Castaway Planet (23 page)

Chapter 35

“How much farther, Sakura?”

“Just over that ridge,” Sakura pointed, “and then head towards the mountains around the edge of the wetlands you’ll see when we get to the top. If things haven’t changed much, we’ll be able to see Mom, Whips, and Caroline from the ridge.”

The whole run back through the night-dark forest had an air of unreality to it. Her father had known he couldn’t leave her behind, so he’d reluctantly put one of the stim codes into her nanos, overriding the need for sleep and keeping her alert, but a part of her knew she really should have been in bed and dreaming a long, long time ago.

But no way am I sleeping until I know Mom’s all right!

She glanced back. Hitomi was still doggedly following, stumbling, but amazingly tenacious, not complaining as she carried a bulky slung sack that looked nearly as big as she was. Melody, longer-legged than Hitomi, was staying next to her little sister, ready to help. Her face was starkly white against her night-dark hair, and her expression was grim. Of them all, Melody was the best at visualizing things, and in this case, that wasn’t helping. “You guys okay?”

“Okay . . . Saki,” Hitomi said breathlessly. Mel just gave a nod and a quick thumbs-up from the hand that held her own carryall.

“Let me know if you need help,” she reminded them, then turned her attention to clambering up the tumbled ridge. They’d gotten so much tougher since they arrived on Lincoln. Sakura couldn’t even imagine Hitomi getting this far before they crashed. For that matter, she couldn’t imagine
herself
getting this far before we crashed.

She looked up at her father, climbing just ahead of her. His slender frame moved with a calm unvarying rhythm like an unstoppable machine, and she saw the absolute focus in his gaze. It made her feel better.
Daddy won’t let anything hurt Mom.

* * *

Lincoln’s sun came up as they crested the ridge, or maybe the ridge being a tiny bit higher up let them see the sun that much earlier. She looked down, seeing the same dappled green landscape, eyes following it across . . .

What was that?

She triggered a zoom and enhance from her omni. “Oh, no.
Mommy!”

Akira stared, frozen for a moment. He saw what she did—a mass of writhing, rippling movement like a mob of landborne jellyfish, oozing steadily towards three figures higher up on the slopes.

Akira set his jaw, and looked at the three of them. “Hitomi, Mel—we have to run, now. I know we’re all exhausted, but they’re almost out of time. Can we run that far?”

“I promise I will!” Hitomi said.

“Try my best,” Melody said, daunted by the distance.

“I can,” Sakura said, and started down the hill at the fastest jog she dared. “Dad, don’t get too far down. It looks smoother near the edge of the swamp, but it gets softer, and we don’t want one of those monsters ambushing you.”

“Neither . . . do I . . .” he said, breathing deeply as he matched her pace.

“You could run faster—”

“No. We can’t get too separated.” He spoke the words with tense reluctance, but certainty. Sakura understood that her father wasn’t going to risk them while trying to get to her mother in time.

A part of her understood that; the other part just wanted him to run flat-out.

Now she saw a streaking glow from where her mother and the others were, multiple streaks that caused the approaching things to withdraw.
What was that?
she wondered, then saw the infrared glow nearby.
Oh, that’s smart. A fire. They’re throwing fire at the things. They’re from the water, maybe . . .

But the creatures were regrouping; she heard her father say “
Kuso
. . .” and from the curse knew how frightened he was.

The gray, repellent, undulating things closed in, starting to give surprisingly quick lunges. Whips was jabbing at them. Then he lifted his spear with one writhing on the end, impaled, and threw it off. Some of the others diverted to swarm the dying one. Her mother was backing up, jabbing with her own spear, but even from this distance Sakura could see that she couldn’t put much force into her blows.

Caroline was the only one in good shape, and she was
incredible
. She stabbed one completely through, hurled it aside, pirouetted—no,
jumped
completely over one that darted at her, landing with both boots
hard
on its central bulge, then over to Whips’ side, stabbing hard, another dead, and a dancing leap back to Mom.

Sakura would have cheered her on, but she had no breath to spare; a dull ache was starting at the base of her chest, and she glanced backwards.

Hitomi was staggering grimly onward, her face a mask of iron determination, with Melody helping balance her. Sakura saw her father look back, make a face, and abruptly he darted over and hoisted Hitomi onto his back.

“Daddy! Can you—?”

“Only a little farther. Yes, I can.”

There were a hundred yards more to go, but her legs felt like they had steel clamps on them.
The ache in her chest spread up and in, each breath requiring another effort, but now they were closer, and she had to
think
. Where? Which direction . . .

“Dad, it’s from the north right now! The wind, I mean.”

He nodded, stumbling, almost falling, somehow recovering, setting Hitomi down. “Good. We come in from this side and just a little lower. It will be dangerous.”

“We know, Dad.”

She reached into her bag, grasped the pipestem container, and saw Melody do the same. Hitomi slowed, knowing she had to stay back and keep the bag that was in her care safe.

They were close now, very close, and they could hear the wet-sucking movement of the creatures and their bubbling hungry cries, and a curse from her mother, a hiss of pain from Whips as one of the things fastened onto one of his arms—

“NOW!” Akira shouted.

Sakura wrenched the sealed top from the container and lunged forward, jabbing the open end like a spear towards the creatures.

A fountain of white, dusty gravel erupted from Sakura’s, Melody’s, and Akira’s tubes and scattered across the mass, dust spreading farther with the north-blowing wind.

There was a pause, a shout of
“Akira!”
from her mother—and then the creatures shrieked, a cry of shocked and unbelieving agony. An undertone of hissing became audible, and she could see steam rising from the things, which now writhed and struggled and rolled over, desperate to escape the hideous pain that was all over them. Creatures which had not yet been touched moved in and tried to flow over those who were struggling. But her father already had another tube out and doused the next group.

With the second outbreak of terrified pain from multiple creatures, the approaching swarm finally broke. Turning, they fled for the water, away from the terrible burning things in the air. Many of them never made it; some that reached the water hissed and steamed more spectacularly.

“Laura!” Akira said, dropping his pack and running to her. Sakura and her sisters followed only slightly more slowly.

“I knew you’d come, I knew you would, but oh
God
that was close!” Her mother was almost babbling in her relief, hugging Dad as hard as she could with her ribs. Sakura let them do that, went to Whips instead.

“Great . . . timing, Saki,” he said, slowly.

“What in the world did you
do
to them?” Caroline asked wonderingly, seeing still-hissing pellets in the wet ground—and crants writhing in death in the white dust that had scattered with the pellets.

She held up her second tube and shook it. “Quicklime.”

“Of course,” Whips said, in a tone of voice that said
Why didn’t I see that right away?
“They were all wet, amphibious; hitting them with that . . .” He shuddered. “Well, we heard. Who came up with
that
idea?”

“Me.” Hitomi held her hand up.

“Really?” Laura asked, startled.

“Really,” Sakura confirmed. “We were packing, trying to figure out what we could take that might give us a chance against a large group of somethings, and Dad said that he wished he had something that could burn when he threw it.”

“I was thinking of oil or alcohol,” Akira admitted with a smile, sitting down on the flat rock, “but then little Hitomi just said, ‘Daddy, didn’t you and Whips say that lime stuff would burn if it got on us?’”

“And it certainly did,” Laura said.

Sakura finally let herself drop to the ground and started shaking. She tried to control herself, but the shakes became sobs, and even when her mother gently touched her hair and tried to hug her, the sobbing grew worse. Caroline didn’t collapse, but she stood shaking, the horror of the siege finally getting to her.

“I . . . can’t . . . Mom, I thought . . . Mommy, I thought you and Whips and Caroline were . . .” Sakura said, disjointedly.

Both her mother and father knelt next to her and hugged her. “It’s all right. You were fantastic, Sakura. You made it there and back—”

Her mother paused and shot a concerned glance at her father. “Did you . . . ?”

“I had no choice, Laura. I couldn’t leave her there, even if she would have stayed—which I knew she wouldn’t—and so I had to make sure she could keep going.”

Her mother bit her lip, then shrugged. “I suppose that was exactly the sort of situation I gave you those codes for. So all right. But now we’re setting your nanos back, young lady.”

She finally got herself under control. “I’ll probably go straight to sleep then.”

“Exactly what you should do. We don’t have any more blankets, though.”

“We brought more food and more camping supplies,” Akira said, “as well as weapons. Don’t worry.”

“All right.” Her mother turned back to Sakura. “Then you lie down on this pad, and I’m shutting off the stimulants.”

Almost instantly, Sakura felt a tsunami of exhaustion wash over her; her eyes started to droop as though weights were hung on them. “We’re . . . okay now?” she managed to say.

“Everything is okay now, Saki,” her mother said, and kissed her on the forehead, just as though she were tucking Sakura into bed. “Go to sleep.”

She tried to ask another question, but somewhere between taking the breath and opening her mouth, she slid straight into slumber.

Chapter 36

Laura sat up suddenly with a pained gasp, but found that the lancing agony wasn’t from an oozing tendriled beast but just one of her ribs—which complained at the sudden movement.

“It’s okay, Laura,” her husband said. “Nothing’s been bothering us. Even the crants are mostly gone; a lot of them ran into the quicklime dust and died. And we hauled the carcasses away to keep them from drawing more predators.” He nodded toward the distant pool. “More of them came out of the water to drag them in. There must be an underwater connection between that pool and a much larger subterranean lake of some kind. There’s no way a body of water that small could support so many predators and scavengers—and such large ones.”

She calmed her breathing, which made the pain subside. Not quite as bad as it had been, either. Looking around, she saw Caroline stretched out on another pad nearby, covered with one of the survival blankets, with Sakura next to her and Whips ending the little row of sleepers. Hitomi was sitting a bit farther up-slope, playing with her omni, and Melody was putting together some sandwiches.

“You’re going to need some sleep too, hon,” she said finally.

“I know, but I was waiting for you to get back up.” He hugged her gently. “Your telltales say the hip is getting better. I think we’re here for at least another three, four days, though.”

“I really would like to get out of here before then,” she sighed, and looked with a shudder towards the water where a few things still moved sluggishly around the carcass, “but you’re probably right. Whips’ injuries need to get better and that fight didn’t help either of us.”

He saw her look at Melody and Hitomi. “Oh, I made them sleep too. Once they saw you were all okay, it didn’t take much convincing. They were practically dead on their feet.”

She shook her head, feeling so much pride in her heart that her eyes stung with tears for her children. “And they made it all the way here, through the night and the morning.”

“For you and Whips and Caroline? Of course we did.” He touched Caroline’s hair gently.

“She’s stayed sleeping?” Laura remembered that she’d had to trigger a sedative setting in Caroline’s nanos; once the emergency had ended, panic had taken over. Caroline had stood, rigidly, hyperventilating and unable to get control over herself, until the sedative effect took over.

“Yes. That was exactly what she needed, really. She was fighting for the two of you out of terror, I think, and her body didn’t know how to stop. She’s been completely out ever since.”

Laura grimaced and moved towards Melody and the sandwiches. “I’m afraid all three of us will have a few nightmares about this.”

“
I’ll
have nightmares about it, Laura!” Akira said emphatically. “Seeing those . . . things about to wash over you, that was a horror show. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be in the middle of it.”

“Well, it’s over now,” she said. “Thank you, Mel.”

“You’re welcome, Mom,” Melody said, and suddenly hugged her tight enough to make Laura’s ribs complain.

Still, she hugged back, and felt Melody sniffling against her chest. “Ease off, Melody. It’s all right, but Mommy’s still hurt. Gently.”

A few minutes later Melody let go and sat back down to finish making the sandwiches for the others. “There’s a big chunk of smoked blockcrab in Hitomi’s bag for Whips,” she volunteered. “And the SurvivalShot’s got ten shots recharged now. We can probably fish or hunt for something else—oh, we also recovered most of Caroline’s arrows.”

She made a face. “That was ucky, pulling them out of the carcasses. But between the ones recovered and the ones we brought, we now have twenty-four arrows.”

“My God, you thought of everything,” Laura said, impressed.

Her husband shrugged. “We packed as much as we could carry, knowing that we could take our time coming back but that we might need to stay a while.”

Laura looked down at the pool. “What
were
those things, anyway? It was terrifying, the way they just kept coming. Predators usually avoid fierce opponents.”

“Very interesting creatures. I dissected one of them. They’re related to the tree anemones, actually.”

“Really?”

“Really. Their behavior mainly results from the fact that they just aren’t that intelligent. Adjusting for body mass, their brains are no bigger than a crant’s. Admittedly, that’s an order of magnitude or more better than the anemones, but still not very impressive. That’s why they kept attacking even after suffering casualties that would make brainier predators run away. Like those six-legged puma analogs you told me about.”

He paused for a moment, considering. “But they’re not invertebrates, like real anemones on Earth are. Instead, they have this interior support structure that looks like an old-fashioned barrel. These things,” he gestured at the remains downhill, “evolved from that same structure. The ‘barrel staves’ stretch outward along with the body, and have interconnects and muscles that allow it to swim or move on land with that rippling motion—and can contract a bunch of them simultaneously to do those lunges we saw. The mouth is now on the underside and evolved a contracting, cutting assembly for active predation and scavenging.”

“So the tendrils sting, too?”

“Not much. They have some cnidoblasts over their surface but they seem mostly for discouraging minor pests. The tendrils have evolved into much better grasping tools. An impressive set of adaptations, but the price they paid for it was a simplified neurological system.”

“Well, I for one hope I never run into them again.”

“I can’t blame you,” he said with a chuckle, “but they
are
fascinating, in a biological sense. I think I’ll call them raylamps—cross between lamprey and stingray, if you see what I mean. I could call them lamp
rays
, but that would be confusing.”

“As long as you don’t study them near me, you can call them anything you want.” She took up the SurvivalShot. “Now, you should get some sleep yourself.”

He nodded, and she could see him already sagging down with exhaustion as he let himself recognize how tired he was. “On the condition that after I wake up you tell us everything that happened
before
Sakura had to come get us.”

“Deal.”

* * *

By the time Akira woke up, all the others—even the exhausted Sakura—had also awakened and eaten. So as her husband ate his own breakfast, she—with help from Sakura, Caroline, and Whips—told the others everything, from their journey through Stonetree Forest through the rough, folded country in between, to their discovery of clay near the wetlands just before Whips was attacked, finally ending with the battle and Whips’ heroic finish of the giant predator.

“And once we realized how badly Whips and I were hurt,” she finished, “I sent Sakura after you and, well, that’s pretty much it.”

Akira’s sideways smile showed he recognized how much she was downplaying their vigil and siege, but wasn’t going to ask her to go back over anything that traumatic. “So, you turned yourself into a trebuchet, eh?” he asked Whips.

“More like a sling, really,” Whips said. “Just a big one.”

“
Very
big,” Akira agreed. “That’s the stone there, right?”

The body of the large predator had settled slightly after death, and the stone’s weight, plus the scavengers coming after, had caused it to sink ever lower. Even so, a fair-sized, dark, irregular dome of rock still protruded from the inky water. “Yes, that’s it.”

The size of the boulder really was impressive. She seemed to remember it was roughly spherical, which would mean it was somewhere between sixty and seventy centimeters across. “I wouldn’t have thought you could lift anything that big,” Laura said.

Caroline shook her head. “Remember that most of the rocks around here are fairly light corallike stuff. That thing probably weighs less than Whips does, although maybe not by much. Still a big rock, and it sure did the job.”

“And I didn’t really
lift
it. We’re not great on lifting, us Bemmies, not the way you humans do it,” Whips added honestly. “That four-jawed gator-thing was doing a lot of the pulling.” His arms—clearly better than they had been a day or two ago—made a small rippling motion that harmonized with the pensive colors running over his hide. “Still, it felt really heavy, I’ll say that.” He paused, colors still rippling. “I mean, I know how strong I am and how tough my arms are. I don’t think a stone that light would have hurt me that bad. Am I wrong, Laura?”

Laura frowned. “Well . . . it’s really hard to tell that, sometimes. We humans can throw out our backs by doing something that seems trivial. But still, you should have a good sense of what your own body can do.”

She turned to her second-youngest. “Melody? Can I borrow your omni’s number-crunching for a minute?”

“Why?” Mel asked, then answered her own question. “Oh, for a biomech sim. Sure, hold on . . . There, I’m out.”

Laura used her omni to provide the data on Whips’ healthy biological parameters, then combined that with one of Akira’s biomechanics applications and a sim that used a considerable chunk of processing resources from all three omnis.

The results were startling. “You know, Whips, I think you’re right. No matter what assumptions the model starts with, that rock
has
to be heavier than you are. Akira?”

“Hmm . . . yes, everything looks correct. I would say that, based on your models, it’s actually well over Whips’ mass.”

Caroline blinked. “But that would put it somewhere close to a specific density of
four
. More than three, for sure.” She suddenly stood up. “Whips, are you feeling good enough to help me get close to that thing?

“Now wait a minute, Caroline!” Laura could see her oldest girl’s face pale as paper. “You know some of those—”

“I know!” Caroline stopped herself, took a deep breath. “Sorry. Sorry for shouting, Mom. I know. Those things terrify me. But . . . if I don’t force myself past that, I might be scared of going
anywhere
I can’t see things, and here . . . we can’t afford that.”

Laura opened her mouth to argue, but she couldn’t. Caroline was right. “Whips? You’re not nearly fully recovered.”

“No,” he agreed equably. “But I get less pressure on me in the water, and now that I know what to look for, those big things aren’t going to sneak up on me again. The raylamps . . . I’m a
lot
bigger than they are, and without me acting injured, I don’t think they’ll want to mess with me in the water. I think I could escort her out and back; it’s not that far, only about fifteen, twenty meters.”

The thought of her little girl—because adult or not, they would always be her little girls—going wading into that black water where some of those oozing
things
might be waiting sent chills down her spine. But telling her she couldn’t go might be a worse choice.

“All right,” she said after a moment. “Just be careful.”

“Oh, believe me, Mom, I will.”

The rest of the family watched tensely as Caroline and Whips made their way to the edge of the water. Akira and Sakura followed, ready to back them up if something happened.

Whips entered the water first, with a deliberate splashing lunge that announced to anything nearby, “Here I am, I’m not afraid of you.” A few moments later his one arm reached out of the water and gestured. “Okay, Caroline. There were a couple but they’ve run off,” he said, voice burbling slightly in the water. “Follow me and I think we’ll be okay.”

Caroline stood at the water’s edge, shivering slightly, paler than a ghost, and Laura almost called her back. But then Caroline’s hand tightened on her spear, and she stepped resolutely into the water, wading in with a determined stride that shouted out her need to finish this before she ran screaming back to shore.

The distance was only twenty meters—sixty feet in old-fashioned measurements, the length of a small house, barely farther than the distance across Sherwood Tower, nothing, really, something to be crossed in a few quick strides on land. But it seemed to take forever, the thick mud on the bottom impeding Caroline’s walk, Whips cruising ahead of her slowly, sometimes circling her to ensure nothing could approach her without him knowing.

Finally the two reached the half-sunken boulder and Caroline took out her kit. It took her some considerable effort to hammer one of the chisels made from wreckage of the
LS-5
into what was apparently a crack in the rock’s surface, but after several minutes a chunk broke away. Clenching it in her fist, Caroline immediately turned and began heading for shore. Laura watched tensely. She was moving towards shallower water. If anything wanted to catch her, now was the time . . .

Whips made a sudden backwards lunge. Caroline gave a
yip!
of startlement and floundered up to the water’s edge, but nothing attacked her. Whips glided slowly up onto the shore. “One of them started to try to sneak up on us, but I smacked it down. If it’s not dead, it’s hurting.”

“I’m just glad you’re both out of there safe,” Laura said. “Well, Caroline?”

Caroline’s hands were shaking slightly, but color was returning to her face and her voice was steadying. “You guys were right. Just carrying this I can tell it’s a lot denser than the other rocks around here.” She held up the wedge-shaped chunk, black on two sides but with a brighter, yellowish-brown color showing where it had just been broken free of its parent stone. “Let’s see if I can figure out what we’re dealing with here. It’s really intriguing. I can’t figure out what kind of a rock we’d find here that would . . .”

She trailed off as she examined the stone, first turning it in her hand, then scraping it firmly against a flat piece of hardened composite scrap. The rock left a brownish streak on the hardened composite, but scratched softer composites and some of the standard corallike rocks of Lincoln. “Mel, help me boot up that spectral analysis program,” she said, and there was something in her tone of voice that made them all look up again.

“Okay . . . yeah, it’s running. You’re using ambient, so make sure the filters account for the sun’s spectrum as filtered through atmosphere.”