Apex

by Robert Appleton

  “Jesus, you’re right.” And I’m not ready to share that secret with anyone else yet. “Vaughn?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I lost your diorthus tooth. It was dumb – I put it in my pocket, figured it would bring me luck when I ventured into the cave. It must have come out while I was swimming. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It did its job, right? I didn’t drown. You had your amazing encounter. It really was a lucky charm.”

  “I still feel bad, though. That was a big deal, what you did to earn that tooth.”

  “You can always get me another.”

  “I will.” If only he knew how hard they are to come by. “I promise.” She made her way forward to join him. “So, you’ve got a niece you didn’t know you had. Tell me about her. You described the case, but you didn’t say much about her. What’s she like?”

  “A pain in the ass.”

  “Granted. She’s a Vaughn. But come on, apart from that, is she anything like you?”

  “Hmm. I’ll let you be the judge of that.” He powered up the thrusters to thaw the impulse regulators. “I’ll say this, though: she’s got moxie.” And he launched into a blow-by-blow account of the deadly theme park chase.

  They flew through the night and arrived at the crash site coordinates in the hinter-glow of dawn, when the moons’ reflected light gave its gradual fading bow to the rising sol. It was an eerie, Arctic netherworld, a few klicks past even the hardiest tussocks. A forest of gymkhana trees, some of the toughest plants on Hesperidia, whose boughs and upper branches hunched severely away from the ferocious northerly winds in deep winter, had been flattened or uprooted by the blast from the meteorite impact. It had hit the glacier, gouging a hole about thirty meters deep and several hundred meters wide. Flash-boiled ice thrown up by the impact had re-frozen and fallen as snow to form a crisp layer upon the glare-ice bowl of the crater. Scorched rocks and odd burrow-holes littered the surface, and at the heart of the crater lay a large chunk of rock that still smoldered.

  The devastation stretched for at least a few klicks in every direction. Ice chunks lay scattered across the glacier for as far as she could see. The forbidding tears of fresh crevasses veined the surrounding area. Meanwhile, the carcasses of umpteen smallish creatures had been left partially disgorged—not burned, Jan noted—along the crater rim. A troubling lifelessness hovered over the region. The sky was normally busy with flocks of vocal, migrating birds this time of year, the navy longneck geese among them. The gymkhana trees’ deep roots gave refuge to a wondrous variety of harvesting hibernators, from the furry zoepedes to the sloth-like Eiger tachyus. Deep winter hadn’t arrived yet, and they ought to be seen crawling and foraging through the tussocks and hollows across the tundra, or mobilizing in groups to transfer their hard-earned spoils to communal deposits in the gymkhana roots. Jan hadn’t spotted a single living creature for miles. Granted, this was the aftermath of an explosive impact, but where were the survivors, the scavengers come to salvage supplies from the fallen gymkhanas?

  What predators roamed this region? She could name several, but none that habitually disgorged the remains of its prey like this.

  Ruben and Frau Zeller had set up camp on the southwest edge of the crater. They weren’t up yet, so Jan set about finding the mysterious hollow rock from the amphibian’s mural. She overlaid the cropped, enlarged image from the slideshow onto her visor and, scanning the area, matched it with a forested section not far from the western rim.

  Stopper growled as he approached the site ahead of her. That instinct he had, a borderline precognitive one when it came to divining unseen threats and dangers, supported her suspicion. The amphibians had perceived it first. How had they got here to investigate? Some underground river network perhaps? Were there other colonies of them—Arctic colonies hidden under the frozen lakes? One thing she knew for certain: they’d seen fit to reveal themselves for this purpose. To alert her to this.

  Whatever had emerged from the hollow rock, its arrival had disturbed life-forms primitive and enlightened alike on Hesperidia. The viscous liquid substance inside, not quite frozen solid despite the sub-zero temperature, did resemble the amniotic fluid found in other oviparous species in the north, but the shell here was unlike anything she’d come across. It was oddly shaped to fit the hollow, and its material also lined both edges of the seam where the rock casing had broken. Jan surmised this substance had to have been inserted into the rock via this seam, like an insect with a long proboscis pollinating a flower that had concealed stamens. The material for the shell would have been injected in liquid form along with the amniotic fluid containing the embryo, and by some ingenious membranous transfer they would have separated, the former forced against the walls of the cavity, where it would have hardened into the airtight protective shell casing. The embryo would then have grown inside the amniotic fluid in almost total safety, as the rock housing it was quite hard and, she guessed by its cross-section and texture, provided formidable insulation from extreme temperatures, both hot and cold.

  A plethora of questions hit her at once. Had the hatchling cracked open the rock, or was it the force of the meteorite impact? Did the hatchling even have that ability, or was it something its parent had to do when the time was right? And the most pressing question of all: was this an indigenous creature, or did it land inside the meteorite? The introduction of an exogenetic organism onto Hesperidia, especially one with such stubborn survival capabilities, could be catastrophic. Or it could simply be an anomaly: a rare species science simply hadn’t come across before, thrust up from its icy sub-surface nest and thawed to life by the sudden explosive concussion. Either theory was problematic. Exogenesis only threw up a million more questions: its origins, its adaptability, how it had come to leave its home world, its ability to prevent radioactive cellular decay over a long period of cryonic hibernation, how it survived the white-hot friction of atmospheric entry…

  Focus, she told herself. Whatever it is, it’s here. Solve the mysteries later.

  But the mysteries followed its every trace. First there were the initial tracks, tiny, likely hexapod, but heavier than its relative size would suggest. Indecision was clearly not in its makeup; it had chosen a path and kept to it, whether to a forage point, where it had dug for sustenance, or to kill another creature, which it had done with savage efficiency, decapitation, disembowelment and desiccation its modi operandi. Remarkable hunting skills for a newborn.

  There were other peculiarities. Around the foraging and killing sites its tracks were quadrupedal, with regular flanking stab marks, as though it stood upright and drew out sharp appendages to help with its conquests. Otherwise it travelled in its hexapod form, always intent in its line, with an unerring instinct for where the food could be found.

  We need to locate this thing, figure out exactly what we’re dealing with.

  She decided to use Stopper’s harness and lead while they tracked it, in case it was unusually vicious or poisonous. His fleece coat, too, was warranted this far north, as well as bootees for his paws on the ice.

  Vaughn looked like a cross between an Eskimo and a downhill skier as he modelled the various cold-weather gear he’d brought, most of which was redundant. She told him not to bother with the skis or the tent—they weren’t venturing to the north pole, for chrissakes—but the ski poles he could bring, to help his balance. And crampons for their boots was a good idea. She gathered a few supplies, including snacks for them and a meal for Stopper, canteens full of water, a spare O2 canister apiece, and flares for emergency, then decked herself out in warm, comfortable hiking apparel.

  She spotted Ruben taking a leak outside his tent in the distance. When he’d finished, he waved.

  “Perfect timing as usual,” she groaned. “We might as well give him the heads up, put him off our scent. He’ll only follow us…at record-breaking pace, the animal.”

  “And you can check in with Frau Zeller,” Vaughn reminded her. “Feed her something as well—anything—just s
o long as she thinks you’re being, how shall we put it, conscientious. Time to science up, hotshot.”

  “I should have left your ass in the weeds.”

  He laughed. “Come on. I want to meet this guy. He sounds like a hoot.”

  “I’ll remember you said that.”

  As they made their way across, she relayed the basics of her discoveries so far to Vaughn, and impressed on him the need to get underway as quickly and as unceremoniously as possible.

  “Why not get him to help us find it?” asked Vaughn. “We don’t have to mention how we discovered it, or anything about our new amphibian friends. If he’s as competent as you say, two top rangers are better than one. Just saying.”

  “Leave that to me.”

  Any apprehension she might have had about Ruben working his charm on Vaughn, inveigling himself into her boyfriend’s trust, as he’d done so effortlessly with so many of her colleagues, was dispelled in their first brief exchange. Vaughn sized him up right away, accepted his overeager handshake, and twitched a smile in acknowledgement of his propensity for striking obvious macho poses. Gut sucked in, chest thrust out, chin up, fists on hips, sleeves rolled up to advertise his huge forearms: the guy couldn’t have tried any harder to compensate for his insecurity if he’d summoned a stretch sky-limo full of leggy escorts and rented celebrities. He was a prodigiously talented scientist and athlete, and, at six-four and two-twenty, built like Adonis, but he was half the man Vaughn was. And both men knew it.

  Vaughn betrayed none of this, nor did he need to. He simply reverted to his natural laconic character, giving his opponent little with which to contend. Jan loved that about him, that his most impressive attribute was his grounded presence, a self-confidence that had long matured beyond the need to prove himself to anyone. It undermined Ruben’s cheap display with such ease that it was almost comical to watch them interact.

  “I’ve always imagined Jane’s man being one of the few in this whole quadrant that can keep up with her. No doubt you have some scientific background, Detective Vaughn?”

  He’s baiting him, she thought. He’s going to try to beat him down with intellect.

  She was about to interject with a pithy put-down, but Vaughn got there first. “None whatsoever,” he said. “Who needs one when I have the most eminent xenozoologist and xenobotanist on Hesperidia plying me with her herb tea.”

  “You went to university, though?” the bug guy persisted. “A law degree, I would have thought, for Omicron-level disputes.”

  “No such thing,” replied Vaughn. “Law degrees come into play after an arrest. Legalese never slapped a pair of magno-cuffs on a dangerous perp, and no lawyer I know of can tell shit from champagne until it’s labelled on an exhibit.”

  “Don’t tell me, you’ve graduated from the university of life. I’m not knocking it. It’s just—”

  “Then don’t. Anyone who claims that, I tend to believe them. It’s a rough galaxy out there, and if you ask me the wisest people are the ones who don’t see themselves above others.”

  “True. But then we’re all of us exceptional who make it this far out with only our wits.”

  Vaughn glared at him. “Where are you from, Ruben?”

  “I was born nebula.”

  “Where were you raised? Where do you think of as your childhood home?”

  The big guy hesitated, shifted his weight as he scrutinized his interrogator right back. “I don’t. I was raised in several orphanages, none that I think of as home. The Koestler Academy is the closest I came to any kind of belonging.”

  “A scholarship?”

  “Yes. The Sagan Prize for Junior Astrophysics.”

  Jan rolled her eyes. Not the way he’d have preferred to broach his credentials, but he was bound to get there somehow.

  “Impressive,” said Vaughn. “What led you all the way out here? You could have made millions in private sector R&D.”

  “The same as led Jane out here, I imagine.”

  That answer was evasive, and Vaughn seized on it immediately. “But you’ve been here a while now, longer than the usual rotation. A lone, super-educated Sagan Prize winner: surely you’ve made long-term plans. Unless this is where you want to end up?”

  Ruben shrugged. “I haven’t decided. I don’t know. We’ll see, I guess.”

  “Really? Something you don’t know?”

  His pose unsteady, his shoulders and chin no longer held up at right angles, the big guy looked deflated. Not enough to burst his ego bubble altogether, but Jan could tell he was growing uncomfortable. Vaughn seemed to sense it too. He gave Ruben a gentle slap on the back. “It’s okay, brother. None of us has it figured out past tomorrow all the way out here. Am I right, Jane?”

  “You’re not wrong. Case in point: we’re standing in a big-ass space crater that our own bullshit helped create. Nobody knows anything.”

  Ruben glanced askance at her. “The First Ranger might.” In his disarmingly cheeky schoolboy wink, she read more of what made him tick than she’d perceived during hundreds of hours working with him in the field. Vaughn had found the opening, that chink in his armor. And though she didn’t know exactly why Ruben Intaglio was vulnerable to such probing questions about his journey here, it was obvious that he was not being entirely forthcoming.

  “Oh, he’s definitely hiding something,” Vaughn told her in private when the big guy went to rouse Frau Zeller from her tent.

  “No wonder. You made him squirm.”

  “No, it’s something deeper.”

  “Like what?”

  “Something obvious but cleverly concealed. A missing motive,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  “Wow. Something you don’t know?”

  He sidled up behind her, put his arms around her neck for the gentlest chokehold ever applied.

  “You don’t intimidate me for a second, Agent Odd Socks,” she said. “I know your missing motive.”

  Eager to make it a three-way team huddle, Stopper reared up and clawed at their sides. No sooner had Jan brushed him off when a shrill bark signaled Flavia’s emergence from the rover. She bounded over, exuberant as ever, but without the overbearing dominance from before. She still ran rings around Stopper, but there was no challenge, and no unbidden contact apart from a few careful sniffs, which Stopper reciprocated.

  “And who’s this?” asked Vaughn, a little wary of the husky’s size and wolf-like appearance.

  “Flavia. A three-year-old GenMod. Think Stopper but with twice the energy.”

  “No kidding. She’s—”

  Both dogs bolted without warning. Stopper took off with such force it wrenched the lead from Jan’s grip. They made a beeline for the hollow rock, and before Jan even thought about using her whistle to call him back, they’d covered half the distance.

  Frau Zeller emerged from her tent fully dressed for Arctic work. When Ruben asked why the dogs had taken off like that, Jan answered, “Anything you’ve got planned for today, drop it. Trust me, this is more important.”

  “What is?” asked Frau Zeller. “Oh, good morning, Detective…Vaughn, is it?”

  Before he got further than “Hey—”, Jan dragged him after her at a jog. “Sorry,” she called back to the COVEX rep. “We’ll have to do introductions on the way. Grab a few supplies and follow us asap. We’re about to track a new species, and we don’t have a second to lose.”

  “What species? Where did you—”

  Jan cut Ruben off and insisted, “I can’t explain now. We can’t let the dogs near this thing until we know what it is we’re dealing with. Just trust me.”

  “But we haven’t even had breakfast…”

  It was closer to lunchtime when Jan finally paused for a proper rest, having photographed the strange tracks multiple times, taken samples, made silicone casts, and studied the numerous carcasses along the way, most small, either voleminx or tinderwinders, but also a carrion bird, sangopteryx, an impressive kill for a hexapod of such diminutive size. Remarkably, no doubt aided by its
rapacious killing and foraging, it had already started to grow. Longer, wider, deeper clawed prints, supported by an enlarged stride, confounded both Jan and Ruben. In a matter of days the creature had almost doubled in size?

  The hunt had led them every which way among the flattened gymkhanas. It was clear the creature was omnivorous, probably an adventitious feeder, eating everything remotely edible within a given area before moving on to other opportunities, only to repeat the cycle. But they’d have been circling the area for days following its tracks if she hadn’t let Stopper and Flavia take over. When the wind had switched direction to a bitter easterly, a couple of hours into the search, they’d gone ballistic. It couldn’t be the sudden cold—they were used to Hesperidia’s capricious weather moods. No, it was because the dogs were downwind of something they didn’t like.

  From there, with Jan barely holding onto Stopper’s lead and Ruben using all his strength to keep Flavia close, they’d ventured many klicks west across the glacier on the trail of what Ruben had dubbed ‘the prodigy’.

  Frau Zeller had tuned in to the excitement of the chase early on. That same girlish enthusiasm she’d shown during the fire-lighting buoyed her now, and Jan, despite a natural mistrust of bureaucrats, found herself warming to the woman beneath the hard coat of office.

  “If you had to guess one way or the other, which would it be: indigenous or from elsewhere?” she asked the two rangers over the stove. “Is this an alien alien, or just another Hesperidian curiosity?”

  Jan shrugged, mindful of her own foreknowledge of the hollow rock. She didn’t want to let anything slip to Ruben, who had no such compunction about piping up with his half-cocked insight. “Highly unlikely it hitched a ride in on a meteor,” he said. “It’s metamorphic rock, possibly gneiss, but the shock and heat of the impact alone would surely have killed anything frozen inside.”

  “But what if it didn’t?” mused Frau Zeller. “Supposing this thing did crawl out of a rock from the heart of a meteor, and it continues to grow, and maybe reproduce asexually when it reaches maturity—there are lots of precedents for that, right?” No one stopped her. “Then this is potentially an infestation on a pretty big scale.”