He let his mind wander as he trudged on until he came to a makeshift dam that stopped the flow of the water. The shadows of the water predators reached it and swam around in circles for a moment before heading back. He realized then that they must have been tracking him—what else could have followed him that he hadn’t had the awareness to notice.
This was not like him; he prided himself on being a great hunter back home, but then he had to admit that he wasn’t exactly in a familiar environment, and he was so tired he could just collapse where he stood and let the local wildlife crack open his suit like a tin of spam.
Even the thought of biting into a lump of spam made his mouth water.
With a grim smile he knew it was bad when he craved that muck.
Come on, Den, get a grip, he thought, urging himself to carry on.
He reached the dam. The top was ridged into what looked like a walkway. With no other way to go, he crossed it, walking carefully, making sure the structure, made from some kind of gray material, wasn’t about to send him into the hungry mouths of the snake-shark things.
It held, and he came to the other side.
His heart sank when he climbed the bank to see that before him was just a barren scrubland of short, spiky grass. There wasn’t even any sign of war here, just an absolute nothingness.
Unable to face the prospect of trekking across kilometers of empty land, he turned east and decided to walk back the way he came, but on the other side in case he had missed something along the way. He travelled, in a daze, for about half an hour until his vision became too blurry to trust.
Exhaustion took its toll and he gave in, finding a small outcrop to hide under. He curled into the shadows and let his body rest, all the while mumbling into his mic until he could no longer do even that.
Chapter 25
LAYLA HAD to resist the temptation to push Vingo into the water and let the creatures in there devour him. Constant moaning about the sun and the need to camp… all the while Denver remained missing. That little tredeyan fucker clearly didn’t understand humans as much as he thought.
For three long hours they had made their way back to the tributary after filtering off into a different route than the one she had seen Denver get carried away on. Vingo told them they needed to camp, rest, but how could they without Denver?
She had told Vingo it was time he did what they said for a change, and he would just have to deal with the sunlight for a while. The alien had a visor, after all; it wasn’t as if he were outside, exposed and baking beneath the strong star.
They slogged on down the shoreline, Vingo stopping every few meters to gather some kind of fruit into a storage sack he had within one of his suit’s pockets. At least the treacherous shit had shown them how to refill their suit’s water supply manually.
And she had to admit that the water did taste great. Fresh and with a slight hint of mint that made her throat and belly tingle. It was oddly comforting. She at first thought it had some essence of the croatoan root within it, but Vingo had dismissed that, saying the water on Tredeya, unlike Earth, did not have any salt content and that the plants that grew within it enriched it with minerals and vitamins.
She laughed to herself, thinking that if humans colonized Tredeya, one of the big corporations would ‘own’ the water and sell it back to the people at a ridiculous cost as they extolled its numerous virtues.
But her meandering thoughts didn’t last long when she saw Charlie break into a jog. He moved quickly down the shoreline, jumping over rock formations.
“What is it?” Layla asked.
“Denver,” Charlie replied, stopping and bending down.
Layla joined him and looked at what he held in his hand. “His combat knife.”
“This isn’t good,” Charlie said. “Denver wouldn’t just drop his only weapon like this. He can’t be in good shape.”
Vingo wasn’t responding. He just kept foraging at the water’s edge and moving along slowly, inspecting the various shrubs and flora that grew on the bank. The sight of him so relaxed while Denver was missing brought murderous thoughts to her mind. She could just go to him now, overpower him…
“Wait,” she said, spinning back round to join Charlie. “There, on the ground.”
Charlie brushed the grass aside. “Tracks,” he said.
The two of them set off, tracing the footprints on the muddy bank. The steps weren’t clearly imprinted and slid into one another. She pictured Denver tired or wounded, dragging his feet as he continued on.
She knew he was probably looking for them. When they had crashed out of the catamaran, she saw him hit a rapid and speed off until they lost sight of him. She figured that the crash had broken the intercom system.
Engaging her external speakers, she called out, “Den! Are you around?”
As she expected, there was no response.
Keeping up with Charlie was no mean feat, but she pushed herself onwards.
“Here,” Charlie said.
He stopped and bent down. “Vingo, what the hell is this?”
To Layla it looked like a cross between a shark and an eel. Must have been about four meters long and with a thick, wide body with a sleek torpedo shape. Its tail had a wide fin on the back. Its head was larger than a human’s and twice as long with a wide jaw, in which was set a triple row of back-curving teeth.
The side of its right flank was crudely cut open and the flesh jagged and torn. Inky black-red blood had pooled around it, staining the yellow and pale-green grass.
Vingo joined the others and placed his sack of berries and strange-looking fruit on the ground. Kneeling, he inspected the creature. “In your language, the closest pronunciation would be a ‘skertch.’ It’s a predator fish. We saw them earlier, remember? The shadows in the water. Their skin is… how would you say it? Changing in the light?”
“Photochromic?” Layla prompted.
Vingo gave his version of a shrug and nodded.
“Probably like our chameleons,” Layla mused. “I’m assuming it’s not natural to find one out of the water like this and in this condition? Although given what Denver and I saw last night, I wouldn’t put it past this planet to have some other fucked-up predator lurking about.”
“Not in sun,” Vingo said. “Not here.”
“Then what?” Charlie said.
“Only one species I’ve known to take on a skertch,” Vingo said with what Layla thought was a smirk on his face. It was hard to tell given the smoothness and subtle curves of his nose and mouth. His beady black eyes rarely gave anything away either, but perhaps it was just the tone of his voice. She couldn’t tell if it was mockery or a faux admiration.
“Well?” she asked. “What would have done this?” Not that she needed Vingo to say, she had a pretty damn good guess herself.
“It’s the foolhardy work of a human,” Vingo said, pointing one of his digits at the wound in the side of the beast. “Rough job, barbaric you would say.”
Charlie launched at Vingo then and smashed an arcing haymaker into the alien’s helmet. It didn’t crack under the impact, but Charlie’s strike did knock the alien to the ground with a heavy thud. Charlie quickly mounted him, pinning Vingo’s arms with one hand while he brought the knifepoint to a gasket joint between the helmet and the chest piece of the alien’s suit.
“You say that again, you little fucker, and I’ll show you barbaric. We saved your worthless life! You dare insult my people and me again and you’ll be the one we find with its guts ripped. You understand that, don’t you?”