Authors: Jason Halstead
Fiona, the third huntress that served the colony of survivors on Vitalis, kept her eyes moving over the surrounding jungle. Her bow was in her hand with an arrow fitted to the string. She covered her friends while they tracked their prey.
“You can tell they left the stream by the water on the ground?” Elsa asked, her tone filled with disbelief.
Here and here,” Kira pointed. Elsa stepped over and let her gaze follow Kira’s fingers. The ground as dark from the thick jungle canopy overhead that blocked the sunlight and kept the air still. Instead of the soft mud along the bank riddled with tracks she found her eyes drawn to where tiny puddles of water were gathered in equally small depressions in the ground. “Fuck me,” she whispered.
“Work now, play later,” Kira suggested, rising to her full height.
“What?” Elsa jerked her head up and found Kira’s laughing eyes staring back at her. She snorted. “Hardly, you’ve got Eric.”
“I wasn’t offering,” Kira said. “Now let’s go, they’ve got quite a lead on us.”
“We left within half an hour of them getting away, how much of a lead can they have?”
“We had to move slowly,” Fiona answered. “We’ve been walking for another hour and they would have moved quickly, at least with the current, if not faster.”
“Come,” Kira said. She’d already moved away from the stream half a dozen feet. “They went this way.”
“War paint?” Fiona asked, gesturing towards the rich wet soil at the water’s edge.
“No time,” Kira said.
Elsa glanced at the soft mud. Normally when they left Treetown to hunt or scout they dressed for the occasion, much as they already had. Their scouting apparel consisted of their weapons and either mud or natural dyes streaked across their skin to break up the pattern of the human body. This time they had only the weapons they’d gotten from one of the secret caches they’d stashed about the jungle. Their clothes, skirts and shirts or vests made from the hides of animals, were stashed away in the cache. The irony didn’t escape Elsa that although year was 2222, they were acting as savages dating back to prehistoric times.
The trail Kira followed became obvious once they climbed out of the creek bed. A tuft of fur tinged with red lay on the ground beside a tree. Another dozen paces ahead lay the remains of a prowler, the hair around the muzzle of the six legged predator faded and grey. Its eyes and tongue were missing, as were the contents of the once formidable creatures torso. The spray of darkened blood and gibbets of flesh gave proof to the ferocious nature of the feeding.
“Fresh kill,” Fiona observed.
“How could they kill something this large?” Elsa asked.
Kira pointed with her spear at a wound on the rear leg of the beast. “One of them bit it and tore the fur from its hide. Their venom paralyzed it. Then they ate it.”
Elsa shuddered. She’d been paralyzed by the spitter venom once. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be eaten alive. The venom paralyzed the muscles first but the brain took longer to be effected. She had no doubt the cat-like beast had been aware of what was happening to it. “Okay, so now which way?”
Kira finished circling the kill and came to a stop. “They split up,” she said. “And they’re growing.”
“Already?” Fiona asked, walking over next to her and squatting down to study the faint tracks on the dark forest floor. “Damn, you’re right. That’s fast even for Vitalis.”
“How much bigger are they?” Elsa’s frown showed her disbelief.
“Ten percent maybe. Not much, but in only an hour or so? They’ll have to slow down as they grow, they won’t be able to eat enough to sustain the growth rate.” Fiona looked up and saw both of the other women staring at her. She shrugged her shoulders. “What? You try spending a lot of time with a nerd who’d rather talk biology than have sex.”
Elsa grimaced. Fiona’s on again, off again boyfriend was all that remained of the eggheads that had been part of the research colony established on Vitalis.
“Oh don’t worry, I make sure we get the sex in too,” Fiona said with a wink.
Elsa and Kira both chuckled, but the mirth was short lived. “They’re growing and separating. Fiona, you and Elsa follow that one, I’ll take the one that’s headed towards the pits.”
Fiona and Elsa looked at one another then at the scant tracks they were supposed to follow. When they glanced back Kira had already moved off after her prey. “The pits?” Elsa asked.
“East and north some,” Fiona said. “We think they might have been natural sinkholes, in places there are even spears or rock that look like stalagmites thrust up from the ground. Not a safe a place though, there’s a lot of things that live there we haven’t even gotten around to thinking up names for. Every one of them filled with teeth and a need to eat anything that gets close to them.”
“And ours looks like it wants to find a way back to the spitter mound,” Elsa observed.
Fiona nodded. “You’re picking things up fast here. I bet part of it’s your Marine FIST training.”
Elsa nodded. First Insertion Strike Teams were the combat elite in the Terran Coalition. Or so she’d thought until she arrived on Vitalis and found there was at least one person who could kick her ass without breaking a sweat. “Special Ops 101, be aware of everything and observe everything. They even had a mandatory class on hand to hand without our FIST armor.”
“Kinky,” Fiona said, starting out. “If I’d have known you guys got into nude wrestling I might have applied for spec ops..”
“Sometimes you mix a little business with pleasure. Now let’s move as quick as we can and kill the chatter.”
Fiona nodded and led the way. The average spitter they’d encountered was a cross between a four legged cockroach and a small dinosaur, except they were over six feet in length when fully grown, possessed a tail they could whip around dangerously, and could spit a venom that would paralyze their target within seconds. The new breed they’d just discovered had chewed their way out of the bellies of humans that had served as a host to the creatures. Three spitters per Marine host. They’d killed four of the hatchlings but and two of the newborns had gotten away. As chilling as the thought of hosting an alien predator was, it paled in comparison to the similarity between the new breed of spitters and their human hosts.
Chapter 2
Fiona and Elsa stalked the creature through the jungle, circling around the colony they’d dubbed Treetown but still heading to the south. Eventually they’d leave the jungle behind and find the hills and ridges that separated the jungle from the plains beyond. The plains hosted the mound that the spitters called home.
The spitters had a queen, but they weren’t organized in a traditional hive. They weren’t even insects, though they did possess some similarities to the garden variety bug. Kira knew the most about them and from what she’d shared, only the queen seemed to reproduce. Dissections of the few spitters they’d killed showed immature sexual organs.
Where the spitters differed from every other meat eating animal on Vitalis was their intelligence. The average spitter was only a few IQ points above a dog, but Kira had made sure everyone believed her when she said the queens was smarter. Possibly even as smart as a human. And that meant if the spitter they followed made it back it was only a matter of time—hours or days—until the human survivors were wiped out completely.
Fiona stopped. She looked about, eyes narrowing. The jungle had grown darker as they’d moved. Elsa looked to the scratched moss on the tree root Fiona stood next to, a chill running down her spine. The scuff marks implied that the footprint had grown even as they’d been tracking it. The human-spitter variant had grown nearly double its birth size, assuming the body grew in proportion to its feet.
“We’ve got half an hour, maybe more, until it’s too dark to track,” Fiona said. She looked around again, this time looking up into the thick jungle canopy. The shadows danced from tree to tree as smaller animals, birds, and insects moved high above them. Even the occasional beam of light that broke through the tropical foliage during the day was redirected by the angle of the setting sun. With the looming darkness came defeat.
“What then? We know where it’s headed, can we try to beat it to the passes and stop it?”
Fiona frowned. “I may have to.”
“You? No. Us.”
Fiona shook her head. “In time you’ll be more dangerous than I am here, but it’s not your time yet. You don’t know the jungle or the land around it. You don’t even know how to use your weapons.”
“Any other time I’d force you to prove that,” Elsa snapped.
“And I would,” Fiona replied with a faint smile. “I don’t doubt your strength, your skill, or your heart. The jungle is deadly at night…and that’s without the threat of this mutant spitter.”
“So what am I supposed to do, just sit here and wait for you?” Elsa’s tone communicated what she thought of the plan.
“Go back to Treetown and warn the others. Tell them to get what they can and leave. There’s not enough of us to fight the spitters off, especially without real weapons. If Kira and I can’t stop these things from getting back to their mound we only have a couple of days until they find us.”
Elsa scowled at her. She opened her mouth to reply but couldn’t find any words that weren’t pointless or argumentative.
“I know, it sucks,” Fiona agreed. “If I don’t make it back tell Jeremy…well, tell him I’m sorry I didn’t make it back.”
“Are you two back together? Kira said you were having problems.”
Fiona shrugged. “He blames himself for a lot of things and can’t get past it. He thinks he deserves all the shit that keeps happening to him and to people around him. He’s hot and cold and it’s really confusing. If I wanted someone with mood swings I’d have gone for one of the girls. Maybe even tried to make a move on you, since you’re new and haven’t had a chance to hook up with anyone yet.”
Elsa smirked at the offhand compliment. “You’ve been hanging around the wrong girls,” She said. Fiona leveled her gaze at her until she relented. “Okay, maybe I’ve had a few hot and cold moments. But never with my team in the field.”
“You’re elite, most of the people here don’t have that training or mental toughness.”
Elsa scoffed. “I’ve only been here a few days but this planet has a way of making a person pretty tough.”
Fiona nodded. She glanced down at the track and sighed. “All right, get going. It’s late enough for some of the nocturnal predators to be out already. Good luck.”
“Good luck to you,” Elsa said. Fiona nodded then recoiled slightly when Elsa stepped into her and gave her a surprise hug. “Take care of yourself, there’s plenty of planet for us to relocate to if we need to, but there’s not many of us.”
Even in the false twilight of the jungle Elsa could make out the blush on Fiona’s cheeks. “Thanks,” she muttered. “I will.”
Elsa turned away and started to the west. Treetown lay less than a mile away. She glanced back and saw Fiona head off again, her bow now resting across her back while she held her spear across her body with both hands. Elsa waited until her sister Marine disappeared into the darkness before she turned back to the west and began her own journey
Only a few minutes into the trek she stopped without even so much as a curse escaping her open lips. One of the multi-jointed creatures she’d seen when her screamer pod had been knocked off course was staring at her. It was clinging to the side of a tree, its hide a perfect match for the color of the smooth tree bark. It blended in almost without fault in spite of the incredible size of the creature. Only her training to look for things that were out of place saved her life.
Her path would take her directly under it as she passed the tree. It was a predator, a natural hunter that would lay in wait until she was in range and then pounce on her. The way its legs were drawn in and the size of the muscle groups served as evidence to support her theory. Elsa moved forward, veering slightly to cross on the other side of the tree. Assuming it wouldn’t want to move until the last minute, that would make its attack more complicated.
Each step seemed a descent into chaos. She tensed her body, preparing to leap out of the way. Her head stayed forward but she might as well have closed her eyes for all the attention she paid to what was in front of her. She was focused on hearing the jungle around her, in particular the spider-like hunter above her.
Something small fell in front of her, nearly making her jump. It hit the jungle floor and splashed, drawing Elsa’s eyes up in spite of herself. A few short strings of alien saliva hung from its open jaws, proof that the Vitalian predator thought Elsa would make a tasty meal.
Almost before she registered the slavering jaws coming closer she heard the sound of its clawed feet tearing the bark of the tree. Elsa threw herself forward, rolling off her left shoulder to keep her bow from hanging her up. The ground shuddered behind her from the impact of the monster, but she felt only the trunk of the three that her hip and side slammed into.
She swung her spear with one hand, batting aside one of the long forelimbs that stabbed for her heart. The dew claw on the limb speared into her side, jarring her and pinning her to the tree. Elsa entire body jerked from the shock of the attack. It reminded her of the time she’d tested out a modification to the feedback system on her FIST armor and it had overloaded her entire nervous system with a low grade voltage.