Dark Planet (31 page)

I made my way into the streambed with the high concealing banks that transfixed the burn. The water in it, relatively shallow before, now ran waist deep and slowed my progress. I was in the middle of a terrific storm, several of them, or so it seemed. Daylight was not much lighter than darkness, only a deep gray instead of black. Lightning furiously attacked the forest, splintering trees with a crashing bombardment that sounded like a nuclear cannon barrage delivered by Star War systems. A bolt of it lit up one of the beetles, detonating it, and splashing guts and blood and parts in a wide radius. His herd mates ignored him and kept on browsing in the rain.

I felt like the elements had turned against me. I listened for the Presence’s hideous laughter.

The lizards followed me to where I entered the streambed at the edge of the burn. They hesitated, clearly undecided about venturing into the open. I yelled insults at them and waved. Agitated, they jumped about until anger overcame their inhibitions and they also took to the stream. They kept their distance. The beetles sensed their presence and began to bunch and move away and ahead.

Good. Exactly what my plan needed. I wanted the Goliaths on the move. Not stampeding, just moving. I hoped the lizards had fed recently and would not be distracted by so much food on legs.

I selected one of the “herd bulls,” a huge six-legged creature with an enormous purple-black forward carapace. To support that bulk required an exoskeleton of a material far stronger than chitin. Although it would be an easy kill at near range with a Punch, I had discovered earlier that even Blade’s Gauss would not always take down one of the creatures easily. That was important in the event he prematurely discovered what I was doing.

I backed the lindal with tape. I crouched as the herd bull approached. Then I scrambled out of the stream and darted at the insect, trying to do this fast to reduce Blade’s chances of discovering what I was doing. Always before, the beetles ignored Humans and Zentadon, as we were not in the local food chain, unless we appeared to be a direct threat.

The Goliath apparently perceived me as a threat. It whirled and caught me with an antenna that felt like a whip lash and knocked me rolling. I instantly sprang to my feet and circled the creature. It wheeled back to the left, but by then I was ready. I dashed in and leaped, slamming the sticky side of the lindal high on the giant’s carapace.

It stuck. I fell back and scrambled to my feet and dashed for cover into a small copse of charred tree stumps. I hid there as the big insect, now carrying the case on its east side, continued south with its west side exposed toward Blade’s approach. Later, I would have to recover the case, but it now served a more useful purpose.

I used taa and the masking herds to disappear out of the burn. I dropped exhausted into shrubbage near the treeline, leaving the lizards dumbfounded. I lay on my belly, panting to prevent lintatai, and watched as Blade entered the burn from the far northwest corner. He cut directly across, following the signal from the lindal and obviously assuming Pia and I were using the beetle herds as cover and concealment. His chameleons had apparently gone completely out by now, but he had nothing to fear from my short-range Punch. Nor did he fear the predators. After all, wasn’t he in his own mind the most efficient killing machine on the Dark Planet?

It was working.

The lizards made the beetles nervous and kept them moving. Blade followed the signal attached to the big bull Goliath. Having lost me, the lizards took up Blade’s track at a respectful distance. The beetles, Blade, and the lizards moved across the burn and toward the tree-studded savannahs beyond.

Humans told an old Earth story with a moral. About how little creatures called lemmings periodically followed each other to die in the sea.

O
ver the generations and centuries and millennia of interstellar sentient evolution, we “intelligent” and “civilized” life forms developed technology to increasingly isolate ourselves from our environments. We broke or bent or changed all the natural laws to meet our demands for comfort, convenience, safety, and wealth. We wrenched control from nature and assumed it for ourselves. Nature was put at bay while we created, or so we thought, artificial habitats that met our own selfish requirements. There were many people — Human, Zentadon, Indowy, Kutaran, Terran — who lived their entire lives catered to by technology. They ate processed food the origin of which few knew, they worked through the media of artificial intelligence, which even fewer understood, they traveled by means almost none comprehended. They lived, worked, procreated, were entertained and pampered by artificial means. Some among us, the most wealthy, even managed to cheat death through the rejuv process, at least to some extent. Many individuals died without ever being truly alone with themselves and with nature. No wonder God had been wrenched from his throne.

But nature had her own little ways of snickering up her sleeve. The Kutaran generations lost their teeth, no longer needed for eating soft processed foods. We Zentadon were gradually giving up our tails, as the balance they provided for speed across open plains and savannahs proved un-needed in an age when most complained of sitting on their tails. Young among the Indowy were reared in colonies by the government; few females possessed teats for nursing infants and even sex was being done in test tubes. Humans were flabby, soft creatures, except for those like Gorilla, Sergeant Shiva, Atlas and Blade, who were provided with certain enhancements to facilitate their function as soldiers. Heaven only knew what the Blobs had given up as they became shapeless, sexless forms virtually indistinguishable one from the other and bent on a single collective goal; conquering the universe.

Within the few days since our landing on Aldenia, the members of DRT-213 had been thrust back into raw nature. Technology failed us piecemeal. The sensors, communications, monitors, robots, chameleons, processed foods, all environmental controls … gone. Death and the threat of death returned as a reality. I, a reformed predator, caught my food with my own hands, tearing it apart and eating it while it was still alive. Any dominance Blade or I professed over other creatures on the Dark Planet would vanish the moment we used our last bullet from weapons created worlds away. The lizards, the scorpion-things, the giant snakes, they understood nothing of our sovereignty, would not understand it even as they tore our flesh from our bones and ate it, as I tore flesh from the newts.

How much more irony could nature deal out than to drop two “civilized” beings into a savage world and pit them against each other
mano a mano
, as the humans put it? Without our weapons, Blade and I would be thrown back to fighting tooth and claw. How much indeed had we advanced when stripped of artificial accouterments? I pictured God back on his throne while the Presence and the Good Presence acted as referees, each partial to its own champion and eager to bestow upon him any advantage. Nature might be impartial, destroying equally the good and the bad, the smart and the stupid, but the forces within natures were anything but.

Sens were amateur philosophers. How could it be otherwise for those of us whose profession encouraged the exploration and reading of others’ thoughts and emotions?

I restlessly sifted for mood and tone coming from either Blade or the lizards. The lizards were easy to read, being fairly uncomplicated beasts of revenge attached to stomachs. Blade proved more of a challenge. He kept his mind locked down for the most part, knowing that I located him through his cognitive waves, much in the same way that he positioned me with the sensor bug on the Indowy Hell Box. He was about to find out, however, that technology could be deceptive and manipulated.

My ears twitched in anticipation as I broke off the trail and took to the high country. I cut a path to intercept ahead of the one being inscribed by the beetles, Blade, and the lizards. Hunter instincts previously dormant surfaced so that my wounds, aches, and pains were relegated to some locked room in my brain. Commander Mott of the broken tail always said that a Zentadon was physically capable of much more than he ever realized. He only had to be tested under real life circumstances. It was all in the mind, he lectured. The mind was the engine that powered the machine. The machine kept going as long as the mind continued to function.

Thank you, Commander Mott. I wondered if he had ever been tested beyond the breaking of his tail.

It was more satisfying being the hunter than the hunted.

The herds of lumbering beetles, mere monstrous gray forms through the swirling clouds and shimmer of rain, illuminated into frequent brief highlights by the pop of lightning, were being funneled into a boulder-strewn narrows between the descending apexes of two mossy hills. There the burn ended. I squatted under cover on one of the hills and scanned below, watching as Blade darted and dodged, maneuvering in an attempt to catch a sight picture of either Pia or me among the Goliaths. He was bare headed after finally discarding his malfunctioning helmet. The beetles appeared jittery, either because of the activity among them or the increasing ferocity of the storms, maybe both. They milled, circling and kind of rearing up on their back sets of legs to test with their antennae before continuing their forced march toward the narrows.

Blade seemed so focused and intent running across the burn among the bugs, trying to locate his prey, that he paid no attention to the remaining four lizards in the pack. The lizards were as centered upon him as he was upon what he thought was me and the treasure. Time was running out. For him. For all of us. I tasted his desperation when he relaxed enough at moments to let out traces of himself.

The lizards cautiously kept to the cover of the streambed. The stream twined toward the narrows. All forces were converging there. I pulled myself up by my shoe laces, an old, old Earth expression, sucked it in, and hobbled as fast as I could toward the collision point. The element of surprise should get me close enough to neutralize Blade’s advantage with the Gauss and place us into dueling range with Punch Guns.

It was going to be shootout time in the rocks. It required extreme extra effort to control my taa output. Even if I won, I could also lose.

Life is a choice and a chance
, said the GP.

It wouldn’t be long now before Blade discovered the hoax. I figured he would catch on about the time he reached the narrows. I thought I heard fiendish chuckles coming muffled through the fury of the storms. I thought the Presence sounded less self-assured than before.

B
y an effort of which I thought myself incapable under the circumstances, without using taa, I made it to the narrows ahead of most of the Goliath beetles, Blade, and the trailing lizard pack. I selected a knotted slab of limestone and black volcanic rock overlooking the narrows and burrowed into a slot among mossy boulders and bushes. From this vantage point I overlooked the stream as it came out of the burn and passed through into savannah and forest beyond. The ground lay open on either bank of the creek, although it was strewn with glacial rock and boulders, some of which were as large as dwellings on Galaxia.

A few of the lead beetles moved past, pushed by those behind, who in turn were being pressed by the predator reptiles. I squinted into the storm deluge, wiping at the rain driven into my face, blinking against the almost-constant flicker, flash, and pop of lightning. Even with the fireworks, my view was limited because of the heavy rain. Water filled the stream and swept off the hill around me in a solid liquid veneer.

My home planet of Ganesh was an arid place in which rain was virtually worshipped. Zentadon had more than one hundred words for rain. Until now, I never thought I could dislike rain.

The giant beetle insects appeared in dark spots of one or two or in dark clumps of several. They gradually took shape as they approached, brought on and off into relief by the lightning. They passed like silent monarchs in a fog. I was suddenly afraid I would not see Blade before he made it through the pass, or that he would detect me first.

That wasn’t going to happen, I reassured myself. There was too much sky activity to light up the terrain. As for his spotting me, I had to believe his LF had gone completely on the blink. Otherwise, he would not be chasing the box on the Goliath and assuming it was Pia and me.

Thinking of my enemy and my designs on his well-being loosed a slight reservoir of taa into my system. I began to get light-headed. It was good to know I still had a cache left. I needed to preserve it for the showdown. I deliberately thought of other things.

Pia?

Because of her Talent, so easily developed, we were reaching the point where we no longer had to differentiate between modes of communications; thoughts and words were becoming one. She was waiting for me on the edge of her consciousness.

I am here, Kadar San. Are you all right?

I am good
.

Can you show me where you are, what you are doing?
she asked.

I relayed a clip of the storm in the pass and the beetles lumbering past like giant specters. I masked the fact that I lay in wait to kill the Human when he approached, after which, if I were able, I would reclaim the Hell Box.

The shorter night will soon come
, I told her.
As soon as it is light again, go to the pod as quickly as you can. Are you rested? Can you make it?

I can if you promise you will be there
.

Keep the light burning for me
.

I blocked her out for my own sanity. Still no sight of Blade. I readjusted my head rag to cover any glint of golden hair. I checked the makeshift bandage on my thigh. It was wet and muddy. Lichen or mold or something equally disgusting seemed to be growing on it. Undoubtedly it also grew on the wound itself. After this was over, if I pulled through, I was going to require a great deal of physical therapy. Perhaps psychological therapy as well. No current Zentadon had ever killed another sentient and survived it.