Project U.L.F. (37 page)

“You did good today,” he whispered to her, “Real good.”

She mumbled something, answering him in her dream, and he smiled to himself in the darkness. He wished she could smile back at him now, it seemed to do wonders for his soul, made him feel invincible. He cast his mind back to the last time she had done so and realized it had been in the shuttle after they had crashed. He shook his head to try and shake the memory but it all came back to him faster than he could consciously filter the images – or the emotions. He felt the same low now as he had then.

She had wanted to say something and he was eager to hear it. He was certain he knew what it was for he felt the same attraction too. She need only to have spoken the words and he could have reciprocated them,
would
have reciprocated them – but she had not and her reluctance to do so had wounded him as much as though she had plunged a knife into his chest. He had not felt that kind of hurt since Tanya had left. Why? He wondered. What had he done?

He made himself comfortable in the darkness and then tried to match his breathing to Kate’s slow, measured breaths, hoping to calm his pounding heart. He lay awake and wondered until sleep over took him.

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Byron and Par awoke with the creatures that greeted the dawn. Byron donned Wyatt’s wristwatch which contained the coordinates of the mining ship and which his friend had given him the evening before. Par patted the breast pocket of his jacket where he held the scorched components of the hyperdrive in a Medi Plasti-Pak that Chris had wrapped them in. He checked the popper on the pocket for the third time to reassure himself that it was closed.

The pair of them slipped silently away. By the time the others even began to stir they were more than ten kilometers away.

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The day passed agonizingly slowly. There seemed nothing worse than having nothing to do than having plenty to do but not being able to do any of it. Wyatt longed for something to occupy his mind. He had started checking the cockpit controls to see which were still functional, or at least, which displays still functioned, but with the hyperdrive gutted and the wiring from other power sources disconnected, Chris convinced him that his efforts would be fruitless and joked that discovering that nothing was working might be awfully depressing.

Wyatt shared the joke with him but frowned as soon as the youngster’s back was turned. He’d heard of black humor before, but that was dark. Really dark. Now Wyatt sat in the shade, yawning all too frequently. He made as if to look at his watch every passing minute, it seemed, and each time he found the naked back of his wrist and remembered that he’d given it to Byron. He shook his head, let his arm fall and reminded himself not to look again, only to do exactly that minutes later. He turned his attention to the others, hoping they might provide some kind of entertainment or distraction.

Chris was the only one who managed to keep himself busy, rifling through the storage hatches and cataloguing his finds. Now and then he would exclaim “Ah” or “Aha!” when he came across something useful or of interest. Wyatt thought about joining him, but reminding himself that he knew little about medical supplies or electrical spares, he figured he would be more of a hindrance than a help. He knew how much the others’ questions were starting to irritate him and was sure the same would apply to Chris. Better just to let him get on with it.

Kate emerged from the shuttle after a long sleep and then seemed to continue it outside. She stripped off to her standard issue T-shirt, something which got a predatory look from Kit, Wyatt noted, and basked in the sun like the tiny reptiles that scattered away from underfoot each time one of them tried to pace away their boredom. She pulled the bright red baseball cap down over her face and eyes.

The heat from the suns was fierce and to lie out in it for any period of time would have been foolish, dangerous even, but Kate never got the chance. She hadn’t counted on Furball’s propensity for boredom as well, and shortly after she settled down the creature jumped onto her stomach, startling her into action. Now she flitted among them all, laughing occasionally at Furball’s antics as the animal scampered around, running away from her in mock chase, leaping from tree to tree and then hanging upside down from a swaying branch and peering at her with those huge orange eyes when she was too tired to continue. Wyatt chuckled to himself in the shadow. Like her, he was growing quite fond of the friendly bundle of fluff.

Kit perched himself on a log and hacked away at pieces of wood with a wicked looking boot knife. To start with, he would strip the wood of its bark, and then, with deliberate strokes, he chopped away chunks until the segment of branch or log was reduced to nothing. When he finished one, he would pick himself up, wander around until he found another, then retake his seat and start the whole process over. It was enough to drive a man insane Wyatt thought, watching him. Still, the shavings would make good kindling for a fire later, but Wyatt doubted that was what Kit had in mind when he started. He was just bored like the rest of them.

There was a feeling of frustration mingled with anticipation over the whole camp and as the day grew long, so the pile of wood chips at Kit’s feet grew high.

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Bobby was faced with a similar monotony, but she was not bored. She was terrified. There was no sense of time in this place. No night. No day. Nor even a sense of time passing from her own body – no hunger, no fatigue. There was nothing here but fire. Everywhere she looked the wall of flame greeted her eyes. Everywhere except where the path stretched out in front of her.

The fire licked at her heels, pushing her onward. The flames danced behind her like excited little bridesmaids decked out all in orange with her playing the bride on this long and strange aisle. But no pews lined this walkway. No heads turned to reveal friendly or familiar faces and, unfortunately for Bobby, no father whispered words of encouragement in her ear or steadied her trembling arm.

But wait.

She squinted, trying to filter out the fiery red which plagued her vision and stung her eyes, making them permanent wells for tears. There was something up ahead. She broke into a run, yelling at the top of her voice to be heard over the roar and crackle of the flames, determined that whoever or whatever was up ahead would have to be deaf, blind or both to not be alerted to her presence. The heat and the fire had been forgotten instantly. All that mattered now was contact.

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Byron and Par had made good time and covered a lot of ground. Their journey had been relatively uneventful compared to previous days and Byron thanked God that not everything he became associated with needed to be complicated.

It was nearing mid-afternoon and they had stopped only twice before now. The first time had been more as a cautionary measure than anything else when a rowdy troop of creatures had swung through the tree tops high above them.

The animals had four limbs, each equally adept at grasping and clinging onto branches, so it was difficult to tell if they possessed arms and legs or whether their legs had just evolved into another pair of arms. Maybe they had never had legs in the first place, Par thought as he watched them. Humans always did assume their phenotypic characteristics to be universal.

Apart from the palms of their “hands”, they were covered in long matted hair, sometimes so thick it was difficult to tell if some of them even owned a head. The larger individuals in the troop moved methodically, using two of their “arms” to reach out and grab the branches in front of them, while the other two remained behind for balance and brought up the rear. Others, the juveniles Byron guessed, spun cartwheels and leapt from branch to branch, just because they could. Massive leaps were met with whoops and howls of delight from the daredevil and his tribal peers. The two men crouched in the undergrowth were stunned by the display of agility and coordination as they watched the strange carpet of life pass overhead.

“Probably a daily migration,” Byron whispered. “I’m sure they’re harmless.” However, both he and Par knew that it was better to err on the side of caution. They were massively outnumbered and these creatures were thick-set and muscular. Byron was sure that if they took an interest in the two strangers below them, a blow from one of those arms, whether aggressive or inquisitive, would easily separate his head from his shoulders.

If the creatures did see the two strange beings below them, they did not indulge them. As rapidly as they had appeared, the collective moved out of sight and through the rustle of the leaves came the ever fainter shrieks of delight as another juvenile became initiated in the way of treetop acrobatics.

It was hours later, as they waded through neck-high ferns, that Byron called them to a halt again. Par caught the same odor on the air that had brought his colleague up short.

Smelling an animal before you could see it meant one of two things: either you weren’t looking very hard, or the animal didn’t want to be seen. If the latter were true then ambush could be imminent. Alex would testify to that, were he still alive.

Par dropped to his haunches instantly, thinking that maybe the view through the stems of the ferns might be clearer than peering through them from above. He was wrong. It was dim, and where the suns’ light couldn’t reach the photosynthetic leaves, the foliage was a jungle of brown instead of one of green.

They heard a rustle and Byron saw a fern twitch about fifteen yards in front of them, then, seconds later, another do the same about ten yards off to their left. Whatever it was, the thing was bloody quick. He had removed his gun from its holster but already knew it was useless. Taking pot shots at something that he couldn’t see and had the speed to literally dodge bullets was a waste of time.

At the sound, Par straightened and took a quick look around. They had to get to higher ground until whatever this thing was had gone. Out here, where they couldn’t even see their feet through the greenery, they were sitting ducks. Sure, whatever it was sounded small, certainly smaller than them, but some of the deadliest creatures known to man could hide themselves under a large pebble.

He tapped Byron once on the shoulder and the other man spun round in alarm, his weapon ending up right under Par’s nose. Par turned his head away, not only to get it out of the line of fire but also to silently indicate where they should go. Byron looked and saw an ancient tree. At its base, a vast and sprawling network of roots grew nearly ten feet above the ground, some as thick as the branches high above. Without a spoken word between them and without making a sound, they crept towards it.

Whatever it was that moved beyond their vision below the ferns, it made no move to attack them. Both men could hear the sounds behind them and then see the ferns twitching to their right and left as the thing raced around out of sight. Both had the same ominous feeling that they were being toyed with, that they were being shepherded toward the tree and it was there that they would be finished. For a moment Par had the horrible feeling that he’d made exactly the decision that whatever it was that zigzagged behind them had hoped for. The pair of them exchanged a glance and the look he got from Byron told him the older man was thinking the same.

To their relief, when they reached the gnarled and twisted ash-white roots nothing happened. Nothing took their legs out from underneath them. Nothing reached down from above to carry them away. They looked at each other in surprise and then, remembering why they had come here in the first place, scrambled quickly up the sinuous growths.

As they climbed a part of whatever had followed them appeared above the ferns behind them. It was a single slender projection which moved with a swaying, serpentine seductiveness and it looked to the two men like a single black billiard ball had been set in the tip. Beneath this there were two small orifices located over two flanges of flesh which wiggled in the air like fingers.

Byron, who had seen some exotic creatures in his time leaned forward for a closer look. “What the…?”