Apex

by Robert Appleton

  “No, I’d like to raise a point of order. And this court’s very much in session.”

  Vaughn had to do a double-take when he saw the fresh speaker march out from behind the depot building, between Tynedale and Ruben. It was Kirsten Zeller herself! Very much alive, and more or less unharmed – her left arm was in a sling, and the tips of all her fingers, and the tip of her nose, were black with frostbite. Carlisle escorted her, alongside Jan, who shrugged when Vaughn gaped at her.

  The avalanche of questions piled so quickly that Vaughn struggled to pick one out. He looked to Isherwood. Isherwood met him with a blank gaze. Together they looked to the woman who’d been, respectively, mauled to death by tenax, murdered and disposed of by Vaughn and Jan, murdered and disposed of by Ruben – according to whose story one believed – and now resurrected from the dead, presumably by some other fictional agent in this tangle of tall tales from the frozen north.

  “It’s a long story, gentlemen.” Her hoarse voice and the frostbite told a part of that story, but Vaughn saw in the stern way she refused her colleagues’ aid, that she meant to get to the truth of the crimes at hand before recounting her own ordeal. “First things first, no one tried to murder me. That was a malicious lie; whoever told it is trying to cover up his own guilt. That’s all I have to say on that. The rest, I think, will have to come from Doctor Intaglio, who, I fear, may be the most misunderstood creature on Hesperidia.” She made her way over to Ruben and crouched at his side. “If I know anything about people,” she said, “it’s that we’re all trapped, one way or another, whether we admit it or not. Some of us just have more means or wherewithal to choose our confines. But you’ve never had a choice, have you, Ruben? You were created this way. You were forced to live here, to go to extraordinary lengths to hide what you are. And someone did this. Someone brought you here, tutored you in science, gave you these fake credentials, sentenced you to a lifetime alone with a secret that makes your very existence illegal…” Her voice failed her, and she broke off.

  Vaughn picked up the thread for her: “And that same someone forced you to smuggle biological specimens off world, using tourists as mules, under threat of exposing what you are.”

  Ruben lifted his head, revealing big, gray, wounded eyes. “That’s not true. It wasn’t the same man who raised me. No, one of them gave me everything. He showed me nothing but kindness, right to the end, and it’s because of him that I grew to love this prison, this miracle prison that’s been my only home. He loved me like I imagine a father would. The other,” he lashed a stinging glance at Tynedale, who refused to meet his gaze, “threatened to take all that away from me. I’m no saint. I don’t pretend to be. But any harm I’ve done to this world I’ve tried to make amends for by caring for it in a thousand different ways. I’ve devoted my life to Hesperidia, because that was my destiny. That’s what I was created for. The only unnatural one here uses his office as camouflage when he slithers in to play his sick power games, then slithers back out again. Tynedale wouldn’t care if this whole planet went up in flames. It means nothing to him. And neither does the truth. But you can take it from me, he’s behind all of it. Every evil thing you’ve heard of, and a lot you haven’t. And do you want to know something else? He isn’t the only one in COVEX that—”

  “Lies!” Tynedale widened his stance and took aim at Ruben. Vaughn reacted, and his shot would have blown the COVEX man’s arm off—but Jan was right there behind Tynedale. She caught his gun arm with her cybernetic grip. Jerked it skyward. Tynedale’s shot zipped to the clouds. She squeezed his forearm, breaking the radial bone. His cry didn’t perturb her, nor did his violent elbow that caught her chin. Jan snarled. Spun him round. She landed a vicious size-six boot between his legs. While he was doubled-up on the floor, she lifted her visor and spat on him.

  “Now he’s all yours,” she said to Vaughn; and to the mob of gobsmacked COVEX reps that had been sent to the Hesp to assess her diplomacy, among other things, “Any more of you shitheads in on this?”

  There was no reply.

  “In that case,” She flicked the safety catch on Tynedale’s weapon, and tossed the harmless pistol at their feet, “you’re welcome.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  With the last of the shuttles now on its way to Saint Jacques, Miramar glade was quieter than Vaughn had ever known it. The forest life had not returned, and the only birds circling overhead were the sangopteryx, whose silence was an integral part of their ghoulish opportunism – they didn’t want to let other scavengers know they’d chanced on such a bounty of slaughter. The dead bodies were in a sealed bunker under the hangar, awaiting transfer back to civilization, but the sangopteryx didn’t know that. They smelled death and carnage, an odor that would linger long upon Miramar.

  Stopper, too, appeared subdued as he trotted at Jan’s side toward the crazy golf course on the west side of the glade. Vaughn had always disliked that tacky game. It cheapened any establishment that installed it. Especially here, the headquarters of Alien Safari, an enterprise that was supposed to celebrate the wildness and exoticism of otherworldly nature, it was a carbuncle on the landscape. And it was puzzling that Ruben had invited them here, of all places, to tell his story. One needn’t dig very deep to find the striking symbolism in his own situation, and…no, Vaughn dispelled the idea. The big guy wouldn’t be thinking with his GenMod intellect right now; he was facing oblivion, a life of incarceration and infamy. The way he lay there against the artificial grass mound before hole number three, leant on his elbow, picking at the Astro-turf, letting Kirsten Zeller stroke his hair with bandaged fingers while she whispered reassuring words to him, was the clue to his frame of mind. Gone was the strutting Adonis and the intellectual giant who, hours ago, had vied for supremacy with the most formidable rangers on the Hesp. Instead, Ruben was a frightened child again. Perhaps the goofiness of the crazy golf set him at ease.

  “The two of you are full of surprises,” said Vaughn, sitting opposite them on the putting green. Jan sat cross-legged beside him, and Stopper settled between them. “We’ve got some time before the next rock-hoppers get here. Time enough to get our stories straight. Honestly, it’s hard to know where to start – this has been one messed-up week – but before we figure out what to do with you, Ruben, I guess we should really hear your story.”

  “Wait, you said the next rock-hoppers,” replied Ruben. “Do you mean there’ve already been some here?”

  Kirsten Zeller brushed an insect off his shoulder. “I didn’t tell you? I could have sworn I did.”

  “I guess…I mustn’t have been listening.”

  “Okay, let’s start there,” said Vaughn. “I’ve only heard bits and pieces myself. Kirsten, how in the frozen hell did you survive up there alone when all those experienced professionals perished?”

  “Luck, mostly…”

  “Oh, come on,” said Jan. “Me and Stops have been all over this world,” she massaged behind the dog’s ears, “in every kind of survival situation there is, and I can tell you luck is overrated. It’s a factor, sure, but luck alone gets you into those dicey scrapes. You need a lot more than that to get you out.”

  “As I was saying,” Miz Zeller went on, drawing a chuckle from Vaughn (which earned him a punch to the arm from Jan), “it was luck, mostly, but it was also watching and waiting. I don’t have anything like the same dash you guys have. I’ve always been methodical, a plodder. You know that old war movie where they dig a tunnel to escape a German POW camp? Well, those that did escape still had to get across the border into a safe country. Most of them went for dash and daring: steal a plane and fly out, or hop on a train with a fake passport, or jump a motorbike over a fence. Nearly all of them were captured or shot. But the handful that did make it out knew to stay away from regular roads and popular transport routes. They took it slow, off the enemy’s radar. Me, I’d have hidden by day and travelled by night, on foot if necessary, in the remotest places I could find. Maybe steal food along the way. Okay, so I’d probabl
y have been caught eventually, but the point is that dash appears more heroic, but it isn’t always the best strategy when you’re trying to evade someone or something you don’t have the measure of. That was me and…tenax, you’re calling it?”

  “Yeah. Tenax hexapoda,” answered Jan.

  “Okay, well, that was me and tenax. When it dragged me underwater and left me there, I had two options: swim back up and fight to climb out, or swim down and hide. I didn’t know what the creature was, but I knew it was stronger and deadlier than me, so I swam right down, as deep as I could before the pressure hurt my ears. God, that was cold. But I’ve done plenty of yoga, and I’ve been in deep meditation before, and I’ve read all about extreme sports. I knew that the only way to survive for any length of time in that environment is to slow everything down – breathing, heartrate, thought process – and stay in that zone. So I did, until my core seized up and my fingers and toes throbbed like shock-rods. I’ve no idea how long I was down there. My omnipod and radio were damaged in the attack, not so much as a crackle of static left. But when the pain in my chest bit, I knew my body was shutting down too. So I slowly swam up, and waited to see if there was any commotion. When there wasn’t, I managed to haul myself out, using the hoverbike’s frame, and crawled into a nook in the cliff wall. The drysuit saved my life, I’ve absolutely no doubt of that. As cold as I got, and I do mean cold – like, can’t feel your hands or feet, or hear anything except your teeth chattering, or ever imagine being warm again kind of cold – the fact that I wasn’t wet as well gave me that slender life-line. That trapped body heat inside the suit’s layers kept me the pink side of a popsicle.”

  “Where did you hide when the creature came back?” asked Jan. “You were near its lair.”

  “Well, from what we’d seen, it preferred to stay hidden until it was ready to strike. It had used the tunnels inside the mountain to get from A to B, and then it had swum under the ice rather than attack from the open. So I guessed it wouldn’t use the lakeside path. It was too exposed. I took that chance, though.”

  “That took dash,” said Ruben.

  “Did it? It didn’t feel that way. After all, what choice did I have? I couldn’t swim again. I wasn’t going to risk the tunnels inside the mountain. I figured the way we got there, unmolested, was probably the safest way back to camp.”

  “How long did it take you to get back to camp?” asked Vaughn. “With the bikes all trashed, and no supplies? What did you do for shelter? It’s minus forty with wind chill up there.”

  “One step at a time, as carefully as possible. Like I said, that’s how I’d have escaped the POW camp. I saw the dogs pulling Jan and Ruben south in the trailer, so that spurred me on. While tenax was chasing you, he wasn’t hunting me. I crawled out over the thin ice to fetch a few things that had been torn from Jan’s rucksack, things I thought I’d need. The tent was torn, and I figured it would flap in the wind and be too conspicuous if I erected it, so I settled for an insulating blanket and the trowel to dig a wind break or a snow cave. I got a couple of sachets of food. An oxygen bottle. The stove was there, and the metal cup, so I could melt ice to drink. No weapon. No satellite phone. There was a first aid pack – I treated the gashes on the back of my head and neck, and tried to wrap a bandage, which didn’t stay on long.

  “That’s pretty much how I lived for two days and two nights. Just doing the bare minimum. Out of sight of the lake, I followed our tracks back to camp. If I’d have deviated at all, I’d have gotten lost. Digging a snow cave was hard work at night because my fingers were frostbitten. I fashioned a wind break instead, and wrapped myself inside the blanket. No way could I sleep. Fresh tracks left by tenax had doubled back along the ridgeline before me – I knew that because they were much bigger than the initial tracks we’d followed up the glacier, and they were heading downward. When I spotted them, right on the edge of the drop, I knew it was only luck that was going to decide whether I made it back or not. The creature had run that same way ahead of me. It could easily be heading back. So any noise from any direction at any time was tenax, in my mind. And that was my great escape. Incremental. Fearful. Attrition. No dash whatsoever, or at least nothing that felt like dash to me. But I did keep moving, and I did keep melting snow, and I ate just enough to feel that I could go on. I knew that if I reached camp, I could pilot the rover south until I reached the rainforest, then hail Miramar from there.

  “That’s when the probes arrived. The wind had gotten up, and it had blown snow over our tracks. This was the fourth time I’d travelled that ridgeline, so I was reasonably sure where I was, and how far I had to go to reach camp. The first probe sailed by on its drone flier and made straight for the lake. I tried to signal it, but with no radio and no flare, arm signals in a semi-blizzard wasn’t going to cut it. I trudged on. By this point I was hypothermic – I had almost no feeling in my hands or feet. A couple of hours later, another probe arrived. But when this one made for the lake, something met it in midair, something so colorful I can’t describe it.”

  Jan gasped, “Tenax?”

  “Yes. I didn’t know right away, but after it had downed the probe and spent a few minutes ripping it apart on the ridge, the creature flew straight over me. All of a sudden, that same newborn we’d been tracking for two days now had wings and was airborne. It headed south, toward the crater, but veered west and circled, again and again, widening its radius around where the second probe had fallen.”

  “Surveying its domain,” said Ruben. “It was airborne, getting used to the new perspective of all it surveyed.”

  “And keeping me in an ever-growing pickle,” replied Kirsten.

  “You were afraid of taking off in the rover,” said Jan, “in case it saw that as a new challenger and went berserk.”

  “Some salvation, huh?”

  “So I’m guessing you hid inside the rover, waited till nightfall, and then made your move, hugging the terrain?” suggested Jan.

  “Even more circumspect than that,” answered the COVEX rep, gently flexing her bandaged fingers to get the blood flowing. “I flew east instead, as far away from the heart of its territory as I could. I’d seen it go south and west, and north was no good to me. East, in a wide south-trending arc, hugging the icy terrain, like you say, was all I could think of. The safest way out. No dash. Just…caution. I watched the rearview and the skies every step of the way. Sometime that afternoon, I saw a shuttle flying north toward the lake. I hailed it on the rover’s radio, but before I could tell them who I was, they were under attack. That blinding burst of color. That savage assault. The shuttle went down. Out of sight. I was left responding to their mayday hail. But what could I say? ‘Hang on, help is coming’? Then it exploded.”

  “Jesus, Kirsten. I had no idea,” said Ruben. “We thought our sled ride was an ordeal…”

  “I’d have swapped for that in a heartbeat,” she went on. “But that’s not all. The sat net must have picked up their mayday, because an EMS crew responded a while after and said they were en route – must have been your rock-hoppers, Vaughn. I was further southeast by this point. They were making for the rescue shuttle’s last coordinates. Only they didn’t know the mayday was out of date or what they were getting themselves into. So it was like the blind leading the blind – shuttle following probe following probe – the vital information hadn’t been relayed, and each one fell into the same trap, all because the sat net was on the blink and long-range comms was ineffective. I hailed the EMS and told them what they were up against. But they had their protocol – the first mayday received was their first priority – especially if it was a crashed vessel – and more importantly they had no reference for the creature they were about to face. So they didn’t heed my advice. Their ship was armed, but that dazzling blaze of light and color – you’ve seen it yourselves up close – it must have blinded them. They veered away to the south. But they were flying all over the place. They almost ditched a few times. I’m pretty sure the pilot couldn’t see a thing. I don�
��t know what happened next, but I heard the screams over the radio. I saw the smoke rise after, several klicks further south. Two crews, two probes. Tenax had beaten everything we’d sent north. So when it kept going in the direction of Miramar, I feared the worst. This thing was never going to stop. I had to try to warn anyone I could of what was coming. Too little, too late for the people here.

  “And that’s the moral of my story, I guess. Caution kept me alive, but it didn’t do squat for anyone else. A little more dash might have got me to the rover sooner, and back to Miramar. I could have warned you that tenax was airborne, how big it had gotten, and you could have made preparations. Instead, a useless woman makes a useless escape and lives to tell her useless tale. Some help, huh?”

  “Swap out the word ‘useless’ for incredibly gutsy and you have my verdict,” replied Vaughn without hesitation. “It’s a hell of a survival story. You got yourself out when the two best rangers on the Hesp were convinced you had no chance.”

  “He’s right,” said Jan. “Your only job was to get yourself back to your family alive. You did that. The rest was on us. The sat net being sabotaged, sending the rescue team against my and Ruben’s advice, not being better prepared: all of those wrong moves caused this shitshow. You did everything right. Never think any different.”

  “You want to know what I think?” Ruben carefully took her bandaged hand and kissed it, the only person on Hesperidia who could in the freedom of its natural air. “You’re as much a ranger as any I’ve ever met. It’s been an honor traveling with you.”

  She cast Jan and Vaughn a warning glance, to let them know she was well aware of Ruben’s disingenuousness, but that he might also possibly be baring his soul right now, so any cynicism on their part would best be left unspoken. “Thank you. That’s sweet. But why make it sound so final?”