Chapter 59 - The Kraken Gate
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‘Well, everything seems to be in-hand,’ observed Benjamin, looking at the fortifications the next day. We were back on Ganessa after a mere six bells of down time. I’d managed to sleep for three. Mr. Jupp and his remaining two lads were there already hammering pegs into roughly hewn planks to complete the two simple buildings from Benjamin’s plans. The carpenters had help from three groundsmen and two of the marines who were felling and splitting trees, widening the clearing as they did so. The eight more marines kept a watchful eye on the surroundings.
‘You wouldn’t speak so nonchalantly if you’d been here yesterday when the worms showed up.’
Benjamin grinned. ‘Harman’s people tell me the defences will be finished today. With the right supplies and a few of my men, this place should be safe enough.’
‘Right.’ I tried to keep my tone neutral, which was difficult. Benjamin had always been an optimist, but this glib attitude to the dangers on Ganessa was rubbing me up the wrong way. ‘I’d better get going.’ I picked up my pack and called to Evershed and Ankush. The incident with the worms had shaken the naturalist badly. He didn’t want to go with me to find the site of the previous touchdown, but his objections had withered under Harman’s stern insistence. Evershed had visited the original site, so he had to come.
Ankush had volunteered to come with me, and my own employees had practically mutinied until I’d agreed to go with some backup.
‘Give me a moment,’ said Benjamin. ‘I’ll get my stuff.’
‘You’re not coming,’ I said. Harman had been clear. ‘Your job is to make sure this place is secure.’
‘Nah! Second Lieutenant Overstrand has got this. I’ll be more useful to you, Connie. You and I have got experience of the Charg. There could be hundreds of them between here and your destination, not to mention man-eating worms. We should take two more of my men as well, we need to carry a decent supply of weapons.’
I ground my teeth. Now I saw why he had downplayed the threat to the camp; he’d been preparing the argument to join my mission.
‘You godsdamned, patronising bastard! Don’t tell me how to do my job.’ Annoyingly, I was worried about our chances. This planet had proved unwelcoming so far, and our weapons were not exactly state-of-the art, but Benjamin? I was far from sure of his motives. I would rather have taken a sack made of tissue paper filled with venomous snakes.
‘We’ll move faster as a small group,’ I tried.
Benjamin nodded in the direction of Evershed. ‘Er, really?’
I squeezed my eyes tight shut and bit my lip for three ticks which was just enough to help me hold back a squeak of frustration.
‘All right. You can come, along with one of your marines.’ If Benjamin was trying to sabotage the project, I was damned if I was about to swan off into alien territory outnumbered.
Lieutenant Scott returned soon after with Private Coleman. I remembered him as one of the two who’d vouched for Bank’s whereabouts on the night the observatory was attacked. He had arrived four days ago, a replacement for one of the two marines that Ellen and I had sent away. It would have been harsh to say that I’d already developed a robust dislike of Private Coleman, but he was a difficult man to warm to. He was an unsmiling brute, and I remembered his file. He’d been a bare-knuckle boxer for a year and had killed two men in the ring. Then he had been arrested after he beat a waitress senseless. Conscription was the alternative to four years in prison for affray and ‘intent to wound’; he’d taken it. Alright, my own team are hardly sainted angels. I admit it. In our very first meeting, Harman had called them scum. Yes, but they are my scum, and so I love them. If I could have expressed a rational reason for replacing Coleman, I would have done. I doubted that, “He’s got eyes like a goat and no neck," would have cut it. Also, the clock was ticking on our mission.
Ankush was as professional as usual; he could not have looked more relaxed if I had told him we were going to the theatre. Our rucksacks were stuffed with lightweight bivvy bags, rations for three days, leather water bottles and a backbreaking payload of Na-Su’s weaponry. I had trousers on and a short-sleeved silk shirt, over the top of which, I’d donned a tough but lightweight, brown leather jacket. I’d reduced one of the spears down to the size of a dagger and was delighted to find that its flint blade perfectly fitted the sheath in my boot-top. The cutlass, as always, was strapped to my waist.
Polonius Evershed finally gave up trying to fit more food in his pack and groaned mightily as he hefted it over his shoulders.
We set off due east, dead-reckoning against the sun’s track across the sky, since we had no compass. Professor Maddison reckoned there was no guarantee that compasses would work anyway; unable to take metallic objects through the gate, it hadn’t been possible to ascertain whether Ganessa had a magnetic field or not.
Private Coleman fell behind several times. The next time I noticed he wasn’t with us, I went back to investigate and found him cutting a mark on a tree. He gave me a flat stare when I asked what he was doing.
‘To help us find our way back,’ he said, matter-of-factly.
‘You don’t trust our navigation skills?’
‘Begging your pardon, Ms. Derringer. I trust your navigation skills, but not my own. What if we ‘wuz to get separated?’ With that, he hitched his belt up and set off after the others.
A couple of bells of trekking got us clear of the forest and out into open plains. Instead of grass, the ground was covered with a sickly yellow plant comprised of short, rubbery spikes. Some were flowering; jagged purple stems rising to chest height with bright yellow flowers, others had gone to seed, heads bowing under the weight of berries the colour of a day old bruise. Evershed said that plains meant grazing things but didn’t elaborate. Skink, or something like them, skittered away as we trudged across the grassland towards a distant line of hills that ran due south. Insect life abounded, especially around strange mounds in the earth that were scattered randomly about, some of them as tall as we were. We stopped near one and Evershed speculated that they had been made by burrowing creatures. Everyone except the naturalist took a step back.
‘That’d have to be a huge critter to make a mound that size,’ Benjamin remarked. ‘Maybe we should keep moving.’
Evershed ignored the marine and poked at the mound with a stick, dislodging some clods that rolled down the sides until they hit level ground. Some of the mounds looked old, overgrown with grasses, but the one Evershed was prodding at was more recent, its surface brown and strangely greasy.
‘Oh! Urgh!’ Benjamin held his sleeve over his nose. ‘That smells terrible.’
I caught a whiff of it and gagged, but Evershed looked nonplussed. He hadn’t noticed the stench. He prodded again, prising it open further. Suddenly he gave a startled cry and jumped back.
‘Gods! Look at this.’
We edged closer and got a look at what he’d uncovered. It was a nest of dozens of white worms the size of a man’s finger, wriggling, trying to escape back into safety. Benjamin was first to sum up what we were all thinking.
‘Younger versions of the ones that attacked the camp?’
Evershed looked pensive. ‘Then perhaps the adults must make these mounds as a nest for their young.’
‘Right, that does it!’ I said. ‘We’re leaving now. I don’t want to be standing here when the parents come back to check on their babies. Come on.’
We were all turning to go when Private Coleman stepped up to the mound and whacked the worms repeatedly with the butt of his spear, mashing them into a sticky paste. Evershed grabbed the marine’s arm. He was taller, and his wide girth probably meant he was heavier than the private, but Coleman had a wrestlers physique and shrugged him off easily and then finished the job. Evershed looked sad, and for the first time, I felt some empathy for him; he was pompous and had a reputation for embellishing the truth in his books, but there was no doubting his passion for all things living.
We passed many more of the hillocks as we crossed the plain, and several times I noticed Private Coleman scuffing the mounds with his boot. It looked like he was stamping on more of the worms, but he was probably still leaving a trail.
Finally far enough from the mounds and the hatchling worms, and no more than a bell’s walk still to go until we reached the edge of the flat land, we stopped for sustenance. The air was oppressive under an overcast sky. Evershed was sweating profusely.
‘Why is Harman so keen for us to go to this place?’ Benjamin asked in-between mouthfuls of hardtack and dried meat.
‘It was his niece, Dr. Jenniver Betz, who first suggested it,’ I explained. ‘She said she needs to understand exactly what happened at both ends of the portal so that the gate can be improved.’
‘Why couldn’t they open the portal where we needed it?’ Evershed complained. ‘It would have saved us a lot of time and blisters.’
‘Apparently there’s no way to transfer the calibration from one gate to another,’ Benjamin replied. He’d obviously been paying attention. ‘Even if there was, all that information was destroyed when the first gate was blown up.’
‘Come on,’ I said, after a brief rest. ‘We’ve got three days to get there and back.’
Copses were dotted about on this side of the plain, some larger than others. I was contemplating the ridge ahead when Ankush made a warning sound.
‘Creatures…behind those trees!’ he breathed.
I followed his gaze and saw what I had taken to be tree tops moving. I recognised them as the herd animals we’d seen from a distance on the previous trip. This time I did not need a telescope to marvel at these curious beasts, as thirty or so emerged from behind the wood no more than a mile away. Four stout legs rose to three times the height of a human, on top of which sat an immense dome-shaped, dusty-brown body. The creature’s disproportionately small head protruded and hung down from its mountainous body, and using a long proboscis, it sniffed from side-to-side. Rising from the the very centre of the back of each of the adults was a long sinew, anywhere between one and two-hundred hands long which acted as a tether to a collection of gas-filled sacks, taking as much space as the body below it. The very youngest had no more than a whip-like lash emerging from their backs while their older siblings had only one or two of the lighter-than-air bladders swaying above them. The herd was a little closer now, allowing me to see birds, or whatever avian creatures passed for such things here, circling high overhead. Evershed had also spotted them.
‘Astonishing!’ he exclaimed. ‘These animals appear to have an ecosystem of their own. Flying things roosting among the air-sacs, and what I thought was grass growing all the way up there might be some kind of fungus.’
The herd hadn’t spotted us, lumbering towards the open expanse we had just come from.
‘I feel their footsteps,’ said Ankush.
He was right. Faint tremors reached us as the adults' feet crashed upon the ground.
‘What are those things for?’ said Private Coleman, gazing up at the balloon-like sacs.
Benjamin was scratching his head. ‘How can such a huge animal get enough sustenance through such a small snout?’
‘Well, gentlemen, both questions may be related, in that these things may not get enough nutrients via their mouths, and therefore their continued existence depends on supplementing that uptake by a symbiosis with the fungus, or whatever that thing is growing on the floating platforms they hoist above them.’
‘Perhaps the birds eat the fungus,’ ventured Coleman.
Benjamin looked thoughtful. ‘Maybe the fungus eats into the air-sacs.’
‘And maybe the bird droppings provide nourishment to the…well, whatever these animals are.’ The professor was enthralled. I could imagine him totting up the royalties from a new bestselling book.
‘What should we call them?’
‘Harmadonts,’ decided Evershed. ‘I name them harmadonts, out of respect for our patron.’
We hadn’t been watching long when one of the adults stopped and squatted slightly in order to defecate. We felt the impact of those turds hitting the ground through the soles of our feet. Suddenly I knew what had caused the mounds we had passed earlier that day.
‘Dr. Evershed. Do you suppose the worms infect these harmadonts somehow, so that the young hatch out in their guts?’
‘Why, yes. I believe you have an idea there. So the mounds we passed earlier are simply…’ he pointed at the herd, ‘their excrement, ready seeded with wormlings.’
‘I wonder how the adults infect the harmadonts?’ This was Ankush. None of us had an answer and even Evershed was silent, so we marvelled at the herd for a while and then struck out east once more.
The ground grew more rugged as we made a path into the hills. Daylight was fading, along with the oppressive heat, and we were forced to wait more and more frequently for Evershed.
‘Let’s make camp here,’ I said, when we came across an area of level ground cut into the hillside. There was a clear line of sight for at least fifty paces in all directions. It wasn’t an ideal defensive position, but at least we wouldn’t be taken by surprise. ‘Lieutenant Scott, please would you and Private Coleman reconnoitre the immediate area for threats. Do not stray too far. Ankush and I will prepare something to eat.’
‘Our pleasure, Ms. Derringer.’
While the marines looked around, Ankush lit a small fire, recessed into the ground, which he shielded around with our packs as much as he could. Using a small brass pan, he heated some water over the fire. I chopped some dried meat and an onion. Ankush stirred these into the water and then crumbled a packet of hardtack in to give the broth some body. Coleman waved his portion away and sat to one side with some dried meat. Evershed didn’t look impressed with the fare, but nevertheless wiped his little wooden bowl clean. Benjamin made appreciative noises.
‘Are Gulreimians all good cooks?’ he asked.
‘Our people are semi-nomadic,’ explained Ankush. ‘Each tribe ranges over a wide area searching for food and patrolling its territory, often in small groups. When travelling in small groups, everyone must take their turn to prepare meals.’
I’ve noticed that an uneventful day topped-off by a bellyful of warm food is exactly the kind of time when everything goes wrong, so of course, that’s when everything went wrong.
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