Horizon Alpha: Transport Seventeen

by D. W. Vogel

  The crowd looked at him, then looked at me.

  Scat.

  “General, I think that’s a terrible idea. The parts we scavenged from the other shuttle were the only ones we had. The only way to replace them is to send a team from Carthage back to Eden and hope there’s something on one of our old transports that will work. And I just don’t think they’re going to do that. Because by the time they did, and got all the way out here to find us, there’s a good chance we wouldn’t be here to find.” Another thought struck me and I looked at McCarthy. “Plus, we only had one good pilot left. And he’s right here.”

  “The tank, then,” the General said.

  “The tank would take a week to get here, even if they started now, which they can’t because it doesn’t run.” I turned to the crowd. “Look, I know what I’m saying here. And I know how scary it is. More than anyone.” I tried to resist throwing a glance at General Enrico when I said that, but it snuck out anyway. “It’s not safe out there. And it’s a very long way back to Carthage. But if we stay here, none of us are going to make it.”

  The crowd was muttering, but most of them were nodding along with my words. I continued. “Most of the way back we can stay in the hills. The big predators don’t go up there. It’s dry and rocky and won’t be easy going, but if we’re careful and we stay together, we can do it. It should take—” I made a quick calculation in my head. “—about three weeks.” I looked around at the little kids, and at Shiro’s dad, weakened from cancer. “Maybe four. Or five.” Be honest. They deserve it. “And we’re not all going to make it. That’s just a fact. But it’s the best chance we have to get this group back to Carthage alive.”

  The moms with little kids pulled them closer to their sides. Four-year-old Shanna clung to Laura’s leg.

  Laura spoke. “All right, then. This has to be everyone’s decision. Who wants to stay here?”

  A few hands were raised. The General gritted his teeth but said nothing.

  “And who wants to try to make it back on foot?”

  The rest of the hands shot up. A clear majority, including all the Carthage soldiers except the General.

  He stared at us in silence for a long moment, then dropped his eyes. “Fine.” He turned to McCarthy and the other three Carthage men, pointedly ignoring me. “Gather the weapons and ammo. We leave at nightfall.”

  A few of the Seventeen men wanted guns, but the General refused, and in that, I agreed with him. None of them had ever shot a gun, and they were much more likely to panic and accidentally shoot a human than a ‘saur if things got ugly.

  We settled in as best we could to wait out the daylight inside the ruined shuttle. Shiro and I brushed away the broken shards of the windshield and sat on the floor of the crushed cockpit, backs pressed against the dead instrument panel.

  “Well, here we are again,” I said.

  Shiro sighed. “Exactly where we said we’d never be.”

  “We made it last time.”

  “Not all of us.” He cast a haunted gaze at me. “And not by much.”

  Of course he remembered. Days alone on a fallen tree over a river, waiting for a rescue that he must have long since given up on. “No, not by much. But we can do this. General E has no clue how to lead a group like this. He’s never been outside the fence for more than a day. We do. And we’re going to get this group home.”

  I listened to the murmuring of the Seventeen survivors packed into the shuttle. Last time I was outside the safety of electric wire or caves, nearly everyone on my mission died. Only Sara and I managed to get back alive, and I readily admitted it was as much due to luck as any skill I had. We were outside for a week.

  This time there are twenty-six people. Three of them are little kids, one is so weak he can hardly walk, and one of them is Rogan. My cousin was a wild card here. If he had a panic attack at the wrong time, he could kill himself, and maybe the rest of us along with him.

  Last time was a week. This time we were almost two months away.

  As hard as I tried I couldn’t shut out the voice in my head that kept saying, we’re all going to die out here.

  Chapter 20

  We left at dusk. I argued that we should wait a bit longer to make sure all the day hunters were gone to ground in the cool of the night, but the General insisted and I’d pushed my luck with him far enough.

  Rogan hung back at the hatchway.

  “Hey, buddy, we need to move out.” I knew better than to give him a push, though I wanted to nudge him along.

  He shook his head, clutching the edge of the door hanging on its hinge.

  “Look, they’re leaving us behind. We need to keep up.” The line of people disappeared among the tall grasses, with Shiro at the end helping his dad along.

  Rogan refused to budge. His hand was shaking against the door. Scat. He’s going to have a freakout right here. I glanced past him out the door. If he starts screaming and a Rex hears it, this trip is already over.

  “Hey, Rogan, let’s just take a few steps, okay?” Where is Ryenne? She could handle him better than anyone when he got into panic mode. I hissed her name into the night.

  After a few minutes she appeared in front of him, pushing past Shiro to get back to the shuttle.

  “Hey, Rogan, you want to come along with me?” She held out a hand but he refused to take it.

  “We need to get moving,” I told her. “Too many of us. We need to get up into the hills as fast as we can.”

  She shook her head. “Can’t force him. He’ll go all panic ball on us and we’re done. He was really freaked out about Officer Halsey. Keeps saying her name.” She turned back to Rogan. “Hey, Rogan, what’s the biggest dinosaur that ever lived?”

  After a moment he whispered the answer. “Argentinosaurus.” He thought for a moment. “Heaviest is Argentinosaurus. Tallest was Sauroposeidon. Longest was Supersaurus.” His hand relaxed on the doorframe. “Most complete titanosaur ever found, Drednaughtus schrani.”

  “And how big was that?” She took his free hand, not pulling but just holding it in the direction she wanted him to go.

  “Originally estimated up to sixty tons. But later downsized to twenty-five.”

  He took a step off the edge of the shuttle.

  Ryenne kept him talking, rattling off questions about Earth dinosaurs. He answered each one, stepping along behind her.

  In a few minutes we had caught up to Shiro and his dad.

  “You guys doing all right?” I asked.

  “We’re fine,” Mr. Yamoto said, with a smile that looked more pained than happy. “You just go on ahead. I’m coming along.”

  I sent Ryenne and Rogan on and hung back with Shiro. I nodded at his dad, asking a silent question. Shiro frowned, lips pressed together.

  He could lie to himself if he wanted, but I heard the words he didn’t say. My dad is fine. He’s going to make it.

  But we both knew there was no way.

  Even if there were no predators on this planet, Mr. Yamoto couldn’t make this forced march.

  I checked the trail behind us wishing I had something to cover our tracks and our scent. The dry foothills rose up before us, moonlight taking over where the forest’s phosphorescent glow left off. We were making way too much noise. Rocks kicked, scuffling feet. People talked quietly, but not quietly enough. My sat trans wasn’t picking up here, but our path lay to the west. The map showed that for most of the way we could stay in the hills, as long as we could find a passable route through the rocky cliffs.

  There were dangers in the mountains, but nothing like the jungle.

  There were ‘saurs in the jungle that could kill our entire party as easily as I’d squash a bug, and those were just the ones we had names for.

  Rogan knew every Earth dinosaur that ever lived. But nobody knew every ‘saur on Tau Ceti e. This planet had its own evolution, and the monsters here were equipped to kill us in a hundred different ways. Sara, our naturalist back at Carthage, said the Ceti ‘saurs were more evolved than
Earth’s ever got. That maybe here was a world that was like Earth might have become if the meteor hadn’t hit and started the great extinction. Here there were poisonous Gilas, camouflaged Crabs, and the four-legged gray pack hunters we called Wolves, intelligent with a rudimentary communication. Wolves followed their leaders’ orders.

  I glanced toward the head of the line where General Enrico forged the trail. Unlike us.

  But General E was wrong. Carthage wasn’t coming. Not in time, and probably not ever. They were stuck in the valley and our only hope was to make it back on our own.

  I thought down the list of ‘saurs I knew that could kill us. There were a lot of smaller predators, on two legs and on four, all faster and stronger than a human. Probably a hundred more we’d never seen in our little segment of forest.

  And of course there were Rexes. Rogan could have pointed out the many ways our Rex wasn’t the same as an Earth tyrannosaur, but they were huge and terrifying, deadly day or night, and I’d thought I’d seen the last of them when we made it into the Carthage cave system.

  We climbed higher into the foothills and I looked back over the grassland, past Shiro struggling up with his dad. Nothing moved in the distant tree line, and no footsteps made the stones vibrate under our feet.

  Somewhere in the gloom, a Rex was out there. I turned back to the rocky hillside and followed the straggling line up the winding path.

  Chapter 21

  We walked well into the night. It started raining past midnight, a soft mist that got heavier as we trudged along.

  I hung back with Shiro, helping him support his dad along the path. Sometimes we were on fairly level ground, but mostly we edged around the cliff base climbing higher up the trails made by smaller ‘saur feet.

  Nothing big enough to be dangerous.

  Keep telling yourself that.

  The storm clouds hid the moon and the wet, dark path got more and more treacherous. Someone was going to fall if we kept going.

  At the head of the line General E must have realized that, too. There was nowhere to stop and shelter, so we struggled on. I couldn’t see far in front of me or behind, but suddenly the straggling line of people started to disappear around a tall column of rock.

  I followed them around and the rain stopped as I entered the mouth of a large cave.

  Shining stars, we’re safe.

  Everyone clustered in the middle of the cave, peering out as the last of us staggered in.

  General E pushed his way toward the front. “It’s too dangerous to go on in this storm.” He looked pointedly at me, and I could hear him thinking, because Caleb thought we’d be safer up here than back in the transport. At least he didn’t say it out loud. “We’ll stay here for the rest of tonight and travel by day from here on in.”

  The Seventeen survivors murmured dissent.

  “We can’t stay in a cave. We lost a scout team in a cave.”

  General E’s shoulders tensed up. “We’re fine. We live in caves at Carthage. There’s nothing here. It’s a whole lot safer than out there.”

  Shiro opened his pack. “We should eat something.”

  There wasn’t enough food salvaged from the shuttle wreck to carry us through the whole journey, but the promise of a meal now distracted the Seventeen crew from their worries. Sometime in the next day or so the digestive insult of changing from a lifetime of processed food onto fresh fruit and meat was going to hit the Seventeen survivors. It had hit us all in the early days. Just one more thing we don’t need. Shiro and McCarthy distributed fruit and dried meat. General E switched on the flashlight from his belt and prowled around the edge of the cave. He disappeared into a tunnel toward the back, but his light only receded for a minute before he returned and finished the perimeter.

  “No passage big enough for anything dangerous to get in,” he announced. “We’ll set a watch at the front opening and everyone can get some sleep.”

  We put the kids in the middle, ringed with adults, just like the plant-eating ‘saurs did when a predator approached.

  Shiro and I volunteered to take first watch and positioned ourselves in the mouth of the cave, just inside the sheltered roof from the pouring rain outside. Flashes of lightning illuminated the forest below. Quiet descended in the cave behind us as full bellies lulled even the most nervous in our group to sleep.

  We sat quietly, watching the dark treetops.

  “I thought you weren’t coming.”

  It took me a minute to realize Shiro was talking about the last mission. He’d been injured, a broken leg. Couldn’t walk. We had to leave him behind, perched on a fallen tree over a rushing river. We left him with a sat trans and a little bit of food, but walking away into the jungle I was sure I’d never see him again. When we found him nearly a week later he was unconscious, lying in a hollow on the riverbank nearly a kilometer downstream from where we had left him. He hadn’t spoken of those days to anyone as far as I knew.

  “I thought we weren’t coming either. The General didn’t want to leave you. None of us did.” General Carthage died trying to retrieve the power core that saved our base, and our new cave home was named in his honor.

  “You had to. I knew it. But I knew I was going to die.”

  I had told him what happened to the General and to Brent, the other soldier who was still alive when we left Shiro. “They said you called in to base for the first couple of days.”

  He sat in silence for a moment and I thought he was done talking about it. But finally he said, “Yeah, I did. Didn’t have much power in my sat, but it was just . . . so lonely. I had never been alone like that before.”

  He was right about that. We were born on a spaceship, an Ark sent from doomed Earth. There was little privacy on the ship; even in a closed room you could still hear the quiet hum of human life all around you. Then we landed, circling our downed transports into a protective barrier against the ‘saurs of the surrounding jungle. We slept and ate inside the transports, coming out only when we had to into the small patch of land inside the electric wires. There was always someone close by, usually a lot of someones. And now we lived together in our caves, in little rooms carved out by an alien race long lost from this planet. Over a hundred people still near enough to shout.

  “That must have been awful,” I said.

  He glanced behind him at our sleeping company. “It was the worst part. Funny, in the daytime it wasn’t quite as bad. But at night when most of the little ‘saurs were asleep and the jungle got quieter, just the moonlight over the river, it was like I was the only person left on the whole planet. The only human left in the universe.”

  Small noises echoed in the cave.

  “So . . . what happened?”

  He glanced over at me, then looked back out through the rain. “Rex.”

  The word made my stomach flip over.

  “It was . . . I don’t know. Two or three days after you guys left. I was getting kind of delirious, maybe. I’d heard them before, Rexes and the other big guys stomping around all night. I knew if one of them saw me I was done for. And that’s the funny part . . . I don’t think it did see me.”

  I waited for him to continue.

  “It was dark, cloudy, and no moon. I heard the thing coming and laid down as flat as I could on the tree. Hoped there would still be enough residual heat in the wood to hide my heat, but I didn’t think it would be. There was this other noise . . . I can’t really describe it. Like . . . something big being dragged through the jungle, but quieter. Not footsteps crunching but . . . more like leaves and branches just getting squished. And then suddenly the Rex was there.”

  I couldn’t help but picture it, prickles breaking out on my arms.

  “The Rex was right by the end of the tree I was on, drinking out of the river. I was just praying that something might jump up out of the river and . . . I don’t know. Kill it, or scare it away. But whatever it was came out of the jungle behind it.”

  “What was it?”

  He shook his head.
“I couldn’t tell. It was so fast. Something slammed into the Rex from behind and it pitched forward half into the river. It turned around and crashed over, just fell right into the tree I was sitting on. The whole tree jolted and I was clinging onto the branches. The Rex was scrambling to stand up, clawing against the tree, and all of a sudden the whole tree just split when its tail crashed down right next to me.”

  No wonder he couldn’t talk about it. My heart was pounding out of my chest at the story.

  “The half of the tree I was on just shattered and I went into the water. And I don’t really remember much after that. I guess I must have been holding onto enough wood that floated. I kind of remember dragging myself up the shore when I finally ran aground, but maybe I’m just thinking that’s what I must have done since that’s where you found me. Probably hit my head when I fell into the water. Probably for the best. It must have been another couple of days before you found me there.”

  I didn’t know what to say, but something about his story was lodged in my brain. “Something attacked the Rex. Knocked a Rex down from behind it. What can do that?”

  He shrugged. “Another Rex?”

  “Did you hear another Rex?”

  He shook his head. “No. And neither did the first one.”

  I checked the magazine in my pistol, laying it in my lap. “So there’s something else out there. Something big enough to take on a Rex, and quiet enough that you can’t hear it coming.”

  Shiro nodded. “Didn’t seem any point telling everybody. No Rexes in the valley anyway.”

  “But out there . . .” I pointed over the treetops. “Whatever it is, it’s out there. And we’re out here, too.”

  The rain was lightening up, small glimpses of moonlight peeking through the cloud cover.

  “Time to wake up the next watch.” Shiro stood up and brushed off his pants.

  General E and McCarthy were the next watch, and they were sleeping along the outer edge of the cavern. Shiro went to the General and I knelt down next to McCarthy. He was covered in some kind of blanket, lumpy in the dim light.