by D. W. Vogel
This was the one. I was sure of it.
“You killed Jack,” I whispered to the dead Rex. “And I’m the luckiest guy on Ceti right now, because I got to see that thing kill you.”
Shiro stood transfixed, staring at the dead behemoth.
In a moment, I turned to him. “We need to go.”
The bass note thumped. It was louder now. Blood kept oozing from the bite wound in the Rex’s shoulder.
Blood oozing. Which does not happen if you’re dead. Oh, scat.
I grabbed Shiro’s arm.
“Run!”
It was a few seconds before I realized Shiro wasn’t next to me. When I turned around, he was still standing there, staring at the not-dead Rex.
Not now, Shiro. Don’t do this, buddy.
I grabbed him from behind and pulled on his arm. “We’re going. Right now, we’re going.” In a flash, I was reminded of a moment that seemed like years ago, when Shiro looked into my eyes and kept me from bolting right into the jaws of a camouflaged Gila. I squeezed his arm as hard as I could now, and his eyes cleared. “Right now, we’re going,” I repeated. Thank the stars, this time he followed me.
We bolted around the Rex before the next deep bass note sounded, the slow heartbeat thumping in its huge chest. I turned to look over my shoulder as we rounded the front of the transport. Behind us the Rex drew an enormous, gasping breath.
“Not dead!” I shouted, as if Shiro couldn’t figure that out.
We crashed through the brush away from the transport, running blindly through the dark. The ground shook beneath our feet. Rex got up.
If it had come our way, we would have been dead. But it pounded away on the other side of the transport, and if it smelled our scent and remembered what humans tasted like, it didn’t turn to track us.
Shiro followed me through the trees until a sharp pain stabbed into my side and I pulled up, panting and shoving my fist into the side stitch.
“Can’t . . . go . . . running . . . like . . . fools,” Shiro said between breaths.
I bent over, hands on my knees until my heartbeat slowed toward normal.
“So . . . which way back?”
Shiro looked at his compass, looked at me, and burst out laughing. It was a freaky moment, coming so soon after his near-hypnosis state in front of the Rex, but I laughed with him, tears streaming down my face. I didn’t even know what was funny, but the terror of the moment left me with nothing else to feel.
“You’re a mess,” Shiro said, wiping at my forehead.
“Ouch, quit it.” I rubbed my palm across my face and came away bloody. A knot was already forming on my forehead where it had slammed into the wall of the transport.
I wanted to talk with Shiro, but he didn’t seem to want to chat. We’ll figure it out once we’re home and safe. He’s hurting, but Mom will know what to do.
Shiro checked his compass again, reversing the arrow we had followed to get here. Our headlong run from the transport might have taken us slightly off course, but once we made it back to the hills, we could check the sat and reorient ourselves. The heavy packs rode hot on our backs.
We walked all night without stopping, feeling absurdly brave. What could possibly be scary after watching Titanoboa take down a Rex? We paused only once to shimmy up a tree and pick ripe red fruits. Sweet juice ran down our chins as we bit through the soft skin.
The first pale light of dawn dappled the hills by the time we emerged from the trees. We climbed through the thinning grass and up onto the bare rocks where we checked our sat trans.
“They should be right over there.” Shiro pointed around the edge of the hillside.
Pebbles shifted under our feet, bouncing away down the hill. Movement drew my eye and I raised my pistol.
“Just me! Just us!” Henri raised his arms. “Don’t shoot!”
The rest of the group filed down behind him.
Kintan pulled the pack off my back, grunting under its weight. “You guys look awful.”
I looked around at the party. They looked better. Still hollow-eyed and thin, but rested and fed. “We met . . . an old friend.”
Shiro divvied up the ammo and Adam handed me a few strips of semi-dried meat. We all settled down against the rocks and Shiro and I chewed while we told our story. Ryenne was fascinated by the unfortunate ‘saurs that had used their chests like battering rams.
“Like icebreaker ships on Earth,” she murmured, and the Icebreaker name stuck, though I couldn’t imagine a place on Ceti that actually had ice to break.
I turned to Rogan in the middle and told him I knew the huge snake’s name because of him. “It was Titanoboa. I heard you say it one time and it just sounds like what a huge snake should be.”
He listened to my description, and when I got to the part where the Boa ate the dead ‘saurs he shook his head. “Not Titanoboa. Titanoboa ate fish.”
My shoulders sagged. I thought I had known one.
“Well, maybe it prefers fish,” Ryenne said, “but it will eat whatever’s on the menu.”
I grinned at my cousins. I forgot how much fun they were.
Laura was sitting with Shanna on her lap, and waved me over. The toddler looked flushed, her fine, brown hair sticking to her forehead.
“How much longer until we get there?” Laura asked.
I thought for a moment. “We should be there inside of a week. We’ll rest today and head into the jungle tonight.”
She nodded. “All right.”
Shanna stirred and grunted in her sleep. The wrap on her foot was damp on the bottom.
“Is she okay?”
Laura looked at me for a moment, and when she opened her mouth to speak, her face crumbled. “I . . . I don’t think so,” she whispered.
I looked more closely at the bandage. The infection smell hit me from an arm’s length away. “Oh boy. That’s not good.”
“I know,” Laura said. “I tried to keep it clean, but the hole went really deep. And the water I cleaned it with wasn’t really clean anyway. Maybe made it worse.” She was fighting tears, lips trembling as she looked at her sleeping child.
Not now. Not when we’re this close. “I’m not sure we can push on much faster. If we’re not very careful every minute we’re moving . . .” I didn’t finish. She’d seen enough out here to know what we faced.
“I know,” she said again. “We can’t do anything except try to make sure we all get back alive.” She brushed the sweaty curls off Shanna’s face. “She’s a tough little girl, you know? Just a baby when we landed on this planet. She’s never known any other life.”
Tears heated my eyes. “She will. She’ll be safe just as soon as we’re back. My mother’s a doctor back in Carthage and we’ve got medicine. We just need to get her there and everything will be fine.” I hoped I was telling the truth.
If she didn’t believe me, Laura didn’t show it. “You’ve gotten us this far. You’ll get us home.”
She forced a smile and I returned it, faking confidence as I had for the entire journey. The stretch of jungle we had to cross would take us two nights, and we’d sleep in the trees tomorrow. Then it was just a matter of walking through the hills for another four days. We’d have to dip back down out of the hills right at the front door to our caves where our useless tank and downed shuttle sat, but really, this last jungle stretch was it. If we made it through this, we were home free.
Chapter 39
Walking in the jungle by night was so much more dangerous than being in the empty hills. It wasn’t just the ‘saurs, though we moved slowly, scanning for Gilas and Crabs. They were so perfectly camouflaged that we were unlikely to see one in time, but there was no point scaring the Seventeen group any further. Keeping a group of twenty-one people together, some of them little kids, was hard enough in daylight on open ground. In the dim green jungle it was almost impossible.
The kids had been amazing. Little Shanna listened better than any four-year-old should, staying calm and close to her mom until sh
e got sick. Now she was frighteningly quiet. The other young ones were just as well behaved. I thought back to when I was a kid on Horizon. There was only so far a kid could run on a spaceship, and there was always some kind of activity going on to keep us busy. We played basketball and volleyball in the little gym, knowing that someday we’d land on a real planet with much higher gravity and have to learn how to shoot baskets all over again. The thought made me smile. That had been my biggest worry . . . that real planetary gravity would mess up my game. We’d had no idea our days of playing games were over.
Shiro led, and we almost lost him and the three people behind him when they stumbled into a small clearing where a Brachi had laid her eggs. It was a short-necked variety, wide as our tank, and feeling very protective. She trumpeted distress and pounded after us, calling her anger long after we bolted into the trees. Gathering our scattered number cost more time than it should have and I felt the weight of everyone’s safety on my shoulders.
Another treetop day brought fitful sleep, and the second night’s travel started slowly. Thunder rumbled in the distance and a fine mist of rain fell. A few hours in we heard the rush of water and stopped at the bank of a slow, deep river.
The bank dropped away beneath us and rain fell more heavily in the open air. We huddled up to discuss our plan.
“Why didn’t you know this was here?” Henri demanded.
I blinked at him. “I did. What would you have done differently if I’d told you it was here?”
He scowled. “We could have changed course. Found a way around it. What are we supposed to do here?”
My sat trans charge was almost gone, so I didn’t turn it on to show him the map. “There is no way around. This river cuts right through the middle of our path no matter how far north we go. It dumps into a swamp that’s three days’ walk south.” I remembered that swamp. “If we can’t find a way to cross, we’ll have to go days out of our way, and it’s all jungle.” I glanced back at Shanna, who was being carried by one of the Seventeen men. She didn’t have those extra days.
Don Rand had sidled up beside me, and peered over the riverbank. He’d hung around the Carthage team since the beginning, trying to insinuate himself among our little band’s leadership, but no one was having it. “If we have enough rope, someone can swim across, and then we can rig . . .”
I cut him off. “No way. You remember what lived in the ocean?”
He nodded.
“Its cousins live in the river.”
Ryenne had let her baby ‘saurs out and they foraged at her feet. Kintan looked over at them.
“We could throw those things in as bait, then swim across when the big water ‘saurs are busy.”
Ryenne heard him and opened her mouth to protest.
“We’re not throwing her ‘saurs in,” I said. “They’re not anywhere near big enough to distract what lives in rivers.” Ryenne gave me a dirty look, but softened when she caught my wink. “Nobody’s going to be bait.”
The gesture Ryenne made at Kintan’s back made me choke back a snort. He’d just made a vindictive enemy.
I grabbed Don’s arm as he bent over the bank. The water flowed by about ten feet below.
“You don’t want to get that close,” I cautioned.
He frowned, peering up and down the bank in the dim light. “We need to build a bridge.”
Shiro cocked his head. “Bridge? We don’t have anything to build with. And we can’t throw a rope bridge because we’re all on this side.”
Don nodded. “I know that. But I know what I’m looking for.” He turned to me. “How about if you and I scout upriver a bit? Get everyone else up a tree to rest while we see if we can sort this out?”
I had no particular desire to scout anywhere with the man, but everybody else looked tired enough to need the rest. “Sure,” I said.
Shiro, Henri, and Kintan rounded up the rest while Don and I plodded through the mud, staying back from the river’s edge. It wasn’t a wide river, but the slow, unbroken water flowing by told me it was deep enough to conceal something big enough to eat a human.
We trudged north, climbing a steep hill where the river fell from high above in a misty waterfall. Above the fall, we plodded on until Don stopped at a cluster of downed trees.
“Here. We can work with this.”
I stared at the huge trees on the ground, probably knocked over by some ‘saur. “No way we can move any of these. Not even all of us together. They must weigh a ton.”
“More than a ton,” he agreed. “But if I can find the right one in the right place . . .” He trailed off, picking his way in the dark. “Here!” he called, far too loudly for my liking.
“What?” The tree looked like all the rest, fallen across another tree and lying at an angle. It was near the bank and looked almost long enough to span the distance, but it would take a crane to move it.
Don explained his plan to me. It didn’t make a bit of sense, but he was confident we could do it. “We just need some manpower. Trust me, this is physics. It’s what I do.” The smug look on his face made me want to shove him into the river, but if there was a way to get across it, I’d take it, even from him.
He seemed sure enough to convince me to go back for the rest of the group. They followed us to the site and looked as mystified as I had when he told me.
“Look, it’s just physics,” Don said. “Picture a huge rock balanced perfectly on another small rock. If it were balanced right, one person could spin that rock on the axis, right?”
Kintan and I exchanged a shrug. “Um, sure.”
“And if you put another little rock right next to the first one under the big one, you could ‘walk’ the big one off one and onto the other without much strength, just by spinning it to the right place. We get the top spun out over the river,” he pointed toward another downed tree that stretched toward us from the opposite bank, “and they meet in the middle. Instant bridge.”
“Um,” I said. “Why don’t you just tell us what to do, okay?”
He sighed. “How many lightning sticks do we have?”
Three of us pulled the heavy metal poles that carried an electric charge to a little fork on the end. We used them to scare small ‘saurs away, but they were useless on anything bigger than about thigh-high.
“Right,” Don said. “We’re going to ruin those, but we can use them.”
The tree he was so excited about was mostly intact. It had broken off its root system, so the bottom end of the trunk was blunt. The leafy top hung over the river. “It’s perfect,” Don said. “It’s even laying downhill.”
We used the lightning sticks as levers to roll a huge rock right up next to the downed tree that was propping our tree up at an angle. It took an hour, and we all took turns. Finally Don was happy with the placement.
“Now we roll the tree.”
His plan still didn’t make any sense to me, but we didn’t have any better options.
The electric forks broke off the ends of our lightning sticks as we dug them into the ground, hauling with all our strength to roll the big tree. Everyone else pushed and we finally got it to move an inch.
“Good. A little more.” Don stood just above the rock, directing us where to push.
We grunted and shoved, backs screaming with effort. The tree rolled slightly downhill along the lower tree and onto the rock we’d placed.
“Now lift.”
The rock acted like a fulcrum, allowing six of us to lift the blunt trunk of the tree. Don directed us to pull it upstream, making the leafy, branched part angle out over the river. Finally he told us to drop it.
We looked out over the river in wonder. The tree now spanned half the distance. I didn’t like the look of the space in the middle where the two treetops met. The branches would be thin and the climbing treacherous. But if we were fast and lucky, we’d make it.
Don nodded. “I told you I was vital. Now who’s going first?”
Chapter 40
I spoke to the res
t of the party. “Wait here. Watch us and we’ll let you know when to start crossing.”
To Don I said, “Your idea. You go first.”
Don’s eyes widened and he looked around the rest of the group. Everyone stared back at him. He opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, and turned to the tree without a word. The tree trunk was slick with rain and I followed him, both of us inching along on our bellies. The river flowed by underneath us. I pictured what might be down there looking up, considering a leap to pluck us off the tree, but nothing broke the surface. When we got to the branches we climbed along, choosing the strongest ones and keeping our weight divided over more than one branch as they got smaller. We were dangerously close to the rushing water below.
“It’s not going to hold me.” Don was bobbing on a thin branch, clutching more small sticks for balance. The top of the opposite tree was poking through into our tree’s space, but one weak branch and we’d be in the water.
“If I can get across, we can string some rope from farther back. Make a little rope bridge just for this part.” I backed up to a stronger part of the tree and pulled our remaining rope out of my pack. It wasn’t much, but it didn’t have to go far. I hitched it around a strong fork in the trunk. “Move out of the way.”
Don scrambled back and I took a deep breath. “Make sure this doesn’t get tangled on anything as I go.”
The branches bent under my weight, closer and closer to the water. The theme song from an old Earth movie started playing in my head. Da-dum. Da-dum. If only it were just a giant shark down there.
Finally I ran out of tree. I reached out for the thin, high branches of the opposite bank’s tree. They were slick in my hands. One wrong foot, and I’d be in the river. And it wouldn’t matter if there was a Great White or a Rex in the water, because I had never learned how to swim.
Steady. Look. Breathe.
I closed my eyes and ducked my head so I wouldn’t get poked in the eye by the sharp twigs.
I jumped.
