War World X: Takeover (44 page)

I told Tom what I thought. He squinted at the sky, then looked at me. “Forty hours between sunup and sundown? There was something about that in the little book your wife showed me, but a lot of it was confusing. Do we get forty hours of night, too?”

I’d known people like Tom: Intelligent, but only what they saw around them was real. Information about space or other planets was just noise. “It’s not that simple, I told him. “This world is a moon. The planet it goes around, Cat’s Eye, is big and hot, hot enough to glow in the dark. When Cat’s Eye is up, we’ll get both heat and light from it. When it’s up but the sun’s down; we’ll have what’s called ‘dimday.’ It will get cooler during dimday, but not as cool as during truenight.”

It also seemed to me that the sun would move around irregularly in the sky, because Haven circles Cat’s Eye while they’re both going around the sun. But I didn’t tell him that.

He looked thoughtful, which was much better than if his eyes had glazed over. He was getting used to a new “here and now.”

“It’s complicated,” I added. “We’ll learn what we need to by experience.” He nodded. Then the last of his scouting parties came back and told him they hadn’t found any water. Nobody was surprised, up on a mesa like that.

“We’ll go down into a canyon, he said to me. “If there’s water to be found, that’s where it will be. After we’ve found water, where do you think we should go? Down into the desert basin, or up on the plateau?”

“The plateau,” I said. “We’re going to need a lot of food, soon, and the Kazakhs up there are herdsmen. We need to steal some livestock from them. But they’re armed, and they’re supposed to be fighters. It will be dangerous.”

His attention drew inward for a minute, then returned to me. “I’ll send a raiding party to the plateau. Do these Kazakhs live in large bands or small?”

A raiding party. The Navajos had known about things like that, two hundred and fifty years ago. Now—Now I wondered. “I don’t know,” I answered.

“We’ll have to go and find out,” he said.

He told his scouting parties to find a way down off the mesa into one of the canyons that flanked it. A way that the women could hike. The canyon needed to have good water and be one that men could climb out of, up onto the plateau. When the scouting parties had left, he went to see how the crews were doing cutting up tents to make shelter pieces. I went with him.

It seemed to me we were lucky to have Tom Spotted Horse as our chief. He sized up problems, made decisions and gave orders like a marine sergeant.

The sun moved as slowly through the sky as you might expect on a world with forty hours between sunup and sundown. Tom’s scouts had found two possible ways to leave the mesa. He selected one, then got the rations, blankets, shelter pieces and pieces of tent rope distributed among the people. They made packs out of them. Then he formed them up in their units and we started down the trail, with scouts leading the way. The sun seemed almost as high as when the shuttles had left, a little more than three hours earlier by my watch. There were eight rations for each person—that was all we had—and no one was to eat until Tom ordered a meal break.

It didn’t pay to think too much about things; you could go into despair. We had to make a decision and do it, and handle the complications as they came up. Or lie down and die. The Dinneh weren’t known for lying down and dying.

We didn’t have nice backpacks from Wilderness Suppliers. We rolled up our rations inside our two blankets each, wrapped them in a piece of tent cloth, tied it all together with a piece of tent rope, and slung it over a shoulder. Also there were a lot of people—almost all the women—who’d been interned wearing street shoes. Their feet were soon in trouble. Those who wore riding boots or engineer’s boots were just as bad off. A few tried to go barefoot, but they put their shoes back on pretty quickly. Marilyn was wearing stout, low-cut walking shoes, but gravel and sand got in them. We took turns carrying Marcel. I offered to carry her pack for her, but she wouldn’t let me. She said it would make her look bad to the Navajo women.

The canyon we worked our way down into was about seven hundred meters deep there, according to our map, and the way was steep, treacherous in places. It wasn’t like hiking the Bright Angel or Kaibab Trails down into the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Those were surveyed, improved, and maintained—almost manicured; I suppose they still are. This was rough, untracked and uncertain. Much of it required scrambling instead of hiking. And we had people, especially women, who’d never hiked in their lives. Some weighed more than a hundred kilos, even after thirteen months on the
Makarov
. For them, the trail was hell; for some it was impossible. Twice we got cliffed out and had to wait while the scouts hunted for a way to continue. Then we all had to backtrack a ways before we could go on again. Once a scout fell to his death. We also lost eight people who fell when rock slid away beneath their feet and they couldn’t stop sliding before they went over an edge.

All the scouts saw goatlike animals. One scout came face to face with something that looked much like a large mountain lion, with thick fur and a ruff—our first cliff lion. It backed away and disappeared when he yelled and threw a rock at it; it had never seen anything like him before.

The plants didn’t look so unearthly either. I know now how strange some of them really are, but the strangeness wasn’t conspicuous. It looked a lot like some canyon might in Arizona. There was a thing like grass with sharp leaves that cut when you touch them, and another with leaves that stung and burned like nettles, but quite a bit worse. Also there was something that gave people a rash; we needed to find out what it was, so we could avoid it.

The geology was different than I was used to. The rock strata seemed to be volcanic from the mesa top to the canyon bottom; there was nothing I recognized as sedimentary. Most of the strata were basalt; some were vesicular.

Even most of us who wore hiking boots had blisters by the time we reached the canyon bottom and buried our faces in the icy creek we found there. Lots of feet were raw, with bloody socks.

The hike down had taken us seven hours by my watch. I’m told some were still straggling in five hours later, and a few never made it, even with help.

Tom Spotted Horse was one of the first ones down. As others got to the bottom, he gave orders about sanitary practices, and had the people spread out along the creek. They could eat one ration each. During breaks along the trail, he’d had the platoon leaders find out who were the survival hobbyists—those who’d learned and practiced traditional survival skills. Now he sent them out to find material and make fire starters. Marilyn gave him the fire starter from Major Shcherbatov; it could serve to start fires till we had our own. She also gave him the little book about Haven.

Almost all of us took our shoes and boots off, and Tom had platoon leaders check on whose feet weren’t too bad. All I had were a couple of blood blisters on the ends of toes, and blisters on the tops of my little toes, from walking downhill. They weren’t very sore. Of the men with good feet, he assigned two hundred to be a raiding party. I’d shown him my pistol, so he made me one of them, assigned as an aide to Nelson Tsinajini, chief of the raiding party. Nelson and I already knew each other; we’d talked aboard the
Makarov
. He’d served in the infantry, making sergeant, and I’d done two years of ROTC at the University of Minnesota for the financial aid.

I didn’t like to leave Marilyn and Marcel, but I knew if anything happened to me, they’d be taken care of. There were lots more men than women among us.

Nelson’s orders were to go up the canyon, climb onto the plateau, find livestock and drive them down to the people. Even Haven’s day wouldn’t last forever, so we were to leave right away. No one knew whether it would be too dark to travel in the canyon after sundown.

No one knew if it was possible to herd sheep or cattle down from the plateau, either, assuming we were able to steal some. We didn’t even know for sure that a man could get up there from the canyon. But we didn’t have any choice. If we failed, the people would starve.

We started. The top of the plateau wasn’t much higher than the mesa top, but the hike was uphill. Judging from what I’d read, the partial pressure of oxygen on top was probably about the same as at 5,000 meters on Earth. That made breathing about as hard as on the Tibetan Plateau. We’d all been living at 1,800-2,500 meters on Earth. One 1,830 at Mescalero, I remember—but we’d just spent thirteen months on a ship with the oxygen pressure about like on Earth at sea level. So we spent a lot of time stopped, sucking air through our mouths and sweating. When we stopped for real breaks, Nelson would ask questions about Haven.

The afternoon sun didn’t get down into the canyon bottom, which ran pretty much north and south, so it wasn’t very hot, but the hard work made us sweat. I was glad we had a creek beside us most of the way, to drink from. I was also glad that the gravity on Haven is only 0.91 Earth normal.

Most of us were in our twenties or late teens—I was almost the oldest at thirty-four—but even so, some of them got pretty sick, probably what they call altitude sickness on Earth. On top of that, a Jicarilla named Juan Cruz, up in front a ways, was charged and badly bitten by something that looked like a short-jawed crocodile. It would have killed him right there, but two Navajos started hitting it with big rocks. A couple of the rocks they couldn’t have lifted ordinarily. Cruz’s right leg was almost torn off at the knee, and he lost a lot of blood before we got it stopped with a tourniquet. He looked more gray than brown. Nelson assigned three guys who’d been having altitude sickness to take him back to the people.

It seemed to me he’d never make it. I’d read about land gators—that’s what the first settlers had named them. They’re a kind of hibernating, warm-blooded version of the komodo dragon on Earth. Usually if one of them bites you, you get blood poisoning.

It was dusk in the canyon when Nelson and I climbed over the lip and onto the plateau. We were damp with sweat, but the air was already getting cold. The sun was setting when the last men reached the top—the last of the one hundred and eighty-two that made it that day. There were others strung out behind for maybe a couple of miles, too sick to go on. It was pretty flat on top, and the vegetation was a little different than on the mesa; there was less grass and quite a lot of a knee-high shrub. Here and there were patches of a bigger shrub, chest high and with lots of thorns.

We had no way to make fires and a raiding party in unknown territory shouldn’t have fire at night, anyway. So we paired up for sleeping, two guys huddled together, with two blankets and a tent cloth under us and the same on top. Nelson was my partner. Most of us had been picked up as guerillas and had gloves, winter caps and jackets in our bedrolls. We wore those too. I could have used some water, but the nearest we knew of was a mile and a half back down the canyon.

Nelson assigned sentry duty, two men on a shift, using watches that were either luminous or would light up. It gets dark fast at that latitude, especially where the air is so thin. It was already deep twilight when we lay down, and in spite of the hard lumpy ground, I was asleep in a few minutes.

The first time I woke up, it was with a leg cramp. I scrambled out of the covers and walked it off, careful not to step on anyone. It was dark and through the thin, clear air, the sky was beautiful. It was also cold and I was cold. When the cramp was gone, I walked out beyond where the men were sleeping, and urinated, then looked at my watch. I’d slept for two hours. That was the longest single, undisturbed piece of sleep I’d have that night.

The rest of the night I drifted in and out of dreams and half-dreams. Even asleep I was aware how cold it was, and while I didn’t get another cramp, my legs felt strange. They wanted to squirm. Also my thighs and buttocks were stiffening up from the hiking. It was impossible not to squirm and jerk, and Nelson was as bad as I was; maybe worse. Huddling together for warmth, we were closer than Siamese twins, which made the squirming and jerking even worse. Add to that being thirsty…. We weren’t used to being so cold and thirsty. It got worse as the hours passed, and I was awake more and asleep less.

Even so, dimday took me by surprise. I’d dozed, and slept through the rising of Cat’s Eye. It made a kind of dawn, and the gas giant loomed above the horizon, looking big! A lot bigger than the moon does on Earth. It was a thick crescent of reflected white, and in the cradle of the crescent, the rest of it glowed a dull, banded red, about as bright as the coals in a campfire. I could see a long way across the plateau top now, though not details; it was a lot lighter than full moonlight.

I nudged Nelson Tsinajini. “Nelson,” I said, “It’s morning.”

He grunted, uncurled a little, and half sat up to look around. “Some morning,” he said, and shivered. “When does the sun come up?”

I looked at my watch; it was about ten hours since we’d laid down to sleep. “In about thirty hours,” I told him. He swore in English; Nelson preferred English for swearing.

I could tell from the thickness and direction of Cat’s Eye’s crescent about where the sun was on the other side of Haven. It agreed with what my watch told me. “Is this as light as it’s going to get till then?” he asked.

“It should get lighter,” I told him. “Cat’s Eye should pass through most of the phases before sunup. It ought to be pretty light out when it’s full.”

“Well shit!” Nelson growled. He folded back the covers, and got up stiffly. “We might as well get started,” he muttered, and looked around. Then, changing to Navajo, he shouted, “Everybody up!”

It took a couple of minutes. When everyone was on their feet, Nelson made us all run in place to warm up.

It helped some. He took his knife and cut thorny stakes about a meter long from the pieces of shrub wood he could find and pushed them in the ground to mark where the trail was, out of the canyon. Then he had us roll our packs, keeping a ration out inside our shirts, and we started to hike again, away from the rim. He said we’d eat after we warmed up more. It seemed to me it must be near freezing and I suspected it wouldn’t warm up much, if at all, till sunup; it was more likely to get colder After walking for about ten minutes—I remember that; I still had the white man’s habit of looking at my watch—we came to a pool and Nelson called a halt so we could drink and eat.