Tropic of Creation (12 page)

Geoff Olander pursed his lips, nodding to Juric. “Perhaps your men would bring this over to the med tent, where I’ll be able to borrow some instruments.”

Meanwhile Sascha hunched over the pan to peer at the
creature, which froze in the shadow she cast over its cage. In the next moment it had gathered its hind legs under it and leapt straight up, tipping the lid to one side and catapulting itself into the air. Startled, Sascha fell onto her back as the tent erupted into action, the two enlisteds scrambling for weapons and Sascha’s father lurching toward her, arms outstretched in warning. She swiveled her head to locate the lizard. She saw it poised by one of the soldier’s feet. Unaware, the enlisted turned from side to side, pointing his gun at everything that moved. Then, just as she said, “By your feet,” the creature bounded into the air again, landing in the middle of Sascha’s lap.

She froze.

Her father was shouting for the men not to fire as the two soldiers pointed their guns at Sascha’s solar plexus.

She stared at the creature. The world collapsed swiftly into the present moment: hot tent, silver lizard, golden eyes, pressure on her pelvis from its feet. The animal looked like a porcelain statue except for the eyes, which seemed to return her gaze in friendly fashion. Then it sprang.

Sascha was knocked flat by an arm. When she scrambled up again she saw the lizard impaled on the tent floor with a knife through its midsection. Orange-red blood began pooling under it.

As her father pulled her away from the creature, she saw it was still convulsing on the knife that Sergeant Juric was methodically twisting back and forth in the creature’s gut. At last Juric stood and, bracing the toe of his boot against the creature’s body, pulled his knife out.

Sascha felt a shudder pass through her, the tremor she couldn’t allow herself a moment before.

One of the soldiers swore.
“Goddamn.”
Then he laughed. “It’s a leapin’ lizard. A goddamn leapin’ lizard.”

“Shut up,” his friend said, holstering his gun and wiping the sweat from his upper lip.

Juric cleaned his knife on a cast-off sock.

“Thank you, Sergeant,” her father said softly.

Juric nodded. Then he turned on his men. “You
alphs.”
They bristled. No enlisted wanted that name, especially these two who sported their regens with pride. “Helpless without your guns, aren’t you? Ever kill anything with your bare hands?” He smiled, a terrible half grin that seemed to carve a painful course into the working side of his face.

Sascha’s father had regained his composure. “Perhaps you men would get that specimen back in the pan?” They jumped to the task, using a rag to lift the creature by the tail.

As they handed Geoff the pan, he said, “We won’t talk about this. We don’t want to upset anyone over what might have happened here, do we?”

The two men nodded. They had no more wish to face Lieutenant Roche than Sascha wished to face her mother.

“Well, then,” her father finished. He clamped a hand on Sascha’s shoulder and gently steered her toward the tent opening.

As Juric held the tent flap for them he said to Sascha, “You’ve got steady nerves, Ms. Olander. Put my
alphs
, here, to shame.”

Despite the glowers from the two enlisteds, Sascha let herself smile at Juric. “Thanks, Sergeant.”

He didn’t smile back, but she had no wish to see
that
particular expression again.

Word came that evening from Baker Camp. They weren’t coming. It was the first time since they landed on Null that Sascha saw her father worried. Her mother always worried, and therefore was no barometer of events. But now Geoff Olander’s eyes took on a watchful, edgy cast that signaled he was paying attention to something beyond biology.

It was 2
A.M
., but every light in camp was on. They didn’t
think that Marzano would attempt a night landing, but the rains had stopped—and if she made a run for it, they wanted the lights to mark the spot. Of course, no one knew for certain that Marzano was in fact sitting secure in the
Lucia
, much less pondering how she might exploit a break in the monsoons to do a night run. Everyone acted as though she was, but no one knew. Not now that they’d heard from Baker Camp.

Sascha was sitting on her bunk trying for the sixth or seventh time to get through to Nazim. Perhaps her friend was asleep. Her connection to Baker Camp faded and surged, promising a bad transmission even if she did get through, but Sascha continued to try.

In the other corner of the tent her mother, who, like Sascha, had abandoned sleep, was busy inputting at her screen, revising her paper endlessly, as though the act of editing imposed much-needed order on the world. Geoff was sitting with the officers in Lieutenant Roche’s tent. It made Sascha proud to think that they considered her father an important resource in their current problems. His dissection proved that the venomed creatures were more like amphibians than reptiles, and that the poison was delivered by spray, not fangs. It meant that you didn’t want to get even close to the amphibs, much less have one eye-balling you as it sat in your lap.

“Nazim,” she repeated again. “Nazim, wake up, you lazy rotten enlisted.” Outside, the breeze rippled the tent walls. After all the rat-a-tat-tatting of the rains, the wind possessed an extraordinarily calm sound, rather like the breathing of a somnolent world, asleep after a purging rage. Sascha sat cross-legged, balancing her screen on her knees, poking the reconnect button at regular intervals.

When an answer came, Sascha was so surprised she almost dropped the slate. Cristin turned around from her screen.

“Hey, Olander,” Nazim said. Her image on-screen was slightly twisted on the diagonal.

“So,” Sascha began, “you patches afraid of a little hike in the woods?”

“Shit, no.” Nazim’s usual devilish grin was twisted to the side. “We’ll meet you halfway, Olander. By the bridge.”

It was such a relief to hear Nazim’s confident tone, Sascha almost wept. It would all be all right. These seasoned troops weren’t going to panic over a little trouble.

Still… “What bridge?”

Nazim hunched something closer around her shoulders. It looked like a blanket, but the screen was seeded with holes, and aslant. “Our camp dog is out there building us a nice bridge. We didn’t like the narrow one.”

“Bridge over what?” Sascha asked.

“Bridge over the black river.”

Sascha and her mother traded glances at this obscure remark. Nazim closed her eyes for a moment as though she would fall asleep in the middle of their conversation.

“Did I wake you?”

“Yeah. But I was having bad dreams.”

“What happened?” After a pause to let Nazim answer, Sascha prompted, “We heard you lost six. That’s ugly.”

“Yeah, we lost Olivetti and Ganz to the lizards. If you stay away from the banyans, they don’t come at you as much, but sometimes they hit you from ground nests.” Sascha didn’t know what banyans were, but she didn’t interrupt. “By the time we got a few hundred yards in, we couldn’t see shit, it was so dark in the canopy and the ever-fucking rain. Couldn’t march in a straight line, with the roots getting in our way.” She seemed to be talking to herself, not explaining anything, just replaying her memory. “So we went around them and ended up switchbacking all over the pocking jungle. That’s when we found the river.” She stopped to take a swig of something from a cup.

“What river?”

Nazim said fiercely, “The goddamned black river, that’s what.” Her fervor caught Sascha by surprise. “You guys didn’t know about the black river, did you? You said, come on down, come in to Charlie, so we took the straightest path we could, and yes, there’s a pocking river in the middle of the Sticks! “That’s where we lost the others.” Her expression was impossible to read on the slant. “Don’t go wading in shallow rivers, Olander.” The connection went out.

Sascha’s mother came over and sat beside her daughter on the cot. In another moment Nazim was back again, continuing, “…  went after him, to help. Then he starts floundering, too, and we see what’s got hold of him, maybe same thing that got Fortney. It’s a big bastard, ‘bout as big as you, Olander. It’s got very large front pincers in front, on a flat body. It had eyes on the top of its back, and a tail with a stinger like a lance. We zapped it the best we could, but our guys went down into the black river. They went down, Olander!” Her voice cracked, or the connection was garbling her. “And they never came back up. So we got the dog to work on the bridge, and it did a narrow one. Perez volunteered to go over, and he was fine, got over just fine, and then we lined up, and when Barent went over, there was a thrashing below the bridge, and he just toppled in. After that, we retreated. We left the dog to do a wider bridge, but we weren’t going to wait. Perez, on the other side of the river, he was supposed to go on, to try to get to Charlie Camp. We finally made it back, sort of.… And you guys, you never saw Perez, did you?” When Sascha didn’t answer, Nazim spat out,
“Did
you?”

“No,” Sascha whispered. Then louder, “No, Nazim, we haven’t yet.”

“Yet?” Her tone was menacing. “You
expect
to see him come waltzing in?”

Sascha felt her mother’s arm around her shoulders. It was the kind of comfort that Sascha wanted to give Nazim, but all she could say was “I’m sorry, Nazim.”

Her friend shrugged beneath the blanket that she kept snug around her. In a more even voice she said, “I’m not going back there.”

“We’re bringing the
Lucia
into Charlie Camp,” Sascha told her. “We’re going to get out of here.”

“Have a nice trip,” came the bitter reply.

“We will. As soon as you get here.”

“We figure to go around the Sticks tomorrow. The long way around,” Nazim said.

“See you tomorrow, then.”

“On a nice day it would take an hour, hour and a half.”

“Maybe it’ll be nice tomorrow.” Even to Sascha it sounded lame.

Nazim stared. “I think we’re about done with
nice”
Then she reached toward the keyboard, and the disconnect button. “Don’t go walking in the woods, Olander,” she said, and the screen went blank.

E
li wiped a gob of paste from his sleeve. Somewhere in the tour of the Prime Way, he had picked up a sticky wad of something. It stuck to his fingers for a moment, and he threw it to the floor, where it joined the unfamiliar litter of his prison cell.

He went to the cell door and listened, trying to discern the rhythms of the place, and when the corridors might be less used. He knew the route to the transit chute. But avoiding meeting a dweller would be difficult, given that he couldn’t predict ahtra periods of rest or low activity. They didn’t sleep at regular intervals, it was known. But when they did, it was a profound and unmovable sleep. It was little enough information to have at his disposal. Ahtra hid themselves and what they were. At the same time, ahtra undertook to study human ways. Maret’s familiarity with his culture might easily come from the radio communications of Congress Worlds, over hundreds, even thousands of years. But ahtra, to their great advantage, did not leak information, by radio or otherwise.

Just now there were voices outside, and shuffling feet in the corridor. He waited.

His thoughts went to the encampment on the surface. Sometimes he thought that by sheer concentration he could see what was happening there. Sometimes he envisioned a blasted place, an enemy attack, everyone dead. Other times, a tidy departure. They had waited, then left, thinking him dead. Or they were breaking camp at this very moment, preparing to leave. He pressed his ear against the door, straining to hear.

He thought of the moments where everything hangs in the balance. Pivotal moments carried in the stream of ordinary events. Like fragments of space rock, they shot past you—or through you—out of nowhere. Sometimes you didn’t realize their importance until you found blood later. Other times you knew them with dead certainty, right away. That day on the
Recompense
, the event came upon him like that. Even at that moment, he knew it would make him or ruin him.

The screens were registering nothing. The bridge was cool, but the electronics, as always, cast a miserly heat, enough to release a gummy, chemical odor. Colonel Suzan Tenering had just left the bridge, passing the helm to Eli, and the crew relaxed a notch. Someone made small talk in low tones. It was the calm, ordered atmosphere of combat readiness with an underlying anxiety, each crew member knowing they could join the fifty million dead today, depending.

Then it appeared on-screen, no more than a speck, but the techs had its signature, some jumping to conclusions, whispering the word that galvanized the bridge:
world ship
. Colonel Tenering was in the elevator, three decks down, heading lower. Then her voice burst into his ears, over the headset, while the bridge crew scrambled, hailing, analyzing. Eli conveyed the gist of it to Tenering, now
riding back up to her command, but too late to be at the center of events as was Eli Dammond, first officer of the
Recompense
. Lieutenant Nule stared at Eli, awaiting the order to launch missiles, looking like a man set on fire. Everyone else stared at the screen, just trying to figure out what they were looking at, the view no human had laid eyes on before, more than a fleeting glimpse at vast distances. “Captain?” Lieutenant Nule said. Tenering’s voice hammered for assessment. Lieutenant Nule asked again for orders. The crew turned to Eli, all frantic. He spoke. His words left an imprint in his body, a fleshy callous.