we stink.

  But at this moment, they’re happy, and they deserve to be. We’re free and clear of danger, until we encounter the next moss monster or native. Hartley will lead us back to the ship. At least someone thought to keep their compass. And with any luck, the ship will still be there.

  Ash turns to look back at me, her smile fading. She slows her pace to fall in step next to me.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” I shake my head. I don’t what to bring her mood down.

  “You’re thinking about Yakovich.”

  I shrug but look away. “I don’t want to talk about Yakovich.”

  “I’m sorry I snapped at you. I know you were only doing what was best for the crew.” She kicks a fallen branch out of the way. “It was the right decision, even if it didn’t feel like it at the time.”