Ryk E. Spoor's Blog, page 35

Castaway Odyssey: Chapter 23

Well, the Sergeant was back to consciousness if not to action...

 

 

Chapter 23.

     "Whoa!"

Tavana lunged out reflexively, catching Maddox as he was almost dragged headlong into the water. The carbonan fishing pole was bent in a sharp curve, vibrating furiously even while Tavana managed to get the smaller Bird brother back on his feet.

"Got something, Tav, we got something!"

"Vraiment, that we do! Can you hold it?"

Maddox' face was set in lines of determination. "If… you can… keep me from falling on my face…"

Tavana grinned, slid both arms around the younger boy just under Maddox' arms, and braced himself. "That I can do!" He raised his voice a bit to activate his omni. "Xander! We have a bite, a big one!"

"You do? We'll be right there!"

"Gimme a video feed, Tavana!" came the Sergeant's voice. "If I can't be there, I darn well want to watch!"

Whatever was on the other end of the carbonan-reinforced line was strong, Tavana had to give it that. Maddox' muscles stood out on his arms like slender bundles of cord as he pulled back, trying to force his prize to turn towards him. No way he can keep doing this himself; the drag on that is set to a third of his own weight!

"Let me take it, Maddox," he said.

"No!"

"You can't hold it in one hand if it yanks like that again, and how are you going to reel it in without letting go at least for an instant?"

Maddox grunted as another powerful yank pulled him forward. "Okay, okay… you turn the reel? Hold me with one arm?"

"Works." He didn't want to deprive Maddox of this – the first catch on a new planet. Sure, he really would have liked to be the one to do it, but it hadn't been his turn, it had been Maddox's, and the smaller boy was hanging on grimly.

And none of us expected our first real hit on the line to be something this big!

He got hold of the reel, which had been made from the takeup reel of the coil-winder they'd cobbled together months ago, and started cranking back hard. The fish, or whatever it was, had suddenly turned towards them and the line was threatening to go slack.

Maddox immediately pulled up and tried to backpedal; Tavana did his best to go along with him. Gain as much on this thing as we can –

The rod whipped down again and the line screamed out at astonishing speed. Mon Dieu, it is strong!

Xander and Francisco appeared around the side of LS-88, the oldest boy wiping grease from his hands. "Holy crap, that thing must be a monster!"

"Be damned careful, boys," the Sergeant admonished them from inside the lander. "Something that fights like that is almost guaranteed to be a predator of some kind – especially since we're using meat scraps for bait. If that's the local equivalent of a shark, it'll be hell on wheels even when you beach it. Stay sharp, stay clear, and don't get stupid; Xander, when and if you get a clear shot, take it. We're not sport-fishing here, we're doing survival. Got it?"

"Yes, sir, Sergeant," Xander said. Out of the corner of his eye, Tavana saw him give a sideways smile. "Do you always order the Captain around?"

The Sergeant's laugh was loud and cheerful. "Only when they're young punks! But you're right, Captain, I should be advising you."

"And it's good advice. Franky, get back. I want you up against the landing strut there. WOW!"

The creature had finally reached the surface, and breached spectacularly like an Earthly marlin, except no marlin ever had spiky, segmented armor or four rows of paired fins – or that edged, flowering nightmare of a mouth. "No joke, Sergeant, that's a top predator for sure!"

Maddox actually swore. "That thing's huge!"

"Big enough – I guess it at four, five meters, boys," the Sergeant said, and his voice was now serious. "Might not be a top predator, but I'll tell you, seeing that makes me damn nervous. Xander, you've done this before?"

"Yes, sir. That's going to be a long fight, if this thing's anything like Earth fish. Maddox, I'm sorry, but we'll need to take turns."

Sweat was trickling down Maddox; his hair was matted and he was breathing heavily. Tavana could feel his arms shaking. Reluctantly, Maddox nodded. "O… okay. Tav, you take it for a bit?"

"Right." He reached out, clamped his left hand firmly on the rod just above Maddox', then grabbed the bottom of the rod. "Got it."

Maddox let go and ducked out, just as the monstrous fish-thing gave another mighty yank.

But Tavana had been braced, and he had no trouble keeping a grip on it. It felt like twenty kilos or so – quite a tug, but nothing outrageous, as the line streamed off the reel again. "I can do this for a while."

"You'll have to." Xander sat down next to him; Maddox had flopped down onto the dirt, exhausted. "Unless these things tire a lot faster, we might be fighting that thing for hours."

"Oui, I am aware. I only did a little fishing, but I remember some of the people saying how long it took to land the big ones. You know that Maddox and I, we will be landing it, yes?"

"I know – I'm the one who's going to do the shooting." Xander looked out at the water, where the thing was visible by the bulge it was making on the surface as it streaked away again. "Honestly? I'm really seriously thinking of cutting the line."

Maddox sat bolt upright. "What? No! Why?"

Tavana had the same impulse as Maddox, but his brain caught up to Xander's. "Maddox, your brother, he has a point. It will not be safe, landing this monster. We do not even know if it will be something edible."

Xander nodded slowly. "Basically, yes. That's what's got you nervous, right, Sergeant?"

There was a moment of silence, then a grunt from Campbell. "Partly. More than that, though, but nothing to concern you right now."

"So you think I should do it? Cut the line?" Xander was carefully looking away from his brother's outraged face.

"Son, right now, you're the Captain. You're going to have to make that call."

"I am asking the old laid-up soldier for advice, Sergeant."

That got a chuckle, one that even Maddox joined in on. "Well, now, that's fine. Advice? Well, honestly, I think we can argue it either way, assuming it doesn't somehow get off the hook and make the argument moot. You've made the argument for cutting the line; I'll make the other one. This is the first bite we've gotten. It's going to be our first look at what lives in these waters, and something that big will have a lot to tell us – not just from itself, but from what it's eaten lately, too. Edible or not, we might find it's got other useful aspects – those armor plates might come in handy, for instance.

"And of course there's no guarantee the next thing you hook will be any safer." He paused. "Now, if you do bring it in, I want you all to remember what we've learned so far. That thing might be venomous, and that could be everything from its teeth to its fins to even its skin. So you boys get gloved up when it's getting close, got me?"

"Got it, sir," Tavana said, and the others echoed it. "Sergeant?"

"Go ahead, Tavana."

"This cable, it is very thin, but it is carbonan, yes? So it should be extremely strong, strong enough to hold that thing's complete weight."

"I'd think so. Xander?"

"That's TaylerCord 5K. The 5k is its rated strength, so it's rated to five tons – five thousand kilograms. I don't think that thing's going to be even close to that, so… yes, easily."

"So… we could just tie it to the landing strut and let it pull as hard as it wants, right?"

After a moment, the Sergeant chuckled. "Might could at that."

"Won't work, if it's like most fish," Xander said. "Give it enough slack, it'll either find a way to pull the hook out, or it'll get up a running pull that will either rip the hook straight out through its body, or peak at a high enough tension to snap even this line. I'll bet on the 'rip the hook out', myself. But that's why we have to keep fighting it this way; if it gets slack, it has a good chance of getting away."

"Then the choice is up to you, Captain Xander."

"I will do a properly Captain thing, then, and put off the decision until I see what shape we're in when it's getting close to time to land it."

"Ha!"

Tavana turned his attention to the rod. The creature had once more paused in its struggles, so Tavana lifted the rod, then lowered it as he wound the line in, lifted again, lowered while winding, dragging the creature towards them slowly but surely.

And then without warning it leapt away again through the water, dragging the line whining with it.

All of them became familiar with that dragging, tiring, yet still fascinating routine, pitting their timing and smaller muscles braced on the ground against the determination and vast power of the creature from the depths of the lake. After the first hour, Tavana started to wonder if the thing was going to beat them, if it was simply able to endure beyond anything they could manage. He muttered something about that as he took the rod for the third time.

"Don't you worry about that," the Sergeant's voice said. "Tavana, human beings ain't the strongest animals on our planet, and we ain't the fastest, and we ain't the toughest in a fight, either, but there is one thing we're just crazy-good at, and that's keepin' on keepin' on. Persistence hunting, that's our game. Sure, we can't outpower that monster out there, but you can bet your last dollar that we can outlast him, if we don't just plain give up."

Tavana tried to keep those serenely certain words in mind as the battle went to two hours, then three, then four, and even Emerald's sluggish sun was clearly crawling across the sky.

But then he suddenly realized that the creature's runs were getting shorter and shorter, and it was clearly getting closer and closer to shore. "Xander, I think we are winning."

Xander, who was eating some jerky that Francisco had brought from the lander, sat up straighter. "I think you're right."

The thing chose that moment to surge to the surface again, but even that powerful movement reinforced Tavana's impression. Unlike that first mighty breach, this was a lunge that broke the surface but did not come close to clearing the water; barely a quarter of the armored fish-thing's length emerged before it sank back beneath the surface. "He's almost done, Sergeant!"

"Sure looks that way. Time for that decision, Captain."

Xander stood still for long minutes, watching as Tavana dragged the thing closer to shore, now no more than ten meters away. Finally he nodded. "Let's do this. Francisco, go get us the gloves. Boots back on, everyone. No chances, right?"

"Yes, Xander!" agreed Maddox.

"Understood," Tavana said. Having seen that nightmarish mouth now several times, he had no desire at all to take any risks.

Tavana nodded to Maddox. "You're going to take the pole at the end. You hooked it, you get to bring it in."

The brilliant smile from the lighter-haired brother told Tavana he'd said the right thing. "Thank you, Tavana!"

"No problem. And I'll stand right behind you just in case it pulls hard at the end."

Xander stood to the side now, sidearm drawn. As Maddox and Tavana slowly dragged the monster closer, Tavana saw Xander release the safety. His finger was still well clear of the trigger, laid along the axis of the gun across, but not through, the trigger guard, and he held the muzzle of the gun pointed low and away from all of them. Francisco was hanging back as he had been instructed, and as the thing made one more lunge, showing two jaws filled with uncountable teeth, paired with ripping mandibles, the smallest of their crew shrank behind the landing strut. Good. Don't want him even possibly in the way on this.

"Keep bringing him in. Closer… closer… Tav, can you and Maddox drag him a little this way? Yeah, it looks flatter there, I think we can get him beached easier… yeah, that's it… Whoa, I think he knows something's up, that was a hard run…"

Maddox pulled up, reeled in, pulled up, trusting to Tavana to keep him from falling. "Come… in… here, you stubborn little…"

"I would call it many things, but not little!"

Maddox growled a little, but focused his energy on pulling again. "Almost… there…"

At the last moment, the creature seemed to finally realize that it was the small animals up there, on the land, that were responsible for its torment. It swung about and charged towards the bank, throwing up twin bow waves in a startling rush of speed.

And then it came right up on the bank and started thrashing across the ground, straight for Tavana and Maddox.

Tavana didn't think, he just acted, literally throwing Maddox over his head and behind him, and then running to the side, waving his arms and shouting, keeping the attention of the hissing monstrosity.

Gunshots cracked out, one after another in rapid succession. The creature spasmed, jackknifed around towards Xander, but then caught three shots in the face for its trouble. The controlled charge turned into a writhing dance of agony that made everyone scramble back, waiting until the convulsions died down and the gigantic body was still.

Finally there were only a few dying tremors rippling down the creature's flanks. Tavana let himself sink down to the rough ground, shaking. "Merde, that was much more exciting than I was hoping for!"

"What did I tell you boys? Planets hold surprises. Back on earth there's more than a few fish that could do that, though ain't none of them nearly that big. On the other hand, orcas do that kind of thing sometimes, and they are that big, and bigger." The Sergeant's voice was also a little shaky. "Good shooting, good discipline there, Xander. And good reflexes, Tav. Everyone did good there. Just be careful approaching it."

"I remember why you are lying inside, Sergeant," Tavana said emphatically. "Believe me, a second lesson I do not need."

"Heh. I suppose not. So keep an eye on the others for me."

"That I can do."

They warily approached it. Now that it was still and fully out of the water, Tavana's omni could compute the exact dimensions: five point two meters long, and if the density was roughtly that of water, massing something over a ton. "That is a monster."

Xander nodded. "Sure is. Stand back, everyone."

He put two more shots into the thing, but it only twitched sluggishly; there was no sign of the sudden, savage reanimation that had nearly cost the Sergeant his life. Xander let out a long sigh. "Looks like he's dead dead."

"Doesn't mean it's safe," Campbell reminded them. "Approach with caution, and remember to be very careful touching anything."

"Sergeant?" Tavana said, as they carefully closed in on the body. "Can you tell us now what the other thing was that was bothering you?"

"Sure," he said, and his tone was grim enough to get Xander to pause. "Take a look out there. What do you see?"

He wasn't sure what he was supposed to see, but he knew better than to question Sergeant Campbell. "Umm… well, I see the lake. Ripples on the lake. Then the other side of the lake, some of those tree things –"

"Right. How far do you think it is to the other side of the lake?"

"That's easy." His retinals sent the image to his omni along with the query. "Six hundred and fifteen meters."

"Little more than half a click. And it's not much longer than that, if any. So tell me, how many fish or whatever do you think are in a lake that size, and how many does a monster like that need to eat every day?"

Light dawned. "You mean it shouldn't be in here."

"Damn straight. That means that it either somehow swam up that not-too-big stream running out of this lake, or there's some other way in that we can't see, because unless that lake's about three kilometers deep there's no way it's big enough to support things that size. It's like finding a great white shark in your local fishing pond." He paused. "Honestly, Xander, I'm glad you made the call you did. That beast's got a lot to tell us, and we need all the info we can get.

"Because I don't think we've even started to find out the surprises Emerald's hiding."

 

 

Castaway Odyssey: Chapter 22

Xander said the Sergeant was waking up, so why not see things from his point of view?

 

 

 

Chapter 22.

     Campbell blinked his eyes blearily, forced them to focus. What… Oh. I'm inside my suit.

For a moment he was confused. Was I on EVA? Fixing something? What happened?

When he tried to sit up, he felt the tremendous lethargy and pain of having been still for many hours, even days, and his leg gave a dull throb despite what his nanos reported as "significant pain reduction".

That cleared his head, and he knew exactly why he was here.

"Sergeant? Sergeant, do you hear me?"

He managed to force his lips into a grin, though that hurt too. "Loud and clear, Captain Xander."

The other boys were crowding round, all looking relieved. "So, how long have I been out?"

"Longer than we expected. Earth-time, about a day and a half?"

"Damn. That is a long time. Hold on." He consulted his nanos and winced. That venom was a nasty cocktail, that's for sure. "Looks like I'm conscious but a long way from running a marathon. Damn thing's venom ate a hole in me that goes to the bone and you could fit two, three fingers into it right now."

Tavana made a face and Francisco shuddered. Xander nodded. "Yeah, I saw that. Took it a while to get all the necrotic under control; there were some kind of other elements to the poison, like boosting factors or something, that didn't count as venom themselves but helped it work. Same for the neurotoxin."

Campbell reviewed the data and nodded. "I see that. It neutralized most of it fairly quickly, then there was a second wave of activity. Wish I was a biochemist, I might know exactly how that worked. Anyway, looks like I'm on the mend, just slowly. Good thinking, by the way, in putting me into the suit; a lot easier than bedpans and such." He could see that one arm was out of the suit, so that the IV could be used.

He smelled an unidentifiable but still savory scent, and his stomach growled. "Now that smells good, whatever it is. I'm starving. No surprise there."

"That's what bit you," Tavana said. "And I'm sorry—"

"Not your fault, mine," Campbell said instantly. "You didn't know what to watch for. I damn well did, and didn't brief you; I earned that bite. Let's just learn the lesson it taught us, right?"

Tavana glanced at Xander and the two grinned. "So, you were right, Xander."

"Told you."

Campbell raised an eyebrow. "All right, you boys obviously had a talk or two. Anyway, before we go around eating the native food, how do you know it's safe?"

Xander hesitated; to Campbell's astonishment, Francisco stepped forward. "Because I tried some first, and my nanos decided it was all safe. I was watched for a whole day afterward."

"Francisco? How'd that happen?" he demanded.

Xander, looking nervous, related the entire conversation that had led to the decision that Francisco would test native food.

Campbell was silent for a few minutes afterward, and he could see the others becoming increasingly nervous. Finally, with an effort, he forced himself up to a semi-sitting position. "Francisco, that was damned brave of you," he said finally. He saw the boy's chin come up proudly. "And in principle, you boys were right. Right now, Francisco's the one we can risk most, no matter how much that sounds bass-ackwards."

"But in practice?" Xander said after a moment, clearly bracing for a major dressing-down.

"Relax, Xander. In practice, you boys just don't know how to do this thing right. I think you already realized there's poisons out there that even a small nibble of could kill, right?"

Xander nodded.

"There's a procedure for this kind of thing that avoids most of the danger, and from now on we use it. We're not in danger of starving; we have time to work in. We'll work out details later, but basically you first do a contact poison test – touch it to part of the skin, like inside the arm, the wrist maybe. Wait a while and see if you have a reaction – the nanos would be able to tell if it's an allergy or a toxin. Then you take a tiny bit, chew, and spit out – don't swallow ANYTHING. Rinse out your mouth, even. That will catch really virulent poisons that are mobile through the mucous membranes. Then you try a little nibble.

"For animals, internal organs are 'be real careful' things. Might have a lot of nutrients, or might have heavy-duty toxins." He had to pause then. Damn, this lying around poisoned sure takes it out of you. Good thing the nanos keep you more functional than you might be otherwise. "But really, you did good, both of you. Anything else to report?"

Tavana summarized the other work they had done, including finishing the job that had gotten the Sergeant laid up. "Got back on that horse, did you?"

Tavana nodded. "Xander said we had to. I… I'm glad he did."

"So am I." He let the two of them – with occasional interruptions and additions from Maddox and Francisco – finish their impromptu briefing.

When they were finished, he nodded, then opened a private channel to Xander. You done good, son. Kept things going, prevented any panic, moved our little colony forward – quite a ways in the little time I was out.

Thank you, sir.

No, thank you. I had to dump the whole load on you in the middle of an emergency. I've seen trained recruits that would've dropped that ball, but you took it and ran the whole length of the field.

He spoke aloud. "You all did a great job. Makes me proud of all of you to know that even if the old Sergeant's out of commission, you'll still get things done."

All four of them straightened, looking proud and happy – and, in Campbell's view, they damned well ought to.

"Now," he said after a moment, "can I get some of that, what did you call it? Centisnake, that’s it, and see what the native food's got to offer?"

"Yes, Sergeant!" Francisco said eagerly, and ran to the other room; both Maddox and Tavana followed, obviously to make sure he remembered things like plates, utensils, and such.

In the momentary quiet, Xander nodded to him. "I guess you can send that revocation code now."

"I could, but I ain't." At Xander's startled, gratified look, he grinned, then went serious. "Son, first off, I'm a long way from being in any shape to run things. The boss of this expedition's got to be able to cover the ground – run his ass off, really – and best guess I see here is that it's gonna be at least a week or so before I'm even starting to get on my feet, and a couple months before I'm going to be close to my old self."

"That long?"

"Necrotic damage is nasty, Xander. And regenerating lost muscle tissue… well, if these weren't military grade, might not be happening at all. Another reason I didn't hesitate to take the hit for Tavana; I can afford that kind of injury more than any of you." He shook his head. "So while I'll be givin' you all the advice and support I can, for the next few weeks, you're still the damn Captain of this crew."

He took a breath, but at that point the others came back in, bearing a length of well-browned meat on a plate. The smell was extremely tempting; however, knowing how long it had been since he'd eaten and how he was still really adjusting to consciousness, he controlled his initial ravenous impulses and cut a small piece, chewed thoughtfully and carefully. "Well, now. That's not bad at all." He took another bite. "Eaten gators that tasted worse. This could be a pretty good staple, if there's a lot of them."

A ping from a private channel – Xander, of course. And after you're better?

Still not revoking your access to them, he replied silently. Might tweak it so that I can still override you, but honestly? We can't take the risk that we will lose access to key capabilities here just because one of us – even me – gets killed. Truth be told, we should probably make sure that Tavana has the codes and they go active if we get taken out.

Makes sense. Thank you again, Sergeant.

You're welcome. And thank you again.

"Well, there were four of them here, at least," Tavana said in response to his last audible comment. "But probably harder to hunt them when you have not plowed their holes down to rock!"

"A better choice would be to see if we can find out what they eat," Campbell said. "Carnivores are always a lot rarer than their prey. But we won't be doing much exploration for a bit."

He took another bite, feeling better already – not from some sudden healing, but because he was now sure that, even without him, these kids would make it. Oh, Emerald's got more surprises. I know it. I can smell 'em out there. But Xander's got sense, Tavana's got more guts than he knows, and the other two ain't lacking, either.

The only thing left to mar his mood was knowing that Pearce Haley was still in deathly sleep a dozen meters away. But we have months to work on that, too. Maybe, just maybe, we can save her, too.

And now… now I know we have those months.

 

Castaway Odyssey: Chapter 21

Well, Xander seemed to have things under control...

 

 

Chapter 21.

     The pistol bucked three times in Xander's hand, almost without him willing it. A screech and convulsive writhing showed that he'd hit the sinuous creature just as the targeting app had said he would; the centisnake, as Maddox had named the thing, shuddered to a slow halt; once it was still, Tavana stepped forward and brought the machete down hard, taking the head from the body and causing another powerful but this time harmless sequence of thrashings.

 

The younger but broader boy wiped his forehead and face with a cloth he carried at his belt. "That, it is the last of them, I think."

 

"Hope so. We'll have to do another full walkaround of the entire area, though."

 

There had been a total of four of the ambush predators lurking under the cleared area around LS-88. It had been Xander's priority to finish the job the Sergeant had started; there was no way he was taking a chance of something like that hiding in a hole where it could jump out and grab Franky or Maddox. Must've been a nest or colony of the things here. Predators can't be concentrated too close together usually; you need enough non-predators around to support them, after all.

 

"You did good, Tav. I know you were scared –"

 

"I was not..." Tavana trailed off, then rolled his eyes and grinned sheepishly. "Oui, I was scared half to death going back out here."

 

"I know you were," Xander repeated. "And I saw your hands shaking at first. But you did everything just the right way, and now we've got probably a safe perimeter and definitely more to eat, now that we know the centisnake's meat is good."

 

He made sure the hole was at the center of his field of view, and then said "Mark hole finished." Immediately a red blotch, looking for all the world as though someone had spray-painted the hole, appeared in his retinals – and, he knew, on Tavana's since the two were linked. "And this was a great idea."

 

"That I am proud of," agreed Tavana. "I was thinking how hard it was to be sure which holes we had checked, and realized it would be simple to tell the omnis to remember and mark them. Took only a few minutes to instruct."

 

"Well, it'll make re-checking the grounds a lot easier; if there are any holes we've missed, they won't be marked."

 

They started the second patrol, beginning right at the edge of the berm or wall of scraped earth that surrounded the camp. "What's after this?"

 

"Hold on. Maddox!"

 

His brother's voice responded almost instantly through his omni. "Yeah, bro, what's up?"

 

"We've got three more centisnakes. Sorry to put this on you two, but come pick them up, then clean and fillet them. We need to get the meat into storage."

 

"Oh, ugh." Maddox sighed. "All right. Francisco!"

 

Fortunately Francisco didn't argue, and so the two younger members of their little crew were soon on their way to pick up the catch of the day. Xander turned back to Tavana. "After this? We start getting that perimeter monitor set up that we were working on during the, what, dark-day?"

 

""Dark-day? Heh. I like it. We will have to deal with dark-days a lot. We are near the equator, yes? So daylight and night-time are about eighteen hours." Tavana nodded. "Hm. So we have to start taking apart one of the excavators for sensor systems."

 

"I think so. There's only five omnis between us – six, if we count Lieutenant Haley's, I guess – and we'll want those for ground comm, tool support, all sorts of stuff. I really don't want to sacrifice an omni if we don't have to. Unless we've got a case of them in storage somewhere?"

 

Tavana shook his head. "That would have been nice, but no, I did not see any such things. So then yes, we will have to strip the situational awareness sensors from one of the excavators."

 

"Will one excavator give us enough? I know we have four of them."

 

"I think yes. They need full panoramic awareness, and the design uses dedicated sensors for all sides, not a single sensor on a mast like some cheaper designs. Though it does have a mast-mounted scanning LIDAR; I will probably leave that installed."

 

Xander looked around. "That perimeter's going to be huge, though. Compared to the machine, anyway; will they still have the range? And for that matter, can they operate by themselves?"

 

Tavana pointed to a suspicious circle of dirt that they had, somehow, missed; the two began the "poke it with a stick" protocol. "If we put a solar pack on them, I think they will operate fine alone; even very stupid sensors these days are more than able to function independent of central systems. Range, that will not be a problem; sometimes they use their sensors to coordinate operations with other devices a long way off. I can tie the sensor data to our omnis – or better, I will tie them to LS-88's main computers and they will be able to do a target evaluation."

 

"Sounds good." There simply weren't enough of them – even if the Sergeant were up and about, which he wasn't – to maintain a good watch using people, but if the sounds they'd heard out there in the dark were any indication, there were definitely things on Emerald bigger and more dangerous than the centisnakes – which were plenty dangerous on their own.

 

There was no reaction from this hole, so they marked it clear and continued. "We… or maybe just I… will have another little task that has to be done soon," he said after a few moments.

 

"I think there are many tasks we will have to do soon. What is this one?"

 

"Lieutenant Haley. The Sergeant won't be able to tend to her for a while, and we know what happens if she's just left in the suit for too long. She needs to be… um, cleaned off, and the suit needs to be washed out."

 

Tavana nodded, then looked up at him. "If it's embarrassing for you, maybe it would help to wait for the Sergeant to wake up. He's in his suit now, yes?"

 

"Yes. Didn't wake up yet, but I sure hope soon." That worried Xander, but there wasn't much he could do about it. The medical database was helpful, but it wasn't a full-blown AI, and couldn't fully understand or model the devil's brew of toxins the centisnake had injected. The necrosis appeared to have been halted, but some of the other effects were apparently harder to reverse.

 

"So wait for him to wake up. If he directs you, much less for you to worry about." Tavana's smile seemed patronizing.

 

"What are you grinning about?"

 

"You North Americans, you are so shy about things. Worry about having chaperones even for the doctors and nurses, I think."

 

Xander couldn't think of an appropriate retort; Tavana was probably right. This was a nursing situation; you had to take care of the patient, and there wasn't anything inappropriate in that. And he was probably also right that waiting a day or two for the Sergeant to be awake enough to direct it wouldn't hurt. "Guess you're right. About both things."

 

Tavana's grin was much less annoying, suddenly. "I am?" He looked down suddenly. "Sorry for being –"

 

"No, no, like I said, you're right. Body-shyness and stupid societal stuff keeping me from taking care of someone like the Lieutenant when she needs it? THAT would be something to be sorry for."

 

By the time they finished the second sweep of the camp grounds – a few hours later – Maddox and Francisco had completed the cleaning of the centisnakes. "What do we do with the, um, remains?"

 

"Good question." They did not want to start getting a garbage dump to attract whatever the equivalent of flies and rats might be. Plus… "Let's pick out some organs that might be useful for fishing. The rest… I think we should probably burn it for now. When the Sergeant's up, we'll all talk about how we want to handle that for the long run. How much meat have we got?"

 

"A lot!" Francisco answered. "We've almost filled the shelter freezer!"

 

That was a fair amount. "I was hoping for something more like an actual number, though."

 

"Well," Maddox said, "Umm… here, we've got the pressure sensors at the doors to open and close them, right? If we tie our omnis into that –"

 

"We could just put the meat on a plastic sheet on the doorstep and find out. Good thinking, Maddox!"

 

After a few minutes work, Xander nodded. "Not bad. A little more than twenty kilos."

 

Tavana frowned. "That seems awfully small. Just one of those things must have been over thirty kilos!"

 

"Closer to forty," Xander said. "But they're long and skinny. You're not going to get a huge yield out of them. Even fish like sea bass don't generally give you more than about a third of their mass in really usable food, so I think this is actually really good. Great job, Maddox, Francisco!"

 

Francisco made a face. "It is messy. And smelly."

 

Maddox and Xander laughed. "Oh, it sure is. Cleaning what you kill is always the part everyone likes least. The stalking and the hunting, that's fun. Cooking, that can be fun too. Eating, that's fun. Gutting and cleaning it? Not so fun."

 

"And I guess all of us will have to be doing this not-fun," Tavana said in a resigned tone.

 

"Better than trying to make one person do it. Right?"

 

Tavana's smile was obviously forced, but Xander appreciated that he was making the effort. "Oui, yes, of course. All of us have to do the work. Even the work we do not like."

 

"So we're going to eat some of this tonight, right, Xander?" asked Francisco excitedly. "I cut this one!" He held up a fillet that was rather obviously more ragged than others. "Can we eat it?"

 

This time none of the smiles were forced. "Of course we can. I'll fry it up for everyone."

 

As he got out the cooking utensils and the limited seasonings that were part of the shelter's equipment, he wondered what he could do for the future. I don't think we can live just on meat. Maybe we can, but it's not good. We'll need to find other things to eat. And stuff like seasonings, salt, to make it fun to cook. We're incredibly lucky that we landed with all these resources, but they'll run out – and some will run out fast. I don't think we've got dietary supplements anywhere on board, either.

 

It was starting to dawn on him just how complicated this was going to be. Going to Tantalus Colony was a completely different situation; there, they would be the second wave, with the first part of the colony set up. Things like "what can we eat", and "what will kill us" would be questions answered long before, and the issues of nutrition would not only have been figured out, but also the ship they arrived on would have everything they needed to stay alive.

 

He cut the meat into pan-sized sections, dusted it with a bit of salt and pepper, and started frying, still thinking. Not having analytical equipment is really going to make this dangerous. Francisco made sense as a taste-tester, but as he remembered from his camping days, usually animal-borne toxins weren't nearly as bad as those that plants might be carrying. We'll have to be incredibly careful; I think there are plants on Earth that can kill people with as little as one seed. Heck, there are some things on Earth that you don't want to touch. Maybe we'll have to find some kind of animal we can keep or observe as a test subject.

 

Xander really didn't like that last thought. Not only would it be hard to keep any animal you didn't understand to begin with, but also it was just not a nice thing to do—imprison some animal so it could eat things and maybe die for your protection. But something like that might be necessary if he was going to keep everyone alive.

 

The sizzling meat smelled appetizing; Francisco had seemed to like the little bit he ate a couple days ago. Well, let's see what it's like!

 

"C'mon, everyone, dinner's ready!" he called.

 

He served everyone straight from the pan onto their plates, then sat down.

 

His omni gave a loud ping that he'd been praying for, and he stood up so suddenly he almost tipped over the little table.

 

"What is it, Xander?" asked Maddox, concern on his face.

 

"It's the Sergeant," Xander answered, heading to the side room where the older man was lying. "He's waking up!"

 

 

Castaway Odyssey: Chapter 20

Sorry about the delay; medical emergencies in the household distracted me yesterday.

 

Chapter 20.

     "You have to eat something, Tav."

Tavana jumped slightly at the unexpected voice. He was sitting on the steps of the lander's ladder, looking up at a comet whose slowly-fading tail covered thirty degrees of the now-dark sky. "Not hungry."

"Bullcrap," Xander said, and held out a plate.

He was about to refuse again when his nose caught the scent. "A Buckley? Merde, Xander, we were supposed to be saving those for special occasions!" Even though his anger and depression were trying to keep his stomach in a knot, his mouth was arguing strenuously that he really should take the plate.

"This is a special occasion. Sergeant's hurt but going to be okay, we've survived our first attack by local wildlife, and it's my first day as Captain. Maybe not a happy special day, but really, we needed something good to make up for all of that."

"To make up for my screwup, you mean." Tavana dropped down from the ladder heavily, falling to hands and knees, then stood and tried to stalk away. "For me almost getting the Sergeant killed."

He heard a quiet, sharp tap as the plate was put down on the ladder, and then one of Xander's hands came down on his shoulder. "How much time did you spend outdoors back home, Tav?"

He was a little puzzled by the question, and it almost annoyed him; he was ready for someone to argue that it wasn't his fault, and this wasn't something he'd prepared for. "Um… not much. I mean, I wandered outside and looked at the stars, things like that, but I didn't do much fishing, or boating, or anything of that sort. Reading, studying, simgames like Canister Seven or Jewelbug, that was my thing."

Xander's head was a shadow limned with faint silver from the stars and comet-light above, but Tavana could make out the nod. "Right. And you're a propulsion and power engineer type, not a bio major. Never did much hiking, and even if you had, you were on one of the Polynesian islands, right?"

"Right." He couldn't figure out what the point of this was, but he knew Xander; the older Bird brother would have a point.

"So you've never seen a dangerous land animal before in your life," Xander said. "Except maybe human beings. No snakes or crocodiles or even, if I remember right, poisonous spiders."

There was a part of Tavana that thought it knew what Xander was getting at, but he pulled away. "So what?"

"You know that the Sergeant gave me full authorization just before he blacked out?"

"No – really?" He'd known the Sergeant was trying to tell Xander something, but this…

"Yep. So I reviewed the playback for the whole thing, straight from the Sergeant's omni. And the only thing you did wrong was something you couldn't have known was wrong. Sure, I would have known it was a bad idea to poke something like that even when you think it's dead; I've seen a rattler take a bite at someone's boot in pure dead reflex, just like that thing. But you hadn't. The Sergeant shot it three times, and killed it sure – it was dead. You didn't know, and the Sergeant should have told you to stay clear. It's as much his fault as yours –"

"No it's—"

"Yes it IS!" Xander snapped. "And when he wakes up, I'll bet you anything you like that he will say so himself. Maybe you should've guessed that you should be more careful, but that's not worth beating yourself up this much. Learn from it. And don't starve yourself, that's a Buckley dinner that's going cold over there."

Tavana stared up at the comet again, then bit his lip and looked over at the shadow of Xander near him. Without saying anything, he turned and walked back to the lander and picked up the plate. Southwestern Taco Supreme Meal. "How'd you know this was my favorite?"

"Remember when we first broke out the Buckley's, way out in the middle of interstellar space? We all talked about our favorite meals." Xander's brilliant smile flashed visibly in the dark. "I knew it'd get your attention."

"You are sneaky."

"I had to raise Maddox for four years. You learn a lot of tricks that way."

Tavana wasn't sure he liked being compared to a thirteen year old… but then, Maddox was awfully bright. He guessed he could live with it. And the first bite of the taco, powerful with cumin, chipotle and ancho peppers, and other spices, helped push away the feelings that had been darker than the night around him. "So I'm not all to blame."

"No. Maybe you'd have made a different decision on a different day. Who knows? But the Sergeant should have known – did know, or he wouldn't have reacted that fast. And he achieved what he was after, protecting you. He's going to be okay, I think. So no long-term harm done, as long as nothing really bad happens in the next few weeks. We'll just have to be about a dozen times more careful until then."

He heard Xander take a bite of something, realized the older boy had probably been carrying part of his own meal all along. "So… how did the fishing go?"

"Got a couple of bites, I think, before the disaster, but didn't pull in anything. But I'm sure we will soon."

The silence wasn't complete. There were vague buzzing, whispering noises from whatever the equivalent of insects were, and some distant shufflings or other noises from the forest outside the perimeter. A plop signaled something that had jumped from the water and fallen back. "How's Francisco?"

"Fine. Nanos didn't pick up any toxins immediately, he liked the taste of the thing. If the nanos still say all clear tomorrow, I think we've found our first edible native food on Emerald. Keep your fingers crossed."

He knew that expression, anyway. "Everything I've got two of, as my grandfather used to say." He looked up at the stars again. "This place has long days."

"And nights. I think the Sergeant said about a thirty-six hour rotation. That'll take a little getting used to."

A shuffling sound. "Xander, back home, there were animals – like sharks – that did a lot more hunting at night than in the day."

He could see the older boy stiffen. "I hadn't thought of that. Maybe we'd better stay inside at nights."

"Right now? Oui, that is probably a good idea. But I think we should be able to use a few omnis or other sensors to give us a perimeter monitor. Maybe we can work on that for a while."

Xander nodded. "Probably for the best. We don't know whether that … worm-snake is the worst that Emerald has for us."

From far off came an eerie, booming noise, a cry of something huge that feared nothing in the dark.

After a moment, Tavana stood back up, holding his plate. "No, and we had best act as though there's a lot worse waiting out there for us."

Xander followed him inside. All the way in, Tavana felt the prickle of tension, wondering what alien eyes might be watching them.

But once in the shelter, with the bright light and the tough, layered-carbonan weave walls, he felt his spirits finally lifting. Maybe it wasn't all my fault. "All right," he said, "we will plan out a perimeter monitor, and maybe a defensive perimeter too, if the Sergeant approves when he gets up. They can make all the noise they want out there. We," he finished, seeing Xander smiling and Maddox looking up hopefully, "will be getting ready for them in here."

 

Castaway Planet: Chapter 19

The Sergeant was down...

-----

 

Chapter 19.

     Xander sensed the information dump hit, stream through him and into his omni, even as he saw the Sergeant slump down and felt as though the bottom was dropping out of his world as it did. No. This can't happen.

The other three boys were staring at him and the unconscious Sergeant, eyes wide, tears trickling down Francisco's terrified face. His own terror was clawing at his mind, the thought of facing a world filled with things like that monster without Sergeant Campbell looming up like a monster before him.

But he remembered his mother, years ago…

*****

"Xander, Uncle Phil will take care of you both. But you're going to have to help him. You take care of Maddox for me, okay?"

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak without crying, without begging her and Dad to stay again – when they'd been through this, through it many times. They didn't really have much choice, and even at fifteen, Xander understood that this was probably harder on them than it was on him. Finally, he swallowed. "O… okay, Mom. I'll take care of Maddox. I promise."

She hugged him so tightly his ribs hurt, but he didn't complain, just hugged back. "I know you will, Xander. I know you will. And when the second wave comes, when you've graduated, you'll both join us."

He couldn't stop himself. "But that will be four years!"

Mom's body shook, and he heard a repressed sob. "I know. It will be a long time for you, and even longer for Maddox. But you know—"

He pulled away, straightened, wiped the tears away angrily. "I know. I know!" Xander stopped himself from starting the argument again, though it felt like he was trying to shove a plug into a firehose. It won't change anything. It won't do any good. We'll just yell and cry and Dad will come in and try to calm us down and end up crying, and at the end nothing will change. They'll still be leaving.

"I know," he said, hating how his voice shook, but saying it quietly, calmly. "And… I want you and Dad to do good out there. I mean do well."

Mom gave a teary smile at that.

"And I will take care of Maddox," he said, and that part he didn't have any doubt of. Maddox might be four years younger, and a big pain in the ass sometimes… but he loved his little brother more than just about anything in the world. "I will, Mom. I promise."

She hugged him again. "I know you will."

*****

Xander Bird straightened up, forcing back the tears. At least I don't have to smile; not a time for smiling no matter who you are. "Sergeant's unconscious," he said. "But he's not dead." He could immediately see some of the incipient panic … not fade, but draw back, waiting. Better than turning into real panic. "Tav, run back and check the medical supplies; I'm pretty sure we had some folding stretchers –"

"Yes, there were! Sorry! I should have –"

"You're doing great, you remembered the oxygen. Just go get it now."

"Can… can I do anything?" Maddox asked, voice unsteady but mostly controlled.

Give him something to do. "Go prep the Sergeant's bed in the main shelter. Put down one of the self-cleaning sheets at the foot end, in case he bleeds more." The nanos seemed – for the moment – to be winning the battle against blood loss, but he couldn't tell what was going on inside. "Francisco, you stay with the Sergeant. It's important to have someone watching him."

The smallest boy nodded and hunkered down next to Sergeant Campbell.

Now that I have a few seconds… He turned his attention inward. What the heck did the Sergeant send me?

As soon as he thought the question, his omni responded, displaying the data and annotations on his internal retinal display.

What he saw sent chills through him, because it told him how worried the Sergeant was. He just gave me full authorization over everything – even his medical nanos, the secure ship procedures, weapons locks, everything. He wasn't taking any chances that he might die and something be unavailable to us.

As far as the ship systems – and even medical nanos and other related systems were concerned – he, Xander Bird, was Chief Master Sergeant Samuel M. Campbell, at least insofar as authority was concerned. The authorization was revocable – if the Sergeant woke up, he had a code to do so – but as long as the Sergeant was out, the authority remained.

Tavana came running up, a small package in his hand. "Here!"

Xander took the folding stretcher, found the release and pulled. The little package swiftly unfolded into a full-size stretcher, including hollow but nicely broad handholds for the bearers; it would easily support someone even twice the Sergeant's weight, or even more, due to being composed of carbonan weave. "Great!" He checked the Sergeant's vital signs – not that he knew a great deal about them – and was at least reassured to see none of them had changed too much in the last few minutes. "He doesn't have any injuries other than the leg wound, so we don't have to worry about how to get him onto the stretcher too much."

This was a good thing, since the Sergeant was a very big man. Xander was tall, but the Sergeant topped his 191 centimeters by at least seven centimeters and probably had at least twenty kilos on Xander, too. But Tavana was startlingly strong for a kid who was honest about his preference for working by sitting down, so together he and Tavana got Campbell onto the stretcher pretty quickly. Carrying the stretcher with the unconscious man on it wasn't easy, but with a couple of pauses to rest, they finally got Campbell into the shelter and onto his bed.

"Do you think… think he'll be okay?" Maddox asked finally.

Xander hesitated. I can't lie to these kids. Not about stuff like this. "I don't know, Maddox. But… check the medical kit. Maybe there's a diagnostic and treatment database in there somewhere. If I were sending medical kits to pioneer colonies or putting them on lifeboats, I'd sure want to add in reference material for amateurs."

"That almost makes too much sense," Tavana said, trying to sound casual and funny. "but we can hope."

A few minutes later Maddox gave a shout of triumph. "Yes! There is one! It just wasn't automatically online, it was actually on a chip, if you can believe that!"

"Can your omni –"

"Already loading it, Xander! Everyone should take a copy, just in case!"

That made sense to Xander. "Just a warning – and I'll bet there's a warning like this in the database – we're amateurs, and the best database, even a smart linking one, won't make us into real doctors." The local omni network, linked through LS-88, quickly transferred the data.

Now let's see if I can make sense out of what's happening with the Sergeant. He pulled up the data feeds from the Sergeant's medical nanos and fed them to the active database.

The database responded instantly. Envenomation. Two primary components with additional supporting elements; one neuroactive venom and one necrotic.

Xander didn't know what "necrotic" meant exactly but it didn't sound good; a query told him that it was in fact worse than he thought, a venom that triggered extensive cell death in a self-destructive cascade. Based on patient data and current status, treatment and prognosis?

The answer came in a set of weighted probabilities, with the database obviously basing its evaluations on known similar venoms, doses, and nano capability. Provide IV fluids and nutrient solution END-5W for support. If subject remains unconscious longer than six hours, support for excretory functions will be needed.

Ugh. Catheters and stuff. He hoped it wouldn't come to that. But now that he thought about it, didn't their spacesuits come with that capability? If so, he could probably get that part taken care of automatically just by putting the Sergeant into his suit.

Internal nanosupport appears (85% confidence level) to have neutralized 65% of the necrotic activity and is progressing swiftly. 82% of the delivered dose of neurotoxin has been neutralized, and other nanos are attempting to undo the binding on specific active sites. Recommended treatment: two additional nanosupport injections, and maintain oxygen support until the patient becomes conscious. Repair of the wound will require significant time due to necrotic damage. Full analysis of other venom components and interactions are uncertain, but generally positive. Overall prognosis is 79% for a full recovery in between one and five weeks, 9% for a full recovery in between five and nine weeks, 10% for significant recovery with minor remaining damage, 1% for loss of limb due to necrosis, and 1% for worse outcomes.

It required a moment to take that in, but then Xander felt a huge surge of relief. He's going to make it. Oh, there was that one percent unknown, but much more important was the almost ninety percent chance of full recovery in a couple of months or less. "Everyone, the Sergeant is almost certainly going to be all right!"

"Dieu Merci!" Tavana said in his Polynesian-accented French. Francisco just gave a cheer and clapped.

Maddox sighed and sat down shakily. "So what next, bro?"

"Well…" Can't stop working just because one of us is down. He's going to be okay, probably. "First I'm going to get an IV going. Maddox, you get two more of the nanosupport injectors and administer them. Tav…" a thought occurred to him. "Tav, get one of the brush machetes out of storage. I want you to go and first cut the head off that thing."

Tavana raised an eyebrow. "I guess I can, yes. But why?"

"Because we're stuck here for at least a while, right?"

"Right…" Tavana agreed, face still clearly puzzled.

"Well, I want to find out if we can eat things that live here. And before we try fillet of monster, I want its head off."

Tavana's face cleared. "Oui! That I can do!" He headed out of the shelter.

Francisco made a face. "That thing? But it's poisonous!"

Xander held the injector for the IV over the Sergeant's arm; after a moment it pinged and latched on. Relieved, he hung the IV bag on a hook above the bed. "No, it's venomous. There's a difference. Venom's a weapon, something the animal injects into you. Poison's stuff that kills you if you eat it. Of course I'll bet most venoms are poisonous, but they're not through the whole body. I remember reading about people eating rattlesnakes, and they're venomous."

"Oh," Francisco said. "So it isn't dangerous to eat?"

"That's what we have to find out," Xander said.

Maddox looked up from finishing his injections. "How? We don't have chemical analysis stuff."

"Well, actually, we do. Just not labeled as that." He tapped the medikit.

Maddox' eyes narrowed. "But that only works if it's in a living body for diagnosis."

Xander shrugged, trying to look more casual than he felt. "Well, yes. But I'll only eat a tiny bit at first."

"No!" Xander was surprised to see that both Maddox and Francisco had spoken. Maddox continued, "You're the Captain now, right? Now that the Sergeant's out?"

"Yes, I think so."

Maddox nodded, folding his arms in the way that he usually did when he'd made up his mind on something and was ready to fight about it. "Then you can't be the guinea pig. We can't take a risk on you ending up down too!"

He opened his mouth to argue, then suddenly realized that Maddox was right. He was the only other person qualified with firearms. He was the oldest, the best trained, the biggest, probably the toughest. The others would be in a lot of trouble without him.

Maddox read the expression on his face – as Maddox often did. "You know I'm right."

"Yeah," Xander said after a moment. "Yeah, Maddox. You are, a lot of the time."

His brother's hazel eyes lit up for a moment with the compliment, then looked serious. "Okay. So that means that I will be the test –"

"No!"

This time it was Xander and Francisco; he glanced at the younger boy, who was looking at both of them fiercely.

"No," repeated Francisco, holding himself straight and jaw set. "It will be me."

Xander stared at the smallest of their crew, startled; he could see, out of the corner of his eye, that Maddox' expression mirrored his own. "Francisco, no, we can't –"

"Yes you can!" Francisco stamped his foot. "You think I am a baby, but I'm eight years old, and I am a Coronel! I am not a coward and I'm not stupid either!"

"Franky… Francisco, no one thinks you're a coward or stupid, but you are a kid. Not a baby, but you're someone we're supposed to take care of, right?"

Francisco looked down, but then looked back up. His face was scared, but still as determined as it had been. "We… the Sergeant told us the ship is not coming back. Maybe not ever, right?"

He wasn't going to deny the obvious. "Right."

"So we all need to do what we can."

Xander wanted to hesitate, but he couldn't argue that, either. "Right, Francisco, but –"

"¡Cállate!" shouted the eight-year-old; he was obviously fighting off a crying fit, despite the tears on his face that were bright in the light against his dark skin. "I am not an engineer. I do not shoot or fight. I am not even big and strong like you and T-Tavana. I just draw pictures and things." He drew himself up to his full one hundred thirty-five centimeters and jabbed his thumb at his chest. "But I eat like everyone else, so I can try food for you, and if it makes me sick, everyone else is not sick and can help me better and help everyone else better!"

Xander found himself unable to speak. He really wanted to. He really wanted to argue against this.

But in cold, hard fact, Francisco Alejandro Coronel was dead right. In their current situation, the eight year old couldn't contribute too much yet to their survival. But this way he could.

And with the medical nanos, and very small bites, it shouldn't be a terrible risk. But still…

Finally, after a long pause, he knelt down in front of Francisco, whose teary gaze was still locked defiantly on Xander. He reached out and put his hands on the little boy's shoulders, like the Sergeant sometimes did. "Francisco… you're right. You're one of the bravest people I've met, and you are one hundred percent right."

Francisco's deep brown eyes widened. "I… I am?"

"You are. We can take care of you better than you can take care of us, and you haven't had time to learn other things that you can help us with. I know you will… but for now, you're right that this might just be the best thing you could do. It shouldn't be too dangerous… but it will be, at least some."

Francisco swallowed so hard Xander could hear it. "I… I'll do it anyway."

"Your parents will kill me for this if they ever find out," Xander said after a moment. "But… they'll also be incredibly proud of you."

Francisco did burst out crying then, but there was a tremulous smile on his face.

 

 

 

 

Castaway Odyssey: Chapter 18

Well, the Sergeant wasn't having a good day all of a sudden...

 

------

Chapter 18.

     It wasn't a conscious decision, but a reflexive action, almost as instinctive as the not-quite-dead-enough creature's strike. Campbell had seen Tavana move forward, his leg lift, and he knew exactly what Tavana was going to do – and having seen this scenario on half a dozen worlds, knew how it might go wrong.

But that was the conscious thought, and it lagged far behind the reaction, which was to shout a warning and lunge, as fast as he could, to shove Tavana out of harm's way.

For an instant – just an instant – he thought he could relax, because he saw Tavana falling far to the side, clear, definitely clear of the thing's striking range.

And then a red-hot nail drove deep into his upper calf.

Campbell heard himself use language he'd promised he wouldn't around the kids. Damnation! Saved him, got bit myself. Great, Campbell, just great.

A quick glance – and the increasing pressure with the pain – showed him the reflexive bite also included a clamping reflex. On the positive side, that gave him a chance to reach down and grab the thing just behind the head. Glove will probably keep any spines or such from penetrating… but maybe not. What the hell are its teeth made of? There's carbonan weave in these pants!

"Oh my God. Sergeant!"

"Calm down, Tav. Panic won't do us any good." He gripped the creature's head tightly, started levering against the one fang that had penetrated. "Gotta get this thing out. Call Xander, let him know what's happening."

An alert went red in his retinal's field of vision – reality overlay from his omni and medical nanos. Oh, sweet mother of… poisoned. Damn thing was venomous. He gritted his teeth. This ain't gonna be no picnic, but I don't have much of a choice. He pulled hard.

The pain was shocking, even for him; as the fang tore free and he hurled the body away, he could see tatters of his own flesh caught in serrated barbs. Extended out when it hit? Damn. That's gonna be a bad one.

He'd managed to keep from screaming, but there'd been a definite pained grunt, and Tavana was staring at the blood now flowing freely from the wound, looking noticeably paler – which was pretty bad when one considered his Polynesian deep-brown complexion. "Tavana! Stick with me, son! Don't lose it now."

"Merde, Sergeant… it's my fault, I was –"

"Stop with the blame, talk about that later. Right now I need you to focus. That thing's bite was venomous." His head was starting to feel like it was floating, and at the same time he noted an ominous tightening of his chest. Damn medical nanos, what the hell are they doing? Get on the job!

Tavana shook himself, still looking sick. "What… what can I do?"

"Call Xander, like I said. But while you do that, run, don't walk, to the lander and get me one of those medical nano injectors, fast."

"Fast." He blinked, then seemed to finally snap back to the present. "Right! Fast!" Tavana sprinted towards LS-88, shouting "Xander! Xander! The Sergeant's hurt!"

That'll get their attention, all right. His mouth felt dry. That could be his imagination, but the data his military nanos were conveying was not comforting. Neurotoxin. Powerful one, too, mixed with a necrotic. Fantastic. The nanos were, of course, trying to counter it, but countering an unknown venom without medical backup wasn't easy even for those top-of-the-line micromachines. He could hear his breathing becoming labored.

Pounding footsteps approached, and Tavana was there, looking oddly distant even when he knelt beside Campbell. "I have the injector, Sergeant. Do I use it?"

The words were hard to assemble into meaning. Campbell had heard the words, but he had to focus hard to force them into a coherent thought. Not good. Not good at all. Must be able… able to leak across the blood-brain barrier. "Yes," he said, slowly, hearing his voice tense and awkward. "Inject… above wound site."

The pinprick and warm tingling told him the injector was working. Instantly telltales on his retinals showed the medical nanos communicating with his resident nanorepair systems. Better… get working fast. "Xander?" he managed to say.

"Here!" Xander's face swam into view, blurred and indistinct.

Here? Didn't … notice him arrive. Can't focus eyes. Not good. "Another… injector. Need…" What the hell was the word? Stuff you breathe… hard to breathe. Hard to concentrate. "… need oxygen."

"I have it right here," Tavana said.

A distant part of him realized that meant that even half-panicked, Tavana had thought ahead and brought just the right equipment. Good kid.

He could barely feel it as Tavana clumsily put the mask on and started the oxygen concentrator running. Descendant of old OBOGS units, his brain said, completely out of the blue. It was true – the same concept of a selective sorbent that trapped the inert nitrogen of the air and let oxygen through was at the heart of the device – but that little tidbit wasn't very useful or even relevant right now. Dammit, brain! Think… useful things!

The fog lifted a tiny bit as the concentrator hit its stride. Major trouble breathing. Muscles close to paralyzed. Nanos overriding where they can, forcing action. Trying to clean out the poison.

What are the kids going to do if I die?

The gray fog was still there, and he could barely make out the others at all. "X… Xander," he managed.

"Yes, Sergeant?" The older boy's voice sounded as though it came from half a mile away, and was shaking.

Concentrate. Got… to… finish. "Open… omni interface…"

A moment later he heard a distant ping and could make out, with great effort, the fact that Xander Bird's omni was open.

Now… just one more… job…

The fog and detachment were deepening. But Chief Master Sergeant Samuel Morgan Campbell had never left anything undone, and he wasn't going to let that happen now. With a supreme effort, he managed to gather his scattered thoughts, activate the right protocols to dump the data that had to be sent.

The fog darkened, and Campbell slid down into blackness.

 

Castaway Odyssey: Chapter 17

Work's never done on a frontier world...

-----

 

Chapter 17.

Tavana sagged back into the shelter's narrow bed and let out an explosive sigh. He hurt in places he didn't remember he had.

The temporary shelter was made of the lightest, strongest materials available. But it was also designed to house up to ten people, which meant that even with the lightest, strongest materials it was very heavy, very bulky, and unfortunately required some manual work to unpack and set up. The automated anchors had failed; they were meant for use on soil surfaces, and after the whole perimeter had been scraped down, there was nothing but stone, or something like it, so Tavana, Maddox, and Xander had been forced to use a hammer – a real, actual hammer, a piece of reinforced composite with a big chunk of heavy metal at the end – to pound the sharp carbonan and steel spikes into the ground.

Fortunately the rock in question was pretty soft, but still, it had taken hours to get everything fastened down to the Sergeant's satisfaction. "You can't cut corners with this stuff, kids," he'd said after forcing them to pull out three spikes, pull the shelter tighter, and start hammering again. "This shelter's gonna be our home for a while anyway, until we can figure out something better and more permanent, and that means she's gotta be locked down damn near perfect."

But it wasn't all bad. After all that work, letting himself slowly sink into the softness of the bed felt that much wonderfully better.

"Tavana!" came the Sergeant's voice. "Bringing your stuff inside doesn't mean stop for a nap! Come on, sunshine, we got work to do!"

"Merde." He said the French curse quietly, then levered himself upright; his muscles protested this unwise course of action, but he knew he had no choice. "I thought we were done for the day, Sergeant," he said as he came out.

"Not yet." Campbell was looking around the wide, clean perimeter. "I've got one more job of cleanup I need to do, and you're going to come with me."

Tavana opened his mouth to ask "Why me?", but caught himself at the last moment. Arguing with the Sergeant, that is stupid. After a pause, he figured he could ask the question, just without the whining overtone he knew would have been in it a minute ago. "All right, Sergeant, but why me instead of Xander?"

"I want at least one armed person with any group, which means in practice that at most we've got two groups. Xander, Maddox, and Francisco are down at the lake trying their hand at fishing, since there turned out to be line and rods we could combine with the TechTools to make a decent fishing rod. Got them some gloves and gave Xander serious instructions on how I want him to do this, and made damn sure the other kids know that Xander's in charge. So that leaves me and you to do this little chore."

He followed the Sergeant across the scraped rock. "What exactly are we looking for?"

Campbell's sharp dark gaze flicked around the landscape, then he reached out an arm and pointed. "Over there."

Tavana looked, but he just saw more scraped earth and stone. Even as they got closer, he really didn't see anything notable. "Sorry, sir, I don't get it."

"Hm. Well, maybe you need a little observational training. Don't you notice anything different a little ways ahead of us?"

Tavana frowned. Campbell wouldn't be joking about stuff like this, so there had to be something special about the area ahead. But all he saw was the streaky white of the scraped bedrock, interspersed with some dark brown (occasionally with white streaks) that was dirt stuck in a ripple of the landscape, but –

"Wait. That patch looks pretty circular."

"Now you're catching on, son. So tell me why."

He thought a moment. "Hole. There has to be a hole there, a round hole."

"And a hole, Tavana, could be a burrow. I saw some nasty-looking things wiggling away from the excavator, but there's no guarantee all of them got away." He looked back at the shelter. "I made sure there were none of them under the place we set up the shelter, but there's going to be quite a few out here, I'm afraid. If I had my way and unlimited resources, I'd rather glass this whole area over, but there's no way for us to do that. Suppose I could try to hover across the whole place with the jets on, but that wouldn't get far down. Which means we have a less safe job to do."

"What's the plan?"

"Operation 'Poke It With a Stick'," Campbell said with a wry grin. "I've got a nice long piece of thick carbonan rod here from one of the storage areas. You will poke that rod into these round areas when I tell you to, and try to annoy anything that might be under there into coming out. I wish I had a better way, but not with what we have available now."

Tavana looked doubtfully at the long, white, slender pole. "And if something does come out?"

"I will – in all likelihood – gun it down," Campbell replied, hefting a pistol with a muzzle that looked like a cannon to Tavana. "Depends on my instinct when I see it. Can't always say – those decisions are split-second and not always conscious. But I'd bet on shooting first and second-guessing myself later; we can't take chances." His gaze dropped to Tavana's legs, and nodded. "Those coveralls are tough enough to protect you some, and you are wearing the boots we got out of storage, right?"

"Yes, sir. Come almost up to my knees."

"Good man. Those are Pathfinders, not top of the line, but good solid boots for colonials or military alike." He looked wistful for a moment. "Wish I had mine; best damn boots in the universe, practically a toolkit in themselves. Unfortunately they're still sitting in my cabin on Outward Initiative, unless they've already cleaned it out. If they did, hope someone saved the damn things; cost me a months' salary."

Tavana blinked. A pair of boots cost someone like the Sergeant a months' salary? "At that price, sir, they should be doing the walking for you."

"Damn near could, too." He sighed. "Anyway, these are solid boots for us both. Wearing ship's shoes would be an invitation to getting bit, or worse. Here, take these."

Tavana accepted the pair of padded gray gloves and pulled them on; he was glad to take any protection offered. The work gloves fit well enough, and had gripping surfaces that made the smooth carbonan pole easy to hold. "Guess I'm ready."

"All right." Tavana saw Sergeant Campbell get the distant look of someone activating their omni, looking at things others couldn't see. "Xander, you hear me?"

"Yes, Sergeant," Xander's voice answered; apparently either Campbell had cut Tavana into the conversation, or Xander had. "What's up?"

"I'm going to be checking out potential burrows here with Tavana. If you hear gunshots, don't panic; I'll check in within a few minutes. If you don't hear me check in within, say, five minutes of a shot, give me a holler. Otherwise, just keep fishing. Any luck?"

"We just got our first lines out after finishing making the hooks out of the steel wire Maddox dug out of the one crate. That stuff's tough – took two of us to bend it into shape. But that means it's going to be a good hook, I think. Anyway, we've baited one with a couple of those shield-like bug things, and I put some of the jerky out of one of the rations on another."

"Sounds good. You boys enjoy a day fishing, just keep your eyes out for anything dangerous. And if you see anything that makes you nervous, son, you just get out of there and make for the shelter – or LS-88, if you feel you need to. Don't worry about being too cautious. Got it?"

"Yessir."

"All right. Have fun. Campbell out." His eyes refocused and he nodded. "Okay, Tavana, it's our turn to have fun."

Tavana felt his heart starting to beat faster. "Oui, fun. I am hoping, Sergeant, that this will be a very boring job."

"Me too, son. You're half-joking, but believe me, that's no joke. Nothing I'd like more than to have a real boring time out here, finding empty holes."

Tavana approached the circular region of dirt cautiously – with the pole in front of him. "Where should I stand?"

"Wherever you like. I'll stand just a little ahead of you and to the side, so there's no chance I shoot you instead of whatever's in the hole. I've got my omni tied in to my retinals; military targeting link. Later, we'll have to figure out a way to program something like that for you people. Faster shooting and a lot safer, done right."

"I might be able to do that. I do games programming and interfaces, some a lot more complicated than Jewelbug."

"Well, we'll look into it. You ready?"

Tavana swallowed, gripped the pole tighter. "I… think so."

Campbell grinned. "No, you ain't. Here. Relax that grip a hair. Hold it like this." He repositioned Tavana's hands. "See? You can push or pull better that way, and you can let go easier, if things go bad. Don't hold onto it with a deathgrip; not only does that give you a lot of control problems, it'll wear out your muscles fast, then you'll have to stop sooner and rest."

"Okay." He forced his hands to relax the tiniest bit. "Ready now, sir?"

"Guess we are." The Sergeant raised his pistol. "Go to it."

Tavana put the tip of the pole in the middle of the circular patch of dirt and pushed. The pole sank slowly into the dirt, which stubbornly contested the way but yielded nonetheless. He was five centimeters in, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five –

The pole abruptly slid downward half a meter.

"Whoa, there. You've gone through. Definitely a hole."

"Definitely. I don't feel anything under the pole; empty air."

"Push it down until you hit something, or until you've gone a full meter and a half."

At just over a meter he hit something hard. "Rock, I think."

"Hole probably curves away in some direction. Well, wiggle and scrape it on the bottom a bit. If there's something in there, it'll either try to run away if there's another exit, or might try to drive this invader out."

Tavana followed the instructions, not exactly happy at the idea of the pole he was using being attacked by some unknown creature that might decide to dig up after whoever was holding the intruding pole, but comforted by Campbell's confident posture.

But after several minutes, nothing seemed to be happening. "Enough, sir?"

Campbell pursed his lips, then nodded. "Yeah, that's all we can do for now. Onward."

They walked a careful spiral, following the same general path as the excavator. The holes weren't spaced terribly closely, but the size of the clearing they'd made still meant there'd be quite a few. He spotted the next one when he was about ten meters away, which made the Sergeant nod in appreciation. "Good eyes, son. You'll get the hang of this soon."

Tavana used the same procedure, and this hole seemed pretty much like the last; twenty, twenty-five centimeters of pretty hard-packed dirt as a cap on top of a hole that was a meter or so deep. Once more he banged and rattled the pole, and nothing happened. "That dirt sticks together pretty well."

"Noticed that, eh? Yes sir, it's not just sandy junk. Got some substance to it. Not surprising, of course, all this water, all these things growing in it, but still, that's got me thinking there might be clay around."

"Is that important?"

The Sergeant chuckled, shaking his head. "Right now, no. But if we're really stuck here for the long haul…"

A chill went down his back and crept down his arms, despite the warmth of Emerald's sun. "Do… do you think we are here for… well, for a long time?" He pulled up the pole, moved on.

The Sergeant was silent for a few minutes, long enough for them to approach the next hole. "Honestly, Tavana? Probably."

"Won't they send a rescue party?" Tavana heard his voice rising unsteadily. I… I thought we would be rescued once we got here. Stupid, but…

"I wouldn't bet on one, son." The craggy face looked grim. "See, there's no way that Outward Initiative would just go on about its business. If the ship survived – and I hope it did – it was pretty bad damaged. Maybe took some of that radiation pulse we got. So they'd have to get her back in flying shape."

Tavana nodded. "I know that, yes. The Trapdoor coils, they would have to be re-tuned for the changed shape of the ship."

"Right. So that's a week, two weeks, at least. Then they have to get somewhere they can get fixed. That pretty much has to be Orado, closest colony. About ten light-years from where we dropped off, so figure it took them a couple months to get there."

"So they have been there a while now, yes?"

"Problem is … at best, they're gonna have a guess as to where we are in space, because out between the stars there ain't no road markers. That means that any searchers would be searching a volume probably larger than our solar system back on Earth. That's … a long, long time searching, looking for something the size of our lifeboat. Years, maybe, less if they have a lot of searching vessels – but they won't have a lot, because Orado's not gonna have a bunch of starships on hand for the job. And honestly? They'll know that anyone in an intact lifeboat will be heading for Orado on their own, taking of course a lot longer to get there, but if they're well supplied, they'll make it. If they don't detect a distress beacon in the right general area, they'll assume we've either headed for Orado… or our ship didn't survive. They might set up some automated search drones, sort of like unmanned lifeboats… but they'd be looking just for closure, not rescue."

"But the star! Emerald's sun, they will see it, yes?" Tavana poked a bit more forcefully at the next dirt-covered hole.

Campbell shrugged. "If someone does a starfield comparison, yes. They'll notice it. And if someone does that, they might possibly think that survivors could look to that system as a refuge – but only if they think of the possibility that we couldn't head for Orado."

The pole sank again, and once more Tavana shook and scraped the end around.

Campbell continued, "But Tav… that's a really long shot. You'd have to be either crazy or desperate – like we were – to head for an unknown system, even one close by, rather than tighten your belt and make the trip to the inhabited system you know about. Maybe someone will come here. I sure hope so. Just the fact it's a star not on the charts will make people puzzled. But indulging curiosity with a starship, that's an expensive whim. More likely they'll just get someone to take a good look at the system with a telescopic array. They'll be able to see the planet all right… even make out the continents and larger islands… but not us."

Tavana pulled the pole out, started walking again, feeling his steps dragging leadenly – a sensation that was not just from gravity, annoying though that was. "So we are stuck here forever."

Campbell spread his hands. "Maybe not. But we can't plan for the best; we can hope for the best, but we damned well better plan for the worst."

Tavana squinted ahead, slowed down. Something's different…

The Sergeant followed his gaze. "What is it, son?"

"I don't know. Just… this one isn't like the others."

A brilliant smile. "You have got some of the instincts. Wish you'd spent more time working them, but this is good. Look again. Tell me what's different about this one than the others."

Tavana stood still, looking, thinking. Finally he nodded. "The others, they were all flat, really smooth. Hard-looking. This one… it has sunk a little in the center, and part of it looks softer."

The Sergeant nodded; Tavana saw him draw his weapon and check it carefully, and the gun did not return to its holster. "You got it. Looks to me like something might have been digging underneath. Maybe was doing it when we were walking up, and stopped because it sensed our vibrations."

"Vibration sense? Is that common?"

"Very, especially in subsurface creatures." Campbell studied the terrain carefully. "All right, let's do this. Be ready, though; I would not be surprised if things don't go nearly as smoothly as the others."

Tavana nodded, and his heart was back to hammering against his ribs. Something is there, I can feel it.

The pole sank into the top layer much more easily than it had in the prior holes, then slowed down, encountering earth of a heavier sort. Tavana pushed –

And something suddenly seized the pole, yanking on it so hard that it was almost ripped out of Tavana's hands.

But Tavana Arronax was not letting go. As it gave another yank, Tavana braced himself and started pulling.

"You got something, son?"

"Oui. And it wants a tug-of-war? It will have one!"

Tavana found himself grinning, despite the fact that the sudden grab-and-pull had scared him so much he felt his pulse racing and a giddiness in his head. Tug of war was the one thing he'd ever been good at when his school had phys-ed classes. He couldn't run fast, he couldn't duck and weave, and he didn't like punching and wrestling, but with his low, squat build, he could brace and pull better than anyone.

He gripped the pole, tucked it under his arm like a rope, and dug in his heels. The pole stopped, then slid backwards. Tavana braced again, pulled once more. Another step back, and now he could feel a vibration, something scrabbling for a hold, fighting the pull and losing. Then it was harder, but something was still holding on, wriggling as Tavana dragged it through the dirt capping the hole.

With an abrupt rush, most of the pole slid free of the dirt, bringing with it a sinuous, segmented, multi-legged shape. It released the pole, making Tav stagger back, started a lunge –

Three flat, sharp reports shattered the stillness of the day, and the creature was shoved sideways, red-purple blood splashing in the air as it rolled over and then contorted in writhing agony, needle-tipped mandibles slashing empty air.

Campbell studied the thing as its convusions juddered to a halt, then nodded, sheathing his weapon. "That's definitely not something we wanted inside the perimeter."

The two moved a little closer. The creature was serpentine, a long body probably well over two meters long and almost twenty centimeters thick equipped with multiple pairs of legs, two on each body section; Tavana noticed that the frontmost legs shifted from being narrow to broader and contoured. Digging tools, almost certainly. The mouth was mostly closed now, but he could make out what looked like blue-black fangs in the four-sectioned mouth.

"Good shooting, Sergeant," he said. "That was not a happy animal when he came out."

"Very unhappy, I think. Thanks. Lemme contact Xander, let him know what's up."

As the Sergeant gazed into the invisible distance, Tavana stepped a little closer; this was the first alien lifeform he'd really gotten a good look at, aside from the preserved specimens back home. It looks like a cross between a centipede, a worm, and a lamprey. Terrifiant, creepy, as Maddox would probably say.

The way it was lying, he couldn't get a good look, but it seemed to have eyes spaced such that there were four of them. And there were four ridges on the thing's body. Four-sided symmetry? He stretched out his boot and tried to roll the creature over, so he could get a look –

"Tavana, NO!"

The limp body suddenly convulsed at the touch of Tavana's boot, and the head whipped around, hissing, fangs extended. In the same instant, Sergeant Campbell slammed into him, sending Tavana sprawling, out of the path of the thing's reflexive strike.

But that left Sergeant Campbell directly in its path.

Wide-stretched mandibles found Campbell's boot, clamped down. Three of the savage hooked teeth skidded on the Pathfinder boot, getting no purchase, but the fourth slid upward –

And over the top of the boot, plunging directly into Campbell's leg, just below the knee.

 

Castaway Odyssey: Chapter 16

Time to make a camp!

-----

 

Chapter 16.

     "This," Campbell said, "Is a JD-CAT Model 450 Universal Excavator."

The boys were all watching attentively, even Francisco. Heavy machinery still held a fascination for most children, and these – thank goodness – were no exception.

He walked around the big machine and smacked the wide, thick bar that was held up by the manipulator frame. "Excavator is just part of what the 450 can do, though. This is a fully controllable advanced SMA – Shape Memory Alloy – universal blade component, similar to the main control surface units on LS-88. It can be a bulldozer blade, a backhoe scoop, a snowplow – pretty much any kind of tool you need to clear an area, dig a hole, smooth the ground, and so on. The rear "ripper" attachments are also SMA units, and can be configured for hole digging and other operations."

"Cool," Maddox said with a broad grin.

"It is that," he agreed. "We have four of these beasts, each one massing fifteen metric tons, and believe me, Tantalus colony's gonna be real unhappy they don't have them. These were designed specifically for new colony setup."

Campbell grabbed the door, opened it, and swung up into the small cabin. "C'mon up, take a look. Manual controls built-in and parallel to the automatics."

"So they can be automated?" Tavana asked. "That will be useful!"

"You better believe it. We'll start out doing things by manual, because with the AIs knocked out by that Trapdoor pulse, we can't count on them to make the right evaluations and decisions. But once our satellite network gets established, we'll have an Emerald-centric GPS system to guide everything they do."

Xander was checking the drive systems along with Tavana. "Superconductor loop batteries, right?"

"Right. No fuel, minimal maintenance – moving components sealed as much as possible, with near zero-wear bearing materials. We just plug her into the shuttle mains and recharge every so often."

Francisco looked at the machine longingly. "I wish I could drive it, but I'm too small."

"Maybe not," said Tavana.

Campbell looked at him with a raised eyebrow. "How you figure, Tav? His feet won't even reach the pedal pads."

Tavana grinned, holding up his omni. "Manual can still be via remote, yes? And I know that Francisco, he is quite good with delicate control in the games."

Yeah, but still, that's fifteen tons of machinery with a lot of power behind it. But he caught Tavana's meaningful stare, and knew what the kid was up to. Francisco's an artist and a kid; he's not like the rest of these boys, an engineer or on the way to being one. He wants to contribute, and Tavana wants to show him a way he can.

And, Campbell had to admit, it couldn't hurt to have someone with an artist's as well as an engineer's eye in on the work. If they were going to be stuck here, letting Francisco try to add aesthetic touches would be a good thing.

"That's… not a bad point at all, Tav," he said, after a momentary pause. "Tell you what: I'll start teaching Xander and Maddox how to run it, but you can hook into the controls in parallel and we'll see if you can figure out a good control interface that Francisco can use. I'm not giving any remote control, though, until I'm sure whoever's doing it knows exactly what they're doing; this thing can do a lot of damage real fast."

The others nodded, and Xander said, "So what's our plan, sir?"

"I want to clear a perimeter all the way around us," Campbell said, gesturing in an arc around them. "Clear the ground, make sure there's no surprises waiting for us in our base camp. Take everything down, out to about fifty meters in all directions from LS-88, down to the water's edge in the direction of our little lake there."

Maddox frowned. "We're just going to wipe out everything around us? That's pretty mean! What about the animals and things that already live here?"

Campbell sighed. "Son, if this was a proper survey and colonization setup, you'd probably be right. Modern approach to colonization is to try to find a way to fit in. But honestly, Maddox, even there, once we decide that we're setting up a colony in a given area? Everything has to go that might be dangerous, or even just something that'll weaken the structures you'll be building."

He pointed out at the towering spiral-leaved trees, the distant columns that he couldn't quite figure out, the shadows under the trees. "We don't know anything about what lives here. We don't know if we're sitting on top of, oh, a nest of chojago like they ran into on Porlumma, sort of super-fire-ants, and we sure don't want to find out the hard way. It may not be the proper environmental approach, but for survival this is the way we have to do it. Everything for a certain radius around this ship goes. Got it?"

Maddox bit his lip, but then nodded. "Yes, Sergeant."

"Good."

The controls of the Model 450 were fairly simple; manual control of a bulldozer, backhoe, and similar machinery really hadn't changed in centuries. Handgrips to steer, hand and foot controls for moving forward and backward, for raising and lowering the blade or bucket, and so on. He configured the universal blade to a standard "scraper" blade shape, lowered it, and – after making sure all the kids were well clear – started forward.

Unlike the old-fashioned internal-combustion designs, the 450 didn't roar and rumble, but it did move forward with massive authority, and the sound of earth and stone and plants being torn and scraped was loud and emphatic. Moving nice and smooth. That's good.

He noticed movement to the rear. "Hey! Boys, don't follow me! You can keep monitoring and watching, but you stay right there at the ship!"

"I thought I'd just look at what you were uncovering, Sergeant," Xander said, slightly defensively.

"You gotta start thinking more paranoid, son. What if there was a nest of… something, like I mentioned? What do you think the reaction's gonna be? You boys have to stay away from the machine in case something here takes violent exception to our trying to clear everything up."

There were no arguments to that, and he was pleased to see the boys simply went and watched from the main ramp; his occasional glimpses showed that Francisco was paying close attention to whatever Tavana was doing, so maybe the boy would learn how to run one by remote.

He took the 450 out the full fifty meters and a little more, then turned at right angles and started carving out a wide, flat perimeter border.

Ha! Saw something there, long and pretty nasty looking, wiggled out of a hole ahead of me and ran off into the forest. There's animals on land and some of them probably dangerous. With the cabin door closed, he wasn't worried for himself here; even if a swarm of this world's equivalent of bees or something came after the 450, they'd never get in to bother him. But he was now more sure than ever that they needed this perimeter.

After a couple of hours, he'd managed to cut a swath all around the grounded LS-88, a double-wide pathway of scraped earth showing white, dusty streaks where he'd been digging into rock running a total of several hundred meters. The debris from the scraping ran in a bulwark all around the encampment. "There we go. You got it now, Xander?"

"I think so. Can I try it?"

"I'll bring her back in and you can. Now, what I want us to do is work from the inside out now, and push everything out. We'll end up with quite a wall, nice earthworks that'll discourage casual intruders, and a smooth place for us to set up camp inside those walls."

"I heard some things running away from you," Tavana said. "I guess there are some animals here for sure."

"And probably a lot more farther in. Like I said, when we landed we probably made most things run far, far away. The few things still here were in burrows – which was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to make sure we got rid of." He finished running the excavator back in to near LS-88. "Once we have the area cleared, we'll have to pack it down, steamroller it as they used to say, and we can start really getting set up."

Maddox was looking at the small lake. "Sergeant, do you think we might be able to do some fishing? We saw something jumping out there…"

"I'm sure we will. While your brother gets the hang of clearing our field here, you're welcome to see if you can figure out some good fishing gear."

"Should we get out a second excavator?" Tavana asked. "I could start prep on that now."

He considered, while keeping an eye on Xander's first hesistant attempts with the 450. "Not right now. Maybe we'll want two of them, but keeping them charged will be a bit of a chore, and it's not like we're going to be building miles of highway. Keep working with Francisco; if he gets a hang of running one of these things by remote, that'll free the rest of us to do other work."

Tavana nodded and sat down next to Francisco.

The older Bird seemed to be getting the 450 under control; the movements were smoothing out, and the scraping noise becoming smoother, more constant. Campbell leaned back with a grin, thinking. Positive mental attitude, first aid, shelter, fire, signaling, water, and food. That's survival in a nutshell. Attitude, well, the kids are doing pretty well on it. We're not hurt. LS-88's a dandy shelter, even if I really look forward to getting into something bigger. We've got all the fire we need. The SC-178s are the best we can do for signaling. Water's not a problem, as long as the whole planet isn't a deathtrap, and we've got food for a bit.

He sat down and let himself relax against the hard, strong alloy of one of the landing struts. Not bad, Campbell. Give yourself a pat on the back and five minutes of peace.

"Yeah," he muttered to himself with a wry grin. He could probably afford five minutes. But not much more, because if his years in the Service had taught him anything, it had been this:

Planets hold surprises.

 

Castaway Odyssey: Chapter 15

Time to step out and take a look...

 

------

 

Chapter 15.

"No, Maddox, Tav, no one but me and the Sergeant gets armed."

"But Xaaaaaander –"

"No but Xander, Maddox. You don't even know how to handle a gun yet, and I don't think that Tav or Francisco do either."

The other boys glared at him and Campbell, but finally the glares turned to pouts. "Well… okay. You're right."

"Good listening, kids," Campbell said. "Guns are not toys. We've got several from the cargo, so if and when I think you boys are ready, all of us can, and will, be armed when we go out. But for now, Xander's the only one who's convinced me I can trust him with something that might put a hole in me if he plays with it wrong."

"But we all want to go out!" Francisco said.

Xander shook his head. "Francisco, I know you do. But we haven't got a clue as to what might be waiting out there, and until we do have an idea, we're not taking anyone else out. Now, you guys can do something, and that's digging out that temporary shelter and making sure it's in good condition before we bring it outside and set it up."

Maddox looked at him with just a bit of resentment and then shrugged it off. "Okay, bro. We'll do that. Anything else?"

"Check inventory on food," Campbell said, "and then start checking readiness on the construction equipment we brought with us. I know we chose the motors we did to minimize damage to the cargo, but I want you boys to make sure we didn't do any real damage to them before we actually try to make use of them."

"Got it, Sergeant," Tavana said.

"All right. Let's take a look at our new home, then."

The Sergeant went first, stepping into the airlock and opening the outer door; that was no surprise. Xander hadn't even tried to argue otherwise – it would make no sense for the less-experienced mechanical engineer to stick his head out on an unknown world rather than the soldier with a couple decades of knocking around colony worlds and dealing with whatever they could throw at him.

That didn't stop Xander from feeling a little jealous.

Sergeant Campbell stepped down and mostly out of sight, then gestured for Xander to follow. Xander opened the inner lock and stepped in, closing the door behind him.

It was the smell that struck Xander first. There was a lingering smell of burning packing fluff and alcohol, but dominating everything was a sharp, sweet freshness, something that he couldn't describe precisely, but that shouted outdoors! in an unmistakable, joyous way. Faint hints of other smells – heated metal from the LS-88 as she cooled down, spicy scents of flowers, and a grassy smell that he thought must be from whatever they'd landed on. He stepped to the outer lock and took a deep breath.

"Yeah, that's something you wait for after every trip," Campbell said from just below him. "First breath of real air. Especially after you've been in a tin can like this one."

For a few moments, Xander couldn't answer. He was taking in the panorama before him. He'd seen the landing site from the air, but that had been a quick glance, through a camera's eye. Now they were down on the ground, and he was seeing everything himself.

They were sitting in a small clearing – scarcely two or three times as wide as LS-88 was long – bordered by towering growths crowned with what looked like delicate green sprays of fine hair, but were probably tough, slender strands. Interspersed with these were other treelike things with spiral green sheets that were definitely leaves, and huge columns rearing dozens of meters into the air. He could hear faint noises in the distance – piercing calls, sounds like chiming, answering chimes or screeches – and saw brightly-colored somethings darting in and out of the forest canopy. Nearer, tall growths with banded joints grew side by side with swaying grass-like things that almost had to be plants, and sparkling-winged somethings dancing among them. The sound of running water chuckled somewhere on the other side of LS-88.

Campbell's chuckle broke into his reverie finally. "It sure is pretty, I'll say that for it."

Xander looked down, to see the Sergeant standing on the last rung of the ladder; he had not yet stepped down. Campbell grinned up at him. "You want to take the first step, son?"

A huge rush of gratitude roared through him, and he felt an incredibly stupid grin spreading across his face. But… "I… of course I would, sir, but shouldn't you…?" It was hard to say, but it was the right thing to say; without Campbell, they'd never have gotten here.

Samuel Campbell shook his head, but returned the grin. "Can't say it's not a major temptation, Xander; even with all the exploring we've done, you could get all the people who've been the first to step foot on another world into one auditorium, and it wouldn't be all that full even after two hundred years. But," his grin broadened, "I'd already be in that auditorium, son, and you wouldn't."

Xander felt a momentary sting of tears. "I don't think I can say thank you enough, sir."

"The way you're smilin' says it all, Xander. Now take that first step."

He climbed part-way down, then measured the way his legs felt. "I think it might be more like a jump and fall."

"Be careful. We've flattened stuff nearby, but any farther and who knows what you'll hit."

Xander gave a tiny jump and let go, passing the Sergeant by inches. The impact felt like he was landing with a couple other people on his back, after all that time weightless, but somehow he stayed on his two feet, not falling, and slowly rose. "And that's one tiny leap for mankind," he said. "Welcome to Emerald!"

"Well, nothing's leapt out of the grass to kill us yet. Good sign."

"Did you expect something to?"

"Nah, not really. Something more than thirty meters long made of metal drops screaming out of the air and lands in your field? Anything halfway sane's running as far as it can go until it's sure nothing more's going to happen. Predators don't survive by attacking things they don't know, anyway. Main danger on planets like this for newbies like us? Dangers that look harmless until we touch them, kick them, sniff them, or eat them. Or walk past 'em – had a trooper get killed once when we walked past what looked like just any other hole in the rock and something jumped out and whacked him."

Xander looked around with more caution and suspicion at the waving grass, brush, or whatever-it-was, and realized that stuff that grew almost a meter tall could hide a lot of things.

Campbell nodded. "That is the look you need, son. Until we're familiar with this place, we haven't got the faintest idea of what could kill us. There's risks we really can't avoid – if the equivalent of the grass is lethal, we're pretty much hosed. But even there I wouldn't yank up a stalk and stick it in my mouth to whistle with until we're damn sure it's not filled with strychnine or something."

"What now, Sergeant?"

Campbell surveyed the area. "I want to walk a perimeter around the LS-88, then – if everything looks kosher – we'll get out one of the excavators."

"Why – oh. You want to make a real perimeter."

"You got it, son. First rule of safety – clear out any possible threats and establish a secure camp. Sure, we can stay inside LS-88, and that's pretty much a damn fortress, but we really need to get used to staying here. And that's not happening if we use the ship as an excuse to keep from acting like colonists. You were all going to be colonists, well, here's your chance."

Xander followed Campbell, who was proceeding up towards the nose of LS-88 with careful, measured steps, surveying everything as he went along. "Well, we were planning on arriving at an already established colony."

"Can't give you one of those, though." Campbell stopped, touched a point underneath LS-88's front cabin. "Hmm. There's the problem child."

Xander looked, seeing a blackened streak. "What is it?"

"Don't know for sure. Some small flaw, probably minor damage from the accident. It affected the TPS deployment just a tiny bit and almost led to burn-through. So I wouldn't want to try another landing with her." Campbell grinned and patted the lander. "But she did her job long enough."

Xander repressed a shudder. He hadn't realized they'd come that close to being a flaming wreck. "Why didn't you say anything?"

"Would you?"

That stopped him. He considered a moment. "I guess not. No point in it."

"Exactly. If it'd holed-through, we'd all have been dead in seconds. No point in worrying anyone with it." They rounded the nose. "Well, now, isn't that a pretty sight?"

Stretching away from them, starting perhaps fifteen meters from LS-88, was a sparkling sheet of pristine blue water, rippling slightly from wind and the tumbling waters of the stream feeding the little lake. "Do you think that's fresh water?"

"I'd bet on it, though the lake itself might be brackish. The stream's almost certainly fresh water."

Without warning, something leapt from the water, far out in the lake, and came down with a splash; Xander had a momentary impression of a slender body trailing more fins than he might have expected. "Wow!"

"Wow indeed. That beast was more than a meter long, easy. Maybe twice that, hard to tell at this distance. Looks like we can expect to do some fishing if we're lucky."

"If we can eat it."

"Well, that will be the question, yes. But we know from Earth and other planets that there's some basic rules we can follow that make it safer. Like not eating the innards of animals in general, until we've had a chance to test 'em." Campbell surveyed the area. "Let's keep going, but right now I'm inclined to stay right here. Looks about as good a spot as we could hope for."

"We don't need an excavator to clear an area for the shelter, do we?"

"Technically… no. Practically speaking, I would strongly recommend it. What if the local grasses can poke holes in your shelter?"

"Well, we did clear out some areas right around the jets when you landed."

"So we did. But I also avoid camping right underneath nuclear jets, on basic principle alone."

Xander laughed, but he had to agree that there was something unsettling about the idea of sitting directly beneath a high-powered jet engine. He squatted down and looked carefully at the soil. Near the edges, he could see some shield-shaped things scuttling about. "I see beetles or something."

"Careful." With practiced ease, Campbell bent over and impaled one on a needle-fine spike from his ShapeTool. "Hm. Not exactly anything we know – no surprise. Crustacean of some sort, exoskeleton and all. Mandibles look like they could nip through flesh, anyway, don't know about cloth. Might be plant-eaters, though. Don't show any response to one of their fellows' deaths – not that I expected them to, or we'd have seen swarms all over the place after the landing." He scraped the thing off against LS-88, then wiped off the Shapetool. "But where there's one thing like that, there's probably ten thousand species ranging from harmless to very nasty. And – whoops! Will you look at that?"

"That" was one of the plant-things, which had been exhibiting what Xander had thought were brilliant red flowers composed of many hairlike petals, like asters. But as they approached and the Sergeant's boot landed near – or perhaps touching – the stem, the "flowers" suddenly withdrew into a bulge on the stem. "What is it?"

"Dunno. Could be a plant, still – seen some on various planets that move. Mimosa's one on Earth – touch it and it folds up fast. But it looked more like an animal movement to me. Interesting."

They had reached the tail section, and could look up the stream to where it disappeared into the forest; low hills were visible in the distance. He saw Campbell frown and shake his head.

"What is it?"

"Those hills. I know we haven't seen but a fraction of the planet yet, but near as I can tell there isn't a mountain on this planet worthy of the name. Most of 'em wouldn't even qualify as hills. I think the highest peak I saw might just barely clear three hundred meters. Most habitable worlds have pretty active tectonics, so you get plenty of mountains somewhere on the planet. Never seen a habitable world without decent mountain ranges. It's a puzzle."

Then he shook himself. "Well, anyway, the cargo bay door's here, and clear. Looks like we can get to work! Get inside and let's get started!"

Xander glanced at the hills himself, but he had to admit he didn't really understand what was bothering the Sergeant. But first things first. "Coming in, Maddox, Tav," he said, seeing in his omni that it had switched to the proper channels. "We're gonna get one of the excavators working!"

 

Castaway Odyssey: Chapter 14

They had just landed.... but were they safe yet?

 

-----

 

Chapter 14.

     Tavana let out a whoop and for a few moments everyone was cheering except for the Sergeant, who was just grinning from ear to ear and leaning back in his seat with obvious relief.

Finally the noise died down and the Sergeant stood up. "Whoo. Feels real funny standing now, but also seems my medical nanos didn't let me get too weak. Still, everybody be a little careful moving around 'til you get used to walking again."

He looked around the little group. "Now, we've got one question left: can we breathe the air? If we can, odds are a hundred to one in our favor that Emerald's a Terran-type world, and we can live here."

Tavana thought, and suddenly a chill went down his spine. "Sergeant… we don't have any chemical sensors, do we?"

"Not without ripping them out of LS-88's air system, and ripping the air system apart – even a little bit – before we know exactly what the air outside is like… sounds a little bass-ackwards to me."

Maddox pursed his lips. "If I had my collection, some of those would have sensors on them."

Xander shook his head. "Sergeant, there's got to be something in the cargo with a sensor that could be adapted."

Campbell looked at him. "If you've got a suggestion, son, I'm all ears."

"It's oxygen we need to check for, right, Sergeant?" asked Francisco.

"That's right, son. The chemistry that supports an oxygen-rich atmosphere is the one we depend on. We've only found one exception."

"Well… then can't we just put something in the airlock that's on fire, and if it stays on fire after we open the airlock, then we know there's oxygen?"

For a minute Campbell just stared, and then threw back his head and laughed loudly. Xander snickered and started to laugh, and then Tavana joined in. Dieu, how we miss the obvious.

Francisco was looking embarrassed and angry; but before Tavana could call the Sergeant's attention to it, Campbell stopped on his own and knelt down next to Francisco. "Hey, son, we weren't laughing at you. Laughing at myself, really. Here we were looking for some fancy high-tech way to find out if we could breathe the air, and damned if the youngest kid in the crew sees the answer that was right in front of us! Good work, Francisco! Great work!"

The uncertain face suddenly broke into a brilliant smile. "De veras? You mean it?"

"I sure do! And let me tell you I'm relieved as all h… heck, because without some trick to tell us if there's enough oxygen out there, the only way we'd have known is to have someone step outside and find out."

Tavana shuddered inwardly. Of course if the air outside wasn't breathable… He shoved that thought as far away as he could, but it wasn't that far.

Francisco had blushed visibly. "It wasn't just my idea, though, sir. I remembered something in one of the old books my mama read to me; one of the people in it said 'where a light can't live, I know I can't,',so…"

"Memory or your own idea, you were the one who came up with it for us."

Campbell went into the cargo, came out with a plastic bottle of clear liquid. "Alcohol. All-round good disinfectant, useful for a lot of things. And perfectly flammable. Now, lessee… sure, I can use a cooking pan to hold it."

"Can I do it, sir?" Tavana asked.

"Why not? You've got the idea, I'm sure."

"Go into the lock, put alcohol in the pan, set it on fire, then go out and close the door and then let it equalize with exterior air."

"Simple and straightforward. But here," he handed them a wad of packing material, "add that. Pure alcohol flames can be tough to see; adding something else fixes that problem."

"I wanna light it!" Francisco said.

"Your idea, your right to help out. Okay, you two."

Tavana walked to the lock – slowly, feeling as though his pants were made of lead, and his shirt too – and opened the inner door. Placing the pan on the floor, he poured it half-full of alcohol and dropped in the packing material which swiftly absorbed a lot of the liquid and sank in a sodden mass to the bottom. "All right, Francisco. Careful! Don't get too close, there'll be fumes."

But Francisco obviously knew how to light a fire – his pocket TechTool actually had a firestarter mode, which Tavana knew his didn't. The little multitool extended into a slender wand that allowed a hot, bright spark to be generated quite a distance from the user's hand.

With a gentle whoomph! the alcohol ignited, the vapors around it making a momentary, ghost-blue fireball; the alcohol-soaked packing material began burning briskly with orange and blue flame.

"Okay, let's get out!"

Tavana felt his gut tensing sourly as the airlock door swung shut and the cycle began. He turned to watch, but Campbell was standing in front of the door, looking through the port already. "Excuse me, sir."

"Eh? Sorry. Here, everyone crowd around, we might as well all watch this." He lifted Francisco up so he could look through the port and the others managed to stand and peek through one way or another.

The little pan of fire was still burning, but the air exchange was still going on. It flickered and guttered momentarily, and Tavana felt sick. Is it going to go out?

But whatever air current had wafted its way around the room had faded. The fire rose slightly higher in blue-tinged orange.

Then the outer door opened, admitting brilliant sunshine and the pure air of Emerald.

The dazzling sunlight dimmed the flames… but they were still there.

The fire was still burning!

"Sergeant –"

"It's burning. By GOD it's still burning! Boys…" and suddenly his voice broke and he sank to his knees. "Oh God, I think we're gonna be okay. I finally think we're okay…"

Tavana felt a burning in his throat and eyes, tears answering those pouring down the Sergeant's dark, lined face; suddenly he realized how terrible the strain must have been on the seemingly invincible Sergeant Campbell. He said it himself, he was responsible for all of us. And no matter what he could do, he couldn't change whether Emerald was livable. He knew how thin the chances were before we even started for this system.

"Sergeant?" he said, seeing the others as dumbfounded as he by Campbell's sudden breakdown. "Sergeant, it is all right. You did it, you got us all here safe, and it's okay."

"Yeah… yeah, I know. Sorry, kids. Just… just finally had it all catch up to me, you know? Started as a goddam milk run, then suddenly we were stranded in space. Couldn't take time to panic." He stood up. "Sometimes it gets you like that, when you finally aren't in a crisis. The relief, you know." He grinned at them, wiped the tears away. "Felt good, actually. Released all that tension I had."

He looked at the door, then at the rest of them. "Well, this ain't going to be a picnic, either, but if we're smart and careful, I'll bet on us living here. So we're going to get us some proper equipment for a little expedition, and then we are going to be the first people to step foot on this planet!"