Under Strange Suns (17 page)

Each consecutive hill stood taller than the previous, the ascent growing steeper. He paused to take his bearings and for a sip of water amidst a jumble of upthrust monoliths interrupting the immediate swath of forest. There were about a dozen of the boulders, tall, sharp-edged and rust-hued rocks, the shortest overtopping him by a yard. A distant outlier perhaps of the mountains looming ahead, or simply an unrelated outcropping. A question for McAvoy.

He heard something and froze, water tube still between his lips. A distant sound reached him, perhaps owing to some acoustic trick of the geologic formation, perhaps simply a combination of good hearing and the baffles of foliage not interdicting the sound waves. But he heard something.

It came from downhill, along his back trail. Voices. Vocalization anyway. Repetition, pattern. Not what he associated with animal noises.

He clipped the mouthpiece of the drinking tube back in position and wormed his way deeper into the rock formation, careful to avoid snagging his clothing or any of the items strapped to him on the jagged projecting surfaces.

Locating a concealed position where three boulders intersected, he turned to face back downhill and hunkered down. By ducking his head a bit lower he could see beneath a jutting shoulder of one of the rocks back into the valley he had just ascended, foothills rising and falling like a rounded set of stairs. To both his right and left he could see lines of egress in case he needed to evacuate this position in a hurry.

He squirmed a bit, working his body into–if not a more comfortable position, at least a less muscle-cramping posture. Then he waited.

The noise reached him again. It was definitely drifting up from below. A patterned vocalization. Then another. A response to the first? A conversation? Or no more than animal communication, like a pack of wolves maintaining position?

Aidan wasn’t ready for first contact. That wasn’t the mission. He’d let them–if it proved to be a “them”–pass by. Wait a bit, then move on, hope they didn’t remain in the way of his path to the shuttle.

There, movement downslope, coming distantly into view. The relative sparseness of the tree limbs worked in his favor; whatever was coming had little concealment, whereas he was ensconced in this rocky hideout.

Aidan felt his heart rate increase, felt the same rush he had experienced so many times, crouched and waiting either for unwanted company to pass by, as if he were involved in some armed version of hide-and-seek, with death as the stakes. Or perhaps it was more reminiscent of SERE school, and he was in the Escape phase of the training.

In either case there was a rather novel element to the current proceedings.

He dug the binoculars from a pocket of his jacket. The jacket had transitioned from operating at near its maximum limits to maintain his body temperature as he plummeted through frigid layers of the atmosphere to radiating any excess body heat built up during his hike. The hike hadn’t proven particularly taxing, the day comfortably cool for Aidan. At the moment the jacket need only serve a more mundane purpose, providing the pocket from which Aidan retrieved the self-encasing binoculars.

He thumbed the slide that cantilevered open the binoculars and looked through the newly exposed eyepieces, allowing the automatic focusing feature to dial in the proper magnification, bringing distant figures into sharp resolution.

He lowered the glasses, blinking. Incredible. But no, why should it be incredible? Here he was on an alien world. And there they were. Aliens. No-doubt-about-it, honest-to-God aliens.

He brought the glasses back up to his eyes and looked again.

There had to be about twenty of them. Hard to tell with them weaving among tree trunks, visible one moment, slipping behind a bole the next. But, roughly twenty. Counting them wasn’t precisely topping his to-do list at the moment. Figuring out how to avoid them and get on to the shuttle was paramount. But the possibility remained that he’d have to fight, so he took the opportunity to observe a potential enemy.

They stood, perhaps, five-feet tall. He supposed he’d classify them as humanoid. Bipedal. Had the leg-torso-head structure. But the divergences were striking. The torso resembled a bowling pin, wide about the hips and abdomen, tapering to a narrow chest. The sternum swelled to some sort of shoulder, from the center of which emerged a single arm ending in a hand sporting three digits.

The hairless head also followed the general human plan. Two eyes set above and to either side of a petite nose, little more than a skin covered nubbin of cartilage encasing a single nostril. Mouth, human-like and obviously capable of producing utterances.

The skin tone, with slight individual variances, was a pale salmon, judging from what exposed skin he could see. They were dressed in loose, split-skirted robes. The fabric was quilted and moved stiffly, like some sort of armor, an impression reinforced by a wide plate of a different material sewn into the center of the chest of the garment. The plates were of differing earthy shades, from brown to near black. Leather chest protectors, Aidan surmised. A hole punched through the center of each allowed the arm to pass through. Boots of the same substance as the chest plates peeked below the skirts of the robes.

He noted with interest that each one was armed. Most had a clutch of small javelins gathered at the hip. All were belted with a long, narrow-bladed sword. Four bore what looked like bows, though Aidan was hard put to guess the mechanics of that, given the single arm. A puzzle for another time. These four also carried quivers slung on their backs.

They were moving with no great speed. The alien in the lead paused and the rest halted. The alien bent, running two long fingers through a patch of the underbrush. Through the binoculars Aidan watched the leader pluck a single blue clover, saw that the stem bent at a sharp angle.

Trackers, Aidan figured. A hunting party? But hunting game or hunting him? Or, perhaps, the shuttle?

He edged deeper into his shelter, a bit closer to the left-hand escape route. Bolting that way risked placing him in the line of travel he judged the aliens were following, but at the moment his slight movement that direction only tucked him more deeply into the shadows. Hedging right increased his chance of exposure. He had no idea how well they saw, or even, for that matter in what spectrum. What if they could make out his heat signature?

After seeing smoke and the straight lines suggestive of roads, Aidan had considered the contingency of being tracked. But speed was the priority. So he had taken no precautions, done nothing to conceal his back trail. Nothing that would slow his reaching the shuttle; a calculated risk. The clover was spongy, the soil beneath allowing a certain give. It was obvious he’d left some marks, but perhaps the vegetation was resilient enough to erase most traces of his passage.

He could hope.

He could also ease his pistol free of its holster, which he did. He toggled the battery, thumbed off the safety, and the gun was hot.

The alien were closer now.

Another pause. The leader squatted again, examining the ground. A stiff breeze whisked across the hillside, causing a curious rattling as tree spines fenced in a massive arboreal battle. A cerulean wave rippled through the ground cover as the zephyr briefly exposed each clover’s underside.

The alien stood and made some remarks to the others; two or three responded. The speech sounded crisp to Aidan’s ears, individual syllables clearly enunciated. For no clear reason he thought of German as taught by a non-native speaker to a first semester class of language students.

The tracking party kept on, closing on Aidan’s position. But their track would pass to his left, clearing the rocky outcropping by three or four meters.

He concentrated on his breathing, keeping it shallow. He told himself to maintain his cool, keep absolutely still and silent.

They were close enough now for Aidan to see variations in equipment. The coloring of the quilted armor–Aidan had decided it was intended more as protection than as a garment–differed from alien to alien. Not mass produced, then. Handmade. Their eyes were large, iridescent, the colors ranging from the silver-green of a trout to gold to pale pink.

The javelins were metal-tipped, iron or steel Aidan judged. So he was facing more than a Stone-Age culture here, though he’d assumed as much from seeing the scabbarded sword each alien wore –slapping a hilt and quillons on a pointed stick would have been a foolish exercise.

They had drawn almost level with his hideout. The leader slowed his pace. Aidan realized he’d settled on the masculine gender despite the absence of any apparent sexual characteristics, male, female, or some alien alternative, but decided now wasn’t the proper moment to delve into exobiology.

One of the aliens spoke. From the long finger pointed at the cluster of monoliths, Aidan could make a reasonable guess what he was saying. The leader glanced toward the upthrust rocky fingers. Unconsciously Aidan held his breath. A few short paces his way and...

The leader held up a plucked sprig of clover. He gestured with it along the line he’d apparently already determined to be Aidan’s course. He snapped out a command and continued on, disappearing from view on the other side of boulders. One by one or in pairs, the rest followed.

Shifting his gaze, Aidan glimpsed the leader as he crossed through the aperture that provided the left-hand escape route. Then he was gone. The others began to flicker by as well, Aidan counting them as they passed.

He heaved a mental sigh of relief. They’d passed him by. He’d need to re-route, take a more circuitous path toward the shuttle to avoid encountering the hunting party. But he’d avoided a confrontation. That was the important thing.

Aidan allowed himself to slump, resting his back against the cool surface of the monolith behind him, dropping his left hand to the exposed ground–except his hand encountered something other than ground, something bristly, soft but not yielding.

A squeal erupted from the thing beneath his hand and it squirmed away. Aidan turned to see something similar to the rabbter leaping away, hopping toward the left-hand escape route, the clawed foot of the muscular rear leg scrabbling against bare stone and propelling the creature out into the open.

Oh, shit.

An alien appeared in the aperture, drawn by the commotion. It looked directly at him. Looked, but did the alien see him? His jacket would have taken on the mottled hues of the boulders, helping him blend in with his surroundings. Aidan held his breath, sat rigid.

The alien swiveled his head, the motion appearing vaguely owl-like given his lack of spreading shoulders. He shouted, a brief burst of gutturals.

Yes, Aidan realized, the alien did see him.

He scrambled to his feet.

The alien dropped into a crouch while simultaneously whipping free his sword, a slender, thrusting blade above a bowl-shaped guard.

Aidan back-pedaled, spun, and dropped to his hands and knees to fast-crawl through the right-hand escape route. He could have bolted back the way he’d come, but he wanted to put some solid rock between himself and his pursuers.

He kept the pistol in his right hand elevated to keep the muzzle clear, taking most of his right-side weight on the side of his palm. He passed through an archway comprised of one monolith leaning against another, then stood. He spun about but didn’t stop moving, walking backwards toward the nearest trees. Not great cover, but better than nothing.

“Believe it or not, guys, I come in peace,” he said.

The alien who’d spotted him was already appearing in the archway. The other aliens were spreading to either side of the boulder outcropping.

“Can we talk about this? I’ll be happy to let you take me to your leader, just as soon as I check on my friends. Okay?”

The nearest alien thrust his sword point into the soil, leaving it to wobble upright. Aidan took that as a positive sign, for about the one second it took the alien to tug a javelin free of the bundle strapped to his hip, the motion of the arm sinuous, perhaps double-jointed. The arm then drew back, like the throwing arm of a catapult. It whipped forward.

Aidan fired the pistol before the alien’s arm could complete its arc. The javelin whirred a foot above Aidan’s head. The alien stumbled back against a boulder, then slid to the ground, leaving a dark red streak of blood against the rust-hued stone.

Not green-blooded, then
, Aidan thought. He spun again and sprinted for the nearest trees, javelins sinking into the blue turf about him. First contact had been a bust. He’d worry about explaining it for the history books if he lived.

He fought down the urge to laugh. The whole encounter was surreal, possessed of an air of artificiality, like a computer game. But he knew he had to continue thinking tactically. This was deadly serious, no less so than that final enclave of jihadists he’d fought on Earth. The javelins could kill him as easily as that boy’s scimitar in Africa.

Reaching the first tree he palmed the trunk, killed his momentum and swung around the tree to face the way he’d come. He took a two-handed firing stance and leaned against the tree, using it as a third point of contact to steady his aim. He hoped these trees didn’t exude some adhesive sap, or that the bark wasn’t poisonous. But he was too busy fighting for his life to worry too much about it.

The aliens were coming on fast, spread out in a skirmish line. They’d apparently decided that taking pot-shots with javelins was a low-probability option and had drawn swords. All but four of them who satisfied Aidan’s curiosity regarding the use of a bow with only one arm.