that.”
She turned to stare at the dead screechers. They were toddlers then, each around six or seven feet tall. She shook her head. “They’re Marines, they’ll find a way and they’ll wait.”
Tarn sighed. “Fine, let’s go.” He glanced behind him. “Can’t believe their momma left them alone this long. Unless maybe daddy got eaten by something bigger.”
She stared at him. Something bigger like the Megasaur, she wondered. She had a lot of questions but if Tarn was right, time and distance were more important. “If something’s bigger than daddy, I really don’t want to meet it.”
“ Momma’s bigger than daddy, and you’re right, you don’t want to meet her. The female of the species on this rock are bigger and meaner than the males.”
She’d read about some animals in Terran history being like that. Some societies had been matriarchal as well. Among her team she might have made a joke about penis envy, but with Tarn, an unknown man who looked like he could have wrestled one of the screechers into submission, she stayed silent. “Lead the way, Tarzan.”
Tarn chuckled before turning and heading deeper into the ravine.
Chapter 13
“ So why’d you come after me? And why didn’t you show up a little quicker, I had a few close calls!”
“ I didn’t have no power armor to help me climb that cliff.” Tarn tested a couple of rocks where the two walls of the ravine came together. It was angled harshly but enough broken rubble remained to allow hand and foot holds. “I killed that baby screecher you stunned with your ULF grenade.”
She’d thought the grenade had finished the screecher off, she’d been too busy to check on it. A glance at the spear he’d slung across his back with a piece of rope showed a few darker blood stains on the barbed point, confirming his claim.
Her broken arm ached where she held it against her side. There were several purplish spots on it from the bruises caused by the screecher and the near compound fracture. “How’d you get up the cliff?”
“ There’s a pass further up, took me a while to get there though.”
Elsa swore, then swore again when she bumped her arm against the rock. “Can’t wait to get this damn thing fixed.”
“ Don’t worry, it’ll heal.” Tarn pulled a loose rock and tossed it down behind them.
“ It’s not even set yet!” Elsa scowled at her whine. She shook her head to clear it. As big as Tarn was, he wasn’t a Marine, he couldn’t understand what it meant to be self-disciplined and fully functional. People depended on her. Tarn should be depending on her, not the other way around. “When we get to a stopping point I need your help.”
“ All right. No sticks to wrap it with though.”
Elsa stared up at him, impressed that he’d intuited what she’d wanted. She wondered what other mysteries Tarn possessed. He seemed older than he looked. Older or, she mused, prematurely experienced.
They climbed in silence for several more minutes until the ground opened up into a small shelf, complete with moss and some tropical trees. “I’ll be damned,” Tarn muttered. “Might get a stick after all.”
Elsa looked at the trees and nodded. She moved over and took out her knife, then started sawing at a few branches. She cut one free then started on a second. Halfway through the knife suddenly felt dead in her hand. She pulled it away and stared at it, then tried tapping it against the tree trunk. With a mew of frustration she twisted the safety catch and pushed the release to eject the energy pack in it. A simple glance at it proved that it was ruined. Somehow some of the screechers blood had managed to get into the watertight compartment.
“ Why you think I’ve got a sharp stick?” Tarn asked.
She scowled at him, then slammed the knife back into her sheath and tried wrenching on the tree limb. Tarn stepped up and broke it free, the muscles flexing in his arm. She forgot her disgust at her broken gear and waited for him to turn and face her. “You ready?”
“ Let me get the armor off my arm,” she said, reaching across to work the manual releases on the armor.
Tarn walked around her and released the seals with hardly any fumbling. Elsa found her eyes narrowing as she watched him pull the armor off in a surprisingly gentle manner. “What?” He asked. “Told you I wasn’t always here.”
“ No armor in the universe like Marine FIST armor,” she stated.
Tarn shrugged but offered no explanation. “You want me to set this or you want to talk about it?”
She scowled. “Set it. I’ll bra-“
Tarn yanked on her arm before she could finish, pulling the bone and seating the broken ends against each other. His other arm squeezed tight against her forearm, keeping the bone in place while he slowly released pressure.
“ Fuck!” Elsa hissed. “You could have let me get ready for that!”
“ Yeah, I could of. Then you’d be tensed up. Swelling’s already fading, didn’t want your muscles fighting back and making it worse.”
“ Yeah, thanks…dick.”
“ Here, hold this tight.” He pressed one of the branches against her arm and let her take over holding it against her. Then he pressed the other branch against it, but frowned before he proceeded any further.
Tarn leaned over and pulled her knife free, then went to the wounded tree and hacked another branch off. Elsa watched him, marveling at how he used a single chop to sever the makeshift splint. He came back with the third branch and eyed her arm and then the stick. He nodded, then cut the rope free from his spear.
“ My high tech shit breaks but you’ve got rope?” Elsa mused aloud.
Tarn held it up closer to her face plate. “We made this here. That long grass you walked through, it’s got strong fibers in it. We figured how to wrap ‘em together to make rope.”
Elsa felt her eyebrows raise in surprise, then realized he couldn’t see her face through the helmet. It was stuffy and her nose itched occasionally, but considering how the helmet had saved her, she felt safe about it. Missing both arms and parts of one leg allowed fresh air to get in.
Tarn wound the rope around the splints, binding them tightly to her arm. She feared a loss of circulation, but she knew the sticks would keep her bones in place as long as she didn’t do anything stupid.
“ You ready?”
“ Depends, what’re you going to do to me this time?” Elsa asked. She secured her knife in his sheath again and caught Tarn’s smirk as he turned away.
“ We follow that strip of grass up and around that rock, then find a way to get over the rest of the ridge. It can’t be far, then we’ll have to find a way down to the place you think you want to go.”
“ I know I want to go there!” Elsa snapped.
Tarn shrugged. “Then quit yapping and start hiking.”
Chapter 14
Elsa guessed it took them another couple of hours to clear the ridge and reach the foothills on the far side. As Tarn had promised, there was no sign in the distance of the research outpost. There was a mound in the distance. Without any technology to assist her, she assumed the mound was the same place the colony had been.
Halfway down the ridge Elsa needed Tarn’s help in getting her helmet off. The humidity inside of it had gotten to the point where the view screen was fogging over. It took some work, the helmet had been bent and mangled badly, but finally he’d managed to beak the seal and work it free. She suspected he’d bent it back some to make it release, given the way he’d been grunting while working on it.
“ You see that mound?” Tarn pointed it out.
