Exigency Read online

  Running felt good. She noticed her energy level increasing the more time she spent outside the oppressive cavern. In the beginning, the limitations of the cave occasionally provided comfort, like tightly swaddling a newborn that had spent its first nine months in a room no bigger than its body. Hynka aside, the idea of the surface’s unfamiliar and boundless expanse had felt wholly unsafe. But after several days, even with the calorie bars and supplements, Minnie had noticed a growing fatigue weighing on her in the cave. She’d felt lazy and unmotivated, useless and depressed. In there, her only consistent drive was handling John’s medical needs.

  Fresh air, despite the higher nitrogen level, had made all the difference.

  One of Epsy’s rodentia popped out of a hole just in front of her before startling and disappearing just as quickly. Biologically, the Hynkas’ favorite prey were closer to birds, their coats consisting of very fine, downy feather structures like young chicks, but they were millions of years from flight, if that’s where they were headed. For now, they behaved much like timid squirrels or rabbits, and the crew fondly referred to them as bunnies. Though no one ever put it in an M (as it’d violate conversation topic rules), curiosity abounded on whether or not, this far from Earth, an animal would still “taste like chicken.”

  As cute as they were, Minnie planned to bring one back for supper. She’d settle the chicken question, once and for all. And this one seemed as appropriate a candidate as any other. She posted over its hole, spun off a length of trapping wire, and fed it into the burrow. When it felt like it reached the end, she snipped the wire, wrapped the ends around her MW’s stun posts, and cranked up the voltage. She pulled the trigger. A sad, muffled peep let her know her very first hunt had been successful.

  Lying prone in the soil, Minnie stretched her arm into the hole, feeling around for her prize. No such luck. After a quick scan through the soil for biomagnetic waves, she dug around to widen the entrance. Quite a few flatworms were exposed in the process, and, unsure if they were related to the ones from the cave, she disdainfully flung them away. Finally, upon reaching and extracting the electrocuted bunny carcass, Minnie stood up and inspected herself for worms or anything else that might have attached itself to her suit. All clear.

  She unzipped a storage pocket, pulled out the crumpled bag attached within, stuffed in the bunny, and sealed it up.

  As she continued on to the EV site, she felt a strange mix of pride and guilt about the limp animal bouncing on her thigh. Hooray for a successful first hunt, but it was almost as though she’d killed a puppy.

  JOHN: Good job with the rodent.

  MINNIE: I forgot you were there. Thank you, but shush.

  He resent her the sealed lips.

  There weren’t many things on Epsy that reminded her of home. The forests were dominated by teal, orange, and yellow megafungi, and the lack of flying insects limited the number of aesthetically Earthlike plants to a few remote locations. But bunnies reminded Minnie of home, and the fact that she’d have to go on killing and eating them reemphasized the fact that she’d never again be at home. A real hunter would probably feel the opposite.

  The red guide line ended beyond a dense thicket of green wafer fungi, like the underside of a portabella mushroom, turned on its side and shooting up from the soil like rows of wavy walls. She could have slipped between them as the guide line suggested, but wasn’t keen on being coated in spores.

  Instead, she took the long way around, observing familiar terrain and the first remains of dead Hynka. If she had more time, a close inspection of a cadaver could prove useful, but her mission was comms. She passed a worm-riddled behemoth and disregarded the bones of several others. But as she came upon the EV site, trampled and littered with more Hynka bones than EV scraps, she noticed a few interesting things.

  The EV was gone.

  All of the Hynka remains but a few were practically scoured of meat. The intact ones had been left to the worms and fungus—the Hynka hadn’t eaten the individuals she and John had killed.

  A not-so-subtle stampede trail led east through trampled foliage; a telltale track marked the middle where the EV had been rolled. The Hynka had taken a prize.

  Pieces of small components littered the entire area, many pressed into the soil beneath massive footprints.

  Minnie squatted over a little blue component she recognized from the station’s rebreathers. In the EVs, these things were mounted deep inside the hull behind the seats, protected along with all of the other life support-related gear. The Hynka must have ripped the inside of the pod to shreds.

  JOHN: Sorry, but what is that?

  MINNIE: CO2 biscuit from the scrubbers.

  She peered around the site, spotting hundreds of other tiny pieces, like hi-tech confetti.

  JOHN: I’m sorry, Minerva.

  MINNIE: It’s ok. I didn’t have high hopes.

  JOHN: Are you going to try to go after it?

  MINNIE: Just looking around here, it’s highly doubtful that any kind of comms gear survived their rage dissection.

  JOHN: What about the beacon?

  Again with the beacon?

  He seemed otherwise lucid, but strange how his memory repeatedly erased the bit about the EV beacon being dead.

  MINNIE: Do you not remember us talking about the beacon? That’s twice in the past 20 mins.

  JOHN: I remember it was out of range. Thought maybe since you were closer now … Shutting up.

  Minnie sighed, feeling like she was once again being mean to a severely wounded man. She pulled out her multisensor. She looked directly at the screen so John could see it through her feed, and set the device to listen for emergency signals. The device immediately emitted the three-beep chirp of an affirmative. Range and coordinates of a beacon popped up on the screen.

  What the hell?

  MINNIE: You see this?

  JOHN: I see.

  JOHN: I’ll stop asking about the beacon now.

  Minnie smirked. So a dash of the old John was still hanging around in that head.

  She couldn’t believe it. Not only had just a few kilometers been the difference between sensing the beacon or not, but she was amazed that the emitter was still functional after all the abuse. Then again, they did make those things to survive pretty serious impacts.

  Wait a second …

  She expanded the beacon signal’s details and found ID info. It wasn’t EV6; it was EV5.

  MINNIE: John?!

  JOHN: Wow, I see it!

  MINNIE: She’s 11K away. I’ll route the course and head straight there.

  MINNIE: How were Angela’s SP scores?

  MINNIE: If her beacon’s active, they probably didn’t find her.

  MINNIE: Or maybe our landing distracted them for her.

  JOHN: Angela didn’t evac in EV5. I guess I never told you. Ish stopped her, volunteered to trade spots so Angela wouldn’t have to be alone. She let her go with Tom in EV4.

  MINNIE: Oh.

  Minnie remembered the clang of EV4 launching into open space. She remembered the recroom and Angela hugging Tom from behind, her cheek smushed up between his shoulder blades. Angela giving Minnie a pedicure with probably-toxic enamel paint. “Now if only we could cut the tips off some old runners and glue on a high heel,” she’d joked as she fanned Minnie’s toes. “She won’t be able to resist you.” An early date night with Aether.

  At least Angela got to be with Tom.

  MINNIE: Well, how thoughtful of her in the middle of exigency.

  Could Ish have known in the midst of all that chaos that the EVs were launching askew, and deliberately sent Angela to die in her place? Minnie just couldn’t see Ish doing something for her fellow humans in a time of crisis. She simply didn’t like people.

  Or what if … was she that crazy?

  MINNIE: John, how was Ish’s last psyche eval?

  JOHN: You know I can’t talk about that stuff.

  MINNIE: Honestly? Even now? Think for a second. Really think about it. I bet you
that looner blew up the station on purpose. Killed more than half of the crew. How would she accidentally guide the pod in on a collision course without Qin noticing? It would take more than a little planning and strategy to hide what was really going on. No way he left her unsupervised for 2 effing hours.

  JOHN: If she was suicidal and meds didn’t help, there were numerous systems in place to detect and report anomalous behavior. But she evac’d with the rest of us. She didn’t even hesitate. She didn’t have a death wish.

  MINNIE: No, she didn’t have a death wish! She wanted to be down here! With her real people. Surface evac was the only way. Did the supply pod hit the tube to the BH first?

  John didn’t respond right away. She knew it had, and she knew he was mulling it over. Minnie paced around the scene, kicking Hynka bones out of the way. Every passing second solidified her suspicions. Ish guided the supply pod to impact the escape tube, and then to destroy the engineering sub-bay. Exigency procedures went into effect and she got her surface evac. As mission psych, though, how could Aether have missed the warning signs? Weekly one-on-ones were as non-opt as group.

  JOHN: If she didn’t establish superiority via violence like we did, the Hynka would kill her in an instant.

  MINNIE: And you know she wouldn’t dream of hurting of her babies. My question is, would she expect an attack from them? Or do you suppose she might have built up some grand illusions about communicating with them? Establish peaceful relations? Join the tribe?

  JOHN: What are you going to do? Won’t it be dark soon?

  MINNIE: I have 3.25 hours of daylight. I’m going to find EV5 and, if she’s not dead, I’m going to find Ish.

  1.7

  Minnie’s stomach ached for food, a dull pain joining the piercing stabs of her colon. Running through the forest along the red line, she hoped the adrenalin would ease her discomfort. Tomorrow, she pleaded with her gut. Halfway to EV5’s beacon signal, she certainly wasn’t going to stop and go back to the cave to eat.

  ALERTS: Terrain 0.5K – 3rd order stream

  She ducked beneath a pair of supershrooms and wondered how those babies would taste on a giant grill, drizzled with butter.

  Everything’s food now, eh?

  An image of John lying in the heater’s glow, his body slowly morphing into a roasted chicken, like an old-timey cartoon.

  “Depth and flow?” she asked her fone, unable to navigate the menu and run simultaneously.

  “One to two meters at crossing point!” Superhero emphatically replied in her ear.

  She hadn’t used audible prompts in ages and couldn’t remember why she’d changed it away from the hilariously sexy, breathy Domino voice she always used. The only times she used Superhero was when John sent out long, rambling messages she wanted read to her. It always dampened her irritation to hear his words read in Superhero’s deep, melodramatic yell. That must’ve been why audible was set to him. A fresh dose of guilt.

  Superhero went on, “Twenty-three C-F-S flow! Bank soil rigidity unknown!”

  “You are advising against jumping an obstacle?”

  “Rephrase!” Superhero demanded. The mapping system wasn’t programmed for idle banter like some of the others. And Superhero probably didn’t know he was a superhero, or all that that entailed. Well, Superhero didn’t actually know anything. He was one of thousands of voices that could speak for her fone.

  Minnie dismissed the warning as the river came into view. It was definitely too wide to jump without getting wet, but she was able to walk through without much effort. Beyond the stream, forestland gave way to a relatively flat plain and a wide, distant view. In the distance, a purple mountain overlooked the land, apparently coated in the same mossy lichen that blanketed the plain of river-smoothed rocks around her.

  She focused on the center of the mountain and expanded the tiny details icon that appeared. The station’s sensors had scanned and mapped the mountain several times a year since their arrival in Epsy orbit. Dormant volcanic, 14 major caves, 29 minor caves, nickel, copper, platinum, and rhodium, and though it wasn’t in the files thanks to Ish apparently erasing everything, Minnie remembered a little something about this mountain.

  Ish had done a report on it for the team a couple years back. The Hynka called it Duchroch and it was apparently their equivalent of Mount Olympus, or any of Earth’s other geographically based origin-of-life legends. Minnie had irritated Ish by calling it “duck rock,” but now she was glad she’d actually paid attention in the briefing. Though there were signs that early Hynka occupied its caves, it had been considered sacred and untouchable for as long as modern-day Hynka knew.

  Minnie resumed running along her guide line, cutting left at the mountain’s shrub-littered foothills. 2K to go, and the last leg would have a 300m elevation rise. Peering “through” the mountain in her map overlay, she could see EV5’s flashing beacon signal coming from a saddle between a low-lying foothill and the mountain.

  Halfway up the rocky slope, 15 minutes later, Minnie paused to catch her breath on a small landing. The next rise wore an apron of rocky debris she wasn’t looking forward to climbing. Her abdominal pain had subsided for the time being, but her chest burned. She closed her visor and sucked in a lungful of pure oxygen. John had been silent a while. Asleep, she guessed, as she curled her tongue around her helmet’s water tube, pulled it to her lips, and watched her fone’s gauge count off as she gulped down 500mils.

  Peering back, she saw that she’d reached treetop elevation, a beautiful view of the curving valley behind her. In the distance, the rocky spire that marked their hideout appeared as a rough-edged toothpick before the darkening western sky. She thought about sending John an M to check in, but didn’t want to wake him. Besides, she might’ve been mere minutes from finding Ish camped out in a nearby cave. John didn’t need to be involved with wherever that led.

  She switched to therm and unholstered her MW, setting it to nonlethal.

  Here we go …

  She opened her visor and attacked the loose scree slope—two steps forward, one back; one step forward, two back. It felt like paddling up a waterfall. Discovering she needed both hands, she reholstered her MW.

  One foot after the next! Get those knees high!

  More time on the station’s legger would have been advantageous. Hell, fitness minimums should have been double the prescribed total, but she admitted it would’ve been yet another complaint she’d have sent John’s way.

  Finally reaching the top of the scree, she huffed more oxygen and waited for the thumping all over her body to wane. She peered left to the floating red guide line gently arcing round a bend.

  Beyond the blind curve, the guide continued briefly as a short dashed line before ending abruptly at a white circle. Therm revealed nothing through the dense rock, but upon switching to mag, Minnie held her breath for a beat, swallowed, and proceeded forward.

  Dry purple lichen crunched beneath her boots as she moved along the mostly flat terrain. The sky grew darker by the minute. She wasn’t worried about her ability to see, but while Hynka weren’t strictly nocturnal, most of their prey were, so she figured it’s when they’d be most active. It would explain the massive horde that had greeted them upon landing. However, if the glowing green sphere in her optic was as perfectly intact as she thought, she may not need to worry about Hynka tonight.

  As she rounded the final bend, Minnie paused and leaned out just enough for a direct view. Indeed, EV5 was not only sitting in a convenient little saucer of a depression, it appeared to be in pristine condition. Its hatch hovered above the opening as if someone had just landed and stepped out. Multicolored lights illuminated the interior and visible porthole. Its parachute had retracted upon its pilot’s command during landing, as evidenced by the closed doors at the top of the sphere—an evac step she and John forewent.

  Minnie switched back to therm and surveyed the scene for lifeforms. Nothing bigger than a worm for 100m around the hillside. She held her breath and had her sensors lis
ten for disrupts—sounds that defied the local din pattern. Nothing.

  Venturing forward, Minnie stepped out and walked cautiously toward the EV, noticing halfway there that the hatch faced the wide mouth of a cave. Her optics wouldn’t have picked up anything inside it. She halted, sidestepped to the cave entrance (possibly wide enough to roll the EV into), and ran the same scans. Still no lifeforms, but mag picked up a collection of disparate metals on the ground about 20m in. Minnie activated IR and crept inside, MW held steadily before her.

  Just beyond a slight curve, Minnie recognized a familiar glow: the little red LED atop a survival heater. She crouched down and activated her helmet’s floodlights. The scene gradually illuminated before her as the floods brightened. Calorie bar wrappers, an opened SSK and backpack, both raided by rodents. She brushed aside the gnawed shreds of foil on top of the SSK and found an untouched, sealed brick of eight bars. The bunnies mustn’t have smelled anything of interest. Nor did they appear interested in meds. Ish had left behind some critical items. Indicative of plans to return?

  Minnie noted what she didn’t see: no MW or ammo packs, no multisensor, no tent or survival bag, no suit or helmet. Ish had taken some essentials, though without a backpack. What was she carrying it all in? Suit pockets? Maybe the EV had been supplied for two occupants like all the others.

  Skimmers!

  Minnie snatched up the brick of bars, medkit, and heater, and walked out of the cave. She set her booty on the ground outside the EV and stepped around to the rear. There she found the empty, zigzagging depression of a skimmer bay: former home of the vehicle Ish had apparently taken on her field trip. But right beside it, in its familiar mirrored position, Minnie beamed up at the exposed edge of the second skimmer, nestled right where it belonged, blending perfectly with the curvature of the EV.

  “Well, hello, sexy,” she said, and gave the exposed edge two taps. “I’ll be back for you shortly.”