Horizon Alpha: Predators of Eden Page 9

  I ran as fast as I could, partly to warn Ms. Arnson and Brent, and partly to escape the horrible sound of the ‘saur chewing.

  “The General . . . the General,” I panted, skidding to a stop when I found them.

  “Where is he? What happened?” Brent took a step in the direction I had just come from. I grabbed his arm.

  “Don’t go. A Gila . . . it got the General. It’s too late.”

  Brent’s muscles softened under my hand as he sagged down. I let go of his arm and he buried his hands in his hair, pushing his palms into his eyes.

  Ms. Arnson looked down at her boots. None of us knew what to say.

  “Fly free, General Carthage,” I said quietly.

  “Fly free, General,” they echoed.

  The three of us stood there in the swampy forest, listening to the sounds of the evening jungle.

  Brent pulled himself together first.

  “All right, team. I’m the highest rank left, so I guess it’s up to me,” Brent said. He certainly had a lot more experience than I did, and Ms. Arnson wasn’t even in the army. I doubted she even knew how to shoot the gun she was carrying.

  “Let’s get up the tree until it’s dark. We need to rest and figure out what we’re going to do.”

  Ms. Arnson and I agreed and we started to climb. Brent carried the reactor core pack and Ms. Arnson and I divided up the remaining food. We only had the two canteens I’d been carrying; the General had been carrying the other two. The Gila wouldn’t eat them, and we might be lucky enough that it wouldn’t carry the General’s remains away with it. We might get the other two canteens back, but that would mean searching whatever was left of the General to retrieve them. I didn’t think it was worth it. We settled high in the branches, startling a number of the small climbing ‘saurs that were browsing among the leaves.

  Brent spoke in a quiet voice. “So what do we have?”

  “Sir?” I replied, not sure what he meant. Brent had never been “sir” before, but he was the leader of this pathetic mission now.

  “How much food, how much water? I have the core,” he said, setting the reactor core in the V of the branch he was sitting on. “Do we have rope? Ammo?”

  We searched the bags. There were three protein bars left, enough rope to tie us all safely for the night, plenty of rounds for our weapons and precious little water. The sun was beginning its descent. We had a few hours until nightfall.

  “All right, then. Let’s tie in for the rest of the evening. We’ll set out again at full dark. The General said we were about two nights out. So we travel through tonight, and hope to reach Eden tomorrow night.”

  He sounded so optimistic. Like he really thought we’d make it. I pictured the General and wondered if Brent was trying to fool us, or himself.

  Ms. Arnson took first watch, but I didn’t sleep at all. My watch passed without incident, and I nodded off for a few minutes during Brent’s.

  I awoke to cooler air and darkness.

  Brent consulted the map on his sat trans, and I did the same.

  “We must be somewhere here,” he said, pointing to the line of darker green which we now knew marked the edge of the swamp. “If we head due west, we should get there eventually.”

  Ms. Arnson looked over my shoulder at my map. “Maybe we should head northwest, try to get up into the hills there.” She pointed to a brown area of dead rock, a point in the foothills of the empty mountains that we had taken refuge in the night Jack died.

  “We could talk to Eden from there, let them know we’re coming,” I agreed.

  Brent shook his head. “There’s nothing up there but rock, no food. No reason to go out of our way. Eden will know when we get there. Calling them a day out won’t help them or us.”

  “So, which way then?” I asked him.

  He pointed out through the treetops. “The sun set right over there, so that’s due east. We go that way.” He pointed in the opposite direction.

  We climbed down out of the branches and our shoes squelched in the mud at the bottom.

  “Should we try to find the other canteens?” I asked, dreading the answer.

  “No. We have two. That will have to do us for two days.”

  I sighed, relieved not to have to search the site where the General had died. I thought about mentioning the strange metal object the General had found that had distracted us from the vigilance this planet required. But I didn’t think Brent would be interested.

  We set off toward the west. We risked turning on our flashlights to search the edge of a wide stream before we crossed it. There weren’t any Gators, as Ms. Arnson had named them, but some large fish darted out of the beams as our lights played into the deeper pools. Each of us drank a canteen full of fresh water, then we refilled them before splashing across. The water was cold and seeped straight into my boots. I would have strangled a Wolf for dry socks.

  Two hours into the night we felt the first tremor. We froze, listening. The jungle had gone silent at the Rex’s approach, a bad sign that it was heading in our direction. A lot of the larger ‘saurs shook the ground when they walked, but nothing matched the pounding footfalls of a T-rex. That concussion had saved countless lives over our three years here, giving men time to dive for cover before the Rex approached.

  The ground vibrated again, closer. Again. We turned our heads, trying to pinpoint the direction it was coming from. We didn’t dare turn on a light and reveal our position but my hand kept straying to the flashlight on my belt. The darkness was pressing in on me as the vibrations trembled through my feet.

  I looked up at the trees around us, hoping to see one with good low branches for a frantic climb out of reach but none looked inviting.

  We didn’t know which way to move, but then Ms. Arnson grabbed my arm and started to pull me. I followed as quietly as I could. We crowded into a hollow at the base of a huge tree, pressing our backs up against the damp wood. Brent was the last one in, blocking the opening with his body. We held our breath as the Rex’s steps pounded through the jungle.

  Hardly any of the forest’s glow penetrated past Brent’s shoulders, but there was no mistaking the darkness when the Rex’s shadow loomed over our tree.

  A huge clawed foot landed inches from where we huddled, not breathing, not moving. Brent could have reached out and stroked the talon, longer than his arm and sharper than his knife. The Rex’s skin was mottled yellow. Two small scars marred the skin of its toe, the result of some small creature’s futile attempt to free itself from the Rex’s attack.

  A terrible roar split the night, driving my eardrums straight into my skull. I clapped my hands over my ears to muffle the blast, making a strangled sound inaudible over the Rex’s call. An answering roar echoed from somewhere far to the south.

  The Rex turned away from us, its huge tail striking the side of the tree where we were hiding. I felt the impact of the blow and covered my head with my arms as dirt from the rotted tree stump rained down around us.

  The tremors faded as the Rex moved off into the jungle and we all sighed. After a few minutes of silence, the noise of the jungle started up again and we crawled out from the hollow on shaky legs. I stumbled into the Rex’s enormous footprint. We crept away into the darkness.

  Chapter 20

  “We’re lost.”

  All three of us knew it, but Ms. Arnson said it. We had been relying on the General’s sense of direction to carry us safely back to Eden base. Now the General was gone.

  Once the sun fully set, we had only the forest’s natural phosphorescence to guide our trail and no indication of which way to go. We tried to continue in as straight a line as we could, but the thick tree canopy hid the stars from our view and I suspected we were veering off course. I hoped we could find a clearing to make contact with the satellites, but then I thought of Shiro, whose one careless step likely cost him his life while trying to crawl out to open sky.

  The forest’s glow was starting to dim as the chemicals on the leaves were used up over th
e course of the night. We were only a couple of hours from dawn and the fresh dangers of daylight.

  We stopped walking and took turns drinking from our two remaining canteens. The protein bars were gone and we chewed on the last of the dried strips of meat from the ‘saur Brent had killed in the swamp.

  “We need to contact the satellites, get our bearings. Eden is tiny and we could walk right past it if we’re off even a little bit.” Brent tapped his sat trans, willing the little screen to connect with a satellite it couldn’t see.

  “I’m the lightest,” I said. “I could try to get high enough in one of these trees to get through.”

  Brent peered up into the darkness, but Ms. Arnson answered.

  “You’ll never get high enough. The canopy is too thick and the branches at that height won’t hold even your weight. If you tried, you’d fall.”

  I shuffled my foot in the dirt, digging a trench with the toe of my boot. “Well, we have to do something. Eden doesn’t have long without this core.” I tapped the pack I carried. The core was heavy, so we each took our turns.

  Brent stood silent, thinking. He wasn’t a natural leader, not like the General or Shiro. Not like my brother Josh had been. But he was all we had left.

  “We need to get somewhere we can get through.” He called up the map on his trans, glowing in the pre-dawn darkness. “We have to be somewhere around here,” he pointed to an area in the green all around. “If we go north a bit we should come to the spur of the hillside here.” He pointed again, to a barren brown spike where the rocky mountainous cliffs angled down near our presumed location.

  “It’s kilometers out of our way,” I protested. “The General said we didn’t have time.”

  “I know. But we can’t risk missing Eden because we can’t navigate from here,” Brent said. “We’ll head up that way and send a signal, figure out how long we have. Then we’ll make a beeline for Eden once we’re sure of our course.”

  Ms. Arnson looked around at the dark jungle. “So which way is north?”

  The sun hadn’t yet started to brighten the sky. We didn’t know.

  “Not sure,” Brent sighed. He straightened his shoulders, coming to a decision.

  “Let’s rest here until dawn. Once we see where the sun rises we’ll know where to go. We can travel by day once we’re sure. It can’t be more than a few hours to the base of the hills. It will be clear enough there to contact base.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “The General didn’t want us traveling by day. Too dangerous.” I looked to Ms. Arnson for support.

  “I agree, but I’m not sure we have much choice.” She shook her head. “Traveling by night hasn’t been all that safe anyway.”

  I didn’t like it. Ms. Arnson was right; we’d lost over half our party by following the General’s plan. But I doubted we’d have gotten this far without his leadership. The night had its dangers, but the day was deadly.

  We sat on a fallen log, resting our tired feet. I pulled my boots off one by one and emptied out the dirt and leaves that seemed to accumulate inside them no matter how tightly they were tied. My aching back popped as I stretched and tried to ignore the feeling that we were making a huge mistake. I tried one more time to convince Brent.

  “Eden base sits on the east bank of the river. I think if we just keep moving west by night, we’ll eventually hit the river even if we miss the base. Then we could just follow the bank until we get there.”

  “Follow it which way, though?” he asked. “If we miss Eden and run into the river, how will we know if we’re north or south of base? We might turn the wrong way and end up hours away in the wrong direction.”

  I didn’t think we’d end up that far off, not if we just kept going the same way the General had been leading us. But I didn’t say anything else. Brent had rank. Brent was our leader now. Right or wrong, I would follow.

  My eyelids felt heavy and my head kept nodding forward. It had been too long since we’d slept well, too long since we’d eaten. We were worn down, exhausted from fear and loss. I must have dozed off because the next time I opened my eyes there was sunlight angling through the treetops.

  “Brent, Ms. Arnson,” I whispered. “Wake up. It’s daylight.”

  I looked around the forest. It looked so different in the light. I had gotten used to walking in the dim glow of the nighttime leaves. Now their vibrant green hurt my eyes. The morning was alive with sound, the less-familiar calls of the small ‘saurs who hunted the treetops in the day. Soon the larger ‘saurs would stir as the ground warmed beneath them. It was time to move.

  Chapter 21

  We moved faster in daylight. It gave us a false sense of security to be able to look out through the trees and think we were seeing all that was there, even if we knew most of the ‘saurs were camouflaged in some way. Even those that had brightly colored crests or flashy red scales could blend in with the huge flowers that opened by day to catch the light that filtered through the canopy.

  I scanned the path ahead, analyzing every shape. Even so, I didn’t see the herd of browsing ‘saurs until we were almost on top of them.

  “Watch out,” Ms. Arnson whispered, grabbing at the back of Brent’s shirt.

  There were at least twenty of them, spread out through the trees, nibbling on the damp fronds and scraping bark off the tree trunks with their bottom teeth. No knife-sharp claws or wicked fangs on these, but they had stocky bodies encased in thick armor to protect them from all but the strongest predator’s bites. The young ones capered around, playing some kind of lumbering game while the adults shook fruits from the treetops. The young ones trotted over to the fallen fruit to share in the sweet meal.

  “Can we eat that kind of fruit?” I asked Ms. Arnson. My stomach growled at the thought.

  “Not sure. We can eat most of the tree fruits that grow here, but not many of the berries.” I knew that from my survival training. Never eat the green berries, only the red ones. Someone had died learning that lesson.

  “Think we can get some of it?” I asked, hopeful.

  We all crouched down.

  “You’re the fastest,” Brent said to me. “Think you can run over there and grab some without getting trampled?”

  I considered it. I knew not to get any closer to a ‘saur than I had to, not even a plant-eater. The General would never have let me go. But hunger made me reckless.

  “I think I can.”

  I stood up and crept toward the feasting ‘saurs. They had already eaten most of what they pulled down from the trees. One of the adults saw me and trumpeted an alarm. They all raised their heads to stare at me.

  I lunged toward them and scooped up a few fruits off the ground. A lot of them had been trampled and mushed into the dirt, but I got several and tucked them into my shirt. I turned to run back to Ms. Arnson and Brent. The herd panicked at my quick movement and suddenly the ground was shaking as they all tried to scatter at once.

  I dodged to the right, narrowly avoiding a collision with a small one heading straight for me. It didn’t even see me, plunging right through where I was just standing. I ran as fast as I could, jumping over logs and careening through dense brush. Finally I stopped near where I had left Brent and Ms. Arnson. I turned back to see the last of the herd disappearing into the trees.

  “Nice job. What did you get?” Brent asked.

  I opened my shirt. Six large orange fruits, mostly intact.

  “What do you think?” Brent asked Ms. Arnson.

  She picked one of the fruits out of my hands. Pulling her knife from her belt she cut the fruit neatly in half. It smelled ripe and fresh and my mouth watered.

  She sniffed it carefully, then rubbed the cut surface over her lips.

  “I think these are okay, but let’s wait a few minutes. If they’re poisonous, I should feel some tingling on my lips.”

  “Let’s keep moving, then,” I suggested. We each took two of the orange fruits and continued our walk.

  After a few agonizing minutes I ran
out of patience.

  “Well, are your lips burning? Can we eat them?”

  Ms. Arnson smiled back at me. She was walking between Brent and me, the leader and the rear guard.

  “I think we’re okay.”

  She didn’t even finish the sentence before I had my knife out. I cut big chunks off the fruit and stuffed them in my mouth. Sticky juice ran down my chin and I wiped it on my filthy sleeve, grinning. It tasted sweet and fresh. It was the finest fruit I ever ate.

  “Oh, it’s so good,” Brent murmured up ahead and I laughed. An empty stomach made the poorest meal into a feast.

  A full stomach improved my mood. I was still exhausted, but the sun was brightening my outlook along with the rest of the forest. Scuttling around in the dark was for shrews. Humans were meant to walk by day.

  Ms. Arnson and Brent fell into quiet conversation ahead of me.

  “How long until we reach the hills?” she asked.

  “Hopefully no more than another hour. We should be close.”

  “I hope Eden is okay.” She said this quietly, almost to herself, but Brent answered.

  “They’ll be all right. We’ll get the core back in time.” He sounded confident.

  Ms. Arnson didn’t answer for a while. Then she said, “You have both your parents at base, right? And two little sisters?”

  “Yeah. We were really lucky. We were all together when Horizon went bust and we all got on a shuttle together.”

  Ms. Arnson turned to me. “And you have your mom and your little sister?” She didn’t mention Josh. Everyone knew about Josh.

  “Mom and Malia, yeah,” I answered. “What about you?”

  “Just me,” she said quietly. “My parents didn’t make it onto the shuttle with me, and neither did my sister. Maybe they got on one of the others. I like to think they’re still alive out there somewhere. Like maybe they landed somewhere safer, some other part of this dino-scat planet where they could survive.” She said it with surprising heat. It was the first time I had heard Ms. Arnson speak of Ceti with anything other than awe. A new planet with life completely unknown to humans, Ceti should have been a naturalist’s dream. But even Ms. Arnson’s reverence for the life here had its limits. I wanted to comfort her, to pat her on the shoulder or something, but even though my schooling was done and we were just three people lost in a jungle, she was still my former teacher.