Up

Up. Fight. Fight. Harder. Up. Up. Light. Here.

Ow, Shit

My head was pounding.

My throat felt raw and shredded.

Swallowing was like being clawed by some angry animal. As soon as I swallowed, I felt the urge to swallow again; surely, it couldn't hurt as much as the last time.

But it could.

Ow. Shit.

I was alive.

Alive

I was sprawled facedown, still in my tightsuit. The suit stank of urine and worse, but the blue OK light still glowed on the inside of my visor: no breach in the suit's skin, and at least an hour of canned air left. For what it was worth, the suit's monitors considered me in perfect health.

Monitors are stupid. I tried swallowing again, and regretted it.

Sloshing inside the suit, I pushed myself up to my hands and knees. My body cast an elongated shadow across the grass of the field; sunset was coming. We had landed an hour or two after sunrise and the season was early fall, so I'd been unconscious nine or ten hours.

And nothing had eaten me all that time. What a wimp-ass planet.

A moment later, a stab of memory jolted me. In a panic, I scrambled to my feet and looked left, right, all around.

Yarrun was gone.

Searching

The Bumbler and the medical kit still lay where I'd dropped them. The scalpel… the empty drug ampoule… even the esophageal airway I thought I had inserted into Yarrun's throat… everything was there except Yarrun. Flecks of dried blood dotted the grass where he had lain, but he was nowhere to be seen.

From reflex, I tapped my throat transceiver and called, "Yarrun! Yarrun!"

My words stayed muffled in my suit. Usually, I heard some trickle of feedback on my audio receiver, a tinny echo of my broadcast voice. This time, there was no such echo.

Radio silence. No-comm. My transmitter had gone Oh Shit.

Perhaps that was why I was still alive: the effort of strangling me had been too much for my throat implant. It had blown its circuits before finishing the job. Equipment burnouts were not a novelty in the Outward Fleet; the Admiralty tendered supply contracts to the lowest bidder.

That still didn't explain Yarrun's absence. If the tracheotomy worked, he might have woken before me. Had he pulled out the airway, then wandered off? He might have done so if he was dazed. With his helmet off, he'd been exposed to local air for hours — plenty of time to get infected by an alien microbe and go delirious.

Damn. How long would he stagger about before he fell off the cliffs into the lake?

Fighting the urge to race forward, I picked up the Bumbler and walked slowly to the edge of the bluffs. Rushing wouldn't help Yarrun, especially if I tripped over the edge myself.

The gathering shadows of sunset didn't make it easy to scan the scrub brush between me and the lake. However, the Bumbler showed nothing as warm as a human body on the cliffside or the shore below.

I refused to consider the possibility that Yarrun's body was no longer warm.

Carefully, I tracked along the bluffs a hundred meters in both directions. The Bumbler showed no significant heat signatures. Added to that, the face of the bluffs was sandy loam, and reasonably moist; if Yarrun fell over the edge, he would have gouged deep scuffs in the dirt on his way down.

The soil showed no marks of any kind. Nothing human-sized had tumbled over since the last rain.

Poison Ivy

I could have continued searching along the bluffs; however, there was still the ravine on the opposite side of the meadow and I wanted to check it before daylight faded. Searching the ravine would not be easy — the trees were losing their leaves with autumn, leaving a layer of red and gold thick underfoot. I hoped the Bumbler was sensitive enough to discern Yarrun's body heat if he lay under a day's worth of fallen leaves.

The weakening rays of sunlight didn't penetrate much distance into the woods. From the treeline, I could make out a spindly creek running along the bottom of the ravine, but beyond that was only shadow. The Bumbler saw farther, but not well; its effective range was a hundred meters, and the ravine was wider than that. For best coverage, I would have to trek to the bottom and follow the creek, scanning both sides as I walked.

Grimly, I started down. The undergrowth was ankle-height and patchy-low-light greenery that could survive in the shadow of the trees. Given the Earthlike look of the vegetation, maybe the plants brushing my legs were poison ivy; I couldn't tell. With all my Explorer training, I had never learned what temperate-zone poison ivy looked like — the Academy could not imagine I would ever face genuine Earth flora.

Not that I should fall into the trap of believing this world was terrestrial. The trees looked like maples, the worms looked like worms, the insects looked like bees and butterflies, but none of that meant anything.

This was an alien world. A hostile alien world.

IR Anomaly

I reached the creek and stopped by the shore, briefly checking the water for dangerous lifeforms. There were only a few small fish, barely the length of my thumb and as slim as whispers; they darted away when the reflection of my tightsuit fell across the surface. I watched them go, then lifted the Bumbler, turning a slow circle in search of heat traces.

Halfway around, I found exactly what I wanted: a human-sized blob of bright glowing warmth. The figure was crouched and working at something low to the ground — I didn't understand what he could be doing, but I was so relieved to see he was moving, I called, "Yarrun! Yarrun!"

On the Bumbler's screen, the figure jerked its head around. Then it put on a spurt of effort shoving at something, pushing, heaving.

Why?

Suddenly fearful, I slung the Bumbler under my arm and set off at the fastest trot I could manage, the confinement of my tightsuit slowing me down… like the nightmare where you can't run fast enough to outrace the monster. Fallen leaves thrashed with the sound of surf as I barged through them. Shadows clustered thick under the trees, but the pale white of a tightsuit soon became visible in the twilight in front of me.

A white tightsuit. A head of white hair.

Admiral Chee stood and came quickly toward me. His face was red with exertion. He had the overly bold look of someone blocking something with his body.

"Ramos," he said, with forced heartiness. "Glad to see you're finally awake—"

I pushed past him without a word. He tried to grab my arm, but was neither fast enough nor strong enough to hold me.

A few paces farther on, Yarrun lay motionless on the ground. Chee had been trying to hide him by stuffing the body into a hollow log. Yarrun's feet and legs were inside the log now, but his top half was clearly visible.

His arms limp.

His face drained of blood.

His throat butchered.

So dead he had not even been warm enough to show up on the Bumbler.

No Weapons

"I killed him," I whispered. Silence from the admiral. "Didn't I?" I insisted. "I killed him, didn't I?"

"You were trying to help," Chee mumbled. "Emergency tracheotomy, right? And in the heat of the moment—"

"I killed him because I tried hacking at his throat when I couldn't see straight. If I'd just left him alone, his implant might have burned out like mine."

"Burnout!" Chee exclaimed. "Is that what you—" He stopped himself. "Yes, burnout," he said. "You were lucky."

What did he mean by that? It was pure luck, wasn't it? Unless the implants weren't designed to kill us at all.