Analog Science Fiction and Fact - 2014-07

by Penny Publications

  "Oh? What? Walk with me and tell me as we go."

  The training was brutal: a total of twelve standard hours a day combining lectures and physical programming conducted in a kind of fenced-in children's garden where the dangers, and there were more than the reports had shown me, could be presented one at a time. The local fauna had rarely been a problem, although several species might kill a human by accident if said human stood in the wrong place at the right time. The flora offered a different story. Those "leaves" I'd thought so beautiful on video weren't all soft and harmless. Some plants grew natural weapons, sharp as a fresh razor and hard as quartz. Spotting the plants that sported such blades wasn't even easy in the garden because they didn't stand out. Spotting them quickly in the wilderness was both crucial and nearly impossible for the inexperienced. Oh, and several of the same plants could suddenly whip their branches around. Dead animals, I gathered, make great fertilizer.

  To my secret delight, Priam alone screwed up in the garden. Avoiding one whipping razor plant, he stepped directly into reach of another. His pride seemed undiminished, so aside from a few trivial cuts, his EE suit suffered almost all of the damage. He didn't appear troubled by this until he learned that the station had no way to make repairs on recent tech, or even do a detailed diagnostic. The fact that the suit registered itself as operational didn't smooth his frown.

  After kindergarten, we were taught to "soft-walk" to make traversing Abreathon's hyper-aerated terrain safer. The trick involved keeping our knees slightly bent as we strolled, which we practiced with and without snowshoes. The idea was to minimize bouncing. Priam pointed out that both he and Micah had already mastered a similar technique as a "prophylactic against back and joint strain" before coming to heavy-gravity Earth, so further training was a waste of time. Our instructor nodded agreeably but kept all of us practicing. Micah observed, with a chuckle, that his feet were already almost the size of the available snowshoes, a remark our instructor simply ignored.

  At the academy, we'd become reasonably proficient with ultrawave weapons, but the UWs here were practically antiques. So we got retrained only to be informed, when our tutor reluctantly declared us fit to make a supervised venture into the wilderness, that we wouldn't be issued any kind of weapon. An armed guide would protect us when and if necessary and only that paragon would be trusted with such a valuable item as a com-link set to cut through the local radio static. Being good to go, we got.

  It's one thing to see videos of an unfamiliar environment, and the quality of the final videos I'd watched had been excellent, but another to actually be in said environment. We could breathe the air with a little help from one of several kinds of patches that had been applied to our skins with a cheerful promise that pulling them off would hurt like hell. Gravity was a tad beyond Earth's, but I'd lost weight on the flight thanks to the cuisine, so I didn't feel heavier. And the terrain didn't strike me as particularly unearthly. But as we left the sandy beach where the safe-camp lay hidden behind light-bending screens, and headed into the forest, I got so disoriented that I could barely keep my balance on the crawler.

  It was the plants, specifically, those flat jewels that passed as leaves here. During the day, the flora sucked up so much air moisture that my nose felt as dry as Death Valley despite the mild weather. The air was vacuum-clear, and the endless rows and spirals of crystal fins everywhere I looked made my brain spin.

  Many "leaves" were larger and more transparent than I'd expected, and I could see other leaves through them, and the show didn't necessarily stop there. Not only were the col-or combinations intricate beyond belief, they kept altering with every inch that my faithful if ridiculous steed carried me along.

  Our crawlers weren't your standard model miniature tanks, rolling merrily along on caterpillar tracks when they weren't abusing gravity for flying purposes. No such luck. They more resembled deep buckets with a crazy propulsion system. EE engineers, all geniuses at near Priam-caliber no doubt, had developed a loam-sparing tread system on elaborate cams that was intended to emulate the way local animals moved. The result? We barreled into the forest almost as fast as I could hop. At first, I was grateful for the slowness, but once my brain adjusted to the surroundings, my appreciation got used up.

  At one point our guide into the unknown, a glum-faced explorer named Neil Coriaca, a UW holstered at his hip and an emergency bag slung over one shoulder, got a bit further ahead of us. I took advantage by edging my crawler closer to Priam's. We hadn't had a chance to talk privately even after we'd left the ship thanks to never being alone, and we'd been separated in the safe-camp. Trust me, I had things to say.

  I kept my voice at a near whisper. "Wish I could believe you knew what you were doing."

  At least he had the grace to squirm. "I suppose we'll find out together. Didn't you notice something odd in the reports?"

  I scowled, trying to whip my mind into remembering "something odd" in recordings where everything seemed odd. "Nothing in particular."

  "Tsk and again tsk. Look, if our native guide there hangs around after we reach the abreathers, I'll need you to distract him for a minute."

  I looked forward, but the explorer showed no sign of having overheard. "What do you mean 'distract'?"

  "Get him to stand with his back to me, or someplace he can't see what I'm doing. Just for a moment."

  I wanted to tell Priam how much I liked that idea, but just then Coriaca braked and gestured toward a clearing some ten meters ahead. We all climbed out of our slow-mobiles, strapped on our snowshoes, and waddled toward the clearing with the explorer in front. On the way, Coriaca placed his emergency bag on the ground. I wished he wasn't the only one armed.

  "Isn't this wonderful?" Micah asked me, his big eyes shining.

  "Glad you're having fun," I muttered.

  Up close and in real life, the hexicows loomed considerably larger and more daunting than I'd figured. Fancier as well, and much grosser. Aside from their overall hexagonal framework shown in the videos, even their substructures followed a hexagonal pattern, such as the fissures where their needles-onbubbles-on-stalks feeding apparatus emerged. Each had six small eyes on their upper torsos in mismatched colors, and if you drew lines between them, connect-the-dot style, you'd form a wide hexagon oriented with a flat facet on top. I'd say that was an eye surplus, but these things were greedy. Each of their dual-f ingered tentacles also had eyes; and even though I couldn't see more than a few from where I stood, I was betting on six per. Oddly, the one exception to the rule was the number of tentacles. Our little herd had a total of four citizens, all equipped with native radio bracelets; two citizens had five tentacles and the others had seven. That inconsistency, I felt, showed a lack of commitment.

  One gross part was the smell, which would've been unbearable if it had been a little more pungent. Since we didn't need to filter our breathing air, I was getting the full snoot of a stench that reminded me of a garbage disposal with halitosis.

  The other grossness was the multicolored mucus that oozed from the hexicows' fissures. I'd seen the slime on video reports, but mistaken it for shiny skin coloration.

  Coriaca stopped and put his fists on his hips in a posture I'd never seen anyone except actors use. "As ordered, I brought you to the nearest group of abreathers. These four are usually right here. If any of you can demonstrate a justification for wasting my time and delaying my packing, have at it."

  The Martian shrugged. "You're welcome to return; we can make our own way back to base."

  "I wish. But I have orders to keep an eye on you until you're ready to give up."

  Priam flashed me a meaningful look. I had no desire whatever to follow his previous instructions, but it dawned on me that I had no real choice. If he didn't have the goods, we were sunk.

  "Explorer," I snapped. "Why are there so many more holes in the ground behind you than where I'm standing?"

  "What are you talking about, Cadet? I don't see any difference—hey! What the hell are you playing at
, Galanis? What did you just put on that abreather?"

  Coriaca had whirled back around just in time to see Priam step away from the closest member of the small herd, and his immediate reaction was to draw his UW. I'd kept my eyes on the explorer while his back was turned, but had caught a peripheral glimpse of the Boy Genius fishing something round out of his survival suit and slipping it onto one of the hexicow's tentacles.

  My boy had major nerve, I admit. With a UW aimed between his eyes, the Martian smiled the kind of smile you'd want to wipe off with sandpaper. "Only something I borrowed from the safe-camp: that abandoned radio bracelet one of your people found. It was a symbolic gesture more than anything else."

  Anger and disgust kept switching places on the explorer's face. "You'll be sorry you stole that, boy, real sorry."

  "No stealing involved, sir. The loan was prearranged."

  "I doubt it. Well, I suppose we'd better leave it there now, but what the hell were you trying to accomplish?"

  "Watch and learn," Priam said, but I wondered how much he was faking confidence.

  "Always sound advice," Micah contributed. The big goof was obviously living in a happier universe than I was.

  We all turned our eyes to the creature with the extra tentacle band. For a time, nothing happened until I heard Coriaca make one of those preliminary noises that warns you a volcano is about to erupt. Priam had just violated, off the top of my head, at least five major EE rules.

  The volcano failed to blow when—I can't claim all hell broke loose when what really broke loose was every damn tentacle on all three hexicows. These things were surprisingly long because their heads and most of their bodies had been hidden inside their, um, hosts. Surprisingly ugly too, with wrinkled eyeless skulls on one end that had tiny tentacles of their own, and large floppy mouths with yellow, disturbingly human-looking teeth. Once on the ground, they moved tail-first, those twin fingers at the ends waggling at us. For a few terrifying seconds, they were all crawling our way, fast. Backing up in snowshoes isn't easy, but just before our new buddies reached us, they all dived into some of the many holes underfoot. The hexicows didn't seem upset at their absence, but something made them gradually ease away from us.

  "And that," Priam said with barely hidden relief, "proves my point."

  "What point?" Coriaca demanded. "What the hell just happened?"

  "They got my little hint and knew the, uh, jig was up. If any of those creatures had stuck around, I'd have introduced you to Abreathon's actual intelligent inhabitants. They were right under your noses the whole time."

  The explorer's larynx twitched a few times before any words came out. "Explain. Now."

  I barely listened to my teammate because of two things. First, I knew what he would say. The truth had figuratively been under my own nose ever since I watched those reports. How could I have missed it? Only one known species of animals here had "tentacles" and only those supposed limbs carried advanced technology. Also, said tentacles were not issued in the otherwise universal six-pack. And despite decades of intense attempts at communication with the, ha, brainy hexicows, the EE team here had made nary a smidgen of progress. Funny thing about Priam: his insights tended to be self-evident, but only in retrospect. They didn't so much make him seem brilliant as make me feel stupid.

  The other reason I didn't pay closer attention to Priam's words of wisdom had to do with a vibration beneath my feet, an uneven sort of gentle shaking. I wondered if it might be a precursor to an unearthly earthquake.

  "Hey!" I interrupted Golden Boy. "Anyone else notice—"

  That's when I got interrupted myself by the ground collapsing under me.

  There's nothing that focuses the mind quite like a surprise fall, also the galactic champion at installing panic. The topsoil I'd been standing on, falling with me, blocked my view of anything below. I'd guess I was five meters down before training kicked in and I activated my inertia-control system while beginning to spread out my body horizontally.

  Thanks to the speed I'd built up, air resistance stopped me cold and I watched the topsoil head downward on its own. Before I could think about what to do next, Priam plummeted on past me. Perhaps he'd been caught so off-guard, concentrating on his educational sermon, that he'd forgotten his own training. Far more likely his suit had malfunctioned thanks to that slasher kindergarten plant. Either way, this was really bad—the ground was still a long way down. Micah also zipped past me in a head-first dive, falling so rapidly that I knew he'd decreased his inertia, less than I had, and was keeping vertical to reduce drag. I knew why, and it poked a whopping hole in my concept of Micah as slow-witted.

  Merely drifting down now myself, I watched the Venusian angle his body to use the air as a kind of ramp. In an instant, he reached Priam and nearly pulled off the stunt of a lifetime. He grabbed one of Priam's arms and pulled the Martian in close, obviously hoping to extend his suit's inertial field to blanket them both and then kill their joint inertia.

  A great plan... in theory, but I doubt that anyone could've gotten that much done in the split-second remaining until they hit. Our suits react quickly, but even the most recent tech can't instantaneously make large changes in field-strength. Both men hit pretty damn hard.

  I'd always thought the notion of one's heart jumping into one's throat was ridiculous, but it sure felt like that. I sped up my fall, more than was wise, but landed on broken-up topsoil with more a jar than a crash. I ditched my snowshoes. It smelled musty here, but not Earth musty. And why was it this warm underground? Skirting mounds of collapsed dirt, plants, and rocks, I called out to my teammates as I ran to them. No answer. They weren't moving but, thank God, both were breathing. Micah, it seemed, had finessed a bit of inertial relief after all, and they, too, had landed on loose dirt. Both had lost their snowshoes. Listening closer, I heard a wheeze in Priam's lungs that I didn't like.

  Micah was the only one of us with health-assessment implants, which seemed more unfair than ironic at the moment. Using the limited medical training all third-year cadets are given, I checked for broken bones and signs of hemorrhage. I thought Priam's left arm might be fractured, but saw no compound breaks or visible indications of major trauma. Still, the wheezing kept getting worse. At a guess, Micah had a broken rib or two. I didn't dare try to move either of them.

  Judging by sensations, my heart had returned from my throat to home base. But it was pounding in my chest as though it intended to break out. I had better, I thought, pull myself together right now if I hoped to save my men.

  But how to save them? My suit had an emergency com-link function, but that wouldn't work underground, and the local radio static would probably block it anyway. But Coriaca's com-link was set to—

  Then it hit me. What had happened to Coriaca? I glanced around to see if he'd fallen too. Took me a moment to spot him. His body lay crumpled not far from me, but on a jagged ledge a few meters higher than my head. Blood dripped down the ledge and not just a little. I adjusted my inertia and climbed the nearly vertical wall to where he lay. No vital signs, which was no surprise. A jagged root with a sharp, broken-off end protruded from his abdomen and a similar one from his chest at heart level, both piercing his antiquated inertia gear. His jacket had come open and I stared at the kind of external suit controls that had become obsolete years ago. No wonder he didn't have enough time to save himself. His com-link, antique enough to resemble an old-fashioned wristwatch, had come off his arm and had cleverly managed to shatter against a rock. The UW had fared better, remaining safe in its holster, but its gory coating stopped me from claiming it as my own. I couldn't spot his emergency bag anywhere.

  I let myself drop to the floor of what appeared to be a small but very deep cave with a modest skylight surrounded by a galaxy of tentacle-sized skylights. The walls started out vertical—I'd just proved how climbing that part was no problem—but after a few meters they progressively curved inwards, making climbing impossible without special gear. Aside from uneven mounds of debris on the cav
e floor, a small tree had fallen in, now lying horizontal and acting as a bridge between two of the largest mounds. One hell of a mess, but adding up to so little material that I knew this area had already been almost entirely hollow.

  I felt light-headed and sick to my stomach, and my vision decided this was the perfect time to go black. I sat down, head lowered, and took three deep breaths, forcing myself to calm down. Why do horror and panic show up just when you can least afford them?

  Slowly, my eyesight cleared. For the first time, I took a good look at the cave wall—or cave-in wall?—opposite Coriaca's bloody ledge. At a glance, I'd thought all the little projections were tree roots, but turns out I had an audience. Hundreds of extentacles, poking out of hundreds of small holes in the wall, were observing me with rapt attention. Aside from soft wind and animal-feeding noises drifting in from above, the cave was dead silent.

  A shock of fear went through me, but this one jump-started my brain rather than shutting it down. Clearly, the collapse had been no accident. The snakes must've excavated this space as a trap, leaving just enough structure to support the ground and animals above, implying incredible engineering skills. For that matter, they'd likely hollowed out many underground spots in their jeweled forest, and made sure that their, um, hexicattle vehicles fed only in those spots in case anything dangerous threatened them, at least anything that could be dealt with by a nasty fall. So when Priam exposed their secret here, they called out the snake cavalry to remove all support.

  My slithering audience had tried to kill us. They'd succeeded with one of us and injured two others. Murderous fury, I'm sure, would be the normal human reaction and it did occur to me that if I grabbed the UW, I could turn every snake watching into a charcoal tube in two seconds flat.

  But there's no clear dividing line between training and conditioning, and in virtual reality scenes that felt entirely real at the time thanks to specialized drugs, I'd worked through many, many emotionally difficult experiences. So anxiety yes, fury no. Honestly, I was a little dismayed by how thoroughly I'd been conditioned. Instead of hustling to get revenge like a normal girl, I automatically tried to envision the situation from the aliens' perspective. While aliens aren't likely to think the way we do, intelligence implies some degree of common logic, and here the logic seemed easy to follow.