by Amie Kaufman
“All right, Finian?” Goldenboy asks, coming up beside me.
“… Do we know if there was any native fauna here?”
Zila glances at me. “Is there a reason for your query?”
“I thought I heard something,” I admit, my pulse pounding a little too quick.
“Most of the fauna on Octavia wasn’t very complex,” Auri says from up ahead. “At least from the early surveys and reports from the biology department. There were mice in the labs, though. And chimps, too. My dad worked with them.”
“There were what now?” My imagination’s supplying a steady stream of things that could match that name, most of them with claws and teeth I would not like to say hello to. Kal’s on alert immediately, his grip tightening on his disruptor rifle.
“Chimps,” Auri repeats.
“Pan paniscus,” Zila supplies helpfully.
“They’re almost the size of a regular person,” Auri explains. “Same basic build as us, same family tree. They’re covered in black hair, though. They climb really well.”
“So they’re just hairy humans?” I ask. “What’s the difference between a chimp and— Did you guys ever meet O’Donnell? There was a guy who sat behind me in mechaneering, and let me tell you—”
“They’re not human,” Tyler replies. “They’re highly intelligent, but they’re animals. What were they doing on the colony, Auri?”
“Initial environmental testing,” she said. “They’re the nearest thing to a human, without being one. Our DNA is almost identical. That’s why they were in the very first rockets ever launched from Earth as well.”
“Wait,” I butt in. “These things are smart enough to pilot spacecraft?”
Kal has his disruptor rifle up now, turning in a slow circle.
“They sound a deadly foe. …”
“No,” Auri corrects us. “Look … They’re not dangerous. And they didn’t fly those early ships, they were just passengers. We put them into space to see how it would affect them. Because physiologically, they’re a lot like humans.”
Pixieboy and I share a long look.
“But if these chumps … ,” I begin.
“Chimps,” she corrects.
“If they couldn’t fly the ships … how did they land them?”
“They didn’t have to,” says Auri. “It was automated.”
“So,” I say carefully, “just let me understand this. You dirtchildren took these animals nearly as smart as you, and shoved them in rockets and hurled them into space to see if it would melt their insides?”
“It wasn’t us personally,” Cat points out, defensive, and there’s a fair amount of foot-shuffling going on among Team Terran.
“Wow,” I say, looking about the group. “Did we Betraskans know about all this choomp murder when we allied with you?”
“Enough, Finian. Even if there were chimps here, that was two centuries ago, and …” Tyler trails off, no doubt thinking the same thing as the rest of us. Patrice Radke and her fine, ferny friend were here two centuries ago as well. Didn’t seem to stop them from roaming the galaxy.
Maker’s bits …
“Weapons,” says Kal simply, and when we continue, everyone’s holding one.
I don’t hear the rustle-rustle again.
Aurora leads us on through the spiny fronds, the suffocated trees, thick pollen falling around us like sticky blue rain. Our biosuits are soon covered with it, and we have to be careful about the fronds, too—the suits are tough, but not indestructible. It’s a couple of hours and several battles with the undergrowth later that we crest a hill, and find Butler colony in the valley before us.
Or at least, the ruins of Butler colony. Every building is wreathed in that green-blue foliage, crawling with creepers, every squared-off shape and hard angle softened by the plants surrounding it. The vines crawl over the concrete and steel, the spores tumble through the sky, swirling in faintly luminous showers.
It’s kinda beautiful. Until I remember my dream of this same blue pollen falling on the surface of my homeworld. I picture Auri’s star map. The red spreading out from those marked stars like a bloodstain.
And then, my heart’s thudding in my chest again.
It takes me several limping steps to realize Auri has stopped at the top of the hill. I see tears rolling down her cheeks as she gazes down at the colony, and with her faceplate in the way, there’s nothing she can do to stop them. I stay where I am, but Scarlett leaves my side and treks up to her.
“If the Hadfield had made it, I’d be down there,” Auri says quietly, but her voice carries. There’s no competition, nothing to drown it out.
“But you’re here,” Scarlett says gently. “And you’re with us. I didn’t know your family, but I think they’d have been glad to know you found a squad to be a part of.”
Aurora sniffs, deep and inelegant. “My dad left my mom when she got scrubbed from the Octavia mission. In a way, she and my sister had already lost him. But when the Hadfield disappeared, they would have felt like they’d lost both of us.” She shakes her head. “And I just … I can never help them. I can never go back and tell them I was okay.”
She sniffs again, her voice quavering.
“The last time I spoke to my dad before I left Earth … we were fighting. I said things I didn’t mean. And they were the last things he ever heard me say. You don’t think about that when it’s happening. You think family’s always going to be there.”
Everyone’s quiet, the breeze stirring up the falling pollen and slowly rippling across the strange plants all around us, setting them softly shivering.
I have no idea how to reply. My family numbers in the hundreds, so the concept of alone is just … impossible. Though I’ve felt isolated many times, often singled out and often separate, I’ve never been alone like Aurora is now.
“I think,” says Zila slowly, and I brace for incoming tactlessness, “that if your sister and mother were given a choice between you being dead or believing you were dead and never knowing they were wrong, they would choose the latter. If my family could be alive, but the price would be my ignorance, I would pay it.”
And what is there to say to that?
Miraculously, Aurora offers Zila a small, watery smile.
Our girl out of time isn’t just grieving for her family, she’s grieving for herself—none of us knows what she is anymore, even as we follow the trail she’s laying down for us. But she must wish for some hint of normality. And we all know what that’s like.
It feels … companionable as the seven of us set off again, the strangest group of misfits that ever trekked across an abandoned alien planet beset with creeptastic plants and besieged by military forces. But it’s probably another twenty minutes’ hike to the colony, and my stomach feels like it’s full of greasy ice and everyone is quiet as the grave. It’s clearly time to lighten the mood.
“So,” I say. “About these chints—”
“Chimps,” Tyler says, long-suffering already.
“Whatever. You still have any of those?”
“They’re extinct,” Cat says. “Just like you’re about to be.”
“Very funny, Zero. Anyway, are you sure you’re not making them up? They sound ridiculous. I mean, hairy dirtchildren who fly spaceships and have almost identical DNA to you lot?” I scoff. “I don’t think they exist.”
And that’s when a snarling, furry pitch-black humanoid thing with jagged yellow teeth that would put an ultrasaur to shame comes screaming out of the undergrowth and straight for my face.
31
Auri
Fin crashes to the ground, the biggest chimpanzee I’ve ever seen in my life landing straight on top of him. Thick greenery blooms from its eyes, its back is covered in a tangle of beautiful flowers, and when it opens its mouth to snarl its defiance at him, I see reddish-green leaves all the way do
wn its throat.
Terror surges through me as it brings both hands down against his faceplate once, twice, sending his head bouncing back against the earth. Kal already has his rifle trained on it, but as if it knows, the thing grabs at Fin’s shoulders and rolls the pair of them, throwing him around like a rag doll and using him as a shield.
“Get this choomp off me!” Fin wails.
“Aee’na dō setaela!” Kal spits, falling to his knees and kicking wildly. I realize with cold horror that the vines nearest him are snaking out, curling around his ankles and rifle and dragging it and him away from the beast. I cry out, and Scarlett steps up beside me, rapidly blasting at the plants with her disruptor.
Not wanting to risk hitting Fin with his pistol, Tyler aims a kick at the chimp’s back instead. It’s sent flying, screeching, and Cat gets off a blast. There’s a bright flash of light, another unearthly screech, but the hit doesn’t seem to stop it. Instead, the thing rolls to its feet and jumps on top of Fin again, screaming as Zila takes two quick steps in, raising her disruptor and looking for a clear shot.
Scarlett is still blasting at the vines that have grabbed Kal, and I’m trying to pull his legs free of the snarl, his eyes locking on mine for one long, intense moment. After his confession in sickbay, we have so many things left to say, and I’m suddenly terrified we won’t get the chance. I hear a shout, turning as Fin’s thrown clear of the brawl. He lands with a crash, something in his suit snapping sharply, and I run forward to hook my hands under his arms and drag him clear.
The thing barrels into Ty and sends him flying—my dad always used to remind me that a chimp was four times as strong as a human, that you could never let your guard down around them. Cat shouts Ty’s name as he’s sent sprawling. She blasts the thing with her disruptor again and it turns on her, lashing out with its moss-covered hands and yellowed teeth. With a cry, she’s sent tumbling away, rolling to a stop and laying still on her side.
“Maker’s breath, shoot it!” Ty’s bellowing as Zila circles them, twisting this way and that to try and get a shot that won’t take out one of her teammates.
I throw my hands up, desperately trying to summon whatever it is that’s helped me so far. The air around me shivers. A low hum building behind my eyes. But my mind’s a wild thing, wheeling away from the sights before me, screaming out to run, to abandon my friends and get away, get away, save myself from this place.
The creature turns on me, and despite the greenery in its eyes, I know it’s looking at me, I know it’s seeing me, lips peeling back from its teeth as it shrieks and launches itself right at my throat.
And then Kal’s roaring, almost unrecognizable behind his helmet’s faceplate. Abandoning his trapped rifle and ripping free of the plants to crash into the beast, coming to my aid with nothing but his bare hands.
He knocks the chimp away from me, both of them tumbling over in a tangle of limbs. Rolling with the impact, curling himself into a ball, Kal plants both boots in the thing’s chest and kicks it hard, launching it up into the air as he cries out to Zila.
And Zila doesn’t miss her shot.
BAMF.
The thing’s head is just … gone. And a thousand tiny spores are floating through the air, carried around us in a quick swirl by the breeze as its body crashes to the ground in ruins.
Cat whimpers where she’s still curled up on her side, and Ty scrambles over to her. But Zila’s already skidding in on her knees, as quick as I’ve ever seen her move, pulling her med kit from her back.
Kal crouches over the remains of the beast, gasping for breath. I help a groaning Fin up to his hands and knees, my heart thumping in my chest. Scarlett has finished blasting the animated vines to ashes. Her hands are shaking, and she keeps her weapon trained on the landscape around us in case any other part of it starts moving when it shouldn’t.
“On three,” Zila’s saying softly, and with infinitely gentle hands, she and Tyler roll Cat onto her back so they can get a look at her injuries.
Oh no. No.
“Maker’s bits,” Fin breathes, and though he’s in obvious discomfort, he’s reaching for Zila’s bag already.
All down Cat’s left side, her suit has been torn open. I can see blood and skin and bone, I can see her ribs, I can …
The air’s reaching her skin.
Even as I stare in paralyzed horror, a miniscule spore wafts down in slow motion to land on her side.
“The pollen,” I gasp, reaching across to try and cover her wound with both my hands, her blood slicking my silver gloves in seconds.
“The pollen will not matter if we do not prevent bleeding,” Zila says simply as a shaking Fin hands her a spray, and she leans down to apply it to the wound.
“Overhead!”
It’s Kal, rising from the chimpanzee’s body, pointing to a white shuttle cutting a quick arc across the sky. Whether or not the Bellerophon is still in orbit I don’t know, but it’s obvious someone has survived the clash between the TDF and Bianchi’s ships. Even as I watch, they wheel around toward the trail of destruction from our crash landing on the beach, the signpost we left behind.
And they start to descend.
Cat groans as Zila seals her suit with some kind of sticky plastic patch, precious seconds slipping away. Tyler watches Cat, a frozen statue crouching by her side, running the odds in his head.
“Zila,” he says quietly. “She needs more than just first aid, yes?”
“Yes sir.” She nods. “She needs serious attention.”
“Well, we can’t go back to the Longbow.” Ty stares in the direction of that descending TDF shuttle, then to the colony in the valley below. “Auri, suggestions?”
I close my eyes, reaching for what I know about Butler settlement, trying to picture the maps I’ve studied a thousand times. My exhausted, overloaded brain glitches for a long moment before I remember.
“There’s a med center,” I say. “On the west side of the settlement.”
Tyler rises to his feet, peering down to the settlement’s eerie layer of green-gray foliage. “I think I see it. Fin, can you walk?”
“Yessir,” Fin says simply. He straightens with a wince, his exosuit spitting out a low, hissing whine. His eyes are narrowed in pain. But he doesn’t complain.
“Okay,” Tyler says. “Scar, Zila, we take Cat to the med center. Kal, you get Fin to the colony spaceport and look for a replacement reactor core.”
“I know the way,” I say, sounding braver than I feel.
Ty nods. “Keep Auri with you, and comms open at all times. When you find what you need, call it into me immediately.”
Kal stands in one graceful movement, nodding at me. I rub my hands against the mossy grass to rid them of some of Cat’s blood, and my stomach turns as the color shifts—green blue to a deeper purple. There’s a warning screaming in my head. I can feel it in my bones. I can feel it under my feet, and in the skies full of dancing spores above me.
Something here is completely, horribly, unnaturally wrong.
I hear a whisper inside my mind. An echo of my own voice in my head.
Beware.
Ra’haam.
Cat’s jaw is clenched, and the fact that she doesn’t fight the splitting of the party, doesn’t try to join the conversation, tells me just how badly she’s hurt. I let Kal pull me to my feet, and we stand side by side for a moment, looking down at the wounded girl, her friends around her.
I brought them all here.
This is because of me.
“Go,” Tyler says, without looking up. “Good hunting.”
Kal retrieves his disruptor rifle from the ashes. As the two of us set off after the already-limping Fin, I can’t resist one last glance back.
I can’t escape the feeling I won’t see Cat again.
•••••
It’s a lot more than twenty minutes to
the flat expanse of the spaceport now, with Fin moving slowly and painfully, concentrating on walking and carrying the containment unit for our new reactor core. Even though I can’t see it under his biohazard gear, I can hear the protests from his exosuit from a few meters away. Kal and I both keep guns at the ready, even though I’m really not sure how to shoot mine. All three of us are trying not to jump at imaginary sounds.
We skirt the edge of the ruined colony—it would be faster through the middle, but Kal says the terrain is too good for an ambush. His voice is steady and his movements are sure, and I find myself drifting a little closer to him.
My mind’s whirling—jumping from the shuttle that’s now vanished from overhead, to Cat’s pale face and bloodied side, back to hazy memories aboard the World Ship, to another monster I destroyed without even touching it. I told the others I didn’t remember doing it, but that was a lie. Like I confessed to Kal in the sickbay, I can see it in my head now. As if I was a passenger in my own body, watching through the screens of my eyes. I remember killing the ultrasaur. I remember after Zila shot me, I remember shattering the Trigger, the words I spoke as the star map glittered in the Longbow’s bridge, the word I’ve been hearing in my dreams since I woke up two centuries too late.
Eshvaren.
The word draws me in, calls to me, in exactly the same way this planet repulses me. The need to find out more about that ancient species is at the forefront of my mind, the only thing that keeps returning to shove my fears and questions aside.
Well, not the only thing.
Kal is prowling beside me, his disruptor rifle raised, moving with that strange, ethereal grace. His every motion is sharp, fluid. The warrior he was born to be is so close to the surface now, it’s almost all I can see. I can’t forget how he threw himself at the chimp when it turned on me. Heedless of his own safety. Fearless and fierce and braver than anyone I’ve ever known.
He looks at me. Looks away again just as quick.
He’s not like anything or anyone I’ve ever known. I mean, I’ve dated before, but there’s a world of difference—a galaxy of difference—between a movie and popcorn on a Friday night and a guy telling you he’s bonded to you for life.
