The Pioneer Read online

  I stand there a moment, breathing hard. What was that? It was huge, but I felt like I could barely see it.

  “Joanna!” Beth calls. “Nine o’clock.”

  I spin and fire the welder at another charging blur of motion. Then another, and another, and another. The laser is getting hot, but I yank my thermal down over my hand and keep firing.

  Between shots, I look for Jay. I don’t see him. I hope he made it back to the flyer. We won’t. It’s too far. The cargo pod is closer—less than twenty meters away. But that might as well be twenty light-years. We’re surrounded. The welder’s laser hurts them, but it doesn’t stop them. They’re coming at us from all directions.

  The cargo pod’s emergency hatch flies open again and a pair of hover carts zooms out. Leela and Miguel are riding them, using packing straps threaded through the handles to steer. Their tiny engines scream under the strain as they hurtle toward us, skimming just above the grass.

  “Get the chief,” I shout to Beth. “I’ll cover you!”

  “Take her feet, Chris,” Beth says, hooking her hands under Chief Penny’s armpits as Leela swings her cart around us and slams to a stop. Miguel is seconds behind her.

  The chief moans as Beth struggles to lift her limp form.

  “You’re hurting her!” Chris cries.

  “We have to get her out of here, Chris!” I shout. “She’ll die if we don’t!”

  That snaps him out of it. He grabs his mom’s ankles and helps Beth heave her out of the grass. The chief screams, deep and shrill and terrible.

  The grass goes still.

  I spin, scanning for the creatures. They’re all around us. They must be. Why can’t I see them?

  “Mom?” Chris’s voice is tiny in the sudden silence.

  I turn to look. The chief’s head lolls back as Beth struggles to help Miguel haul her onto his hover cart. Her eyes are open and staring.

  She’s gone.

  “No!” Chris’s piercing sob breaks the weird death spell. Suddenly, the grass boils with movement. The nearly invisible creatures are charging at us from all directions. Too many for me to hold off.

  “Beth, help!” I shout as I grab Chris and half drag him to Miguel’s cart. Beth hooks an arm around his waist, and together we push Chris up behind Miguel. Beth scrambles onto Leela’s cart, leaving the chief’s body in the grass. We can’t help her now.

  Beth reaches out a hand to pull me up, but I don’t take it. We’re never going to make it back to the cargo pod. Not together. The carts aren’t fast enough.

  We need a diversion.

  I look up at Leela. “Go. Now!”

  I don’t wait for them to argue. I turn and run in the opposite direction, screaming at the top of my lungs and flailing my arms against the grass. The ground heaves as the creatures charge after me. I fight to run faster, but the grass pulls at me with sticky fingers, like it’s trying to drag me back into the roaring green.

  There’s nowhere to hide. The flyer and the wreckage of the Wagon are behind me. In front of me, there’s nothing but grass and cliffs and trees.

  The trees! I can make it to the little forest at the base of the waterfall. If I can climb one of those huge trees and get out of reach, I might be okay.

  My lungs are burning. White sparks are dancing at the corners of my vision. My legs feel like they’re going to tear free of my body. But my mind is strangely calm. It’s funny. I figured out a long time ago that Teddy knew we were probably going to die trying to save the Pioneer. But when I suggested my crazy plan, he didn’t even hesitate. I always wondered how he did that. Now I know. In the moment, there isn’t any debate. If you can save the people you love, you do.

  I don’t slow down as I hurl myself at a massive tree trunk. I catch the lowest branch and plant my feet against its smooth gray bark. My arms feel like limp noodles, but I force my elbows to bend, pulling me up. My head swims and my muscles scream in protest. I ignore them. I’m almost there. Just a few more centimeters, and I can rest.

  There. I made it. I think I’m safe.

  I’m wrong.

  Without warning, a fist-size rock slams into my stomach, knocking me out of the tree. Air explodes out of my lungs as I hit the ground.

  I roll to my hands and knees, fighting for breath.

  Thick, gnarled fingers wrap around my neck and hoist me upright. A second huge hand clamps my left arm to my side as it hauls me backward, the toes of my boots scraping over the ground. The hand on my arm is twice the size of mine. It has five fingers, including an opposable thumb and pinkie. It’s green. Then fades to a pink-tan that’s the same color as my skin. No wonder I couldn’t see the predators. They’re chameleons.

  Why do I care? This thing is about to kill me. It doesn’t matter what its hands look like.

  Then I realize what my frantic brain is trying to make me see. The creature is holding my left arm, but my right is dangling free. And my laser welder is tucked into the waistband of my jeans.

  This is going to suck.

  I pull the welding torch out, twist my arm to jam it into my attacker, and hit the power button. The edge of the laser beam slices ice hot across my left shoulder. The creature shrieks so loudly that I can’t hear myself screaming.

  It drops me. I stumble away, gasping for air. It feels like I am trying to walk on the deck of Grandpa’s boat in a storm. The ground seems to rise, then falls away under my feet. I think I’m in shock.

  I stumble back again, inadvertently turning a dizzy half circle that brings me face-to-face with the thing that’s trying to kill me.

  Even close-up, its camouflage is so effective that I’m having a hard time picking out the details of its body. Color ripples over its skin, shifting to blend in with the trees around us. It’s almost as tall as I am, even crouched on its haunches. Its eyes are huge and violet-blue, like the Tau sunrise. The skin around the charred wound on its shoulder is turning black, and the arm below it is hanging limp.

  It pushes back up to standing, towering over me. I try to run. I end up falling instead. I crawl, dragging myself through the spinning, heaving trees.

  The creature grabs my ankle, pulls up, and twists. I feel the bone snap. I roll and fire the laser welder again. I miss, but the burning white beam is close enough that the creature lets go of my ankle and stumbles backward a few steps. Its skin shifts constantly as it moves, from brown to green to gray and back again.

  I re-aim the welder and fire another laser burst at my attacker, but my arm is shaking so hard that I don’t even get close. The creature grins, revealing a mouthful of jagged teeth. It kicks me in the small of the back, and I go sprawling at the base of one of the wide tree trunks.

  I try to roll back to my knees, but my body refuses to cooperate.

  Something lunges out of a shadowy hollow at the base of the tree. It grabs my hand, yanks me forward and down into a hole that was invisible in the shadows. Pain screams through me as my broken ankle cracks against the tree’s roots.

  Then there’s nothing but dark.

  Six

  I’m so cold. Goose bumps run up my arms, rasping against the sleeves of my thermal. It’s dark. I keep waiting for my eyes to adjust, but they don’t. There’s no light to adjust to.

  Where am I? What happened? Where are my friends? The questions are heavy and slippery, sliding through my mind as I try to focus on them.

  Something drips on my face and slides into my eyes. It stings. I shake my head to clear it away, and pain whips through the laser welder burn on my right shoulder and races down my body. Everything hurts except my left ankle, which is numb and tight. I can feel my blood pulsing through it, beating against my swollen skin like hands on a drum. I need to loosen the straps on my boot, so it doesn’t cut off circulation.

  As I struggle to sit up, a deep hum fills the air. It’s weirdly tactile, like the sound is touching me. My heavy, aching mind soaks it up like a sponge until there’s no more room for thought. I don’t even notice when I lose consciousness.

/>   “Joanna?”

  I blink. Light stabs through my lashes like shards of glass. I squeeze my eyes shut again for a moment before trying again.

  “Chris?” I croak as his red-rimmed eyes swim into focus. He’s crouched next to me, close enough that I can see the flecks of gold around the irises of his black-brown eyes.

  “Miguel says you shouldn’t move too much until the pain patches kick in.” His voice is wet and thick. He’s been crying.

  I can feel the tingle of a pain patch on the back of my neck. I cautiously roll my head from side to side. A headache thuds gently at the insides of my temples, but I can tell it would be worse without the painkillers flowing from the patch. The arm of my thermal has been sliced open, and most of my left shoulder is smeared with bright yellow dermaglue. The transparent wound sealant doesn’t hide the angry blisters of the burn underneath.

  I lift my head. The right leg of my jeans is rolled to my knee and a spray-on cast encases my ankle. Two more bright-green pain patches are lined up on my shin above the cast. They aren’t enough to suppress the agony that roars through my leg when I shift my weight.

  I flop back onto the cot and stare at the ceiling, fighting to catch my breath. The octagonal panels above me are impossibly familiar. We’re in an ISA cabin. I’m lying on a cot just like the one I sleep on back at the Landing, except the sleeping bag spread under me is red instead of green.

  Are we back home? No. We can’t be. If we were at the Landing, we’d be in the medical center. Doc would be here. Mom would be here.

  I wish Mom were here.

  “Where . . .” My mouth is dry and sour. I lick my lips and swallow a few times. Then I try again. “Where are we?”

  “I dunno,” Chris shrugs, picking at the edge of the cot. “I don’t remember much after Mom . . . Mom . . .” He presses his face into the pillow, like he’s hiding from the memory.

  “I’m so sorry, Chris,” I whisper around the tears that clutch at my throat. I roll onto my side and rest my cheek against his hair. He smells like smoke and rocket fuel and grass, as though the horrors of that valley are clinging to his skin.

  I push myself up on my elbow and look around. The cabin is sparsely furnished. There isn’t even a chair—just the cot, a storage locker, and a portable combination recycler/3D printer. Beth is sitting cross-legged in front of the storage locker surrounded by neat piles of blankets and light sticks and protein packs. It looks like she’s taking inventory. Leela is sitting on the floor with her back to me. Miguel is crouched beside her applying dermaglue to her arm.

  “Hotshot?”

  I look up to find Jay standing in the open cabin door with a light stick in his hand and a look on his face that’s more intense than I can handle. I try to think of a joke or something to break the moment, but all I can come up with is “Hi.”

  He smiles. I smile back. I can’t help it.

  “You’re awake,” Beth says without bothering to look up from her inventory.

  “’Bout time,” Leela grumbles. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “How did we get here?” I counter.

  After that, the air fills with overlapping questions and answers as we all try to figure out what happened to us. Finally, a sharp whistle breaks through the jumble of interruptions.

  Beth waits until she has everyone’s attention before she announces, “This is unproductive and repetitive given that we discussed this ad nauseam while Joanna was unconscious. I’ll summarize.”

  Beth lays out what I missed in her usual blunt style. The Wagon suffered an unexplained cascading systems failure and crashed. While preparing for an emergency landing, Leela figured out she couldn’t eject the engines. She moved everyone on board into the cargo hold before emergency separation, because she knew the landing chute for the passenger pod was going to get screwed up by the fuselage.

  “It was an innovative solution to an intractable problem,” Beth says. Leela shrugs the praise away, staring at her boots.

  Everyone on board survived the crash, thanks to Leela. But they had to scramble to deal with the engine fire before the fuel cells exploded. Chief Penny didn’t even bother to find the Wagon’s satellite phone and call in their location first.

  Once they got the fire out, they thought they were safe. Miguel and Leela were in the cargo hold retrieving emergency supplies when the crash site was attacked. Leela wanted to go out and try to help the others, but then they saw Ensign Scott get ripped apart by two of the predators. After that, Miguel wouldn’t let her leave.

  I’m glad. As far as we know, all twelve of the other pioneers who were on the Wagon were killed. It’s unclear whether Chief Penny managed to call the Landing for help before she was attacked.

  Leela’s face is carefully blank, and I can tell she’s working hard to keep it that way. Reliving all of this is killing her. I’m not the only one who sees the pain bleeding through her neutral expression. Miguel puts a comforting hand on her back, but she waves him off.

  “We arrived less than an hour after the initial attack,” Beth says. “Your diversionary tactic was successful in leading most of the creatures away from us, Joanna, but we lost consciousness before we reached the cargo pod. When we awoke, we were here.”

  “What do you mean, you lost consciousness?” I say. “All of you passed out?”

  “Yeah,” Jay says. “It was even weirder than it sounds. One moment I was about to be gutted by this huge, green-skinned . . . thing, and the next there’s a knife sticking out of its eye and it drops dead at my feet. I looked up and saw someone in a black robe with the hood pulled up over their face. Then I heard a really intense hum and passed out.”

  Uneasy recognition dances up my spine. “A hum?”

  “I heard it too,” Chris says. He sits up, scrubbing tears and snot from his face, then wipes his hands clean on his uniform pants. “It made me feel weird. Tingly, kinda.”

  I tell them about the strangely tactile hum I heard and felt after I got dragged into the cave. Then I have to go back and explain about my fight with the huge, chameleon-skinned creature. I’m not as organized as Beth, but the story gets told.

  “Camouflage explains some stuff,” Miguel says. “I swear, it felt like the grass had grown claws and was trying to eat me.”

  “Where are we?” I ask. “And how long have we been here?”

  “Not long,” Leela says. “We only woke up an hour before you.”

  “It has been ten hours and”—Beth checks the time on her flex—“thirty-six minutes since I logged our landing time at the crash site.”

  “As for where we are,” Jay says, standing up, “it’ll be easier if I show you.” He points to the cast on my ankle. “Is Hotshot okay to walk on that thing, Miguel?”

  Miguel shrugs. “Long as the happy patches have kicked in, she should be able to tough it.”

  Jay holds a hand out to me. “Come on.”

  I let him pull me to my feet. Curiosity does more to dull the hurt in my leg and shoulder than the pain patches.

  “Beth, crack those light sticks you found and bring them,” Jay says, wrapping an arm around my waist to support me as we hobble to the door. “And switch your flexes to flashlight, everybody.” He swipes the lock and the door slides open.

  There’s nothing on the other side but dark.

  “What the hell?” I breathe.

  “It’s a cave,” Jay says, leading us out into the bubble of brightness cast by the cabin’s exterior lights. “It’s huge. I went as far as I dared, and I couldn’t find the walls. But there’s a second cabin about fifty meters thataway.” He points into the darkness. “It’s empty, but the components are all marked with Vulcan printing codes just like the ones in this cabin.”

  Beth passes each of us a light stick. The oasis of light around us grows, but that doesn’t make me feel less like we’re marooned in an endless void. It’s dizzying. I look down at the solid ground under my feet, just to remind myself that it’s there. Veins of crystal in the rock catch
at the light from my flex and light stick.

  “We’re still in the Diamond Range,” I say, pointing out the sparkle.

  “Or under it, at least,” Miguel agrees. “We might not even be that far from the crash site.”

  “Doesn’t matter how far we are from the crash site if we can’t find a way out,” Leela says.

  “Leela’s right,” Beth says. “There are only three pertinent questions right now: Where are we? Is it possible to get back to the flyer? And if it isn’t, how are we going to reestablish communication with the Landing?”

  “What about: How did we get here?” I say.

  “The answer isn’t relevant to our survival,” she fires back. “Which makes it a waste of time.”

  “It’s also obvious,” Leela says. She points at the cabin behind us. “We know all this stuff was made on printers from the Vulcan. It’s freaking weird that the Rangers are still on Tau and not in Wolf 1061, but they obviously are. They must have rescued us. No other explanation makes sense.”

  “The Rangers didn’t save us,” Chris says. “They’re dead.”

  “How can you know that?” Leela demands.

  Jay throws a raised eyebrow at me. I shrug. “There’s no point in trying to keep it secret now.”

  “I agree,” Beth says. She tells Leela and Miguel about finding the Vulcan and the abandoned settlement, and then the graveyard in Jannah.

  “None of this makes sense.” Leela shakes her head. “If something happened to the Rangers, why don’t we know about it? Why would the ISA keep that a secret?”

  “Speaking of things that don’t make sense,” Miguel says, “doesn’t the Planetary Survey Report say that there aren’t any large predators on this continent?”

  “Correct,” Beth says.

  “Which means either the Rangers totally missed a species of massive chameleon beasts with claws and fangs, or . . .” Miguel trails off.

  “I think Mom knew they were out here,” I say, picking up the horrible thought. “That’s why she made us hustle to get the shield up.”