She ran back along the lakeside, rigging the makeshift sled and harnesses in her mind as she went. By the time she got there, and uncoupled the trailer from Frau Zeller’s mangled bike – the former’s trusty gravlev still worked, providing a generous half-meter hover – she’d imagined every bump and turn of the ride back to camp. A historic first on Hesperidia. She’d never been a musher before. And Stopper had never been a sled dog.
A good thing they had a wolf with them.
Chapter Eleven
“You’re almost out of O’s. Here—” Jan plucked the spare oxygen bottle from Ruben’s rucksack, “—you’ll want to swap out before we start. Once the dogs hit high gear, they won’t want to stop.”
Ruben waved it away and resumed his fastening of the trailer’s luggage straps to his belt. “I’m good. The gauge is damaged, that’s all. It’s been on the blink for a couple of weeks. Must have broken again during the fall.”
“You’re sure?”
“I changed bottles before we set out. This one’s good for another day, at least.”
“Fair enough. You all set then?” she asked, inspecting his ad hoc ankle dressing – a spare scarf wrapped and tied ingeniously to seal and cushion the gaping injury. “This will get bumpy.”
Her initial plan had involved using the gravlev stabilizers to keep the trailer suspended several inches off the ground, but a quick trial run had confirmed her doubts. The levitation and impulse modules were slave protocols; without a towing vehicle’s remote uplink coupling to guide it, the trailer was dead weight. No brakes. No self-correction whatsoever. What if they were heading over a cliff and the dogs had to swerve suddenly? The trailer’s mass and momentum might drag them all over the edge. But without the gravlev, that same maneuver would be assisted by the ground’s friction. It was safer, if less comfortable, to use the trailer as an old-fashioned sled.
Thus harnessed, Stopper and Flavia stood excitedly in position out front, with their necks craned round to watch their human masters’ odd behavior in and around the rectangular boat-like metal container with its flat, ridged underside curved up at the front. Stopper, being a two-decades-plus veteran of field trips alongside Jan, and exceptionally smart, knew a great number of her spoken words by association. “Go on” meant forward. “Wait, wait” meant stop moving. “Come back”, “go on right”, “come back left”, “sit” and “fetch” were nursery phrases he’d learned when his parents had still been alive. Since then he’d expanded his zoological and botanical vocabulary beyond the majority of many human tourists, even if Jan had had to substitute catchy nicknames for the more tongue-twisting technical names. One of his proudest accomplishments, because it had earned him more treats, hugs and loving “Good boy” approbations than anything else, was his mastery of a series of barked tones to use as passwords to unlock doors.
But from Jan’s agitated demeanor, her rapid, quiet puzzle-solving and worried glances every which way, he knew that whatever she was doing had to be important. He was concerned for her, just as he sensed Flavia was concerned for the injured man named Ruben. They’d fought off the nasty interloper, but it didn’t seem to get the message. It was around here someplace, hiding its scent somehow, planning its next strike. Jan wanted him to pull her away from here in the metal container, and he was going to pull like his life depended on it. So was Flavia, he knew. Ever since he’d had to thrash the young showoff for threatening Jan, Flavia had stopped bugging him. She’d showed him respect, and had shadowed him to copy what he was doing. The latter was a little irritating in itself, but at least she was taking her work seriously now.
It didn’t get more serious than this.
“Go on!”
His gaze caught Jan’s as she called this out. The sharp command spurred him into action. He took the strain, driving low, and found that as his claws dug into the compacted snow, it gave him enough purchase to be able to move forward. Flavia copied him, and the load was instantly lighter. The two of them pulling together soon built up a head of steam. They were sprinting in no time, not in competition but resolutely at his pace, his momentum. He saw it as Flavia working with him to do Jan’s bidding, and he was proud of the youngster.
Jan marveled at how naturally the pair took to their new roles. Stopper’s experience crossing the continents had given him an unerring navigational sense. He was running with a tailwind, which negated his most acute sense – smell – but the way he negotiated the rolls of the hills, the impasses, the frozen rivers, by always taking the easiest route, as opposed to the shortest, suggested he was aware of the trailer’s dumb unwieldiness. She didn’t need to shout another command. He was making for camp, and he aimed to give Jan as quick but gentle a ride as he possibly could.
The underside clanked and scraped over rock and ice. Jan wasn’t strapped in, but she held onto the tow handles. Standing at first, she quickly changed her mind whilst entering a steep downhill; the trailer lurched forward and almost threw her out. If it had, it would have run her over. To hell with that! She sat on the folded tarp instead, bracing her feet against the prow grips, and, after tying spare straps to the tow handles, hung on for dear life.
They plunged into a westward-trending crescent valley that ran parallel to the ridgeline. There was no way up to the ridge, so Stopper steered them the long way round, the full length of the valley, hoping to be able to double back around the steep ice wall.
Jan pulled herself upright to survey the changing terrain, and swallowed a scream. The creature sprang at her from the right side, six limbs akimbo, its wing tips cocked to take her head off. She let herself fall back down just as the talons swiped. A razor edge nicked her neck. It plucked her visor frame and tore the entire breather rig loose. With a desperate snatch Jan caught it and yanked it back. The creature landed on its feet on the other side of the trailer, but skidded into a snow drift.
Jan thanked God the tear in the rig hadn’t depressurized it. The frame was buckled and a chunk of the sealant cup was missing. The gasping breath she took after reaffixing it swelled her breast like a life-giver, but the elation was short-lived.
“Jan, you’re bleeding!” Ruben warned her, motioning to his neck. “Is it deep?”
She fingered the wound, assessed how much blood had run across her fingertips. Not much. It was seeping, not gushing. The creature hadn’t pierced anything vital. “It’s fine,” she replied, scanning the surroundings. “You see it?”
Ruben swept his Ares across the rear. But he was awkwardly positioned for a full three-sixty sweep. The way he was strapped in, with his back against the right-hand panel, did not afford him optimal coverage. The first strike had blindsided them both. He was still vulnerable to that same angle of attack.
“Let’s switch weapons,” she said. “You’ve got position, you take the rifle, pick it off from range. I’ve got maneuverability, so I’ll use the Ares, single grip, try to keep it away from the dogs. And I can protect our right flank better.”
He thought for a moment, then slid the pistol to her across the deck. Jan unclipped the rifle bag from the right panel hold and slid it to Ruben. He was still unpacking it when she spied the creature sprinting along their right flank, a stone’s throw away, overhauling the dogs as it veered toward them.
Sonofabitch!
She flicked the Ares to its low-yield, high-range setting. Less power but greater accuracy. The first shot kicked shards of ice into the creature’s hind quarters. It glanced back but didn’t alter its course. She fired again. The pulse blast seemed to clip its back, somewhere between the shoulders, drawing a spray of dark blood that made the creature halt and shudder. Then it rolled on its back, rubbing snow onto the wound. With a gentle, agile forward roll it regained its feet and, after flexing its two front limbs, one at a time, reared up to signal it was still in tiptop shape. The gesture was clearly for show, and arrogant. Almost a shrug. But it knew it was being assaulted, and where that assault was coming from.
It took off in the opposite direction, adding a
leap to every hexapod stride without sacrificing speed. That made it harder to hit. Ruben tried twice, both times missed by inches as it completed its wide arc around their rear. It was clearly changing tactics again. Jan waited for it to scurry half way up the sheer ice wall before she let off a high-yield blast, hoping to bury it in an icefall. It leapt to one side before the pulse even reached it, and watched the chunks of ice fall harmlessly by as it clung like a free-climber, with supreme confidence. Her next effort, a little higher up, barely grazed the cliff. The distance was too great for that yield level.
Ahead lay another problem. The creature had gained not only the high ground but the home stretch. It could handily ambush them at any point during their eastward run back to camp. There were copses and hillocks and ice caves galore on the south edge of the glacier. The risk of it leaping out onto Stopper or Flavia was too great.
“Go on right!” she yelled.
Stopper buffeted the big husky as he veered in that direction. She panicked and darted ahead with a start, not knowing what was happening, but then settled into his steady rhythm and fresh vector. As they approached the turn-off back to camp, around the ice wall, the gap between hunter and hunted grew bigger and bigger.
“We’re going all the way south?” asked Ruben. “We’re not fighting our way to camp?”
“We need open ground. That gives us the advantage. The tundra. We’re heading for the tundra.”
“It’s not going to give up, you know,” he argued, “no matter how far we go.”
“Then we’ll have plenty of target practice. But I’m not taking us anywhere near tight places. It’s too damn smart.”
“We’re exoplanetary scientists!” he shouted.
Jan snorted a grim laugh. “That can be your comic book caption, right there, hero.”
“You’ll have to censor the rest. But my point stands – we should be able to outwit a newborn, no matter how evolved a killer it is.”
“Tell it that!” she shot back.
“I aim to, with a lullaby it won’t forget.”
“My dart didn’t exactly slow it down much,” she said.
“Then let’s see how fast it goes with five darts in its neck.”
Jan hmphed. “Seriously, you want to impress me? Then stop telling me what you’re gonna do and do it already.”
He didn’t reply. His next three shots, all rather hopeful and ambitious at a moving target at long range, missed. The creature galloped parallel to the dogs’ run but over fifty meters distant. Whenever it narrowed that gap, Jan snapped off a shot to deter it. After a while it veered away to the east, out of sight, and appeared to have given up the chase. But everything in its behavior thus far suggested a pathological apex predator mentality – losing one battle was simply a prelude to its winning the next, ad infinitum, until it killed its prey or died trying. Its lair behind the waterfall was chock full of food, so it clearly had no problem finding it. What benefit was there, then, in expending so much energy chasing down enemies that were a match for it, and possibly outmatched it, if not to assert its territorial right to dominate all life-forms it came across?
The powdered covering thinned over the course of the next several kilometers. Snow-capped tussocks began to poke holes in the white blanket. The dogs ran unmolested, their pace never flagging. Jan kept trying to reach Miramar on all frequencies, but the signal did not get through. If anyone had received her SOS, which had pulsed repeatedly throughout the sled ride, they weren’t exactly breaking the sound barrier to come to her aid.
Then Ruben’s cry of “Eight o’clock!” broke the silence, made her jump. She swiveled to that bearing, just in time to see the creature fell a lone bulviger and tumble with it down a scree slope. A knot of uprooted gymkhana roots hid the grisly finale, but one thing was certain: this animal gave new meaning to the phrase ‘eat and run’. It didn’t stick around long enough for more than a bite or two before it shot off at top speed, weaving this way and that until it settled on a trajectory parallel to the dogs’, matching their sprint.
“Is it just me or has this thing got even bigger since the ice wall?” asked Ruben.
She doubted it, but at this point nothing would have surprised Jan about what had to be one of the most extraordinary animals she’d ever encountered. And on Hesperidia, that really was saying something.
“Okay, where does this end?” said Ruben.
“What?”
“If nothing changes the status quo, and we get to where we’re going, what happens next? I mean we really don’t want to lead this thing anywhere near a human outpost, right? Let alone Miramar.”
She fired a brace of warning shots as the creature tried its luck against Stopper. Accurate enough, even if they did miss. They successfully warded it off for the time being. “What do you suggest?”
“Once we clear the mountains, we head east. At least then we’ll be able to radio it in, and it won’t get so much as a sniff of a human settlement.”
“Okay, let’s see what happens at the mountains.”
But while those grew to an imperious cloud-piercing arc ahead, trending right, both the light and the weather darkened. For hours into the evening gloom, and then the pitch of night, the dogs and sled rattled on, breaking trail across the tundra. Meanwhile, the creature continued apace. It pressed its predatory claim at random times, from different angles, only to disappear without warning for long stretches, and then reappear with equal abruptness, with a renewed spring in its stride. Its rapacious appetite spoke of a ferocious metabolism, hell-bent on energy for growth and conquest. An amazing animal to be able to observe and study, but its savageness rendered it unobservable in any practical zoological sense, much like the Hesp hydra. Entities evolved to suffer no rival were laws unto themselves. The only logical course was to respect their dominion.
But where did this creature’s domain end? Again it flew at Flavia, again Jan and Ruben fended it off with cracking shots (using infrared targeting) that either shaved it or hit it directly. Jan’s back ached with the constant tension and her rigid, uncomfortable posture. Her toes were numb. She had to switch hands after every salvo because the outer glove was too bulky for the pistol trigger, and she could only wear the neoprene under-glove on her gun hand, which soon left her fingers tingly in the sub-zero wind chill.
A few klicks after she yelled for Stopper to “Go on left”, he cleared the last of the range and pulled them onto the summit of one of the shallow foothills overlooking the first sea bays. It was here that the creature halted and, to Jan’s immense relief, backed away in a low skulk. Nor did it follow them by another route. The last she saw of it was its sudden sprint back in the direction of its Arctic lair.
“At least now we know why the comms didn’t get through,” said Ruben, pointing south toward Miramar, where a dark sponge of nimbus clouds hung low over the forest and sparked angry flashes that imprinted on her infrared vision. “Looks like they’ve had a good lashing.”
The trailer’s forward lurch into a sharp decline left Jan’s stomach behind. She enjoyed the sensation. “What do you think scared it off in the end?” she asked.
“What? It’s gone?”
“Slinked away—” She jabbed her thumb behind her, “—with its tail between its legs, so to speak.”
He crossed himself. “Thank God for that!” After a quick scan of the bay area, and demonstrating the headwind with a palm raised in the air, he added, “Maybe it doesn’t like the sea. Ice and freshwater, it might be king, but the ocean is a different domain entirely.”
A lick of forbidden wonder roused her rigid senses into a memory. A distant recent memory of an aquatic kingdom and its mysterious emissary in a cave of light and color. A different domain entirely. Jan pressed that idea further. What if, through some ancient hereditary instinct, the newborn creature feared this race of intelligent sea-dwellers who frequented the bay area? And vice versa? The amphibian in the cave had called her attention to the hatching caused by the meteorite crash. So it was cle
arly concerned by what had emerged. And small wonder!
But was there something deeper between them? A long-lost rivalry? A common ancestry? If this was the resumption of some ages-old battle for supremacy on Hesperidia, should she intervene, or let the natural enemies fight it out among themselves – let alien nature take its course?
Either way, they’d left a colleague behind in the frozen north. Protocol and decency demanded they do everything in their power to retrieve Kirsten Zeller’s body.
Jan winced. Everything in their power did not include revisiting the lair of an apex predator.
Did it?
Chapter Twelve
Vaughn had settled into a comfy sofa chair in the corner of Isherwood’s office and, eyes closed, was partway through his meditation cycle to induce lucid dreaming when a double thunderclap cracked the sky. An unceasing torrent battered the roof, producing heavy streams that escaped the broken gutter and slapped the asphalt below. The racket proved too much, even for Vaughn’s focused ritual, so he abandoned the attempt and paced the office instead, waiting for a reply to the message he’d sent hours ago, via warp gate relay, to the Omicron Bureau’s Federal Criminal Imports and Exports (ImEx) Division.
His old colleague, Lacey Hallow, had worked in ImEx pretty much her entire career. She was now Chief Superintendent Hallow, on her way to an Omega-grade diplomatic appointment, but that hadn’t diluted her sense of loyalty to those she liked and trusted. She was one of the few colleagues Vaughn hadn’t had any qualms about approaching for favors after his long absence. Likewise, she didn’t hesitate to pick his brain every now and then regarding the peculiarities of crime-solving and criminal behavior across the colonies. Little details that didn’t add up to much in the lab or the office might benefit from the irreproducible light of practical real-world law enforcement experience.
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