FSF, August-September 2009

by Spilogale, Inc

  Cara nodded. “The villagers call them moving-hills. You've seen them before?"

  "A couple times. At first we thought they were natural formations."

  "It's the camouflage. They cover their shells with grass and moss, glue it on with spit that hardens like glass.” Cara raised a hand, showing a scar on her thumb. “I touched one once. Not a good idea."

  "What about going through them?” Delta asked. “Because that's the direction we need to go.” She pointed toward a section of forest beyond the center of the herd. “Can we do that? Is it safe?"

  "Safe enough if we don't startle them,” Cara said. “When they sense danger they close ranks, lock shells, stay that way until the threat passes."

  "Should we go on foot?"

  "That'd be my suggestion, provided we have time."

  Delta looked left, consulting her in-eye display. “I planned on stopping here anyway, waiting a few minutes before moving on.” She stepped from her rover. “If we start walking now, we'll be fine.” She pushed her riding shaft into the chassis, latched it down, and fastened the collapsed rover into her shoulder harness. Then she turned away, cupped her ear, and spoke to the orbiter. “Alpha, I need five minutes off-line.” A pause, and then: “Yes, Alpha. Right now. I'm taking five minutes.” Then she blinked, straightened up, and looked at Cara. “We need to talk.” She started walking. “It's about Epsilon. I've got concerns. I need to know if you share them.” She drew closer to Cara, speaking softly as they entered a band of mist at the foot of the rise. “We've got five minutes, Sister. Talk to me."

  Cara frowned. “You want to know if I have concerns about Epsilon taking over the mission?” Her voice sounded flat within the mist, more like thoughts than spoken words. “I guess I don't feel all that good about it. I mean, she doesn't seem to have the temperament for fieldwork ... and she's not particularly good with the villagers. Long-Eyes calls her ‘the tall one.’ Did you know that? He thinks she's prideful."

  "So even Long-Eyes sees it?"

  "I think so."

  "So that's three opinions,” Delta said. “All agreeing that Epsilon is different."

  Cara winced.

  "Something wrong?"

  "Maybe.” Cara sighed. “Listen ... it might be easier if I didn't say this, but we need to consider it.” She turned toward Delta, looking into eyes that were partly her own, partly those of a stranger. “What if it isn't just Epsilon who's different? What if it's all of us?"

  "I don't follow."

  "No? Surely you've noticed we're not identical. Maybe we were at first. At the moment of integration we were perfect copies of Cara Prime, but working together has changed us. To function within our group, each of us has assumed a role. You turned quiet, secretive. Zeta became a devoted follower. Epsilon became—"

  "Arrogant and devious."

  "That's harsh."

  "It's true."

  "Maybe. You've been with her since she integrated. I'm sure you know her better than I."

  "That's right. I've seen things. Did you know she rigged the drawing we did back at base camp? She hid the short straw in her palm. I saw her do it. I would have said something then, but I figured it best to play along: deal with the nests, then deal with her."

  "You saw her palm the straw?"

  "I did. And I don't think behavior like that has anything to do with healthy social order. Her differences are deeper than ours, more troubling. What do you think?"

  "What do I think?” Cara slowed her pace, lowering her voice as she and Delta moved among the grazing snails. “I think you're begging the question, that you want me to say that Epsilon's differences are ingrained, that perhaps something went wrong during her transmission from the orbiter's data files."

  "All right,” Delta said. “You think that's possible?"

  Cara shrugged. “Maybe. It might be, but the odds are against it."

  "Forget the odds,” Delta said. “Consider the evidence. You see it and I see it.” She stepped ahead of Cara, moving away from a pivoting snail.

  Cara moved with her. “You need to talk to Alpha about this, not me."

  "I plan to,” Delta said. “But not yet. We have work to do. I'll talk to Alpha after we place the markers. Then, once the nests are gone, I'll head back to the village.” Her expression turned stern in the moonlight. “I have no intention of retiring, Sister. I'll leave you on site and tell Alpha I need a private link, just her and me."

  "That's going to make Epsilon suspicious."

  "There's no preventing that. The important thing is that Alpha hears our concerns."

  "They are your concerns, Sister."

  "And yours, too. And those of Long-Eyes. You've just confirmed it. Epsilon's not fit to assume control of the field. And I'm thinking maybe Alpha's got the same suspicions. When I lay it out, she'll understand."

  "And then what? You'll go back to the village? Confront Epsilon?"

  "That's right, confront her and hope she listens to reason. Best-case scenario, she retires voluntarily and leaves me in charge."

  "And worst case?"

  "That could be—” Delta flinched, averting her eyes, looking left. “Yes ... yes, Alpha. I'm here.” Delta stopped walking. “Say again, Alpha. Are you sure?"

  Cara looked up, noticing a clear patch of sky overhead. The orbiter hung at zenith, a bright speck among the predawn stars.

  "Show it to me, Alpha.” Delta's gaze turned inward. “Show me what you're seeing."

  Cara heard something moving behind them: a shifting of the forest canopy, the rhythmic thump of heavy footsteps.

  "Delta,” Cara said. “We should—"

  Delta raised a hand, gesturing for Cara to wait a moment. “Show me infrared, Alpha. Zoom in."

  The thumping grew louder, reverberating through the ground, alarming the snails.

  Cara turned in place, shifting on her good leg, looking back at the forest behind them.

  "All right,” Delta said, glancing down, still focusing on the view from the orbiter. “I see it! I'll tell Gamma!” Then she turned, blinking to clear the in-eye image.

  But Cara didn't need to be told. She already saw it for herself. Fifty meters behind them, above the jagged backs of the snails, a cloud of flying slugs jetted from high branches on the edge of the field. A moment later, a head emerged from the trees, three meters above the ground, staring at Cara with cold, milky eyes. It was one of the fang-claws, a straggler returning from the central forest.

  "What now?” Delta asked.

  The fang-claw reared back, brushing the trees with its reptilian head. But unlike a reptile, it had no lower jaw. Instead, a pair of arms sprouted from the base of its skull, thrusting forward along the face so that the claws curved like fangs across the snout: fang-claws.

  "What now?” Delta asked again, reaching for her rover. “Do we ride out of here?"

  The snails were closing in.

  "No,” Cara said. “Hold your ground.” She flexed her knees, hoping her bad leg wouldn't fail. “We have to climb."

  "Climb?” Delta turned in place. “The shells?"

  "Get on top, but watch out for those jags."

  The glass-like projections flashed in the moonlight, poking from tufts of camouflaging grass and moss.

  "Climb!” Cara pointed. “That one! Go!"

  Delta responded, scuttling up along one of the shells as Cara turned to find herself standing a step away from a pair of pulsing eyestalks. She pivoted on her bad leg, dodging the sweeping arc of the snail's razor-sharp tongue. The snails were still feeding, scraping up anything that came in reach. Flesh or grass, it was all the same to them.

  Cara sidestepped, away from the snail's head, toward the grass-covered spiral at the side of its shell. Then she climbed, pulling herself up, reaching the top as the phalanx closed. Shells collided. She felt the impact through her hands and knees: hollow thumps followed by the grind of meshing jags.

  Delta knelt a few meters away, hands bleeding, eyes going wide as two more fang-claws emerged fro
m the trees. They came up behind the first, then the three of them raced forward, approached like wingless birds: bodies cantilevered across pulsing hips, heads counterbalanced by ridged tails.

  "Find the center,” Cara said, looking along the shells. “There!” She pointed. “Go there!"

  Delta stood and started running, bounding across the shells. The closest fang-claw tracked her, head swinging like a derrick, mandible arms spreading wide, exposing the toothless mouth at the top of its throat.

  "Stay put,” Cara shouted. “You're out of reach. Just stay—"

  Something moved to Cara's left, a second fang-claw reaching for her, talons splayed. She leaped back, rolled, and dropped into a gap between shifting shells. The talons clicked above her, closed on empty air, and drew away.

  Delta called to her, voice shrilling.

  Cara didn't answer. It was all she could do to cling to the jags, fingers slipping as blood bubbled from her palms, cuts deepening as she pulled herself up to peer across the shells.

  The fang-claws circled, focusing on Delta.

  "Hold on!” Cara unslung her harness, removed her rover. “You brought me along to wrangle these animals.” She crouched, ready to sprint along the shells. “Here goes.” She took off, powered by panic and adrenaline.

  The fang-claws pivoted, tracking her as she leaped toward the ground, landed on her good foot, and yanked her rover out of latch-down. Then she mounted the pedals, snapped on her headlamp, and took off so fast that she nearly overpowered the stabilizers. Gyros whined, correcting her balance as she hurtled along at a forty-degree angle, wheeling away in a tight arc that carried her back toward the nearest fang-claw.

  The animal's eyes flashed in her headlamp, then went dark as she shot between its hips. Clawed feet shifted, turning, nearly clipping her before she sailed out beneath a swinging tail. A moment later she was racing away, crashing through grass that whipped around her knees. The forest lay dead ahead, a dark wall of trunks and leaves. Above her, a school of flying squids reeled in jetting arcs, flocking toward high branches to await the inevitable kill....

  Cara cut her speed and turned to see Delta stumbling atop the shells. But the snails kept shifting beneath her. She lost balance and fell—first to her knees, then to her hands, and then sideways to vanish between the shells.

  "Delta!” Cara raced back through the high grass, watching the locked phalanx of shells until a hand emerged, bloody and groping, climbing up along the jags. A moment later Delta was back on top, crawling now, slicing open the legs of her unitard as she reached the outer edge of the herd. Then she fell, slammed the ground, and tried getting up. She almost made it, rising on one foot, but falling again when she tried putting her weight on a leg that now ended in a bloody stump. One of the snails had taken her foot.

  The fang-claws raced toward her, converging so fast that Cara barely made it past them in time to grab Delta by her shoulder pack. She held on, riding full throttle, trying to drag Delta clear as the beasts closed in.

  Something popped, the sensation reverberating through Cara's wrist like a snapping tendon, and suddenly she was moving faster, overtaxing the gyros and crashing into a sideways skid. She looked up, expecting to see one of the fang-claws reaching for her. But the animals weren't there. Nor was Delta. The pop she had felt was the pack's straps letting go. She had dragged the pack to safety. Delta had remained among the fang-claws.

  Across the field, the animals fed, heads together, tails waving in the air until one turned away. A piece of field jacket fluttered like a tattered flag from its mandible claws. An instant later the beast was running, coming toward Cara as she got up, lashed Delta's battered pack across her shoulders, and accelerated out of the field and into the forest.

  The ground angled downward. She took the descent at full speed, crashing onto a level stretch that might have been the remnants of an ancient road. Here, still riding full tilt, she unclipped the rover's headlamp and held it high, letting the fang-claw fix on it. She didn't look back. Didn't need to. She felt its head looming behind her, angling forward, closing for the kill....

  She threw the lamp and pulled her feet from the pedals. The light shot away, streaking like a meteor as her rover's gyros cut out. She crashed to the ground. The animal kept moving, following the streak as it curved into a stand of weeds. She waited until she heard the animal thrashing through the leaves, digging for the light. Then she got up, leaped onto the rover, and rode into darkness.

  * * * *

  Dawn broke in the distance, appearing as an indigo haze beyond the trees. She rode toward it, bracing herself against the control shaft as the aching thunder of her wounded leg, bandaged arm, and lacerated hands intensified. She needed to rest. “Soon,” she told herself, and kept moving.

  The ground angled upward. She followed it, accelerating until a ledge came into view beyond a stand of ferns. And then, too late, she saw the pit.

  She pulled back, trying to stop as her wheel skidded over the edge. Gyros whined, cutting out as she slipped into empty air. Nerves took over. She released the shaft, threw out her arms, and spun around to grab the edge of the hole. Her hands slapped hard against the rock. She stopped with a jolt, chest and knees slamming the pit wall. Something popped in her shoulder, but she held on, legs dangling as her rover landed below her with an echoing thump. She looked down. Saw nothing. Only darkness. The rover was lost. She couldn't get it back. What mattered now was climbing out of the pit and back onto level ground.

  The pack that she had taken from Delta shifted on her back, dangling from where she had lashed it to her rover's harness. The weight put her off balance, and her hands kept sliding on the shale, leaving bloody streaks until her fingers grabbed a break in the rock. She pulled ... a moment later she was crawling ... a moment after that she was facedown amid the ferns, panting, too weak to move.

  She slipped both packs from her shoulders and tried sitting up. No good. The best she could do was prop herself on a throbbing elbow.

  Something sharp dug into her hip. It was the hard-shell case, the one she had placed in her pocket before leaving the village.

  "Get it out,” she muttered. “Use it."

  On the back of her neck, beneath the no-longer-functioning transmitter in the base of her skull, a pressure-release cover protected a slot in her C-3 vertebrae. Her good arm twinged as she reached for the cover, pinched it, and pulled it free. It slipped from her fingers, falling down into the bed of ferns. She didn't bother looking for it. Odds were she'd never need it again.

  Then she pulled the case from her pocket and broke its code-red seal. Inside lay a dorsal plug, dermal pad, and wristband monitor. She hesitated, wondering one last time if she could get through the next quarter hour without using them. Perhaps she should try standing, take a few steps, see if things loosened up. But her back flared as she moved. “I'm wasting time.” She looked at the contents of the open case. “Just do it!"

  She picked up the plug, careful not to touch its gold-plated end. Then, using one arm to steady the other, she inserted the plug into the slot.

  Next she took the dermal pad, pinched it to activate the adhesions, and pressed it into place over the plug.

  The monitor came last. She lifted it from the case, wrapped it around her wrist, and remotely activated the plug by pressing a sensor on the monitor's side. Relief came at once, washing over her so fast that she fell sideways, landing hard on her bad arm. She felt the impact, sensed the cold hardness of the ground, but not the pain of collision.

  All pain was gone.

  She was halfway there.

  Among her pack's cache of chemical meds was an injector with a code-orange seal. She pulled it out, uncapped it with her teeth, and jammed the needle into her thigh.

  Then she waited, giving the first wave of time-release catecholamines time to burn through her, holding herself steady as exhaustion yielded to a rush of power. She leaned forward, hugging her knees, holding herself in place as she considered the dangers of what she had ju
st done to herself. Energized and freed from pain, she could now harm her body in ways that would have been impossible a few moments earlier. Muscles and bones could now be pushed to catastrophic failure. She would need to be careful, keep her eyes on the wristband monitor, and remember that her euphoric sense of power had nothing to do with her true condition.

  She stood up and turned in place among the ferns. Her knee popped painlessly as she gave it her weight. Bones shifted in her lower back. Nevertheless, she was ready.

  Delta's pack lay at her feet. She opened it, pulled out the markers, and jammed the first one into the rim. Her shoulder creaked. She kept moving, placing the other markers, realizing that she could now see her rover lying in the bottom of the pit. A few minutes ago it had landed in darkness. Now it lay in a pool of golden light.

  She crouched on the edge. The glow looked like sunlight, but the sun was still too low on the horizon to be shining into the pit. The light had to be coming from another source—from a cave that opened on the seawall below the ledge.

  And if that light came from a cave, and if she climbed into it, she would probably be able to glimpse the nests.

  Her thoughts raced.

  Somewhere, deep inside herself, in a dark space that still lurked beneath her catecholamine-induced high, she feared her newfound sense of reckless courage. A few moments ago she had nearly fallen into the pit. Now she believed she could climb to its floor and back again. And why not? There were plenty of handholds among the rocks. And even if the climb entailed risk, the fact remained that there were at least three fang-claws in the forest. If they arrived before the lander, she'd find it hard to wrangle them without a uniwheel.

  She turned, pulled the rover's harness from the back of her field pack, and strapped it over her shoulders. Then she returned to the pit, gripped the edge, and started down.

  A moment later she entered the glow. It was indeed sunlight, warming her as she turned to find herself peering through the oval entrance of a long, funneling cave. The sun was there, rising out of the ocean, shining through a break in the seawall.

  She shielded her eyes and looked at the sides of the cave. The walls seemed to be covered with blisters, translucent sores that quivered in the light. She moved closer, her eyes adjusting. The blisters were gelatinous sacks, hammock-like nests full of twisting shadows. The young had hatched.