half-ass parachute-landing fall alongside Howard.
I righted the Slug saucer. Our friend shivered there on the vibrating plate, betraying no hostility and less inclination to flee. The cliff broke the wind down to a sixty-mile-per-hour swirl and stretched away to the limits of vision in both directions. Most significantly, in the cliff face directly behind us, over which Howard and I had tumbled, loomed a black opening twenty feet wide and ten high. “Howard, you found a cave.”
He pointed through the snowflakes. “Just resistant limestone above eroded shale. Probably hundreds like it along this outcrop. I doubt there’s much depth to it.”
I wrapped my rope around my glove again and pulled toward the cave mouth. “There’s enough.”
Ten feet under the overhang, the wind gave way to calm, and the twilight outside gave way to blackness deep enough that I paused to let my optics adjust. The ceiling even opened up a bit, rising to fifteen feet by my ’Puter. My visor’s outside temp gauge shot up to a balmy thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit and continued to rise. I tugged off my gauntlets so I could rub circulation back into my fingers. Toes were next on my agenda. I popped my visor to enjoy the coziness.
I sniffed. I said to Howard, “Smells like-”
From the shadows, something rumbled.
I froze.
Howard said, “Uh-oh.”
On further listening, the rumble was more a growl, but a very large growl. A boulder along the cave’s back wall moved, then grew, as it resolved into something brown, furry, and grumpy.
The exobiologists had briefed us about Weichselan fauna, observed as well as anticipated. They noted that no analogue to the cave bear of Ice Age Europe had yet been observed on Weichsel, but the probability that such an analogue had evolved calculated at seventy-two percent.
The bear reared on hind legs and snarled at its uninvited guests. The largest modern Earth Kodiak bear mounted out fourteen feet tall. Paleontologists estimated Earth cave bears could have been thirty percent larger than Kodiaks.
I can only report that the first observed Weichselan cave bear bumped its head on the fifteen-foot-high cave ceiling. This just made it grumpier.
I backed out of the cave as I unslung my rifle.
“Howard, bears eat berries and salmon, right?”
“Not cave bears. Their remains are high in Nitrogen- 15.”
“Meat eaters?”
“When available.”
Any Weichselan two-legged hunter that this bear had encountered up until now would have been very available. The bear dropped down on all fours, lowered its head, and snarled.
I thumbed the selector switch on my rifle to three-round burst as we backed out, then tugged a smoke grenade from my thigh pouch. With personal transponders, smoke is obsolete as a position marker, and the cans are clunky to carry, but I carried them anyway. As Ord said, it was better to have and not need than to need and not have.
The bear stepped forward and bared its teeth.
I stepped backward as I popped the can and rolled it like hissing dice under the bear’s nose.
When the can popped and hot crimson smoke billowed out, the beast yipped and jumped back into the shadows.
Howard and I ran like our hair was on fire.
An hour of exploring along the escarpment later, we probed another cave. This one wasn’t as deep or as warm as the first one, nor was it as crowded.
We bundled our prisoner in a corner where the temperature measured thirty-six degrees Fahrenheit. There the blob seemed as comfortable as a blob can seem. Then Howard and I sat facing each other on the cold stone, while he uncoiled a hose that connected his scapular vent to my foot vents. His batteries were fully charged, and the barely warmed air he trickled over might stave off frostbite for me, even though the throb of returning circulation made me grit my teeth.
Howard said, “You didn’t shoot the bear.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t have to.” I jerked my thumb at the Ganglion. “Will it survive?”
It was Howard’s turn to shrug.
“If it does, how much can it tell us?”
“Ask me again after we get it to Earth alive.”
I disconnected from Howard’s armor and tugged my boots and gauntlets back on.
Howard said, “We could stay connected. That would be more comfortable for you.”
I shook my head. “One of us needs to stay at the cave mouth, on watch. I’ll take the first watch. While I’m warm.” A relative term.
A half hour later, I sat at the cave mouth with my rifle across my thighs.
At two a.m. local, the sky cleared enough to show stars. Weichsel’s version of the North Star sits in a constellation that looks like a bear.
At three a.m., the first dire wolf came sniffing around the cave, its eyes glowing red through the dark. A rifle shot would wake Howard. More important, it would flash a heat signature unlike anything natural on Weichsel. The Slug Warriors might be as disorganized as Howard thought, but why take chances?
I gathered a little pyramid of throwing stones, then pegged one at the wolf. It bounced off his ribs, and he trotted into the darkness, more confused than hurt.
Later, I shook Howard awake, then turned in.
The assault rifle’s burst snapped me awake inside my armor, and the armor’s heater motor, ineffectual but operating, teased me by prickles between the shoulder blades. The shots’ reverberation shivered the cave’s ceiling, and snow plopped through my open faceplate, onto my upturned lips.
“Paugh!” The crystals on my lips tasted of cold and old bones. There was no cave bear in here at the moment, but there had been. I scrubbed my face with my glove. “Goddamit, Howard!”
Fifty dark feet from me, silhouetted against the pale dawn that lit the cave’s mouth, condensed breath ballooned out of Howard’s open helmet. “There are dire wolves out here, Jason!”
“Don’t make noise. They’re just big hyenas.”
“They’re coming closer!”
“Throw rocks. That’s what I did. It works.” I rolled over, aching, on the stone floor and glanced at the time winking from my faceplate display. I just got wakened from my first hour’s sleep after eight hours on watch.
I squinted over my shoulder, behind Howard and me, at our companion. It remained a hippo-sized, mucous- green octopus on a platter, humming a yard above the cave floor.
Sleepy or not, I had to get us three off this Ice Age rock unfrozen, unstarved, and undigested.
I groaned as my replaced parts awakened, more slowly than the rest of me.
“Jason!” Howard’s voice quavered.
I stood, yawned, wished I could scratch myself through my armor, then shuffled to the cave mouth, juggling a baseball-sized rock from palm to palm. Last night, I had perfected a fastball that terrorized many a dire wolf.
As I stepped alongside Howard at the cave mouth, he lobbed an egg-sized stone with a motion like a girl in gym class. It landed twenty feet short of the biggest, nearest wolf. The monster sauntered up, sniffed the stone, then bared its teeth at us in a red-eyed growl. The wolf pack numbered eleven total, milling around behind the big one, all gaunt enough that we must have looked like walking pot roast to them.
The wolves couldn’t eat us. A dire wolf could gnaw an Eternad forearm gauntlet for a week with no result but dull teeth.
I looked up at the clear dawn sky. The wolves were, however, bad advertising. The storm had wiped out all traces of our passing and, I hoped, would retard any search by the decapitated Slug Legion.
I planned for us to hide out in this hole until the good guys homed in on our transponders.
If any good guys survived. We might starve in this hole waiting for dead people.
I wound up, pegged my baseball-sized stone at the big wolf, and plinked him on the nose. I whooped. I couldn’t duplicate that throw if I pitched nine innings’ worth. The wolf yelped and trotted back fifty yards, whining
