Overture (Earth Song) (41 page)

At
the top, Amanda grabbed some of the roping used to hold the gate together; she balanced to the side while sitting the toolbox on the log and using a foot to keep it from sliding down the incline. Next she removed a high power driver and a pair of two foot long lag bolts from the teetering tool box. “No time for subtlety,” she mumbled and fitted a bolt into the driver. With more brute force than she knew she possessed she rammed the end into the bark covered log a foot from the end and triggered the driver. The battery powered machine turned out so much torque that she was nearly catapulted from her perch. She hung on as it whined and spun, driving the lag bolt through the end of the log and into the gate it was supporting. She grimaced at the sound of protesting and popping wood as the bolt was driven home.

The
second one went in a little better because she was prepared for the sudden jerk of the driver. When it was done, she yelled down to the men. “Got this one, make sure the other doesn’t come loose!” As if the creatures outside could understand, the gate shuddered from a mighty blow. Her improvised fastening looked sound enough so she fished a couple more lags out and looked toward reaching the other log, more than ten feet away.

“
Hang on!” someone yelled as the gate was hit by a sloth again, even harder this time. Amanda squawked and flailed for a better handhold. The toolbox flipped over the side and sent tools clattering to the ground, but somehow she hung onto both her precarious perch and the bolts. She dropped the driver too. Luckily the safety strap was over her wrist so it was still hanging within reach.

“
They’re making runs at the gate,” Lt. Colonel Wilson told her from his perch a few yards away. “The damn fifty can’t hit them over the wall.”

“
I didn’t take suicidal lizard charges into account when I designed the tower,” she grumbled. The gate was hit with a thunderous crash again. She was pleased to see her work was quite secure, but the other log jumped up a foot with the impact despite the four strong men holding it down. A second later it was hit again, even harder. Not only did the log jump, that entire side of the gate moaned.

“
I think they know it’s weak on that side,” she said in disbelief. Wilson leaned over the wall and cut loose with a sustained burst of automatic weapons fire. The attacks stopped for a moment.

She
knew she didn’t have time to climb down and then back up the other log. With a grimace for what she had to do, Amanda stuffed the two remaining lag bolts into her waistband and snatched up a loose rope. She bit her lip and jumped, doing her best imitation of Tarzan complete with a little yell. To her surprise she landed, albeit a little low, and ended up straddling the second log. Ignoring the screams of pain from her thighs as they ground against the rough bark, she snatched up the driver and a bolt from her belt. The angle was much better now that she wasn’t balancing tools with every limb. The lag drove home in seconds. She’d just fitted the second bolt into the driver when the door was hit again. The gate jumped up and forward, smashing her head into the rough wood and sending her plummeting to the ground below.

When
Amanda opened her eyes she was in the dim interior of the supply hut, now also a laboratory and sick bay. She turned her head and could see the outline of the man who had been mauled last night, his chest slowly rising and falling as a life signs monitor kept watch nearby. “Well, I’m not dead,” she said matter-of-factly.

“
I’m surprised. You landed on your head.” She looked over painfully to see their wayward scientist standing by the bench working on some unknown device.

“
Are we safe now?”

“
You palisade is working fine. We’ve got about thirty sloths stalking around out there. They can’t seem to figure out how to get in. Or what the wall is, other than a confusing puzzle. They really don’t have the brain for that sort of thinking. One or two dug down about a meter, but since you made them dig the logs in so deep, they gave up. We’re stuck in here. At least we haven’t had to shoot any more of them.”

“
I’m glad to hear that much at least.” She reached back and felt the back of her head.

“
The impact threw you sideways; you landed on your tool box. Bled like a stuck pig until I got you sewed up.” She tried to look past him at what he was doing but he turned around and went back to work.

“
So what the hell were you doing while you were AWOL?”

“
I can’t go AWOL; I’m not in the military.”

“
I suspect Lt. Colonel Wilson will have a different take on that.” The man shrugged his shoulders as he worked. “Like I said, what in the hell were you up to?”

“
I was running down a couple theories.” For a minute, he worked without comment.

“
Are you going to elaborate?”

“
It was two things that drove me to a field trip, but they’re connected. One is why haven’t we seen any juvenile Komodo sloths. Every one we’ve seen is sub adult or adult. As many as there are in this area you’d think we’d be crawling with little baby sloth. Their physiology suggests a relatively short life cycle, but a reptile that big would take a decade or so to grow on Earth. The other question is where are all these lizards coming from? In just the time I’ve been here we saw two dozen or more, which would suggest thousands in the vicinity.

“
The Special Forces concentrated on maintaining Ft. Eden and hadn’t explored more than a mile in any direction. I took my equipment, picked a direction, and started walking.”

“
How far did you go?”

“
Only made it three miles before I ran out of land.”

“
Huh?”

“
Three miles to the planetary north from here I found a cliff, sheer, about a thousand foot drop. I hadn’t considered having to rappel down a precipice and didn’t bring any climbing gear. I could see a vast grassland below, tropical as opposed to this subtropical surrounding us. I was quite curious, so I began to move along the cliff. Without GPS I had to use those simple inertial navigators we have so I didn’t get nearly as many accurate readings as I would have liked.”

“
How far did you go?”

“
I started out early that morning. It took about two hours to reach the cliff, then I followed it for the rest of the day. I finally checked my navigator just before making camp. Turned out I covered almost twenty miles.”

“
The cliff goes on for seventeen miles?”

“
No, it goes on forever.” He turned around to look at Amanda and grinned at the puzzled look on her face. The look turned to anger so he continued. “I was amazed too until the next morning when I checked the navigator again. I’d been going in a circle.”

Amanda
realized what that meant immediately. “We’re on a hill, or mountain?”

“
More like an atoll, or a plateau. Like those ones in Arizona? Only this is forested, of course. The cliff is more or less uniform all around, Ft. Eden sits in the approximate center. Realizing I’d been walking in circles, I went looking for a way down. I got lucky and found a fairly wide path before noon and took it down. It’s wide enough to be used by a truck and curls along the cliff with only a few switch backs.

“
Just before reaching the bottom I found a stream and was going to refill my canteen. Following the survival training they gave me, I used a chemical analysis kit and it detected human waste.”

“
It must feed off that one the men wash the dishes in and use as a latrine occasionally. We never did figure out what feeds that stream.”

“
Hmmm, probably an artesian spring. Anyway, in finding that stream I solved another mystery. While I was busy testing the water a Komodo sloth came up behind me and started sniffing the water. I was so scared I just stood there. It used two of its eyes to look me over, looked up the cliff and then walked up the trail. Once I got my wits about me I hid in some bushes and watched. In the next three hours I observed six of the sloths follow that stream up to the base of the mountain and then proceed up the trail.”

“
Oh God, you mean we’re bringing them in by crapping in the streams?”

“
Without a doubt. I could tell after that necropsy that their sense of smell was almost as developed as a wolf, maybe more so. They probably have no trouble following it all the way here.”

“
I’ll tell the commander as soon as I can stand up without puking.” Gibson chuckled and turned away from his tool bench.

“
This planet is not as simple as it appears. I need to do a lot more work before I’m certain, but something is definitely not kosher.”

Amanda
sat up slowly, fighting the swimming of her head and the churning of her stomach all the way. “You obviously know something, how about letting me in on it? Not much chance of a Nobel here.”

Gibson
looked over his shoulder and scratched his head as he thought. “I guess I can talk to you, at least you have some education. I’m certain the commander would think I’m cracked.” He took a deep breath before speaking. “I think this planet is artificial.”

“
Come again?”

“
I said I think this planet is artificial. It’s either a construct, or it’s been terraformed. Things just don’t add up. Soil samples I took from more than fifty meters down indicate an atmospheric mix vastly different than the current day. This planet once had tons of sulfur and argon swirling around, a few hundred thousand years ago.”

“
So the planet underwent an epoch of some sort, maybe from an asteroid collision like Earth is about to experience.”

“
That’s a possibility, but how did it evolve life in a hundred thousand years?”

“
What’s that?”

“
Can a planet evolve life in a hundred thousand years?”

“
Single cell organisms might have evolved in that length of time.”

Outside
the palisade, Cupid struck, and a pair of the sloths roared as they mated. “How about evolving something like them? No, of course not. While I was down there I took samples in a dozen places around the base of the cliff. This mountain is seismic in nature, looks like it was pushed up during an event less than a hundred thousand years ago. The whole area appears to have been at the bottom of an extremely acidic ocean.

“
Like in South Dakota and Wyoming?”

“
No, those are extinct volcanoes. All that’s left is the core. But there are cliffs in Arizona and streambeds in the Montana Badlands that let you look back hundreds of millions of years. This face is not that old, we can only see about a million. But what’s significant is that in almost all the million years there is nothing, no biological record. I’ve checked with my portable spectrometer, visual light microscope and just now with that delicious little electron microscope I brought with me from NASA. Not a damn thing. Everything living on this planet arrived here less than a hundred thousand years ago.”

Amanda
finally got to her feet and walked over to where Gibson was working. As she approached, he looked for a moment like he might stop her from seeing what he’d been working on, but at the last minute he stood aside. From pieces of hewn wood and other scrap he’d constructed a box about three feet on a side. He’d made a lid from some left over transparent plastic, like they had used for windows on the living quarters, and assembled it with some of their precious metal fittings and screws. She was about to complain about the wasting of such irreplaceable equipment when she saw there was more. A pair of digital cameras had been mounted to look down into the box and one of their tiny heating guns was affixed to the inside and wired to a palm computer. “What are you up to here?”

“
Better just look inside.”

She
looked at him and then leaned over to look through the top. Inside were four nearly round objects colored in a brown and green camouflage pattern. They looked like some kind of big seed and she said as much. “You’re not too far from the truth,” he said. She gasped when one of the four objects quivered with the unmistakable motion of something moving inside.

“
They’re eggs!” she yelled. He smiled like a proud poppa. She looked at them, each bigger than a softball and wondered what they could belong to. It only took a second to reach the worst case scenario. “They’re eggs for a Komodo sloth, aren’t they?”

He
smiled even bigger. “I found a nest late last night with my night vision goggles. You would be amazed at how complicated their nesting patterns are. They're not territorial at all, but nest communally in the shadow of this plateau. I found three nests all within five miles of each other. At least a dozen adults pool their eggs together into these huge mounds, like American alligators. Their method of temperature control is more unique though. As the sun falls behind the mountains, they fan out and bring rocks from a location and sit the rocks on the nest. Their stored heat keeps the nest warm through the night.”