Kyle had faced many weapons, thugs with guns and knives, and once, a jar of acid. He had stared into the eyes of men who wanted to hurt him, to make him suffer and die. But he had never feared being
The terror was atavistic. Scrambling madly, Kyle plummeted down the hill, seeking escape or just a place to hide, every step in the heavy gravity like wading through a nightmare. He threw himself into the first narrow crevice he found.
The monster pounced again, sealing Kyle in his tomb. Its fangs gnawed at the narrow lips of stone. It was trying to stick its horrible maw in to bite him, instead of just fishing him out with its legs.
The radio whispered in his ear.
“What on Earth is that?” Bobby was on the edge of panic, his voice trembling and wet. Paradoxically, his terror rallied Kyle.
“GO!” Kyle hissed over the radio. “Get the fuck out of here! While it’s still occupied with me—I don’t think it can catch the buggy. Go, damn you!”
The creature began flaying the stone with its claws. It was going to dig him out.
“Is that what attacked my world?” Bobby was asking intelligent questions, and it was pissing Kyle off.
“Get the fuck out of here! Go get help!” Kyle didn’t have a weapon. He didn’t have room to fight, even if he could get his heart to stop pounding long enough to think about fighting. He couldn’t see anything except the dark bulk of the monster, blotting out the sky.
It stopped, freezing perfectly still. Its motion had been unnatural, inhuman, alien; now it was almost comical. One leg stretched out, claw-first, reaching down to him. It had finally figured out that all that was required was a single puncture of Kyle’s suit.
A flare of light. Sobbing in fear over the radio, Bobby unleashed the plasma torch on the creature, having crawled up the hill unnoticed. Instantly the monster reverted to mindless spider, and sprung on him. The two of them rolled down the hill, disappearing from Kyle’s sight.
He kicked his way out of the crevice. He was too late.
On the plain below him, the spider straddled Bobby, pinning him with half its legs, rising up on the other half. Futilely Bobby cradled the plasma tank for protection, trying to hide behind it. The fangs descended like a jackhammer while Kyle cried out in helpless rage.
Sparks of metal on metal, and then the tank exploded.
The flare was blinding. For a moment Kyle could not tell ground from sky. When contrast returned, all he could see was the horizon, a cardboard cutout standing against a starry background. On his hands and knees he slipped and slid down the hill, every bump rising up to punish him, every hole trying to suck him down.
He collided with something that was not rock. A leg. Groping, he found another. Scraping his helmet on the ground, he tried to bring the scene into the horizon. Above the legs was nothing. Sparkles slowly began to appear. Parts of bodies were burning, but Kyle’s vision could not identify them.
His hearing returned, and he realized the clicking sound was not part of the ringing deafness in his ears. Somewhere out there the creature still moved, trying to stand. That it was severely injured was deducible only by the fact that Kyle was not yet dead.
Crawling on the ground, he picked out the silhouette of the buggy. As much as he wanted to, he could not stand and run, because then he would lose sight of the buggy. As if he could run blind across broken ground, anyway.
The shadow from before, from on top of the hill, flashed through his mind. It had been to the right. This creature had come from the left. There was another one out there, still stalking him.
Scrabbling on all fours knees, dipping his head to keep the buggy in sight, he battered his hands and knees without mercy. It was the longest seven meters of his life.
Crawling into the buggy, he flicked on the exterior headlights. They would give away his position, yes, but without them he simply could not drive. On their brightest setting they revealed only outlines. He could avoid boulders, but crevices would be invisible to him. He would be lucky to survive the first kilometer.
He was still owed some luck. But he wasn’t sure he deserved it.
After five minutes he stopped and turned out the lights. Closing his eyes was unbearably hard. Forcing himself to count to one hundred was the most terrifying thing he had ever done.
When he opened them again, he could almost see. If he drove slowly enough, he would not need the lights. The lights would kill him. Driving too slowly would kill him. Wrecking the buggy would kill him.
There were a lot of ways to die out here, but all of them were the same, in the end. A spider standing over you with shining fangs. Kyle thought about what spiders did with things they caught.
Bobby might have been the lucky one.
But he wasn’t. Kyle’s damned luck held out. Gradually he drove faster as his vision returned, and nothing sprang out of the darkness on him. He found a road, and picked a direction at random. After a kilometer he thought to turn the buggy’s navcom back on. It told him he had chosen correctly. It even warned him about upcoming curves and rough spots.
Damned luck.
Pulling up to the same air lock he and Bobby had left, he was too tired to be worried. The authorities wouldn’t give him any trouble. Dejae-2 couldn’t afford to let people know he had killer spider guards. Instead, he would send an assassin, somebody who had to work outside the system. That meant Kyle had a little time.
It also meant that he had to ditch the fake persona he had been living under. He didn’t think he could even risk going back to his hotel. His documents opened the air lock, but they also marked his presence outside the dome, and every person who returned after the spider died would surely be investigated by Dejae’s agents. He drove in, waited for the scrubbers to cycle the air, and drove out the other side. At least he didn’t have to present a credit stick to pay a fee. All the air locks let you in for free, a reasonable safety precaution. That just meant they charged you double to get out.
Parking the buggy behind a rowdy bar, he left the keys in it. Maybe someone would do him a favor and steal it. He dropped his old documents into a curbside trash disintegrator, and shoved his pressure suit in after it. The machine choked on it, but after a few well-placed kicks it fired up again and shredded the suit. Kyle idly reflected that you could probably shove a body down the damn thing.
All he had left were the clothes on his back, two credit sticks, his original Altair ID papers, and the data chit in his pocket. Bobby had died so Kyle could get a vid of a man in a mask.
Kyle consoled himself with the fact that he would probably die over the same useless vid. Then he found a cheap, cheap hotel room and gave up one of his credit sticks.
Seven hours in the heavy G had drained him, leaving him brittle like a rag wrung dry and left in the sun to parch. He should have collapsed into unconsciousness as soon as his head hit the disposable foam pillow. But the memory of the young man struggling under the spider would not leave him. That should have been him; would have been, if not for Bobby’s heroics. In the grand scheme of things it was just another casualty of the Kassan war, but this one had been on Kyle’s watch. He had never lost a member of his squad before. He didn’t understand how to deal with it.
Only the inescapable fact that escaping from this planet would be impossible, and therefore he would soon join Bobby in death, let him finally sink into sleep.
In the morning he did the only thing he could. It would be what they expected, of course. But he didn’t have a choice. Five minutes in a convenience store and he was deep brown, staining his face with some cheap cosmetic intended to preserve skin in the harsh recycled air, but undoubtedly chemically inert and useless. Then he went down to the docks, to try and find a ride home. A tramp freighter would be his only hope. They would search the passenger liners, like the one he had come on. Not that he could afford a luxury ticket, anyway.
There didn’t seem to be a lot of tramp freighters on Baharain. He wasn’t sure why, and he didn’t dare consult an official registry or government information kiosk to find out. Instead, he went from bay to bay, looking through the windows to see if there was a ship outside. He was tired, anxious, and angry. That’s how they caught him by surprise.
He heard a voice behind him. Soft and yet hard, familiar and yet exotic. Fear bit into his belly like the spider, his stomach muscles contracting involuntarily. He spun, knowing what he would see.
