Excelsior (27 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“And they still point north?” Cardinal asked, walking up to them with two sample containers full of vegetation.

“Magnetic north, yes. Compasses always point to magnetic north.”

“Right. I must have plants on the brain.”

Alexander nodded to Stone. “Well, so long as we have a heading, we shouldn’t get lost. Lead the way.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And keep an eye out for anything that might be dangerous.”

“I’ll just watch everything then.”

“Exactly.”

They walked past Stone’s Cheetah, standing sentinel at the line of debris that marked the end of the devastation caused by the tsunami. Here the debris was thicker than ever. They climbed over half-dead trees and branches that writhed and slithered as they were stepped on. All three of them hesitated when they reached the dense wall of red and purple foliage. The jungle looked impossibly dark. There could be anything in there, and if the trees suddenly decided to become hostile, no amount of laser fire would be enough to save them.

“I don’t like this,” Alexander breathed, panting over the comms as he balanced on top of a piece of driftwood the size of the rover.

“We could turn back,” Stone said. “No one will blame us for leaving him. If we had contact with Earth I bet they’d order us not to go any further.”

Alexander frowned and took two steps closer. The jungle reacted to his approach by reaching out with leafy branches and feeling him up once more. This time they didn’t leave a sticky trail of sap, and they withdrew after just a moment. Alexander took that as good sign. Shrugging, he turned to regard Lieutenants Stone and Cardinal. “I was never very good at following orders. That’s why they made me captain. Let’s go.”

“Yes, sir.”

They walked in, gently pushing tree branches aside. Once they were below the canopy, daylight vanished. The darkness was suffocating, but not absolute. Some of the ground cover radiated its own light. Blue-glowing ferns. Glowing fuzzy yellow growths sprouted from tree trunks. Clusters of crystalline rock glittered on the ground in all the colors of the rainbow, pulsing out beams of shifting light.

The soap bubbles they’d seen earlier floated everywhere, glinting in the shadows.

“This deserves a hologram,” Stone said while stepping through a curtain of glowing purple vines. “Where’s Max when you need him? Wasn’t he supposed to be documenting this trip?”

Alexander watched the vines react to Stone’s intrusion. Hairlike tendrils stood on end, feeling him, while the length of the vines furled and unfurled restlessly.

“What kind of evolutionary purpose is there for plants that move?” Alexander wondered.

Cardinal crouched down beside one of the blue-glowing ferns, but it shied away from him, turning out the lights and furling up its leaves. “Protection maybe?” he suggested. “Movement could also be justified and reinforced by active food and nutrient gathering, a result of plants vying with each other for limited space. Reproduction is another possibility. Maybe that sap isn’t their blood, but rather some kind of reproductive fluid?”

“Way too much information, Cardinal,” Alexander said, regarding a sticky red stain on his uniform with a wrinkled nose.

“Agreed,” Stone put in. “Let’s get to that sensor anomaly and get out of here before we start growing baby trees.”

The comms crackled with Korbin’s voice next. “How’s everything in there?”

“Nothing hostile so far,” Alexander said. “Jungle is pretty dense, and a little too much on the touchy feely side, but no problems yet. Our heading is 255 degrees. We have one klick to cover before we get to the anomaly. At the rate we’re going, we should stumble on it in about half an hour.”

“That long?”

Alexander grunted as he climbed over a wall of tree roots as tall as he was. “Maybe longer. We’ll be in touch.”

It actually took forty minutes before Stone held up his hand and called a halt. He was staring as his direction finder and shaking his head.

“What is it?” Alexander asked.

“Whatever we saw on the sensors has to be around here somewhere,” Stone replied, turning in a slow circle and searching the ground cover.

“I don’t see anything,” Cardinal said.

Alexander didn’t either, but it wasn’t easy to see through all the phosphorescent ferns. “Let’s sweep the area. Push aside the ground cover wherever it’s obscuring the ground.”

“Roger,” Stone said.

“What’s that?” Cardinal said, pointing up to a hanging curtain of crimson vines. They were rolling down to the ground like a roller shade. As the vines unfurled, Alexander saw a familiar flash of reflective white fabric. That fabric had been designed to stand out against the black of space.

Cardinal gasped. “Is that…”

“Come on,” Alexander said, already running toward the vines. By now they could see arms and legs, and Max’s wavy blond hair.

“Where’s his helmet?” Cardinal asked, crouching down beside him to check for a pulse. “He’s alive,” Cardinal said a second later. Max’s eyes were shut, and his face was pale, but otherwise he appeared fine.

Stone called it in. “We’ve found Max. He’s alive, but he lost his helmet somewhere. That must be what we picked up on sensors.”

“Is he hurt?” Korbin replied.

“As far as we can tell he’s fine,” Cardinal replied. “He’s just unconscious.”

“Then he’s not fine!” Korbin snapped.

Alexander frowned and commed back. “You’ll have a chance to examine him soon. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you have a crush on him.”

“I cherish life in all its forms, Captain. I don’t need a vested interest to care about my fellow man.”

“Fair enough.”

“How are you going to carry him back?”

“There’s three of us. We’ll figure something out.”

“Let me know if you need anything.”

“Will do.” Alexander glanced up at the vines. They were busy furling back up into the trees.

“What do you think they were doing with him?” Stone asked.

“And why did they drop him here when we arrived?” Cardinal asked.

Alexander turned to the botanist with a frown. “You’re attributing a great deal of awareness to these plants.”

“With good reason,” Cardinal replied, gazing up at the massive trees. “They are aware. They know enough to recognize that Max is one of us, and they must care enough about each other to infer that we would care about one of our own, too. This jungle is a sentient community of alien life.”

“Let’s not get carried away,” Alexander said. “Any idea why he hasn’t woken up yet?”

“Maybe he’s hurt more than he appears to be,” Stone suggested.

While they stood over him, trying to decide what to do next, Max’s eyes flew open. He sat bolt upright and screamed at the top of his lungs.

Chapter 24

“Max!”

Max went on screaming as if he hadn’t heard, his eyes glassy and unseeing.

“Max!” Alexander slapped him. “It’s us! What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

The diplomat shut his mouth and turned to look at his aggressor. It took an extra moment for his eyes to focus. “Captain?”

“You’re safe now. Are you hurt?”

“We need to get out of here!”

“Why?”

Instead of answering, Max looked around wildly. His blue eyes were big and black in the dim light of the jungle.

“What are you afraid of?” Stone asked.

“I… you didn’t see it? It was chasing me.”

Alexander nodded. “We saw the footprints. Don’t worry, it didn’t follow you in here.”

“That’s because the jungle kept it out. They made it bleed, and it killed one of them.”

Alexander remembered the sticky red sap the trees had been wiping off on them, and suddenly he realized what it was. That had been the creature’s blood.

“They who…?” Cardinal asked, walking up to them.

“The trees! That monster turned one of them to splinters!”

“What did it look like?”

“A dinosaur is the closest thing I can compare it to, but it wasn’t reptilian. It had black fur all over its body.”

Alexander traded looks with Stone.

“Like a hairy T-Rex?” Stone asked.

“You saw it?” Max asked.

“Just a lucky guess.”

“We need to go,” Max insisted. “Before it comes back.”

“How did you get caught up in those vines?” Cardinal asked.

Max shook his head. “What vines?”

“You were rolled up in a bundle of vines when we found you. They dropped you on the ground when we arrived.”

Max frowned. “I fell asleep on the ground…” He looked up, his eyes darting between the trees. “You don’t think they were going to eat me, do you?”

Cardinal shook his head. “If what you said about them defending you is true, they might have been trying to protect you.”

“Let’s not start jumping to conclusions,” Alexander said. “Can you walk?”

“I think so,” Max said.

“Good, then let’s get out of here. You have enough samples, Cardinal?”

“No, but I’m out of sample containers, so it’ll have to do for now.”

“You still have my rocks, right?” Stone asked.

“Yes, I still have your rocks, but maybe you should carry them.”

“Sure. I’ll just put my rifle down so I can do that. If we run into Mr. T. you can pat him on the head and tickle his tummy.”

“Never mind,” Cardinal muttered.

“Move out,” Alexander said. “Stone you’re back on point. I’ll take the rear.” Mentally activating the comms, Alexander said, “Korbin, Max is ambulatory. He woke up. We’re on our way back.”

Korbin breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s good to hear.”

“Any sweet nothings you want me to whisper to him for you?”

“Ha ha.”

Alexander smiled. “Just checking.”

*

By the time they reached the shuttles, the sun was high in the sky and so hot that they could feel its heat radiating through the rover’s hull.

“So this is what it feels like to be in an oven,” Alexander muttered. Up ahead they saw Stone’s Cheetah taking long strides toward the shuttles, kicking up sand and bits of sodden vegetation.

The comms crackled and Stone said, “Captain, there are more of those footprints up ahead. The big ones.”

“Leading to the shuttles?” Alexander asked. He studied the gleaming hulls in the distance, but none of them appeared damaged.

“Around them. Headed for the ocean. Should we check it out?”

Alexander’s first impulse was to say no, but they were safe in the rover. Besides, it would be better to find out what these creatures were like now, rather than wait for them to come sniffing around the hab complex.

“Go for it. We’ll follow you.”

They didn’t have to go very far. The footprints converged on a large pile of red, black, and white vegetation. As they approached, Alexander began to doubt it was vegetation. A frown wrinkled his brow and he keyed the comms once more. “What is that, Stone?”

“Not sure. Magnifying…” A burst of static came over the comms as Stone made a noise of disgust. “That’s the beached whale we saw.”

Korbin leaned forward in her seat, her eyes wide. “Poor thing.”

It was a grisly sight—black whale skin clinging to jutting white bones. Bloody red meat and pink whale fat were scattered all over the beach.

Despite the shock of seeing the whale carcass, Alexander found the sight curious. That whale had been so similar to an Earth whale that it could have washed up on a beach on Earth and no one would have batted an eye, and now with its innards exposed, that was no less true. Besides the balloon creatures and moving trees, life on Wonderland seemed a lot like life on Earth. Was that a coincidence? Animals with red blood and white bones, and trees with leaves and trunks. Evolution had somehow picked a similar path twice. Very curious.

“Any sign of the predators that ate the whale?” Alexander asked.

“No, sir,” Stone replied.

“Then let’s pack it in. We need to get Max back to Doctor Crespin for a thorough examination.”

“How’s he doing?”

“I’m fine,” Max replied from the back of the shuttle.

“All the same,” Alexander said. He made a wide circle around the whale carcass and opened the shuttle’s loading bay as he approached. The doors swung wide, the ramp dropped, and Alexander drove straight up. The rover and Lieutenant Stone’s Cheetah were now both thoroughly contaminated, along with the shuttles that contained them—there was no airlock big enough to sterilize either a rover or a Cheetah—so they couldn’t take off their suits or helmets yet. The airlocks back at the hab complex would sterilize them all. As for Max, he was about to enjoy an extended stay in the quarantine module.

The flight back to the habs was short. Alexander saw the white domes gleaming on the horizon long before they arrived. Korbin passed Max a spare helmet inside the shuttle airlock on their way out, then they all went through decontamination together as they went from the shuttle’s airlock to a grassy field, to the quarantine module of the hab complex.