Paul and Gretchen were unsure how to respond, Paul stifled a sarcastic retort about how he never had a mother in the primitive sense. He did quietly attempt again to contact Tiffany, but to no avail. So they walked along in silence. Brinley was deep in thought and peering ahead as they got closer to the dark green area.
After some time passed, Brinley said, “I believe that is a forest of some kind.”
Ahead of them the ground gently rose until it met the edge of the forest. The grasses got progressively more tightly packed together until they looked like a seamless garment of waving stalks. The trees were densely packed and of different hues of green.
The automacube replied, “That foliage may present another obstacle in our journey. However, we are on the correct vector. When we reach the side of the habitat, we will need to find an exit and enter the decks and corridors which are between the habitat and the exterior of the Vanguard.”
“I thought you were not a transport automacube,” Paul barked, letting out some of his frustration.
“That is correct. I am not a transport automacube. I am attempting to re-purpose my skills for this trek. I cannot upgrade my memory vault at this time,” Doctor 147 answered. “I was, however, able to re-purpose my emergency medical response programming to allow the input from the damaged memory vault. Hence, I am able to function in this manner.”
Several more of the strange black and bright red birds flew by heading toward the forested area. Other birds were also fly about in and out of the forest.
“Those trees are sort of like the ones in that frozen habitat,” Paul observed. “They are more spindly and ragged looking.”
“This habitat’s exits will be sealed against the Outbreak, I am certain of that. They may also be guarded, however, that usually is only around populated areas. At least from my own experiences and what the other Free Rangers tell me,” Brinley said as they walked. “We Free Rangers usually have a contact person or a few of them who live in the habitats. They help us distribute what we bring for trade. If we could find the ones for Pampas, they would help us get to a safe exit.”
“We have tools, and cutting torches, so we can open up any sealed exit,” Zoya said with confidence. “We must do that. It is essential in order to reach my momma.”
“Yes, I am aware of that,” Brinley said with a wide smile. “No door can keep me in or out, and you are correct, we do need to find one that opens to places near where your mother was lost. We cannot just try to cut through the sidewall of a habitat.”
As they were approaching the forest, some new animals were seen in the grasses at the edge of the forest. These animals were buff colored, which blended nicely with the grasses, and had four thin legs. They had white colored bellies with some white blotches on their necks and rump. Their upright heads turned to look at the people and the automacube as they approached. Some of the animals had spikes coming from their heads. The spikes were slightly arched back toward the animals back and each spike was about twice as long as the animal’s pointed upright ears. The animals began nervously pacing.
Paul pulled out his handgun. “Those things might be predators!”
“Paulie, I doubt it. Watch, they are eating the grasses,” Brinley stated.
Indeed, even though the animals were wary, a few of them were ducking their heads down and eating the grasses. Brinley continued, “They are a type of deer. We trade venison, furs, and sometimes the antlers. Although, I do admit I have not seen this specific type of animal before.”
“What is venison?” Paul asked. “Is that the name of the animals?”
“No. Venison is a term for the meat of a deer,” Brinley explained. She started to go into graphic detail of the types of cuts of meat and how it was transported or stored. Gretchen interrupted her.
“They do have those spikes on their heads,” Gretchen commented. “Are those defensive weapons or offensive weapons?”
“Well, those other predators might chase these animals, so those spikes could be a defense, but those spiked animals are taller,” Paul said. “I just do not understand how all this biological stuff works. Here it seems the animals travel together in groups. We saw that group of rat things with their underground tunnels, and the groups of flying birds, and that group of predators, and now this group of spike headed animals, although not all of them have the spikes. Some of the animals look like younger versions. What if they do not want people to go into the forest? Will they attack us if we try? Maybe they are the guardians preventing people from leaving the habitat?”
“Paul has a point,” Gretchen pulled out the pistol she carried.
Suddenly, all the animals they had been watching bolted away. They raced incredibly fast through the grasses and were out of sight.
“Wow!” Paul said. “They can run quickly! But why?”
“Perhaps because I pulled the weapon?” Gretchen suggested.
“I had my weapon out already,” Paul said.
“Paulie, they must know how good your aim is. They only felt threatened when Gretchen had hers ready,” Brinley said cheerfully. “I guess they are not the guardians of the forest or the exits. Now we just need to find the exit.”
“Do you have any suggestions?” Paul asked the automacube.
“As I have said repeatedly, I do not have details, only a general direction to guide us. This forest is one of the obstacles I warned about.”
“Spread to either side of the edge,” Brinley commanded. “Paul and Gretchen go to the right, Zoya and I will go to the left. Keep Doctor 147 in sight. If you see some way in, call to the others.”
“That sounds like a plan,” Gretchen said and led Paul away. They walked along the edge of the forest, looking for a path or a trail of some kind.
“We could just push through and into the forest, I suppose,” Paul said. “But the ground goes steadily upward rather steeply, and the trees are gnarly. It would be slow to press past them.”
“I agree, that looks like the path of most resistance. It would be a steep climb even without the trees and growth,” Gretchen replied. “If the people who designed the Vanguard built exits in the habitat, I would imagine they are clearly marked, right?”
“That would be a logical assumption, but from what I have seen, there are many things here that do not make sense. Remember the entrance to the Canyon? Or all that snow?”
They walked until they heard Brinley’s call. “We found it!”
Paul and Gretchen turned and retraced their steps and then followed the automacube as it rolled to where Brinley and Zoya were standing.
A narrow path led back into the forest where it met the bottom of a stairway. The path would have been very easy to miss, as a person had to be standing directly in line with it to see the stairs. The trees had overgrown much of the passage, and some of the steps were actually buckled up from trees which had grown up near to them. The stairs were also covered in leaves and fine brown colored small sticks. Those sticks were the same size as the green bristly ones on many of the trees. The brown ones were dry and brittle, while the green ones were flexible and a bit wet and sticky to the touch.
“This place has not been used in many years,” Brinley commented. “It will be perfect for us. It must lead to an exit.”
Zoya rushed ahead and sprinted up the stairs two at a time. “I will get to the door and begin operations to open it.” She called back.
Walking up to the stairway, Paul noticed the musky smell of being in the forest. The brown needles under his feet snapped a bit. The air did not move, and the light from the sky tube was blunted. There were green patches of something attached or growing on the trunks of the trees. He peered into the forest on either side, but it was too dense to see very far.
Insects flew by and their buzzing sounds were varied by their numbers and how close they got to the listener. A few landed on Paul’s ears and that annoyed him. He saw Gretchen batting at the flying insects as well. Other sounds of other kinds of creatures came from the forest around t
hem, and those noises were unfamiliar to Paul or Gretchen.
The stairway was not made from permalloy, or from steel, but some other substance. It was difficult to identify since it was covered in growing things in so many places. The stairway was not quite a meter wide, so they progressed in single file. The old stairs ran parallel to the angle of the ground. The further up that they climbed the more the steps were covered in the dry needles. For about a hundred meters they continued. The automacube rolling up the steps behind the people.
“I found the exit!” Zoya called from up ahead. “It is a real mess.”
“We will be there momentarily,” Brinley called. She hurried her pace and ran up the stairs and away.
At the top of the stairs, Gretchen and Paul found a twisting pathway which they began to follow. They stopped to look at this more level part of the forest. Overhead they could see it led to a permalloy wall. The wall was mostly blocked by overgrown trees, but they could see that it was the side of the habitat. They knew the wall would reach upward until it gently arced to meet the sky tube.
“In the other habitat, there was an open section next to the sides. Here the foliage has grown up right to the permalloy. Some of the vines are actually attaching to the permalloy and climbing it,” Gretchen observed.
They saw a glimpse of Brinley as she ran around a twist in the path and was lost to sight.
Brinley found Zoya pulling at a branch which was blocking a pressure door. The branch had been part of a tree which had cracked and split down its trunk, leaving a jagged yet still connected cone of fragmented wood spikes. One side of the tree, a large branch, had fallen over horizontally, but was only half torn from the tree’s pointy and split trunk. The pine needles were still green on only some parts of the tree, but beneath it there was a blanket of fallen, brittle, brown, dried out twigs, needles, and small segments of broken bark. The tree had not broken apart entirely, with several branches trying to shoot upward in one direction, with the large fractured branch inclined to the side. New growth was coming up from the sideways trunk, but mixed in among that were numerous broken and dried branches. The tree looked half dead.
“I cannot even get at the pressure door until I get this wrecked tree out of the way. I thought it might just break completely where that large crack happened, but no matter how I pull on it, it will not snap,” Zoya complained. She had both hands wrapped around the branch which was about a quarter of a meter in diameter. “So I will just cut through it.”
Zoya quickly unpacked a cutting torch and fired it up. The orange flame was shooting out about a hand span. “This should cut quickly through this!”
“Zoya wait!” Brinley cautioned as she approached. “When the others get here we will safely move that obstacle.”
“I am getting this out of the way, so I can rescue my momma,” Zoya said as she touched the flame to the branch.
From back at the top of the stairway came a deep male voice, “Halt! You will not break quarantine!”
Victor and the tracking dog Tarpay stood there. He could only see the automacube, Paul, and Gretchen. Zoya and Brinley were further along the twisted pathway, next to the wall where the blocked pressure door was located. Victor did have his sidearm drawn, and Tarpay’s ears were perked forward in alertness.
“Who are you?” Gretchen asked as she turned.
“Why is that predator there?” Paul asked as he too turned to address Victor. He was surprised by the animal. The beast did not look exactly like the ones which he had scared off at the river, and it did not seem to be a threat to the man. In fact, the animal and the man seemed united in purpose.
This new predator had a look of intelligence in its eyes, and a face that was creamy tan colored with large brownish nose and darker gray fur around its tan ears. The muscular body was covered by soft looking fur of grays on its back, and creamy buff colors elsewhere. The animal’s abdominal fur was almost white color. Paul was struck by the majestic feeling the animal inspired in him, unlike the dangerous feeling he had from the predators at the river.
Paul’s eyes went back and forth between the mysterious predator he did not understand, and the man with the weapon trained on them, which he understood as a direct and imminent threat.
“I thought you might have already escaped after the pronghorn were spooked by me and Tarpay,” Victor stated. “Just turn back and walk slowly to where the other two smugglers are. Make no sudden movements. I will shoot smugglers with little hesitation. Your friends cannot escape. No one can outrun Tarpay, especially in the boundary forest.”
As they walked along the twisting pathway, Victor spoke into the multiceiver, “Base, I have confronted the smugglers. They were about to break quarantine, at F-23. I have two of them, and the automacube in custody. The other two are not far away and cannot escape.”
“Well done, reinforcements will be there in under thirty minutes,” the voice on the multiceiver replied.
Back at the pressure door, Zoya was carelessly handling the cutting torch, and using it on the large tree.
“Zoya, shut down the torch!” Brinley commanded. Neither could see back along the twisting path to where Victor had confronted the others. Brinley thought she had heard someone call, but the torch was burning through the tree and making a whining sound. The cutting also was causing cracking and popping noises from the burning wood.
“I will have the pressure door open momentarily,” Zoya said. She pushed the smoldering branch, now severed from the main trunk, out of the way. It fell with a crash and struck against the roots of the tree. Zoya had much more experience cutting metal than she did in cutting wood. She had used the widest flame to cut through the tree by viciously burning down from the break in the tree and into the horizontal branch. This had removed the obstacle, but had also deeply cut into the other side of the trunk which was smoldering badly. Stepping past the remains of the limb, she changed the style of cutting flame and applied the torch to the welds around the door. “I will get to my momma!”
Paul and Gretchen walked past the bend in the pathway and they could see what was happened by the pressure door. So could Victor, who was appalled. “Halt! You cannot use flames like that in here.”
Tarpay began wildly barking and his ears were laid back as he stepped between Victor and the two captives, Paul and Gretchen.
The cutting torch had severed the branch, which was now smoking badly and smelled terrible. Gray smoke was coming from the burned stump as well as the removed branch. Embers had fallen onto the dry, brown, needles around the trail and the tree trunk. They were burning and starting to flame up. The fire was following the dead needles and dry branches.
“Idiots! Put the fire out,” Victor rushed ahead and started to stomp on the burning needles.
“I am getting to my momma!” Zoya yelled as she continued to apply the cutting torch to the pressure door. She again adjusted the flame and was now using vibration and sonics as well as heat to cut the permalloy welds. The last weld separated, and Zoya pushed in an override code and the pressure door slid partially open with a grinding shriek.
Zoya pushed through the small space and was away. Brinley leaped after her.
Victor fired the handgun twice at the fleeing Zoya and Brinley.
Blam, blam!
The bullets struck right where they had been standing and only missed them by the smallest of margins.
Paul rushed forward and yelled, “Do not shoot!”
Tarpay leaped at Paul and dragged him down, pulling savagely at his arm. Paul was wailing in fear as the beast dragged him back. Paul tried to kick or hit, but the animals was overpowering in its strength and skill. Paul was immobilized.
Gretchen quickly pulled out her handgun and leveled it at Victor.
“Call off the animal!” Gretchen commanded.
“Idiots!” Victor yelled. “You have broken containment and started a fire! Are you trying to kill everyone here?” His handgun was aimed squarely at Gretchen. He was about to squeeze the trigger,
when he saw the weapon she held. It was a design he had never seen before, and for some reason that gave him pause.
Victor’s mind rapidly considered his options. The woman aiming at him clearly looked confident in her abilities, the weapon was strange and dangerous looking. The threats of the outbreak and loss of quarantine were serious, but behind him he could hear the crackling and smell how the fire was quickly spreading. The fire was the more urgent danger. Yet he knew if he tried to put out the fire, this female smuggler would flee or shoot him.
“You two will not escape. You are guilty and…”
“Look out!” Gretchen yelled.
The still upright side of the burning tree cracked and then broke. It fell in a crash all around Victor. Flames engulfing him as he was stricken to the ground.
“Arguu!” He screamed as the burning tree covered over him. He tried to turn and roll out, but the flames were high.
The Colony Ship Vanguard: The entire eight book series in one bundle Page 58
