Between squawks Tyrell heard the thumping of the bird’s heavy footsteps behind him, getting closer. Ahead of him, Dejois was now only ten meters from the trees, Klaar a meter or two behind. He pushed harder. Then his right foot snagged something and threw off his step. He struggled to regain his balance, to bring the foot forward in stride, but he’d lost it. He went down, hard, sliding along the dirt as he tried to turn it into a roll and get back to his feet.
Squawk!
It was too late; the bird was upon him. Its massive head swung down at him and he rolled just in time for the beak to miss. He rolled to the side again. He wanted to face the bird to anticipate it. Then it raised a foot, and he scrabbled backwards. Those claws could gut him in an instant. It stepped toward him and darted its head forward. He twisted, and felt the bird’s hot breath on his face as the beak slid past. It stunk of rotten meat. He was done for; the bird was too fast.
“Fred!” Klaar yelled, looking back at the commotion. “Hey get out of there!” Klaar turned to run back at the bird. “Ha! Ha!”
Squawk! The bird turned its head away from Tyrell. “Ulrika, just run!” he yelled at her.
“Fichez le camp! Scram!” Dejois had found a long tree branch and come back, he began whacking and stabbing at the terror bird. That wouldn’t deter it for long. “Tyrell, run!”
Tyrell scrambled to get to his feet, Klaar helping him, and they ran for the tree line. Dejois backed up and tried to shoo the bird, nearly twice his height, with the branch. The bird grabbed at the branch, missing, but Dejois needed help.
There must be more loose branches. Tyrell scanned the brush at the edge of the tree line. Nothing!
“Tyrell! A little help?” Dejois kept swinging his stick at the bird, to little effect. “Shoo! Ouste!”
“Working on it!” Could he pull a branch off? He tugged at one. It barely moved.
“Tyrell!” Dejois called, desperation evident in his voice.
There was one, on the ground. Tyrell grabbed it up. It wouldn’t come. He wrested it hard, and Ulrika joined to help. It pulled free of the tangle it had been caught in. “Stay here,” he said to her, and ran back at the bird, waving the branch.
“Ha! Shoo! Scat! Get out of here!”
Squarwk! The bird backed up a step. It looked from Dejois to Tyrell and back again, at the branches they were waving in its face and swatting it with. It took a tentative peck at Dejois’s branch.
“Hah, no you don’t, get out of here!” Tyrell darted in from the side and whacked the creature’s side, jumping quickly back from the leg that came up. The angle was wrong for the bird to score a hit, and it turned toward him.
“This way, you grand poulet!” Dejois came in from the other side to distract it. All the while, they were both trying to edge back closer to the tree line.
“That’s it, we’ve got him confused,” Tyrell said. “Hah yah!” He thwacked at the bird again, then backpedaled a few steps. “Almost at the trees.” Thwack! “On three we throw the branches at it and run like hell.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Squawk! The bird tried to rush Dejois. Tyrell moved in to whack at it.
“None of your squawking, Tweety! Take this!” Poke, thrash. “Okay, on three.” Tyrell saw Dejois nod and they began counting. “One. Two. Three!” He hurled his branch at the bird’s face.
“Allons y!”
“Running! Ulrika, get going!”
They passed the tree line and kept going. They could hear the bird crashing through trees behind them. The trunks were too far apart to slow it down much.
Tyrell spied a thicker clump of trees off at an angle. “To the left!” he called to Klaar, a few paces ahead of him. They veered off. The crashing behind them seemed to be slowing down.
Squawk. It sounded more disappointed than angry, now.
They reached the thicket and slowed. The slim trees were only a half meter apart, sometimes narrower. They had to squeeze and turn sideways in places to thread between them. Five meters in they stopped and turned, panting to catch their breath.
The bird pushed up against two slim tree trunks, trying to squeeze through. It reached its head in and pecked, then pulled back. It squawked again, loudly, then looked around as though realizing where it was. It turned and trotted back out toward the clearing.
“Well, that was fun,” Klaar said. “Let us not do it again.”
“Fine with me. But did you catch the look it gave when it left?”
“Look? You can read alien bird facial expressions now?”
Tyrell shrugged. “Maybe not, but I got the impression it didn’t really want to be in the woods. Do you suppose it was afraid of something?”
“I don’t think I want to meet whatever scares that thing. But maybe it is something small, something that eats eggs,” Dejois said.
“That bird would make a quick snack of anything like that.”
“In the open, yes,” Klaar agreed. “But it might be more difficult in the woods. If there were something eating its eggs, survival bias would favor birds that stayed out of the forest.”
“Yeah, I can see it.” Tyrell looked about them. It was forest in every direction except toward the clearing where the terror bird lived. “Now, how do we get home from here?”
“Stay close at the tree line and follow it south, non? If the terror bird attacks again we scurry back in.”
“And if whatever it’s afraid of attacks us from the forest?”
“Ask me again when it happens,” said Dejois. “Let’s just get going.”
“I don’t think we really have to worry about anything large,” Klaar said. “Do you Roger? The predator-prey ratio is wrong, what would it feed on?”
“A good point.” Roger turned to Tyrell. “Predators need multiple prey animals to sustain them, especially if they are high metabolism like mammals or birds. A few terror birds wouldn’t be enough, and I don’t think there’s much else near the edge of the forest. Deeper in, maybe.”
“Oh?” Tyrell wasn’t convinced. “And what if there are so few terror birds because the local predators ate them? Maybe we’re here at the wrong time.”
Dejois and Klaar looked at each other. She shrugged. “It’s possible, but not likely. We will just have to watch ourselves.”
“Keep an eye out for smaller animals,” Dejois said. “If there are few or many we will have some idea of the amount of other prey there is, or maybe we will spot something that likely eats bird eggs.”
“Next time, how about we find a nice barren area where I can go rock collecting?”
∞ ∞ ∞
“Hey, what you were saying about eggs?” Tyrell asked Dejois as they made their way back to camp.
“Yes? What about them?”
“The eggs of those things must be huge, bigger than ostrich eggs. Do you suppose they’d be good eating?”
“Hmm. I don’t see why not. Most bird eggs are. Would you agree, Ulrika?”
“Well, edible at least, perhaps not tasty. That would make one very large omelet.”
“Oui. The shell would be thick, too. We might be able to do something with those, some kind of container or bowl. Primitives use ostrich eggs that way I think.”
“Be a bitch to collect, though,” Tyrell said.
“What, do you want to set up a chicken coop for those monsters?” Dejois asked.
“Oh that would go over real well. Although, one drumstick would be a Thanksgiving dinner for the whole crew.”
“That it would.”
“Now if we could just find us some cranberries,” Tyrell said.
“They grow in bogs, don’t they?”
“For all I know they grow on trees. I’ve only ever seen them on my plate, or in a bag or can at the grocery store.” He paused, then in a wistful tone added: “Ooh, grocery stores.”
“No,” Dejois
said, “I am certain it is bogs.”
“Whatever. It won’t be real cranberries here anyway, but if we’re lucky we can find something that tastes similar.”
“I think we would want to test them carefully first,” Klaar said. “A lot of berries have toxins to discourage certain kinds of animals from eating them. The nightshade family, for example.”
“Like tomatoes?”
“They’re not all toxic. But also hot peppers, which is why they’re hot.”
The conversation continued in that vein as they continued their hike. The terror bird had given up on them and was well behind. They didn’t encounter any more such birds, but did see what might have been a nest, empty of eggs.
Chapter 15: Engineering Problems
Engineering, aboard the Anderson
Naomi Maclaren closed the browser window on her screen and slumped back in her chair in disgust. Building the aqueduct had turned into a stupid chicken and egg problem. There was nothing like bamboo anywhere to be found nearby, Singh had said the climate probably wasn’t right for it. There was no shortage of trees, but she needed a way to saw them into lumber, even rough lumber, to construct the flume. A sawmill would be perfect. if she had something to make a blade with, and something to power it. Like a water wheel. If she had lumber to make one. And an aqueduct to convey the water to it.
The construction of the sawmill presented several challenges, not least of which was figuring out how to actually cut the logs down to lumber. She had access to a vast library describing tools, mechanisms, mills and whatnot—the ship’s computers held the equivalent of several early twenty-first century Wikipedia’s worth of information, as well as digital copies of several million books. Storage was cheap, and digital bits didn’t weigh anything. What she did not have was access to a vast warehouse of tools or processed materials.
She picked up her coffee mug, drank from it, and almost spit the coffee back out over her keyboard. “Crikey, that’s awful!” she exclaimed aloud. It was cold, and disgusting. She took the mug back to the galley to refill it, thinking about the problem.
Making a meter-diameter circular saw blade on Earth would be a simple matter of laying a sheet of steel in a laser or plasma cutter and feeding it a digital template file. The ship’s library also had a wealth of templates and design files to control the fabber. The fabber was an elaborate robotic manufacturing machine combining elements of a 3D printer, computerized milling machine, extruder and compact chemical synthesis lab. It could create an amazing variety of useful objects and parts. What the fabber could not do was create a square meter of sheet steel, although with a little reconfiguration it could certainly cut that steel. It could cut various structural materials, like the aluminum alloys and carbon composites used in the ship. The mission planners had known that they didn’t really know what to plan for, and so had tried to prepare for anything. An extended stay on a terraformed planet, though, was a bit beyond what they had expected.
Coffee in hand, Maclaren sat back down and doodled on her notepad.
Even if she had a saw blade, that was only part of the problem, just cutting the logs. There was also the matter of powering that blade, whatever it turned out to be, and of getting the logs from wherever the trees were felled to the mill. As far as cutting trees down in the first place . . . well, if they found the source of the obsidian spear points, they could make stone axes, although she doubted that would go over well.
I wish I’d taken more mechanical engineering classes, she thought. Who knew?
She flipped her screen to the area map that Finley had been working on. The map was better than the aerial photographs, as it eliminated a lot of superfluous detail, and highlighted useful things like the topography, tributaries to the river they had landed near, and so on. There was a stream there, more of a small river, that descended a fairly steep slope for a stretch. If there were a channel or aqueduct from further upstream, it would have a good drop at this point. She traced the path of the river upstream. Yes, if they cut and trimmed trees in this wooded area, they could float the logs down to a mill placed here, and use water power from the channel to turn a saw blade by way of a water wheel.
If she had a saw blade. And a water wheel. Damn it!
All right, what did she have?
There was sheet metal in the ship’s structure, mostly aluminum alloys but also many titanium parts, as well as composites and miscellaneous other metals and plastics in smaller quantities. How much would Sawyer or the rest of the team be willing to let her cut up the ship? In theory, it was still space-worthy, but it had no fuel and many of the seals would soon be approaching the end of their design life. They wouldn’t have been expected to sit out in the weather for several months longer than a planned landing, although Maclaren was confident that they’d hold up well past their best-before date.
Either way, she didn’t think anyone reasonably expected that a return mission would just expect them to be able to fuel up and go, they’d have to send another lander that could return them to orbit. The thing was, disassembling the ship was a psychological milestone, like Cortez burning his boats on arriving in the New World. It meant there was no going back until they were rescued, or developed spaceflight all over again. And if it comes to that last, why go back at all? There might not be anything to go back to. We’re fucked.
A call on the ship’s radio interrupted that train of thought. It would be Sawyer or Finley calling in from the EP03. Maybe they’d found something interesting. Maclaren went to answer the comm.
Chapter 16: The Hill
EP03, northwest of the landing site
Sawyer and Finley cruised over the thick green forest beneath them, looking for a good place to land and set up another seismographic station.
“I don’t like this,” Sawyer said. “We haven’t seen a clearing for a while, there’s nowhere to set down.”
“Let’s go a little further. It’s not like we have to worry about engine failure.” The electric motor powering the aircraft could run continuously for years if it had power. Right now the solar panels built into the wings were providing power almost as fast as the motor could take it. Together with the battery, they had an easy thousand-kilometer range left.
“No, nor bird strikes. We’ve seen a few, but nothing like the dense flocks on Kakuloa. But I’m going to want to land soon. I thought there’d be clearings.”
“What did the orbital photos show?” Of course they had done a survey of most of the planet before landing.
“Clearings further west, and back toward our landing site. This particular area was under cloud cover though. It seemed reasonable to expect clearings.”
“Ah, so you assumed,” Finley said.
“Don’t rub it in.”
It didn’t help that a mid-day haze was cutting their visibility. Sawyer estimated it at ten kilometers or so, adequate for visual flying but useless for spotting a clearing that might be only a few kilometers further than that. Wait, what was that ahead on the left? Through the haze, it looked like something poking up above the trees.
“Finley, what do you make of that?” she pointed and banked the plane toward it.
“Huh. Looks like a lone hill. We know this area was volcanic once, maybe an old cinder cone?”
As they drew closer, Sawyer could see that the regular, triangular shape of the feature made that a possibility. They were close enough now that she could tell it was tree-covered. “That’s a lot of vegetation for a cinder cone,” she said, thinking of the Capucin volcano in northern New Mexico.
“Wet climate, fertile soil.” Finley shrugged. “Although it does seem to come to a point, there’s no obvious crater.”
“Yeah. Something else, then.”
Finley didn’t say anything for a moment, just studying the peak as they approached it. Then he said “Interesting. A volcanic fea
ture would tend to be circular, this is squarish.”
“You’d get angles at the intersection of two dikes,” Sawyer said, although she couldn’t recall anything specifically like that on Earth. The volcanic neck at Shiprock, New Mexico, perhaps?
“I’ve seen something like this in the Yucatan,” Finley said.
“The Yucatan peninsula? What was it?”
“I visited Altun Ha, about fifty kilometers from Belize City. Several pyramids. Not very tall compared to some other sites, but from the top of the main pyramid, you could look out over the jungle and see, here and there, what looked like triangular hills poking above the trees. Those hills were jungle-covered pyramids.”
“You’re saying this is a pyramid? It’s a long way from obsidian knives to pyramids.”
“Is it? Not in Mexico and the Yucatan it wasn’t. Maybe those spear points or knives we found weren’t as old as we thought. No way could something like this last a million years.”
“No. A few thousand at most, depending on the stone, more if the climate were cool and dry for a while. But there’s only one, and it doesn’t look much like a pyramid.”
“Covered with forest and soil. It wouldn’t.”
The forest was unbroken beneath them. “I wish there were a clearing, I’d love to land and check it out.”
“We don’t really know what might live in the forest here. I’d be wary. And the slopes of that thing might be unstable. But there’s nowhere to land anyway.”
“No, there isn’t.” Sawyer banked the aircraft, circling around the hill, or pyramid, or whatever it was. “Take lots of pictures. I want someone to come back here with scanners to see what we can make out through the vegetation and surface soil. The same goes for the general area. If somebody did build this”—the thought gave Sawyer a brief chill—“there could be other evidence around. Other structures, stone fences, something.”
“Might not be much after all these years.”
Alpha Centauri: Sawyer's World (T-Space: Alpha Centauri Book 2) Page 7
