Ryk E. Spoor's Blog, page 51

Castaway Planet: Chapter 17

 

Time to relax, it’s been a long day…

 

——

 

 

Chapter 17

 

 

       Whips jolted awake as a loud, strident beep! beep! beep! sounded from somewhere above him. That was the camp alarm! Something was coming through the perimeter!

The night of Lincoln was, by Earthly standards, pitch-black; even if one of Lincoln’s two moons had been up, they were too small to shed very much light.

But Whips’ ancestors were from the utterly lightless sea of Europa, orbiting Jupiter in the farther reaches of the solar system, living beneath kilometers of solid ice cold enough to freeze air. There, the only light came from other creatures or strange natural processes, and any creature that could see at all had eyes that could wring every possible bit of data from every photon they could catch. To Whips, the blazing stars above made the black night nearly as bright as day.

Plowing its way up the gouged scar of LS-5‘s crash was something huge—ten, maybe fifteen meters long. Its hide glistened wetly in the starlight and air hissed from it as it breathed, a round, wormlike thing with rings of serrated white at intervals along the body, crowned with a writhing mass of tentacles surrounding a mouth like a grinder.

It was also headed straight for the shelter, and Whips knew it would be a matter of seconds only before someone came out to see what the alarm was—emerging right into that tentacled mass.

Whips heaved himself up out of his land-nest and simultaneously bellowed loudly, even as he sought around desperately for something to throw or swing with.

The movement and bellow did, at least, accomplish what Whips hoped. The monster slewed around, facing directly towards him, and started flowing in his direction. Whips humped backwards as fast as he could, grabbing with tail grippers, curling his body back and shoving back with the elbow pads on his lower two arms. The tentacles lashed towards him but he wasn’t—quite—in reach yet.

Laura shoved her way out of the tent flap and said something shocked and probably rude, but at that moment the thing gave vent to a howling roar which drowned her out. Despite the insulated walls of the shelter, Whips could hear responding startled screams from inside.

The thing gathered itself and lunged. One thick, velvet-looking tendril brushed Whips and he heard himself let out a steam-whistle shriek of pain. That stung!

With horror he realized he’d slipped in the sand; the thing was about to catch him!

Two sharp reports rang out as Laura fired the SurvivalShot twice. The creature gave a low-pitched bubbling growl and swung about towards her.

“Look out, Laura! It’s like the anemones!” Whips felt a faint numbness radiating from the sting, but his internal nanos and his own self-awareness told him the damage was actually minimal. A human getting stung, however, might be really bad.

Laura dove to the side, the deadly tendrils smacking the shelter and causing it to shudder, but missing their target.

But Whips realized that if it followed Laura, something that size could probably rip the shelter apart, or crush it if the rigidity currents keeping it up failed. He took a breath and then charged forward as fast as he could, synchronizing rear anchor-feet and arms, and threw himself on the monster, arms spread wide.

He felt dozens of his attack barbs sink deep. The creature’s pained, writhing attempt to escape caused the barbs to rip gashes in its hide. But the force of the thing’s twisting motion yanked Whips around, dragging him across the sand, slamming him down like a ball on a string. Two of the tentacles wrapped around him, and it felt like two belts of fire strapped to his body. Grimly, he hung on, dug in, tried to pull himself closer. If he could just bite the thing…

The SurvivalShot popped again, twice, and the other Kimeis were shouting, screaming, out of the shelter, but were they safe? Whips didn’t dare let go, he couldn’t bear the thought that he might let this thing go too soon and get his friends—his adoptive family—killed. At this range he let the agony focus his cry, let go with a stunshout that rippled the creature’s skin as though it were struck. Then he heard half a dozen small impacts. Rocks? Were they throwing rocks?

Another tentacle caught at him, but he pulled as hard as he could, clamped down with beak and let his tongue start ripping into the leathery, bitter-tasting flesh. The venom was starting to work its way through him, his resistance being overcome by volume, but he refused to let go, even though he found his vision becoming distant, his arms trying to become shaky…

Suddenly the monster wrenched itself around, trying to flee. The Kimei family were still pelting it with rocks and debris from the crash, more shots from the hydrogen-powered pistol slamming into it. The thing rammed into the ridge of the crash scar and Whips found he could hold on no longer, scraped from the thing’s side.

But it didn’t take the opportunity to turn on him. It just continued swiftly slithering away, back into the water from whence it had come.

The sounds now were distorted, strange, like they were if your sound membrane was half-in, half-out of the water, and everything was painful and drifting and distant at the same time. “Whips? Oh, God, look, he’s been stung all over!”

“Settle down, Sakura. I’ve got his nano telemetry.” That was Laura’s voice, but somehow Whips couldn’t tell which of the figures over him, shining bright lights, was which.

“Will he—?”

“Quiet, all of you!” Akira’s usually quiet voice was raised, worried, but filled with iron authority. The others went silent. Wow, Whips thought disjointedly, he bellows like an Old One…

“Neurotoxin,” a voice muttered, wavering in and out. “But there’s natural resistance… similar to other poisons…”

Vaguely, Whips realized he was losing consciousness, finding himself unable to understand the noises around him. He couldn’t feel more than the most distant jab of fear, though. The numbness had spread to his brain and even thought, fragmented already, was fading.

Light faded, dwindled, became gray fog.

But then the gray brightened, and sound began to come back, at first just incomprehensible murmurs, and then faint, almost random words: “… responding… hope that … killed…”

His eyes finally began to respond. He felt shaky, sick as he had ever been, but his mind was slowly clearing. He turned one eye, saw Laura kneeling next to him. Pain like fire burned across most of his skin, but it seemed to be fading now. “Everyone… okay?” he managed to ask.

“Okay?” Laura repeated, and then shook her head; a pair of tears suddenly rolled down her face. “Whips, you were the one hurt!”

“Knew… if it got any of you… probably kill you,” he managed. It still hurt a lot.

“You were right,” she said, voice and eyes back in control. “Your people have a higher resistance to some toxins, of which this was fortunately one. Even so, closing in on it and letting it sting you—”

“Didn’t have much choice,” he said. The sickness was rising inside, like something coming to a boil. Oh-oh. “Um, excuse me…”

His shaking body tried to betray him, but he somehow kept control until he reached the waste pit and voided everything he’d eaten into it. He lay there, gasping and shuddering, letting his tail hang over the edge in case another fit hit him. So much for dinner.

Sakura had suddenly reached him, and her fierce embrace made him feel a tiny bit better. “Whips, are you okay?”

“Feeling a little better, maybe.”

“It’ll take a while. I had to use what was on hand, which wasn’t ideal,” Laura said apologetically. “Your nanos and your natural resistance kept things under control long enough for me to fake up something like an antidote, but it’s not perfect.”

“As long as I’m going to recover, that’s good.”

“What was that?” Melody’s question was somewhat rhetorical—it wasn’t like anyone had any better answer than she did—but she was terrified, and Whips couldn’t blame her. “Why did it attack us?”

“That’s a good question, Melody,” Akira said, his calm voice making even Whips’ pained, sick mind feel a little steadier. “Why would it attack us? It crawled a long way out of the water to get here. How could it have sensed us?”

Something about the question nagged at Whips. “I don’t think it did sense us. Not out there, anyway,” he said slowly.

“Hm? But then why come here? Do you think this is just the way it normally hunts—comes up on land and looks for things that are sleeping?”

Whips concentrated, trying to force his brain to work. “No. Well, maybe… but it has to have some way of choosing where it comes up.”

Melody suddenly froze. “Oh. Oh, I think I know, Dad.” She pointed over to the now-tumbled tables and chairs. “The block-crab—”

Now he heard Akira Kimei swear. After a moment, he shook his head. “Baka. We gutted it and then dragged it up to camp, leaving a perfect trail of blood straight here.”

Whips waved his hands affirmatively. “That was just what I was trying to think of. Predators like that in Europa will follow scent-trail.”

“Well,” Laura said, “no real harm done. We’ve learned that lesson and won’t do it again.”

“But that’s only a temporary fix, Mom,” said Sakura. Now that she was sure that Whips wasn’t dying, she was hugging a still scared and crying Hitomi and getting her to settle down.

“I know it,” Laura said. She knelt down and hugged Whips. Even though touching the stung areas hurt, it was still comforting… and the pain was fading. “First… thank you, thank you so very much, Whips. If you hadn’t distracted it, it would have grabbed me when I stepped out. And without you fighting it, I don’t think we could have stopped it.”

“I second that,” Akira said gravely. “Our pistol—and throwing rocks—stung it and infuriated it, but I really don’t think we did enough damage by ourselves to drive it off, or that we could have without someone getting killed. You risked—”

“Nothing, sir,” Whips interrupted, feeling so embarrassed that the pain and sickness were secondary. “I’m not going to survive without you either. You’re my family now, right? And we always fight for our family. Together.”

The two Kimei parents were quiet for a moment, Akira in particular wearing an expression that looked oddly like vindication, and then they simply nodded. “You are our family, yes,” Laura said unsteadily, and he could see the tears again. “And we will fight for you. Together.”

“Always,” agreed Akira and Sakura, and the others echoed it—even little Hitomi, who reached out and patted him gently.

Then Laura looked out into the dark, where the thing had fled. “But we don’t want to do fighting we don’t have to, and now we know we are in danger here. We have to find somewhere else to live—and do it soon.”

“But that,” Akira said, “will be something for later.”

Whips nodded, and finally felt himself relaxing, the sickness starting to ebb… and exhaustion coming close behind. “Later,” he repeated, and closed his eyes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Polychrome: Chapter 25

Well, let’s see what Erik’s up to now…

 

——

 

Chapter 25.

     “Chancellor, we have stormclouds ahead.”

Inkarbleu glanced up from the small dining table we were sharing. “That is… unusual, is it not?”

“Very, sir. Weather indications for this time of year are usually clear – for weeks or months at a time.” The Captain looked grim.

I rose and ran up the steps to the forward deck.

Black stormclouds loomed up in a narrow front, focused on the Pearl of Gilgad, our ship, and her escorts. I narrowed my eyes, trying to see better, as I heard the others coming up behind me. “Captain, can I borrow your spyglass?”

The tiny telescope brought the roiling clouds several times closer. Just enough for me to make out what I was afraid I’d see.

Three tiny dots moving within and about the clouds, guiding and shaping them. Three dots of a sickly black-green-yellow that I had seen once before. Tempests.

“We’re in trouble, Captain.” I handed him back the telescope, a sinking feeling in my gut. Given the situation – on a ship in midocean – “sinking” was not a word I even liked using to describe my gut feelings, but it seemed all too appropriate. “That’s a Faerie storm. Tell your people to batten down the hatches and everything else. This is going to be very, very rough.”

Inkarbleu gazed up. “A storm? How odd. Why in the world would they not simply send a Torrent or three, raise a wave that would crush us like matchwood or drag us through a great whirlpool to the very bottom of the sea? This may actually afford us some small chance to survive.”

I watched as the storm moved rapidly closer, thinking. “My guess? These waters are probably the territory of the Sea Fairies, and King Ugu isn’t ready to piss them off by trying to send his own emissaries straight through their own country.” Given what I knew about Pingaree, that seemed a pretty good bet. “I dunno if that makes things much better, though. They can raise waves on the surface just fine, maybe even cause a whirlpool, certainly hit us with enough wind, rain, and lightning…”

“Lightning is not a terrible danger; we have long since forged steel and copper into our vessels to disperse much of its power,” Inkarbleu said. “Waves and wind, however, remain the boon and bane of all ships.”

The sea began to heave, waves slowly building in height, as the winds started to pick up. “Chancellor, you’d better get below. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do… but I doubt there’s anything you can, and neither I nor the Captain need to be worrying about you while we try to survive this.”

Inkarbleu had already shown he was a man of great practicality; with a simple nod, he headed back below.

I took one of the lines available and bound myself to the forward observation post; I had no intention of being stupidly swept overboard. The armor of the Rainbow Kingdom, fortunately, was ludicrously light – I suspected it was actually lighter than water by a good amount – and would probably help rather than hinder me if I ended up in the drink, but I sure wouldn’t be able to swim the rest of the way to Pingaree. We were about halfway to our destination, which made sense; if Ugu and Amanita wanted to stop us, do it at the point farthest from any possible help.

It bothered me they’d caught on this fast. I’d hoped the distraction at the border of the Nome King’s lands would actually lead them to look at Kaliko’s domains first, but it seemed that hadn’t worked too well.

Now I could make out the Tempests without the spyglass, swirling dots the color of twisters and destruction. Damn. They’re nothing but pure magic bound up in a tiny bit of matter. If I could REACH them they’d probably pop like evil little balloons, but there’s no way I can think of to manage it. Despite a couple of cheap comicbook imitations I’ve done, I can’t pull off flight, or even leaping over tall buildings. Maybe a medium-sized building, if I’m in a really high-magic area, but this ship is mostly mundane. I’m not feeling much resilience from the deck.

The Pearl of Gilgad heaved up as a twenty-five foot crest hit the hundred-fifty foot vessel, and I wavered in my balance.

The ship and its escorts, I saw, were turning into the wind, not letting the waves hit them broadside. They slid up and down smoothly, and it was clear that it would take vastly larger waves to threaten them.

I saw the Tempests spiral downward. They’ve reached the same conclusion. The rain was now sheeting down and a spark of lightning split the sky with an echoing blast, but the ships sailed on. They need to amp up the storm quite a bit, and they can’t do that way up there.

I frowned. The rain was making it harder to see. A lot harder now as it pounded down, mixed with hail, the wind screaming through the rigging, waves reaching crests of nearly fifty or sixty feet. Despite the roller-coaster rises and dips, I still felt the deck startlingly solid beneath me. They build good ships, Gilgad does.

Then I felt it. A slight roll.

“Wind’s shifted!” I heard the Captain bellow over the howl of the storm. “Seas shifting … Bring them around, ten points!”

The fleet began to turn, following the signals barely visible in the storm-gloom. But the rolling continued.

“Shifting again, Captain!” shouted one of the crewmen. “Eight… Ten more points!”

The cresting waves were clashing now, making it harder to judge the angle of attack. I tried to cover my face, get a feel for things. I noticed, oddly, that the wind and rain seemed not quite as intense near me.

Of course. The Tempests are driving this as hard as they can. Their magic drops off near me. Has to.

But then, feeling how the wind was shifting, I realized I had something a lot more important to worry about. “Captain!” I called, but by now the screaming wind was ripping away any sound. I grabbed a nearby deckpin and pulled it up, waving it back and forth to get his attention as the rolling increased.

Dammit, look at me!

The glittering of my armor moving apparently caught his eye at last; he made his way over with careful steps. “What is it, Lord Medon?” he shouted.

“Whirlwind, Captain! They’re making a tornado!”

He cursed. “Of course! That’s why the wind keeps shifting! But not a tornado, boy, they’d have to do that personal-like!

“They’re making a whirlpool, turning the winds, turning the sea!”

Now I could see it, shadowy movement around us, cresting waves higher in a sinister circle , flattening inward, turning, turning…

“Oh, crap. Now what?”

To my surprise, the Captain grinned, a savage smile that would have looked at home on Nimbus. “Now what? Now we sail right out of their trap, Lord Medon! Use the speed of the currents and the winds to whip us up and over! Thanks to you, we’ve seen it in time!”

He raised his arm and signaled his crew, who sent up lights and flags. The ships turned. Then turned again, sails belling out in the storm, and I felt the Pearl of Gilgad lunge forward as it caught the power of the storm. It slid down the forming curve of flowing might that was the developing maelstrom, gathering speed, accelerating at a tremendous rate, turning again with the whirling wind. The masts creaked, inaudible but something I could feel through the deck, bending with the centripetal force, like a car careening around a too-tight curve. Before us loomed a clashing barrier of black-green waves, nearly invisible against the green-black sky.

“HOLD ON!”

The Pearl hit the waves with a shock that stretched my mooring lines almost to the breaking point, forced me to catch the Captain as he fell. The ship was momentarily in freefall, literally having jumped the crest, and then it came down with a mighty splash, running before the wind.

“Ha!” the Captain said, still grinning “Let them try that trick again, we’ll head right back out! See, see, my lord! All of the fleet, still with us!”

I looked up.

Three miniature stormclouds were descending, trailing more storm behind them. “I think they realize that wasn’t working.”

The Captain followed my gaze. “Blast. Now you’ll have your waterspout, Lord Erik, and I’m not sure we have anything for that.”

The wind was now whirling tighter, the storm contracting, more and more intensely upon the Pearl of Gilgad. It was clear that this was their target.

The sails guttered, flapped, and the ship stalled. I saw the banners hang limp, then lift… starting to point up. Spray whipped around the ship, rising higher, more intensely.

A funnel cloud was forming above, following the descending Tempests, narrowing, dropping towards us as the spray rose to meet it.

Rose to meet it…

The Captain gaped as I suddenly released the ropes holding me. “What are –”

“Tie yourself down, Captain!” I said. “And if this doesn’t work… well, you may still get out of this alive.”

I threw myself into the rigging and began climbing as fast as I could, trying to ignore the swaying of the ship and the increasingly distant deck. Got to get as high as I can…

The Tempests were getting closer, much closer now. I could make out their spinning, roiling forms, living clouds the color of bruises and agony, glints of lightning-blue for eyes, and the howl of the growing twister was growing, the entire ship starting to turn despite the efforts of the men at the rudder. The whirling funnel was dropping with terrifying speed. A few more seconds… Got to get higher…

With a final lunge I popped out into the crow’s nest, weaving dangerously, catching the mast with one hand as I yanked my sword out. Wait… wait… judge it…

Just as the funnel cloud was about to drop upon me, I saw a deckpin go flying up. NOW!

I judged the jump through sheer gut instinct, seeing the Tempests almost to my level, spinning in a perfect triple circle around the tornado. I hit the updraft and was carried up, moving outward with the whirling winds, sword extended.

There! For a moment I thought I’d misjudged it too badly, even angling my body, turning –

–but it saw me. I don’t know if it recognized me, and thought it could finish the job on its own, or just thought it had found a new and temporary plaything. For whatever reason, the Tempest slowed, turned, and our courses were bent together. Too late it saw the sword, too late it realized there was no terror, only a grim smile, coming through the wind and mist to greet it.

“I’ve got you, my pretty – and your little fog, too!”

The sword cut through the Tempest like a hurricane through a wheatfield, causing the twisted elemental to burst into disintegrating fragments of vapor, and I continued on, sword and my mortal body ripping through the side of the mystically-controlled tornado. The whirlwind seemed to stagger and waver, coming apart at my passage, and the second Tempest was suddenly in front of me, trying to somehow regain control of the storm, realizing a fraction of a second later that it had made just the wrong move as I reached out and plunged my hand into its icy center, causing it to explode into nothingness.

The mighty upwelling winds broke apart as the last Tempest retreated, understanding that there was no longer any chance of this plan working.

I looked down. “Oh boy. Now I know how the Coyote feels.”

Five hundred feet below, the wind-tossed sea began a lunge up at me.

I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, and tried to align my body into a spike. Armored feet will hit first. Rest of the armor will brace me to some extent. Might survive if I hit just right – a wave just dropping away below me. Keep the eustachian tubes open, you’ll be going way, way down… open your damn eyes a crack, you have to know when you’re going to hit so you can hold your breath –

The ocean was rushing closer, reminding me of my prior fall from a great height. This time I was in better shape, I was armored, I was falling into water, not onto land… but there was no faerie princess to rescue me, either. Almost there… Hold—

IMPACT!

A drifting pattern of darkness… a spark of tormented light, far away, calling in green… I reached out…

“Lord Medon?”

I opened my eyes, becoming aware of aches in almost every part of my body. The Chancellor was looking down at me.

“…Wow,” I managed. “I’m… alive.”

“Just barely, it would seem, but you should make a full recovery by the time we reach Pingaree.” Relief was written clearly on Inkarbleu’s face. “Your armor and luck appear to have saved you.” He raised his voice. “Tell the Captain he has awakened and appears to be himself.”

“How… how long was I out?”

Inkarbleu smiled faintly. “Hard to say precisely, sir. You were floating unconscious when we found you.” So I’d been right about the buoyancy of the armor… fortunately. “But it has been about two days.”

“Two days we have waited in fear that we could not thank you.” The Captain stood in the doorway. “Lord Medon, you took a fearful risk to save my ship and crew, and we cannot easily express our gratitude.”

I tried to wave that away, but my arms were not cooperating. Any movement made me wince. “Forget it, Captain.” I said, feeling the aches in my jaw as I spoke. Even my tongue hurt. “You wouldn’t have been in any danger except for me being there, so it was the least I could do. I don’t think they’ll try that again, though.”

“I would hope not. But ah, what a song this adventure will make!” The Captain bowed to me, and then strode out on deck, presumably to tell everyone the news.

I turned my eyes towards Inkarbleu. “I… think I need some water and food. Soup. Chewing would hurt. And then real sleep.”

“It is good,” Inkarbleu said as he rose, with a thin smile, “to see that some heroes can actually be sensible… once they’ve regained their senses.”

 

 

Castaway Planet: Chapter 16

Well, Hitomi hadn’t gotten herself killed after all…

 

 

——

 

 

Chapter 16

 

 

       “Barkcloth,” Laura repeated wonderingly, looking at the green sheet which was slowly coming apart under repeated handling.

“A beginning to it, I think, yes,” Caroline said. “The Polynesians made something like this, called tapa. We’ll have to do some experiments, but… I think Hitomi might have found us something really important.”

Hitomi looked very proud.

Laura bent down. “But you also could have gotten yourself hurt.”

The youngest Kimei looked down. And she looks so tragic it makes me want to hug her and tell her it’s all right. But I can’t. Not here.

“Your sister told you to stay near her, she explained why, and you still didn’t listen.”

“I’m sorry!”

“Sorry is good, honey, but it’s not good enough. We can’t trust you to listen yet, I guess. You’re still young. But that means you have to stay with someone all the time from now on. That could slow down everything we’re trying to do, because whoever that is won’t be able to concentrate on something else. They’ll have to be watching you.”

Hitomi looked up, tears running down her face. “I’m sorry, Mommy!”

“So are we, Hitomi. We’re very glad you’re safe, and this cloth-stuff you’ve accidentally invented might really be important, but you could have been killed. If you behave very well the next week or three, maybe we’ll change the rules.”

Hitomi sniffled, but nodded. “Okay.”

Now I can give her that hug. With Hitomi still clinging to her neck, she glanced at Sakura. “You aren’t –”

“—I know, Mom, don’t you think I know it was my fault? You left her with me and I lost her.”

The tears and shakiness in her second-oldest child’s voice told her the lesson had been taken to heart. “All right. Don’t forget this. You know what could have happened.”

“Yes.” The reply was almost a whisper. “I didn’t think of anything else all the time I was looking for her.”

“Then I’ll let it go.” She turned to Akira, putting down Hitomi. “Now what is that thing you’ve brought with you?”

“Not thing, things,” her husband corrected. “What we carried with us is a sort of crustacean—a general observation, not a biological classification, let me note—and two of those hole dwelling ambush predators. ‘Minimaws,’ Whips wants to call them.”

Now Laura could see that what she’d taken for a creature with two long tentacles around a huge blocky body was a blocky, cuboid creature bracketed by two things like the one Whips had killed. “Why minimaw?”

“They look and act something like miremaws,” Whips answered, “but they’re so much smaller.”

“Good enough. Minimaw it is, then.”

“I’m going to have to come up with proper Lincolnian taxonomy and nomenclature,” Akira said.

“I suppose we’re going to try that crustacean thing?”

“Tests show it should be edible—well, the main meat. I think the internal organs are questionable. Whips and I dragged it down to the water’s edge and gutted it first. I should note that was not easy; the shell is extremely tough.”

“Awfully large to drag. I’m surprised you got it all the way here, Whips.”

She could tell by the way the colors rippled and his arms curled that he was a bit embarrassed by the praise. “Well, we didn’t want to waste it, and it had sort of forced us to shoot it.”

“Came after Melody when she was between a couple of rocks and couldn’t get away easily,” explained Akira. “Took three or four shots—I’m not sure if it was dead when I fired the fourth time or not, but I wasn’t taking chances and I was very grateful you had convinced me to take the gun with me anyway. That armor is tough.”

Laura looked at the shell; like many creatures, it shaded to light beneath, but the top of the shell, both on the body and on the legs, was a beautiful mottled green. “That could be useful. Plates, big bowls, and such. Did you test the shell itself?”

“You wouldn’t want to cook with it. It’s got enough metallic content that would probably leach out if you put the wrong kinds of things in it and applied heat. But we could use it for just putting things on, and certainly for wearing, carrying, making things out of, it should be fine.” Akira poked at two ridges on the upper portion of the shell; things that looked like jointed spines projected from the ridges. “I think this does share some lineage, somewhere, with the minimaws and other creatures. You’ll notice these spinelike things are actually degenerate legs—I think for defense, possibly venomous—which means that it had that effectively fourfold symmetry of the minimaw and those flying things we’ve seen.”

He looked up and grinned apologetically. “Sorry, getting into my professional habits. How were your days, barring the last-minute panic?”

“Tiring,” Caroline said honestly, “but we got the disposal pit dug. It goes down a couple of meters and about that long. Until we figure out a better method we can just dump stuff in, bury it, and extend the pit a little each week or so.”

Sakura held up a somewhat mangled piece of metal. “I thought I could make a spearhead at first…”

Whips gave a whooping snort accompanied by diamondlike color patterns they all recognized as laughter. “You thought you could just… what, pound it into being a blade?” He laughed again.

“Oh, shut up, Whips!” Sakura’s face went red with embarrassment. “Yes, I know, it was stupid. I guess we’ll have to figure out some way to make them, though.”

Whips settled down. “Grinding works on just about anything. With the right metal, forging can work well, but we’d need to be able to maintain high heat for quite a while.” The adolescent Bemmie’s engineering training was showing clearly. “Right now we’re able to keep the superconductor loop batteries charged with the sun, but if we try rigging up a forge I’ll bet we’ll be using it way faster than we can recharge.”

“Still might be worth a try if we can figure out how to make the furnace—a few hours forging, a couple days off, try again?”

“Mmmmph. Maybe. I’ll have to do some calculations. It’d be better if we could actually build a fire, but I’m not sure anything here is going to be burnable—or safe to burn, even if it will.”

Laura stood up. “Let’s start getting dinner together, everyone. There’s going to be plenty to talk about, but we can’t leave these things sitting here.”

Dressing the minimaws wasn’t terribly difficult. The way they were built it was something like gutting and cleaning a long, skinny fish, though you’d get narrower steaks or fillets out of it because of the four-sided design. The blockcrab—as Melody named the large, squarish creature—was more of a challenge. Laura eventually figured out a workable method to get the legs open and get at the meat: score it deeply along the sides with her Shapetool, then lay it across a rock and let Whips pound on it with another rock until it split along the carved seams.

“What do you mean about it being safe to burn, Whips?” asked Caroline.

“Well,” Melody answered almost instantly, making Whips twitch slightly, “We know that the plant-like things are—”

“Melody,” Laura said sternly.

Melody blinked. “What… oh.”

“‘Oh’ indeed. The question was asked of Whips. I know you like to show off what you know, but let the people asked answer. Don’t be rude.”

Melody bit her lip. “Yes, Mom.”

“See that you remember it.”

Whips himself had an apologetic pattern rippling on his skin. “Dr. Kimei—”

“Whips—Harratrer—I know what you’re going to say, but it’s necessary. We may be the only people around for ten light years, but we still need to be reasonably polite to each other.”

“Sorry, Whips,” Melody said. There was in fact a note of genuine regret, even if part of her posture still said But I knew the answer!!

“It’s okay, Mel,” Whips said. “To answer the question, Caroline, it’s because we don’t know what this stuff is made of. In Europa, of course, we didn’t have fires—we used vents for cooking—but even there, some vents were safe to cook with, some weren’t. Here, well, we don’t know yet if there’s anything like wood. Wood’s just cellulose, mostly, and burns pretty well, but if I remember right there were still some plants you didn’t want to burn even on Earth.”

“Quite a few, actually,” Laura said. “I remember a neighbor of ours who got exposed to oleander smoke and got pretty sick. There’s quite a few others in different parts of the world.”

“So,” Whips went on,” we don’t even know if any of the stuff that looks like trees and plants will burn—well, I mean, will burn well enough to make fires with—and if it will, we haven’t got any idea if any of it will be safe.”

“We’d better see if we can find out,” Akira said slowly, even as he started up the stove. “If anything happens to our stove, we’ll need some way to cook our food—maybe even to heat wherever we end up living, if our continent drifts into a less comfortable region. And fire has, historically, been one of the best defenses against any dangerous animal.”

“Might be less effective on things which have never encountered fire—if things don’t naturally burn here,” Sakura pointed out.

“Ha! A definite point, Sakura. They’d have to learn what it feels like to get burned, rather than just avoid fire in general.”

“I was wondering about fire anyway,” Sakura said. “After my complete failure at making a spearhead, I thought we might be able to make a bow with that flexible support rod, but needing arrows with points put me back to the problem of spearheads, but then I remembered reading something about—”

“—fire-hardened arrows!” Melody burst out, then immediately looked contrite.

“‘sokay, Mel,” Sakura said with a grin. “I was going to say I don’t know much about it, so if you do…?”

“I was reading… well, some survival stories and things, so I looked up a lot of stuff on that,” Melody said, “and it’s still in my omni. Basically you put the tip into a bed of coals and rotate it, pull it out and rub it with a coarse stone to get char off, and repeat until you’ve got the point you want. According to my references doing the repeated rubbing with a good stone often helps by embedding bits of stone in the wood, but the real effect is caused by driving out the moisture in the wood and polymerizing other parts of the plant into a harder form.” She got a thoughtful expression. “But we don’t know if there’s real wood here so that technique might not work.”

“Couldn’t we cut out arrowheads from the block-crab’s shell?” Hitomi asked. Akira put some fried minimaw in front of her. “Yum!”

Conversation was temporarily interrupted as the food was served. Laura thought the block-crab meat was very tasty, though a bit chewy, but both Hitomi and Sakura spat it out. “Ugh!” Sakura said, with Hitomi concurring. “Bitter, nasty bitter.”

“That’s strange,” Caroline said. “I don’t taste hardly any bitterness. It tastes sort of … like lemony duck with a lobster texture.”

“Well, I taste bitter. It’s almost like wine—that alcohol taste.”

“Ah,” Akira said with a nod. “Specific sensitivities to tastes, like cilantro. Many people think cilantro tastes like soap, while most other people don’t taste a hint of that flavor. Well, then, everyone else can have some more block-crab, and I’ll serve you and Hitomi more minimaw. Hopefully we can find some vegetables or fruits that are edible, and perhaps there are ways of eliminating the taste you don’t like.” He continued, muttering about different ways of marinating or preparing meat.

Whips wasn’t saying anything; based on the way he was shoveling the block-crab into his mouth, Laura figured he liked it far too much to waste time talking.

After dinner, Hitomi wanted to go back up and look for more of the possible barkcloth plants with someone, but Laura shook her head. “Hitomi, it’s time for bed.”

“But Mommy, the sun is still up!”

“I know, honey, but that’s because the day’s much longer on this planet. Little girls still need their sleep on time.”

Hitomi kept protesting as she was dragged inside, but by the time Laura had made sure her littlest girl was all clean and given her bedtime story, Hitomi’s eyes were sagging shut all on her own, inside the cool dimness of the shelter. That wasn’t surprising, Laura thought. By her omni, it was actually the equivalent of nine in the evening—well past Hitomi’s usual bedtime. Sakura was already getting herself ready for bed, with Melody having just got out of the minimum-water bath.

They’d have to find more water soon. Put the main shell of the block-crab out to catch water in case it rains? That might work.

She went out to join Akira; he gave a gesture, closing a file he must be viewing in his omni, as she approached. “Sun’s finally starting to go down.”

“Yes; I’m afraid it’ll be full nighttime by the time we hit our next day cycle.”

She shook her head and smiled. “It’ll take some getting used to.” Laura looked back at the shelter, and then over to Whips digging in for his vigil and torpor. “Whips can extract water from the ocean, right?”

“Yes, he’s not in any danger of dehydration now.” He slipped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. “You’re worried about our supply.”

“Well, of course.”

“I think we’ll be all right. It looked to me like there might be a stream a couple of kilometers up from where we stopped our exploration. We’ll check that out soon enough.”

“And if there isn’t?”

Caroline answered from behind them. “Then we can probably dig a well.”

“A well?” Laura was puzzled. “Caroline, we’re surrounded by the sea here, and most of the rock looks … awfully porous. Won’t we just end up with salt water?”

Caroline looked up—at only 165 centimeters she hadn’t much choice when talking to her mother who topped her by nearly twenty centimeters—and shook her head. “I don’t think so. You see, salt water is denser than fresh, and in many island settings that means that if you get a reasonable frequency of rainfall, a ‘lens’ of freshwater forms on top of the saltwater trapped underground. Since the pores in the ground don’t let the water move fast, waves and such aren’t going to mix it up. So you get a pretty thick layer of fresh water if you’re fairly far inland.”

“Planetography studies are coming in handy,” Akira said.

“Well, the geology parts,” Caroline said modestly.

“And your knowledge of suns and planets,” he reminded her.

“We are very lucky,” Laura said bluntly. “Just seven of us and we have an expert biologist, a doctor, someone who’s almost a planetographer, and people who know something about other fields.” She looked across the water. “Imagine getting wrecked here without any of that.”

The three were silent for a few moments. “Well, we aren’t without that,” Caroline finally said, “and we’ll be all right, I hope.” She glanced back at the shelter and up at her omni, perched above as high as Akira had been able to mount it. “I’m exhausted, Mom. I’m going to bed now.”

“Go ahead, hon. We’ll go to bed after you,” Laura said. Honestly, she was tired—and she could see Akira was, too—and it was just about time to turn in, no matter what the confusing sun said. But while waiting, she could just lean against her husband, and he against her, and relax, looking at their new home, which—just maybe—wasn’t going to succeed in killing them.

 

 

Castaway Planet: Chapter 15

 

Sakura did some exploring before; now there’s time to do some work…

 

 

——-

 

 

Chapter 15

 

 

       “Can’t I please come with –”

“No.” Her mother’s answer was firm. “You seem recovered, mostly, but you were in very bad shape for a while yesterday. I don’t expect to see any more trouble, but for today you’re staying near camp. You’ll have plenty more chances to explore, I promise.”

“Sorry, Saki,” her father said, and gave her a consoling hug. That didn’t exactly make up for it, but it was a hug, anyway.

Akira straightened and beckoned to Melody. “Come on, Mel. You were hoping for an adventure a while back, now’s your chance.”

Sakura saw the momentary excited jump up, and turned away to hide a smile. Melody was normally lazy, and she cultivated the bored appearance at times—why, Sakura didn’t know, it wasn’t like she was old enough to be acting like that—but that was right now clearly fighting a battle with Melody’s curiosity and desire to be one of the people who found something new on this planet.

Of course, she suspected that Mel had another reason for volunteering to be the third member of the expedition.

Whips waved to all of them, and the three disappeared over the edge of the landing scar, heading for the shoreline, which they planned on following for a considerable distance to observe what the local sea and shore life was like.

“All right, Caroline,” Laura said briskly. “It’s up to you and me. Sakura, you’re in charge of continuing camp setup and keeping an eye on Hitomi.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“And you call me if you feel anything wrong, you understand?”

“I will, don’t worry.” She meant that. She wasn’t going to forget the terror she’d felt as the poison worked its way through her, not any time soon. If there was a slower-acting component to the thing’s venom, she had to admit there was no better place to be than in shouting range of her mother.

And it did, at least, give her an excuse to not be digging the deep disposal pit, which was where they’d put the, well, crap that would eventually have to be emptied from the shelter’s toilet facility.

“C’mon, Hitomi. We’ve got chores to do before we get to play.”

Hitomi made a face, but stopped her run towards the edge of the landing scar and came back.

Sakura first had Hitomi help scrub out the shells she’d brought back with sand, multiple times. Her mother’s tests had shown that the tough little shells were a mix of carbon-based material and silicate, but didn’t have any toxic components of note. The same couldn’t be said for the remnants of stinging land-anemone or whatever that was inside, so they had to get every little trace of the animals out.

This was, fortunately, exactly the kind of thing Hitomi was good at. Get her focused on one task that she could keep doing and that needed a lot of attention to detail, and she could keep doing it for a long time. Sakura didn’t find this task quite as engrossing, but it was nice to see the things cleaning up so well, becoming smooth, shiny white-green bowls. They’d have to rinse them out with water too, but if they got all the hard part done with the sand it’d go a lot easier.

After that was done, she and Hitomi carefully swept out the shelter, using a bundle of frayed wiry fibers from the crash tied to a broken support rod. She glanced at the sun, noting how far it had risen, and checked her omni. “Hey, Mom, it’s been a while—I think it’s lunchtime.”

“Really?” There was a pause, then, “You’re right, Saki. I was thrown off by the sun. Makes it look more like, oh, ten thirty in the morning.”

“Thirty-two hour rotation instead of twenty-four,” Caroline confirmed. “That’s going to be a little confusing.”

“Yes, we’ll be out of synch with the light cycle,” Akira’s voice came over the omnis. “Our natural cycle will still stay around twenty-four hours, so our “morning” will migrate from actual morning to afternoon to late night and back to morning again over three of Lincoln’s day-cycles.”

“You’re still in range, hon? It’s been several hours, I’d have thought—”

“—I’d have gotten farther, eh? Well, love, first of all we are quite a ways away. But we have Melody’s omni, which does have better range, and I moved Caroline’s up to the highest point near the camp so it could be a relay. Also, we’re following the coast. We’re probably about a kilometer and a half from you as the four-winged whoosiwhatsis flies.”

Sakura and Hitomi were getting out some of the rations as her mother and Caroline came trudging up the slope. “So how is the expedition going, Akira?” her mother asked.

“Oh, very well. Unlike the broken area near the ex-lagoon, which got rather well cleaned-out by the fall of that mass of rock, most of the shoreline does, in fact, have an extensive mass stretching out underwater—a beach and shore or surf zone. Whips has done some quick survey work and says in places he can scan it can go out two kilometers or more.”

“That should be a good thing for us, yes?”

“Very good, yes. Shallow-water ecosystems like that will be easy for us to harvest from, and will tend to keep the worst predators from getting too close in to shore.”

“How’s Melody doing?”

“Occasional minor complaints, but she’s been taking pictures with her omni and making muttered notes to herself. Whips didn’t encounter anything too large in his quick dips, but he thinks he’s found underwater burrows of creatures similar to the one he caught before. We’ll try to catch a couple and bring them back for dinner when we’re returning.”

“And what have you been up to?”

“Sampling everything I find, of course. There are a couple of tentative observations I have, but I’m going to need a bit more data before I draw conclusions from it.” He paused. “Melody’s calling me; I had better go see what she’s found. Talk later, Laura; love you!”

“Love you too.” Her mother smiled as she put the omni back on her belt. “Oh, thank you, Sakura, Hitomi. That was lovely of you.”

“We’ll need to find water pretty soon, Mom,” Sakura said hesitantly.

“I know, hon. I’m sure your father has an eye out for that, and we’ll keep looking until we find it.”

After lunch, Hitomi and Sakura cleaned everything up. Sakura stopped her little sister before she crammed the plastic wrappings into the disposal at the side of the shelter. “Wait on that, Hitomi.”

“Why? It’s trash. Mommy says to always put the trash in the trash as soon as you’re done.”

“Because stuff that’s trash back home might not be something we want to throw away here,” Sakura said slowly. “Mom?”

She heard her mother give a pained grunt, obviously lifting something heavy. “Yes?”

“Should I be keeping the wrappings from the rations? I mean, I don’t know if there’s a use for them –”

“Oh. Keep them for now. We’ll talk that over when everyone else is together. Now, honey, don’t interrupt me again unless you absolutely have to, Caroline and I are working hard on this together.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Saki? Can we go up there?” Hitomi pointed up to the land above the landing scar. “I haven’t seen where we are yet.”

I should be doing something useful… Sakura’s gaze lit on the pile of salvaged material that Caroline had brought back yesterday. There’s an idea. “Okay, we can, Hitomi. Just let me get a couple of things.”

The route the family was using to climb up to the higher ground was already starting to look like a path. That made it easier to climb, too, Sakura thought as she led Hitomi up, carrying a bundle of stuff with her.

“Wow, it’s so pretty!” Hitomi exclaimed, and started to run.

Sakura dropped everything she was carrying and snagged her sister. “Slow down, Hitomi! You listen to me. Are you listening?”

Hitomi looked slightly hurt, and shocked by the sudden yank. “What?”

Sakura knelt down and looked seriously into her little sister’s eyes. “Hitomi, we’ve just gotten here. We don’t know everything that’s safe, and everything that’s dangerous. You have to stay near me. You can’t go running off by yourself somewhere. Be careful. Watch what you’re touching. We know that most of this stuff doesn’t seem to cause any problem just by walking on it or sitting on it, but,” she held up her arm, where the sting marks still showed, mottled red-brown, “we’ve already seen something else that will kill us if it can.”

Hitomi’s eyes were wide, and Sakura could tell she now had her sister’s full attention. “I’m not saying to be terrified of everything, either. Just be careful, and if anything nips you, stings you, pricks you, you let me know right away. And stay near me.”

“Yes, Saki.”

“Okay.”

Hitomi watched as Sakura took the jumble of wreck materials over to a nearby flat-topped boulder and spread them out. Sakura sat down, and picked through the pieces. She’d chosen a bunch of reinforcement fibers which had been ripped free, a chunk of metal about the size of her fist whose origin was uncertain, and some smaller shards of metal, along with a rod of composite about a meter long and some composite pieces.

Okay, let’s see. We already talked about needing weapons, and if we’re going to protect ourselves and hunt, it’s time to start on that.

The smaller shards of metal were of generally triangular shape—ideal, Sakura thought, for spearheads. But she’d need to get them to a pretty symmetric shape and get them sharp on the point and edges, plus have something—a haft? she wasn’t sure of the right name—which she could use to connect it to a shaft, like the rod she had brought up.

Her Shapetool could of course configure to exactly what she wanted, but if it was strapped onto a spear shaft she couldn’t use it for anything else—and if it got used and the spearhead came off, they’d have lost one of their most versatile tools. Mom’d kill me. And that would be taking the really easy way out, anyway.

The three pieces she had to choose from were roughly the same size, but one of them actually had a bit sticking out which might be good for the… Sakura paused and checked her omni’s database. Tang, that’s the word! That should be good for the tang.

The rest of it came to a nearly-symmetrical point. One side had a thick edge, the other a ragged but much thinner edge. If she could hammer the one flatter and smooth out the other, it might make a good spearhead.

The hand-sized chunk of steel would make a good hammer. It fit nicely into the palm of her hand. She took a good grip, steadied the putative spearhead on the flat rock, and brought the hammer-chunk down.

There was a sharp, buzzing whack, and she could see the impact had left a significant ding in the other metal. Ha! It’s softer than the hammer! Encouraged, she hit the thick side several times. It does seem to be flattening!

“What are you doing?” Hitomi asked.

Sakura explained her idea. Hitomi immediately wanted to try, but it was pretty obvious that she didn’t have the strength to hit hard enough; it wasn’t easy for Sakura, truth be told. “So what can I do?” she asked.

She’s in a helping mood. That’s good, if I can figure out something… An idea struck her. “You know what? I think there is something you could do that would help everyone, especially Mommy and Daddy.” Sakura fiddled with her Shapetool and handed it to Hitomi, now configured into a two-sided tool that was a pair of gripping tongs on one side and a cutting shear on the other. “Go over the local plants and things and get a sample of each one. Pile them in order on that other rock, there? That way Daddy and Mommy can go over them and see what kinds of things we have. The shear will let you cut pieces out and the tongs let you pick them up safely, just in case.”

“I can do that!” Hitomi said proudly. She took the Shapetool carefully and walked to the waving grasslike stuff nearby. Studying the stalks intently, the little blonde-haired girl very methodically selected one, clipped off a stalk, picked it up with the tongs, and carried it to the other rock; without being told, she took another loose rock and put it down on top of her sample, to keep it from blowing away in the light breeze. Hitomi went back, studied the grass, and cut another stalk.

“Isn’t that the same stuff? We want samples of different –”

“This isn’t the same!” Hitomi said defensively. She brought the newly-cut stalk over, gripped in the tongs. “See these bumps? They’re not the same on the other one.”

Sakura put down her hammer-chunk and went over to the first sample with Hitomi. Sure enough, the “bumps”—which looked to Sakura sort of like the joints seen on things like horsetails—had a different pattern that really did argue for them being different species.

“Sorry, Hitomi. I should know better than to argue with you.” Hitomi’s attention to detail, when you got her attention at all, was legendary. “You keep doing that and Mommy and Daddy will be very excited.”

Hitomi smiled brightly and skipped back to the surrounding greenery.

Sakura turned her attention back to the piece of metal. I’ve seen stuff kinda like this on some of the immersives I’ve played, but never really did any of it. Still, how hard can it be? Just pound the metal into the right shape, then sharpen it by grinding it down. I’ll bet I could use this coral-rock as a good grindstone kinda thing.

She started pounding methodically, working her way up and down the thick edge so that she hopefully wouldn’t flatten one area much more than another. It took a while to figure out the right angle and force to use to not jolt the heck out of her arm and hand and still get the metal to move a bit on every impact. Sakura paused and checked on Hitomi; her little sister had moved somewhat around the perimeter but was now carrying, very carefully, what looked like a dark green puffball in the tongs and placing it on what was already a fairly impressive array of pieces of plants and, probably, plant-like things. She’s focused now; she’ll do that for hours, probably, unless something distracts her.

Reassured, Sakura went back to her work. Now that I’ve figured this out…

But as time went on, Sakura found, to her chagrin, that what looked really easy in an immersive sim … wasn’t nearly so easy. The side she was pounding on was thinning, yes, but it was also mushrooming out, and parts of the metal were splitting slowly. There was no sign of a nice, clean edge appearing. She thought her Shapetool might be able to trim off some of the edge, but she had to, grudgingly, admit that her cavalier assessment of how easy this should be had been badly wrong. They make it look easy in the games—smith heats metal, pounds it, grinds it, got a blade. Sometimes just pounds on the metal.

         She studied the mass of junk again. Making a blade wasn’t easy. Whips would probably be laughing at her for trying it that way. But maybe there was something else.

The long reinforcement fibers were like braided cord—and very strong. But they wouldn’t do as a whip; she’d intended them just for tying things together. The meter-long rod wouldn’t make a very good club; it was too light on its own. The hammer-chunk of steel wasn’t shaped in a way that would make it easy to attach it to something. She thought about various types of weapons. Well, tough cord could be used for a, whatchacallit, garrotte, but that’s not a hunting weapon. I’ve seen something people throw to tangle up prey… a bola? Her omni had a little information on those, including how to determine the right weights and lengths of cord.

But learning to use them would take a lot of time, and they’d be pretty useless as a defensive weapon up close. Sakura wanted something they could use for hunting or for protection.

She looked at the rod, then a thought occurred to her. She took it and tried to bend it. The rod bent, then sprang back to its original shape as soon as she let go.

Bow and arrow?

The problem then would be arrows. They’d need something pretty straight, the right thickness, and a way to put heads on them—and making the heads would go right back to the problem she was having with making spearheads. Or maybe you could just take the stuff you used for the shafts and sharpen it? Fire-hardening, that’s what I’m thinking of. There’s some kind of trick to that.

“Well, Saki, what are you up to here?”

She jolted to her feet, startled. “Dad? I thought you were out exploring!”

“We were, but it’s been a long day.” Akira Kimei showed traces of sunburn, a lot of sweat, and his hair was disarranged and filled with sand and salt, but he was grinning widely. Behind him, Melody was trudging up, carrying a bag of samples, and the scraping sound and movement behind her showed Whips was also approaching. “But a very good day overall.”

She saw a potential disaster in the making as Whips emerged from the surrounding vegetation. “Watch it, everyone—Hitomi’s samples are on that rock. Don’t walk over it.”

“Hitomi’s samples?” Akira smiled. “Well, that should be interested. Where is Hitomi?”

With a shock, Sakura realized that she’d lost track of time—and she didn’t remember, now, seeing that movement out of the corner of her eye that told her Hitomi had brought in a new sample. “I… I don’t know!”

“Don’t panic,” her father said quickly. “Hitomi! Hitomi!” he called.

There was no answer.

“HITOMI!” she called as loud as she could.

There was still no answer. “Dad…”

“If she was making this collection, she can’t have gone too far. Let’s all look around.” Her father’s tone did not quite conceal his worry, and Sakura’s gut tightened. How could she have been so stupid?

She hesitated, took a deep breath. Got to think. Part of me must have heard her, must have seen her, last time she went by. Which direction?

She turned slowly, until a part of her said yes. She couldn’t put her finger on exactly what told her that was the right direction, whether she’d heard some faint noise, seen some shadow, or what, but she was pretty sure this was the direction Hitomi had gone.

Please be okay, please be okay…

“Hitomi! Come on, answer me, Hitomi!”

Her omni pinged. “What’s wrong, Sakura?”

“Mom…” she heard her voice quiver. “Mom, I… I lost Hitomi.”

There was a sharp intake of breath. “How could you—” her mother began to snap, then stopped. “You’re looking for her now?”

“Me, Dad, Mel, and Whips. They just got back. Oh, God, Mom, I’m so—”

“Don’t, Saki. Find her.”

She filled her lungs again and shouted, “HITOMI!!”

She heard the others calling too, in different directions, pushed on. There were so many things they didn’t know; so many things that could have hurt her. She had a grisly vision of one of those hole-dwelling things striking, dragging her little sister down… She shuddered, felt nausea rising. Or something could have stung her… poisoned her… God, I’m so stupid, stupid, I should’ve watched her…

“HITOMI!”

Nothing.

She drew another breath, then stopped. What…?

Ahead, and a little to the right, she heard a rapping sound.

She waited.

There it was again. It sounded like rocks banging together.

If she gets absorbed in a project…

She ran towards the sound. Sparkling, darting things flew in panic from the plants. Something else scuttled away, making a faint wheezing noise as fled.

Sakura burst through a group of jointed-stalked plants into a tiny clearing.

Hitomi was sitting there, a rock in her hand, carefully banging on another rock that was covered with plants. In that momentary glance, Sakura had the impression the unpounded ones looked something like very skinny celery.

Sakura felt her knees wobble, realized that the combination of yesterday’s poisoning and this new panic was catching up with her. “Everyone, I’ve found her!”

Hitomi didn’t even seem to notice immediately. She took another handful of plants, placed them carefully on the rock, and started pounding on these new additions. Sakura walked shakily closer, then laid a hand on Hitomi’s shoulder.

Her little sister jumped, then looked up with a suddenly guilty expression. “I’m sorry!”

Sakura dropped down on her knees and hugged Hitomi fiercely. “It’s okay, I just… just should have kept a better eye on you.” She looked at the green-spattered rock. “What in the world were you doing?”

“Oh! I was cutting a plant, and one of them … squished funny. And I saw it had these, like, strings? In it. And the way it squished was funny, and I wanted to see what happened if I squished more, but there were only a couple, so I kept looking until I found a lot of them in a big clump…”

Sakura shook her head. It was so very Hitomi. She got an idea in her head and it literally took over. “Well, look, Dad’s back. Let’s get back to camp.”

Hitomi looked back at the rock reluctantly. “But I want to bring it with me.”

“A bunch of squished plants? Hitomi, how could we carry it? It’s stuck to the rock! Even if it wasn’t, it’d just be a big squashy mess!” To prove her point she grabbed a mass of the fibers at the edge and pulled.

Most of the mass of pounded plants peeled off the rock in a single sheet, translucently green in the sun.

 

 

 

 

Polychrome: Chapter 24

 

We should see how our Heroine is doing…

 

 

——

 

 

Chapter 24.

     “He is clever! And lucky! Oh, Father, this might work, it might really work after all!” Polychrome was dancing around the viewing pool, the perfectly circular bowl of mist and rainbow through which Iris and those in the throne room could, when he willed it, see that which passed in the area of the Jewel of the Bridge.

Iris watched her closely, a faint smile on his lips but a chill in his heart. He glanced over at Nimbus, whose gaze met his grimly. It has begun.

There were so many things his instincts told him to do, to try and avert that which seemed more and more inevitable. But none of them did he dare. Any attempt to interfere could – almost certainly would – recoil upon him and his entire realm.

And instead I must take the hardest path of all. “It may indeed, daughter. A long road ahead of him, but thus far he has taken steps straight and true.”

She nodded, watching as Erik Medon left the Throneroom of Gilgad, then turned back to him as he continued to speak. “But there are more pressing matters today, Polychrome Glory.”

That gained her undivided attention. “Yes, Father?”

Carefully. Carefully. “Did you mean what you told me – and him – some time ago? That it was your will that you be present, even at the final battle?”

The delicate face hardened, the chin came up in the stubborn way he knew all too well. “You are not about to argue me out of it, Father!”

He raised his hand. “Speak not to me in such a tone, Polychrome. Yet know that I have no intention of arguing with you; long since have I given up any hope of persuading you to do anything save that which is already in your mind.”

A brief flash of a smile like the sun itself, and she bowed. “My apologies, my Royal Father.”

“Accepted as always, errant yet beloved.” He sighed. “Polychrome, if the field of war you would take, then prepared you must be, as prepared as any of my warriors – as prepared, indeed, as the finest of them, for you shall lead them.”

So shocked was she that the ever-dancing feet halted in mid-step and she stumbled. “What?” She glanced in confusion at Nimbus, then back to him. “Lead them?”

“Not in the details of war and strategy, My Lady.” Nimbus said. “What Lord Iris Mirabilis means is that you shall be the High Commander and his representative, though I shall of course continue to direct military matters.”

Polychrome looked suddenly uncertain. “Father?”

The lordly smile he wore was one of the hardest expressions he had ever had to maintain, against the twin fears he had. “Polychrome, I must remain here. Well you know the power of our enemies, and I will – as the Prophecy requires – be in essence emptying all of the Rainbow Land of its warriors. In case Ugu and Amanita attempt, in that time, a strike to the rear, an assault on my kingdom, then only one force remains to me that might defend this castle, this city, this land and all my people: myself. I must remain here, vigilant, ready for any and all threats and assaults that may come while my General and his armies are assaulting the Gray Castle and its legions.

“But still someone of the blood must be present, my hand be shown as clearly as though I myself were there upon the field of battle. Daughters only have I ever had, and of all of them, one, and one alone, has the courage, the will, the strength, and the heart to be my right hand and my sword.” He reached down, and took his daughter’s hand. “You, Polychrome.”

Her eyes were wide, and her grip spasmed tight on his hand as she came to understand. “I…”

“Lady Polychrome,” Nimbus said quietly, “this is simple truth as well as grim and necessary policy. If the assault upon Oz fails, Faerie cannot afford to lose Iris Mirabilis; he remains the sole and only hope the lands have now. Yet if the Rainbow Land falls, we cannot afford to lose hope, and the armies I command must return to take it; but retaking the Rainbow Castle will be of no use if there be none to take the Rainbow Throne. And only one other lives who could rally our people, one other that the other children of Iris Mirabilis will follow, one other whose face is known and loved throughout Faerie, even more so than our King himself.”

It seemed to sink in, finally, and as he saw the lovely face became just a tiny bit older, the shoulders sag beneath an intangible burden and then straighten as though bearing up that weight, Iris Mirabilis thought his heart would simultaneously break for the loss of one more drop of her innocence, and burst with the swell of pride as she accepted the royal burdens. “I… I understand, Father, Nimbus.”

He embraced her then, allowing him a few moments to clear the unshed tears from his eyes. “It is well, daughter. Very well.” He rose and returned to the throne. “So you must train now, and train well, and train hard. As hard, perhaps, as the mortal Erik Medon did, and in some ways harder; for though he is surprisingly kind of heart, and unwilling to do injury, still he has the savagery of his ancestors locked within, and none of a Faerie’s inborn hesitance in warfare, that normally only those of dark and twisted nature may overcome.” He signaled to Nimbus, who bowed and hurried away.

Polychrome grew thoughtful. “I think I see. You can carry the battle to the enemy yourself, Father, and if I am to represent you or…” she hesitated, then forced out the words, “…or succeed you, then I must be fully as formidable as you.”

“As much as may be possible… and much is possible, my daughter.” The tall figure of Nimbus re-entered, carrying the polished silver box, four feet long and two square, that carried the seal of rainbow, spear, and hammer. Iris took the beautiful yet simple case from his General and laid it before Polychrome. “This was a gift to your mother from… your great-aunt, I suppose would be the best term. She never had need of it, for which I was always grateful; but now it has passed to you, her first child, and the time has come.”

Polychrome slowly reached out and touched the box; the seal reacted instantly to her touch, unlocking, the top springing open with a martial chime like a trumpeting bell. From inside, his daughter drew out armor, plate with mail permitting ease of movement, carven with ornate grace to be both elegant protection and shining symbol.”This… was mother’s?”

“In name, yes, although as I said, never did she wear it. I am unsure if she ever opened it, in fact.” He touched the mail, which rippled like water in sunlight. “Forged in the fires of the Above and passed to us. But armor is of little use to one who has not learned to make use of it.”

“Oh, Father… I will. I will learn, Father! I promise!”

Seeing her shining face, imagining herself taking the battlefield in the Armor of the Gods, Iris felt his heart sink once more. Yes, you will. Oh, Father and Mother help me, you will learn.

Castaway Planet: Chapter 14

 

Sakura was safe now, time for a little aftermath and a discovery…

 

 

——

 

 

Chapter 14

 

 

              Whips wallowed his body back and forth, feeling the coral-based sand squish reassuringly under him. “Hm. That will be good.”

It had been quite a while since he built a land-nest—years ago, when he and his father had gone on a camping trip with the Kimeis, and that was long enough that he’d had to think about just how you did this right. His first attempt, about three meters away, hadn’t quite worked and ended as a loose sort of sand crater. It was supposed to be soft in the middle but still packed at the edges in certain ways.

This one felt right. He thought he would be able to crawl out of it and get back in without it collapsing, which was the way a land-nest was supposed to work.

Night had fallen on Lincoln—well, their part of Lincoln, anyway—while he’d been busy digging. Built-in solid-state lights illuminated the area near the shelter, and Laura was bent over her medikit while Akira cooked on the portable stove that had come with the shelter. Carefully, Whips pulled himself forward and up, and slid from the nest, keeping his anchors carefully pulled in. He glanced back once he was far enough away. It was still intact!

Feeling better at that minor triumph, he began moving towards the stove to see what Akira was cooking; as he slid along, though, he noticed Caroline almost directly in his way, apparently staring upward. “What are you looking at?”

“The answer to one mystery, I think,” Caroline answered absently.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I think I understand why this system could be here, halfway to Tantalus, without it being anywhere in the databases. Because any G-type star would definitely be in the databases.”

“Okay, well, don’t keep me waiting. Why?”

“Look up, about there.”

Used to following human pointing fingers, Whips reared up and gazed in the indicated direction. There were stars of all colors and sizes scattered across the night. “Where, exactly? I see a lot of night sky.”

“Your omni active? Okay, here.”

A set of dim crosshairs materialized in his field of view, and he turned his attention there. “Just night sky and stars there. Well, there isn’t a star exactly there, but—”

“That’s the key. See, exactly there is where the Sun should be. At about magnitude 5.8, but with my omni’s enhancement and your naturally sensitive eyes, that should be easy to see.”

“Oh, my,” came Laura’s voice. The tall woman joined them, looking up. “So something is between Lincoln’s sun and ours.”

“And has been for probably a few centuries, at least, so it wasn’t ever mapped out. Lincoln’s star would be pretty dim from Earth-magnitude six, I think, what with being a little dimmer than the sun overall—so naked-eye astronomers might not have caught it regularly. And if our relative motion to Earth’s solar system isn’t big, a pretty small nebula could cover it up for quite a while—a Bok globule, maybe.”

“But wouldn’t the other colonies have noticed it?” Whips asked. “I mean, they’re going to be looking from another direction, so the same cloud of stuff isn’t going to be in their way.”

“Maybe. But like I said, it’s going to be pretty dim from any reasonable distance, and most colonies aren’t going to be looking for new, close-to-home stars that we missed.” Caroline continued staring up. “Maybe, if Outward Initiative didn’t get totally destroyed, they’ll check images of that region of space and figure it out, though.”

She glanced down suddenly. “Do you… what do you think the chances are that Outward Initiative … well, didn’t get totally wrecked?”

Whips bunched inward slightly, tense. He knew why they’d ask him. He was as close as they had to an engineer or physicist, he knew more than anyone here about how the ships worked. But…

He thought about it seriously. He’d studied those brief, terrifying sequences of images, the fading of most of Outward Initiative with only a few ghostly pieces of the hab ring remaining before the disaster, and in the weeks it had taken to get here to Lincoln he had, in fact spent a lot of time mulling over what had happened, what could have happened.

“I can’t give you a… well, a good probability estimate,” he said finally. “But I think there’s a chance it survived. The hab ring’s built with a lot of redundancy in the structure, and the ship itself has a lot of safety cutoffs that should cause it to reduce rotation or otherwise adjust if it suddenly lost chunks of the hab ring. If the Trapdoor field wasn’t just oscillating out of control, then it was some kind of glitch that probably only lasted a few seconds on the outer perimeter of the field. There’s some minor instability in the field all the time, it’s just that the wavering of the field is usually kept many meters away from any actual components of the ship. If you got a really huge peak in that instability… I think they’d damp it down in ten seconds or so, and after that they’d be okay.”

“Will they come and rescue us?” Akira asked from the stove.

Whips waved his arms in a shrug. “If they survived? They’d have to somehow guess that someone could have survived falling off the interface; I never heard of anything like that, and I think I would have in my studies. Maybe their records will have ghost images of that happening, like we have ghost images of part of the hab ring, but without that… maybe.”

“No point in worrying about it,” Akira said firmly. “Our job is to survive, to build this into our home, and if rescue comes, wonderful. If not, we leave for the people who will, eventually come after us a record showing that we didn’t despair, but we did everything we could to survive and prosper.”

He rapped on the table set a ways from the entrance. “Now come on over and let’s find out if the native food’s going to be a trial or a treat.”

“Oh, wow! That’s what you were doing, Dr. … I mean, Akira?”

“Since you’d brought enough to cook up, yes. It’s not much, and we’ll certainly all have to have some rations, but it seems to me that we might as well have a taste right away.”

“Not leaving me out of this!” came a sleepy voice from the tent doorway. Despite her heavy-lidded eyes, Sakura was moving a little better than she had when she went into the shelter; Whips felt relieved.

“Me! I want to try some!” Hitomi said excitedly. Melody emerged from the tent as well, but hung back. “I want to see what happens with the rest of you first.”

“Suit yourself, Melody. Though either way we’ll have to eat it sooner or later; our rations won’t last forever, and in fact I’m going to require we stop eating them as soon as we find enough sources of food that we have an assured supply,” Laura said. “I want as many rations left as possible for emergencies, travel supplies, and so on. They’ll last more than ten years, so having them as a backup will be something very comforting.”

Whips looked at the dark fried pieces of meat on his plate, reached out and gingerly picked one up between two fingers. “Warm. All right, here we go!”

The texture was reassuringly meaty—tougher than many vent-dwellers, softer than some patrolling creatures like orekath. Overall it was something like miremaw or, for Earth creatures, beef. The taste was… Good, actually, now that he tried another bite. Really good! It wasn’t exactly like anything else, but… “I’d forgotten what fresh meat tasted like after being in Outward Initiative so long!” he said finally.

“It’s like … alligator, I think,” Akira said slowly, a relieved smile spreading across his face.

The others’ faces wore the same expression, as they realized that not only was there something to eat, but it would be something worth eating. “A stronger taste than that… but you’re right, Dad,” Caroline said after a moment. “It’s got that cross between land and sea taste going.”

Hitomi had already cleared her plate and was looking hungrily at the chunks on Melody’s plate. Whips couldn’t help but laugh when Hitomi’s face face utterly plummeted as Melody snatched it up and stuffed one of the pieces into her mouth. As Sakura and Caroline echoed the laugh, Hitomi looked at first betrayed… and then suddenly started laughing joyously herself.

Then he noticed Laura. “Laura? Are you crying? What’s wrong?”

Everyone else immediately stopped, staring, worried. “Laura, honey, what is it?” Akira asked softly, going to his wife and putting his hand on her shoulder.

The tall human woman blinked fiercely, but the tracks of shining tears were obvious, and her voice was a little thick when she answered. “I’m sorry. Oh, god, I feel so silly. It’s…” She shook her head, wiped her eyes, and smiled brilliantly. “I was just so worried about everything. About Sakura, about having to live on our own, about how many things might be out there waiting to cause another disaster for us, and … well, just suddenly seeing everyone sitting here, eating food we found on our own planet, eating good food we found here, seeing us all smiling, laughing…” She shrugged helplessly and laughed, still with tears in her voice. “I just felt everything let go in me, and I was so relieved, so happy that we did survive, that we’re all here and alive and living…”

Whips felt the strange tight tingle of the same painful, joyous whirl of emotions, knew his skin was shimmering in a clash of colors, and then saw that all around the table, the other Kimeis were also crying in exactly the same way, even little Hitomi.

Akira hugged Laura tight, and suddenly, without any word or gesture, the others all gathered around and hugged, as they had after they knew they had survived and found a destination. Whips enfolded his whole adopted family and squeezed tightly, as he would have twined arms with his mother. Now we know we can survive, that this world is a place worth surviving on. And so now, we will survive, no matter what Lincoln has to throw at us.

Our family will survive.

 

 

 

 

 

The Ethical Magical Girl: Princess Holy Aura — Teaser Chapter

 

Because I’ve had a lot of questions about this new novel (hopefully series), I’m posting the current first chapter which should at least give an idea of what’s to come. Of course, at this early stage there’s no guarantee that this will still be the first chapter, or that this chapter won’t change some as time goes on, but the basic concepts will be there!

 

——

The Ethical Magical Girl, Volume 1: Princess Holy Aura

 

Chapter 1.

 

    The screaming came from the alley to Steve’s right; it was high-pitched, the voice of a child in terror and pain. Steve found himself sprinting down the alley before he’d even consciously realized what he was going to do. This sure wasn’t what I expected after leaving work. Most days he walked home from Barron’s Bagels after cleaning up and making sure the shop was set up for the morning crew, and either prepared for an evening of gaming, or just watching whatever happened to appeal to him that evening.

 

It seemed that tonight wasn’t going to be quite so quiet.

 

There were a lot of shapes moving at the end of the evening-shadowed alley, he realized as he shoved his way past a dumpster. He skidded to a halt, frozen for an instant by the macabre nature of the scene.

 

A little boy – Emmanuel, he realized, a boy who lived in the apartment a few doors down from his – was backed into the far corner of the dead-end alley, eyes wide with fear, face bleeding, beating at what seemed dozens of feral cats that had surrounded the kid. A large white rat – a pet? – was clinging precariously to Emmanuel’s shoulder, balancing as far away from the hissing creatures as possible.

 

Jesus, that looks like a Halloween diorama. Steve knew that feral cats could be dangerous in packs, but he’d never seen such a mob around here; one or two, yeah, but nothing like this. Still, it was one thing to attack a little kid, another to deal with a full-grown man. Steve didn’t like fighting, but he’d found that being six foot three and slightly over three hundred pounds with a good deal of muscle could convince most things to not even try.

 

“HEY!” he bellowed. “SCAT! Get out of here!” He grabbed up a two-by-four from the ground and whacked one of the animals aside. “Go on, get!”

 

All of the cats turned their heads to look at him, an eerily synchronized action that sent gooseflesh running down his spine. Their eyes glinted a uniform green that seemed, impossibly, to be brighter than the light in the alley, almost as though they really were glowing. As one, the entire pack hissed venomously at him and then turned back to their prey.

 

What the hell? Steve was taken momentarily aback. Even the one he’d struck was returning to the attack, leaping up a set of crates for a better attack position. He’d expected the animals to scatter, at least, and really he’d pretty much expected them to run; now that he had a better look, there were only about a dozen of the animals, which meant that he still outweighed all of them put together by more than three to one, maybe four to one. But as Emmanuel threw a panic-stricken gaze towards him, Steve adjusted his grip on the board and struck hard this time. “I said SCAT!”

 

He connected well and truly this time, sending the animal flipping end over end across the alley, and he caught another on the backswing, bored in to start flinging the creatures aside and get to the boy.

 

The hisses suddenly took on a furious screeching note, and then they deepened.

 

Steve fell back, horrified, as the furry little animals swelled to twice their prior size, eyes shrinking to nothing but faint ridges on a black, flat head with a mouth filled with ebony needle-teeth, body distorting to something semi-bipedal, wrinkled batlike wings extending from the shoulders. Blind the things might have been, but they still all faced Steve now, and he had no doubt they could sense him.

 

His stomach churned with fear, his knees shook, and he wanted to run. But there was a little boy in there, in among those monsters, and a tiny furry creature desperately trying to find shelter, and he was not going to leave them.

 

On the positive side… the monsters were now all focused on him.

 

One of them lunged, catching the board and ripping it out of his hands with terrifying strength; two more grabbed the board and broke it apart. Holy crap, they’re strong as hell! I need something tougher!

 

He saw it almost instantly; a lovely thick steel pipe, probably ripped out of some nearby house, leaning against the wall just past one of the things. Got to try.

 

As the creatures started to slowly encircle him, he jumped forward – with a speed that had surprised a lot of people, thinking that his bulk was mostly fat and not merely an overlay of fat on heavy muscle. He raised his iron-toed workboot and stomped as hard as he could on the one in front of him; something crunched and he heard a pained shriek, a quick scuttling to get away that gratified him. Whatever they are, they can feel pain. He hadn’t been sure until now.

 

Something leapt onto his back, sinking what felt like a hundred burning needles into his shoulder and back, narrowly missing his spine. He cried out but finished the charge, caught up the pipe, and then spun around without slowing; his attacker absorbed the impact of his entire weight against the brick wall.

 

Two more flew at him – literally, flapping those leathery wings swiftly and powerfully to propel themselves through the air. Steve swung the pipe around like a baseball bat and a double impact shuddered down the steel shaft; the two monsters were sent smashing into the far wall.

 

But now the others, clearly realizing that Steve was a far more formidable opponent than they had taken him for, attacked in earnest. Teeth and claws slashed at his legs, two of them lunged for his arms and gripped, pulling, trying to disarm him, take him down to the ground where he would be dead in a moment.

 

Steve heard his own scream of pain and fear and it galvanized him; he shoved himself up against the tearing, wriggling mass and forced his body into another charge, ramming into the steel dumpster a little ways up the alley, bouncing back and forth between the walls, using his mass and strength and the hard city itself as a weapon to stun or crush his opponents. He spun the steel pipe around, brought it down in a piledriver blow that impaled one of the night-black monsters completely through, tore another from his arm and hurled it into the wall, hammered his fist into another yawning needle-filled mouth – feeling skin tear and rip – and then spun about like a top, hurling the stunned and disoriented things away.

 

The steel shaft felt right somehow, balanced in a good way like a fine quarterstaff, and its extra weight was comforting, helping firm his resolve and courage against these living nightmares. A lot of them were down now, but there were still more, six of them, and they were stalking, coordinating, remember they can fly, two of them gone, flanking him in the air, other four trying to hem him in!

 

The four in the clear space ahead gave him an idea; instead of retreating, he dove at them, dropping his weight on two of them like a falling anvil, then rolling to his feet before the others quite caught him. The steel pipe whipped around as he rose, and he nailed one of the flying ones, the heavy strike sending it sailing thirty feet almost straight up before plummeting back down to land, limply, on the filthy ground. Steve ignored the aching agony in his arms and back and set the steel staff to whirling up, down, right, left, smashing at anything and everything that moved, the slightest sign of beetle-black motion drawing his wrath and the hard, cold vengeance of steel.

 

Suddenly it was still in the alley; nothing moved but Steve and his shaking, bleeding arms. He looked around, wary, fearful, but no attack came. Everywhere he looked, there were twisted, monstrous bodies… but there was not a hint of motion from any of them.

 

Emmanuel had fallen to the ground, and for a moment Steve had the horrific thought that one of the monsters had killed the boy while Steve was fighting them. But after checking his pulse, Steve decided Emmanuel had just passed out from shock and fear. No wonder; wouldn’t be surprised if I do, myself.

 

But the thought of being unconscious in an alley with those monsters – some of whom might not be quite dead – kept him quite focused on staying alert.

 

From behind Emmanuel crawled what Steve could now definitely see was a large white rat, fur gleaming slivery in the dim glow from distant streetlamps and the skyglow overhead. Oddly, it seemed to be wearing a tiny crown of some sort. Kids do put all sorts of strange things on their pets, that’s for sure.

 

The animal sniffed at Emmanuel, then stood up on its hind legs, surveying the area, sniffing at Steve and the air around. Steve, who had had a pet rat himself some years back, gave an exhausted grin. “‘Sokay, fella. I think I got them all.”

 

“That you did,” the rat said, with a dignified accent. “Well done, Mr…?”

 

Steve blinked, then shook his head. “What the… did you just talk?”

 

“I did. Perhaps it would be better if I introduced myself first, and then you can provide me with your name. I am Silvertail Heartseeker. And you are…?”

 

Am I nuts now? Did I just snap from boredom or whatever and imagine I was fighting monsters instead of cats? Talking rats? What the hell, Steve? You write better RPG scenarios than this!

 

He decided, after a split second, that if he wasn’t going to assume insanity, then dream was the more likely explanation, and therefore, being rude to the talking rat – Silvertail Heartseeker – was pointless. “Um, I’m Steven. Steven Russ.”

 

He tried to stand, found that it was really hard; screaming pain from uncountable lacerations echoed through him. I’ve never hurt like that in a dream. Tiny pains, referred pain from something that happened during the day, but nothing like that. It’s clear pain. Not muffled, not dreamed…

 

“… is this real?”

 

Silvertail Heartseeker nodded in a satisfied way. “The natural question, of course. Yes, Steven Russ, I am afraid this is all too real. You answered calls of the innocent and helpless and risked your life to protect young Emmanuel from things far worse than you imagined existed. For that, I must first thank you. Many there are in the world who would have ignored those cries, and far more who would have fled when mundanity turned monstrous before their eyes.”

 

Silvertail bounced up and laid a pink paw on Steve’s hand.

 

Instantly a white shimmer of light flowed out from the tiny hand-shaped paw, light that was cool and soothing and that surged outward through Steve’s body. He saw the narrow rodent face wrinkle in concentration, the whiskers quiver, as the light erased pain, eased tension. Silvertail sagged down, looking as though he had just spent an hour running on an exercise wheel.

 

Steve flexed his muscles experimentally. There was still pain, but it felt superficial – more like the cat scratches he’d initially expected, not the deep, possibly dangerous wounds the monsters had left. “Wow. Um, thanks.”

 

“On the contrary, as I said, I thank you. I could not cure all of your injuries, but you will suffer no lasting ill effects from this battle.” He glanced at the boy. “Emmanuel will also recover, though he should receive appropriate mundane care shortly.”

 

He drew himself to his full height – which, standing, was probably all of eight or nine inches – and bowed. “I must formally greet you, who have passed a test that few in your world would have passed – a test of empathy, a test of attention, a test of reaction, a test of courage, a test of endurance, all compressed into this single battle. You are the one, the Heart I have been Seeking.”

 

Steve felt a chill of awe and anticipation, sensing that the tiny figure before him was far, far more than it seemed, and that it was speaking a ritual, a destiny, not merely ordinary words.

 

From apparently nowhere, Silvertail Heartseeker produced a glittering brooch, three inches across, of gold and silvery metal, covered with an elaborate pattern in gems. Even to Steve’s untutored eye, it was exquisitely made, the main body in the shape of a strangely broken-pointed star with a jeweled galaxy across it. Silvertail lifted the brooch in both tiny hands and said solemnly,

 

“Steven Russ, you are the Heart that was Sought, the Courage that is needed, the Will that is eternal. It is for you, and you alone, to take up this burden and defend the world against the darkness that now rises to swallow the light. Take you up the Star Nebula Brooch, and become that which is your destiny. Take it, and become your true self – Mystic Galaxy Defender, Princess Holy Aura!”

 

 

 

Castaway Planet: Chapter 13

 

Sakura had discovered the local wildlife was not harmless…

 

——

 

 

Chapter 13

 

 

       Laura restrained the urge to leap forward. Panic would not help her.

Even as she scanned the data from Sakura’s internal medical nanos, she categorized the symptoms of the shaky girl. Skin reddening… pupils dilating… heart rate increasing. Sakura was also looking dizzy, disoriented.

The data from the nanos confirmed her guess. “It’s a hyoscyamine derivative, something like atropine. And a few other chemicals, too.” Thankfully, she knew how to counteract that kind of thing. It was in the basic medikit data.

         She first directed the medical nanos to counteract some of the symptoms—bring the heart rate under control. “It’s okay, honey, I can handle this. Are you with me?”

“Funny… hard to think. Hurts.” Sakura was clearly working hard to focus on her mentally as well as visually.

Heavy dose. But the nanos can slow the reaction, and the kit’s able to do a physostigmine variant. Timed and controlled release to the proper sites, then the nanos can finish adapting to the toxin and start cleaning it out.

Laura made the injection, feeling her own heart starting to slow down finally as she took action. The bright red color faded and slowly, slowly Sakura’s pupils began to contract. “Feeling better?”

“Yes, mom,” Sakura answered, and shakily sat up, then leaned back into Whips’ supporting arms. “It still hurts bad, though.”

The stung area was a twining pattern of reddened welts with dark and light banding. “Looks very much like a jellyfish sting.” Laura looked up. “A land anemone-like thing, then.” She studied the details from the internal nanos in that area. “Yes, there’s cnidoblasts or something like it. Mostly inactive now. The pain’s mostly from an associated toxin, probably meant as a warning to accompany the main poison. Even if the sting doesn’t kill you, you’ll remember it. I’ve got the nanos doing some anesthetic damping. Better?”

“Lots.” She watched her little girl—not so little any more, but she’ll always be little to me anyway—close her eyes and relax.

“That scared the light right out of me,” Whips said quietly. Laura could see that even now Whips’ colors were subdued.

“An important lesson for us, though. We had started to relax after getting through all that underbrush without trouble. Now we know that even things that look like red flowers could be dangerous.”

Sakura smiled weakly. “Don’t think I want to be a demonstration again.”

Laura reached out and hugged Sakura tightly, letting the tears flow finally. “Neither do I. Thank God you’re all right.”

After a few moments she let go and wiped her eyes. “How do you feel? Can you stand up?”

Sakura was a little wobbly, but in a few more minutes she seemed steadier on her feet. “I’m getting better.”

“End of an expedition?” Whips asked.

“Yes. We don’t want to push things any farther, and I want Sakura back to camp and lying down until tomorrow. We don’t know for sure if there are any other effects of those toxins, and without a full medical system I can’t simulate it well enough. I’m also not getting any contact with the base camp, so we need to get closer before we can even update them.”

Laura took the lead, with Sakura in the middle being partly supported and watched over by Whips. It took longer to get out of the forest, but by the time they reached the open area in front of the forest Sakura was moving almost as well as she normally did, though she was still holding her arm well away from anything that could touch it.

Suddenly her omni pinged. “Laura? Are you there?”

“We’re on our way back, sweetheart. Something stung Sakura –”

“Stung her? Is she all right? I’m coming –”

“Akira, don’t panic,” she said in her most confident tones. “She’s walking fine right now. It was dangerous for a few minutes, and we’ve learned a lot, but I think everything’s okay. You stay right where you are. We came out of the woods a little farther west than we went in, but it shouldn’t take more than, oh, forty minutes to get back to you.”

“All right. Sorry,” he answered, his voice a tiny bit sheepish.

“It’s all right, I’d react the same way.”

“So,” he said in a more normal voice, as they continued moving back toward the camp, “you said stung. How?”

She described the events, from the time they’d left the fallen column to the time Sakura had recovered from her sting. “So I think we’re looking at something like a land-dwelling anemone.”

“Or hydroid, which is probably also what those plant-like things that Whips noticed are like. Yes. Very interesting. I’ll have to get some samples of all these things later. I’m also very interested in your samples of potential food—and that ground—dwelling attacker. Did you keep its head?”

“No, honey, sorry. I didn’t want to burden us and thought we’d go farther and get more samples.”

“Don’t worry about it. Unless it was one of a kind, which I very highly doubt, I’m sure we’ll run into more. Hopefully without being bitten.”

“That does worry me, though,” Caroline put in. “We don’t have multiple outfits, and none of us have good hiking boots.”

“We’ll have to start thinking about how to address that,” agreed Laura. “but for now let’s take one problem at a time.” They came to the edge of the crash scar, and Sakura gave a delighted laugh. Laura smiled as well. “It seems that you’ve helped solve one of the problems, anyway.”

Tucked slightly under an overhang from the crash, the inflatable temporary shelter looked large and solid, a rounded almost igloo-like shape with a tall entrance hall and two rounded lobes extending out to each side. Transparent windows were visible, allowing natural light in when desired, and the faint, dark sheen on the outer side of the shelter showed that it was coated with active high-efficiency rugged photovoltaics.

She could see Melody, sitting on a flat-topped stone a short distance from the shelter, and her husband was visible now, just coming around the other side, but… “Where are Caroline and Hitomi?”

“We’re on our way back. We went up the scar some distance and we’ve been picking up metal and composite junk that might be usable.”

“I found bowls!” Hitomi announced proudly.

“Bowls?” echoed Whips. “What do you mean?”

“She found empty shells or carapaces that are close enough in size that we can actually carry them pretty easily, and look like they could work as bowls or small pots,” Caroline answered. “They’re quite tough, too, so I think we can use them freely, if there isn’t something poisonous in the material.”

“Can we determine that?” Akira asked cautiously.

“Definitely,” Laura said, picking her way down the slope. “My medkit will certainly be able to do that much. Melody, why are you sitting down reading when everyone else is working?”

Melody flushed slightly. “I helped put up the shelter.”

“I know, honey, but you can’t just stop because you finish one task. Why don’t you go inside and see if you can figure out the best setup for our living and sleeping space? You like solving space puzzles.”

Somewhat to her credit, Melody managed to restrain a roll of her eyes, and stood up. “Yes, mom.”

Laura shook her head as Melody disappeared inside the shelter. “Where does she get that from? Neither of us were like that.”

Akira laughed and came over to hug Sakura. “My love, you didn’t know me when I was young. Melody reminds me rather forcefully of me, which is why I try not to encourage her.” He looked down at Sakura. “Now you go lie down and rest.”

“But I’m –”

“Don’t argue with your father. Or your doctor, who happens to be your mother,” Laura said with a smile. “I wouldn’t have had you walk at all if we’d had any choice on the matter. After what you’ve gone through, you should get a lot of rest. Melody,” she said to her omni, and saw the twelve-year-old acknowledge the signal, “pull out Sakura’s bed now.”

“You okay, Saki?” Melody’s laziness was no longer evident when asking about her sister.

“I think so, but mom and dad don’t want to take chances.”

Laura noted that Sakura’s gait wasn’t nearly as bouncy as its usual habitual rhythm as she went inside. Whips obviously saw it too. “She’s more tired than she lets on,” the big Bemmie said.

“I’d be astounded if she wasn’t.” She pulled out the sample bags. “Let’s check out what we found.”

“While you do that, I’ll go make myself a land-nest,” Whips said. Before she could say anything, Whips continued, “Doctor… Laura, I’m a lot bigger than the rest of you and I’m also a lot tougher. I don’t mind being outside; if it rains, that’s just fine with me. If you don’t have to squeeze me into the shelter, you’ll be a lot more comfortable. If I bury myself in dirt and sand, it’ll be hard for anything to just come bother me, anyway.”

“He’s right,” Akira said. “It makes sense. Plus if he has to go to the sea for any reason, it will be much easier from here in the open than trying to go out through the entranceway. He’s also got better senses than ours in some areas, so he might help protect us that way. I’ve set up Caroline’s omni as a security monitor, but it can’t hurt to have someone outside who can be a second line of defense.”

She couldn’t argue the logic, even though a part of her still felt that it was like marginalizing the young Bemmie to a less-desirable neighborhood. Quashing that irrational feeling, she nodded. “All right, go ahead.”

The two adults bent over their analysis devices and studied readouts. After fifteen minutes, Akira shook his head. “Those are indeed berries, but they’ve got alkaloids or some close analogues which are quite toxic in them. On the other hand, their very existence gives me hope that we will find other fruits which are, in fact, edible.”

Analysis of the meat went somewhat faster, partly because they were both getting used to this much more primitive setup, and Laura found herself grinning foolishly at Akira as they finished. “Completely edible… and nutritious,” he said, and the two of them hugged. “Food, honey. There is food we can eat here!”

“That’s worth celebrating,” agreed Caroline’s voice behind them. The oldest and youngest of her children came around the side of the shelter in the now-setting sunlight. Caroline had a large bundle of assorted junk on her back, strapped together with what appeared to be salvaged cable. Hitomi was doggedly half-carrying, half-dragging a string of moderate-sized objects. “Of course, let’s hope it doesn’t taste terrible.”

“Look, Mommy—bowls!” Hitomi held the string of objects up.

The shells were of a peculiar shape—effectively flat-bottomed, with perhaps a tiny curve, generally cylindrical, and the top flared out in small ripples around the edge. Something about the shape and green color tugged at her memory; then she realized the truth and laughed again.

“What is it, Mom?”

“I think what Hitomi’s picked up are a bunch of shells of the same kind of creature that stung Sakura,” she said.

Akira glanced at them and then looked over the footage that Laura had brought back. “I do believe you’re right.”

“I’m going to go show her!” Hitomi said, but Laura caught at her sleeve.

“Wait a while, honey,” Laura said. In her monitor, she saw Sakura, and her vital signs. A faint snore came from the girl.

“Wait a while,” she repeated and smiled over at Akira. “She’s sleeping like a rock.”

 

 

 

Polychrome: Chapter 23

Back to Our Hero, who is out there looking for allies…

 

 

——-

 

 

Chapter 23.

     The gates of the city of Gilgad stood wide before us, a full fifty feet high in a wall of white and black marble. The wide street continued on, with houses and larger buildings visible, street vendors, and hundreds of people bustling about the city’s business. “You should be safe here, Amrin. At least as long as anyone is, and I hope that will turn out to be a long, long time.” I shook his hand.

“Many, many thanks, Lord Erik,” Amrin said, and his family – Ralla, his wife, and Amril and Rallin, their son and daughter – added their own thanks with enthusiasm which I found acutely embarrassing. After all, I’d just happened to be in the right place in the right time, and I was getting an awful lot out of them from that happy accident. I could have spent a long time wandering around before finding my way to the port city, and by walking with Amrin and his family I’d gotten a clear and detailed picture of the situation in Gilgad and surrounding areas.

“Well, you’re welcome again, and stop with the Lords already. I’ve got no titles yet. Just a sword and pretty armor.”

“And the strength of a mountain!” Amril piped up enthusiastically.

“Ha! Not that simple, Amril. Not that simple at all. Why, your father could probably out-wrestle me.”

He laughed at that and of course denied the possibility; after what he’d seen, naturally, that wouldn’t seem possible, and I wasn’t going to try to explain the True Mortal business. No need, and good reason not to. “You won’t have trouble living here?”

“No, L… Erik. I have a few stoneseeds already harvested and some savings we brought. It will keep us for quite some time.” His tone of voice reassured me that I hadn’t just brought them here to hide in genteel poverty.

After a few more farewells, we finally parted. My destination wasn’t hard to spot; the great square-cut castle dominated the center of Gilgad, with outbuildings ranging eastward towards the sea.

Now for the next step… and thanks to Amrin, I even know what I’m doing after this little sequence of events.

The stoneseed farmer almost certainly hadn’t guessed the significance of various things he – and his children – had told me. The most important being something little Rallin had said shortly after we’d set out: “At first I thought you were the Penitent, but then I realized you were much too tall.”

The Penitent… local folk hero. No one knew where he came from or who he was, a mysterious grey-cloaked figure who appeared from out of the mountains, striking down raiders, leaving food for the hungry, jewels for the robbed, never staying long enough to accept thanks, almost never speaking… but that told me all I needed to know. I know who you are, Penitent, and when the time comes, we will be definitely talking.

But that wouldn’t be for a while yet. First things first. I strode up the center of the street, conscious of the stares of numerous residents of Gilgad. Wish I could be subtle… but I’d stand out here anyway. Most of these people are shorter than me, even the men, dark-haired, tanned… No, I’d have about as much chance of sneaking in to see the King here as I would in Japan.

To my surprise, the King of Gilgad was, according to Amrin, the same man as the one described in the books, though his name was Rin Ki-tin – making it obvious where Baum had gotten the name Rinkitink, given Baum’s love of wordplay. But Amrin’s description – given with affectionate smiles from all his family – depicted the same personality, a man of immense appetite, vast girth, and even vaster mirth, who nonetheless hid shrewd statesmanship behind the guise of a rollicking buffoon. He was old, very old now, but as far as Amrin knew he was still as sharp-witted as ever.

Lucky for me if that’s true. Old King Rinki… Rin Ki-tin was just the man I needed to talk to.

The guards at the gate were leaning up against the walls, looking rather bored, but they straightened up as I approached. One held out his spear, barring my path. “Hold, stranger. What business have you here?”

“I’d very much like an audience with the King, if I might, sir.” I’d found that being respectful to guards, police, and soldiers was always the best policy. They often got to deal with people who didn’t respect them in the worst possible conditions, so giving them their due gave you the best reaction. Usually.

“Well, now, nothing wrong with wanting an audience, but the King isn’t receiving visitors right now. Seeing as he’s not here right now.”

Damn. “Is he expected back soon, then?”

The guards exchanged glances and chuckled. “Whenever Chancellor Inkarbleu despairs of being summoned by the King and goes to find him of his own accord. Which will earn the Chancellor another three days of awaiting his terrible execution and then a stay of execution, and another three weeks of rewards for his invaluable service to the Crown.”

Well, now I knew where the King was and who I needed to see instead. “Then would it be possible for me to speak with the Chancellor? I have travelled a very, very long way.”

The two had been studying my armor, and I was rather gratified to see that they were clearly recognizing something unique to the design. “One moment.”

The two guards withdrew, conferred for a moment, and then turned back to me. “Please step inside.”

Once inside the entryway of the castle – a large, arched tunnel through impressively thick walls – the guards motioned me to a side room which was obviously a guard office. “Now, sir, your name – and if you can, your business?”

I smiled. Smart guards. Someone chose well. “My name is Erik Medon. And you’re right, I’d rather not state my business to anyone except the Chancellor. But I think you’ve probably guessed part of it. And you are…?”

They looked startled; I guess that people didn’t ask their names very often, treating them like speedbumps or door-openers. “First Sergeant Huru Ro-Van and Second Sergeant Zammu Rin-Aro, sir!”

“Glad to meet you both, Huru, Zammu.” I shook hands. “Now could one of you let the Chancellor know I would like to see him at his earliest convenience?”

Huru nodded at Zammu, who saluted and set off at a near-run.”Is it… happening, sir?”

I looked at him for a moment, considering. Then I said “It might be. But a lot could still go wrong, so I don’t want it getting out, understand?”

Huru straightened, and nodded. “Understood, sir!” But I could see a gleam in his eye.

I felt both glad and a little guilty. Glad that I could bring some hope to these people, and guilty that I was using him, Zammu, and Amrin’s family. All of them would quietly spread the word. There’d be a whispering of hope, getting stronger, no clear source, hard to trace – but rising up, building support for what we needed to do. Sorry for being a manipulative bastard, Poly. I hope you don’t think too badly of me for it.

Zammu came running back. “Sir! Chancellor Inkarbleu says he will see you immediately.”

I followed Zammu and Huru through the main courtyard, up wide white marble steps with polished black rails, into a vast entryway. Impressive for something built basically by hand, even if the whole castle would have fit inside of Nimbus’ training hall. At the end of the entryway, twin doors were thrown open, and Zammu announced, “Erik Medon, traveller, to see the Chancellor!”

I stepped through and looked up, the doors shutting behind me and leaving me alone with the Chancellor. Chancellor Inkarbleu was seated in a secondary throne, mounted three steps down from the high dias where the King’s throne sat. Inkarbleu stood, and I met his gaze, sharp black eyes in a seamed, narrow face atop a very spare frame in simple formal black robes trimmed with silver. “Erik Medon. An unusual name, indeed.”

“Not terribly common where I come from, either,” I admitted.

“What brings you here, traveller, and what do you seek from Gilgad?”

“From Gilgad directly, I merely seek passage on one of your vessels to a destination only your captains know.”

“That… destination is a closely guarded secret,” Inkarbleu said, tone carefully neutral. “I need something more than the word of an unknown traveller to even consider your request.”

“Of course.” I reached into my armor, and brought out the Jewel.

Immediately the huge gem flared with polychromatic radiance, and a brilliant arch stretched outward, filling the room from one side to the other. Inkarbleu staggered back, knees striking his throne’s edge so he sat down hard, staring. The Rainbow hung there for a moment, and I could hear the Music of the Spheres, chiming and singing, a faerie fanfare. Then it faded, and I returned the Jewel to its hidden location.

Inkarbleu’s face was white beneath its tan. “The Rainbow Lord moves against the Usurpers?”

“He does. We are asking little of Gilgad, but that little is absolutely vital.”

Inkarbleu shook his head slowly – not a refusal, but a sign of disbelief and the need to think. “If they suspect we are assisting an actual attempt to overthrow them, Ugu and Amanita will level this land, Lord Medon.”

I didn’t contest the assignment of nobility here. “Yes, they will. If it’s worth their time. But if the bid against them fails, they are more likely to use the actual participants as an example. I won’t pretend you won’t get more pressure brought against you. There would be costs, and they would be ugly.

“But if no one will help, they’ll come for you anyway, someday. All of you know it, every single land in Faerie has to know that. This temporary peace lasts exactly so long as they’re not quite sure they can take you all.”

Inkarbleu sat, looking down, for a long time. I didn’t dare interrupt his thoughts; I was asking him to make a decision which really was the King’s to make, one that could affect every living person in his country, and I could pressure him no more than he was clearly pressuring himself.

But then his head came up, and with a rising heart I saw that he was smiling.

“My Lord Medon, these are weighty matters of State indeed. Matters of deep policy and terrible consequence,” he said, rising slowly, still smiling. “And I am afraid that I simply cannot make this decision myself. To involve this country in these affairs? No, no, it would not do, it would be an inexcusable over-stepping of my authority.”

The words were not encouraging, but the smile was broadening, so I simply smiled back. “And so…?”

“And so, my Lord, I must insist that you ask the King yourself, directly.” The smile became a grin, and mine answered as I understood how Inkarbleu had found the perfect solution to the problem. “And as the King has already been too long absent from his throne, and as your business is most urgent, I will myself go to fetch him hither. And,” he said, with an elaborately careless air as though it were an afterthought, “you may accompany me on that errand, if you will, and thus ask your question somewhat earlier than otherwise.”

I could not help but laugh. By taking this approach, Inkarbleu could quite honestly say he had made no decision to assist me in anything, had committed Gilgad to no sides. And at the same time, by inviting me along, he would be bringing me exactly where I wanted to go, giving me exactly the assistance I needed while on an errand which, as Huru and Zammu’s conversation had shown, was an expected and oft-repeated one, one which would draw no undue attention and which thus might not even be immediately connected with what I was doing.

I bowed deeply to the Chancellor. “I would be honored beyond words, sir, if you would be so kind as to allow me aboard your vessel so that I might put my case directly to the King.”

“Very well, then,” he said. “You may stay here in the Castle until we depart – which will be early on the morrow, if I have any say in it, and I believe I shall. Zammu! Huru!”

The doors popped open. “Yes, Lord Chancellor?”

“Show Lord Medon to the First Guest Chambers, and then tell the Master of Ships to ready the Royal Galley. I have decided it is time our aged and reckless monarch returned to his seat for a time.” As the two began to lead me out, he called out, “And have old Keys clean out my favorite cell, I’m sure the King will have me prepared for execution as soon as we return and I want everything ready!”

Castaway Planet: Chapter 12

Time to take a real look around their new home!

 

 

 

——

 

 

Chapter 12.

 

 

              “No, Akira, you keep it,” Laura said, pressing the pistol into her husband’s hand.

Whips could see he was still reluctant. “But you’re the one going –”

“I’m the only one here who actually knows how to fight. Police background, remember? And Whips is coming with me and Sakura on the scouting expedition, so that means that you’ll need something to protect yourselves with while you get things set up here and start scavenging the crash scar nearby. Tomorrow you and Whips will do your fishing expedition, and then I’ll take the gun.”

Akira nodded, and looked over to Whips. “Keep an eye on them for me, all right?”

“Of course, Mr… Akira.”

“Come on, Mom!” Sakura was already at the top of the ridge of earth carved out by LS-5.

“If you keep trying to get ahead of us, Sakura, you will stay behind with your father,” Laura said bluntly. Sakura immediately froze. “Honey, I’m glad you’re enthusiastic—God knows we need all the positive attitude we can get—but you can’t go running ahead much. We have no idea what we’re getting into out there, and staying together is vital. You understand?”

Sakura nodded—but with a bit of a stubborn tension, Whips thought. We are a lone pod now, Sakura, he said over their private link. Don’t be angry that your mother wants us all safe.

The young girl’s shoulders relaxed slightly, as both Whips and Laura came up next to her. She turned to her mother. “Sorry, Mom.”

“It’s all right.” She lifted her head and looked up and out. “Now that’s quite a view.”

For the first time, the three beheld the floating continent they stood on clearly. Sparse shrubs or something like it were scattered here and there nearby, with serrated, split leaves of the same brilliant Lincoln green that Hitomi had noticed and named the world after. There was also short-cropped ground cover of multiple sorts, most of it the same shade of green but occasional spots of blue, red, and purple. Shimmering and brightly colored somethings moved through the air, glittering with the iridescence of dragonfly wings. None of these things came near them yet.

Perhaps half a kilometer off, larger, treelike growths began, drooping what seemed spiral leaves nearly to the ground and standing closer together in what swiftly became a forest of deep emerald and aqua, with splotches of brighter color. Something much larger than the little things near them darted up and in and out from the trees, soaring and diving like ventsprites on Europa.

Farther out the terrain spread out and rose higher, stretching towards the sky. Now that he realized that the entire thing was a floating mass and not a continent, he was astounded by the size. Hundreds of meters above meant at least that much below. “These things are bigger than anything like them on Earth, aren’t they?”

Caroline answered over the omni’s link. “Masswise? This one probably outmasses every coral reef on Earth put together. I’m betting that when I go through the actual structure it’ll turn out to have a lot of carbon in it, used as natural reinforcement fibers or something.”

“All right, we’re off,” Laura said briskly. A brief wave of static drowned out her next words, so she paused and then repeated, “As I said, we’re off. Akira, I don’t intend to go very far outside of that two-kilometer maximum range, but with interference we might well be out of communication for a while.”

“I promise not to panic,” Akira said. “Just be careful, all of you.”

“We will.”

The three began walking—well, in his case sort of dragging—inland, keeping along the edge of the scar left by LS-5.

At first, Whips tried to keep as much of himself off the ground as he could, and he noticed that the others were stepping as carefully and gingerly as they could. Finally, though, he sighed. “I can’t keep this up all the way while we’re exploring. I guess I have to assume that the ground’s not much more dangerous than it is on Earth or our planned colony, right?”

Laura laughed, as did Sakura. “You’re right. If it’s really that much worse, we’re in real trouble. Just keep an eye out for, oh, the equivalent of snakes or something.”

He rippled assent, and focused his two lower eyes on the ground. The upper eye, though, could keep watch ahead, and he noticed something that seemed to stick out. He stretched out his topside arm and pointed ahead of them and slightly to the side. “What’s that, do you think?”

Lying on the ground a hundred meters or so away was what appeared to be a very large broken column, slightly tapered, wound about with vines.

“What is that?” murmured Sakura. “A building?”

“What?” Akira’s voice and the others echoed the startlement.

“Calm down, everyone,” Laura said, not without a smile. “Sakura, it does look interesting, but I would bet that it’s natural.”

It took a little longer to reach it than Whips had expected, because it was much bigger than he’d thought. The wider portions were over four and a half meters across, and the whole thing was well over thirty meters long. It was clearly recently broken, with sharp edges around the visible white-pink exterior. The twining vinelike stuff seemed oddly… plated, Whips thought, but it didn’t react to prodding or, after a moment’s hesitation, cutting, when Sakura tried a Shapetool blade on it. “It’s broken off here at the base,” Laura said musingly. “Except I don’t see the actual base it broke off from.”

Sakura pointed off to their right. “In the trench, Mom!”

Sure enough, there was a squat circular something in the trench which seemed the right size and showed the same bright white-pink material. “Oh,” said Whips, understanding, “we must have hit it during landing and made it fall.” From this angle he could look back and see down the center of some of the pieces; the column was hollow. “It seems to be a floatcoral structure of some sort, not engineered. Sorry, Sakura.”

“Darn. Still, it is pretty impressive.” From her greater height the young Kimei squinted ahead. “You know, Mom, I think that some of those trees in the forest are actually some of these columns.”

Whips raised himself on his two lower arms and focused all three eyes in that direction. “I think you’re right. There seem to be some scattered trees that actually don’t have those top fronds.”

“Well, let’s go take a look at the forest. We haven’t seen anything that I’d want to test as edible yet—experience shows that it’s the plants that tend to be more toxic, and I’m not quite ready to try catching the equivalent of ants for dinner,” Laura said. “How’re you doing, Whips?”

“Not bad, Laura,” he answered. He realized he meant it. Despite the panic and confusion earlier today, he felt better now than he had in a couple of weeks. It was amazing what a couple dips in a real ocean had done for him. “Really. I know I look clumsy on land, but I can keep up with you guys for quite a while. Don’t worry about that.”

“It does look harder than walking, but I guess you should know. Just make sure you tell us if you’re getting tired enough to turn back; remember that we’ll have to walk all the way back, too.”

“I know. I will.”

As they approached the forest, the undergrowth became higher; Whips found himself plowing through it, and then paused in startlement. What was that?

“What is it, Whips?” Attuned to his movements and moods, Sakura had noticed his reaction first.

“Wait.” He concentrated and relaxed, reaching out with that sense which was usually so useless above water…

And there it was. A faint chime, a tiny vibration in the world. He pushed experimentally at one of the thicker “plants” he’d been shoving through, and the chiming increased slightly, shifted in tone. “Wow. Sakura, Laura, some of these probably are plants, but some aren’t. These things,” he nudged the shiny-stemmed, multi-branched object with what seemed greenish threads trailing along the branches, “they’re alive more like we are. They react fast, they’re like some of the animals in the ocean. They look like plants, but they’re not.”

“You mean like hydroids or barnacles or something of that nature?” came Akira’s voice faintly over the comm. “That’s a surprise. There are definite limitations to such creatures out of water, and I would think that would prevent colonization. Or at least that the land-dwelling forms would lose the harder shells which must be very energy-intensive to form.”

“I don’t know, sir, but I know what I sense. Skinsense is pretty good about that, and if I can feel it at all here out of water, it’s actually an active sender, not just passive.”

Laura bent over, studying it. “Here’s some images, hon. You can look them over while we keep going.”

“Thanks so much, Laura. Oh, my, this is fascinating. Melody, take a look at this…”

The three explorers moved on; Whips felt a little sorry about mashing things under his admittedly broad belly pad, but there weren’t any paths. None of the squashing seemed, so far, to be dumping anything irritating onto him, but he still was nervous about running over unknown creatures.

A tap… taptaptap… sound ahead under the trees caused all three of them to halt. “Sounded like something walking,” Laura whispered. Whips bobbed his agreement as Sakura nodded. The three of them waited to see if the unknown creature would approach or flee. After a moment, Whips made a single heaving step forward; there was an explosion of tapping steps that dwindled into the distance, and Whips relaxed slightly.

“If it runs,” he said, “it’s less likely to try to attack us.”

“On the downside,” Sakura pointed out, “if it knows enough to run, it means there’s things it expect to run from. Wow!”

He turned his gaze up just in time to see something disappear into the foliage far above, the spiraling leaves rippling for a moment. “What was it?”

“I… don’t know.” She played her omni’s recording back, showing them something zipping from one tree to another. It seemed to have a long, pointed head, two pairs of wings or something like them, and two or maybe even four tails. Unfortunately, the images were blurred. The omnis were in lower-power mode and so high-speed image capture was disabled by default. Even with high-efficiency solar cells the omnis would take a bit to charge and no one wanted them to run out while they were separated. “Looks like it was about a meter long. Probably won’t bother anything as big as us, but we’d better keep an eye on the trees, too.”

It was really becoming clear to Whips that he had to treat this like an expedition into an unknown vent region on Europa. Even now, a hundred years after contact, most Bemmies still explored their world with spears and courage and not much else, and you never knew what was hiding in the next crevice. And up here, he had no skinsense, and the soundsense was pretty limited too. He could do a sort of acoustic ranging at ten meters or so, but nothing like the sonar his people were accustomed to. On the other hand, he could still use a loud enough soundpulse that it could hurt at close range, and he was much better at tracking sounds and getting direction out of them than his human friends.

“Well, now, this looks more promising.” On a tall bush, or low tree, were growing several teardrop-shaped blue-purple things. “Whips, is this a plant or an animal?”

He reached out and touched it gingerly. Nothing. “I’m pretty sure that’s a plant. Do you think those are berries?”

“They might be. Worth a sample, anyway.” Laura reached out with gloved hands (her medikit had several reusable pairs, Whips knew) and plucked one cautiously. There was no reaction, so she dropped it into a sample bag which had been one of the ration packages.

As they turned to move on, something lunged partway from a hole in front of them and hissed.

Whips didn’t think about it. He just saw jaws with black-blue teeth extending towards Laura and reacted. One arm shoved both Laura and Sakura back, and the other two lashed out, griptalons extending, whipping around and pulling.

The thing was braced in its burrow, but Whips’ talons struck deep. His over two hundred twenty kilograms of mass far outweighed the target. It flew from its hole, trailing soil, and Whips spun, smashing it into the scale-shining bole of a nearby tree. It shrieked and fell limp, twitching slightly. Above, the foliage rustled as other creatures fled in startlement.

Laura was just recovering, eyes wide; Sakura was helping her to her feet. “Are you all right?” Whips asked.

“Fine,” she answered, a bit shakily. “I… you know, I don’t think it was actually attacking.”

“Probably not,” Whips admitted, feeling a little embarrassed now. “It was a threat display, as Akira would say. I just…”

“… reacted to protect us. Thank you, Whips.” Laura looked down at the creature he’d just killed. “And honestly, I don’t think I would have wanted you to wait.”

The thing was over two meters long and thicker around than Laura’s thigh, with multiple legs spaced in four rows down its sides. It had four eyes, one pair top and bottom, and a mouth like a spiky four-section door. In general nastiness it reminded Whips of a smaller version of the huge miremaws, ambush predators native to Europa.

But the thought of miremaws, which were as delicious as they were savage, did bring to mind the other question. “I wonder if it’s edible?”

Laura smiled. “Worth a sample or three.” With the Shapetools providing maximal blades, it didn’t take very long to cut sections from the creature in several locations. The blood, Whips noted, was red-purple in color. As they cut it apart, Laura reached out and carefully pulled out one of the dark fangs. “Hmm… yes, Whips, take a look at that.”

The very tip of the fang had a small hole in it. “Venomous.”

“Yes. And a quick analysis indicates a nasty neurotoxin. A good thing you killed it before it could fight back. That means we need to be very careful. These creatures could easily kill any of us—including you.”

“Can’t you make an antivenom?” Sakura asked.

“I might, and certainly our medical nanos will do their best to prevent untoward effects, but everything has its limits.” He could read the concern on Laura’s face. “Remember, honey, all I’ve got is my kit. I did—at your father’s advice—have a lot of extra nanodust made up, and I have some of it here, but we have to remember there aren’t any hospitals, no medbays, nothing but what I carry with me.”

Sakura looked more sober as they moved on, and Whips felt a quivery tension in his guts. It’s funny, a century or two ago I wouldn’t have even known what a ‘nano’ was, now I’m afraid of not being able to rely on them.

“Here it is!” Sakura sang out suddenly. “Wow, it’s big.”

In front of them, looming over everything else in sight, was the undamaged twin of the column they’d seen. Whips was impressed. Standing, the thing was huge, farther across than Whips could stretch his bottom arms and extending beyond sight through the canopy above. Scaly vinelike things twined around it and other plants, or plantlike things, grew on its sides, mostly the same shades of green but with occasional splashes of color; most evident were round green cylindrical bulges about the size of Laura’s fist with a puff of brilliant scarlet feathery fronds extending something like fifteen centimeters out in all directions. There were other objects affixed to the trunk that were less spectacular; ovoid, dark-colored, ranging in size from smaller than his last finger’s claw to as big as Laura’s head.

“Mom? I’m going to go up, see what I can see from a higher vantage point.”

Laura hesitated, then nodded reluctantly. “I know how good you are at climbing. Just be careful; if you don’t see a good handhold, you stop right away. And try not to touch anything other than these vines, which we’ve already looked over, okay?”

“Okay. Well, there’s those leaves up there, but I’ll check them before I try going through.” She tested the stability of the vine, seemed satisfied, and began climbing.

Whips admitted he envied Sakura her climbing skill. He was very strong for his size and he could, in fact, climb using his three arms to get him up into things that even human climbers had a hard time with, but he was generally pretty slow. Sakura was like a monkey, making her way up now with an assured speed that ignored the possibility that she even could fall, let alone ever actually would.

Sakura reached the point at which the column penetrated the canopy, then took out her Shapetool and turned it into a long, slender rod. She smacked all the leaves nearby and poked through the area she intended to climb. Small creatures fled at her actions. A few moments later she disappeared from sight through the foliage.

“Wow. Mom, I can see a long way now,” came Sakura’s voice from above. “Those hills keep going quite a distance—I can’t see the end. We’ve got a couple more lagoons off to, um, I guess it’s south? They’ve got lighter water color, too, so I think they’re shallow water we might be able to fish in or something.” A pause. “Holy wow, you should see the scar LS-5 left. It goes on and on, even farther than I thought. I can’t believe we survived that! It’s totally awesome, though.”

“Anything else?”

“There’s… like paths or something through the trees—I can see places where they’re not as tall or they’re separated by a little bit. And there’s some kind of big clearing off to the west, almost straight west from where we are, before the hills. Might be the edge of the forest, actually. Maybe if I got a little higher, but I’m almost out of handholds I trust. Oh, neat.”

“What?” Whips demanded. It was really quite annoying to hear someone else talking about things you couldn’t see.

“There’s a hole in the side of this thing, and it’s hollow, just like the fallen one. I can feel a cool breeze coming out of it, too.”

“Don’t go in!”

“Mom, I’m not stupid, that other one was hollow, it’d be like a what, twenty meter fall?” A pause. “Okay, I got the best imagery my omni could get, I’m coming down.”

Sakura descended almost as quickly as she had gone up. The path was slightly different as handholds that were easy to reach from below might be harder than other hand and foot-holds for the way down. As she passed close to one of the scarlet puffs, the fronds suddenly flicked out and Sakura gave a combined scream and curse, nearly falling, catching herself. “OW! Ow ow OW!”

“Hold on, honey! Just keep coming down as fast as you can!” The worry in Laura’s voice was the same as in Whips’ heart; if one of the native creatures was dangerous, what about these?

“Coming, Mom… oh, that hurts…” Sakura nearly missed a grab. “Oh, crap. Mom, I feel… funny. Shaky. And things look a little blurry.”

Whips slid up to the base of the column, then opened his arms high and wide, keeping the griptalons sheathed—except for a few on his lowest arm-branches, which were gripping the base of the column. “Drop down.”

She gave a quick glance down and, blurry vision or not, understood what he was doing, and let go.

Sakura plummeted the final eight meters like a dead weight.