Exigency Page 12

  John was quiet a moment, tentatively feeling around inside his survival bag. She watched the lump of his hand inspect his side, move down to the left thigh, and then the hand appeared at his neck, gently probing the shiny glaze of sealant she’d sprayed on all of the wounds. He turned his head on the fluffy coat she’d bundled into a pillow for him, and peered up at her.

  “I meant, have you been able to … well … purge?”

  Minnie laughed and slapped a hand over her mouth. His expression suggested she looked like a looner, but it was just so inexplicably great to hear John being John again. “Funny you should mention that. Been handling that business for a while now. Even handled one just a couple hours ago. Feel like a new woman.”

  He cracked a small smile, then resumed the professional, mature tone. “How’s the regularity been? Since the first?”

  She shook her head, amused by the preoccupation. “Well, that was only just a few days ago.”

  “Wow. So—”

  “Hey, I know it’s your favorite subject matter, but we’re done with this topic, boss.” She grinned and patted his arm. “Back to your wounds. Sensors show you’ve regrown about ten percent of the lost tissue. In terms of mobility, it looks like your right calf is still pretty much useless. I don’t see that changing without some kind of implant. If Pablo was still around, he might have had better ideas.” She watched his face slowly sober. Perhaps she wasn’t relaying this news with the best bedside manner, but he already knew most of this, so it shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise. “As for the ribcage, I honestly don’t know how that’s going to work out. It worries me more than any of the other ones. If not for the sealant on there, the bones would still be exposed.”

  John blinked purposefully a few times in a row, licked his lips, and tried to speak. “Min—” He grimaced as he tried to swallow. Minnie stuck a straw in his mouth and he drew a few pained gulps of water. “Thanks … Minerva, but what … what exactly happened to me?”

  He didn’t remember.

  It was all gone.

  Minnie spent the following hour recounting the events of the past weeks. John seemed to gradually stow away his surprise and fear, thanking her at the end for everything she’d done to save his life.

  Following an uneasy silence, while John peered under a couple of his bandages, Minnie decided to leave him alone with his thoughts and venture out to hunt.

  “I’ll keep an eye on you in mapping,” he said as she left.

  In the valley, she came across a pair of bunnies nibbling at a root bulb they’d dug out. With the bunnies in her pocket, she inspected the root. Like most non-fungi plants on Epsy, the seeds grew from roots, acting as both fruit and storage organ, and where they were most accessible to seed-spreading helper animals. This one was a dark aqua hue, had the exterior texture of a carrot, and a squishy tomatoey pulp inside. She unearthed a few that hadn’t been nibbled, and brought them back to the cave.

  Despite her insistence that he rest, John lay on his side and used one hand to help rig up a rotisserie using the heater and some IR emitters.

  After a chemical analysis, it turned out that the root’s outer crust was both edible and safe, while the pulp and seeds were human incomp. The nontoxic part tasted like a pickled shallot or onion. Unimpressed with their “vegetables,” they moved on to the meat. Both agreed that the bunnies, indeed, tasted like chicken.

  Minnie setup a drying rack to preserve what they hadn’t eaten. Bunny jerky would soon join their expanding diet.

  As they fell asleep, cave entrance moaning with the wind, Minnie told John she still planned to track down Ish. Bring her back if she found her alive. John didn’t argue. He even suggested a method of pinpointing Ish’s skimmer even if it was completely shut down.

  The next day would see no search expedition. The storm had arrived.

  Neither had appreciated the power of Epsy’s major storms. Viewed from above and through sensors, sure, many were stronger than Earth hurricanes, but to experience one first hand for forty straight hours, Minnie and John shared a new respect for Epsy’s resilient inhabitants.

  On the second night, after eating, John put on his earnest face. “How you doing up here?” He tapped the side of his head. “Almost three weeks.”

  Minnie looked to her eyebrows, as if conducting a visual inspection. “Looking good!” No amusement in John’s expression. She exhaled. “Honest, not even a hint. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, as each day passed. Maybe my broke got fixed in the metabed on the way here. Or what if every year that went by on meds—years without a single episode—just gave the crazy glands time to heal? Nature tends to fix itself when given time.”

  “You know it doesn’t work that way. What if the neurotoxins from the cave were keeping you in check? Just delaying. You might be on the verge.”

  Minnie shrugged. “Could be. Or I’m cured. Time will tell. Leave it, okay? I’ll let you know if anything even slightly zany pops into my head.”

  The skies cleared on the third day. Minnie set up her skimmer’s onboard scanners while John walked her through the steps from the cave.

  By midday, Minnie was flying toward the other skimmer’s reactor power signature. Observing that her pathway followed along the curving course of a well-known river, Minnie was keenly aware that this route led directly to the area’s largest Hynka village.

  JOHN: If we haven’t already, we’re going to lose DC soon.

  MINNIE: Yeah, any second.

  JOHN: I know I said it already, but if it looks like you’ll be in any danger whatsoever, abort and come back. Do not land that skimmer.

  MINNIE: I know. Me and it are your only way out of this giant butt. I won’t be hasty.

  JOHN: It’s not just for me. And it’s an order, understand?

  Ugh. Old John back in action.

  Minnie ignore his last message and, a few seconds later, saw the DC icon flash and break in two, letting her know she’d traveled out of range. Below her, the landscape shifted to an oddly beautiful plain of knobby green waves, like a flash-frozen ocean. She dropped to 10m, gliding across the surface, exhilarated. Upon closer inspection, the lumpy topography appeared to be ancient lava flow coated in lichen moss.

  If not for deadly native inhabitants and another human life dependent on her for survival, she’d love to set out exploring this land from coast to coast. So much of it was entirely different from Threck Country. She didn’t know why that surprised her. The Threck lived in the geographical equivalent of New Zealand, while the Hynka had a landmass the size of Eurasia to call home. Mountain ranges to canyons, deserts and great lakes. “What a waste,” had been Minnie’s not-so-quiet original observation, especially given the fact that the Hynka stuck to these premiere upper-middle latitudes.

  More fungal forestland approached up ahead, and Minnie returned to her higher elevation. The instant she passed over an especially tall stand of epsequoias, Minnie realized she’d arrived. Throngs of Hynka filled the trampled, near-barren land, moving about like worker ants without the lines. Hundreds carried water in hollowed-out shroom stalks to a vast “well” in the center of the village, while hundreds more streamed in from the forest with arms full of large nut pods, bundles of stringy black leaves, bunnies, and other bounty. Circling over the village, she saw clusters of Hynka in the river catching jellies with their bare hands.

  Not so savage at home, eh? Cooperative civilized behavior like this never made it into one of Ish’s reports. Why hide it? She’d so desperately wished to convince Minnie and the others that the Hynka were these advanced people—not the frenzied pack animals everyone observed, little more than rudimentary tool-wielding wolves.

  But then she was spotted and things returned to familiar territory. Five individuals yelling and pointing grew to ten, which grew to thirty, and before she could zip from the clearing, chests began heaving, heads rolled around on necks, shoulders rose and fell, guttural shrieks rang out, and bodies were ripped apart. For the Hynka, there was no time li
ke a crisis to devour your closest neighbor. Minnie peered back just in time to see that limbs and heads weren’t being ripped asunder merely for rage management or food, but for ammo. An arm whizzed by behind her, instantly followed by a head, which actually struck the side of the skimmer.

  She accelerated and shot up into the sky another hundred meters, well above body part flinging range. She pulled up the tracking screen in her fone and saw that Ish’s skimmer was only 1.5K east. The app had precise coordinates now and Minnie set them as her destination, bringing up the familiar red guide line. It was interesting to see it floating in the sky, like a game, gently arcing toward an unseen location beyond a rocky red outcropping jutting up from dense foliage.

  Less than a minute later, Minnie was well away from the hordes of Hynka, but she could still hear the ruckus she’d instigated. There were no Hynka in sight here on the outskirts of the village, but it was quite clearly an area they frequented. The lack of small foragers dispersing a variety of seeds had created a monochrome landscape dominated by a single species of tall, cream-colored, martini-glass-shaped fungus in every direction.

  They’d surely seen which way she’d flown. They’d be here soon enough.

  Minnie crossed over the 30 meter-high sandstone outcropping, like a natural wall extending from the taller hills on one side, gradually losing height until finally plunging beneath the fungus jungle’s (Tom had brilliantly coined “fungle”) colorless canopy less than a kilometer away.

  Another half-K into dense, seemingly untrodden fungle, the guide line plunged into a small gap in the vegetation. Without an obvious path to land, Minnie switched to biomag. The drab fungi disappeared, revealing the distinctive structure of a parked skimmer, shining green. Clearly the Hynka had yet to come across it.

  She surveyed the perimeter, finding no signs of Ish or anything else. Gazing back toward the sandstone wall, Minnie tried to imagine where Ish would’ve gone first. Heading straight for a crowded area would be patently suicidal, but who knew if Ish would see it that way?

  With a now-or-never fire beneath her, Minnie landed, hopped over to Ish’s skimmer, powered it on, and enabled pairing. After a quick glance at the small pile of supplies (and Ish’s helmet) on the ground, she leapt back to her pad, completed the skimmer pairing, and launched back out of the hideaway. The handling was slightly different than a single vehicle, but not remotely as unwieldy as she’d expected. The two ionic drives seemed to act as a single, giant propulsion surface, even seamlessly correcting for the lack of load on Ish’s skimmer.

  Keeping low over the fungle canopy, Minnie returned to the rock outcropping and slowly floated above a path of seemingly cleared ground between rock face and vegetation. The trail soon widened out into an unquestionably created area.

  Hovering above an apparent shrine—a massive, many-pointed star composed of what appeared to be thousands of bones—Minnie slowly rotated the skimmers. The pale bone star had been set up on a level bed of dark gravel. Large, crudely chiseled blocks rose away from the bones and pebbles toward the jutting sandstone—1-high, then a stack of 2, then 3—the initial building blocks of an as-yet unimagined pyramid. The giant steps led to a landing or stage, also built of monolithic blocks, three wide. From there, natural tiering took over, offering access to increasingly steep third and fourth levels, where semi-spherical natural cavities dented the sandstone, like docking ports for 20 EVs.

  The whole rock looked to Minnie like pics she’d seen of the Utah desert, and it probably would’ve been even more reminiscent a thousand years ago, before the Hynka decided to make it their own. No doubt the stone on this side had not always been so pale. Like a seabird flock’s favorite offshore rock, the tiers of formerly red sandstone had been bleached white by years of defilement—Hynka blood sheeting down the steps like a gory fountain, or some bizarre “water” feature one might find outside the HQ of the International Milk Farmers Association.

  As she imagined the grisly ceremonies that must occur here, something caught Minnie’s eye above the bleached layers. On the rocky outcropping, between the highest tier and the peak, Minnie found Ish.

  2.0

  EV4’s stabilizer legs deployed as the sphere descended slowly toward a vast, featureless plain. Thomas Meier held his breath as he watched the altimeter count down, awaiting the jarring thud of surface contact. Through the porthole above, a mostly clear violet sky implied a beautiful Threck Country day awaited them, though sensors had warned of gusty wind in the projected landing zone.

  On the panel before him, a virtual Evacuation Vehicle graphic met the ground’s jagged line a few seconds before he felt anything. For an instant, it seemed they’d stopped moving, but then the EV grazed the surface, tilting and wobbling for a few seconds as it bounced and drifted several more meters, then skidded to a stop. Silence followed, emphasizing the eerie, almost sickening sensation of zero motion.

  Concerned about the wind and the EV toppling if he retracted the chute, Tom instead hit the chute release. A muffled ch-kck overhead signaled its successful detachment, and he turned his head left to see Angela’s stunned face. Eyes alert and guarded, her mouth hung open in a frozen smile. They sat there, still, for nearly a minute.

  Angela’s hushed voice in Tom’s helmet broke the silence.

  “Strewth … We’re actually alive.”

  “For the moment,” he replied with grim earnest. A line from Outpost Iota. “Let’s see if there’s anything outside that wants to eat us.”

  She glared at him and lifted her visor. He did the same and began disconnecting his helmet.

  “You hole!” She backhanded his chest. “We lived! You can’t just celebrate that? Or at least let me celebrate it for more than a second?”

  Tom sighed and put his hand on her knee. “Honey … shut up. That was a quote. And an awesome one at that. Victor Kant. Such a bad ass. But yeah, I wasn’t serious. What I’d like to verify is that there’s nothing that wants to eat me.” He winked and unfastened his restraints.

  She pulled off her helmet. “I’m so kicking your ass when we’re settled.”

  “I love you?” he said in an apologetic singsong.

  They leaned close and embraced, both squeezing a bit more firmly than the other had expected. Tom planted his nose into her hair and inhaled.

  She pushed him back. “No way. Don’t smell me right now. Five days of funk layered up on this nasty body.”

  “I enjoy your nasty body.” A spot-on impression of Welsh actor Vale Bevan, if Tom said so himself.

  He set the pod to begin equalizing with the outside air as he and Angela opened their surface survival kit’s to resume evac procedures. Tom clipped the holster onto his suit and pulled his multiweapon from its case. He held it out by the grip, pointing the business end up.

  “A man and his gun,” he said.

  Angela glanced at him and laughed. “So sexy.”

  Tom lifted an amorous eyebrow. “You want another go before we disembark for the rest of our natural lives? Make it a nice even three?”

  “Uh, no. Rewind forty-five seconds and pay close attention to the ‘five days of funk’ part. And three is an odd number, doof. We’ve got work to do. For one, we need to track down Aether and Qin. Do you have a fix on them … or Zees and Pablo, for that matter?”

  “I lost my DC to Aether when our chute blew. Figured they kept descending for a while before theirs deployed, thus moving out of range.”

  “Wait, what if their chute didn’t pop at all?”

  Tom waved a dismissive hand. “These things have backups for the backups. Don’t wack out on me.” He studied the EV’s console. “We’re all equalized here. Weather outside is safe. No natural threats in the vicinity. You ready to step out?”

  “I feel like we should wait for Aether’s instructions.”

  Tom’s hand hovered in front of the hatch lever. “Honey, I’m eighty-eight kilos. Nearly two meters. I’ve been in this thing with you for almost ninety hours, and while the conversation has been riv
eting, and while I feel that our relationship has reached a beautiful new level—and I don’t just mean the fact that we’re probably the first people in history to christen an EV, not only once, but twice—and while I love you and never wish to be apart from you, I need to get the hell out of this thing before my spine buckles and my brain implodes.”

  Angela looked up at him with loving eyes and a touched smile. “Okay, sweetie. If you’re sure it’s safe outside. And I like it when you turn into Mr. Take-Charge, by the way. Uber-sexy. Though I doubt we’re the first to defile an EV.”

  “But during a real evac? Hmmm?” Tom rotated the lever and the hatch glided outward before rising up and over the top of the EV. Hot air flowed in.

  “Oh wow, that smell!” Angela said as Tom poked his head out and peered around. “So different … Is that sun-dried landfill I detect?”

  For a brief moment, Tom thought they’d landed on a dry lake bed, the surface a seemingly perfect flat, almost all the way to the horizon. In the heat-blurred distance rose a low, rolling mountain range. Above, the pale violet sky was painted with stretching cirrus clouds. Gusty summer winds howled and whistled around the EV, the shiny white sphere an alien blemish on the monotonous landscape.

  Tom checked the ground before stepping out. “You know where we are?”

  “No, you’re standing in the way.”

  “The Parking Lot,” Tom said with genuine awe, and moved aside.

  “No way.”

  Like referring to Everest or the Amazon on Earth, Epsy’s “Parking Lot” was a renowned land feature. It was one of the 17 Wonders of Epsy, so branded by the station crew. Six years after arriving in orbit, or more precisely, three years after dispatching their initial report and data drop back to Earth, the mission had received its first set of new orders. For Tom, the most intriguing part of the message was not the strange shift in research priorities, but the unexpected intro to their new bosses and colleagues.