Castaway Planet (18 page)

Chapter 29

“Everyone ready?”

“I’m ready!” Sakura answered, trying to keep from bouncing. A day just exploring! It had been a long time!

“Ready, Laura,” Whips answered. While Whips would slow them down to some extent in long walks, the fact that they were looking for watery areas made it important to bring their amphibious member.

“I wanna come!” Hitomi said, dangerously close to whining.

“Hitomi.” Akira’s voice was quiet, but the warning tone in it was enough to make Sakura wince even though she knew it wasn’t directed at her.

“I wanna
go
with
them!” Hitomi insisted stubbornly. “
Tired
of just staying here all the time!”

“We discussed this, Hitomi. We’re going to a new area of this continent, and it could be dangerous.”

“But—”

“
Hitomi
.”

This time the youngest Kimei stopped, though it looked like the effort to stop talking would make her explode.

Akira nodded. “Just in time. But good listening. Your mother and I have made the decision, and you are not going to argue out of it. If you keep making a fuss, I’ll give you more chores and no Jewelbug for three nights.”

Hitomi bit her lip and looked down, angry but still quiet.

“Good. Now stay quiet for a few more minutes and I’ll forget you were arguing with your mother.”

Akira gave Laura a hug and a kiss. “You be careful.” He looked to Caroline. “And you make sure you help watch over your sister and Whips.”

“Don’t worry, Dad, I will.”

“You’ll be all right with just Mel and Hitomi?”

“Fine. We’ll work on some of the smaller things that we’ve been putting off.”

Sakura found her self-control sorely tested as Mom and Dad continued talking. Finally she took matters into her own hands. “Okay, Whips, Caroline—time we got moving, right?”

Whips started moving forward in his deceptively jerky way. Caroline’s sideways smile showed she knew perfectly well what Sakura was up to.

It worked, though. Her mother looked over, saw they were all starting to move, and sighed. “Well, Akira, I have to get going.”

One more quick kiss and her mother jogged up to join them. “All right, I suppose I was taking a while, Sakura.”

“’Sokay, Mom, we’re going now!”

“How long do you think this will take, Laura?” asked Whips.

“Hard to say, exactly,” Laura admitted. “You’re able to maintain a bit more than three kilometers per hour walking, or crawling, speed, but like us you’ll slow down when the underbrush gets too thick. The landing scar would give us some easier walking but we’d have to waste time getting there first. Caroline, how far is it?”

“According to our omnis, it looks like several streams come down the slopes—and disappear from anything we can see from a distance—about ten to fifteen kilometers from here. Have your omnis project the line for you.” Caroline’s phrasing reminded Sakura that Caroline still didn’t have an omni, because hers was now mounted as a relay and alert sensor on the very top of Sherwood Column.

“So . . . five to eight hours each way, probably,” Sakura said, adjusting time for the slowdowns they’d expect. “No wonder you and Dad had us pack for a couple of days.”

“Yes,” her mother agreed. “There’s a good chance we’re overnighting it.”

“Oh,
that’s
what the heavy package you added to my pack was,” Whips said in understanding. “A section of the old shelter.”

“Correct.”

Ten kilometers
. Sakura was still occasionally jolted by her changes in perceptions since they’d crashed. Back home, ten kilometers was, what, a few minutes in a car, or nothing in anything faster. Here . . . it was an epic trip.

And back home, pretty much everything along those ten kilometers from home would be familiar and safe.
These
ten kilometers might have something awesome to discover . . . or the most dangerous creatures they’d yet seen.

With Whips plowing his way steadily along beside her, Sakura followed Caroline and her mother past the Blue Hole, which happened to lie slightly “inland” of their column, and through Thin Column Meadow, and cautiously through what a vote of the family had christened “Stonetree Forest”—the jungle that covered much of this part of their floating continent. Hitomi had been very put out that her choice—Sherwood Forest, naturally—had been overruled, but she’d grudgingly agreed that since she’d already gotten to name the whole planet, other people should be able to choose some of the names.

Periodically, they passed a burned, broken stump and a trail of broken underbrush where a tree had been cut down. “Mom, do you think we’re going to get, well, Lincoln mad at us?”

“Hm?” Her mother glanced back, saw where she was looking. “I hope not, honey. We are certainly doing
some
damage, but we’ve done what we could to spread it out a bit, and we’re not concentrating on any one area.” They moved on for a few moments in silence, her mother’s face thoughtful. “Still, I know what you mean, and we should all watch for any signs of that sort.”

“Hold up!” Whips said sharply. “Laura, I don’t like the look of those growths ahead.”

Sakura immediately saw what Whips meant. The slender, reedlike growths were covered with brilliant scarlet fuzz—fuzz that looked very painfully familiar.

Laura moved closer and pointed her omni at it, obtaining a better image. “Let me see . . . you may be right, Whips. Caroline?”

Caroline picked up a stick and gingerly poked at the stand of red reeds. Immediately the “fuzz” snapped out and wrapped around the stick. Caroline pulled back. Most of the tendrils let go, but one of them had wrapped tightly enough around the branch that the tendril was broken off and came with the stick. “Here, Mom.”

A few moments later, Laura nodded. “Very similar toxin, and the cnidocysts appear powerful enough to penetrate human skin but not Bemmie hide, just like the tree-anemone. Good catch, Whips.”

They gave the stand of plantlike creatures, which Sakura dubbed fire-reeds, a wide berth as they continued on.

After that, they hiked for quite a distance without any particular incidents, until they noticed a shift in the light. “I think we’re coming up on another clearing.”

Caroline unlimbered her bow and nocked an arrow. The fire-hardened points had proven quite effective over the last few months, and Caroline was the best shot in the entire family—although Hitomi showed indications of being very good. Sakura carried a bow, but she really hoped she didn’t have to use it. Hand weapons like her machete were her forte.

Unfortunately, the canopy krakens were not something you wanted to use hand weapons on. She’d been incredibly lucky in her one confrontation, and Whips, even though much larger than her, had needed his own share of luck facing three. And if they were coming to a clearing or something like it, the canopy krakens were likely to be there, waiting for things approaching or crossing that boundary.

“Whips, do you see anything?” Laura asked, holding the SurvivalShot at the ready.

“Nothing . . . no, wait. My omni’s saying there’s a pattern discontinuity up there. Two of them.” He looked up with all three eyes, eyes which could make out the faintest gleam of light in the depths of Europa and were more sensitive to ultraviolet than human. “Yes, I see them now. Two krakens. Transmitting to your omnis.”

With the enhanced vision from her omni projection, Sakura could clearly see the predators, crouched on the branches maybe five meters up. “Here, Caroline,” she said quietly, and passed the omni to her big sister, who let the bow relax long enough to take the miniature wrist-computer unit and strap it on.

“Can we go around them?”

Whips looked in both directions. “It looks to me like the clearing, if that’s what it is, must be pretty large, so yes. But no guarantee there aren’t any others. Remember that we’ve seen . . . prides, packs, schools, whatever, of them, as many as seven.”

“True.” Sakura waited; this was her mother’s decision.

“We’ll go forward,” Laura said finally. “Saki, you’re the smallest and look the most vulnerable, you stay behind me and Caroline, and Whips, you bring up the rear.”

The four of them moved slowly towards the forest edge. Knowing where they were, Sakura could make out the things with unassisted eyes now; anchored to the trees by their leg-tentacles, armor and skin shifted like Whips’ body to match the surroundings, striking tentacles curled back, looking deceptively short.

She swallowed and gripped the hilt of her machete tightly; the memory of facing one on the ground, and nearly being killed by it, was all too clear.

Perhaps it was Whips’ presence, much more massive than any of the humans, or perhaps something about the way the group moved showed that they were well aware of the canopy krakens’ presence and were still going straight through—an act which indicated minimal fear of the creatures. But for whatever reason, the two krakens never tried to grab any of them.

“Oh,
neat!
” Sakura said as they cut their way through the thicker brush at the edge of Stonetree Forest.

This was no clearing; the forest ended here, rather sharply, with only a few scattered trees and tree-animals spaced about. The land in front of them had a jumbled, wrinkled look that made it more rugged and clearly harder for trees and similar creatures to anchor well on.

“We’ve been making better time than I thought!” Caroline said, pleased. “I’d thought we were still half a kilometer from the edge, near as I could guess it with what we could see from the top of Sherwood Column.”

The mountains, or tall hills, rose up perhaps five kilometers away, the ones farther behind tinted blue with distance. Three streams or small rivers were visible at this distance, coming down the flanks of the mountains and disappearing behind the jumbled terrain. What lay between them and the mountains wasn’t easily visible, but even with the roughness of the land, Sakura thought they could move even faster.

“Let’s go!” she said, starting forward.

“Slow down, Saki!” her mother said sharply. “Remember—this is a new kind of territory. We have no idea what kind of things live in this part of the continent.”

“Sorry, Mom. You’re right.”
You’d think being stung by a pretty flower-thing would have taught me not to just charge ahead
.

The thought of the sting reminded her of something else. “Hey, Mom . . . how are your medical supplies doing?”

“Getting a bit low,” Laura admitted after a moment. She stepped over a moderate-sized rock and watched Whips go around it. “But on the positive side our personal nanos have been programmed with countermeasures for the toxins and allergens we’ve encountered so far, and they’re holding up well. I’ve overridden their lifetime counters for now, but I think what I’m going to do is have them start concentrating out—probably in the urine.”

“Oh, ugh. We’ll have to save our pee.”

“I’m afraid so, sweetie. But not for too long. Once I can replace them with some of our reserves, I can run a cycle where the reserves reprocess the old ones, make sure any long-term damage is purged and the units reset for use.”

“We’ll lose some nanos that way, though, won’t we, Dr. Kimei?” Sakura noticed that whenever addressing Mom in her professional capacity, Whips suddenly became formal.

“Some. About ten percent. So we can’t do this forever. But I also hope that by then our own bodies will be doing most of the work, since that’s part of what the nanos are supposed to do—basically train and enhance our own immune systems. And with ten percent loss and needing a twenty percent reserve to do this process, well, I can do this a few more times. So we’ve got at least a few more years before it’s an issue.”

Whips dragged himself over another ridge, then waved one arm. “Hold up. I need a little rest.”

“Gee, you seemed to be doing fine all the way here.”

A rippling snort, combined with a red-black pattern of mild annoyance. “I know. But most of the forest and shore area is fairly flat. Sharp slopes, even short ones, and these blocks and boulders, those are harder for me.” Another shimmer of light, this one less hostile. “Remember, in Europa we generally swim over every obstacle.”

Sakura hadn’t really thought of it that way, but it was obvious now that this kind of terrain—simple as it was for humans—would be a problem for Bemmies. They had to slide or hoist their ways over obstacles, and judging by the rise of the land they had another kilometer to go before they reached the top of this region and could maybe rely on gravity to help on the descent.

“A good place to stop,” Laura said cheerfully. “Let’s all have lunch, take a break. We’ve come a long ways and it’s been several hours.”

Sakura didn’t object; her legs
were
getting tired. As they unpacked lunch, she looked to Caroline. “Hey, Caroline—can you tell me something?”

“Depends on whether I know whatever it is.”

“Well, I hope so. We see three rivers over there, and I guess there’s probably a lot more in other parts of this continent. But water wears through stuff, right? Why don’t the rivers just cut through and then drop down out of sight into the hollow we know is there?”

Caroline smiled. “I can’t know, but I can guess. First, I think the . . . crust, for lack of a better term . . . around here is pretty thick, and has a lot of the carbon-silica variant that’s much tougher. Remember that the lifecycle for these floating landmasses probably has them regularly breaking and rolling over, so what we’re looking at here is the former lower portion. So the mountains are like ballast, thicker parts of the continent that provide a counterweight to the stuff floating above.”

Sakura nodded. “Makes sense.”

“Second, I suspect that the island defenses actually include maintaining the crust. And it takes time for a river to wear through even soft rock, so the defenses can affect this river’s course slowly. Look over there, the far left river. See above and to the right of that one loop, about in the middle from where we see? That’s part of the river’s prior course. It’s shifted to the left. And I think I see similar shift indications all the way along its path, and that of the other two.”