Chapter Nine
Riordan grunted as he tried rolling up from his landing fall, but stumbled sideways instead. The Dornaani smart fabric had thickened its weave thickness and reduced its air permissibility to slow him more rapidly during the final hundred meters. But now, on the ground, the brisk wind was entering the canopy from a new angle and tugging him in that direction.
Caine kicked back to get his feet faced toward the flapping ’chute. But he didn’t dig his heels in, remembering O’Garran’s warning: “You’re not stronger than the wind, so don’t resist it directly. If the canopy fills, it’ll pull you off your feet and drag you behind: headfirst and facedown. This is not just embarrassing and painful but, in an unknown landing zone, dangerous.”
It was good advice: the round ’chute was filling with wind and Riordan had to use every moment it slacked to swivel his feet toward it. Fortunately, the Dornaani fabric was becoming “smart” again: even as it stiffened against expansion, it also became more air permissive, allowing much of the wind’s force to pass right through it. Between that and O’Garran’s advice, Caine managed to maintain enough control to release the rig’s right-hand toggle. With only one side of the ’chute still secured to him, it was no longer able to catch the breeze; it simply unfurled and rolled listlessly downwind.
Riordan finally staggered up to his feet, began reeling in the risers and suspension lines, and discovered that his scuffing feet were raising clouds that obscured everything beneath his knees. That, along with the sharp impact of his landing, confirmed what he’d come to suspect during his descent: the wastes of the landing zone weren’t dirt, or even sand, but a featureless expanse of hard-packed dust.
With half the suspension lines looped around his still-sore left arm, Caine quickly swept the horizon: nothing except a few low rock outcroppings. He blinked through to one of his HUD’s few available options: the visual motion detector. He turned slowly; the only object that the sensor limned with its faint orange indicator was the fitfully flapping canopy. Riordan exhaled: the lack of contacts was hardly a guarantee of safety, but it was a whole lot better than irate beings converging from all sides.
He began the more involved process of gathering and saving the canopy, a priority task for which there was no set strategy: Eku had lacked detailed knowledge of the frames and Miles could only draw flawed comparisons to Terran analogs. The full measure of those flaws had become evident when the parachutes deployed: the bags holding them did not open, but simply tore away. Every part of the system had been engineered toward expendability.
Riordan spent a few minutes folding the highly cooperative fabric into a still-sizeable trapezoid. After rolling and securing it to the side of his survival pack, he retrieved the musette bag he’d dropped just before landing and checked the icons in his HUD. Most were still blinking: not full system failures, but too long to be a simple reinitialization. The CME had caused a full reboot.
Caine had hoped that at least the compass and atmosphere analyzer would function before he had to move, but he couldn’t afford to wait for them. The only direction in which there was any promise of shelter was to the south, where distant irregularities hinted at slopes or hills. Unfortunately, his destination—the tributary that led to the city—was to the north. So if he were to have any chance of finding cover there, he’d need to get beyond the present horizon by nightfall.
After fixing the musette bag across the top of the survival pack, Riordan slipped back into its harness and tested the balance of the load. Ignoring his still-sealed vacc suit, he was carrying twenty-eight kilos: the approximate mass of a soldier’s full kit ever since such things had been recorded. He’d intended to walk with the survival rifle—well, puny carbine—at the ready, but had settled for stowing it just under the pack’s top flap. The suit would alert him to anything approaching over the flats, and if something jumped up out of the dust as he passed, he’d rather have a sturdy stick to block it. So, with a fully extended EVA gaff stick serving as a staff, he put the sun over his left shoulder and started north.
***
Shortly after a set of low ridges finally edged tortuously above the ruler-flat northwest horizon, Riordan’s HUD lit up with bright green-blue icons: the suit’s various systems had returned to life. But he only had eyes for one of them: the transponder tracking system. He held his breath as he called it up.
Miraculously, no one else had died. But as Newton had portentously intoned before they had left the ship, the day was still young—and the scattering of the group did not augur a happy outcome.
No two of the color-coded transponder markers were closer than seventy kilometers, but it was the broader pattern—or lack of it—that was truly arresting. Including his own, the twelve blinking dots south of the tributary were liberally scattered along a fan-shaped dispersal footprint eight hundred kilometers in length and just over four hundred wide at its terminus. Which, if memory served, was a patch of ground slightly larger than the state of Montana.
Eku’s transponder was about halfway along the east-west axis, but offset three hundred and fifty kilometers north: on the other side of the tributary. Worse still, his marker was ringed in yellow: a biomonitor warning. Whether they were simply reporting his already broken arm or new injuries was impossible to determine without contacting him.
That yellow ring was one of the few events that called for a contact outside the daily squelch breaks, the timing of which also served as a status code. However, when he brought up the subscreen that monitored the strength and fidelity of the various comm channels, he discovered that the network was still laboring to establish itself. Parts were intact, particularly among transponders that were close to anyone wearing a Dornaani suit; they’d been programmed to self-assemble into a network of repeaters. But those nodes had not yet bridged the greater distances. Whether that was because they’d been degraded by the solar weather or were still trying to restore connections was, again, impossible to determine.
Fortunately, no one other than Eku was terribly isolated. Whether by chance or effort, almost everyone had landed in roughly proximal pairs. Newton was the one exception, but he’d come down barely a hundred kilometers from the river juncture, and so would probably remain there to let others collapse inward on his position. The pair closest to him were Bannor and Duncan, just over two hundred kilometers to the south. Two other pairs were located about the same distance, one to the west, the other to the southwest: Ayana and Dora, and—happily—Yaargraukh and himself.
But beyond that cluster, the separation beyond the remaining pairs increased markedly. Peter and Craig were almost seven hundred klicks southwest of the rendezvous point. Miles and Katie were at the same distance, but due west. More troublesome still, if those two pairs followed the post-landing protocols—to link up with those closest rather than each individual heading directly for the river juncture—their meeting point would put them slightly further away.
The moment Caine’s focus drifted away from the revelations thrown up upon his HUD, he became aware of aches and pains all along his back: reminders of the survival pack and the musette bag atop it. The urge to rest was strong, but the notional safety of the distant ridge line called more powerfully. He had yet to encounter a single terrain feature that provided some benefit of elevation, flank protection, or concealment. And while that hadn’t been a concern so far, once the sun went down . . .
Riordan smiled, glanced to the west: that’s where Yaargraukh was, probably moving toward the same ridges, if they ran far enough in his direction. The temptation to rest arose again; if he did, he could move longer, into the night if necessary. But it had been Yaargraukh himself who had recommended against doing so.
In doing so, he’d put himself with Miles, who’d loudly asserted that, with their HUDs and thermal vision, they would “rule the night.” In response, Yaargraukh’s neck had circled lazily: a slight shrug. “It has not always been the case for us Hkh’Rkh. Perhaps because our sensors are more rudimentary, we had unfortunate experiences during early exploration of worlds. Not only did various exobiota possess superior night vision, but we encountered several with other senses—hearing, echolocation, smell—that enabled them to surprise us in various, costly ways. So until one knows an environment, unwarranted confidence can prove to be as great a danger as the exobiota one might encounter.”
Caine remembered the truculent set to Miles’ jaw—the little SEAL had never met an argument he didn’t like—but Bannor defused the debate with a single shake of his head. “We should learn from Hkh’Rkh experiences. This situation is likely to resemble the ones that shaped their approach: a lash-up of tech and old-school caution. And with the exception of long-range visual acuity, our senses are a lot worse.” When the chief frowned and started to open his mouth, Bannor added, “Trust me: I know.”
Little Guy looked back and forth between the Special Forces colonel and the Hkh’Rkh. Under the aegis of a letter of marque, the two of them had led a post-war security mission in the pirate-plagued Epsilon Indi system. Whatever occurred there had forged a strong bond between them and brought in enough ecus to relocate, hide, and support the Lost Soldiers and the renegades who watched over them.
Riordan shook off the memory and resumed moving, but more westward. With any luck, he’d still have enough time to find a safe place before nightfall.
***
Riordan’s morning alarm did not employ the same strident alert that announced suit malfunctions or dangerous REM levels. Reminiscent of persistent wind chimes, the sound roused him so slowly that Caine’s first waking image was of diffuse brightness: sunlight filtering through his eyelids. Annoyed that he’d misgauged his intended wake-up—daybreak—he opened his eyes.
And saw the belly of a large insect, crawling across his face.
He swatted at it—before remembering that his sealed visor separated him from the intruder. His hand clunked into the side of his helmet, only grazing the bug. It fluttered off in a drumming of wings.
Caine sat up sharply—and almost pitched himself into the shallow, dry wadi beneath him. He paused, drew in a deep breath and released it slowly.
Not an auspicious start to his first full day on the planet. He’d misgauged the sunrise by almost an hour and the motion sensor had not detected the insect. A malfunction, perhaps? He glanced at the helmet icons.
The day was already improving: every system was now active and running a green light. Which meant, that in addition to everything else, he could run an air sample. As he pinky-flexed and blinked his way through the screens and commands, he had to suppress a surge of optimism. Yes, the insect had scared the hell out of him, but it was a living creature, so the odds of some oxygen in the atmosphere were now quite high.
But as Caine navigated to the HUD’s transponder tracker, he frowned as a second realization imposed itself atop the first: it was recognizably an insect. Most green worlds did have crude analogs; small, physically simple creatures were the typical foundation of any xenofauna pyramid. But this was so similar to terrestrial insects that he’d reflexively thought of it as a palm-sized palmetto bug. Perhaps the prior civilization the Dornaani called the Elders hadn’t just left behind an unfathomable shift-beacon near this planet; maybe they’d seeded it with primitive life-forms, as well.
The transponder tracker winked on and showed Riordan what he’d hoped to see; all the pairs he’d spotted yesterday had pulled closer together and Eku’s signal had at least changed position, although it still had a yellow ring. Newton’s marker had moved incrementally closer to the confluence of the rivers; he was probably within forty kilometers, now.
The faintly pulsing icon of the air test blinked off . . . and returned as a steady green glow of hope. Caine scanned the report that scrolled alongside it: a long list of unrecognized microbial taints. Hardly a surprise: if a planet had life, some of it invariably mixed into the air. There was a marginally higher sulfur content, but both the atmosphere and oxygen pressure were, as predicted, a near match for sea level on Earth. Fortuitous, yes, but so improbably optimal for humans that Riordan had to wonder if this was yet another hint of influence—or terraforming—by an earlier civilization.
Riordan stood carefully, keeping his heels against the small nub of rock that had sheltered him during the night. The slopes he’d spotted the day before had proven to be nothing more than low, useless rises. But just beyond them, the land dipped and was grooved by a shallow wadi, marked by a solitary tooth of stone protruding from its lip before disappearing into the crack-veined plaque of the dry course two meters below. He’d spent the night in a leeward notch between the stone and that lip: probably cut by runoff from rains and melting ice. Although the suit’s internal temperature remained twenty degrees centigrade while sealed, he’d also broken out the Dornaani shelter half and draped it over his body. Cocooning into it would have even been more effective at preserving the suit’s power, but that would have left him looking like a foil-wrapped appetizer to passing creatures.
The temperatures had not been as extreme as projected, the environmental monitor recording an overnight low of minus nine C after yesterday’s midday high of fourteen. But had he been exposed to the nighttime wind that had occasionally whistled around the rock, he suspected it would have been closer to minus twenty.
Riordan rose, stretched stiff limbs and a stiffer back. He wanted to shoulder his pack—better to have that misery over as soon as possible—but food and water had to come first, beginning with an assessment of the latter. Locating the controls for the water-recapture gauge took the better part of a minute; there hadn’t been the time to master the suit’s many functions. The result was reassuring; the baffled storage bladders had rebuilt to sixty percent. Happily, a sizable portion was pulled from the air; as amphibians, Dornaani required higher humidity and their suits were designed to provide it. Even those built for their factotums.
In anticipation of a long day’s march, Riordan bled half of the stored water into a valved container and began to unpack his breakfast. He was determined to spend a minute or two enjoying it because, once he’d gone through the six-day supply from the ship’s galley, eating might become a grim task. Dornaani emergency rations were likely to be even worse than those prepared by humans. But before he could begin, there was one final, fateful test required.
He popped the helmet’s visor and sniffed the air.
Odorless: oddly so, even for a barren world. Drawing in a cautious breath, he imagined he detected a faint, flinty aroma . . . but the dust that began to tickle his nostrils was all too real. Particularly if too much got into his lungs.
Caine dug out the survival kit’s combo-mask—it could both filter and compress air—and as he snugged it over his nose and mouth, decided to put off eating until he’d unfurled the solar panel and hooked it into his suit. He considered doing the same with the smaller and impossibly thin “solar tissues” but decided against it; the intermittent breeze might carry some off, a risk he could not afford. Between maintaining temperature, reclaiming wastes, running the HUD, and every other suit function, regularly recharging its battery was literally a matter of life and death.
Once the suit signaled it was getting current from the solar panel, Riordan removed the combo mask to finally begin his breakfast: a Dornaani rendition of an egg salad sandwich.
Damn, he decided as he chewed the first mouthful, it almost tastes like one.
Almost.
***
Meal finished and survival pack secured, Riordan checked the HUD’s compass/Coriolis detector. Aligning it to the heading that would take him directly toward Yaargraukh’s transponder marker, he started out.
But as he completed the first step, his helmet painted a query alongside the compass:
Heavy load detected: do you wish to engage the support-frame mode?
Riordan read it again, blinked on the icon for a detailed description.
Evidently, the suit’s “smart hardening” feature that provided resistance to impacts could be retasked to function as the equivalent of a light cargo exoframe. However, the typically obtuse Dornaani technobabble explained that it was not a load-bearing, but rather a load-sharing system. Its ancillary calculator indicated that it would reduce Caine’s perceived load by approximately 9.4 kilograms.
He almost laughed out loud, but only because that was better than fantasizing about throttling Eku. Yes, the support-frame option had been buried beneath one of the many dark icons which had only finished rebuilding and returning to function as he’d slept. But to think that Eku had never even thought to mention it?
Caine shook his head. It was possible that the factotum himself hadn’t known about the system. But either way, as Miles had observed during planetfall, Eku needed to improve his personal initiative and situational awareness. Assuming he survived.
Before activating the support-frame mode, Caine tried to discover its projected power consumption, but either that data did not exist or was buried still deeper. It was a tough choice: risk running low on power or settle for a slower pace and greater exhaustion.
Riordan shook his head: No, not a hard choice at all. The sooner he rendezvoused with Yaargraukh, the better. Together, they would have twice the recharging capability, would be safer, and because of that, would move more easily and rapidly.
Caine engaged the support-frame mode, snugged his combo mask tighter, overrode the suit’s automatic life support for just enough overpressure to keep out the dust, and began marching hard on a west-northwest heading.
***
To the south, thunderheads continued to edge higher up into the dome of deepening twilight, a black tide streaked by lightning that shot upward almost as often as it flashed down. Riordan shook dust out of his shelter half, glanced at Yaargraukh’s transponder marker. Now directly atop his own, both of them had stopped blinking. But that had been thirty minutes ago and there was still no sign of his Hkh’Rkh friend.
Caine glanced at the flare he had removed from the survival pack. If something had happened to the big exosapient—a fall, even an ambush by some local creature—maybe he was unable to move and his radio had been damaged. And since he had only a crude handheld tracker instead of a HUD, he might not know Riordan was in range to see his own flares. If so, then Caine might need to launch one first.
Picking up the flare, Riordan sealed his visor. The HUD’s night vision setting—a combination of thermal imaging and light intensification—showed nothing upon the flatlands to the north or the south. He looked back along the spine of the low ridge he’d followed from out of the east: empty. He turned to the west . . .
A murky speck glimmered for a moment, then disappeared. Riordan blinked for magnification. As he did, a faint wash of light reached over a dip in the ridge, then grew as the source ascended back into view: the foggy outline of a biped with a digitigrade stance. Just what one would expect to see if looking for a Hkh’Rkh in a duty suit running with thermal suppression.
Riordan swapped the flare for his hand light, set it to UV pulse, and aimed it at the oncoming figure.
Which stopped and, a moment later, replied in kind.
Riordan exhaled, and, allowing himself one inattentive moment, laid back in an abandon of relief. Then he rose and resumed showing his friend the way to the camp he’d made near the crest of the ridge.
***
Yaargraukh was moving—skillfully—on all fours as he made his final approach to the small, rock-sided declivity which Caine had chosen both for the shelter it offered against the elements and searching, hungry eyes. “It is good to see you, Caine Riordan. I believe the hurricane will pass very close to us.”
“Hurricane?” Riordan echoed in surprise.
The Hkh’Rkh crawled over to shelter under the edge of the small dip. “Yes. We passed over it during the most unfortunate moments of our descent.”
Caine admired the effortless tact with which the exosapient ambassador-soldier managed to avoid referring to Liebman’s death and the utter debacle that followed. “Still, I can’t believe I didn’t even see it.”
“You would have been fortunate to notice it; it was very far away at the time.”
Riordan frowned, made some crude guesses at its initial distance, compared that to the elapsed time. “To get to us already, it would have to be moving at least one hundred kilometers per hour.”
“Significantly more, I suspect.” Noting his companion’s alarmed stare, Yaargraukh circled his neck diffidently. “As you observed during your EVA, this planet’s weather is quite . . . dramatic.”
Riordan sighed. “Thanks for reminding me.” He smiled. “Speaking of reminders: I thought you said it was unwise to move at night?”
The Hkh’Rkh pony-nodded. “I did.”
“And yet—?” Caine gestured back along the path of his approach.
“It was not yet night.” In response to Riordan’s raised eyebrow, Yaargraukh allowed a garbled fluting to escape his three equilaterally arranged nostrils. “Caine Riordan, there is a saying among my people: ‘He who gives advice is typically the one least likely to follow it.’”
Riordan had to stifle what would have been a loud laugh. “Sometimes, if I close my eyes, it’s difficult to remember that you’re not human.”
Yaargraukh’s garter-snake tongue wiggled out briefly. “I am well chastened by that insult.” But in the next moment, his neck curved downward. “I fear that by rushing to join you and be of assistance, I may have failed in a more serious particular.”
Riordan shook his head. “I don’t see how that could be. Now that we’re together, we’re much safer.”
“Yes,” Yaargraukh allowed, “but in my haste, I may also have brought even greater difficulties.”
“What do you mean?”
“I cannot be certain, Caine Riordan, but I believe I have been followed.”