Equatorial Forest, Twilight Valley
Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge
4453.1.25 Interstellar
Focused on their search, the gatherers were quiet aside from the occasional cursing or rustling from a clumsy misstep. Janus was no ranger, but he stepped carefully, too. He hadn’t grown up on Krandermore, so he didn’t have their resistance to the local poisons, venoms, viruses, and bacteria. There were a lot of things out here that could kill him beyond pissed-off locals. It didn’t bother him. He just adapted his behavior. He’d grown up on a planet that tried to kill him every day, and no great discoveries were made without risks.
Janus checked the hazard indicator he had built into his suit, a combination of air sampling and visual scanning that estimated his risk of exposure. Amber-yellow-green. Amber meant he was at moderate risk of a reaction to an animal bite or plant-based contaminant, while the yellow referred to the likelihood he would contract some sort of disease. The final green, the only low-risk indicator, referred to the environment itself. While the temperature was 31° Celsius, and humidity was close to 100 percent, Janus was in good shape, well rested, and hydrated. At least exposure won’t get me, he thought.
He took off his helmet, unsealing it with a sharp hiss.
The smells of the jungle washed over him, rich and loamy, sometimes sweet and rotten as well. The calls of birds and primates sounded from the trees, somehow more full-throated when heard directly instead of through the helmet’s aural pickups.
And there was something else, a bitter smell, maybe? Janus turned toward the scent, pushing through the foliage to follow it.
He immediately found the reason the gatherers had avoided the area. It was thick with Chitimacha Thorn plants. The Chitimacha looked like a regular Monstera vine with two exceptions: bright red berries and hundreds of fine needles all along its stem.
Janus grinned.
Sun-side Krandermorans were annoyingly hardy. They didn’t live long, seventy years at most, but in exchange, their metabolisms shrugged off illnesses and toxic substances, laughing off small ailments and injuries—even Mick had a hard time keeping up with them on a bender—but the Chitimacha Thorn was the exception. The hair-thin needles stung and burned Krandermorans like fire, creating itchy blisters that were resistant to both ointments and oral medication. Worse, the irritation could spread through scratching. The best thing someone could do was take a healthy dose of narcotics and try to sleep through the pain.
The locals avoided it instinctively, to the point where even seeing the plant was considered bad luck.
To Janus, who always wore gloves and had a much longer list of plants and animals he was susceptible to, Chitimacha patches were a treasure trove of biomes no one else had examined. In fact, he had a theory that the stinging vine had evolved in response to human presence. On Irkalla, on any other planet settled for so short a time, that would have been impossible, but in the jungle environment with its abnormally high mutation rate, it could have happened in a matter of centuries. Humans had been on Krandermore for at least two millennia. Weird interactions happened all the time.
Something crunched underfoot. Janus looked down and saw he was standing in a patch of charred foliage.
That wasn’t just weird. It was impossible. This was a rainforest, for void’s sake. Everything was wet.
“Janus, are you okay?” Dr. Mbari asked him over the comm.
“Just fine,” he answered, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice. “I’m chasing something down.”
“Okay,” the doctor said. “Don’t go too far. You know the foliage dampens signals.”
“I’ll let you know if I’m moving out of range,” Janus said.
He appreciated that Dr. Mbari was in charge of this site, but his days of deferring to people in positions of authority had ended a year ago when he’d won the Trials and gotten exiled from his homeworld for his trouble.
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Moving farther away from the research camp, Janus discovered more char marks. The patches were small, always close to the ground, and they often contained the remains of small prey—beetles, lizards, and rodents cooked to a crisp and half-eaten. Furthermore, the burn marks tended to happen in the vicinity of patches of Chitimacha, and that really got Janus excited.
It was a theory on top of a theory, but it was possible that the animal he was following viewed humans as predators, or at the very least a threat, and that it had formed either a mutual or commensal relationship with the vine, perhaps by eating pests that damaged the plant in return for keeping Krandermorans away.
He found another burned patch. Heat sensors in his gloves told him the ashes were still several hundred degrees hotter than the ground around them. It has to be around here somewhere. The patch was about ten or fifteen centimeters across—he took an image of it with his implants. Janus tried to imagine the kind of animal that could produce that kind of conflagration. Was it an insect? Some sort of fire-producing bug, like a bombardier beetle but much bigger? Dr. Mbari’s concerns suddenly seemed prudent. Maybe he should go back to fetch a few “research assistants,” even though he’d have the Survivor’s own time convincing them to walk through Chitimacha patches.
As was often the case, the jungle made the decision for him. Janus stepped around the next tree trunk and found himself face to face with the beast.
The animal he’d been tracking was a small quadruped a little bigger than his helmet. Its body was covered in short orange and purple scales that grew larger and stuck out flower petals to form a stunning mane around its neck and chest, and it had long, pointed ears that flicked his way as he stepped around the tree. It fixed him with bright blue eyes that seemed intelligent and unafraid as it slowly lifted its head from the giant caterpillar it had been munching on.
“Hey, little guy,” Janus said, reaching for the tranquilizer gun at his hip. “I’m just going to—”
The creature let out a tremendous belch, and the jungle lit up for a moment like someone had shone a lamp in Janus’s eyes. That acrid, burnt smell filled the air. When Janus had blinked away the afterimage, the creature was gone.
“What was that?” Dr. Mbari said over the common channel. “Has anyone seen Janus?”
Janus drew his tranquilizer gun and plunged into the green after his quarry.
Not for the first time, Janus cursed himself for not taking Mick up on tracking lessons. The happy-go-lucky Hunter, whom Janus had met during the Trials on their homeworld, had taken to the Krandermoran lifestyle with gusto, learning to live off the land and sometimes disappearing for weeks at a time. Janus also spent a good bit of his time in the field, but he liked tools and tents more than manly bravado, and he took his findings back to the lab in Cofan for proper cataloging and research.
Fortunately, this creature wasn’t hard to follow once he knew the signs. For one, it stuck to areas with Chitimacha, allowing Janus to quickly choose a path based on where he saw red berries. For two, the fire breathing appeared to be a stress response, and when he lost sight of it and couldn’t spot its favorite vines, the occasional flash of fire or smoking tree led him onward.
His comm screeched with static. He ignored it and pressed on.
At the top of the next rise, he thought he caught sight of it again and snapped off a shot. The tranq dart hit the small creature in the haunch, making it yelp and stumble.
Janus whooped and took a step forward to follow, slipped in the mud, and pitched forward, tumbling and sliding down the hill. He shielded himself as best he could, banging against rocks and logs and kicking his feet. He managed to stop, scrambling to stand, and saw the strange animal watching him from a few meters away.
It had the tranq dart in its mouth. With a huff, fire and smoke curled around the small projectile, and it spat the charred syringe on the ground.
“Oh crap,” Janus said, realizing he’d dropped his gun.
The creature charged, apparently more pissed than scared, even though its head was barely as high as his calf. Janus pinged his weapon with his wrist-comm, localizing it in his retinal implant as he tossed first a rock and then a stick at the angry critter. The dog-thing dodged the rock and caught the stick in its jaws, setting it on fire before spitting it out.
To Janus’s surprise, the stick burned bright, even sitting in a puddle of water.
There! Janus exulted, spotting the tranq gun at the same time the dog-thing latched onto his shin.
Searing pain ran through his leg.
Janus kicked the animal off him, diving for his weapon even as the dog-thing scrambled in the mud to come at him again. His trouser leg was designed to protect him from vehicle fires. It was smoking, and the fabric had burned away, revealing skin, but he was uninjured.
The creature leaped, its blue eyes hard and mouth open.
Janus shot it in its tiny chest and rolled out of the way.
“Janus?” Mbari said. “Janus!”
Janus stumbled to his feet and turned, tranq gun pointed, searching for his target.
The dog-thing whined, limping toward him as smoke and a flicker of fire curled from its mouth, and then it fell over on its side, eyes closed but ribs rising and falling.
“Janus, are you okay?” Dr. Mbari said, coming through the brush with two other gatherers. They looked wary of the Chitimacha and concerned about the little patches of flames that burned and hissed as the rain hit them.
Janus put his hands on his knees and laughed. “I’m all right, doc. This little guy gave me a run for my credits, but I do believe this is something even you haven’t seen before.”
The doctor knelt by the downed animal, lifting its gum to check its teeth and touching its side. “You may be right. Come, let’s get this back to camp; the others are searching for you as well, and we should get this contained before it wakes up.”