Tropic of Creation (29 page)

The shuddering stopped. Quiet filled the hexadron.

“The hatch …” Tirinn grumbled.

Eli turned toward the hatchway mechanism. Tirinn’s hand on his arm stopped him. “As soon as we get out,” Tirinn said, “start moving away from the carrier. The noise attracts undesirables.”

He cranked the lever, pushing open the hatch and letting in a deluge of sunshine. It hit him like a physical blow. Wafting in with the light, a miasma of botanical smells. Up. He was Up. The hexadron was poking out of a steep hillside, forcing Eli to jump, landing hard. His feet sank into sucking mud.

He looked around him, at a world of muted green. Jagged hills surrounded him, draped with grasses thrusting up through a web of vines. Sunshine turned leaves silvery, created prisms of colors on the water-soaked world. The sky stacked over him in bright infinity.

The thought came to him that, by sheer misfortune, they’d sent him to a place far from the desolate, dry valley of his camp. Maret had said that he would find forest. But this…

Behind him, Tirinn grunted. The old ahtra was standing in the hatchway opening, shielding his eyes. Then, with surprising agility, he clambered out of the capsule, and half ran, half fell down the hillside, dropping his weapon. He lumbered back for it, then stood pointing it at Eli.

Eli made a brushing motion with his hand. “Aim it somewhere else.”

“Right,” Tirinn said, moving the gun to the side. “And let’s
get
somewhere else. Rather soon.”

They set out down the narrow declivity as fast as Tirinn could manage. A backdrop of insect noises pressed in on them as Tirinn began talking, puffing with the effort of the hike. “I don’t have much time to help you. The first thing you need is a different smell. No offense, but you smell like a promising dinner. We’ll find you some food. Seed polyps, if yellow and not wrinkled; those are best. Eat as many as you can find. Should be compatible with human chemistry, from what little research I had time to do. But, with or without food, attend me, you get to that ship. Don’t stop for anything.”

Overhead, occasional vines draped between short, massive tree trunks, forming a tattered ceiling.

“These trees weren’t here when I left.”

“They aren’t trees,” Tirinn huffed beside him. “They’re shoots arising in a circle, so they look continuous. Don’t get near them. Animals den inside them, usually with progeny, which makes them a little edgy.”

They emerged from the ravine, confronting a stunning sight. Before them, a long valley stretched, bordered by eroded mountains on the right, and a forest on the left, with a network of rivers spanning the distance between the two. Tirinn sank to his knees, hanging his head, as though he might pass out.

Eli scanned the valley. It was eerily familiar. It might have been the site of Charlie Camp. Except it could not be, with jungle, and rivers …

Towering thunderheads glided overhead, pressing shadows into the valley. He couldn’t see anything else moving below. No monsters. No humans …

Tirinn was muttering. “So high … who would have thought it was all so high?”

Eli knelt down beside him. “Tirinn-as?”

The old ahtra looked at him with eyes gone wide, lower lids fluttering as though unable to complete a blink. “The sky …” At Eli’s questioning look, Tirinn said, “It’s
awful.” He slumped into a seated position, shaking his head.

Eli pivoted, as down the ravine behind them a pack of small animals came running. As they came closer, Eli saw that they ran on two legs, with arms ending in long claws. He sprayed them with a pulse of fire, dispersing them if not doing much damage.

Tirinn fingered the short gun in his lap. “I’m not much of a fighter, I’m afraid.”

He had traveled from a black and white, subdued world, to a stunning realm of excess: an excess of color, of jungle growths, of smells and sounds. The world was full of dizzying complexity. Amid the fecundity, he searched for signs of his people: gear, footprints … bodies.

He thought this might be the valley he’d left. He could convince himself he’d seen these hills when they’d been naked of grass and vines. In the distance, a rampart of green marked the foreword edge of a forest that might be the Sticks, in a new season. He noted that the flora were mostly grasses, vines, and ground-hugging plants that he could imagine sprouting in days, not weeks. It was harder to imagine animals emerging—and from where?

Like Tirinn, he carried a food pouch swelling with polyps and seeds. Tirinn staggered on, methodically collecting, and urging the sour yellow puff balls on Eli, insisting he chew and swallow. Though Tirinn had surprising stamina, he was unobservant and careless, not pausing in his foraging even when the orange-throats sprang up from the river.

The small creatures emerged from the water, three of them, pausing and swaying, neck sacks pulsing with orange light. Insects swarmed around the light, to be lapped up by a flick of a foot-long tongue. Eli retreated from the stream, pulling Tirinn backward, as several more of the
creatures strutted out of the water to eye—and tongue—them.

“Poison,” Tirinn said offhandedly, as he bent to harvest a puff ball. “In their tongues.” He thrust the food into his pouch, spilling some as Eli pulled him away from the swaying creatures. He heard them plop back into the water, then turned to face Tirinn. He would not last long without Eli.

As though acknowledging that, Tirinn sat heavily in the mud. His face was pale with exertion and stress, but his voice was oddly flat. Looking into the distance, he mumbled, “No training. Trained so many, but never myself. That’s the thing.” He pointed upward. “It never ends, does it? Things fly apart, nothing holds it all together, how could it?” He began muttering in ahtran.

Eli knelt beside him. “Tirinn-as … I have to go on.”

Tirinn waved a tired hand at him. “Go. The ship. Find it and leave. Take this.” He thrust his pouch of food toward Eli.

“You keep it, Tirinn-as.”

The Data Guide’s former self flashed for a moment. “Don’t be a clod. This is for you; I can’t eat that fodder. You eat it. You still smell like a snack for vone.”

Eli shook his head. “Get back to the carrier, Tirinn-as. Go back down. Confound Nefer. Survive.”

Tirinn put his hands on his knees and stared up at the sky, where boiling clouds rapidly closed ranks, dimming the landscape. “Yes, yes, I’ll do that,” the old fluxor said, though his great body looked like it was thoroughly cemented in place. “Now go.” Tirinn looked at Eli as he crouched there, hesitating. “What are you waiting for, a ceremony? There isn’t one.”

Eli wanted to say,
Don’t pin your hopes on me. They won’t want to hear your news, Tirinn-as. No one will want such kin as ahtra. No one will thank you. No one will thank me
.

“Well?” Tirinn demanded.

Eli stood up. “How will I know a vone when I see one?”

Tirinn sighed. “You’ll know. When you do see one, kill it. Even if it looks—familiar.”

“Familiar?”

“Yes, yes, they eat what they kill. Then they play with forms, with physiognomy. To confuse and frighten. It’s a world of disguise and camouflage, disguise and camouflage for which you are particularly ill-suited. But don’t worry, the biological information deteriorates quickly after ingestion. The vone don’t keep the dead more than a few hours. Don’t hesitate to kill them.” He shooed Eli away with both hands. “Go, go …”

Closing his eyes, Tirinn blew out breath from his massive chest. “I’m not afraid. Once you’ve made up your mind to die, there’s no survival value to fear.” He waved absently at the gun at his side. “Take the mav.”

Eli crouched down, retrieving the ahtran weapon. As he did so, Tirinn’s eyes opened for a moment. “There’s something I have to say.”

Eli waited.

Tirinn blinked, as though struggling to remember something. Then he whispered, “I do not know you, Eli Dammond.”

The first drops of rain fell like icy pellets. Eli turned and left Tirinn, shouldering the ahtran weapon, carrying his own before him.

He found the camp at last. A heavy rain lashed down, obscuring but not hiding the awful scene. Charlie Camp lay abandoned, a scene of death.

He walked among the tents and the bones of his soldiers, jumbled near-skeletons, picked at by carnivores and
scavengers. He found an ID clip here and there, recalling a face for the name, a shred of history.…

Holding a fistful of clips, Maret’s words came to him, from that first awful meeting:
They are dead … very deeply sorry … all dead…

There were other skeletons as well, of the animals that overran the camp. With so many carcasses, it showed that his people had sustained an organized defense long enough to do great damage, but not enough. He saw many long-legged, upright skeletons, birdlike; and other bones, lying in puzzling heaps.

Because their wounds had vanished with their flesh, it wasn’t clear exactly how his soldiers had died.

But it was clear how Cristin Olander had died. Her skull bore a bullet hole. A gold locket around her neck and the remains of civilian clothes were all the ID Eli needed. He pulled the locket free. Next to her, another civilian, Geoff Olander … so keen to stay, once, now here for the duration. What had been their last moments? Had she taken her own life, or been in the line of defensive fire? He looked for a younger body, dreading to find it, forcing himself to watch for short arm or leg bones, about Sascha’s size.…

He found Lieutenant Roche’s ID … Lieutenant Anning’s. But not Luce Marzano’s, not Sergeant Juric’s. No sign of Sascha. He half expected to find his own ID clip.
Captain Eli Dammond, Sixth Division Transport
 … His place had been here, among these bones. His burrowed prison seemed long ago, like a dream, a partial death, an interim hell. And now on to the real thing …

There were no ahtran bodies. He examined each intact skull for the telltale ridge of the data tendril. No ahtran bodies. That was good. He didn’t want to find that Maret had lied. But it somehow would have been easier to have a target for the emotions coiling in his gut: a betraying enemy, a conscious evil. But if the wilderness of the planet
had killed them—like an avalanche, a forest fire—it was no proper enemy, and it was immune to justice.

He found the command tent, where he searched for and retrieved the electronic log and a reader. Then, shouldering the weapons he’d chosen for their condition and portability, he left the camp quickly, toting a pack of essentials light enough not to slow him down as he searched for survivors.

He knew there were survivors; the ahtra had said so. And one other clue gave him hope: the bots. There were no bots in camp, live or demobilized. It was the one weapon he’d omitted in the inventory he gave to Nefer.

They raised the odds. Considerably.

I
t had been raining so long, it was not possible to become any wetter than she was. Sascha had a ferocious headache from her fall, and her stomach ached like someone was pulling on her intestines. She lapped at the milk that gathered in the grooves as she clung to the great shoulder of the beast.

She dozed again, dreaming.