“I’ll be damned!” Harker muttered as he fired into the area around the back of the boat. “The damned thing can fly!”
The Pooka may have been able to fly, but it wanted to fly as little as possible. As soon as Hamille cleared the sands and saw rock, it landed with a loud splat and immediately coiled and turned, tentacles emerging, watching the two mercenaries. Harker made a mental note to remember how fast the Quadulan could move if it wanted to.
Something was pushing the sand up like a wall, catching and overturning the boat. The two men knew they couldn’t save it; they dropped the lines and ran like hell.
The wall followed at almost the same pace, but as soon as they hit the rocks it stopped and then subsided.
“The supplies!” Mogutu gasped, breathing hard but pointing at the overturned boat. “We have to get them!”
Harker and Chicanis looked at him. “You volunteering, Sarge?” the Navy man asked. “Cause I got to tell you, I don’t want to get back out there until I’m ready to leave. And we have our boat and supplies!”
“I could order you to get them,” N’Gana said sternly, out of breath but recovering rather quickly now from seasickness.
“Colonel, you and I both know, as old fighting men, that there are orders you give because they will be enforced and orders you give because they should be enforced,” Harker responded. “And then there are orders that are meaningless. That would be this case. I thought you divided things pretty well between the two so there was some redundancy. We’ve got one. Let’s leave it at that, unless you can figure out an easy way to get them.”
N’Gana and Mogutu both looked back at their boat, upside down in the sand. To get the supplies, somebody would have to run toward the sand monsters, turn the boat over, then drag the supplies up on the rocks. The question was whether or not it was worth it.
“You’re right, Harker,” the colonel said with a sigh. “But we’re down to one change of clothing each, and we’ve more than halved our guns and ammunition. It will be pretty tight.”
“Colonel, human beings have somehow managed to survive here, at least in small numbers, with a lot less, I bet,” Father Chicanis responded. “I think we will cope.”
Harker stared back at the other boat. “The supplies will probably stick in the sand, for all the good they’ll do anybody. Looks like the boat will go back out with the tide, so at least there won’t be obvious signs of a landing here in a day or so. Let’s get the boat up and into the brush and hide it, then take inventory. I think we should be inland and well away from the beach before nightfall.”
They all turned to business, then stopped. Katarina Socolov was still sitting there, still staring.
Harker went over to her. “It’s all right. We made it. We’re here! We’re alive!”
When she didn’t react, he put out a hand and touched her shoulder. She suddenly whirled and screamed, “Don’t you touch me! Don’t you touch me!”
“I won’t touch you,” he responded gently. “Not unless you don’t get off this coast.”
SEVENTEEN
A Long Walk in the Sun
Katarina Socolov had not said a word after they got the supplies from the surviving boat unpacked and divided up. There were now only three backpacks for the five members of the team who could handle backpacks, the Pooka being built for different things. Mogutu took one, Father Chicanis took another, and Harker took the third. The commander of the expedition had not volunteered, and Socolov, though she had trained with a heavy pack, was nonetheless the lightest and smallest of the humans. She also gave no sign of volunteering.
Harker wasn’t sure if it was shock, self-doubt after the rugged landfall, or his own harsh barking at her to do what had to be done that was causing her sudden withdrawal, but for now they had enough of problems that he decided not to push it. Either she’d snap out of it and rejoin the rest of them or she’d break, in which case, in the cold reality of survival in hostile territory, she would become a liability.
She’d been very athletic and very confident, it was true, but she’d still emerged from the ivory tower and thought of this as something romantic, youthful fieldwork upon which to build a career. Most academics had never come face to face with situations in which split-second decisions might cause their own death. It had to be a tough awakening, and they were only starting.
N’Gana looked at his watch. They had already synchronized on the island; now he checked each to ensure that the watches were still in synch at least to the minute. They were; computers might not govern these watches, but they had designed and built them.
“We have at least six more hours of daylight,” he told them, looking and sounding like his old self. “I think we ought to make what time we can. The sooner we get to our objective and retrieve what must be retrieved and get that information up to the others, the sooner we can be concerned with getting back.”
There wasn’t much argument on that score, and while they’d had a trying morning, it felt good to actually be doing something. N’Gana turned to Father Chicanis. “Which way, Father?”
The priest pointed east. “Stay parallel with the coast and not too far inland. Since that was Capri Point back there, it means we’ve got a hundred and fifty or so kilometers to where we need to be, give or take. It will be difficult to get lost if we keep close to the ocean and keep going east.”
“Remember that,” the colonel said to the others. “If anything happens and we become separated, that is the way there, and, from there, the reverse is the way back.” He thought a moment. “Allowing a bit for unforeseeable problems, I would say we have a week’s good walk here. Since I don’t have a backpack I’ll take the point, the sergeant will take the rear. You see or hear anything unusual, or anything helpful for that matter, don’t hesitate. And keep a good lookout for anything edible. We want to save the preserved stuff for when we absolutely have to have it. If humans can exist down here in the wild, then so can we. Father, you know the local and imported plants here, so you’re the one who says what’s edible and what’s not.”
They started walking, and were quickly enmeshed in the tall grass that was two to three meters tall, well over N’Gana’s head. It wasn’t hard to follow the leader in this stuff since he was so large a man and trampled down quite a swath, but this made Harker start thinking about how easy it would be for any enemy to be there in the tall grass, even in force, and remain invisible until it was too late.
“Was it like this when you were living here, Father?” Harker asked the priest.
Chicanis shook his head. “No, not like this. These grasses were pretty well tamed, cut, managed, and in most cases we thought it was plowed up. It’s good protection, but it’s tough finding landmarks. I hope this won’t be the norm all the way.”
“There were some groves of trees going along for some distance not too far inland on the survey photos, if I remember,” Mogutu commented in a low tone that the others readily took up. “They looked like fruit trees of some sort.”
“They were. Tropical fruits, mostly,” Chicanis responded. “They were quite a favorite delicacy in the good old days. There were a number of fruits grown very near the coast because the regular sea breezes gave them added moisture year-round. I don’t know, though, how you’re going to find anything at all down here walking through this. Even I am lost.”