Chapter Six

AFTER A SOMETIMES-perilous climb, I emerged from the cave. I was a disgusting mess of stomach bile and strange blood, of sweat and dust and every manner of stink. But, for all that, my bout of nausea seemed to have cleared my mind. I didn’t feel woozy, I’d stopped talking to myself, and I wasn’t losing track of time.

So when I stepped into the light of Kepler’s red sun, I’d steeled myself for battle. Because I knew that was what waited: the Thingling was dead, but its parent remained. She’d already demonstrated how much more formidable she—it?—was than her offspring. But I’d be damned if I’d be taken by surprise twice in the same day.

I had a little more perspective on our situation on the planet too. Our part of the ship hadn’t been the only one to survive. Whether the bones in the cave were the remains of people who had been pried from their cryo-units, or whether they’d been fully reanimated when the Thing grabbed them, I couldn’t say. But they obviously hadn’t been burned to ash on entering the atmosphere. That meant that some other part of the ship had survived in well enough condition to protect the bodies—and maybe lives—inside. With any luck, the handful of surviving passengers in my section of the ship weren’t alone.

Perspective, though, could wait. For now, I had to get back to my ship, alive. Judging by the dimness of the light, I guessed the day was mostly over. I had to figure out where I was, where I’d come from, and how to get back there as quickly as possible. And all while avoiding the Thing, preferably, or killing it, if necessary.

Keeping low, I surveyed my surroundings. The cave entrance was nestled into the side of a rock face and sat below an outcropping of stone that probably shielded it from aerial view. While that particular arrangement might have been well suited to the Thing’s needs, it rather put a damper on the as-quickly-as-possible portion of my plan. To have any idea of where I was or where I needed to be, I needed to first reach a better vantage. And hope the momma’s not out there watching.

I crept to the nearest rock and listened for anything like the flapping of wings. When I heard nothing, I peered over the top—and froze stiff. My heart skipped a beat, or ten. There, not fifteen feet away, was the Thing.

I ducked back down and drew my knife. Had it heard me? Had it seen the shadow I’d cast when I peeked out from behind the rock? I strained my ears for a sound, any sound, that might confirm my fears.

But I heard nothing but the thundering rush of blood as it raced through my temples and the low, ragged breaths I tried to suppress. The phrase “scared shitless” had been invented for situations precisely like this one, and it pretty well encompassed how I felt at the moment. Had I been spotted? Was the Thing was even now creeping toward my location to finish what it had started? Or had I gone undetected and was just wasting precious time behind this rock? Not knowing was a hell of a lot more terrifying than either possibility.

When after a good ten minutes, nothing had happened, I figured I could safely advance again. Slowly, very slowly, I crept forward. Since I’d heard no hint of movement, I guessed I would find the creature where I’d last seen it. If so, I might be able to take it by surprise and kill it in the same way I had killed its offspring.

I inched my head up. But for the occasional howl of the wind, the day remained eerily still—no chirp of birds, no buzz of insects, no chatter of rodents; just silence.

As I left cover, my heartrate accelerated. A standard stress reaction, of course. But in this oxygen-poor atmosphere, it felt anything but standard. The winded sensation I’d already experienced heightened until I gasped with each breath. Try as I did, I couldn’t get it under control, and I wondered how the Thing hadn’t heard me yet.

It had its back to my position, and it seemed not to have moved at all since my last glimpse. Its body slumped forward, away from me, and I thought it might be angling its head to peer down into the valley below. Or is it sleeping? I’d had my share of luck on missions before, but this seemed almost too good to be true.

Still, if fate had my back in this, I figured I shouldn’t squander any more time than necessary. Clutching the handle of my blade, I crawled up the rock one step at a time, pausing after each movement to see if it had stirred. Now and then, the wind swept up the mountainside, ruffling the monster’s coarse fur and carrying its wretched stink toward me. But it didn’t budge.

I slid down the rock slowly, quietly, until I was on the plateau once more. The enormity of this senior member of the species struck me yet again. Even slumped over, it stood well above my head. Still, I had an idea of using the current incline of its back as a sort of ramp and racing up toward its head and vulnerable eyes before it had a chance to react.

Whether I succeeded or not, I couldn’t confront it face-to-face, nor could I take the chance of trying to slip away undetected. If I had a hope of walking away alive, it would be over the Thing’s dead body.

I got into position, drew in a lungful of air, and stepped forward—directly into a puddle of some sort.

Splash.

It hadn’t been loud, but it was enough to be heard. My heart missed a beat. I fully expected to be staring into the Thing’s jaws in half a moment. But, again, it didn’t move. It just sat there, absolutely still.

I glanced down at the puddle and began to understand why. I stood in the same greenish-black ooze that covered my clothes. Blood. Or more specifically, blood from a Thing. And not a little blood either. I hadn’t been able to see it from the other side of the rock, but now I could. The plateau was covered in blood. It ran around the creature’s body, all the way to my feet, forming multiple pools along the way. Pools like the one I stood in.

Death. Of course. Death had put a solid magazine’s worth of holes in the Thing before it had taken me. No wonder it was leaking like a sieve. It must look like Swiss cheese.

The slumped posture, the absolute stillness, the seeming deafness—it all made sense now. The Thing didn’t respond because it couldn’t. It was dead.

I felt fairly sure of the fact, but I still maintained a ready hold on my knife as I crept around it. A sensible precaution but needless in this case. Swiss cheese had been a pretty fitting description. The Thing’s fur was matted in blood, its anterior end hanging limply forward as its mouth gaped. One wing twisted under its squat body, and the other rested motionlessly to the side. The creature had, it seemed, carried me home to feed its young and then crawled off to die.

I couldn’t help but feel some grudging respect for it. The instinct so familiar on Earth, to nurture and even sacrifice for the species’ young, seemed no less present among the monsters that called Kepler-186f home.

Respect and relief were not, however, mutually exclusive, nor equally matched. On the contrary, the relief I felt at that moment, seeing the Thing dead, was one of the most intense emotions I’d ever experienced. I dropped to a crouching position on the rocks and let myself breathe for a long time. I steadfastly refused to think about how close I’d come to being dinner. Still, it took a few minutes before I could get back on my feet.

But get back up I did, and headed up the mountain, leaving the two dead creatures behind me. The Thing’s plateau had provided a glimpse of a rocky valley below, but the mountain’s many rises and outcroppings largely obstructed the view. I could detect nothing useful. I might have been standing directly above my ship without being any the wiser.

Realizing that I needed a better vantage, I headed farther upward. This quickly proved more difficult than I had supposed. In addition to the constant feeling of oxygen deprivation, I now had to contend with new, twin difficulties: hunger and thirst.

Before we’d blasted off, we had been required to abstain from both food and drink for forty-eight hours prior to entering the cryochambers. In reality, that had been many years ago. But time had paused for me. I’d gone to sleep on an empty stomach, and now I’d woken on an empty stomach. It hadn’t been so bad earlier. I’d been too discombobulated and generally uncomfortable to notice. But now?

I couldn’t shake the sensation. The thirst was worse though. I could mostly ignore the nagging gnaw of hunger pains. But I couldn’t shake the constant pull of dehydration. Once or twice, I stumbled upon a little pool of collected rainwater, nestled in a nook in the stone, and drank what I could. But I got little more than a few sips each from these puddles, and they carried an odd sort of tangy metallic taste that sat poorly with my stomach. I had the impression I might not have been able to drink more even if I’d found it.

In time, as I climbed, I found I’d misjudged the hour when I’d emerged from the Thingling’s cave. I had supposed the wan light of day signified the approach of sunset. Not so, as it turned out. More than half the day remained. The dimness I’d mistaken for a late hour was a feature of Kepler-186f, the planet’s star, and its proximity to the planet itself.

Kepler-186 produced less energy than Earth’s sun and was farther from the planet than our sun was from Earth. These two factors in combination meant a rather dim day by Earth standards. As the hours rolled on, and the day hadn’t ended, my thinking started to adjust. It felt something like an overcast or stormy Earth day, and I found myself constantly glancing up at the sky.

I needn’t have, though, for there were almost no clouds overhead and certainly no storm brewing—which was fortunate since it took some time to reach a decent lookout. But what a view it was when I did find it.

From there, I got a better picture of the mountain range upon which I stood and upon which the Genesis II—my portion of it, at least—had come to rest. It looked like a great, jagged wall of rising and falling gray-green stone stretching to the eastern horizon. I was observing from one of the higher peaks. A good mile and half or so down from me, on the side of an adjacent mountain, sat the Genesis. From this distance, it seemed little more than a toy, small and frail and far away.

To the west there was something of even more interest, not only for myself but to the rest of the crew as well. Something I had, in my time here so far, not yet seen. Vegetation. A great mass of tall, dark spires stretched out before me, with huge, billowing tops rising off them. They resembled some kind of tree, though no variety I’d ever seen before. These were more like a childhood drawing than anything Earth had to offer—tall, gangly trunks sporting oversized puffs of foliage, or a stick figure sporting a cartoonishly oversized hat.

They stretched out from the foot of the mountains until the horizon vanished to the curvature of Kepler-186f’s surface. I stood there, trembling at the sight of them, beautiful in all their strange glory. They were the first thing I’d seen so far that remotely resembled home. And what did they signify?

Well, that was more beautiful yet. It meant this world had more to offer than rocks and predators. And maybe, just maybe, we’d have a decent shot at building a colony after all.