Alien--Echo, page 21
“It’ll refuel if you give it a few seconds.” The forest is looming up ahead, more welcoming than ever. The creatures are new to the planet. They don’t know it as well as I do. Sure, they’re knives in more ways than one, capable of cutting through virtually anything that gets in their way, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be impacted by any obstacles I can throw into their way.
“We don’t have a few seconds!”
That’s when the creature leaps onto the back of the ATV, rocking it. Kora screams. I scream. Even Viola screams, which is impressive, since she has no lungs.
“Hold on,” I shriek, and turn us hard to the left, heading straight for the trees.
Kora, who has seen Earth cartoons before, understands what I’m about to do, and ducks down. The creature doesn’t have her cultural advantage. It reaches for us, and is in mid-reach when the branch catches it across the middle of its chest, knocking it back, off the ATV, leaving us to go roaring on without its additional weight.
This isn’t a solution. On the one hand, I don’t think the creature has enough higher thought to actually be angry with us. On the other hand, now it’s in the trees. Not exactly what I’d call a net gain on our part. I haul on the controls again, settling us on the path my family has cut through the trees, and race on toward the wetlands.
Terrain varies. That’s one of the great things about terrain, from a biological standpoint, and one of the terrible things about terrain, from a tactical standpoint. The caves are located on the edge of the taiga, which gives way in turn to forests of both trees and towering mycotic blooms. The forests verge on more taiga, on deeper, more impenetrable forest, and on the wetlands.
The wetlands, where the Zagreus hippos live.
“We’re gonna get wet,” I say, raising my voice enough to be heard above the rumble of the engine. I can hear the creature crashing through the trees behind us. I’m doing my best not to focus on that, because if I lose focus, we’re all going to be dead. Except for Viola. She’ll be in the same situation she was in when we found her in the cave, only worse, because now she’s just a head. She’ll have to watch us get ripped apart—please let us get ripped apart, and not dragged back to the cave—and then she’ll lie, forgotten, wherever she fell, until her batteries run down and she’s finally allowed to slip away.
We have to beat this thing. We have to win. So I gun the engine and coax a little more speed out of the straining power connectors, sending us flying over a rise in the ground, into the marshy edge of the wetlands.
This is where things get tricky. If I’m not careful, I’ll swamp the axles, getting them so stuffed with waterweeds that we can’t move anymore. We’ll be easy prey for the creature if that happens. I ease off on the power, just a little, and take one hand off the controls, digging into my pocket. My backpack is also digging into me, pressing into my back until every jolt knocks the breath halfway out of my body. It seems impossible that I didn’t notice it before, although to be fair, I’ve been distracted.
The creature shrieks behind us. The ground sags beneath us. The ATV shakes around us, fighting to make its way through the growing marsh. It’s a loyal little machine. It’s always done exactly what we ask it to do, even when that meant damage to its systems.
Just one more great escape, I think, and gun the engine. We break free of the marshy patch, rolling onto solid ground as I pull the second vial of lion-worm pheromones out of my pocket and pop the lid off before flinging it into the waterweeds looming on our left.
This is the risky part. If any of the stuff gets on us, we’ll be contending with ongoing attacks from amorous lion-worms for the rest of the day, all of them convinced that we’ve somehow hidden the most attractive female of their species in our pockets. But.
Lion-worms don’t hunt in the wetlands, because the Zagreus hippo is one of the few creatures native to the region that possesses the size, strength, and natural defenses to make the lion-worm reconsider its choices. Hippos hate lion-worms, an accidental re-creation of an old Earth relationship between two animals that bear no actual resemblance to Earth lions or Earth hippos. Their usual reaction when a lion-worm—generally a juvenile, too young to know better or to have an established hunting ground of its own—wanders into the wetlands is fast, bloody, and violent.
A juvenile lion-worm that survives one encounter with a Zagreus hippo will do almost anything to avoid having a second one.
We race on, and the creature chases behind us, unable to be silent on the uneven terrain, with the waterweeds lashing at its chitinous form. It hasn’t learned the territory yet. It’s still the universe’s perfect predator, still the knife that hunts, it’s just having a little difficulty figuring out how to wield itself. Give it time, give it time.
Time’s what I’m not going to give. I punch the engine one more time, and we roar forward as it reaches the patch of waterweeds I’ve saturated with lion-worm pheromones. It recognizes the scent and roars in anger at the presence of another predator—a roar that proves remarkably prescient as the hippo charges out of the weeds and slams its bony head into the creature’s midsection.
My parents would be so proud of the way I’ve been using the wildlife of Zagreus to do my dirty work.
Solid ground begins just a few meters away, marked by a small, blooming fungus that only grows where it can be sure of staying dry. It makes a grubby red line all along the edges of the wetland, fragile and easily overlooked. Mom missed it the first time, and fell into the water up to her neck.
It’s a funny memory now, while I’m still in semi-shocked denial about what happened back in that cave. Maybe someday it’ll be a funny memory again. I pull onto solid ground and stop the engine.
“What are you doing?” demands Kora.
“Buying us some time,” I say, and draw Mom’s gun from its place at my hip.
In the cave, I’d been afraid to fire, afraid to bring more monsters down on our heads. Here, I have no such fears. Here, I need to stop this thing from following us. It killed the lion-worm back in the cave. I absolutely believe it can kill a single Zagreus hippo. Maybe if a whole pod came out to finish the kill, the odds would be different, but we can’t count on that, and we can’t count on the creature deciding that it would rather hunt here in the wetlands than follow us back to the colony. For whatever reason, these things like human prey.
The creature and the hippo are a roiling ball of limbs and terrible natural weaponry. One of the hippo’s horns has broken off near the base; it’s bleeding, which only enrages it more. Adult hippos aren’t used to getting hurt. They aren’t used to thinking that they can be hurt. It slams its head into the creature again and again, ripping and tearing with its terrible bony maw.
As for the creature, it slashes with all four limbs and with its terrible tail, clearly angling for a clean shot at the hippo’s throat. The purpose of the second mouth is suddenly horrifically clear. If the creature can bite down just once, it won’t need any leverage to rip the hippo’s throat out: all it will need to do is let its second mouth snap forward and bite down. It can sever arteries without ever relaxing its grasp on the main bulk of the hippo.
It’s efficient and elegant and I hate it. Breathing out, I line up the barrel of my mother’s gun with the two roiling forms, trying to relax into my stance.
Shooting is one of those things that works better when you’re not stressed or tense. Naturally, most of the time, if you need to shoot something, you’re probably going to be at least a little bit uneasy. I can’t quite forget that a miss will mean the creature shifts its attention away from the hippo and maybe comes after us again. But it’s going to win. The hippo is the nastiest creature on Zagreus, and the creature is going to defeat it, rip it to shreds and leave it for the scavengers, and I can’t let that happen. Not out of any desire to conserve the hippo—although they may be endangered someday, the Zagreus hippo has a perfectly stable population right now—but because I want this to be over. I want to get back to the colony and know that we’re finally safe, that this is finally finished.
So I line up my shot, and I breathe out, and when the rolling of the two terrible beasts brings them into the right alignment, I pull the trigger.
The recoil is immense, slamming me against the seat and nearly ripping the gun out of my hand. It doesn’t dislocate my shoulder—quite—but it feels as though it might as well have done so. The impact vibrates all the way down to my bones. I don’t want to do that again.
I won’t have to. The entire front of the creature’s long, curving skull has been blown away, sending chunks of chitin and sprays of terrible fluids in all directions. The hippo bellows—but not in triumph, as I would have expected. It’s bellowing in pain.
“Hold me up,” commands Viola.
I lift her with my good hand—my right arm is so much deadweight, and probably will be for the next several seconds—and turn her so she can see the creature topple gently onto its side. The hippo is shuddering, shaking its head like it thinks it can shake the pain away, and … smoking? I’m too far away to say for sure, but from here, it looks like the flesh on its skull is melting away, blistering and bubbling and coming off in chunks.
“Acid,” says Viola firmly. “I suspected as much. We should get out of here. The rest of the hive will come looking for the one you just killed.”
“Scent tracking?” I ask.
“I think so,” she says. “Nothing else makes their movements make sense.”
“What are you talking about?” demands Kora. “You—you killed it. That means we won. That means we can go home, and everything is going to be all right. Doesn’t it?”
I don’t like the rising edge of hysteria in her tone. It’s justified, absolutely so: I’d be hysterical too, if I thought I could afford to be. But something being justified doesn’t mean that it’s convenient.
“It would, if there were only one of the things,” I say. Perfect ambush predators, adapted for virtually any biome, with knives for hands, secondary jaws tailored specifically for ripping out throats, and acid for blood? If there had only been one of them, I would have been planning the parade.
But there’s never only one. Not when you’re looking at this sort of natural disaster. They had come to Zagreus through chance, with the resources they needed to start establishing their hive, and now that they were here, it was going to take a lot more than one girl with a gun to stop them.
“We have to go back to the cave.”
Kora’s voice is barely louder than a whisper. I tense my shoulders, not looking at her.
“We have to go back,” she repeats. “Michel—”
“Saved our lives by being alive enough for his heartbeat to cover for ours, but that’s it,” I say. “He’s past saving.”
She looks at me, eyes wide and wounded. “You don’t know that. We went back for your sister. Why can’t we go back for my friend?”
“Because…” I take a deep breath. We shouldn’t be doing this here, in sight of the collapsing horror that was pursuing us only minutes ago. We don’t have time. We don’t know where the others are, and we don’t know how much of the creature’s scent is on the ATV, and we don’t know whether we’re all about to die.
But my arm aches from the recoil of Mom’s gun, and the ATV’s engine needs to cool a little if I don’t want it to overload and die, and I need to catch my breath. Please, just let me catch my breath.
“Do you know what an ovipositor is?” I ask.
Kora shakes her head, expression tight.
“It’s … it’s a thing some insects have. I mean, and some mammals, too, but only the ones in really weird biomes, we don’t see many of them, they’re pretty scary, and—”
“Olive, you’re babbling,” says Viola gently. “Take a breath.”
I do. The air burns my throat. I didn’t realize how much I’ve been screaming. “They’re used by animals that don’t gestate their young inside their own bodies. Animals that use the bodies of other creatures as sort of … giant living wombs.”
Kora pales. “What are you saying?”
“Those splits on Michel’s lips weren’t from impact with the ground. They were from something forcing his mouth open long enough to put an egg inside of him. He’s already dead. He was dead before we got there. His body just doesn’t know it yet.” I look at her sympathetically. “I’m sorry.”
“But your mother…”
“I saw them,” says Viola. We both look at her. It should be comic, talking to her severed head, with its ragged-edged stump and trailing wires. It’s not. It’s horrific. Everything about this is horrific. The world is never going to be normal again.
She can’t turn her head, but she can move her eyes. She focuses on Kora, expression grave. “I saw what they did to our mother, and if Olivia says your friend Michel had the same splits in his lips, I know what they did to him. I’m sorry. He wasn’t my friend. He tried to lock me out because of what I am, even though it wasn’t something I had any control over, and he nearly got my sister killed, but that doesn’t mean he deserves what happened to him. No one deserves that.”
“What happened?” Kora lunges, snatches my sister’s head out of my hands before I realize what’s happening. She grasps Viola by the temples, fingers tangled in my sister’s hair, and raises her to eye level, glaring. “You’re a machine. I’m a human. You have to tell me what I want to know.”
“Okay, well, that isn’t how this works, and even if it were how this works normally, my parents were smart people and knew that if they had one daughter who did everything the usual way and one daughter who did whatever she was told, people would notice,” says Viola. “I’m not going to tell you something I don’t want to tell you just because you tell me to.”
Kora blinks, looking like she didn’t quite follow that sentence. I know I didn’t. Then she takes one hand away from Viola’s head and raises her other hand, like she’s about to throw my sister into the weeds.
I grab her wrist. I don’t hesitate. Kora turns to look at me, confused.
“What?” she asks.
“Give her back.” My voice is low and dangerous. “Right now. Or you’re walking to the colony.”
Offense blossoms in her face like a terrible flower. “Are you serious?”
“Give me back my sister.”
Kora hands Viola’s head back to me and leans back in her seat, folding her arms sullenly across her chest. I tuck Viola securely between my knees, facing to the side, so she can see as I drive, and restart the ATV.
Kora doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t feel like there’s anything to say.
19
BROKEN WALLS
We’re almost across the taiga, almost back to the colony, when Kora says softly, “I’m sorry.”
I glance at her, but I don’t say anything. This apology is hers to give, not mine. I’m not going to interfere with it.
Oh, but she’s beautiful. Even now, even with everything that’s happened, I can’t look at her and not see how beautiful she is. The pollen is still gilding her hair, snarled so deep in the curls and twists of it that it dusts her with golden light. It’s all wiped off of her skin, leaving smooth brown exposed to the world. A few motes cling to her eyelashes. I want to kiss them away. I want to stop the ATV and put my arms around her and tell her that everything’s fine, everything’s going to be all right, forever, because we’re here, all three of us; because we’re going to get away.
“I don’t…” She pauses, seems to assess her own words, starts again. “I don’t understand biology the way you do. The way you both do. If you were willing to leave your own mother behind, there’s no chance she was going to survive. There’s no chance Michel was going to survive. You weren’t being cruel. You were being … realistic.”
She says the word like it’s bitter, like it burns her mouth. I want to argue with her. I can’t.
“They were already dead,” I say. “They didn’t know it yet, but they were, I promise you.” As long as they don’t wake up before their terrible cargo starts hatching, they won’t suffer more than they already have. It’s a small, cold comfort. It’s the only comfort I’ve got. I only wish I felt like it would be a comfort to Kora.
“I shouldn’t have … Viola, I’m sorry. I don’t get to treat you like you’re not a person. You’re a person. I know you’re a person. I was just angry, and lashing out, and it wasn’t okay, and I promise I won’t do it again.”
“It’s not your fault,” says Viola. “Stress generates hormones that make humans weird.” A note of wry, bitter amusement enters her voice. “I guess that’s one area where I’m lucky. I don’t have any hormones to mess with my thinking.”
“You’re a talking head,” I say. “You’re already weird.”
Kora offers me a wavering smile. “Are we okay?” she asks.
I want to say no. She threatened to throw my sister—my sister—away. Viola’s the only family I have left, and Kora was ready to dispose of her like so much trash. But Kora was also scared, and out of her depth, and lashing out. We’re all out of our depth. If I refuse to forgive Kora for being frightened, I’ll be the one lashing out. That’s not fair. I don’t want to do that. So I nod, and return her smile, as warmly as I can.
“We’re okay,” I say. “I mean, we still need to get to the transport, and get off this—”
The wall finally comes into view up ahead, and the rest of the sentence dies in my mouth, turning to ashes that blow away with the wind. I stop the ATV. I have to. I’m not safe to continue driving.
There’s a hole in the dome.
The gate we came through is still closed, but it doesn’t matter, because there’s a hole in the dome. Eight feet across, with irregular, melted edges, like something has burned through the supposedly unbreachable plastic.
Something with acid for blood, maybe. Something that already knew there was life beyond that barrier, life and hosts for its gestating young. Something fast, and hungry, and smart enough, in its own alien way, to figure out that all it had to do to get inside was create a weak spot where none had previously existed.
