Rift (6 page)

“Clavers
are
animals.” He spoke in jest to keep Marie off guard; he didn’t need her mothering right now. Handing her the club he’d fashioned from a large branch, he said: “Any of those bugs get near you, defend yourself with this.”

“Aye, captain.” She gave a mock salute with the arm-length weapon. Her expression turned sour. “I know better than to caution you.”

He cracked a smile. “Guard the house. I’ll be back before dawn.” He turned and set off, not liking to leave her, but without much choice. Unaccustomed to hunger, Reeve’s stomach ached and growled in rebellion. If he had to eat animal flesh, he would. He’d seen pictures of cooked flesh, and vids of people eating it. It was better than starvation, and with the food pouches down to a handful, it was turn carnivore or die. Lithia’s vegetation was not an option. And the bugs—some kind of hard-shelled millipedes—were too revolting a prospect. He killed them when he encountered them, though, knowing it for a childish reaction to their invasion of his pack. They had devoured most of his food pellets. He had yet to see any Terran creatures except birds, though semiadapted Terran flora still hung on in places, notably the Forever Plains—still green, by the Lord, despite the worst Lithia could do.

In this, the second great biological die-off, the niches once occupied by humans and the imported fauna left great gap—gaps that would remain empty for millions of years. Lithia’s creatures had mostly perished
in the first die-off, the one driven by terraforming.

He scrambled to the rise, lying flat in the grass, peering out, swallowing reflexively against the minor annoyance of the breather. Even after three days planetside he was still shocked by the view. There was no end to the plains. In every direction to the rim of the planet lay the carpet of undulating grass, a living but somehow desolate plain of green. Through this strange expanse the wind blew hour after hour. It stole the moisture from his face and the thoughts from his head. At night in their tent he heard its breath as he strained to listen past the scuttling of the crabs.

Reeve had learned not to look up. The sky was a blank, colossal emptiness that sometimes made the plains spin around him until he sank to his knees and held on to the grass for support. He gazed into the distance, seeing the cookfires of the clavers. Since they cooked twice a day, it meant they had plenty of food. He hurried on his way, keeping to the gullies when he could, crawling over the ridges when he couldn’t.

Behind him, a rock rattled down an incline. Reeve swiveled, scanning the near hillside and down the ravine to the next ridge. But there was only grass bent under the wind. Hunkered down, he scurried over the crest of the hill and set out across the next shallow gully. And the next. He wished Marie hadn’t mentioned his father. He didn’t need those thoughts at a time like this. Memory was a great sump; it could siphon off your attention faster than the wind took the moisture from your face.

A large, hairy beetle skittered in front of him, another example of Lithia’s hospitality to insects. Nearby Reeve saw clustered red bulbs the size of his big toe. He’d found a few of these over the last few days, and kicked at them, sending clouds of brown spores into the air. No doubt these polyps were samples of Lithia peeking out, the old Lithia. In these small, bright
knobs was a glimpse of the great Reversion that had not yet claimed the grasslands.

As he paused a moment, he saw the carcass of a dead animal, perhaps a wild dog, lying some thirty yards off in the bottom of the ravine. Maybe dinner was going to be easier than he thought. He hesitated, squinting into the gully. Things looked ordinary enough, but might not be. Might be a ghost hole. You never could tell. Not understanding that pockets of carbon dioxide sometimes collected at low points, clavers thought that ghosts dwelled in some of the valleys, wraiths that kissed the breath from you and claimed you for one of their own. Reeve retreated back up the hillside and hurried on.

Station biologists argued about the exact dynamics of the Reversion, with its complex feedback loops involving volcanism, atmosphere, weather, and chemistry. But the outlines of the process were clear. Lithia’s high carbon dioxide atmosphere, always a marginal human environment, was breaking out of its terraform restraints. Carbon dioxide outgasing from volcanism had easily overcome terraforming’s prodigious oxygen production, adding minor but unwelcome traces of sulfur and, from deep mantle plumes, chlorine. Always a cold world in its orbit on the edge of the planetary habitable zone, Lithia was saved from an icy fate by its primordial CO
₂
greenhouse effect. Moderated by high-salinity oceans that suppressed water evaporation, the greenhouse effect was nevertheless strong and growing stronger, bringing the velvet strangulation of sweeter, warmer days, short on oxygen.

Escalating carbon dioxide and sulfur compounds slowly attacked the lungs of Terran creatures, and acid rain and the erosion of new lava deposits created a biosphere changing faster than many Terran plants could adapt to.

Despite this planetary turmoil, though, the grasslands
managed, in places, to endure. The claves somehow hung on.

And Bonhert would destroy all this. By some convoluted reasoning—or madness—he would commit an act of unthinkable destruction. If a dying man’s ravings were to be believed.
What had Grame Lauterbach said … seventy days
? Ten weeks and they would sink the pellet and quake the world apart. And though he could find the Rift on a map, finding it on the planet was an entirely different thing. Especially when he had no clear idea exactly where he was.

He didn’t want to believe it—his current predicament was peril enough—but something in Grame’s eyes and the surge in his voice made Reeve uneasy. That Gabriel Bonhert was capable of it he had no doubt at all. The man would allow nothing between himself and his goal, if his iron rule of Station and his relentless harassment of Cyrus Calder were any measure.

His father openly derided the majority view, maintaining that Bonhert’s scheme to release mantle heat would boil off the planet’s atmosphere. It made more sense, Cyrus believed, for Station to build a starship, beginning with the mining of asteroids and complete restructuring and retooling of Station for the massive building enterprise. Of course, there was the orthong ship in high orbit, presumably abandoned and ready for the taking—except that its automatic defenses had twice incinerated Station shuttles that dared to approach it. Though the orthong seemed to have no use for the vessel, they were of no mind to share it, either.

Despite the obstacles, Cyrus believed they must Voyage On. Many secretly supported this idea, and Marie openly so. But those who “diverted Station focus,” as Bonhert said, gradually lost privileges, and were passed over for advancement, their researches chronically underfunded. These political battles were the subject of many discussions at the family dinner
table until Reeve’s mother died; after that he and Cyrus ate alone, mostly in silence.

So the research into habitable planets and starship design were fueled by the relentless energy of one man, Cyrus Calder. And Reeve had no faith in his father’s dream. He had wanted to, desperately, but to his shame, Reeve clung to the hope of Lithia. Like many others, he was seduced by the fierce logic that while Lithia was harsh, it was all they had. It was a fact that the generation ship on which the first colonists arrived had found not a single other suitable world—not even a reasonable candidate for terraforming—in 250 years. Nor had the other Terran generation ships of the human diaspora ever reported success, not in the messages that had had time to reach them.

Reeve pushed these thoughts away. No time now to linger on old problems, with new ones clamoring for attention. Like hunger. With the food pouches all but gone, his prospects for a meal were bleak. The luck of the draw had put them down in a swamp surrounded by grasslands. Though he knew little about Terran plants, he knew enough not to eat grass and moss and to avoid the Lithian outgrowths, with their toxins. The insects might be edible—or might not. But by far the safest guide to a proper meal would be the local savages.

As the sun moved toward the horizon, it began cooking up a brilliant sunset, creamy orange with galleries of hot red clouds cooling to purple. He gaped, despite his mission. Finally the show subsided, replaced by the camouflage of dusk. He zeroed in on his target: the campfires of the clavers. Years of practice avoiding detection on coldwalks had given him a sixth sense for stealth. He meant to make good use of that now.

The claver camp lay over the next rise. He crawled up on his belly, peering from the crest. One guard. The barbarians were confident. Looking down from his
knoll, he counted fifteen clavers, two of whom were women. Poles or spears spiked the ground here and there, some with curious flat objects crowning them. Over two fires, the clavers were cooking their meals—small chunks of something skewered on sticks. From the smell, he took it for meat—a sickening thought, yet his stomach stirred in response. He would steal flesh if he must, he told himself. But perhaps there was proper food among their baggage. He hunkered down and waited for dark.

The boisterous, hooting behavior he had seen in the marsh was gone, replaced with a more ominous silence. Perhaps intent on their meal, the clavers communicated in grunts and shorthand phrases, sometimes jostling each other with rough camaraderie.

At the head of the draw were their pack animals—huge, stomping horses—and near them, stacks of their supplies, off-loaded for the night. The claver guard made a slow, lazy circuit of the hillcrest; compared with the sensors on Station hull, he represented no challenge. Years of breaking other people’s rules had taught Reeve that people usually saw what they expected to see, and since the members of this party were pursuing
him
, they wouldn’t expect to
be
pursued.

While he waited, Reeve found himself studying the poles with the flat objects on top. When he recognized what they were, it felt as though he’d been struck in the chest. They were feet. Several of the poles had a severed human foot impaled, sole pointing up. Weak, he turned away. He knew where those feet came from. Damn them to everlasting hell. He didn’t let himself think about what else they had done to the bodies of his fellow Stationers, or Grame Lauterbach, poor bastard.

Trembling with rage, he toyed with the idea of stealing those awful poles; his comrades shouldn’t have to suffer such outrage. But he wasn’t on Station anymore,
and the stakes were higher than a dressing-down by the brass. Setting the fantasy aside, he turned his attention to the task at hand: theft and survival. Pulling his jacket around him, he moved off from the ridge, biding his time in the next gully until the night deepened and the fires burned down.

Lithia’s moon popped above the ridge. Just a slice of light in the dark sky, it would not threaten his cover of darkness. Waiting for the clavers to bed down, Reeve gazed at the night sky—a vista familiar to him, the only one on the planet that could be. This was the sky as it should look, dark and fractured by star drifts. Seeing this canopy, he longed for Station, his thoughts returning to the moment of destruction, and to what had caused it. Perhaps the orthong vessel had opened fire. But in sixty years the orthong had never initiated an offensive against Station; the orthong remained a shadow threat. Grame Lauterbach said a ship was coming—had this ship fired on them? And could it be true that Captain Bonhert intended to destroy the planet?

We got to kill her, Reeve. Promise you’ll never tell …

He sat up, weary of these ruminations. Now that the camp had been silent for an hour or more, he crept closer to spy out the guard’s position. After a long while the claver made his pass by Reeve’s side of the gully. A predictable monitor, easily avoided.

Reeve made his way to the far side of the defile and approached the horses. Their animal smell was powerful. When they stirred and nickered, Reeve understood they smelled him, too. Moving smoothly and with excruciating slowness, he crept to the pile of claver supplies, passing close enough to the horses to note their enormous haunches and bulging eyes. They were magnificent creatures, far grander than in the vids. Hurriedly pulling out his knife, Reeve slit the ropes binding one of the bundles, revealing coarse strips of a
fibrous material. One whiff told him it was dried flesh. He stuffed the strips into his field pack and went on to the next bundle, finding granules of some kind that might be edible. As the horses stomped and grew restless, he crammed his pack to the brim and strapped it closed. Then, thinking about the poles and their terrible adornments, he slit open a few bags with a slash in the shape of an X, so the clavers would know it was no animal that had bettered them.
Stationer, by God
. He began to move off, then turned back. On impulse he pissed on the remaining supply bundles, taking inordinate pleasure in it.

Withdrawing back down the defile, he circled around the next gully and slunk westward across the ridges, putting distance between himself and the camp. After an hour, as dawn lit his path, he ran toward the spot where Marie waited, a week’s rations weighing down his back. When he reached their bivouac, Marie was up, having struck the tent. In the first hint of dawn, she looked fragile and pale.

“Going somewhere?” he asked.

She nodded. “Figured we’d be in a hurry this morning. Successful hunt?”

“Yes. But we’ll be turning carnivore, I’m afraid.” He peered at the crest of the arroyo. “Let’s get out of here.”

Marie tossed him a food pouch. “Eat something first.”

He grinned. In truth, he was hungry enough to chew on his boots. Without taking off his pack, Reeve ripped open the pouch. In his haste, he dropped it, spilling the food nuggets on the ground. Swearing, he knelt in the hardpan soil and scraped together a few spoonfuls of the pellets. He stuffed them into his mouth, ravenous and beyond scruples, crawling to salvage his meal before the bugs descended.

“Reeve!” he heard Marie shout.

As his head came up he found himself facing a
glinting sword. At the other end of the weapon stood a man with a patchy brown beard and bald head. Claver. Though the man’s shoulders were covered with a fur pelt, he was thin as a girder. Reeve could take him on, but there were more than one. Another one was sitting astride Marie. The sword edged closer, nudging Reeve’s throat.