THE OTHERS

by Lawrence C. Connolly

Larry Connolly says he has been busy. He is publishing two books this year: Visions, which collects his science fiction and fantasy stories, and This Way to Egress, which assembles some of his horror fiction. His recent novel Veins has inspired an album’s worth of music and you can find this soundtrack at www.VeinsTheNovel.com. Meantime, his next novel, Vipers, is coming along.
“The Others” is a direct sequel to “Daughters of Prime,” which first ran in our July 2007 issue and is reprinted on our Website this month. These stories concern several incarnations of Cara Randall, who has been sent to observe a distant planet with intelligent life.

A predawn downpour pelted the thatch roof, soaking the support beams and seeping down the walls. Aching dampness radiated from the floor, and even the fire, burning in a stone-rimmed pit in the center of the room, seemed to cramp beneath the chill.

Long-Eyes sat before the flames, neck arching from the raised collar of his tunic. He looked like a goose in a loose-fitting robe, but with arms in place of wings. He glanced at the dripping skylight, clucking idly at the drops falling through the smoke. Then he turned, abruptly swinging his head around to look at the damp cloth that hung across the door. “They’re coming,” he said, speaking in the native tongue—all clicks and whistles.

“They?” Cara asked, trying to get the inflection right. This was only her third day of using the language without prompts from the orbiting database, and pronouns could be tricky. “Who is coming?”

“The others.”

“My sisters?” Cara listened for the sound of approaching rovers but heard only the falling rain and crackling fire. “Are you sure?”

Long-Eyes raised a three-fingered fist, a sign of affirmation. “The first one is already inside the village wall.”

Cara stretched her wounded leg and climbed from the bed of dried grass and matted leaves. Her ankle twinged as it took her weight, flexing stiffly.

Long-Eyes turned a dilated ear toward the door. “She is riding faster than the others.” He paused, listening. “Almost here.”

Cara heard it now, the hum of an engine racing toward the hut, the splash of a single wheel braking outside the door.

“It is the tall one,” Long-Eyes said. “She is carrying something heavy.” He lowered his face, listened carefully, then added: “She is carrying you to it.”

“Carrying me?” Cara asked. “Carrying me to what?”

Long-Eyes sometimes spoke in riddles. Was this one of them, or had she misunderstood?

“Not you to it,” he said, speaking more slowly, letting her hear the glottal tones that trumped word order. “I said that the tall one is bringing something to you. I do not know what it is. But you will see for yourself in a moment. She is almost—”

The damp cloth swung back, sending a misty spray into the hut as Epsilon stepped into view. She carried a full load on her back, a bundle of field supplies that included a spare uniwheel rover in latch-down position. The rover weighed nine kilos. The pack added another two. But Epsilon stood tall, assuming the straight-backed posture that always made her appear larger than she was. “You’re up,” she said, lowering her hood. Her face was identical to Cara’s: square jaw, narrow cheeks, wide-set eyes. But Cara barely noticed such things. It was the differences that put her on edge.

Epsilon gestured toward Long-Eyes. “Is he still taking care of you?”

“More or less,” Cara said. “Mostly he just keeps me company.”

Epsilon stepped away from the door. “I was afraid you might be sleeping.”

“Can’t sleep,” Cara said.

“Pain keeping you awake? Is it your leg?”

“No. Not really.” Cara stepped into the light, trying to appear strong.

“Your arm, then? Those bandages look loose.” Epsilon rounded the fire, dragging her rover by its control shaft, its single wheel leaving a muddy streak on the clay floor.

Long-Eyes stepped aside, making room.

“I thought I’d wrapped those bandages tighter than that.”

“Too tight,” Cara said. “I had to take them off, reapply them on my own. I think—”

Epsilon raised a finger. “One moment.” She cupped her ear and turned away. “Go ahead, Alpha. I’m listening.”

Three days earlier, Cara would have listened as well. Now, with her cybernetics down, she waited in silence.

“All right,” Epsilon said. “I’ll ask her.” She turned to Cara. “Alpha wants to know if you think the wound’s infected.”

“No. I gave the burns a good look before replacing the bandages. The scabs appear healthy. No abnormal discharge. And I don’t feel warm. I think I’m fine.” She realized that such observations were less reliable than a full-system diagnostic, but they were all she had.

Epsilon nodded. “Guess we’ll have to take your word for it.” She unslung the pack from her shoulders, dropped it and the spare rover onto the floor at Cara’s feet. “This gear is for you.”

Cara frowned. “The rover, too?”

“Yes. Provided you’re strong enough to ride it.”

“And the pack?”

“It’s standard issue: rations, meds, field suit. Alpha transmitted it an hour ago. You need to get out of that native tunic, come back into service.”

“But I’m off-line.”

“Right, but it’s your experience that matters ... provided you can ride.”

Two more rovers splashed outside the door.

“Where are we going?” Cara asked.

“I’ll tell you, just as soon as—”

The door cover slapped back, making way for Delta and Zeta, each identical to Epsilon in form but different in manner.

Delta’s gait conveyed tension as she rounded the fire, turning her head just enough to make eye contact with Cara. We need to talk, the eyes said. But not here. She glanced at Epsilon, then Zeta. Not around them.

Zeta was less guarded. She drew up next to Epsilon, standing close enough to be her shadow. “Everything okay?”

“Yes,” Epsilon said. “She says she can ride. I guess you could have stayed at the base after all.”

“No problem,” Zeta said. “I wanted to come.” She peeled back her hood to reveal a fresh abrasion on her forehead: a wide, scabby streak that might have come from a swinging branch, as if at some point she had been following Epsilon too closely through the forest. “Did you tell her what we’re doing?”

“Not yet,” Epsilon said, keeping her eyes on Cara. “I want her to start suiting up first.”

Cara glanced at the others, reading their expressions, intuiting the reason for their predawn return to the village. “You’ve found it, haven’t you?” she said. “It’s the nesting site, isn’t it? You’ve found it.”

Delta nodded.

Cara turned away. “Long-Eyes!” She called his name in the native tongue, looking back to where he had been squatting by the fire. “My sisters have—”

Long-Eyes was no longer in the room.

Cara looked toward Delta. “Did he leave?”

Delta shrugged. “I wasn’t watching him.”

Cara looked toward the door, the cloth cover swaying in the predawn wind.

“Maybe he went to wake the Elders,” Epsilon said. “He probably wants them to know we’ve come back.”

“But I have to tell him—”

“What you have to do is get ready. Alpha’s predicting a break in the weather, clear skies at dawn. If you’re going to help us, it has to be this morning.”

Cara glanced once more at the door, then knelt beside the fresh gear, favoring her wounded leg as she lifted the new rover from its harness. She set it aside and broke the seal on the field pack. The contents were all newly integrated, form-fitted into a near-solid mass of plastic shells and folded fabric. She lifted out one of the latter, a compressed cybernetic unitard. “What I need is information.” She set the unitard on the floor and removed her tunic. Her skin, imprinted with cybernetic conductors, flashed in the firelight. “Tell me about the nests. Where are they?”

“Eastern shore,” Epsilon said. “There’s a ledge overhanging the sea. The wall beneath it is honeycombed with caves. Access is through a pit that opens near the edge of the forest. I climbed down it yesterday morning. The fang-claws are there. Hundred of them. When the young hatch they’ll be thousands.”

“X-eeÑa,” Cara muttered, using the native name for the animals. Pronounced as a glottal click followed by a nasalized whistle, the name could be tonally inflected to be either singular or plural. Roughly translated, it meant fang-claw. Like most native words and names, it was aptly descriptive. “Thousands of X-eeÑa?”

“They’ll decimate the island,” Epsilon said. “It’ll set the mission back a year if we don’t do something.”

Cara unfolded the unitard, opened its dorsal seam to reveal a lining embroidered with microcircuitry. “You’ve got a plan for dealing with thousands of those things?”

“I do.” Epsilon turned to Delta. “Show her the markers.”

Delta unslung a field pack from her shoulders, reached inside, and pulled out four transmitters, each mounted to a spring-loaded rock anchor.

“Delta’s going to mark the target with those,” Epsilon said. “Then the two of you are going to stay on site, making sure the target stays marked until Zeta takes out the nests.”

Delta returned the transmitters to her pack. “You get the picture?”

Cara’s mind raced, putting the details together, filling in the blanks as she slipped her arms and legs into the unitard. “You’re talking about using the lander, aren’t you?” The unitard’s lining tingled as it slid along her skin. For a moment she thought she felt the rush of cybernetic current, the heat of her personal system powering on, but it was only the residual warmth of the fabric, still fresh from integration. Her circuits remained dead. The unitard would keep her warm and dry, but her senses would remain off-line. “You’re going to crash the lander into the nests?”

Delta grinned at Epsilon. “I told you she’d figure it out. She might be off-line, but she’s still one of us.”

Cara frowned. “Let me get this straight—”

“You’re getting it just fine,” Zeta said, furrows forming behind the scratches on her brow. “We’ve moved the lander’s remaining fuel into the forward tanks and primed it to ignite after I power-dive into the nests. The collapsing fuselage will seal the opening, forcing the energy down into the caves.” She spoke softly but forcefully, with the stoicism of a disposable fieldworker, someone trained to serve a brief term on the planet before yielding to a freshly integrated copy from the orbiter’s digital files. That was the way things were supposed to work: one fieldworker at a time. “When it’s all over,” Zeta said, “the mission goes back to following protocol.”

“You’re saying all but one of us will be retiring this morning?”

“It makes sense,” Epsilon said. “There’ll be no need for multiples once we take out the nests.”

“So it’ll be you, then?” Cara said, speaking to Epsilon. “The rest of us retire. You continue the mission. May I ask who made that decision?”

“No one.” Epsilon extended a hand to help Cara to her feet. “We drew lots back at base camp.”

“The luck of the draw?”

“No. Not luck. Duty. This mission was never about a single worker.” She squeezed Cara’s hand, but the pressure was anything but reassuring. “We’re all in this together ... and we’re all expendable. You know that, Gamma.”

Cara winced. Gamma. She wasn’t used to hearing that name spoken aloud, but there it was, her sequential designation, the label that identified her as one in a series of identical fieldworkers, each transmitted from the orbiter to the base camp’s integration chamber.

“Something wrong?” Epsilon asked.

Before the additional fieldworkers had arrived, Cara had found it easy to think of herself as unique. But now—in the presence of Caras Delta, Epsilon, and Zeta—everything was changing.

“You look tense,” Epsilon said.

“It’s nothing.” Cara reached down with her good arm and lifted the field pack from the floor. “Just a little stiff, is all. I’ll be fine.” She didn’t dare say otherwise. Among the field-pack’s standard-issue supplies was a retirement kit containing a lethal dose of morphine sulfate. Any fieldworker who found herself unable to advance the mission was expected to inject that dose, retire herself, and make room for a replacement.

Epsilon was right about one thing. Retiring in action would be better than overdosing on a bed of matted leaves.

“So you want me and Delta to stay on site, make sure nothing comes along to dislodge those markers?”

“That’s right,” Epsilon said. “But the local wildlife tends to steer clear of the nests, and most of the fang-claws will already be underground after sunrise. At most, you’ll only have to worry about a straggler or two.”

“In which case, you’ll want me to distract them.”

Epsilon shrugged. “Nothing you haven’t done before.” She grinned. “You know their moves. You wrangled one and lived to tell about it.” Her grin broadened. “But this time staying alive isn’t a concern. The stragglers can catch you once Zeta locks in on the signal.”

Cara nodded, turned away, and reached into the pack once again, this time lifting out a field jacket and a pair of lightweight boots. She put them on, then realized she might be needing one more thing before the morning ended.

The pack’s medical compartment held a mix of supplies—some chemical based, others cybernetic. Among the latter was a piece of hardware known innocuously as a dorsal plug. Sealed in a hard-shell container and emblazoned with a code-red label, the plug was as potentially lethal as a dose of morphine. “I might need this,” Cara said, slipping the case into her pocket.

Epsilon frowned. “I thought you said you were feeling better.”

“I am.” She lifted the field pack over her shoulders. “Better than I was.” She tightened the straps and picked up the rover. It was still in latch-down position: riding shaft collapsed into the chassis, wheel locked on its gyro-balanced hub. She held the handgrip, extending the shaft and freeing the wheel with a swing of her arm. “I’m ready.” She turned to the door, realizing as she did that she no longer heard the patter of rain. The room seemed oddly still. “Maybe we should find Long-Eyes, tell him the plan.”

Epsilon glanced left, checking her in-eye clock. “No time,” she said. “You need to go.”

“But the Elders will want to—”

“I’ll take care of the Elders,” Epsilon said. “This is my post now.” She stepped toward the fire, making a show of warming her hands over the flames. “The database will prompt me with the language. Alpha will advise me on the customs.” She spoke with the authority of one who had already claimed the field as her own.

Not like me, Cara thought. My face, my body, my training—but the arrogance is all hers.

“Something wrong?” Epsilon asked.

Delta rounded the fire, stepping toward Cara. “We need to go,” she said, her eyes once again conveying the dark weight of things unsaid. “The nests won’t keep. We do this now or not at all.”

Epsilon grinned. “You need to trust me.” The flames played across her face, pooling in the hollows of her cheeks. “Trust me, Gamma.” She turned away. “It should be as easy as trusting yourself.”

* * * *

A palisade wall surrounded the village. Within it stood a mass of densely packed huts interspersed with dirt trails and clay courtyards. At the center of everything, on a rounded hump of land, a great hall spewed smoke from dormer vents.

“Something’s going on,” Cara said. “They’re lighting fires, getting ready for something.”

Zeta nodded. “So are we.” She mounted her rover and took off toward the palisade.

Cara and Delta followed, their running lights cutting the predawn darkness.

The villagers seldom left their huts before sunrise, especially during the cool, rainy mornings that followed the harvest. Still, Cara couldn’t shake the impression that the hovels looked unoccupied: no billowing smoke, no faces peering from cloth-draped doors as the rovers raced by. She wondered if everyone had gone to the great hall, leaving their homes as abruptly as Long-Eyes had left his—the entire village responding to some unspoken cue to convene with the Elders. She shivered, realizing yet again how much there was to learn about these people....

The path remained clear until they reached the palisade. Here they found the resident gatekeeper standing beneath a thatch awning. The villagers called him Always-Ready.

Cara waved to him as they approached, giving him the formal greeting: a clenched fist with the thumb tucked beneath the fingers.

He returned the gesture, hunched his neck, and walked out to where a sliding gate rested in wooden runners.

“The huts are quiet this morning,” Cara said.

Always-Ready lowered his fist and reached for the gate.

“They’re lighting fires in the great hall. Is something—” Her words gave way to the rasp of the gate sliding in its runners, moving back to reveal a narrow pass between overlapping sections of wall.

Zeta and Delta rode through.

Cara held back a moment. She considered asking Always-Ready for more information, but he seemed anxious for her to leave, as if he had something to do ... someplace to be. She raised her fist and leaned on her control shaft, speeding out onto the harvested field that stretched between the palisade and the tall, dark face of the surrounding forest.

The rain had stopped, but low clouds still churned overhead, flickering with lightning, riding a stiff wind toward the eastern shore. And there was something else, a strange glow flashing above a familiar sheer-walled mountain to the northeast.

The mission’s base camp occupied a ledge near the top of that mountain, hidden in a clearing behind cliff-side trees and camouflage netting. Until three days ago, the camp had been Cara’s home. She had worked there alone, studying the village, eavesdropping with powerful microphones, learning the ways of the natives. Through it all, she had been careful to keep the camp dark. Evidently, her sisters no longer considered that a concern.

“What’s going on up there?” Cara asked.

“Modifications to the lander,” Delta said. “Epsilon had Alpha send us another worker.”

“Eta?”

“That’s right. Integrated yesterday afternoon. She’s up there now, getting things ready. When she’s done, she’ll serve as Zeta’s copilot.”

“Two in the cockpit?” Cara tried picturing that. The lander, designed for the sole purpose of ferrying the mission’s integration chamber from the orbiter, had a cockpit barely large enough for a single pilot.

“We’ve modified the design,” Delta said. “Taken out some hardware, made room. Crashing the lander means flying with the higher functions disengaged. No fail-safes. No autopilot. Epsilon says that kind of flying is going to take two pilots.”

“Epsilon says a lot of things, doesn’t she?”

Delta leaned forward, speeding away as if she hadn’t heard the comment, hurrying after Zeta who had already reached the wall of trees.

* * * *

The forest rang with invertebrate songs—the whistles of worms, squids, and carrion moths—all clearing the way as the uniwheels hurtled forward.

The sisters rode together until Zeta’s course veered toward base camp. After that, Cara and Delta continued on, finally slowing their pace near the remnants of a deserted village. Here the forest became a riot of creepers, vines, and weeds—all contending for dominance among a jumble of leaning poles. But something had recently cut through the site, leaving a wide swath of sheared-off stubble that glistened with the mucus of grazing pseudopods.

Delta followed the stubble, wheeling along a curve of rising ground to pause beside the doorframe of a fallen hall. Cara pulled alongside her, looking east to where the trail widened along a stretch of level ground, finally ending at a stand of trees. And there, at trail’s end, a line of grassy hillocks rose from a band of silver mist.

“Snails?” Delta pointed toward the hillocks. “That’s what they are, right? Giant snails.”

Cara nodded. “The villagers call them moving-hills. You’ve seen them before?”

“A couple times. At first we thought they were natural formations.”

“It’s the camouflage. They cover their shells with grass and moss, glue it on with spit that hardens like glass.” Cara raised a hand, showing a scar on her thumb. “I touched one once. Not a good idea.”

“What about going through them?” Delta asked. “Because that’s the direction we need to go.” She pointed toward a section of forest beyond the center of the herd. “Can we do that? Is it safe?”

“Safe enough if we don’t startle them,” Cara said. “When they sense danger they close ranks, lock shells, stay that way until the threat passes.”

“Should we go on foot?”

“That’d be my suggestion, provided we have time.”

Delta looked left, consulting her in-eye display. “I planned on stopping here anyway, waiting a few minutes before moving on.” She stepped from her rover. “If we start walking now, we’ll be fine.” She pushed her riding shaft into the chassis, latched it down, and fastened the collapsed rover into her shoulder harness. Then she turned away, cupped her ear, and spoke to the orbiter. “Alpha, I need five minutes off-line.” A pause, and then: “Yes, Alpha. Right now. I’m taking five minutes.” Then she blinked, straightened up, and looked at Cara. “We need to talk.” She started walking. “It’s about Epsilon. I’ve got concerns. I need to know if you share them.” She drew closer to Cara, speaking softly as they entered a band of mist at the foot of the rise. “We’ve got five minutes, Sister. Talk to me.”

Cara frowned. “You want to know if I have concerns about Epsilon taking over the mission?” Her voice sounded flat within the mist, more like thoughts than spoken words. “I guess I don’t feel all that good about it. I mean, she doesn’t seem to have the temperament for fieldwork ... and she’s not particularly good with the villagers. Long-Eyes calls her ‘the tall one.’ Did you know that? He thinks she’s prideful.”

“So even Long-Eyes sees it?”

“I think so.”

“So that’s three opinions,” Delta said. “All agreeing that Epsilon is different.”

Cara winced.

“Something wrong?”

“Maybe.” Cara sighed. “Listen ... it might be easier if I didn’t say this, but we need to consider it.” She turned toward Delta, looking into eyes that were partly her own, partly those of a stranger. “What if it isn’t just Epsilon who’s different? What if it’s all of us?”

“I don’t follow.”

“No? Surely you’ve noticed we’re not identical. Maybe we were at first. At the moment of integration we were perfect copies of Cara Prime, but working together has changed us. To function within our group, each of us has assumed a role. You turned quiet, secretive. Zeta became a devoted follower. Epsilon became—”

“Arrogant and devious.”

“That’s harsh.”

“It’s true.”

“Maybe. You’ve been with her since she integrated. I’m sure you know her better than I.”

“That’s right. I’ve seen things. Did you know she rigged the drawing we did back at base camp? She hid the short straw in her palm. I saw her do it. I would have said something then, but I figured it best to play along: deal with the nests, then deal with her.”

“You saw her palm the straw?”

“I did. And I don’t think behavior like that has anything to do with healthy social order. Her differences are deeper than ours, more troubling. What do you think?”

“What do I think?” Cara slowed her pace, lowering her voice as she and Delta moved among the grazing snails. “I think you’re begging the question, that you want me to say that Epsilon’s differences are ingrained, that perhaps something went wrong during her transmission from the orbiter’s data files.”

“All right,” Delta said. “You think that’s possible?”

Cara shrugged. “Maybe. It might be, but the odds are against it.”

“Forget the odds,” Delta said. “Consider the evidence. You see it and I see it.” She stepped ahead of Cara, moving away from a pivoting snail.

Cara moved with her. “You need to talk to Alpha about this, not me.”

“I plan to,” Delta said. “But not yet. We have work to do. I’ll talk to Alpha after we place the markers. Then, once the nests are gone, I’ll head back to the village.” Her expression turned stern in the moonlight. “I have no intention of retiring, Sister. I’ll leave you on site and tell Alpha I need a private link, just her and me.”

“That’s going to make Epsilon suspicious.”

“There’s no preventing that. The important thing is that Alpha hears our concerns.”

“They are your concerns, Sister.”

“And yours, too. And those of Long-Eyes. You’ve just confirmed it. Epsilon’s not fit to assume control of the field. And I’m thinking maybe Alpha’s got the same suspicions. When I lay it out, she’ll understand.”

“And then what? You’ll go back to the village? Confront Epsilon?”

“That’s right, confront her and hope she listens to reason. Best-case scenario, she retires voluntarily and leaves me in charge.”

“And worst case?”

“That could be—” Delta flinched, averting her eyes, looking left. “Yes ... yes, Alpha. I’m here.” Delta stopped walking. “Say again, Alpha. Are you sure?”

Cara looked up, noticing a clear patch of sky overhead. The orbiter hung at zenith, a bright speck among the predawn stars.

“Show it to me, Alpha.” Delta’s gaze turned inward. “Show me what you’re seeing.”

Cara heard something moving behind them: a shifting of the forest canopy, the rhythmic thump of heavy footsteps.

“Delta,” Cara said. “We should—”

Delta raised a hand, gesturing for Cara to wait a moment. “Show me infrared, Alpha. Zoom in.”

The thumping grew louder, reverberating through the ground, alarming the snails.

Cara turned in place, shifting on her good leg, looking back at the forest behind them.

“All right,” Delta said, glancing down, still focusing on the view from the orbiter. “I see it! I’ll tell Gamma!” Then she turned, blinking to clear the in-eye image.

But Cara didn’t need to be told. She already saw it for herself. Fifty meters behind them, above the jagged backs of the snails, a cloud of flying slugs jetted from high branches on the edge of the field. A moment later, a head emerged from the trees, three meters above the ground, staring at Cara with cold, milky eyes. It was one of the fang-claws, a straggler returning from the central forest.

“What now?” Delta asked.

The fang-claw reared back, brushing the trees with its reptilian head. But unlike a reptile, it had no lower jaw. Instead, a pair of arms sprouted from the base of its skull, thrusting forward along the face so that the claws curved like fangs across the snout: fang-claws.

“What now?” Delta asked again, reaching for her rover. “Do we ride out of here?”

The snails were closing in.

“No,” Cara said. “Hold your ground.” She flexed her knees, hoping her bad leg wouldn’t fail. “We have to climb.”

“Climb?” Delta turned in place. “The shells?”

“Get on top, but watch out for those jags.”

The glass-like projections flashed in the moonlight, poking from tufts of camouflaging grass and moss.

“Climb!” Cara pointed. “That one! Go!”

Delta responded, scuttling up along one of the shells as Cara turned to find herself standing a step away from a pair of pulsing eyestalks. She pivoted on her bad leg, dodging the sweeping arc of the snail’s razor-sharp tongue. The snails were still feeding, scraping up anything that came in reach. Flesh or grass, it was all the same to them.

Cara sidestepped, away from the snail’s head, toward the grass-covered spiral at the side of its shell. Then she climbed, pulling herself up, reaching the top as the phalanx closed. Shells collided. She felt the impact through her hands and knees: hollow thumps followed by the grind of meshing jags.

Delta knelt a few meters away, hands bleeding, eyes going wide as two more fang-claws emerged from the trees. They came up behind the first, then the three of them raced forward, approached like wingless birds: bodies cantilevered across pulsing hips, heads counterbalanced by ridged tails.

“Find the center,” Cara said, looking along the shells. “There!” She pointed. “Go there!”

Delta stood and started running, bounding across the shells. The closest fang-claw tracked her, head swinging like a derrick, mandible arms spreading wide, exposing the toothless mouth at the top of its throat.

“Stay put,” Cara shouted. “You’re out of reach. Just stay—”

Something moved to Cara’s left, a second fang-claw reaching for her, talons splayed. She leaped back, rolled, and dropped into a gap between shifting shells. The talons clicked above her, closed on empty air, and drew away.

Delta called to her, voice shrilling.

Cara didn’t answer. It was all she could do to cling to the jags, fingers slipping as blood bubbled from her palms, cuts deepening as she pulled herself up to peer across the shells.

The fang-claws circled, focusing on Delta.

“Hold on!” Cara unslung her harness, removed her rover. “You brought me along to wrangle these animals.” She crouched, ready to sprint along the shells. “Here goes.” She took off, powered by panic and adrenaline.

The fang-claws pivoted, tracking her as she leaped toward the ground, landed on her good foot, and yanked her rover out of latch-down. Then she mounted the pedals, snapped on her headlamp, and took off so fast that she nearly overpowered the stabilizers. Gyros whined, correcting her balance as she hurtled along at a forty-degree angle, wheeling away in a tight arc that carried her back toward the nearest fang-claw.

The animal’s eyes flashed in her headlamp, then went dark as she shot between its hips. Clawed feet shifted, turning, nearly clipping her before she sailed out beneath a swinging tail. A moment later she was racing away, crashing through grass that whipped around her knees. The forest lay dead ahead, a dark wall of trunks and leaves. Above her, a school of flying squids reeled in jetting arcs, flocking toward high branches to await the inevitable kill....

Cara cut her speed and turned to see Delta stumbling atop the shells. But the snails kept shifting beneath her. She lost balance and fell—first to her knees, then to her hands, and then sideways to vanish between the shells.

“Delta!” Cara raced back through the high grass, watching the locked phalanx of shells until a hand emerged, bloody and groping, climbing up along the jags. A moment later Delta was back on top, crawling now, slicing open the legs of her unitard as she reached the outer edge of the herd. Then she fell, slammed the ground, and tried getting up. She almost made it, rising on one foot, but falling again when she tried putting her weight on a leg that now ended in a bloody stump. One of the snails had taken her foot.

The fang-claws raced toward her, converging so fast that Cara barely made it past them in time to grab Delta by her shoulder pack. She held on, riding full throttle, trying to drag Delta clear as the beasts closed in.

Something popped, the sensation reverberating through Cara’s wrist like a snapping tendon, and suddenly she was moving faster, overtaxing the gyros and crashing into a sideways skid. She looked up, expecting to see one of the fang-claws reaching for her. But the animals weren’t there. Nor was Delta. The pop she had felt was the pack’s straps letting go. She had dragged the pack to safety. Delta had remained among the fang-claws.

Across the field, the animals fed, heads together, tails waving in the air until one turned away. A piece of field jacket fluttered like a tattered flag from its mandible claws. An instant later the beast was running, coming toward Cara as she got up, lashed Delta’s battered pack across her shoulders, and accelerated out of the field and into the forest.

The ground angled downward. She took the descent at full speed, crashing onto a level stretch that might have been the remnants of an ancient road. Here, still riding full tilt, she unclipped the rover’s headlamp and held it high, letting the fang-claw fix on it. She didn’t look back. Didn’t need to. She felt its head looming behind her, angling forward, closing for the kill....

She threw the lamp and pulled her feet from the pedals. The light shot away, streaking like a meteor as her rover’s gyros cut out. She crashed to the ground. The animal kept moving, following the streak as it curved into a stand of weeds. She waited until she heard the animal thrashing through the leaves, digging for the light. Then she got up, leaped onto the rover, and rode into darkness.

* * * *

Dawn broke in the distance, appearing as an indigo haze beyond the trees. She rode toward it, bracing herself against the control shaft as the aching thunder of her wounded leg, bandaged arm, and lacerated hands intensified. She needed to rest. “Soon,” she told herself, and kept moving.

The ground angled upward. She followed it, accelerating until a ledge came into view beyond a stand of ferns. And then, too late, she saw the pit.

She pulled back, trying to stop as her wheel skidded over the edge. Gyros whined, cutting out as she slipped into empty air. Nerves took over. She released the shaft, threw out her arms, and spun around to grab the edge of the hole. Her hands slapped hard against the rock. She stopped with a jolt, chest and knees slamming the pit wall. Something popped in her shoulder, but she held on, legs dangling as her rover landed below her with an echoing thump. She looked down. Saw nothing. Only darkness. The rover was lost. She couldn’t get it back. What mattered now was climbing out of the pit and back onto level ground.

The pack that she had taken from Delta shifted on her back, dangling from where she had lashed it to her rover’s harness. The weight put her off balance, and her hands kept sliding on the shale, leaving bloody streaks until her fingers grabbed a break in the rock. She pulled ... a moment later she was crawling ... a moment after that she was facedown amid the ferns, panting, too weak to move.

She slipped both packs from her shoulders and tried sitting up. No good. The best she could do was prop herself on a throbbing elbow.

Something sharp dug into her hip. It was the hard-shell case, the one she had placed in her pocket before leaving the village.

“Get it out,” she muttered. “Use it.”

On the back of her neck, beneath the no-longer-functioning transmitter in the base of her skull, a pressure-release cover protected a slot in her C-3 vertebrae. Her good arm twinged as she reached for the cover, pinched it, and pulled it free. It slipped from her fingers, falling down into the bed of ferns. She didn’t bother looking for it. Odds were she’d never need it again.

Then she pulled the case from her pocket and broke its code-red seal. Inside lay a dorsal plug, dermal pad, and wristband monitor. She hesitated, wondering one last time if she could get through the next quarter hour without using them. Perhaps she should try standing, take a few steps, see if things loosened up. But her back flared as she moved. “I’m wasting time.” She looked at the contents of the open case. “Just do it!”

She picked up the plug, careful not to touch its gold-plated end. Then, using one arm to steady the other, she inserted the plug into the slot.

Next she took the dermal pad, pinched it to activate the adhesions, and pressed it into place over the plug.

The monitor came last. She lifted it from the case, wrapped it around her wrist, and remotely activated the plug by pressing a sensor on the monitor’s side. Relief came at once, washing over her so fast that she fell sideways, landing hard on her bad arm. She felt the impact, sensed the cold hardness of the ground, but not the pain of collision.

All pain was gone.

She was halfway there.

Among her pack’s cache of chemical meds was an injector with a code-orange seal. She pulled it out, uncapped it with her teeth, and jammed the needle into her thigh.

Then she waited, giving the first wave of time-release catecholamines time to burn through her, holding herself steady as exhaustion yielded to a rush of power. She leaned forward, hugging her knees, holding herself in place as she considered the dangers of what she had just done to herself. Energized and freed from pain, she could now harm her body in ways that would have been impossible a few moments earlier. Muscles and bones could now be pushed to catastrophic failure. She would need to be careful, keep her eyes on the wristband monitor, and remember that her euphoric sense of power had nothing to do with her true condition.

She stood up and turned in place among the ferns. Her knee popped painlessly as she gave it her weight. Bones shifted in her lower back. Nevertheless, she was ready.

Delta’s pack lay at her feet. She opened it, pulled out the markers, and jammed the first one into the rim. Her shoulder creaked. She kept moving, placing the other markers, realizing that she could now see her rover lying in the bottom of the pit. A few minutes ago it had landed in darkness. Now it lay in a pool of golden light.

She crouched on the edge. The glow looked like sunlight, but the sun was still too low on the horizon to be shining into the pit. The light had to be coming from another source—from a cave that opened on the seawall below the ledge.

And if that light came from a cave, and if she climbed into it, she would probably be able to glimpse the nests.

Her thoughts raced.

Somewhere, deep inside herself, in a dark space that still lurked beneath her catecholamine-induced high, she feared her newfound sense of reckless courage. A few moments ago she had nearly fallen into the pit. Now she believed she could climb to its floor and back again. And why not? There were plenty of handholds among the rocks. And even if the climb entailed risk, the fact remained that there were at least three fang-claws in the forest. If they arrived before the lander, she’d find it hard to wrangle them without a uniwheel.

She turned, pulled the rover’s harness from the back of her field pack, and strapped it over her shoulders. Then she returned to the pit, gripped the edge, and started down.

A moment later she entered the glow. It was indeed sunlight, warming her as she turned to find herself peering through the oval entrance of a long, funneling cave. The sun was there, rising out of the ocean, shining through a break in the seawall.

She shielded her eyes and looked at the sides of the cave. The walls seemed to be covered with blisters, translucent sores that quivered in the light. She moved closer, her eyes adjusting. The blisters were gelatinous sacks, hammock-like nests full of twisting shadows. The young had hatched.

And all through the cave, moving like giant birds, the adults went about the business of tending the nests and feeding the young. Some worked at repairing the sacks, reinforcing them with saliva that they drew into threads with their mandible hands. These saliva weavers were smaller and grayer than the hunters, with fingers that ended in pads rather than claws.

And the hunters worked too, disgorging meat that they dangled above the nests, encouraging the young to leap and grab....

The hatchlings were strong, agile, perhaps only days away from leaving the nests.

* * * *

Cara grabbed the rover, latched it down, and lashed it to the harness. Then she climbed out, her legs and hips stiffening by the time she reached the top. She checked the monitor on her wrist, flinched, and looked away. Something was wrong with her lower back. A pulled muscle? A cramp? The bar graphs didn’t specify. They merely showed that the pain was nearly off the chart. Now that she had the rover, the best thing to do would be to sit and wait, rest her limbs until one of the fang-claws arrived ... or until the lander came to blast her into retirement.

But she couldn’t rest, not with the catecholamines coursing through her. She was buzzing. She needed to move.

Turning toward the sound of crashing waves, she walked along the ledge until sandstone gave way to misting air. Looking straight down, she realized the extent to which the ledge overhung the wall beneath. Even leaning out as far as she dared, she could not see the vertical face below.

To her left, however, the view was different. There the slope of a partially collapsed wall curved beyond a narrow channel of mist and waves. Weeds grew along the slope, angling down to a hanging forest of windswept trees about thirty meters below.

Nowhere on the adjacent mass of rock were there signs of caves like the ones that riddled the wall beneath her. Was it possible that the X-eeÑa nests were to be found only in one place on the entire island? Long-Eyes had assured her that it was so. But why? And where did the X-eeÑa come from? And where did they go when their spawning period ended? So many questions. So much to learn.

“I want to learn it,” she said, speaking aloud, almost shouting.

The pounding surf shouted back, echoing up from the inlet between the seawalls.

“I’m still capable,” she said, speaking louder. “I know this island. I know its people. They know me.” Her mind raced. Perhaps she should walk some more, burn off the endorphins. But she stayed put, her thoughts flashing to things Delta had said about Epsilon. A moment later, she came to a conclusion that crashed louder than the waves: “I have to go back!”

Echoes thundered in the narrow inlet, rising between the seawalls, reverberating through her. She lifted her face to the orbiter, its amorphous hull appearing as a point of fading light in the brightening sky. “I need to go back!” She exaggerated the words, enunciating them in hopes that Alpha might read them on her lips. “Tell Epsilon. Tell her I’m not retiring. I need to talk to her, and you need to listen in.”

There had been times, before the age of cybernetics, when people had carried handheld communicators. In those days, hardware, not people, had been expendable. When a device failed, it was discarded for a new one. Life was easier, simpler. Perhaps, if Alpha transmitted the parts, Cara could assemble an external communicator that would enable her to resume control of the mission—provided she had not by then damaged her body beyond repair.

She glanced at her wrist. Pain had spread to her good leg. What did that mean? Nerve damage? And if that were the case, could she even make it back to the village? “I’ll take it slow,” she said, resolving to head into the forest and keep watch from there. That way, when the lander arrived, she would be clear of the blast. It was a good plan, but again she hesitated, realizing deep inside herself—at a level beneath her energized confidence—that she was in no condition to make such a plan. “I need to stay the course,” she muttered, not believing a word of it.

Behind her, a shrill whistle rose from the trees, the sound of squids jetting from high branches. Their bodies shimmered in the sunlight, banking overhead, gliding down to the hanging forest on the adjacent wall. They flew like arrows, piercing the treetops, vanishing beneath the leaves. She recognized the behavior. Danger was coming. She heard it, too. The predators that had killed Delta were returning home. And something else. Another sound from farther away. She cocked her head, listening.

“The lander!”

She unslung her rover, extended the riding shaft, and mounted the pedals as the first fang-claw emerged from the forest. Sun struck its face, reflecting in its eyes. She suspected it was the one that had chased her into the forest. But it looked different. Sunlight revealed sagging skin, scarred flanks, and broken claws that had not been visible in the darkness. And its eyes looked dead, milky with cataracts, thickened with age. She wondered if this old male had a nest to care for in the caves below. Or did it live alone, going through the motions of a life that no longer mattered?

She rolled toward it.

The animal stopped, watching her as its two companions appeared behind it.

She accelerated, jumped the pit, and kept moving—weaving between their legs as she headed for the forest.

They turned with her, crashing together, giving chase.

She would lead them into the trees and lose them there. They would survive the explosion, but that wasn’t a problem. A few confirmed survivors would work to her benefit once she returned to the village. She was the X-eeÑa wrangler, the person who knew their moves better than anyone, the logical choice for assuming control of the mission.

The plan flashed through her. It felt like destiny. But then an animal leaped in front of her, cutting her off. She changed course. Another animal came at her. She swerved again. Claws swung. She ducked and turned once more, and suddenly she was racing out along the southeastern side of the ledge—the side that rose above the hanging forest of gnarled trees.

The animals followed.

The lander roared closer, changing pitch, entering its dive.

She pogoed, throwing her weight upward and spinning through a 180-degree turn. Her wheel smoked as it hurtled her back the way she had come, but this time one of the fang-claws caught her, clipping her with a swinging leg and throwing her sideways—first across level rock, then out into empty air.

She flew over the inlet, arcing down to crash into cliff-side weeds on the adjacent wall. Then she slid down to where the slope ended above the hanging forest. Leaves spread beneath her. She struck them hard, crashing through. Boughs snapped. Or was it bones? She rolled, grabbing at branches, finally holding on to one as the lander hit its mark. She felt the explosion more than heard it, a deep concussive shifting in her bones. She gripped the tree, looked toward the adjacent seawall, and waited for the landslide....

Nothing happened.

Something had gone wrong.

She scuttled back along the branch, then down the trunk to level ground. In that instant, as she collapsed among the cliff-side trees, the lander finally exploded.

The wall shivered. Dust flew from the caves, followed by swarming animals who raced out along the vertical rock. She watched them, amazed by their movements—as agile on the vertical wall as they were on level ground. And then, with a roar loud enough to drive her breath from her lungs, the wall calved, belched dust, and folded into the sea. And when the air stopped ringing, when the haze of airborne grit gave way to cleansing mist, she found herself looking down toward the remnants of the fallen wall. Dark shapes lay amid the rubble. On one of the rocks, a hatchling stood on spindly legs, stretching mandible arms toward empty sky.

* * * *

Cara’s legs finally failed as she neared the village. Her back cracked a final time, and she went down, falling onto a wedge of sloping ground.

Then she crawled.

The village came into view, dark beneath heavy clouds. Thunder roared, reverberating as a figure emerged from the gate. It waddled like a goose in a knee-length tunic.

It was Long-Eyes.

He was alone.

She reached for him. “The tall one?” she asked, garbling the words. “I need to see her.”

He cocked his head. “The other?” he said. “You are asking about the one you left behind?”

She raised her fist.

“In the great hall,” he said. “I will bring you to her.” He gripped her arm, swung it around his shoulders, and started walking.

“The X-eeÑa,” she said. “They’re gone ... maybe not all of them ... but enough. You’ll be safe now.”

“We know,” he said, holding her tighter as they slipped through the gate, past rows of silent huts, and toward the sound of chanting voices.

“Everyone is in the great hall,” Long-Eyes said. “We received the signal before dawn, when you were meeting with your sisters.” He swung his long neck around, looking deep into her eyes. “The signal came from X-ah.”

He pronounced the last word as a glottal click followed by a breathy sigh. A simple enough word, but one that Cara had not yet been able to translate. It seemed to refer to some kind of higher power, probably a deity, possibly a kind of collective consciousness.

They walked on, following a muddy trail until the great hall appeared before them, smoke rising from roof vents, voices chanting within. She tried making out the words, and realized she was hearing a single word being chanted over and over—the same word that Long-Eyes had just spoken: X-ah!

Higher power ... deity ... collective consciousness?

The entrance to the great hall lay through a passage that curved back on itself before opening into a wide fire-lit room. The air reeked of burning wood, boiled meat, and steeping tea. The latter produced a strong narcotic effect that would serve her well when her dorsal plug stopped functioning. For now, however, she resolved to have none of it. She would need her wits when she confronted Epsilon.

The crowd parted as Long-Eyes led her through the center of the hall, toward a raised dais that held a wooden chair, its height and depth contoured to accommodate the human form. Colored stones adorned its sides. Atop its backrest, a bright jewel flashed in the firelight.

Was it Epsilon’s chair? Her throne? Cara shivered. “What has she done?” She spoke the question in her own language, muttering it aloud as if addressing Alpha. And then she blacked out.

* * * *

A three-fingered hand gripped the back of her head, lifting her up, pressing her lips to a steaming bowl.

“No!” Cara pulled back. “No tea!” She opened her eyes to see Long-Eyes staring at her.

“It is not tea.” He pushed the bowl toward her, letting her smell the brothy steam. “You’re weak,” he said. “You need this. You—”

She didn’t need to be told again. Instinct took over. She was famished. She drank, gripping the bowl.

“You haven’t eaten since last night, and then hardly anything at all. You need your strength.”

She finished and eased back, realizing that a figure now sat in the jeweled chair. Cara glimpsed an embroidered shoulder, the edge of a tall form in an ornate robe.

“I need to talk to her,” Cara said. “Take me to her ... now ... please. Take me to her!”

Long-Eyes arched his neck, a sign of confusion. “Take you? What do you mean?”

“You said you would take me to her.”

“No.” He gripped her hands, pulling her to her feet. “I never said that.” He stepped aside, giving her a clear view of the gleaming chair and the robe she had glimpsed earlier. But Epsilon was not wearing the robe. No one was. Its broad shoulders draped the back of the chair. Its sides hung open, waiting.

It dawned on her then. She grabbed Long-Eyes’ arm, holding on. “What did you say?” She squeezed his hand. “In the field, what did you tell me? Say it slowly.”

He did, and this time she heard it—the glottal declension that trumped word order.

Her gut knotted, heaving weakly, producing only a dry cough as two strong-armed males pulled her to her feet.

“I brought her to you,” Long-Eyes said. “And now she is being brought to everyone.”

Looking around the great hall, Cara saw bowls being passed hand to hand.

“It is a wondrous morning,” Long-Eyes said. “You die but live. We consume you, and yet you remain. You consume yourself ... and become stronger.”

Cara glanced at the bowl in her hand.

Long-Eyes stepped back, raising his voice. “The great champion. The immortal champion!” He held the bowl higher. “X-aha ö X-ooh ee-ö X-ah!”

The final exclamation went through her like a thunderbolt.

“X-aha ö X-ooh ee-ö X-ah!”

The first word wasn’t a native word. It was her name rendered in native phonemes: X-aha. In sound and tone, it was nearly identical to the final word in Long-Eyes’s statement, the elusive X-ah.

The crowd chanted it with him, louder, stirring the smoky air as they walked Cara toward the robe-draped throne.

“Cara!” they chanted. “Cara the champion from X-ah!”

“You can’t do this!” She dug in her heels, trying to stop them from leading her onto the dais. “My commander won’t let this happen.” There was no native word for commander, so she spoke it in her own language, the strange consonants reverberating like a feral roar.

How could she explain to these people what would happen now? They stood no chance of grasping it. And yet it was real, as real as the force that had blasted the X-eeÑa into the sea.

Alpha would now have no recourse but to transmit a new Cara—Cara Theta, eighth integration of Cara Prime. But unlike the others, Theta would never set foot in the village. She would remain at base camp, studying from the safety of that sheer-walled mountain.

“Do you realize what you’ve done?” Cara roared. “You’ve destroyed a great opportunity.”

“No,” Long-Eyes said, leaning close as she mounted the dais. He peered into her eyes, gazing deep as if reading her thoughts. “No more Caras will come. You are the last.” He backed away, gesturing toward the glowing jewel atop the throne.

She blinked at it, noting how it caught the firelight, reflecting the flames on its mirrored surface.

“Our X-ah told us where to find it,” he said. “We climbed the steep mountain after your sisters flew away. We took it and brought it here. For you. For all of us.” He lifted the robe from the chair. “Please trust us, Cara. Believe in us. It is better that way.”

She felt herself moving again, yielding to the hands that gripped her arms. Then they released her. She teetered forward, catching herself on the armrests and staring at the shining object that crowned the chair. It was the optical guide from the base camp’s integration chamber—the piece of hardware that made it possible for Alpha to transmit supplies and personnel to the planet’s surface.

“It is the best way,” Long-Eyes said. “The best way to make sure you are our final champion.”

“But I’m crippled.”

“We will heal you.”

“No! You don’t understand! We need someone here who can communicate with—” Once again, she found herself groping for words that did not exist in their language. “We need someone here who can communicate with my X-ah.” She pointed upward. “Do you understand? I need—”

“That isn’t necessary,” Long-Eyes said. “Now that your voice is dead to your X-ah, we will teach you to communicate with ours. You will see. You are blinded now, cut off from the truth—but that is the way to realize who you are ... why you are here ... what you must do.”

“What I must do?” She spoke the words in her own language, considering them as she gripped the throne. What she needed to do was heal, gather her strength, and then return to base camp. She would take the optical marker from the back of the throne and reattach it to the integration chamber. Then her replacement would come. And then, at last, she would retire.

She leaned forward, staring at her image reflected in the marker’s right-angled mirrors. Multiple reflections stared back, gazing with the eyes of many Caras—Caras beyond number. But she could not take the marker now. She needed to heal before the dorsal plug’s power supply ran dry and she found herself paralyzed with pain.

Something hissed along her back, pressing down, warming her. It was the robe. Long-Eyes hooked it into place as she collapsed into the chair. And now the storytellers launched into a synchronized song, one that sounded rehearsed even though it detailed the destruction of the nests on the eastern shore.

She looked upward, toward the smoky ceiling and the vent that stood open to a gathering storm. She couldn’t see the orbiter, but it was up there.

“I can fix this!” She mouthed the words, wishing Alpha could see her through the skylight, through the smoke and gathering clouds. “I can fix this. Trust me.” And so she prayed in silence to her other self in the sky, mouthing the promise as the song of her exploits rose around her.