Expedition
We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey no one can take for us or spare us. —Marcel Proust
Steinholt Plains, Near Mulhicky Pass
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.1.29 Interstellar
The sun rose over the snow-covered ground, and Janus drank in another sunrise on Lumiara. There was a quality to the silence here—neither the emptiness of the void nor the constant dripping, rustling, crawling, and calling of the rainforest. The silence here had a brittle sharpness to it. It caught the breath in his throat, but the sound carried so far across the open ground that anything, from the scurrying of an arctic hare to a small avalanche on a distant peak, could break the moment.
Fury exploded from the ground, showering Janus in fine, icy dust and snapping at some of the clumps she’d just sent flying into the air. She shook her feathery white and glacier-blue scales clean of the snow she’d buried herself in, and then she plopped down on her rump and panted, fixing Janus with a self-satisfied grin, tongue lolling.
“No breakfast for you,” Janus said, wiping ice crystals from his jacket and mock glaring at her from under his fur-lined hood.
Fury huffed, bouncing once on her front paws, like she did when she broke through a crust of ice or the burrow of a small animal.
“I’m serious. You’ve been bad.”
The jungle dragon snorted, and thick, oily smoke curled from her nostrils. She lifted her snout and puffed it away.
“Oh, very clever,” Janus said, digging into his pack. He pulled out a wrapped and half-frozen fish the size of his forearm. He undid the yarn keeping the grease paper package together, then tossed the prize to his pet and companion, who caught it neatly—almost delicately—with her teeth. She settled down in the snow, cradling the fish in her paws as she worked up just enough heat from her maw to first thaw, then sear her breakfast.
Janus chuckled and pulled a ration pack from a separate and sealed part of his pack.
The little jungle dragon he’d first captured and then adopted was no more. In her place was Fury, a fully-grown jungle dragon whose shoulders rose to his mid-thigh and whose head, when raised, was as high as his belt. She’d gotten bulky, too, with a broad chest and plenty of muscle and fat to keep her warm and sharp claws to grip the ice and frozen rocks.
But the most stunning transformation was her coloring, which had changed from the blacks, oranges, reds, and purples she’d worn on Krandermore to match the color of the landscape, shades of white and gray for her body and glacier blue along her spine and at the tip of her tail. Like the humans who’d brought her, Fury had become a creature of her new habitat and an apex predator at that.
From where he sat, chewing on a bar made of seal meat and blubber, Janus could see the mountain pass they were heading for. They should reach it by noon.
***
By the time they reached the pass, the sun was overhead, and Janus had to wear goggles to shield his eyes from the glare of the snow. He moved quickly, setting up the specialized equipment he’d carried in the pack, then striking out off-trail up the southern slopes of the mountain.
The going was tough. This part of the mountains rose sharply from the snow-covered plains, forming a barrier between two of the Cult’s surface settlements. It was the reason the pass had to stay open. Janus struggled and sometimes stumbled through deep snow drifts and, at some points, had to break out his ice axe and climb. It felt good to measure himself against the mountain, and soon, he was several hundred meters higher and staring out across the plains he’d crossed to get here.
Lumiara was different from Irkalla and Krandermore in some ways, the same in others. There was life here, but it was often hidden. The land and the weather could kill, but not if you were careful and prepared. Like the other planets of Survivor’s Refuge, Lumiara forced a certain kind of competence on the people who wanted to walk its surface.
Most stayed within the safety and warmth of the Cult settlements. Janus was one of a few Irkallans and Cult members who moved between them, either to exchange rare resources or, in Janus’s case, to revive the tradition of the wandering aspirant.
Now, if I can only get this job done before the sun sets, he thought, swallowing a salty mouthful of seal jerky and washing it down with icy water from his canteen.
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If Janus didn’t find his quarry before it got dark, this little quest would get much more interesting.
And deadly.
He screwed the cap back onto his canteen and twisted to put it back in his belt pouch when a new silence fell over the mountain—not the emptiness of dawn, but the hush of Mother Winter leaning forward to watch a kill. Janus strained and heard the faint crush of something large moving carefully through the snow.
It sounded like his search was over. His prey had found him.
***
The snowy slope was a blur of white and gray as Janus fled, his breath coming in ragged gasps. Behind him, the beast he’d been tracking gained ground, closing the distance between them much faster than Janus had hoped or anticipated.
It was a good thing he wasn’t the simple, lost-tech-level planet dweller he’d been before. A quick mental flick brought up his wearable tech interface, and he activated the AG units in his boots.
His body was suddenly seventeen percent lighter, enough to help him move more easily and run across the surface of the snow instead of sinking into it.
A frustrated growl rumbled behind him, and Janus looked back to see the white-haired primate drop on all fours to run faster.
His quarry—if he could call it that under the present circumstances—was a yeti. When he’d first heard it, he’d thought it was a joke, but no, it was an actual abominable snowman. They had not been brought here from Old Earth. In fact, there was no evidence there had ever been such a thing on the home planet of humankind. Some Cult scientist had just woken up one day, looked at the snow-covered world of Lumiara, and decided what it needed was an elusive cold-adapted primate that could survive in the high-mountain biomes.
The creature grunted with effort, and Janus barely managed to zig out of the way as a head-sized boulder blurred past him like a cannonball. The damned thing threw a rock at me! Janus jumped, flying off a small shelf and tumbling down two three-meter drops before scrabbling to a stop before the cliff’s edge.
The yeti peered over the edge at him, and Janus could see the intelligence in its deep-set eyes. The creature was half a meter taller than him and twice as heavy. It was also uncannily smart. Janus drew his chem pistol to try to shoot it with a tranq-bead, but the yeti disappeared as soon as his gun cleared the holster. Janus cursed the Cult scientist who’d bred the things under his breath and got to his feet, wiping snow from his pants and kicking it free from his boots.
With a roar, the yeti came flying off the ledge, leaping at him.
“Oh, void damn it!” Janus said, bolting to the left as the yeti slammed into the snow.
The twice-damned ice ape was right behind him now. Janus ran frantically, firing the chem pistol behind him blindly to make it dodge.
He knew he wouldn’t hit it. The locals had sent hunters after this thing before, and they’d died with guns in their hands and no ammo left.
The monster stayed close on his heels, snarling and huffing as it closed the distance. A warning in Janus’s retinal display told him his AG boots were half-drained. Just a little bit farther, he told himself, seeing the cliff’s edge approaching. It was twenty meters to the bottom of the pass. The boots wouldn’t save him from a fall that high; that was why he’d buried a rope with an auto-descender in the snow.
Janus dropped into a slide, and his eyes widened as he saw a furry paw pass through the air above him. The yeti’s razor-sharp claws had missed him by centimeters.
His hand found the auto-descender, and he twisted, turning back to face the yeti as he went sailing off the cliff. He took the opportunity to flip it the bird with his free middle finger.
The snowman roared at him.
The autodescender slowed the running of the rope, and Janus clasped it with both hands as it swung him back toward the cliff face. “Oof!” he said as he slammed into the rock, then pushed himself off to keep going.
Ten meters. Five meters. His descent stopped three meters from the ground. Janus looked up to see the rope vibrate as the yeti hauled him upward, and he let go, falling five meters to land on his back in the snow.
Janus groaned. Definitely felt something pop, there. Falling five meters was plenty enough to kill someone. He was fortunate his jacket was padded, and he’d landed in fresh snow.
Gritting his teeth against the pain, Janus got to his feet. He looked back up the cliff and saw the yeti was already climbing down.
He sighed. It made sense. It wasn’t as if there was a lot of plant life up here, and a two-hundred-kilo hominid wasn’t exactly an energy-efficient organism. The Cult scientist had made the yeti to be a focused and relentless hunter, thinking it would subsist on a diet of bunnies and mountain goats.
Janus continued to shuffle away while holding his side. He hoped the scientist had gotten eaten while studying his pets.
The yeti looked down at him and grunted. Then it jumped, dropping ten meters and landing on all fours. It roared at him.
Janus pushed on. His legs and back ached from the abuse he’d just put them through. His gait was awkward. He didn’t have far to go, though. He could hear the yeti churning through the snow as he stumbled past the buried electrical wires. He didn’t have to outrun the monster at this point. He just had to get it to set its big, hairy paws into his trap.
He turned around, tired and triumphant.
The yeti skidded to a halt at the edge of the wires.
“No, come on!” Janus said.
Almost human in its intelligence, the monster inspected the disturbed snow, cocking its head and sniffing the ground before looking back up at Janus.
“Come on, you ugly idiot! Are you really going to pass up a tasty meal like me?”
The yeti narrowed its eyes at him and took a step back.
Janus felt his heart sink as the monster turned away, but before it took another step, Fury stepped out from her hiding place among the rocks. She took a deep breath, her fan-like gills unfurling from her neck to bring in extra oxygen, then she opened her jaw and roared, superheated air blowing past her vocal cords and making a sound not unlike the roar of a jet engine.
The yeti howled in fear, raised its arms to protect itself, and stepped backward toward the trap. As soon as it set foot in the trigger zone, the trap fired, wrapping the eight-foot monster in an electrified net.
Muscles spasming, the abominable snowman toppled like a tree.
Janus let out a long-held breath as Fury sauntered over to him, and Janus couldn’t help but smile.
“Good girl, Fury,” he said, his voice filled with admiration and relief as he looked up at the prone form of the monster. Just another day on Lumiara.
And just another close call as an aspirant.