“Here come the carnivores.”
“Yeah. A whole hierarchy of them, probably.”
A shadow passed over them, filmy, complex, and they both looked up. A flyer was crossing the sky, triple vanes turning languidly with soft rustles, a huge structure even compared to the kite Onizuka had shot down in the forest. As its shadow passed over the pit, creatures of various sizes fled from the stromatolite garden, or hid out of sight.
Yuri grunted. “What a sight. Like a pterosaur.”
“What’s a pterosaur?”
Yuri felt oddly sorry for Lemmy. He suspected Lemmy was a hell of a lot brighter than he was, the way he kept figuring stuff out. But, after a shit life, he knew a lot less. “Earth stuff, Mars boy. Come on, we ought to take some samples for the ColU.”
Together they walked into the hollow, tucking samples into sacks at their waists.
Chapter 17
They got back to the camp late, after around twelve hours away.
The explorers delivered their samples to the ColU. The colonisation unit immediately began to pick apart the bags of green muck and greasy marrow with murmurs of satisfaction that even to Yuri’s ears were intensely irritating. It said it intended to put together a family tree of life on this planet of Proxima, the better to exploit it—not exterminate it, it was no threat, it couldn’t eat you or infect you, but to push it aside and use its remains as feedstock for human farming. So samples like this were food and drink to the ColU. When it began to speculate about predator-prey interactions—on Earth the predators hunted mostly at dawn or dusk, but maybe they would strike at any time here on timeless Per Ardua, a difference that would have effects that would ripple down through the whole biosphere, and blah blah—Yuri just walked away.
After another few hours, following a meal of ship’s rations and desultory talk around the fire, most of them began to drift to bed. Lemmy, Onizuka and Harry Thorne stayed up. They had started a poker school, or rather had continued it from their days on the ship. When Mardina forbade them to bet ration packs they had started to use tokens made of stems, taken from around the lake and broken up to different lengths to give multiples of ten, a hundred.
Yuri, trying to settle in his own small one-man fold-out tent, heard Lemmy laugh. “I’m a stem millionaire tonight! The richest guy on Per Ardua.”
“You’re still a little prick, you little prick.”
The game soon broke up, and the couples went off, Martha with John Synge, Abbey with Matt Speith, Pearl with Lemmy, leaving the rest high and dry, as Onizuka put it. Yuri could hear it all, tell who was going where and with whom.
Tonight Matt stayed up, however, for it was his turn on sentry watch. In his tent, Yuri listened to Matt whistling through his teeth.
He kind of liked Matt Speith. Matt was an artist; as a child he had been a refugee, with his similarly arty family, from a terminally flooding Manhattan. He was vague, ineffectual, not particularly strong or attractive: “Neither use nor ornament,” he said of himself. He seemed to have stumbled into poverty, and into the UN sweep that had taken him first to Mars and now to Proxima, without really noticing it, like he was sleepwalking into disaster. But he was quiet, unassuming, resilient in a calm kind of way, and always prepared to talk about anything—anything that wasn’t to do with Mars, the Ad Astra, or Prox c, anyhow.
He was the best artist on Per Ardua, probably. Every world needed an artist. Matt was a lousy sentry, however. That night he didn’t even call the alert until Pearl’s scream had already woken everybody up.
Even before he was fully awake Yuri pushed out of his tent, barefoot, wearing only his trousers. As usual when his sleep was disturbed he blinked in the full daylight, surprised to find Prox high in the sky when his body told him it was three or four in the morning.
He saw there was a commotion around the tent Lemmy shared with Pearl. Yuri ran that way, trying to take in the scene as he went in.
The tent had been pulled away, evidently by main force, leaving a heap of groundsheets, blankets, clothes in the dirt. Lemmy was lying on his back, and even from a distance Yuri could see the pool of blood around his head. Pearl, naked, was sitting up, knees to her chest, hands clamped to her cheeks. Her bare legs were slick with Lemmy’s blood. She was silent, eerily so.
And Onizuka stood over her, pulling at her upper arm, trying to make her stand. Harry Thorne stood beside him, looming over Pearl as well. Yuri saw that both men had their crossbows in their hands.
The others came running, in shorts, T-shirts. Only Matt wore his daytime jumpsuit, and even he didn’t have his boots on. Yuri checked his own back; he always kept a knife in his belt, even when asleep. Now he slipped the knife into his right hand, concealed.
Soon Matt, Yuri, John Synge with Martha, Mardina, Abbey, stood in a wary circle, the whole of the little colony gathered around the central tableau, the ruined tent, the screaming girl, the body, the looming men.
Mardina strode forward now, as if taking command. Yuri saw she had her eyes on the crossbows, but the men didn’t raise them, or stop her approaching. Mardina knelt by Lemmy, and felt for a pulse at his wrist, neck, bent to listen for breath. She sat back on her haunches. “Well, he’s dead. Crossbow bolt to the throat, another to the temple.”
Onizuka grunted. “Little prick won’t have known what hit him.”
“We were merciful.” Harry Thorne sounded more conflicted than Onizuka.
“Merciful,” Mardina said. “Why did he have to die at all? Don’t tell me. So you two could get at Pearl, right?”
Onizuka, clinging to his crossbow, pulled at the girl’s arm again, but, silent, passive, she wouldn’t move. Onizuka was sweating, angry. “That and the little prick beating me at poker again. Final straw,” he snarled.
“And now you’re just going to take her for yourselves. What will you do, share her?”
Harry Thorne spread his hands. “Come on, Mardina.” Now he sounded miserable. “You know me. I’m no killer, I’m a farmer.”
“You’re a killer now.”
“You can’t expect a man to live without a woman. I mean, you’re talking about the rest of our lives. And Pearl, well—”
“She’s used to putting out. Is that your logic?” Mardina glanced around. “Otherwise you might have come for one of the rest of us. Me or Abbey or—”
“We got rights.” Onizuka, struggling with Pearl, tried to raise his crossbow at Mardina. “We’re taking what we’re entitled to. Cross me, you bitch, and—”
Yuri let fly with his knife.
It was from the culinary gear left behind in the dump from the Ad Astra, easier to conceal than the big heavy hunting knives they’d been issued with by the astronauts. And he’d been practising too, alone at the edge of the forest.
The knife caught Onizuka in the right eye. Onizuka fired the crossbow wildly, and the bolt sailed away, harmlessly. He fell back, dead.
“That’s for Lemmy,” Yuri muttered. He found his heart hammering, the world tunnelling as if he were under heavy acceleration. He’d never before killed anybody.
Now, in front of him, it was all kicking off. Pearl was pulling away from Harry Thorne. Abbey Brandenstein came in from the other side, trying to get to Onizuka’s dropped crossbow. Harry was panicking, waving his own weapon around like an idiot. “No—please—it wasn’t meant to be like this—”
Abbey had the crossbow. She raised it. “Then how was it meant to be, asshole?”
Mardina, on the ground, scrambled back out of the way. “No—Abbey—”