SoliS

"That damn jumper must have flooded the compression tanks," Rey says, doing the same, reaching across the burned gash of the console and stroking the sensor pads that will flood the compression tanks. In the next few minutes the tanks will explode and Grielle will make her passage sooner than she expected. He's pleased with himself that he has at least arranged for her to do so in the presence of Sarna Neve. "I better take the dune climber down there and see if anyone can be saved. Stay here, and I'll call you if it's safe."
Grielle makes a feeble attempt to detain him, but he exits quickly and closes the wing-hatch after him. She is moved by his humane urgency and stands to watch him sprint up the salmon-colored rise of sandstone to the dune climber. He bounds into the cab and starts rolling downslope, the big blue wheels scattering gravel in fins behind him.
Less than halfway down the escarpment, the dune climber fishtails to an abrupt halt. The glimmer among the strewn boulders that Grielle had glimpsed earlier flickerflashes toward Rey. In the red dust kicked up by his hard stop, the disclike bodies, whirling fins, and raving mouth parts of the shreeks materialize.
The white tarpaulin, now peach-red with sand, pulls away under their biting frenzy, exposing the cumbrous crates in the carry bay. More rocks spit skyward as Rey swings the dune climber around and starts churning up the boulder-waned slope. The shreeks thrash among the crates with shuddering might and bang their .pugnacious bodies against the spinning wheels. Splats of squashed shreek spin away in widening vectors, and Grielle, who is watching appalled, thinks Rey is going to elude them. She looks for the com-link to encourage him.
Then one of the shreeks slams into the cab of the dune climber, and the canopy roof wings into the air. Grielle's heart thumps, and she steadies herself with a bracing gust of degage. Only the olfact enables her to stand still and watch the dune climber weasel among the scarp boulders, scrambling back toward the ridge. She scans the burnt console before her, trying to recall how Rey drove this thing. She wants to go to him, to drive the shreeks off if she can. But the array of sensor pads are just so many jeweled lights to her.
The dune climber disappears from Grielle's vantage. Four heartbeats later, her breath is snatched away when the climber shoots over the rim of the scarp and lofts into the air, wheels blurring. It smacks onto the road in front of the rover, toppling the crates from its carry bay under the shrill screams of its brakes.
Rey pulls himself from the cab, and Grielle opens the side hatch for him. Shreeks flap up from below, etched into the visible by veils of dust. And though they are thronging toward Rey, she stands in the doorway to help him, to sacrifice herself if necessary. Under the gaze of Sarna Neve and the hundreds of millions who passed here, she can do no less for so valiant a man.
But Rey barrels into her, frantically shoving against her, trying to reach the console and abort the flooding of the compression tanks. Grielle, however, thinks he is eager to get her out of harm's way, for she can see the shreeks slashing closer. Their grinding jaws electrify hearing, sending hurting vibrations into the small bones of her head. She tries to help him by closing the wing-batch, but he hurls her aside the instant before she can reach the lever. In his obvious zeal to save her, he exposes his back. Grielle and he scream together as a flashing streak of fangs scythes through the hatchway and severs his ham tendons.
Grielle watches in rigid horror as Rey collapses across the console, blood smoking from his legs, the shreek gnashing loudly as its teeth crunch into bone. She can't breathe.
Wildly flailing at the console to stop the imminent explosion, Rey enters the stop sequence just as the shreek completes its bone-crushing clamp on his leg and hauls him howling from the rover. A magnetic wind of sheer terror whisks Grielle to the hatch lever, and she secures the rover.
Standing at the viewport in an aching twist of fright and shocked stupor, she observes firsthand the feeding habits of the shreek. They do not compete once the prey is seized. They float in a circle of quiet, shared ecstasy. Only the successful predator feeds. It hovers over the writhing body it has hobbled, swiftly scissors it into parts, and does not share a crumb of bone.
In an astonishingly brief time, it is done. Then, like a shift of wind, the whole shimmery school of them is gone, and no trace of Rey Raza remains but the smeared imprint of his last agony in the coppery sand.
Late in the day, with the bloated sun looking corrugated among the ruins of Sarna Neve, Mei Nili and Buddy find Grielle Aspect sitting stupefied with olfacts in her rover. While Buddy examines the battered dune climber, Mei shakes Grielle alert and finds out about Rey's heroic death. Grielle refuses to believe that Rey had anything to do with the destruction of the second rover, which killed Shau Bandar. "He sacrificed himself to save me," she whispers through her drugged torpor. "He could have fed me to them instead. I was ready to die. I wanted it, but he shoved me back. He saved me."
The dune climber remains functional, and Mei programs the rover's computer to autopilot it along with the rover lugging Munk's body. Slowly, the caravan departs Sama Neve and trundles into the night. Ghostly vegetative blooms ripple on the sandstone ridges in a nocturnal wind-foxtail, bitter dock, cordgrass, and yarrow-the profuse flora of the spores carried across the shoreless dark from the blue star that is Earth.
A few hours later, the water cycler in the pilot rover emits a raspy groan and cuts out. By dawn the blackglass viewdomes are foggy with exhaled moisture, which Buddy and Mei carefully sop up with their scarves and squeeze into empty nutripouches. Mei retreats to the rover that is carrying Munk, but the water cycler there is dormant, its power cells drained by disuse because the rover has been emptied of air to carry Shau Bandar's frozen body. When Mei tries to hook the cycler to the engine's power drive, the circuits, already straining from the supermassive weight of the androne, shut down. For most of that day, Mei and Buddy struggle to revive the engine.
"Abandon the androne," Grielle demands, "or we're all going to die out here. Is that what you want?"
"Go take a sniff, Grielle," Mel gripes from under the chassis.
"Do you want to die out here, old one?" Grielle asks Buddy.
He looks up from where he is kneeling in the auburn sand, holding a lux torch for Mei and shrugs. "We're three days from Solis. We can make it without a water cycler if we don't panic:"
"Life is a panic," Grielle states derisively and turns her head to take another gust of degage. With all the olfact she's been doing since yesterday's tragedy, she's less talkative than before, yet she manages to add, "Our senses detect only the smallest fraction of what is. Why do you want to go on living in this poverty?"
Mei and Buddy ignore her, and she drifts back to the pilot rover. Inside, she seriously contemplates activating the engine and leaving them behind with their precious androne. But when she looks over the laser-gashed console, she can't figure out how to run the damn thing, and the possibility that she might blow herself up stymies her angry ambition. She wants her passing to be ritualized. Rey Raza died for her that she herself might die with ritual exactitude in Solis, and she will not squander that gift.
Instead, she stares admiringly at the dune climber parked in the shadow of a pinion rock, its burden of psyonic crates promising her a welcome reception in Solis. For that, she will have to wait. But she won't wait thirsty. She helps herself to one of the pouches of reclaimed water and sips it. The acrid taste makes her grimace, but she finishes the pouch anyway. She's the director. This is her caravan, and this her water.