Hella Read online

  “That’s what I said. She’s stupid.”

  This was one I’d have to think about.

  So when we saw this one juvenile exploring ahead of the herd, it reminded me again that I still didn’t understand why Marley Layton was so mean.

  I knew what the animal was doing. And why. He was an outlier. There were probably others, but we hadn’t spotted them yet. If this one got as far as the Dystopic River, it would probably wait for the rest of the migration to arrive, along with any other juveniles who’d survived their explorations. According to our tracking displays, there were seven packs of predators ahead of the migration, two more than last year. And last year had been bloody enough.

  But now we could see that this juvenile wasn’t trekking alone. He was making the journey with a couple of buddies, one just a bit smaller and the other noticeably larger. Traveling together increased all their odds of survival. The smaller one was most at risk, unless it stayed between the other two.

  “Want to see a leviathan up close?” The Captain looked at me.

  “Is it safe?”

  “Of course not. Want to look anyway?”

  I considered it. Captain Skyler wasn’t stupid. “Okay. Yes, please.”

  “Good answer.” He touched his com-set. “One and three, orbit the target at a half klick. I’m going in closer. I want to tag these fellows.” Another touch. “Lilla-Jack, you’re upstairs on the cannon. Make your shots count.”

  It took the better part of an hour to close the remaining distance. The leviathans don’t move fast, but they move steadily. With almost every step, one or another would lower its great shovel-shaped head and chew its way forward in great ponderous bites. Each of the beasts was cutting a swath wide enough to drive a Rollagon with room to spare—and these were only teenagers. A grandmother could leave a path wide enough for three or maybe even four trucks to travel side by side.

  Even one of these animals would consume a dozen tons of vegetation every day. A single animal could strip a whole forest in a couple weeks. But there was another reason why they wouldn’t stop, couldn’t stop, why the whole herd circled through the southern realm of the continent in an endless migration: The trees would poison them if they didn’t.

  After about fifteen minutes of being munched on, the tree would respond with an increased production of tanninoids. The smell would be horrific and the beast would move on to a more appetizing tree. But it couldn’t just move to the next tree over. The smell would alert every tree in the grove, every tree downwind. So the animals had to take a few bites, then move on to the next tree for the next couple of bites, then move on again, and again. The forests kept the herds moving.

  The animals at the rear of the migration suffered the most, because by the time they got to the trees, the tanninoids were already building up. The sick and the slow became sicker and slower. And the predators would pick them off from behind. Captain Skyler thinks that the tanninoid reaction is one of the reasons we see juveniles pushing ahead. They want to get a fresh untainted lunch before the grammas arrive. I’ve seen that behavior at our own caf too, just by following Jamie.

  At a half-klick, the forward and follow trucks unhooked their chains and split off to start a circular path around the slow moving mountains. We headed in closer. I climbed up to an empty turret to get a better view. Even from a half-klick away, the animals were scary-huge. It’s one thing to know that Hella’s lighter gravity and oxygen-rich atmosphere allow for everything to grow to enormous proportions, but until you can see an actual meat mountain in motion, up close and thundering, you can’t really understand what it means.

  Leviathans have huge flat feet that hit the ground with a great bone-shaking thump. Even a juvenile—each leg must weigh twenty or twenty-five tons. A leviathan moves only one foot at a time. The earth booms with every thundering step. That’s why some people call them thunderfeet, but on a mission we have to use the scientific term—leviathan. This close, we could see the muscles straining, each leg shifting with audible moans and groans, all the way up to the shoulders, all the way up to the hips, and you could hear the animal’s spine creaking in protest at its own horrendous weight. The ribcage was big enough to hold at least two of our trucks, and these were only younglings. The extended neck stretched out even longer than the animal’s body and the tail was just as long at the other end, swinging ponderously back and forth.

  Each animal’s broad head moved from side to side, a counterbalance for the tail, but more than that, when you’re made of that much pot roast, you have to pay attention to your surroundings, so the leviathans were watching out for each other.

  But the thing I noticed most was the hide on these creatures. It was thick and flabby and wrinkly almost everywhere, but especially around the joints, the shoulders, the hips, the neck and tail—wherever the beast needed flexibility. Despite the dust and mud caked on the animal’s body, it was still possible to see the dark tones beneath—gray, dark gray, shading to dark blue and even a hint of purple. But that was only the skin. The animals had a kind of moss growing on their backs and sides. It was patchy and uneven where the skin flexed and folded most, but it was thick across the back and sides and even down the flanks.

  High up top, spread across each leviathan’s broad back was a whole other ecology as well, a familiar contingent of slugs, leeches, and lawyer-bugs, parasites of all kinds, and a good-sized flock of conductor birds to feed on all these passengers. The birds were the cleanup crew, the maintenance team, keeping their personal continent free of pests and vermin, lice and bloodsuckers. They looked like yellow crows, but with sharper beaks. They shrieked and gossiped, flapped their wings, and threatened any trespasser that violated the leviathan’s airspace. But on closer observation, it was evident that the birds were serving another purpose too; there were always a few circling above, protecting their mobile island by keeping a high watch for predators.

  Of course, this entire organic circus had its own distinctive smell. You didn’t need the augmented display to know it was there. It was a brown earthy scent, a musky dirty smell, a sweaty animal smell. Members of the First Hundred said it reminded them of cows, a whole herd of cows, an endless herd of cows, an inescapable pungent herd of cows. It wasn’t offensive, it was just strong and inescapable.

  All three of the animals grumbled as we rolled closer, a low deep-throated complaint that was more earthquake than sound. We were in no danger, the beasts were too large and too slow. Even if one of them were to charge, we could easily outrun it. And if we were too close, and it looked like it was going to rear up, we’d see its head lowering and its muscles tensing in plenty of time to retreat. A leviathan would more likely use either its long neck or its tail as a weapon, swinging one or the other around with more than enough force to overturn a Rollagon. Back at Summerland, people had a lot of different names for the leviathans. Some people called them longnecks, other people called them other things, but out on the drive-around, we only called them leviathans. Even these younglings would be dangerous. But the Captain had no intention of getting close enough to test their tempers.

  Lilla-Jack sat in the higher central turret. I watched as she loaded a tagging dart into the railgun. She could easily have hit her target from a half-klick away, but the homefront always preferred as close a view as possible. We approached the animal slowly and matched its pace about a hundred meters off its right flank. Lilla-Jack’s red-laser painted a bright circle, split with cross-hairs, high on the shoulder of the largest creature.

  “I have a lock,” she reported.

  “Anytime,” said the Captain.

  Lilla-Jack squeezed the trigger. The railgun fired with a soft thunk. The leviathan’s shoulder twitched involuntarily as the needle dart went in. Other than that, the mountain of meat never even noticed it had been punctured.

  “Stand by,” the Captain said. I could hear quick typing on his keyboard. “All right, we’ve got a sig
nal. Lilla-Jack, you may have the honor of naming this fellow.”

  Lilla-Jack considered it. “He’s nice and dark. How about Blue Boy?”

  “Blue Boy it is.” Captain Skyler typed it into the record. “What do you think? Shall we circle around and tag the fellow on the other side?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Mission Control says go.” Captain Skyler wheeled the truck around to the left to make a wide U-turn. We headed rearward for what seemed like a much longer time than it really was, but it was necessary so we could circle the slowly moving animals from behind. We had to keep out of the range of their tails. Even the spike at the end could be dangerous. If one of those animals swung its incredibly long tail, the tip would crack the speed of sound just like the snapping of a whip and could slice or puncture even the best-armored vehicle.

  When we finally did turn to come around behind the beasts, the birds on all three of the animals started clattering loudly and frantically. They swarmed up into the air in a sudden bright cloud of fluttering wings.

  “Okay, what’s that about?” the co-pilot asked. Halloran was tall and lanky, with a shiny-shaven head. This was the first time he’d spoken since we’d rolled out. Behind his back, his nickname was “The Silence.” If he knew that, he never said.

  I whirled around in my turret to look. What had startled the birds? And then all the alarms went off at the same time—and there were voices shouting in my headset too.

  “Bogies at the six!”

  I looked to my left. Just coming up over the top of the rise to the west—a pack of six bigmouths. All sizes. A family. A very lean and hungry family of carnosaurs. How had we missed them? They were moving thirty klicks per hour. And we were headed directly between them and their prey.

  The truck lurched as Captain Skyler accelerated. We could outrun the pack on the straightaway, they didn’t have the endurance of a Rollagon, but we were on an intercept course, and the real danger here was that the bigmouths would see the vehicle as a more attractive target than the leviathans. “Cannons, find your targets, but don’t fire unless I give the order.” That last part was unnecessary. The Captain was the only one who could arm the weapons.

  Carnosaurs aren’t as big as leviathans, but they’re big enough. Each one is twice as tall and twice as long as a Rollagon. Across their backs, they have coarse fur that sprouts into bright feather-like growths, but beneath that, especially on the lower sides and belly, they have rough, almost-scaly skin. They’re leaner and faster than leviathans, but it takes a whole pack of them to bring one down. Carnosaurs are faster than leviathans—but by human standards, they seemed to be moving in slow motion. It was an illusion created by the contradictions of distance and dimension. The brain doesn’t do size well—it insists that nothing could be that big, so obviously it has to be close. But because it isn’t, even when it’s moving fast, it still looks slow. There was a whole big discussion about this one time, right after the Big Break-In, because so many people said they couldn’t understand why we hadn’t been able to do more. After all, the creatures hadn’t been moving that fast, had they?

  Um, yes, they had. It’s all about physics. The larger the animal, the more mass it has to balance, the more inertia it has to overcome, the more momentum it has when it finally starts moving, and how much that momentum acts on its ability to stop or change direction—but just off our port side, we had plenty of evidence that the long strides of the carnosaurs more than made up for the challenges of their size. One of the newer colonists once said that she saw them as two-legged lions with big jaws attacking giant land-whales.

  The leviathans were grunting now. They knew they were being tracked. They weren’t running, leviathans don’t run, but they were moving with intention. At best, the leviathans could manage maybe ten klicks an hour, maybe a little more if they were headed downhill.

  Eventually the carnosaurs would catch up to them, probably in the next five or ten minutes. The carnosaurs were probably running for the smallest animal. If they could get it by the neck, they could pull it down and suffocate it. Or if they could leap up onto its back, they could dig at its skin with their two-meter claws. If they could inflict significant blood loss, the animal would collapse within hours.

  We didn’t know what prey the carnosaurs had locked onto—us or one of the leviathans. Even at this distance, we already had laser-targets painted on four of the six advancing predators, the four largest. We could take them down if we had to—if they started toward any of the Rollagons, but we had a longstanding policy not to interfere with local animal behavior if we could avoid it. We simply didn’t want to risk triggering any kind of ecological tipping point. But we also had an it’s us-or-them rule too.

  Somebody switched off the alarms and now I could hear Captain Skyler calling out, “Hold your fire. Everybody hold. It looks like they’re going after Blue Boy.”

  “Crap,” said Lilla-Jack.

  “That little bigmouth at the back. It’s not certain what it’s doing. Lilla, paint it please.”

  One of the red targeting circles shifted to the young predator’s breastbone and Lilla-Jack reported, “Locked.”

  “I’m taking control of the cannons,” the Captain called. “Lilla, you’re the secondary.” In case anything happened to him. “Halloran, you’re third.”

  “Ya, boss.”

  “Where’d they come from?” I asked.

  “Shut up. We’ll worry about that later.” That was Lilla-Jack.

  The ground was thundering now. The whole truck was shaking. We were between the retreating leviathans and the pursuing carnosaurs, but the Captain was pushing the truck as fast as it could go through the heavy grass. If the carnosaurs didn’t change course, they’d pass only a hundred meters behind us. Too close for comfort, they could change both their minds and their direction without much warning—but now I could see that the other two vehicles also had their cannons locked on the predators. A single command could take down the whole pack. But if they were right on top of us, we would probably experience what some people call collateral damage, that place where people say, “Oh, crap!” And the “Oh, crap!” zone was rushing toward all of us awfully fast.

  Horrendous bright screeching suddenly filled the air. Blasts of awful stink as well. At first I thought we’d been attacked, then I realized that Captain Skyler had done it. Sonic blasts of warning screams. Synthesized fear pheromones. Randomly triggered ultra-bright dazzler flashes. And even a few flash-bangs too.

  The pack of carnosaurs skidded, one of the forward ones stumbled, the one behind it crashed into its rear, a third one sideswiped and veered off, but it was enough to unbalance the first two and they went down in a gigantic bone-crunching avalanche. A landslide of hellacious hunger, screeching and roaring and hissing.

  The remaining carnosaurs staggered in bewilderment. The two on the ground thrashed in confusion. One of them kept trying to stand, but its leg was twisted in an impossible direction. The other just spasmed and convulsed. The laws of physics again. Things that big tend to go splat when they fall down. Especially on Hella.

  Captain Skyler brought the truck to a stop and we watched as the rest of the drama played out. To the east, the leviathans were steadily putting more distance between themselves and the danger they had just escaped. The four uninjured carnosaurs circled their injured colleagues curiously, cocking their heads, staring, considering. The two on the ground grunted and hissed desperate warnings. The four on their feet hissed back.

  “This is going to get ugly,” said Lilla-Jack.

  “If you’re a bigmouth, meat is meat,” Captain Skyler said.

  It didn’t take the four circling carnosaurs long to figure that out. Perhaps it was hardwired into their brains—if it’s not standing up, it’s lunch. If it’s an injured buddy, it’s still lunch. Why wait till it’s carrion?

  We watched in silence for a while. There was not
hing much to say—and most of us had learned a long time ago not to say anything when a camera was running. Having a dramatic video punctuated by astonished cries of, “Oh my god, look at that!” did not add to the impact of the recording, it only provided hours of future embarrassment for the person who said it.

  The Captain put up a handful of little drones, skyballs, to circle the carnosaurs. Nobody had ever dissected one—for obvious reasons, think about it—so these videos would provide additional scans for our growing library of digital reconstructions.

  The two larger carnosaurs were feeding high on the flanks of their fallen comrades—each one ripping away huge chunks of heavy musculature, then jerking its head to throw it to the back of the throat, where they gulped it down in one horrible swallow. I wondered that they didn’t choke themselves. The two smaller animals grunted and growled as they peeled back a huge strip of belly skin, revealing thick layers of blubbery fat. They thrust their snouts in, jerking their heads back and forth, gobbling and growling in hunger.

  Lilla-Jack was already adding her observations to the log. “The cannibalism is understandable. It’s fresh meat. But it’s disturbing to think that these carnosaurs might be eating their own parents or children alive. It’s not a good argument for having children.”

  The four survivors continued to tear chunks of bleeding flesh from the two fallen animals. After a bit, the fallen stopped writhing, and then after another bit, they stopped breathing. But their arched necks and staring eyes still looked agonized. Then, for another while, there was nothing but growling and ripping and gulping. And then finally, the fallen carnosaurs stopped being recognizable as animals and were just pulled-apart jumbles of meat and bones.

  There was enough here for several days of good eating and the surviving carnosaurs could go another two week or two before they became really hungry again. By then, the rest of the herd would have arrived, but with two less bigmouths to help, bringing down a leviathan would be difficult. Problematic, as the Captain might say.