Horizon Alpha: Transport Seventeen

by D. W. Vogel

  “We’ll be fine,” I repeated, “as long as we only need them for hunting. If we’re lucky. If we’re not . . .” I holstered my pistol. “. . . then we’re dead.”

  He bit his lip. “But they don’t really do that much, usually. I mean, we shot like crazy at that horned thing and it didn’t turn away. And we’ve shot at Rexes and stuff a hundred times. It just bounces off.”

  “Right. But we just took down that Pterosaur that would have killed one of us. And I’ve killed more than one Wolf.”

  “And Kintan took a bullet.”

  There was that.

  We glanced around at the empty hills. Henri shrugged “Well, it’s not like we have any choice. There’s no more ammo out here. We just have to be really careful.”

  I looked out over the treetops, a distant memory poking at the back of my mind.

  “Actually we do. There’s a lot of ammo out here. And I know where it is.”

  Chapter 33

  It seemed like forever ago that General Carthage led a small band of soldiers to a downed transport in the middle of the jungle. We were looking for the power core that eventually allowed us to fly to safety in the mountains. We found the core, and a transport full of wreckage. And crates of ammunition.

  We couldn’t carry it all with us, so most of it would still be in that shuttle, locked away from the elements. My sat trans showed that crash site as sitting a solid night’s walk from our current location, straight south into the forest.

  “It’s not worth it,” Kintan said.

  The Carthage crew and Laura from Seventeen huddled around me. Shiro hung off to the side, as far from Kintan as he could. Whether or not we made the journey to the downed transport, we didn’t want the rest of the party to know how low on ammo we were.

  “It might be worth it. We might just walk straight back from here with no problem.” I patted my holstered pistol. “But there’s two nights of jungle between us and our mountains. And we brought most of our remaining ammo on this trip. There isn’t much left at Carthage anymore.”

  Henri shook his head. “We don’t need it at Carthage. The first crops should be harvested by now. And a couple of the guys were working on bows and arrows to hunt the little ‘saurs around the mountains. Nothing hunts us there.”

  I glanced up at the sky. “Nothing but Pterosaurs.”

  They were the last real threat, and one we’d never escape. The smart ones sailed into the glaring sun and dove straight down on top of us before we even knew they were there.

  Henri glanced over his shoulder at our party, scattered among the rocks. “They won’t make an extra two days’ travel.”

  Laura nodded toward where her daughter slept next to Ryenne. “And Shanna’s hurt. She cut her foot pretty bad on a rock when that thing attacked. I got the bleeding stopped and it’s wrapped, but she’s not going to be walking on it. We’ll have to carry her.”

  “They’re not going.” I pointed up the hill. “Take them up higher and try to find some shelter . . . rock overhangs or something. Not caves. Find some water and hunt a couple of little ‘saurs. Rest everyone for two days while I’m gone, then we make a beeline for home.”

  “No, no, no,” Shiro muttered. “You’re not going alone.”

  I brushed him off. “I’m the fastest, and I know this part of the jungle. One person is much easier to hide than the whole party. I’ll leave tonight, get the ammo and sleep through tomorrow in the transport, then meet you back here by dawn the next morning.”

  “No way.” Shiro kept his eyes on the ground, but his voice was more insistent. “Two can travel as fast as one, and two sets of eyes make it a whole lot more likely that the ammo gets back here safely.”

  Henri looked at his shoes. Adam coughed.

  I took pity on them. “Kintan’s hurt, and you guys have to stay with the group and keep them safe here.” They all exhaled with relief at not being asked to go along.

  Shiro stepped forward. “They’re staying. But I’m going. End of discussion.”

  Now what? He hadn’t spoken to anyone that I knew of since his stray bullet had shot through Kintan’s arm. Kintan wasn’t angry with him, but Shiro wouldn’t even let him approach to show him he was okay. He’s a liability now. The old Shiro would have been the best choice for this mission. But I wasn’t certain who this new Shiro really was. He was still looking at me, waiting for my response. I looked at the other guys, then back at him and sighed. He’s still Shiro. He has to be.

  “Glad to have you along. Thanks, buddy.”

  ***

  Henri collected the Seventeen survivors and led them away up the hill. The higher they got to wait for two days, the better. We had agreed that they’d wait three, just to give us an extra day in case we got lost, not an unlikely event given my history of navigation in this jungle. Maybe Shiro was better with a compass. We left them with pistols, the rifle, and two of the grenades from my belt.

  The batteries on our sat trans were running low and we hadn’t thought to bring the solar chargers. Just one more lesson learned. We’d spoken with Carthage a few times over this trip, but mostly we saved the charge for navigation. My poor mom. She must be getting used to sitting by a silent trans waiting for me to call in from this scatting, ‘saur-infested jungle. Luck was with us and the satellite was overhead now. Shiro and I plotted our course as quickly as we could, setting the dials on our compasses for the site of the downed transport. We came from a spaceship that found this planet after two hundred years of space travel, and now we relied on something as ancient as a compass to save our lives.

  We rested until the sun dropped onto the horizon, then picked our way down the rocky hillside toward the towering trees below. It wasn’t safe to enter the jungle until at least a few hours after sunset, but it wasn’t safe to climb down this mountain in the dark. We’d have to split the difference and hope for the best.

  I wished there was something I could say. It was breaking my heart to see Shiro so despondent. The night sky was clear, darkening from blue to purple in the last rays of the sunset. Stars twinkled into view overhead, the brightest already visible. By midnight the sky would be awash with light, the great sweep of the galaxy glittering overhead. One star, brighter than the others, blinked over the mountain. Horizon Alpha, the ghost ship in its endless orbit.

  “You know,” I said, “It sounds really silly, but sometimes I feel like my dad’s still up there.” I pointed up toward the dead Horizon. “I mean, I know he’s dead. But sometimes it seems like maybe he can still see me somehow. Like he can look down from up there and see this whole planet, watch over us and see how far we’ve come.”

  Shiro looked at the bright light in the western sky. “We lost a lot of people that day.”

  We were sitting on the ground just above the tree line, leaning back against sun-warmed rocks.

  I took a sip from my canteen. “It’s funny. I knew everybody on that ship. Maybe not really well, but there wasn’t a single person I didn’t know by sight, and most of them by name. But now I can barely remember any of them. I look down the wall at Carthage and there are names I can’t place at all.” We kept a memorial to our dead, each name painted on the only bare wall of the Painted Hall, adding our own epilogue to the long-dead birdman’s story. “And there aren’t enough names. There are people we forgot. People who died on the ship or were lost in the crash, and not one person in Carthage remembers them to put their name on the wall.”

  The ghost of a smile crossed Shiro’s lips. “Some names we’ll have to wash off, though.”

  “Yeah.” I grinned. “The people who get back with us from Seventeen are going to be really surprised to see themselves on the dead wall.”

  “Might be really neat for them, though, don’t you think? Let them wash their names off when they get there? Kind of like they’re starting a whole new life.”

  I nodded. The night’s phosphorescence shimmered on the leaves below us and the bloodsucker mosquitoes buzzed in our ears. I broke off the last rema
ining leaf from the Hushtree and smeared it on my face and arms before I handed it to Shiro.

  Night calls echoed up the rocks.

  “Shiro . . . I’m really sorry about your dad.”

  He crushed the Hushtree leaf and tossed it down the hillside. “Thanks.”

  We stood up and climbed down into the jungle.

  Chapter 34

  Ryenne’s Diary: Year 3, Day 99

  It’s really quiet up in the mountains at night.

  You can hear noises down in the jungle, and you can hear the wind blowing all around the rocks, but mostly it’s quiet. I’ve never heard quiet like this before. Back on Horizon it was never quiet. Too many people in too small a space, and the noises of the ship were always there. I never missed that until it was gone.

  Caleb and Shiro left tonight. They’re going to get more bullets, which should be a comforting thought, but really isn’t. Caleb keeps saying, “We’re getting closer, we’re really close now,” but he’s been saying that for weeks. We must be getting closer, but it doesn’t matter until “close” turns into “here.” I’m worried what’s going to happen if we don’t get there pretty soon. Laura’s little girl Shanna is running a fever. She’s got a nasty puncture on her foot and it doesn’t smell healthy. It feels like we’re right on the edge of this whole thing falling apart, but there’s nobody I can say that to, so although it feels sillier than ever to write to a generation of future humans in a book that will probably end up in a dinosaur’s stomach along with its writer, here I am.

  I haven’t written much since we started this journey. Usually I’m too exhausted by the end of the day to even think about it. But it looks like we’re staying here for a day or so, and we’ll get a little rest. So it seemed like a good time to write down what happened when I left the transport to go looking for help. Feels like a million years ago now.

  Our plan worked perfectly. Rogan had a panic attack right on cue, and Officer Halsey came storming out yelling for him to shut up. Why do people think yelling at somebody to shut up is ever going to work? Before anybody knew what was happening, I zipped onto the bridge and grabbed the sat trans, and right out the side door.

  It was almost dark when it all started, and I knew I didn’t have a lot of time. Either nobody saw me go, or they did, and figured with me gone the food would last another day, because nobody came after me.

  After everything I’ve seen on this planet since we left the transport, I realize now how miraculous it was that I survived. There are a million things out here that could have eaten me, and that none of them did is way more than lucky.

  I climbed up the cliff, and it was so much harder than I thought it would be. There was a trail, kind of, but it was getting dark and I was terrified, and climbing up a real cliff is so much harder than just climbing around on the side of the transport ship. I only made it about halfway up before it got too dark to see anything. If I went farther, I would have probably fallen off and died, so I just found a flat place and scooted in as close as I could to the cliff face and waited ‘till morning. If I slept at all, I don’t remember it.

  The next morning I got over the cliff. I was a lot farther south than where Caleb and his team parked their shuttle. The far side of the cliff was a lot less steep, and I kept checking the sat trans hoping I was high enough to get a signal. A couple of times I thought I could hear something, but nobody answered when I shouted. And pretty soon I realized that shouting was probably a really stupid idea, because even though I hadn’t seen any dinosaurs up on the top of the cliff, there probably were some.

  Staying up high surely saved my life. I could see out over the jungle but the trees were so thick I couldn’t really see anything moving. In the middle of the day I got hungry enough to climb down partway to where there was a tree with a bunch of squashed fruit on the ground all around it. Later on I told Caleb what that tree looked like, and he just laughed and laughed. He said his mom used that fruit in her medicines as a laxative. I could have told him that.

  That second night was the worst. My stomach ached, I was cold, hungry, and more scared than ever in my life. It felt like I was the only person left alive on the whole planet.

  Early the next morning I climbed as high as I could. There was an open patch of rock with nothing obstructing it all around, and I turned on the sat trans. The battery was already half empty.

  There was no one to talk to, so I just started talking to myself. “I know there’s nobody out there. It’s just me and nobody else. But if there’s anybody who can hear me, please just tell me you’re there.”

  And that’s when I heard it.

  “Carthage Valley? It’s Caleb Wilde. I hear you.”

  For a minute I didn’t even believe it was real.

  “Caleb?”

  The sat trans lost its signal and went dead. I called and called, but got nothing.

  Everything felt like it was on fire. Somebody was out there! And not even just somebody, but my cousin Caleb! All day long I was imagining all the people from Horizon sitting around the city they had built, far away from the dinosaurs. They’d be eating lunch and planting vegetables and everything would be perfect.

  There was no signal until the middle of the next night. The third time I called for Caleb, he answered.

  The signal kept cutting out, and it was another day before they promised they were coming to get us. They said they could see where my trans signal was, and I told them where I’d come from so they could find the transport, which they said wasn’t emitting the beacon it was supposed to, which is why they never knew we were here.

  I hadn’t eaten anything for three days. The people on the other end of the sat trans, who it turns out weren’t living in a safe, beautiful city all this time, told me some plants that were safe. I was able to dig up some roots, and there was a little stream where I refilled my water flask. Just over the edge of the cliff I could see a narrow pass that led from the jungle side out to where I knew the beach side was, but I watched all day and there was never more than about half an hour that some kind of dinosaur didn’t walk through it. No way that would be safe. So I retraced my climb. Caleb and his people wanted me to wait where I was, but the people at Seventeen needed to know rescue was on the way.

  It was almost dark by the time I got back down to the beach. The transport was just a quick run across the sand, but there was a huge dinosaur between me and the ship. It walked on two legs and kept sniffing the air, looking all around. I thought it maybe smelled me, and was getting ready to climb for my life up the cliff, but it suddenly looked back down the beach and took off running in the opposite direction.

  It was now or never.

  I ran for the shuttle. The door that worked was on the far side, and the tide was coming in. I had to splash through knee-deep water to get to the door, and pounded on it until it opened.

  Everybody crowded around and I told them my story. I could tell some of them didn’t believe me, but in just a couple of days it wouldn’t matter if they believed me or not, because Caleb’s people would be here to rescue us.

  The windows on the far side of the shuttle all went dark for a minute while I was telling my story, but by the time I got over to look outside, nothing was there. Officer Halsey gave me an entire protein bar all to myself and I slept until well after sunup.

  Chapter 35

  It would be wrong to say I missed this. Tucked safe in our mountain caves, I would sometimes bolt awake, hearing the deep calls of the jungle in my nightmares. If anyone had asked me I would have said I never wanted to set foot outside the mountains again.

  But out here I was good for something. Walking through the dense underbrush, picking every footstep for quiet, pistol at the ready, I was alive in a way that farming the valley could never provide. At home, I’m just Caleb. Out here, I’m a soldier.

  We used our lights as little as possible, checking our compasses as we picked our way through the night. Any break in the trees and one of us would creep out, check the sat trans and a
djust our course, and move on. My hope that Shiro was a better navigator than me was borne out and he took the lead.

  The largest herbivores browsed all night. We skirted small herds of them, staying far enough away that we couldn’t identify what kind they were. I wouldn’t have known anyway, but I would have liked to describe them to Rogan later. He’d tell me what their names were.

  I wondered if we might be close to our crashed shuttle. I wondered if it was already growing over with vegetation, the jungle claiming its prize. But the crash site should be west of us, assuming we were on the right path.

  Shiro turned back to me and whispered, “We should be close.”

  We had been walking all night without a word, following Shiro’s compass through the trees. I peered up at the canopy hoping for a break where we might catch a satellite signal, but the thick treetops blocked out the sky. Sara once told me there were whole ecosystems up there, little creatures who lived their whole lives in the highest leaves and never knew there was ground far below. Their tree was their whole world. I wondered then what truths we might be taking for granted. We had crossed the galaxy to get here. But were those light-years of distance just a hop between leaves for some immense species below, looking up at us and pitying our tiny existence?

  My sat trans lit up, sensing the proximity of the transport. Even though it had been without power for over three years, its beacon still worked. I flipped my trans off to save the charge and we followed Shiro’s through the trees. They were huge here, trunks growing far apart, leafy canopies joined into one thatch overhead.

  The transport looked exactly like it had when we left it. Vines and ferns had reclaimed the hatchway we’d cut clear, and the whole thing glowed like the rest of the forest, coated in phosphorescent insect slime. It was a huge, hulking thing, a dead husk in the middle of the living jungle. We hacked at the foliage around the closed door and hauled on the hatch, which didn’t budge.