Beast

by Patrick McClafferty

  Someone was sitting on his chest. He opened his eyes and gasped in a lungful of air that smelled of burnt plastic and electronics. Solomon realized Elora had been performing CPR on him. When she moved to give him another chest compression, he caught her wrist in his hand. “Enough!” he wheezed. “I’m breathing, and my heart is beating just fine.”

  The young woman stood, blushing and brushing herself off. “You were buried for thirty minutes, Solomon.” Her face was carefully neutral. “You should be dead.”

  Shaking his head groggily, he pushed himself up and into the nearest seat. “Did we all survive?”

  Brigit gave him a sour look. “The passengers made it. One of the flight attendants broke her fool neck. I warned her, the leathcheann.”

  One of the two surviving flight attendants handed him a bottle of water, and he took a long drink then looked up into her battered face. She’s going to have a hell of a black eye. “Do you know where the emergency locator beacon is stored on this tub?”

  She looked at him blankly for a long moment before she replied. “Only qualified personnel are allowed to access the—”

  “We have crashed,” Solomon said slowly and clearly. “We need to see if the emergency locator has been damaged and is operational. Where is it located?”

  She looked back at him with only slightly glazed brown eyes. “Under the floor in the galley.”

  Solomon pulled a small multi-tool from the pocket of his cargo pants, walked the ten meters to the small galley and dining area, knelt, and began unscrewing floor panels. Five minutes later, he lifted the panel free and stared into the empty spot where the emergency locator should have been. He, and everyone who was looking over his shoulder, could see where the wires to the locator had been crudely hacked off. He felt Elora grip his shoulder tightly.

  “What does this mean?” the flight attendant asked in a shrill, girlish voice. “What does this mean?”

  Solomon shut his eyes, but it was Brigit who answered the question. “It means that someone is trying very hard to kill us all and to make sure we stay killed.” She looked at Solomon as he closed the floor panel. “What do we do now? We’re marooned on Mars in a crashed shuttle, and nobody, including us, knows where the hell we are.”

  Elora smiled at Solomon. “How many times does this make, Solomon? How many times have you saved all of our lives?”

  Solomon sat back in one of the empty seats and shut his eyes. “I’ve lost count, Elora.”

  From the back of the group, Mila chimed in. “I think it’s five times, Solomon. Maybe.”

  “So,” Elora continued in an even tone, “are you planning on stopping anytime soon?”

  Solomon opened one eye. “Nope,” he replied, in a bored-sounding voice as if he did this sort of thing every day. “This isn’t even particularly hard.” He smiled up at his shocked audience. All but Elora, who was still smiling at him. “All I need is a map.”

  Finding a map was easier said than done. After two hours of fruitless searching, they discovered that there was not a single map of Mars in the entire shuttle. Jax finally found a survey map of Mars in the small leather pilot’s case brought in by the shuttle pilot just prior to liftoff.

  In the dining area, Solomon spread out the map on the table, and they began to work. “We are here.” Solomon stabbed the map with his finger.

  “How do you know?” Brigit asked. “I saw you check the backup GPS. It had been smashed, so how do you know?”

  Solomon put Giuseppe’s phone on the table beside him. “This was given to me by Giuseppe. Although we are out of range of the Martian cell towers, the GPS feature works just fine. Our adversary doesn’t have the pull to start shooting down the GPS satellite constellation.” He smiled grimly. “Giuseppe mentioned to me that there is a small research installation in the foothills of Nereidum Montas.” He pointed. “Here. All I have to do is to get there, call Giuseppe, and have the shuttle pick us up. Simple.”

  Elora’s face was flushed and angry. “How far is it from here to there?”

  Solomon shrugged. “Two hundred kilometers, or four or five days’ quick march.”

  Brigit snorted. “You couldn’t make it two hundred kilometers if you were in a sand crawler without a recharge, and you’re talking about doing it on foot, through soft sand. Are you insane?”

  Solomon held up his hand, thumb and forefinger about an inch apart.

  The woman glared at Elora. “I told you he was crazy,” she growled in a husky voice.

  Elora gave Solomon a long considering look, reminding him of Lucinda. “Solomon isn’t crazy,” she said slowly. “Just like my father, he isn’t telling us everything.” She smiled. “Based on his track record, I’m inclined to cut him some slack.” She gave Brigit a wink. “Seeing as how he just saved your life, too, you might consider trusting him.”

  “Do I have a choice?” Brigit snarled.

  Solomon gave the young woman a little bow. “I just need a couple of hours of sleep and a few bottles of water, and I’ll be off.”

  “You don’t even have a compass,” Brigit said.

  Solomon grinned and pointed. “That way is north.” His arm continued to track right and stopped. “That way is the research station.”

  “How the hell do you know that?” she asked.

  Solomon shrugged.

  “Now, are you beginning to understand why we trust Solomon?” Elora murmured.

  Brigit opened her mouth to say something, closed it, and just nodded.

  The hatch to the crashed shuttle grated closed, and darkness enveloped Solomon like a cool blanket. Dawn was still six hours away, and time was wasting. In his mind, the stars sang to him and the desert sand whispered his name. His heart pounded, and for some reason, he felt the three-degree Celsius air refreshing, not just above freezing. Pulling off his shirt, he tied it about his waist and luxuriated in the sensation of the wind against his skin. With great effort, he suppressed the inclination to howl at the silver sliver of Deimos. Checking the stars one last time for his direction, he put his head down and began to run, totally unaware of the stunned faces in the windows of the crashed shuttle watching him.

  The darkness wasn’t a particular inconvenience, he discovered within the first kilometer. The very starlight seemed to give the world around him a dim red glow. He stopped for water at first light then kept running, the kilometers of red Martian sand seeming to flow beneath him. When the sun was well overhead, he noted his skin was beginning to tan—or burn, as the case might be—turning a rusty red… nearly the same color as the land around him. Ignoring that, he kept running. Midday on the second day, he stopped from sheer exhaustion and sat with his back against one of the few and far between rocks. His eyes slid shut.

  Something brushed his arm, and Solomon opened his eyes. Every muscle in his body seemed to ache from the endless running. The hairs on his left arm stirred briefly as a finger of shadow moving out from beneath the rock crossed his hand, sending a tingle up his arm. The strangeness of the shadow creature froze him, but he also felt a sense of familiarity. It was like standing at the very edge of a conversation and not quite hearing what was being said. A second shadow appeared, crawling over his legs, and a third came up over his shoulder and down his bare chest, appearing to vanish into his pectoralis major without a trace of feeling or pain. The conversations waxed then waned to silence as the remaining shadows slid off his body, disappearing back into the red sands. He blinked. Every ache and pain seemed to have disappeared, and he suddenly felt as though he’d slept in a good bed for eight hours. Standing, he took a long drink of water, dropped the empty bottle, and began to run again.

  Solomon knew, without knowing how he knew, that he was approaching his goal as he scrambled to the crest of the tall dune. Red sand slithered under his feet as he stared down onto the small cluster of four white domes where an older man wearing a small respirator was working on a crawler. Looking down at his dark-red arms and torso, Sol considered his options just as the man looked up
and took away all Solomon’s choices.

  The man moved slowly away from the crawler, backing away from the approaching figure. Solomon caught the wafting odor of fear. “Emil!!” the terrified man shouted back over his shoulder, toward the nearer of the four small white domes of the research station. “You had better come out here… right now.” He raised both of his hands over his head as Solomon approached, and glancing down at the heavy energy gun on his hip, Solomon sighed and then blinked in surprise. Already, his skin tone was fading to a healthy olive, and his black ten-centimeter nails had returned to Terran normal. Pulling a shirt from around his waist, he slipped it on just as Emil emerged from the nearest dome.

  “Good morning,” Solomon called out in a conversational voice as he finished buttoning his shirt. It was the morning of the fourth day since he’d left the crash site. “I had a little problem with my shuttle.” He grinned at the two stunned-looking men. “May I use your phone, and perhaps a bathroom? I’d really like to clean up a bit.” The first man to see Solomon was now staring at him, openmouthed.

  In the mirror of the bathroom, Solomon saw that he’d grown leaner in the last four days, and harder. He started when a faint but noticeable shadow flickered across the cornea of his left eye. If he hadn’t seen it in his reflection, he would never have known that it was there, and he shuddered at the implications.

  “Hola,” Giuseppe said into the phone when Solomon called.

  “I have some bad news for you, Giuseppe.” Solomon decided to get right on with it, and not to beat around the bush. “We never made it to orbit. Someone took out the shuttle with a surface-to-air missile. Your family are all safe. I made it to the research installation in the foothills of Nereidum Montas and am calling from there. Pick me up, and I’ll show you where the crash site is. I’d rather not put out the location on an unsecured line.”

  There was silence for a long moment. “My children are all right?” Giuseppe said in a stricken voice.

  “Yes, Giuseppe. The flight crew and a flight attendant were killed, but your family is fine.”

  “But… if the flight crew were dead, who flew the shuttle?”

  Solomon hesitated. “Ahhh… I did, sir.”

  Giuseppe sighed then said in a businesslike voice, “I will be there in thirty minutes. I eagerly await your story.”

  “Yeah,” Solomon replied grimly. “You might not be so eager once you hear it.” He cut the connection before Giuseppe could respond. The story of what really happened would probably cost him his job. If he was lucky, he might have earned enough to pay for a ticket back to Earth. If not… there was always American Express, and he hadn’t left home without it.

  By the time the shuttle engines were winding down, Solomon exited the dome, his face washed and hair beaten back into some semblance of order. Giuseppe, who was waiting by the open cargo ramp, nodded briefly to a gaping Taulant Halil.

  Giuseppe studied Solomon. “You look leaner.”

  “That tends to happen when you do a two-hundred-kilometer hike in four days,” Solomon replied dryly as he made his way to the flight deck. He nodded to the pilot, the same one he’d flown with the previous week, and pointed through the windshield. “Thataway.”

  The shuttle lifted and headed off in the indicated direction.

  “A little more to port,” Solomon said. “There. Follow that heading.”

  The pilot noted the heading then glanced over his shoulder at Solomon. “How do you know the heading, without a compass?”

  Solomon snorted. “You really don’t want to know.”

  The sound of the approaching shuttle must have alerted them, because all of the survivors of the crash were standing outside, watching the shuttle’s arrival. After a quick hug for her father, Elora walked directly over to Solomon, studying him carefully with her emerald-green eyes.

  “There’s something different about you. Something happened to you out there in the desert.”

  To himself, Solomon cursed the particularly bright and overly observant young woman, to say nothing about the fact that she made him jumpy for a variety of different reasons. “You are absolutely right, Elora, but it’s not such an interesting story that I want to tell it twice. You can sit in when I tell your father exactly what happened.”

  She gave him a sweet smile. “Thank you for admitting it, and I will sit in. This should be… interesting.”

  For some reason the rest of the Fontaine family, along with Brigit, were keeping their distance from him. He thought perhaps it was because he hadn’t had time to shower. When he asked her about it, Elora gave him a level look. “We were all looking out of the windows when you left. We saw you… change.”

  Solomon shut his eyes. It’s all down the toilet now.

  “Solomon,” Giuseppe called from the half-buried nose of the shuttle, “if you have a moment, I’d like to take a look around the shuttle.” With the toe of his boot, he scraped away the sand to reveal the hole the SAM had blown in the side of the shuttle. He glanced in at the sand that had impacted the flight deck when they crashed. “You were in there?” His tone was incredulous.

  “Yeah, I was. Ask Elora about that. She and the others dragged me out and resuscitated me.”

  “I see.” Giuseppe stared at the gray hand of one of the dead flight crew sticking up out of the red sand. “Let’s go inside.” His jaws tightened when Solomon showed him the empty compartment that should have housed the emergency locator, and his gray eyes became thoughtful as he studied the ruined door Solomon had wrenched open.

  “It’s amazing what hysterical strength can do,” Solomon explained lamely.

  “Of course,” Giuseppe said in a flat tone. He looked once more around the empty shuttle. “We should go now. This has been an ordeal for everyone involved, and I’ll have a team come back to tidy up the area. Mars will take care of what remains.”

  The small office barely had room for Giuseppe, Lucinda, Solomon, and Elora. Sitting in a stiff straight-backed chair, Solomon felt as though he were being interrogated.

  “So, why don’t you begin by telling us your story, Solomon?” Giuseppe smiled, leaning back in his chair. “After that, we’ll probably ask you a few questions, and then I will tell you a little story.”

  Elora looked sharply at her father, but both Giuseppe and Lucinda were watching Solomon.

  He shut his eyes. “The flight started out routinely enough, right up to the point where I saw the contrail from the SAM an instant before it hit us, blowing a hole in the side of the flight deck and killing the flight crew. We must have been up at fifteen kilometers by then. I managed to get the flight deck door opened, sat down in the pilot’s seat, and pulled the yoke back. The nose came up, and although one of the engines was out, I managed to set us down.” He bit back a laugh. “I was pretty lucky.”

  “I suspect that luck had little to do with it, Solomon.” Giuseppe raised a single thick eyebrow. “The controls for an orbital shuttle are amazingly complex. How did you, with no orbital shuttle experience, ever manage to set the craft down in one piece?”

  Solomon frowned, knowing that his story had painted him into a corner. The only card he had left to play was the truth. “I really have no idea, Giuseppe. My hands seemed to move to the controls with their own volition.”

  Giuseppe gave his wife a long look then turned back to Solomon. “Please continue, Solomon.”

  Solomon proceeded with his rather abbreviated version of the story, right up to the point where Giuseppe arrived on the scene. Taking a long drink of water, he leaned back in his seat as Elora leaned forward.

  “That sounds like a CliffsNotes abbreviated study guide to our little adventure.” Her voice was as flat as her father’s had been. “He failed to mention that he went through the reinforced door to the flight deck like it was made of tissue paper. He also failed to mention that while both the pilot and navigator died of asphyxiation, Solomon suffered no ill effects, although he was there for the better part of fifteen minutes. Even Corporal Uí Dubhái
n had to wear an oxygen mask when she went forward to assist Solomon. Until he kicked her out.” Her green eyes swung back to Solomon. “After the crash, Solomon was buried under the sand for a full thirty minutes before we could dig him out and resuscitate him, and to top the entire story off, when he left to go to the research station, we were all watching from the window. We saw him change into…” Her brow furrowed. “Something else.” She swallowed hard. “Like a chameleon, his skin darkened to the color of the sand at night, and when he looked around to check the stars, his eyes glowed red.” She finished in a whisper, “I’m sorry, Solomon. I had to tell them.”

  He gave her a sad smile. “It’s all right, Elora.”

  Giuseppe sat calmly, his hands folded in his lap, while beside him, Lucinda had turned a deathly shade of pale. Then the elder Fontaine did the last thing Solomon had expected… he smiled. “Now, perhaps, it is time for my little story.”

  He turned slightly to Lucinda. “Feel free to fill in the blanks if I forget something, my dear. It has been a long time.” He turned back to Solomon. “My story begins twenty-eight years ago, right here on Mars. The estate wasn’t nearly as large as it is today, nor was my family as big. At that time, my eldest child, Maribel, had been gone for two years, dead from a wasting disease she contracted on Earth when her mother and I were married the previous year. That left me with my eldest son, Malachai, a precocious eleven-year-old who I spoiled rotten, and his brothers and sisters—Xane, Brea, and Hepzibah. His mother, Julia, was pregnant at the time with Corban. She died giving birth to him.” He stopped to drink a single swallow of water. “Malachai was a great adventurer and explorer, and he used to venture far out into the desert on his sand crawler.” He quickly continued at Solomon’s indrawn breath of surprise. “He was always accompanied by guards on another crawler, wherever he went,” he explained gently. “One day, several months after his eleventh birthday, Malachai found something out in the deep desert.”