by Chogan Swan
Her hands met the port side pontoon. She grabbed it and vaulted out of the water onto the cargo then scanned for threats while hauling in the sea anchor, but everything was still. The wind was becoming fitful, but her craft slid into the passage. She often spilled wind from the sail to navigate tight turns, but still worked her way deep into the ice before the sun climbed a handspan above the horizon.
Then the wind changed.
The boat was in a tight passage between two floes; the ice to starboard rose just above her knees. When the wind stopped pushing, the boat bobbed up against the ice.
The cloud cover in the west had been working toward her throughout the morning, and now the dividing line between clear sky and cloudy was straight overhead. Fitful eddies and gusts brushed against her face, bringing a musky, animal odor. She looked around, but saw nothing.
She dropped the sail and furled it, preparing to paddle. Without warning, the boat lurched and smashed into the ice floe. The starboard side pontoon snapped off the frame; its welds cracking with a scream of tortured metal. Her staggering tumble changed into a leap to the ice where she slid to a stop and snatched out her knives, not knowing what to expect.
The starboard pontoon floated free of the tangled wreckage. The port side pontoon hung from the listing framework that held her supplies.
She glimpsed something big moving fast below the surface. It struck the daggerboard on the central pontoon, driving the frame back onto the ice and cracking the welds that attached it. The port pontoon floated away, and the framework rotated around the detached central pontoon and slid into the sea, leaving one container and three pontoons bobbing on the surface.
Tiana felt as though something had broken inside her.
She shook herself to stay in the present.
A wary step toward the edge turned to a leap away when a huge, streamlined body shot out of the water onto the ice. It lunged at her with sharp teeth in a mouth big enough to take off her entire head. She danced away across the ice as it lumbered after her on clumsy flippers, barking in a deep threatening tone. Tiana kept moving back, avoiding the lunges of its reptilian head.
A gray and black spotted fur coat covered a body more than twice as long as her boat. It was immensely strong to jump so high out of the water. On the ice, it was awkward but still fast; a predator by its teeth, but it was just driving her away not hunting her.
Tiana snarled in frustration. She had to get to the still floating container holding her food supplements. Without it her chances of survival nosedived; the elements might be scarce.
After chasing her a while, the beast stopped, but continued barking threats. Perhaps it was protecting a nest nearby. Tiana analyzed the creature's smell and decided—probably a female.
Tiana debated using her gun; she had no desire to kill the creature, but it would be tricky to disable without losing a chunk of her own body. The memory of teeth as long as her fingers flashed in front of her. She would need to make it charge again, maybe by coming between the creature and its nest…. She took off in a sprint across the ice straight at it… and its teeth.
It bawled and drew back its head, ready to snap.
Instead of taking another step, Tiana gathered both feet beneath her while she was still hurtling forward and slammed them down to leap, clearing the snapping jaws by a satisfying margin.
She landed on all fours, spinning across the ice, dug her toes into a crack and waited.
The creature flopped about and charged back toward her.
A small ridge of ice to Tiana’s right caught her attention, and she gauged the jump to it. Just before its teeth reached her, she sprang, turning to feel for the ridge with her feet. The beast hurtled past, sliding on its flippers, trying to stop. Tiana’s toes hit the ridge, and she used the purchase to spring back, pouncing full on the animal’s back.
She locked her arms around its powerful neck, clamped her springheels on its body and squeezed hard to keep it from whipping its head around and taking off her leg. Its teeth snapped at her knee, but she kept them from reaching her.
Tiana sank her own teeth into its neck and sucked hard to bring the blood to her tongue to analyze its body chemistry. It took longer than normal to parse the alien physiology as the huge beast thrashed, bucked and rolled on top of her.
Thank the ordering principle; its biology was not too different from the animals of her home world. She built a fast-acting paralytic and forced some into the bite, all the while fighting to keep her leg out of its mouth. It continued to thrash and moan for a few moments before flopping on its side at last.
She loosed her aching arms from the creature’s neck. It had been close; the creature had rolled them to the edge of the ice floe in the struggle. If they'd slid into the water, the fight would not have gone well for either of them.
It might have knocked her off its back by ramming her into the ice. Even if she'd disabled it while they were in the water, she could never have stopped it from drowning.
The creature gazed at her with dark expressive eyes, moaning, Tiana stroked it and rose to her feet. She shook herself to release the tightness from her muscles and walked to the edge of the floe.
She looked at the dark water.
Valishnu’s sensors had measured the ocean depths and there was no chance she could dive so deep, or even see anything without a waterproof light. Her cargo was gone.
The pontoons and the paddle drifted on the surface and the crate bumped against a nearby ice floe. She dove in and retrieved it, tossing it, the paddle and the pontoons onto the ice. She climbed out and dried herself by swiping the water off with her hands.
Tiana opened the crate; at least one thing had gone right. The supplements were dry; the crate undamaged.
A long piece of rope dangling from the pontoons survived. She turned the two smaller pontoons over so their foils would not drag and rigged a sling for the crate and lashed it, the daggerboard and the paddle to them.
She unsheathed her knife and cut boards from the sides of the larger center pontoon until it was about the size of the other two. Those went on top. Another piece of rope fastened to the tips of the pontoons made a leash to drag what was now her amphibious canoe behind her.
The spotted beast groaned when she licked the bite with the antidote before trudging west. At the end of the floe she lowered the canoe. Behind her the creature bellowed.
‘That’s right, you’d better run,’ it seemed to say.
After two days of moving from one ice floe to the next, the routine became automatic. If the distance between floes was close enough to jump, she lowered her canoe into the water, jumped across holding the rope then pulled the boat to her.
At times, she paddled; mostly she didn't need to.
On the morning of the third day, the sun peeked through the cloud cover again. The ice had thinned out since the day before, and now clear water stretched to the north.
She stopped and pulled out the monocular. When she swept the horizon with the scope, she noticed tiny swirling specks in the sky to the north. She sucked in her breath; they appeared to be flying creatures from the way they moved.
Land.
She ate as much as possible without wasting it then filled her harness pockets with packets. If this boat capsized, she'd save something at least.
She untied her canoe sledge and went to work. A foamsteel board supplied material for spikes, and she fastened boards to the three pontoons to make a crude catamaran frame. The thickest of her foamsteel boards she stood upright in a slot cut into the center pontoon. Now it had a mast.
A sheet of material for a shelter turned into a sail when she sliced off a corner then sewed the two pieces together to form a triangle.
At last she placed the daggerboard in its slot on the center pontoon, ready to be pushed into place. She looked over her new sailboat.
It would carry her… until another sea beast took exception to it. At least it only had to carry her and one crate.
The west wind had be
en rising the last hour; she'd have to be careful, but there was nothing else to do except set herself against the stern and launch the crude craft off the ice.
The canoe landed cleanly, and a quick dive and a scramble put her on it. She untied the lashings at the mast, lowered the boom to spread the sail and pumped the tiller. When the sail grabbed the wind, she shoved in the daggerboard. The little boat dug its nose into the crosswind.
Tiana panted in satisfaction.
Sailing again.
The little craft worked its dogged way across the swells. Tiana struggled with her curiosity as she moved closer. She wanted to pull out the monocular to get a better look at the wheeling sky creatures, but dropping it overboard would be a disaster.
A rocky cliff appeared above the waves first, but soon a higher point of land stretched further to the north. The flying creatures soared and drifted above the beach, most of them large, white seabirds with hooked, yellow beaks. The rocky southwest shore was full of animal life. Flightless swimming birds shared the rocks with their flying cousins.
Large, flipper-footed mammals sunned themselves on the rocks. They called to each other with deep groans, stout beasts living in colonies dotting the shoreline, not streamlined and solitary like her boat's nemesis.
She didn’t see an easy place to land on the southern beach that wouldn't disturb the animals, so she turned to beat upwind along the western shore. Soon it became gentler, rising in a gradual slope to a knoll two hundred and thirty feet above the water, twice the height of the southern cliffs.
A spot to beach came into view. She lifted the daggerboard and dropped the sail to ride in on the waves, maneuvering through the rocks then jumping out to pull the boat through the shallows.
She hoisted the center pontoon to her shoulder then climbed above the watermark and concealed the boat in the tall grass.
A quick inventory of her surroundings showed a few birds and insects, but nothing that needed her immediate attention. The high ground was the obvious place to start; she made a rucksack of rope and cloth, threw it over her shoulder and set off exploring toward the northern peak.
The top of the knoll ended in high cliffs. She looked north over the sea to where two hazy mountaintops hovered above the horizon, one several degrees east of north, the other a few degrees west.
The air was hazy, but it was clear the peaks marked the double island outpost of civilization—such as it was. She recalled the map to mind and triangulated her position. The cliff below her feet lay forty-five miles from the southernmost shore in the distance.
A sudden gust from her left side almost staggered her. The wind was coming in from the west-northwest at thirty knots now. She grimaced; much too fast to make landfall in her tiny makeshift boat. The original could have done it, but the wind would tear the rickety canoe apart or blow it far to the east, and no landfall lay in that direction for three thousand miles. If the boat capsized, she could swim, but she'd lose the crate and might starve without the supplements.
If the predators below don't finish you first.
Until the wind slowed, she was stuck here.
Chapter 3 (Passenger)
Day thirty-five on the island started as usual when she woke in her cave before dawn.
Tiana sat up and uncovered the peat embers enough for them to ignite in a gentle blue flame. The cold did not bother her, but she disliked damp, and the fire dried out the overhanging corner of the seaside cave where she slept.
She placed two bricks of peat on the fire, scooped coals into a large oyster shell, wrapped it in damp kelp leaves and sealed it in a leather pouch. She hadn't named the large fish with nasty rows of sharp teeth that provided the skin for the leather, but she was glad it washed up on the beach rather than finding her in the water. She ducked low and scrambled out of the cave.
The east showed hints of the coming sun while the waning gibbous moon still hung in the west. Since her arrival, the wind had never dropped below thirty knots. Now, it was holding steady at thirty-five. She shook back her shoulders and set off down the hill toward the western beaches.
It was easy to pick her way across the narrow isthmus between the two high places. The island was only two and a half miles long and an irregular half-mile wide. Multiple trips each day up and down the two peaks, watching for a passing ship, gave her the chance to stretch her legs. She enjoyed the chance to bounce through the boulders and climb the cliffs—even though she now knew every cave, every rock and every tussock on the island.
The island held signs of occasional visitors. Peat deposits showed signs of harvesting near an old hunting camp heaped about with sea mammal bones while the interior was dotted with broken tools and manufactured items. The biggest find had been a cairn near the hunting camp where she had exhumed a humanoid skeleton as tall as she was herself, but with only a vestigial tail. She’d reburied it after taking a tiny sliver of bone for analysis. Though degraded, the sample hinted the species might be compatible for symbiosis—at least a physical one.
Ahead the sea mammals called to each other as Tiana bounced toward them across the boulders. A musky-sweet aroma, now familiar, wafted from a tide pool and changed her course. Several connected strands of the gray lumps holding the precious trace elements that completed her diet, floated in the still water. She fished them up and touched them to her tongue—a rich find. She inserted the smallest into the life orifice at the fork of her legs for slow consumption and put the rest in her pack. Her supply grew larger every day.
The colony came in sight as she vaulted a low wall of rocks, and a group of youngsters galloped over to her, flippers slapping on the flat rocks. The colony knew her now; she had won the bull over by mimicking the odor of a young female and scratching his itchy spots. The beasts clustered around her as she worked her way through them, removing parasites, treating wounds and checking for diseases by taking tiny sips of blood and bits of hair.
Even her limited contact with the planet’s biology revealed a rich diversity.
The rising sun found a break in the cloud cover and scattered rosy light across the sea. She turned inland and picked up an armload of beached kelp near the southern tip of the island, a long finger with sheer cliffs on either side. At the top, she dumped the kelp on the rocks to dry and glanced at her signal pyre, to make sure it was still in order. Then she leaned her elbow on a tall stone block, steadying the monocular.
Visibility was better than usual today. Patches of blue scattered across the sky and sun sparkled on the sea all the way to the horizon. She scanned, starting from the northern peak and working her way across the seascape as she had many times a day, every day. Since landing, she had seen dozens of varieties of sea birds and glimpsed many large fish and air-breathing sea creatures.
When she reached due south, she almost dismissed the gray triangular specks that appeared and disappeared behind the swells—they looked so much like bird wings—but she checked twice.
The tiny triangles maintained their relative position; she took a deep calming breath. It was a sailing vessel.
She sprang to the signal fire, ripped the leather cover from the oyster-shells and pulled the kelp leaves off the tinder pile beneath the pyre. Then she dumped the coals into the fire pit.
The wind whipping across the rocks fanned the coals to life. Tiana sheltered the tinder with her body to keep it from blowing away until the flames roared up and lit the peat and the bundles of dry grass.
She spread green grass and seaweed over the stacked bricks of peat, creating a satisfying pillar of dark smoke that the wind carried streaming across the sky.
The pyre was large; it would take a lot of smoke for anyone to see it against the usual gray horizon when the winds whipped it away. She'd placed it on the bare rocks to the south instead of taking the chance of lighting the rest of island on fire from the grassy north side.
When she trained the monocular on the boat again, she saw a two-masted brig with full gaff-rigged mainsails and staysails, but topsails still fur
led. With the assumption that the sailors were the same size as the skeleton she had exhumed—the vessel was seventy-five feet long plus another twenty feet of bowsprit. The pilot was doing his best to make west and doing it rather well. They were cutting thirty-five degrees to the lee of the wind; the sails tilted at a jaunty angle and the crew moving with purpose. Sailing vessels on many worlds followed similar patterns.
One of the crew, stationed on a platform near the top of the aft mast, was calling to those on deck and pointing toward her. He had seen the smoke. Another sailor, in a more ornate jacket, pulled a telescoping glass from a jacket pocket and looked in her direction.
Tiana switched her own monocular to her left hand, curled her tail behind her back to conceal it and stepped from behind the rock and waved.
When the sailor gestured that they were coming to her. She bowed—still hiding her tail—hoping that meant something positive to them.
The sole anchorage lay on the lee side of the island. She pointed east and dropped a rock from her hand, to suggest anchoring. The sailor, waved his hand overhead. That must mean agreement.
They needed to stay on course for a while before turning so she had time. She sped across the rocks back to her cave, keeping her tail out of sight. Best they assume she was one of them for now and keep her alien origins out of sight. Not concealed, they might think hiding them was an attempt to trick them. Besides, they'd know she was different, but there was no time to change her stripes.
At the cave, she had a flash of inspiration. She mixed the charred peat from her fire pit with sunscreen and rubbed the concoction into her skin, muting her stripes. It might help her seem less strange to them, at least for a while.
She grabbed her pack and ran back to her signal fire.
The boat, now headed back towards her, cut through the waves, making for the anchorage.
She could smell them when the wind reached her. There were thirty-five different males; the entire crew was male. The faint odor of gunpowder drifted on the wind and the boat had four cannon ports on the side facing Tiana, so eight guns.... A yellow flag with red stripes on top and bottom with an oval design off-center fluttered at the stern. She continued watching until they passed the island then ran down the slope to the inlet that sheltered the anchorage.
