Chapter Eleven
Peter Wu rubbed dust off his hands as he connected Craig’s suit to the battery that had originally powered Hsontlosh’s gun-toting proxrov. The paratrooper had arrived just before dark, face grey with exhaustion and fear; his suit had almost run out of power. If that hadn’t been bad enough, his helmet’s alarm system had spent the last two hours issuing increasingly urgent warnings to that effect.
Wu smiled encouragingly at the miserable sergeant, resisted the urge to go to the other side of their shelter and pat him on the shoulder. Girten had done his best, but he’d been unable to manage the bewildering array of devices and controls required to keep the suit powered, diminish needless drains on its batteries, and make use of a variety of key features. As a result, his greatest problem was not his profound exhaustion or lack of sleep; it was his certainty that he could not survive in this new world and that he was nothing more than a burden to the rest of the Crewe.
Granted, Girten had ample reason to be disappointed. He’d not understood how to take an air sample, and so had remained buttoned up ever since landing. Consequently, he’d spent the first two days existing solely on the protein compound available through the tube in the helmet, and then spent the entirety of this day without any nourishment at all. The hasty shipside instruction on setting up and connecting the solar cell had been confusing to start with, and he’d been unable to navigate the Dornaani HUD well enough to locate the instructions. Had the suit not had a limited kinetic energy recapture system built into it, he’d never have made it through the third day. And if he hadn’t used the frame-tracking grid on the way down, Peter doubted he’d have known how to bring up the fortuitously similar transponder tracker after he’d landed. And if he hadn’t figured that out . . .
Wu sat next to Craig’s musette bag and inspected the rest of his rations while, finally freed of his helmet, the GI was able to eat a whole day’s worth of solid food. Peter was satisfied the food was still edible, thanks to the generally low temperatures, but they’d need to increase their intake to ensure it was used before it spoiled.
Girten looked up, cheeks still full. “I could probably eat another,” he ventured. His tone said there was no “probably” about it.
Wu shook his head. “I recommend against it. Best to let your stomach process this before adding more.”
Girten nodded, crestfallen. He looked at the low tent that they’d made from their shelter halves. “Nice being out of that suit,” he sighed.
Wu nodded. “And you got here just in time for us to set this up.” Girten nodded, a hint of gratitude in his eyes. He’d been glad—desperately so—to actually be useful; whatever else had changed in one hundred seventy-five years, military tent halves remained largely the same in shape and construction. And when Peter had shown him how to connect the temperature-exchange module that came with it, Craig had only required one thorough explanation, followed by a quick review, to begin setting it up himself.
Wu nodded at the small, humming unit that was cycling cold air out of their shelter. “It is running just as it should, Craig. Well done.”
Girten nodded but looked away.
Had he been alone, Peter would have closed his eyes in self-remonstration. That sounded like praise for a childishly simple task . . . because it was, you fool. You are not a social worker; you are a soldier and an operative. Speak directly. “Every meal, we will go over another piece of knowledge you must have for survival. The first will be the suit’s ability to help you carry your load.”
“It’s what?”
“Think of the suit as having a robot built into it. That robot will bear some of the weight. But it uses a great deal of energy.”
Girten nodded. “So, at lunch, we’ll go over the solar panel, right?”
Peter’s pleased smile surprised even him. “Yes. That is correct.” So he can get this. Meaning . . . “We should have reviewed more systems like these when we were still waiting back on Rainbow.”
Girten shrugged. “Oh, I was plenty busy. Had to dig hidey-holes for the corvette and the coldcells, had to learn all about your radios and computers and—damn, it’s hard to remember all the new stuff there was to qualify on. I’m just sorry I wasn’t better at it.”
Peter suppressed a frown. Now that he thought about it, Girten’s name had never come up as being a poor learner.
“And you know,” Craig blurted out, “I was a pretty damned good paratrooper, back in Fran—well, back in my day.” His face crumpled. “But here—sheesh.”
Peter stared at him. “Sergeant Girten. Without any prior experience, you jumped out of a spaceship and landed—alive and uninjured—on a planet it was just barely orbiting. By any definition, that is a resounding success.”
Craig’s frown modulated into a broken smile. “I guess that’s true enough. I—”
The wind rose quickly; it produced a low moan as it went over the lip of the wadi just a meter above them.
“Damn,” he said with a sympathetic shudder, “this place is damned cold at night. It’s like I could feel it through the suit. And when I went out to, er, unload the waste desiccator, I swear it reminded me of the Ardennes. Without the trees.” He glanced at Peter. “Must be below zero out there, yeah?”
Peter frowned before he understood. “Ah. You are thinking in terms of Fahrenheit?”
“Well . . . yeah.”
“Four below. But it usually gets lower.”
“Sounds like the Ardennes, all right.”
Peter nodded, remembering what Bannor had shared about Girten before they’d departed Zeta Tucanae for Collective space. It was the kind of crucial information that never made it into a file, that only existed as scuttlebutt. And in the case of Craig Girten, it was that as likeable as he was, he was considered a “black rabbit’s foot”: the fellow who attracts disasters to the unit he’s in . . . and is the only one to survive.
It had started when he jumped into Normandy, then again during action in Holland. And then twice more in the Ardennes: first when his original squad had been chopped to pieces by a troop of Panthers, the next time as part of a pickup platoon from various units that got overrun on the perimeter at Bastogne. Each time, he had been out in front of the main body, either in an observation post or as a forward observer. Each time, he had been overlooked, or the only survivor in his hole, as the onrushing Nazis bypassed him in their push to breach the line. And when he woke up in this century, the pattern had repeated on Turkh’saar; he was the only one to survive in his hole when the Hkh’Rkh steamrolled most of the defenses at the River Kakaagsukh’s northern ford.
Ironically, he’d originally been considered a good-luck charm, protected by an invisible halo of divine favor or any of its various permutations; soldiers are a notoriously superstitious lot. But that began to invert when it became clear that Craig’s good luck never rubbed off on anyone else: time after time, he was the only survivor in his unit. That variety of luck had become a source of shunning and, in some cases, thinly veiled suspicions of craven self-preservation that no one had survived to report. By the time Bannor and the rest of the Crewe met him on Turkh’saar, he had already become a pariah among the Lost Soldiers. The final tragedy at the northern ford simply ensured that the black legends surrounding Craig Girten were urgently passed on to anyone who had not already met him.
But despite that, or maybe because of that, Liebman had befriended him. It might have been simply because Murray Liebman was innately and unrepentantly contrarian. But Caine and Bannor had shared their suspicion that Liebman’s friendship might have been rooted in the strange sympathy for outcasts which often lurks beneath the crablike shells of iconoclasts and pessimists. Perhaps, therefore, he’d warmed to Girten because the paratrooper seemed a fellow victim of a universe that used both of them as the dupes in ever-blacker comedies of error.
And now, if any were foolish enough, it would be whispered that the curse of Craig Girten had also reached out and touched Liebman through the very hands with which he’d checked Murray’s rig, just before their fateful planetfall.
Girten’s voice pulled Peter out of his assessment of the many threads that had woven a thick tapestry of despair into the skein of his life. “Lieutenant Wu, I know how to use the freekset okay. I just don’t understand how it works.”
Peter suppressed the logical reflex: to ask the GI why he just hadn’t asked to have it explained again during the admittedly hurried training.
But Craig’s eyes revealed that he’d already read the reaction in Wu’s. “Look, a guy like me gets tired of always asking to have everything explained a second or even a third time. But Liebman? Hell, Murray was just the opposite. He was the smart one. Wherever he went, from the sound of it; A’s in everything, right down the line. And fer sure the smartest in our unit on Turkh’saar.
“But me? I worked hard to get B’s and C’s in high school. And living and working around folks like you . . . well, it can get pretty embarrassing, sometimes.”
Peter nodded. “I understand.” Because, suddenly, he did.
Girten frowned. “Frankly, I kinda doubt you could understand . . . sir.”
Wu shook his head. “I am not saying I know what it is like to live through what you have. What I mean is that, starting in the later years of your century, we began to identify various differences in people that make it difficult, if not impossible, to thrive in the educational models of your time, Sergeant. We know a great deal more about that, now. And from my observation, I suspect you might still benefit from some of the different approaches used today.”
“Not sure about that, sir. Like my Aunt Tilda used to say, you can fix ignorance, but stupid goes right down to the bone.”
Hoping that Aunt Tilda was now burning in the mythological hell she’d no doubt believed in, Peter smiled patiently. “Sergeant, allow me to ask you one, maybe two questions.”
“Sure.”
“Did you have a hard time with both math and reading?”
Girten snorted. “Sure did. I just couldn’t keep things straight. Not in either subject.”
“You ‘couldn’t keep things straight.’ That’s an interesting turn of phrase. Tell me: did letters and numbers seem to change?”
Craig’s eyes widened. “Yeah, every time I tried to fix a word or a math problem, it was like playing hide-and-seek with a . . . well, a chameleon. I’d think I saw one thing, then I’d go back, and bam, it was something else.” He shrugged. “Often as not, the teacher would tell me I just didn’t have enough confidence in myself, that the first thing I’d seen was correct. But sometimes, it really was the second thing that was right. And I never knew which it was going to be. And everybody just thought I wasn’t paying enough attention or that I wasn’t trying hard enough.”
Peter smiled sadly. “I am quite sure you were paying attention and trying very, very hard, Sergeant Girten. Just as I’m relatively sure I know why you had such a hard time learning.”
Girten’s taut lips relaxed slightly. “You do?”
“Later on, I will tell you about a condition called dyslexia. In the meantime, allow me to explain how a freekset works . . . ”
***
It became very clear very quickly that Craig Girten was not “slow” or “dim” as he’d been told since childhood. The concept of a freekset—quickly changing frequencies for radio transmissions—was not always a self-evident concept even to persons of average intelligence. But Girten immediately saw the cypher value implicit in it: that messages sent using the rapid frequency changes could not be intercepted unless one possessed both the wavelength and duration values of the signal.
A further surprise was his rapid grasp of how the changes to their present freekset were being generated: fractal evolutions of a set of number seeds. Craig snagged on the terms, but not on the basic concept. And he immediately intuited how it was being combined with their current, timed transmissions: that each of the Crewe broke squelch during a different hour of the day and the minute in which a transmission was matched to one of thirty blind codes for different statuses or events. Furthermore, the first thirty minutes indicated that the sender was safe, the last thirty indicating that they were not. All of which he grasped with marked ease.
Although Craig was armed with a grapple gun, the next item on his retraining agenda was the operation of Peter’s survival rifle. No matter whose kit it had been in and no matter who was more proficient with it, it was the default weapon for whoever was standing watch at night. Girten side-eyed the device ruefully; he admitted that when Chief O’Garran had picked it up to review its operation, he hadn’t even recognized it as a gun. And given the differences from those on which he’d been trained—the M1 Garand, the Thompson, and the M1 carbine—Wu could understand why.
Almost every aspect of its operation was radically different. Gunpowder had been replaced by magnetic coils pulsing the projectile down a barrel that was little more than a tube of self-realigning smart material. Instead of a box- or drum-shaped magazine in front of the trigger guard, the bullets (well, projectiles) were fed into the firing (well, launching) chamber from a rotary cassette where they were not stacked, but stored in a helical pattern. Craig was not alone in finding this a particularly baffling arrangement, but slowly warmed to it as Wu demonstrated how, with the magazine lying flat against the weapon, it not only improved ergonomics but eliminated the awkwardness of having a part of the weapon sticking out at a right angle.
His skepticism about the bullpup design was particularly short-lived: having taken buildings in over a dozen French and Belgian towns, he deeply appreciated that without diminishing performance, the shorter barrel made the weapon infinitely more handy in close quarters. For the same reason, he notionally approved of the extendable stock but eyed its construction warily. “Looks flimsy,” he muttered. Peter left the more esoteric features for a later lesson. The sights that could be jacked into the Dornaani HUD, the reusable sabot carriers, the scalable muzzle velocity: these were grace notes, easily added now that Girten possessed basic operational competency.
By the time they’d finished, Peter suggested a further half ration. Craig devoured it and soon became drowsy. More importantly, he was far less demoralized than when he’d arrived out of the dusk four hours earlier. Wu assured the paratrooper that he would wake him for the second watch. It was the only falsehood he’d uttered, and he did not regret it. Unsure of how to manage or recharge the suit, Girten had neither slept long nor soundly since landing, and he wouldn’t be a reliable soldier without it.
***
“Sir, don’t do that again. Please.”
Wu turned, frowned back at Girten. “I will change our watch rota as I see fit, Sergeant. I do note that your objection seems to be motivated by concern for me. That is commendable—however misguided it might be.”
Craig looked like he was ready to object, then saw Wu’s stare, and nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Peter nodded back, turned, and resumed paralleling the wadi before the paratrooper could see the grin on his face. Although with both their visors down, he might have missed it anyway.
After using their two solar panels to recharge Girten’s suit, Wu decided that although the wadi seemed to be leading slightly north of the shortest route to O’Garran and Somers, it would allow faster travel.
But remaining down upon its dry bed had one significant drawback; it made them blind to whatever might be approaching across the wastes. Peter had ultimately decided upon a compromise: for every three kilometers they moved along the bottom of the wadi, they would walk one along its lip. That routine opportunity to scan their surroundings at ten-times magnification, aided by both motion detection and thermal discrimination, would almost certainly give them ample warning of an approaching threat. And if it didn’t—if anything could close all the way from the horizon during their interval in the wadi—well, he and Girten probably wouldn’t have much chance against it, anyway.
After making one last visual sweep of their surroundings, Wu motioned down into the wadi. Craig, who reached the bottom first, once again tried to caretake his superior, albeit using a more indirect approach. “Sir, you just let me know when you want to stop.”
As if I wouldn’t? But Wu only said, “Why should I want to stop?
“Well, uh . . . to rest a bit.”
“I feel fine and am quite alert. I do not need any—”
“Sir, behind us!”
It was a full two seconds before the speakers in Peter’s helmet conveyed what Girten had heard; distant shouts, channeled by the sides of the wadi. The paratrooper preferred traveling with his visor up, but that hadn’t been why Wu ordered him to do so: even Dornaani audio pickups were unacceptable surrogates for uncovered ears. “Up, over the lip,” Peter muttered. “Slowly,” he amended when Craig almost leaped to comply.
“Slowly?”
Peter nodded as he checked the spider-veined course behind them. “Take a few more seconds. We do not want to leave raised dust or tracks behind us.” By the time he’d finished the explanation, they were out of the wadi and on their bellies.
They barely ducked down in time. Two bipeds—humans?—came running along the wadi from behind them. But they were not the ones shouting; they kept looking over their shoulders as they ran past. Raising one eye to the lip that concealed him, Peter risked a better look.
They were shaped like humans—two arms and legs—but seemed asymmetrical, misshapen, as if they’d been built from parts of multiple species. Wu didn’t dare study them long enough to make out any more—the shouting of their pursuers was growing much louder—but they were certainly not Homo sapiens. As Wu ducked down, he caught a short glimpse of the ones chasing them.
So did Girten, who was about to lift his head even higher before Peter pulled him down. “Humans?” he whispered.
“Not quite,” Peter murmured as the next group—three, he thought—pounded past two meters beneath them. Not unless humans on this planet looked like some nightmare version of Neanderthals. Or worse.
A savage cry from the now-passed group brought up their heads—just in time to see one of the pursuers hurl a bone-tipped spear into the back of the slower of their malformed quarry. Its gait, already uneven, broke as the weapon went into its back. With an almost animal cry, it fell facedown. Wondering what had become of the other, Peter craned his neck.
Twenty meters further along the wadi, the second creature had come up short against a chest-high barrier of dust, dirt, and rocks. Either the edges of both sides had fallen inward at the same time or the pursuers had set a trap. Wu suspected the latter when they turned the bend and were completely unsurprised by the obstruction. Instead they laughed—a hauntingly human sound—and approached the unwounded creature with weapons held casually, hair kirtles swaying beneath what looked like tunics made of cured hide.
All except the one who’d thrown the spear. He turned back and approached the wounded being that Wu now realized was indeed disfigured; its mismatched legs flexed and kicked as it struggled to rise, despite the spear lodged in its back.
The nightmare Neanderthal put a broad foot next to the bloody entry wound and pushed down.
The creature howled; the sound was more like a dog’s cry than a human’s.
Girten’s eyes were wide as they turned toward Wu. “What the hell are—?”
Wu shook his head, needing one crucial moment of silence to decide upon their course of action. By all appearances, the one who’d thrown the spear would soon torture or kill the malformed being struggling beneath his almost spatulate foot. But the planetfall protocols were clear: avoid detection by locals, and above all, avoid hostile contact. Also, just because one side was cruel didn’t mean the other was morally superior. If the tables were turned, the misshapen creatures might behave the same way.
Except, Wu realized, whereas the pursuers had crude armor and sizable weapons, the creatures they’d chased had neither.
Peter was already rising as he made his decision, activating the HUD targeting interface and tracking the survival rifle toward the one standing over the wounded creature.
“Sir?” Girten whispered far too loudly.
“Cover me,” Peter muttered as the HUD’s smart targeting guidon led the superimposed crosshairs onto the jeering semi-human—just as he leaned into the spear so that it went clear through his victim’s body.
Peter squeezed the trigger twice, didn’t stop to watch the attacker fall; he had already moved the virtual reticle to rest upon the larger of the other two. Hearing the spear thrower cry out, they’d turned and froze upon seeing the strange figure perched on the lip of the wadi, twenty meters to their rear.
Peter squeezed the trigger, drifted the reticle to the left, cheated it a hair more to be sure he wouldn’t hit the creature behind the second one. He fired again.
The first, larger one had fallen, whereas the second only lurched when hit. Peter kept the guidon between the two; how to get them to surrender? How to communicate at all? There was no easy—
“Down, sir!” Craig shouted.
Peter ducked even as he turned. Which was why the arrow flew over his helmet rather than hitting its visor.
Girten, grapple gun held firmly, fired at the bowman who’d appeared around the bend in the wadi just ten meters behind them.
The grapple didn’t hit the new Neanderthal anywhere near the center of mass; it caught him low and to the right, but plunged deeply into that corner of his abdomen. He fell back, shrieking as the still-flaring booster both burned into him and drove the grapple deeper.
Peter spun back toward the two he’d wounded. The one who’d fallen seemed barely alive, but the other was moving up the side of the wadi.
Trying to escape, not attack—
Peter shook his head, both at survivor’s action and his own necessary response. He kept the guidon in front of the scrambling nightmare-man, leading him before tracking back toward his body. The reticle met the target’s torso; the HUD outlined the silhouette: locked. Wu squeezed the trigger twice.
The figure only jerked at the first hit, but the second produced a gout of blood from what was likely its suprascapular artery. The heavy-limbed humanoid pitched backward and hit the bottom of the gully as limp as a bag of sand.
For a moment, none of those who could still move did. Then, crouching, the being they’d rescued began inching forward, eyes cast up at them. If Peter was willing to see human expression in those eyes—a profoundly unlikely projection—they seemed both wary and hopeful.
On its approach, Peter slowly allowed the survival rifle to tilt down until its muzzle was pointed at the ground. As he did, he examined the being more closely by shifting the HUD back to high magnification.
He suppressed a start at the shocking combination of facial features. Although most of the features were human—more or less—the bone structure left him with the impression of a flat-faced reptile, possibly because of the faint scales encroaching downward from its hairline and upward from where a beard would be, if it could grow one. The most pronounced difference was the broad fleshy nose that descended directly from the brow and was vaguely reminiscent of a turtle’s. The arms and legs were even and seemed essentially human, enough so that Wu reflexively perceived of its shape as male, but without any confidence in that label.
The being reached its wounded fellow and, a moment later, its head sunk heavily. Peter had already presumed it was dead; the widening pool of reddish blood left little room for doubt.
The being’s next action—so casual and natural that it took Peter and Craig a moment to realize it had happened—was simply a long, mournful sigh. Then it moved toward the dead nightmare Neanderthal. But rather than defiling or raging at it, the turtle-nosed being lifted a bag from around its neck and what appeared to be a flint knife from its belt, and held them out to Peter.
Peter wondered if it was a gesture of gratitude, but then noticed that the being’s legs were taut, the tendons in high relief; it was ready to flee at a moment’s notice. Which made the proffered goods some cross between tribute, supplication, and placation. Until now, Peter had been glad the visor concealed his own reactions and expressions, but now . . .
Wu slowly released the visor and, hoping it would be recognized as a calming gesture, he let his one open palm sink downward.
The being moved quickly: to kneel.
Peter almost rolled his eyes, but at himself. Of course that gesture could mean other things, you dolt! If I had half a brain—
Before he was even aware of the movement, Girten was past him, moving down the side of the wadi, his left hand extended, his right touching his mouth.
Damn it, Girten—!
But instead of fleeing, the being cocked its head, face softening into an expression that, on a human, would have been one of perplexity, possibly curiosity.
Promising, Wu had to admit.
As he reached the bottom of the wadi, Craig slowly opened his left hand . . . and Peter finally realized the paratrooper’s intent, just a moment before the malformed humanoid did. Girten was offering the being food: what the Dornaani called a sandwich wrap and the Crewe had renamed “mystery meat in a tasteless tortilla.”
Wu’s first thought was, That “meal” might kill it! His second was, The taste might scare it off! He almost chuckled . . . except this was first contact and it was quite possible that the next five minutes would shape how, and if, they survived on this planet. Either way, the being would only get confused and chary if Peter tried to call back Girten’s offer. So Wu turned his hand over and lifted his palm.
The being’s startlingly human eyes went rapidly from Craig to Peter and back to Craig: or rather, what Craig held in his hand. Girten extended it even further, his steps small and slow. The being matched the approach and, rather than snatching the food away like an animal would, removed it slowly and carefully from the GI’s fingers with a finely scaled and faintly greenish hand that was otherwise as human as theirs.
It sniffed the dreaded mystery meat and tasteless tortilla and delicately nibbled at a corner. Its eyes widened—Peter had a vision of it vomiting green goo in reaction—but instead it bowed its head deeply, took a very sizable bite . . . and looked up and smiled.
Craig glanced back at Peter with a smile of his own. Peter returned it along with a sigh of relief: both at the strange local’s response and the renewed purpose he read in Girten’s eyes.