Castaway Planet (20 page)

With a booming roar, the creature began to drag Whips back.

Chapter 31

The wetlands were full of the signals of life, and thick with confusing echoes and returns from the shallow water and masses of earth on all sides. It was only as he passed beyond one hummock and into a broad pool on the other side that Whips suddenly sensed that the mass at the farther side of the pool wasn’t a hummock of dirt at all.

He spun and streaked for the land. Even if it, too, was amphibious, getting it on land would give the Kimeis a chance to help him.

Twin hammers slammed into his side, an agonizing double impact just above the base of his tail-anchors, and something
yanked
on him, trying to pull him towards the massive creature he could now clearly sense. It was huge—the size of an orekath, he thought!

That might have been a bit of an exaggeration, but the way it had ambushed him and was pulling him towards a multitoothed mouth was very much like that of the giant tentacled predators of Europa. He couldn’t let himself be dragged backwards!

Lashing out with all three arms, Whips caught hold of an outcropping of stone—a projection of the corallike bedrock of the continent—with his right arm. His top arm could also get a good enough grip on that outcrop. The left arm couldn’t, and he flailed frantically. He needed all three anchored or this thing would just drag him back anyway, maybe tearing his arms out at the base!

His sonar showed a faint, harder return below and to the left. He plunged his left arm deep into the mud and was rewarded with the feel of something solid. It might just be a boulder, but it felt big and heavy. Better than nothing.

Deeps and Sky, this hurts!
The creatures’ arms or claws or whatever were only partly penetrating his hide, but they had a grip on him that wouldn’t be broken, and the immense mass of the thing was starting to stretch him.

Three sets of splashing footsteps suddenly detonated in the water near him. He heard Sakura shrieking something in both terror and fury, and the hillock-sized creature holding him twitched and gave vent to a howling growl. Instead of letting go, however, it tightened its grip and heaved.

Despite his desperate attempt to hold on, he felt his own grip slipping, several of his own capture-hooks starting to rip out. He couldn’t keep from screaming, a loud, moaning shriek that could be heard both above and below the water.
I’m losing it!

“Let . . . him . . .
GO!
” Caroline’s frightened voice was no less determined, and he felt the impact of her spear echo through the thing’s arms. Laura’s struck in the same moment, and that caused the thing to bellow in agony.

One arm suddenly released him, but he still had lost most of his grip on the projection of rock. Desperately he fastened his other arms onto the boulder, but it, too, was being dragged backwards.

Then Laura gave a scream—a scream of shock and crushing pain.

Laura!

The thought was very, very much the same as
Mother!

His pain was forgotten. All that mattered was that he had to act, had to act
now.
Using the strength of his own attacker, Whips pulled as hard as he could, and the boulder moved, water flowing now in around it, pulling out. The creature was dragging him swiftly towards it now, towards the huge jaws, but he was turning, arching his body like a sling, seeing Laura in the grip of the hulking thing and her two daughters reaching toward her—

And the boulder, still held in his arms, exploded
from the muddy water, arching around, a morning star the size of Whips’ entire body, almost tearing his arms out by itself, and he twisted around, pulling, let go
NOW!

The dense, heavy stone struck like a bludgeon wielded by a giant, smashing against the monster’s low-slung head, driving it down with a piledriver force that hammered it into the black, stinking mud below. The arms convulsed . . . and went limp.

Whips sagged down, sinking into the water, feeling the torn, strained, and bleeding agony of his arms.
Don’t think . . . any of them are very good right now.

His siphon and anchors still worked, though, so he ignored the stretching, grinding pain of some of his body plates and turned around, jetting to the thing’s body . . . and Laura. “Laura! Dr. Kimei, are you . . .”

“Mother!
MOM!
”

“Don’t pull on her!” Caroline snapped, just as Sakura was reaching for her mother, who was slowly sinking.

“But—”

“I
know!
But if you just pull on her and there’s something wrong with her neck or back—Whips, can you support her?”

“Yes,” he answered. His body was vibrating with the aftermath of terror and shock, and his arms and fingers did not want to move; pain and
wrongness
—of dislocation and torn muscle—echoed up all three of his arms. But he forced them to spread, to catch hold of Laura Kimei, and give her support as Sakura, sobbing but still moving, and Caroline carefully removed her from the slowly relaxing deathgrip of the thing’s claw—which, he could now see, was a three-pincered affair.

I don’t think I want to look at where it grabbed me,
he thought. He could tell, just by feedback through his omni, that his medical nanos were in overdrive trying to negate blood loss, shock, and other effects of the combat.

He could see that Laura’s eyes weren’t completely closed, and she was still breathing, quickly, with tension showing her pain. That was good. She wasn’t unconscious.

With great care, the three of them managed to get Laura well up the bank and lay her down very gingerly. By then, her eyes were open, and she managed a tiny smile. “Good . . . thinking, Caroline.”

“Sorry, Mom,” Sakura said shakily. “I . . .”

“Are you all right, Laura?” Whips asked tensely.

She raised an eyebrow—barely visible with the black mud, mixed with blood, smeared across her face. “I’ll need . . . my omni back . . .”

Caroline practically tore it off her arm and put it around her mother’s wrist. “You linked back in, Mom?”

“Working . . . fine, Caroline,” Laura said faintly. “Now be quiet, I have to do some scans.”

The next few minutes crawled by as though through the thickest mud he could imagine. But finally he heard a sigh from Laura.

“Well, Mom?” Caroline asked tensely. Sakura was wide-eyed and silent.

“I’m not going to die,” she answered with a smile. “But I’m not going to be hiking right away, either.”

Sakura and Caroline exchanged glances, and Whips’ inward wince didn’t have anything to do with his pain. If she couldn’t walk . . .

“How bad is it, Laura?” he asked.

“Broken ribs—that claw crushed hard. Some minor internal injuries. It also managed to crack my hip. I can’t move very far until that’s patched up.” Laura’s voice was stronger. “The nanos are on that, of course, and fighting back the shock and other secondary effects, but they can’t do magic.” She looked at him. “You aren’t much better off, Whips.”

“Oh.”

“‘Oh,’ indeed. You’ve got multiple dislocations in your arm plates, some in your main body, torn muscles, you’ve lost at least ten griphooks, and you took a hit that jarred your brain enough to produce a minor concussion. Your rear holdfast support was half crushed.” She smiled wanly. “A lot of that damage you did to yourself, I think. I only saw what happened vaguely, but it looked like you threw a
hill
at that thing!”

He laughed, even though that really hurt. “I guess it would have looked like that coming down. It was awfully big and heavy.”

“Good thing, too,” Sakura said, looking at the half-submerged, seven-meter-long carcass with a shudder. “Mom stabbed it in the eye but nothing else we did seemed to be even annoying it much.”

“We have a problem, though,” Caroline said slowly.

Laura nodded her head with care. “Yes. We don’t have much with us, and two of us are basically crippled.”

Sakura rose. “Then I’m going back.”

“No,
I
am going back for help!” Caroline said flatly. “I’m older—”

“I can move faster than you!”

“You need to stay here and—”

“
ENOUGH!”

Laura’s agonized shout cut the near-hysterical argument short. She lay still for a moment, breathing shallowly. “Girls. Let’s talk this out sensibly. Yes. One of you has to go for help. We don’t have the supplies. Even if Whips or one of you could manage to get out there and cut steaks or something out of our now-dead adversary, we’re still badly limited. At least one of you has to go back just to let them know what happened, since otherwise we won’t show up when they expect us.”

“So I should start out right away,” Caroline said emphatically. “Sakura can help you both—”

“Sakura,” Laura said emphatically, “will be the one going back.”

“What?
Why
? Mom, she’s only—”

“I know how young she is, Caroline. And how young
you
are. But Sakura’s better at the fast, long-distance work. And you’re better with the bow and arrow, and if we need to be protected, I want to use ranged weapons. We can’t afford another close-up fight. Either way we’ll have only one able-bodied person in camp with us. I want it to be my oldest daughter, who’s the best at organizing and systematically taking care of things.”

Caroline opened her mouth, then closed it slowly. “Yes, Mom,” she said finally.

“Okay, I’m off.”

“Saki!”

Whips had shouted at the same time as Laura, and Sakura stopped dead.

Whips continued, since Laura was once more in pain from shouting. “Jetting before thinking again? Even going as fast as you can, it’ll take you hours. Refill your water bottles. Take some of the dried meat we brought. And whatever else, don’t
run
. You’ll just wear yourself out faster.”

“But I . . . I . . .” Sakura took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and finally let it out. “Right. Sorry.”

“That’s my girl,” Laura said quietly. “Go as fast as you can, but not faster. Right?”

“Right.”

Sakura followed those directions. She even took Caroline’s bottle (made, like the others, from the bamboolike pipestem) for extra water to support her trip. “Okay . . .
now
I’m off. You’ll be okay, Mom, Whips, right?”

“We’ll be fine, honey. Just make sure your father knows what happened.”

“I will!”

Whips watched Sakura striding off—maybe a little faster than she should—until she disappeared over the ridge.

Now let’s just hope nothing else comes after us while she’s gone
.

Chapter 32

I can’t run. Can’t run
.

Sakura repeated that to herself, a mantra of restraint. She knew Whips was right. There was no way she could run the whole way back to Sherwood Tower, and even if she could, it was way too dangerous. This wasn’t familiar territory that she knew like the back of her hand, like the forest around their home and the nearby beach and the Blue Hole. This was new, and she could run into something that would kill her, or just put a foot in a hole and break her ankle, and that would be it.

Don’t run. Don’t run.

But she
wanted
to run. The memory of her mother’s face, pale, tight with pain, and of Whips, covered with the darker purplish blood of a Bemmie, screamed at her that she should run, push herself, to get back home as fast as she could.

She strode forward as fast as she could walk, and concentrated on her surroundings. They came down . . . about
there
. She compared the view on her omni.
Little farther along . . . yeah, there, I see Whips’ skid-marks going down here.

Following the flattened trail Whips left was, luckily, not too difficult. Sakura reached the top of the ridge and looked back.

Far, far away, across a wide expanse of the green, hummocked swamp, she could see two dots and a slightly larger brownish blob. She waved, and could just barely make out a return wave by the others; her omni enhanced the view and showed her both Caroline and Whips waving.

“Okay,” she said into her omni. “Bye. Once I’m over the ridge I think I’ll be cut off.”

“Probably,” her mother’s pained voice answered. “Good luck, honey—and be careful.”

“I will, Mom. I promise.”

By the time she was halfway down the ridge on the other side, her omni showed signal had been lost. She was now alone on Lincoln—completely alone—for the first time since she had been on the alien planet, and that fact suddenly struck her, hard. There was no one nearby to help her. No one would hear her if she screamed or shouted; she could expect no answers if she transmitted.

Gooseflesh raised the fine hairs on her arms and for a moment the entirety of the wrinkled, jumbled plain was menacing, long black shadows in the slowly setting sun stretching towards her like claws. For a moment, Sakura shivered, and thought about just going back.

But she knew she couldn’t do that. Her father needed to know what had happened, and there was no way for him to know until she got there. She swallowed and took a deep breath. “Okay, Saki, keep it together. Mom chose me, I’ve got to make it.” She took a bite of the dried meat, then drank several swallows of water. The climate of Lincoln—at least where they were—was warm, but usually not stifling; but that did make it very easy to become dehydrated. She had to remember to drink regularly. It’d be really humiliating to keel over because she just forget to take a drink.

Setting her jaw, she started marching across the tumbled landscape, trying to follow the traces Whips’ passage had left. Some of the land was pretty bare and tough, though, so it wasn’t always easy to tell if she was following exactly. Fortunately, her omni had recorded the route so with that as an overlay she could tell if she was getting too far off.

Something warned her just in time. She jumped to the side as a minimaw lunged at her from its burrow. The creature gave a whistling hiss, but then backed down when Sakura jabbed at it with her spear.

“Come on! Come on, ugly, come on, I’ll shove this thing through you and
eat
you!” she heard herself say, voice shaky and cracking.

Hungry or no, the minimaw apparently recognized a superior force when it saw the dull spear tip jabbing at it. With a more subdued hiss, it shrank back into its den. Sakura moved on, but her legs were shaky again, almost rubbery. She couldn’t afford any mistakes out here.

It was definitely getting darker, and that was bad. Walking through Stonetree Forest by herself, at night? She shuddered, but realized there was no choice. She was traveling light, which meant that she hadn’t brought any camping gear; that was all with Caroline, Whips, and her mom. So she couldn’t just sit down and wait, even if Lincoln’s day wasn’t so darned long.

It wasn’t going to be easy, though. She’d been up for, what, almost sixteen hours now? She was starting to really get tired.

And tired people made mistakes.

But she couldn’t camp, either. Not in a place she didn’t know, where she couldn’t see anything without using her omni, and without anyone to be eyes for her while she slept. The omni could probably do a sort of sentry duty—Caroline’s was programmed for that. She checked and was relieved to see that she had downloaded that app.

It still wasn’t a good idea, though. Too many unknowns. If she was up and moving, anything roughly her size and smaller would probably not bother messing with her, and even bigger things might hesitate. Asleep . . . by the time the omni woke her up, it might be too late. She remembered her father the other day, pointing to a carcass crawling with large crants—short for “crab-ants.”

“Be careful around those things,” he’d told her. “They nest like ants, and I’m a little suspicious they might be predatory as well as scavenging. Army ant-type behavior in these things would be very nasty.”

She shivered again. That would be an even worse death than the giant four-jawed gator-hill-thing. No, she’d keep awake and keep going.

There was movement ahead of her, some squeaky grunts and burbles. She tensed, then relaxed.
Those
noises she knew. Capys, a herd of them. They weren’t dangerous if she didn’t do anything they thought was a threat.

Capys
and
threat
made her think of canopy krakens, though, and her gut tightened again. The edge of Stonetree Forest was coming up, and the krakens had been there before . . .

Her omni, familiar with the target patterns, soon projected the augmented-reality overlay she feared. There were indeed still krakens in the trees, waiting. They were pretty high up the food chain, though. If they weren’t the top land predators, they couldn’t be far off. Which meant there couldn’t be too many of them. They certainly couldn’t be in every tree at the edge of the forest.

Of course, if she moved too far, she’d have a ways to go to get back on track. She had to trust the omni’s record to help her get back, at least until she was back in areas she knew.

She could head for the coast and follow the sea down. Eventually she’d get to the scar and from then it would be an easy route to follow.

But that would add a lot of distance, and time. She sighed. It occurred to her, belatedly, that her current mission was maybe not so well considered. They all been worried and half-panicked. It might have been better to wait until she was rested.

But . . . Then she’d have started in the night cycle of Lincoln. Picking her way along the swamp edge . . . No, that would have been worse.

The capys murmured to each other sleepily, and that sparked an idea in her head. If she got some of them moving towards the forest edge, that’d distract the krakens, and then she could get through.

She was sure she could pull it off. She knew how the capys reacted to startlement and other stimuli, so she could get them stampeding towards the forest pretty easily. And the canopy krakens would then drop down and grab up a feast, keeping them busy for a couple of days.

She looked at the peaceful feather-furry creatures and shook her head. No. She couldn’t do that. It was one thing to kill them for meat, fur, hide . . . but completely different to just send them to be killed as a distraction.

She slowly moved down the edge of the forest, staying at least fifty meters away from the treeline. After about a quarter of a kilometer, she found a stretch of trees without a single kraken in it . . . that she could see, anyway. She knew better than to assume that her omni was perfect. Still, it was the best chance she’d seen.

Her heart began to thump so hard that she could feel her chest vibrate as she approached the forest. She kept the omni focused above her, picking her way along carefully more by feel than anything else. The spear was held vertically; if one of the things tried to drop directly on her, it would have a very painful surprise.

To the tree edge. Nothing yet, and the omni still didn’t show telltale shapes or movement.

No. Wait.

There
was
a canopy kraken—a lone creature, but a large one, resting in the branches of a tree about twenty meters to her left.

It wasn’t directly above her, but she was uncomfortably close. Twenty meters was within striking distance, though long. Still, she was committed now. Backing up would send exactly the wrong signals. She continued moving slowly forward.

The creature stirred, shifting. She brought the spear around, pointed directly at the canopy kraken, and kept it that way as she moved.

The hard-shelled, tentacled predator slowly settled back. She didn’t know if it had given up on her, or just been shifting for other reasons, or if the fact she’d been moving and keeping her weapon pointed at it had made it wary. She just kept moving, and only turned away from it when she was a good sixty meters past it.

Now she was alone in Stonetree Forest.

The darkness was almost absolute. If her omni hadn’t been able to use multispectral imaging and considerable light intensification, she would have been as blind as though she were in a cave. The enhanced-reality view painted the darkness with fairy-light structure, showing her trees and stones and all the details she needed to pick her way through the forest. Slowly, a green path became visible as she closed in on locations that the omni thought corresponded with the path they’d followed on their way out.

She breathed a sigh of relief as she reached that phantom landmark. She couldn’t actually
see
any difference, but though this world lacked navigation signals and stable landmasses, the omni had been recording her movements all day with dead-reckoning from accelerometers, optical flow, and key features of the natural world. If it thought this was the right area, it was probably right.

“Not home yet, Saki. Keep moving,” she told herself.

She paused for some more water and another bite of jerky. Around her, the forest whispered and shuffled, wind moving the branches above, and other things—small and not so small—moving below. The enhanced vision showed infrared signatures of small creatures scuttling away as she moved, and larger ones—fortunately not on her projected path—that turned slightly, showing they were aware of her presence.

She glanced back, and up, frequently.
No one’s going to ambush
me
, no way.
She tried to move silently, attract as little attention as possible, and suddenly she was reminded—forcibly—of the last day, the same day the accident had happened, and how she had been playing the stalking game with Whips just before.

Well, I won that one. This one . . . I can’t afford to lose.

It seemed to be hours that she spent, moving slowly but steadily through the forest; she almost ran into the fire-reed patch before realizing what she was seeing. Once she’d skirted that, though, her heart began to lighten. Not that far away. Maybe she was in calling range?

There was no obvious signal, but they knew that altitude made a huge difference. She took the omni off and held it up, as high as she could reach.

A faint light pulsed, showing the barest beginnings of a signal. Not quite enough to transmit . . . but she was getting close!

Then as she lowered her arm, something snarled, not close, but not all that far away, either. She jumped—

And her foot caught on a projecting branch. Sakura went suddenly sprawling, the wind knocked out of her.

But that was nothing. At the same time, the
darkness
hit her, almost as much a physical force as the ground. Her omni! It was . . .

The omni’s coupling was resonant and short-range, unless tuned in advance to track on one signature at greater range. It had fallen somewhere farther away than it could resonate with her iris displays!

Now she truly understood what
dark
meant. On Lincoln, there were no cities. There were no villages. There were no artificial light sources anywhere on the planet other than their little camps. When the sun was set and the moons not high, darkness held absolute sway over the land and sea. Beneath the forest canopy, she couldn’t even see the stars, make out even the faintest movement or shape.

And the thing that had snarled was still out there. Maybe too far away . . . maybe getting closer.

She reached out and found the shaft of her spear.
Okay, I’m still armed. Breathe! Don’t panic!

That was one of the hardest instructions she’d ever given herself, but she made herself concentrate on those two words. If she panicked, she’d probably never get out of here alive. There were still a lot of hours—a
lot
of hours—until Lincoln permitted its sluggish dawn to start.

Got to remember. What direction did it go?

She felt the root that tripped her, remembered the way her foot had hooked it.
I fell . . .
that
way. So my arm was out like that . . . which means it had to fall somewhere over . . . there.

Sakura prayed she’d gotten the general direction right. If she hadn’t, her chances of coming back to the right area to search were near zero.

But she didn’t have to actually find it. She just had to get near it. Two meters was the transmission range for the omni. Short indeed, but the great advantage was that she didn’t have to identify the thing by touch, search through the debris on the jungle floor trying to find the little curved bracelet. She just had to get close
enough
.

Using her spear as a blind man’s cane to explore the area in front of her, Sakura slowly moved forward. One step. Two. Three.
How far did it go?

It could have gone quite a distance, she admitted to herself. And over a fairly broad arc. If she didn’t find it soon, she could spend hours looking—and she’d have to. Searching for the omni here would waste time, but trying to make her way home through the darkness without it? Utterly hopeless.