IronStar (6 page)

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
!

“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! Ee
yu
tha!” 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, that
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.

Fair enough
, she thought,
reaching for the twenty-centimeter knife in its sheath on her right thigh. The
green strands parted easily enough, but there seemed to be so
much
of
it, slithering towards her from all directions, even as it dragged her
thrashing body briskly toward the center of the swamp. After a few more moments
of intense struggle, the score was approximately: Kirrah - two or three hundred
severed green strands; Green Strands - one neatly trussed Survey Lieutenant.
Looks
like I’m gonna find out how deep it is in the center, after all
. The
growing mass of living green rope had her tangled like a bird wrapped in a net,
and was pulling her under the surface.

The suit’s air recycler had cut in
automatically when her helmet closed, and on the faceplate’s clear surface she
could see hundreds of tiny serrations working back and forth, as the Green Web
began trying to saw its lunch into convenient bite sized pieces.
Meter and a
half, max
, she decided, looking up at the water’s surface.
Not so deep,
but I can see how this would be a nuisance to someone without their own air
supply… like that little boy, for example… how
was
he doing
, she
wondered briefly.
I hope those Grass Weasels really need something in their
front end, we hadn’t really known one another long enough to target vital
spots…
Frustrated at the toughness of Kirrah’s survival suit, the green
strands shifted tactics, twisting and pulling her tangled limbs painfully. With
her chin she nudged the stud that extended the auxiliary controls in the suit’s
collar. As she took the control stalk in her mouth, the suit’s AI projected the
main menu onto a corner of the faceplate. Using tongue and teeth on the stalk’s
mouth-control pads, she called up:

<
Medical; Emergency Splints; Fractures
>.

,

the screen declared primly.
Not
yet
, Kirrah thought grimly,
but this predator is determined to tear me
limb from limb, and it’s probably strong enough to do it
.

<
Emergency Splints; Fractures;
Immobilize; Select All; Override
>,

she tongued. Her suit turned
suddenly rock-hard as its approximately 75 million tiny interlocking hullmetal
links stopped simulating a supple cloth, and locked rigidly into place.
Chew
on that, you…
thought Kirrah.
Stalemate
.

Time passed.

How long am I gonna have to imitate
a rock,
she wondered,
before you get the idea that I am not your
next meal?
Eighteen minutes, it turned out; then the green webbing just
sort of lost interest and slowly slithered back to its ambush position on the
pond bottom. Kirrah’s suit drifted to the surface where she bobbed and rolled
gently. One of the blue bird-things landed on the rigid hullmetal cloth
covering her right wrist, which was twisted across her chest.
No, you can’t
pick my bones, you’re
my
lunch
, she thought as it pecked
experimentally at her right hand, which was still clutching, thank God, the
sidearm.