IronStar Page 4

  Kirrah stepped out into a brilliant late afternoon sun, soft blue sky overhead, coarse green growth underfoot, spongy like a mattress. Trees (no, that’s “tree-like structures”, no dangerous assumptions please) scattered across gently rolling hills to a line of, well, it looks like forest, about a klick to the north. Scattered white clouds filled the sky. To the …yes, that would be east, a dark wall of clouds stacked high into the sky. A spectacular double rainbow shimmered on the cloudbank. The air was, let’s see, the air was 14 Celsius, aww, screw it, we’re going to be breathing it soon anyway… Kirrah pressed the two studs and twisted. With a tiny sigh, the helmet folded back into its ring. The air was …bright, yes. It smelled fresh and fragrant, a tiny pungency, a lot better than the inside of her suit. A long, slow rumble penetrated the buzzing in her decompression-damaged ears: thunder.

  Great. Stranded on an unexplored planet for who knows how long - Yes, Captain Bill Leitch, again I thank you and your professional paranoia, for sending that mailtube ahead of us. It will be activating in exactly… one hundred eighty-one hours, twenty-seven minutes. It will require approximately seventy-five days, Standard, to reach the NavInt station on Trailway. It will take …oh, two weeks, to mount a rescue force. Another one hundred eleven days for them to reach local space. That’s, um, two hundred and eight days, give or take, and then this little blue light is gonna light up on my wristcomp, and I’m gonna say, ‘Over here, people’, and then I’m gonna have a long, hot shower.

  And speaking of ‘other people’… Kirrah cycled her wristcomp's screen to display “Local comm traffic”. Zero entries. She opened an analog channel, let it sweep the radio spectrum a few times. A faint, impersonal hiss, floating on an ocean of silence. Well, what were you expecting, genius? They're all dead.

  Right… now, where was I? Yes, stranded here, night approaching, also rain, which will turn that nice four-story high gel igloo behind me, back into a liter of goop in about six hours. Damn, right now I’d trade six years of Astronautics and Navigation courses for a good two weeks of planetary survival school. That I’d pay really, really close attention to, this time. What’s the drill? Shelter, Fire, Water, Food… Ok, Lieutenant Roehl, let’s get organized.

  Chapter 4: Organized

  “When abroad, take half the clothes, and twice the ammunition” – ancient advice for travelers, origin unknown; modified by Survey Service for training use.

  The term “organized” is probably over-rated anyway, thought Kirrah, as she huddled miserably in the non-shelter of a thirty-meter “tree-like structure”, at the edge of what her mind kept insisting was a forest. Cold rain spattered on the ground around her, drummed against the hood of her suit, and somehow found its way to her cheek and chin, but she refused to close her helmet and use bottled air, just to keep her face dry. A few meters away a jumble of cut branches and sodden leaves mocked her efforts at building a shelter. It had seemed so much easier at survival school…

  And dark! No one had told her how dark it was going to be. Darker than nightside on any civilized planet she had ever visited; darker than a 3V theatre; darker even than space - no starlight penetrated the dense clouds. As featureless as Tubespace, and probably colder. Certainly wetter.

  She felt naked and exposed here: her hearing was still damaged, although it had returned a little over the course of the evening, she was still sure there were hunters in the forest she’d want to know about. Her suit’s material would turn most teeth or claws, but might not protect her from a sprain or a broken limb if something big attacked. She lay on one side, her back to the meter-thick trunk, sidearm clutched in one hand. A small J-1P beamer, useful for welding, cutting, or making holes in unsuspecting night monsters. In a pinch it could even modulate a tightbeam to an orbiting rescue ship. What it could not do, however, was fire more than a dozen more times tonight. After an evening of cutting branches for that misbegotten lean-to, it badly needed a recharge, which would be first on her list tomorrow, when the sun came up and began to feed the photoelectric sheet she would spread on the ground.

  If the sun came up. How long were these nights anyway? Let’s see, twenty-seven hours fourteen minutes rotation, it was spring in the northern hemisphere, assuming she was in the northern hemisphere, wasn’t there a way to measure your latitude from the noon sun? That would be, hmmm, gotta reprogram the wristcomp to local day length, yes. And find food – the suit’s nutrient inventory was not intended for a two-hundred day sabbatical, no, and shelter… how about a nice warm cave… warm, and dry, and dark…

  See (said that familiar voice), I told you she’d be fine.

  Fine? You call that fine? Without that suit, she’d be dead of hypothermia before morning! Her survival skills are pathetic! Inattentive, that girl has had her head somewhere else all of her life! We’ll be seeing her again, and soon, you mark my words!

  Maybe, we’ll see. We all have to find our own path through life’s lessons, old friend, even you.

  …oh, fiddle!

  …whuff-whuff, crack, whunch, whunch, whuff…

  With a start, Kirrah opened her eyes, and noticed two things immediately. One, it was morning, and two, a big, dark brown, furry, something was standing about three meters away from her head. With a nearly audible click, her eyes snapped into focus. Not three meters, ten meters, which made that “big” adjective just pale, that thing was huge, it must be a good five meters tall, and six or seven long, from its whiplike tail to its slowly swinging head, and a set of …not just horns, more like a helmet mounting a three-meter parabolic dish antenna… twelve scalloped curves spaced evenly around its circular horned rim, and a sturdy bony support. The rim looked sharp. A small amber eye glared at Kirrah suspiciously, all four heavy legs did a sort of sideways shuffle, then slowly the massive head lowered, and a wrinkled mass of skin around the, the face, just lowered to the ground like an animated curtain, whuff, whunch, whunch… and lifted, leaving a half-meter-wide oval of much shorter …grass, whatever that ten-centimeter green wooly stuff was that covered the ground as far as the southern horizon. Behind the creature, now that she looked, there were quite a few like him (her?), in fact a loose but rather large grouping, extending right from the treeline out half a klick onto the rolling plains, perhaps a hundred individuals munching their ponderous way across the savanna.

  Ok, matey, we’re not gonna hurt each other, are we? Kirrah subvocalized, as she very slowly rolled to a sitting position, sidearm tightly gripped in her right hand. Personally, I don’t know if this popgun could hurt a mountain like you, you must mass at least twenty-five tonnes. With a feeling of relief and accomplishment, she eased around the bole of the tree, backing a few steps into the forest. “Matey” turned indifferently and continued grazing, lifting his two-meter-long tail and leaving a steaming thirty-liter deposit on the ‘grass’, which went, Kirrah noticed, a long way toward explaining that ‘tiny pungency’ she had detected last evening.

  Sunlight, I need sunlight, she thought. And water. And food. Not in that order, though; where’s the damned ladies room, the suit’s honeybucket is full…

  An hour later, with her beamer happily sucking up energy from the photovoltaic sheet spread over a low bush, Kirrah got down to the serious matter of food. Water was not a problem at the moment: a shallow pool in a small depression had filled her suit’s reservoir, and fresh, clean water was even now filtering through its recycler. So far, the suitpack’s analyzer had rejected samples of grass (indigestible), three kinds of leaves (all indigestible, one mildly toxic), a vine, and, to her secret relief, a pale ten-centimeter slug-thing she had found at the base of the bush (digestible but toxic). She was beginning to wonder whether “Matey” (she was already thinking of the huge beasts as woolly mammoth analogs) had any smaller cousins. And another thought from Survival 101 was seeping disquiet into the back of her consciousness: If a herbivore as large as ‘Matey’ needed to (a) travel in herds and (b) carry a three-meter circular(!) horned weapon on its head, then what in Murphy’s name did this pla
net use for predators?

  Time to move on, she decided. She allowed herself a bite of the tasteless but nutritious food carried in a tube stitched to her suit’s leg coverings. Enough nutrients on its own to keep a foolish sailor alive for a month, or a smart sailor alive for two hundred and eight days, if it was supplemented by native food, and used as a source of any essential vitamins the local ecosystem was thoughtless enough to leave out. Make that two hundred and seven days, she recalculated, one down already. With the photocloth draped around her like a cape, she could walk and maintain some recharging for her beamer, now up to twenty percent - call it seventeen shots at full power. Hmmm, those moving mountains of herbivores seemed to be pretty well focussed on mowing their way across this endless plain, she considered… as long as I don’t startle them… If anything one four-hundredth their mass can startle them. Apparently whatever predators they knew, didn’t look much like a forty-two year old, 162 centimeter, 51 kilogram, rather plain woman, wearing a Model 3G Survival Suit.

  Giving a wide berth to the herd of mammoth analogs, one Lieutenant Kirrah Katherine Roehl, Navigator First Class, Helm-qualified on Regnum military vessels up to Light Cruiser, most recently Helm One on a Scoutship capable of speeds in excess of a highly classified 2300 times lightspeed, set off on foot across the rolling green plains.

  ‘Foot’ was the operative word, she decided ruefully some time later. The spongy grass analog, while uniform and resilient, seemed to absorb energy with every step she took. The day was warming quite nicely too, thank you, and it was all very pretty… and after the ninth or tenth gently rounded rise in the ground and sparse clump of trees, pretty boring. After an hour of trudging, she’d spotted nothing more interesting than a second herd of ‘mastodoids’ as she thought of them, at a distance, and the occasional sparse patch of spiky gray plants, sticking up about knee-high above the not-grass and each looking like a pair of mating tripods. On impulse she squatted and picked one of the gray plants, which promptly shrilled a high wail, stabbed one of its sharp “stems” hard against her suit’s forearm covering, and bit her hand. All the other “plants” promptly pulled up their pencil-thin legs and made a small clattering stampede away from her, making the same soprano ululation.

  Kirrah shrieked in surprise and dropped the small creature, which scuttled off after its fellows. A few moments’ attention from the suit’s first-aid kit cleansed the modest laceration and applied an antiseptic gel covering, as well as providing the time to reflect anew on the danger of assumptions in a novel biosphere. The next two small patches, correction, herds of gray stick-creatures, she detoured carefully. It would be interesting, she thought, to make a thorough investigation of the local ecology. Those stick-things were obviously earning a living somehow, yet they seemed to be doing nothing but weed-imitations in the middle of a vast fuzzy plain. Under the dense mat of not-grass was a light brown sandy soil, with a few tiny insect-analogues that scurried for cover when she exposed them.

  After what seemed like an interminable weary hike, she stopped to calculate progress. To her mild horror, she had been travelling only ninety-five minutes (was that all?), and according to the inertial nav in her wristcomp, (really?) only four point six klicks. This would simply not do. That’s only three kph, this is going to take forever!

  “Well, what exactly is it that‘s going to take forever?” she countered. “Do we have an actual goal?” Food, yes. Ok, we don’t seem to be in the right department for food. Everything out in the open’s too big, or tastes bad. In the, the “forest department”, everything’s too high, or too smart to be spotted. Where’s the next department? Hmm, how about that darker green patch, looks like about three or four more klicks angled off to the south. Damn, wish I’d had time to load some of those excellent views of the planet from the Arvida’s sensor suite into my wristcomp… (Doris!) hokay, soldier, march!

  Chapter 5 (Landing plus one): Dinner

  “Of all the unending rhythms of life, fear versus greed is the most universal and most basic balancing act for any organism, from a single cell to an entire planetary ecology. There is no more fundamentally useful question an individual can ask than, Am I at this moment the hunter, or the huntee? Noticing when the answer to this question changes silently but decisively under one’s feet is the first step to survival, whether one is in the desert of Novo Karachi, on the bridge of a Fleet warship entering action, or sitting around a table for a friendly game of cards. Influencing the answer is the second step to survival.” - Introduction to the ‘Darwin Series’ of Regnum Survey Service basic survival courses.

  Another hour and a half of slogging brought Kirrah to the edge of a three or four hectare patch of swampy lower ground, a sort of oasis of brighter blue-green vegetation in the sea of paler green ground cover. Which she by now refused to think of as “grass”, it was way too hard to walk over. Reeds as tall as her head, some topped with pale green flowers, bobbed and dipped in the light breeze of late morning. Even to her untrained eyes, a dozen varieties of flowering bushes and small trees were evident among the green profusion. To her steadily improving hearing came the rhythmic piping of something very much like a bird, light blue and about the size of her foot, sitting on a low bush partway into the swamp. Ripples in the small patch of water, and a few low clucking sounds, suggested a diverse and possibly edible ecosystem awaiting discovery. Planetologists shouldn’t be this hungry when on duty, Kirrah reflected, it makes everything look like dinner…

  Careful now, we don’t want to scare anything, and we don’t want to get out into the actual water. Judging by the height of those reeds it’s only half a meter deep, but who knows, they could be growing ten meters tall off the bottom, just to make me look like an idiot… let’s circle along the bank and see what we find. Slowly and as quietly as she could, Kirrah crept to her left along the muddy bank. The low clucking sounds stopped. The bird-thing kept up its piping… look, there were two more of them, let’s see what the analyzer has to say about roast bird-thing. That one, perched at the very edge of the water, just a careful step off the bank, the bottom is reedy but solid enough to stand on, one more step sideways for a clean shot around this brush, slowly, set the beamer to ten percent, don’t want to blow it to smithereens… lean just another two centimeters to the right…

  “Eeyu! Irwua! Eeyu!” shrilled from off to her left. The bird-things took to the air, scarlet and orange underfeathers flashing a warning to every swamp dweller with eyes. A thousand tiny ripples appeared on the surface of the water, no doubt from schools of minnows diving for cover. What… with a murderous glare, Kirrah swung the weapon toward whatever had just volunteered to take the place of the bird-thing on her menu. A confusing motion among a circle of leaves and reeds, a small bush surged upwards, on the shoulders of a, a, a… small, brown, nearly naked boy! …a human boy! What was he - looks like about eight or nine Standard years - doing out here in the middle of nothing, ruining her dinner? And why was he backing quickly away, pointing, surely she wasn’t that scary… and still piping at her:

  “Irwua! Eeyu! Eeyutha!” Then Kirrah became aware of two things in quick succession. The ripples out on the water weren't dissipating, they were increasing. Quickly, and all over several hundred square meters, the water was surging with activity, and it all seemed to be arranged with her at the epicenter. And second, behind the boy, something impossibly long and perfectly grass-colored was rising out of the not-grass, something surging towards his unsuspecting back, supple as a weasel, as thick as a man’s body, and at least a dozen meters of it moving, more rising from its incredible concealment in plain sight in the ground cover.

  Kirrah’s mind, drilled to fluid near-automation in Tubespace tactical warfare, was perfectly capable of analyzing half a dozen competing tactical priorities, and her mind was already shifting smoothly into full battle mode as time seemed to slow elastically:

  Scanning… Two threats detected: imminent personal attack (water); danger to the young boy. Priority allocation: first the boy, th
at thing will be on him in another second. Next, something in the shallow water was obviously about to attack her, but she wore her survival suit, and he wore just a loincloth. Signal to hands while we’re working this out: there’s already consensus for maximum beamer intensity, twist that setting up… Peripheral vision now reporting probable hostile activity at our feet, recommend immediate retargeting to protect self… Overruled, the boy’d broken cover to try to warn her, and that bought him the first defensive shot, in Kirrah’s personal universe… Over her steadying sights, the weasel-thing was closing on the boy… yes, I feel whatever-you-are already touching my ankle (eek! ankles!) in the water, you can’t have my attention this instant, take a number, you’re next; steady, wait for the target to cross the sightline SNAP! An eye-hurting incandescent yellow bolt connected her weapon to the grass-beast, about a meter behind its front end, and a very messy explosion of steam and pink and gray tissue was spouting in all directions, and the boy’s startled face swiveled to look over his shoulder, and Kirrah landed facedown in the muddied water as something powerful jerked both feet out from under her.

  Time to get the initiative back, said Kirrah’s tactical reflexes. Her elbows struggled to keep her upper body out of the greenish water as her left index finger brushed the Close Helmet stud. Twisting onto her back against the grip around her ankles, she could make out a web of green ropy somethings, already entangling her lower legs and reaching greedily for her hips and arms. Oh, no we don’t, she thought, bringing the beamer to bear on the tangle of thumb-thick cords. She pressed the firing stud, the beamer emitted a tiny beep and its indicator light flashed proximity-warning orange, indicating the weapon’s decision that the target was too close to fire without damaging its owner.