Michael Siemsen - Exigency

Not so savage at home, eh? Cooperative civilized behavior like this never made it into one of Ish’s reports. Why hide it? She’d so desperately wished to convince Minnie and the others that the Hynka were these advanced people—not the frenzied pack animals everyone observed, little more than rudimentary tool-wielding wolves.

But then she was spotted and things returned to familiar territory. Five individuals yelling and pointing grew to ten, which grew to thirty, and before she could zip from the clearing, chests began heaving, heads rolled around on necks, shoulders rose and fell, guttural shrieks rang out, and bodies were ripped apart. For the Hynka, there was no time like a crisis to devour your closest neighbor. Minnie peered back just in time to see that limbs and heads weren’t being ripped asunder merely for rage management or food, but for ammo. An arm whizzed by behind her, instantly followed by a head, which actually struck the side of the skimmer.

She accelerated and shot up into the sky another hundred meters, well above body part flinging range. She pulled up the tracking screen in her fone and saw that Ish’s skimmer was only 1.5K east. The app had precise coordinates now and Minnie set them as her destination, bringing up the familiar red guide line. It was interesting to see it floating in the sky, like a game, gently arcing toward an unseen location beyond a rocky red outcropping jutting up from dense foliage.

Less than a minute later, Minnie was well away from the hordes of Hynka, but she could still hear the ruckus she’d instigated. There were no Hynka in sight here on the outskirts of the village, but it was quite clearly an area they frequented. The lack of small foragers dispersing a variety of seeds had created a monochrome landscape dominated by a single species of tall, cream-colored, martini-glass-shaped fungus in every direction.

They’d surely seen which way she’d flown. They’d be here soon enough.

Minnie crossed over the 30 meter-high sandstone outcropping, like a natural wall extending from the taller hills on one side, gradually losing height until finally plunging beneath the fungus jungle’s (Tom had brilliantly coined “fungle”) colorless canopy less than a kilometer away.

Another half-K into dense, seemingly untrodden fungle, the guide line plunged into a small gap in the vegetation. Without an obvious path to land, Minnie switched to biomag. The drab fungi disappeared, revealing the distinctive structure of a parked skimmer, shining green. Clearly the Hynka had yet to come across it.

She surveyed the perimeter, finding no signs of Ish or anything else. Gazing back toward the sandstone wall, Minnie tried to imagine where Ish would’ve gone first. Heading straight for a crowded area would be patently suicidal, but who knew if Ish would see it that way?

With a now-or-never fire beneath her, Minnie landed, hopped over to Ish’s skimmer, powered it on, and enabled pairing. After a quick glance at the small pile of supplies (and Ish’s helmet) on the ground, she leapt back to her pad, completed the skimmer pairing, and launched back out of the hideaway. The handling was slightly different than a single vehicle, but not remotely as unwieldy as she’d expected. The two ionic drives seemed to act as a single, giant propulsion surface, even seamlessly correcting for the lack of load on Ish’s skimmer.

Keeping low over the fungle canopy, Minnie returned to the rock outcropping and slowly floated above a path of seemingly cleared ground between rock face and vegetation. The trail soon widened out into an unquestionably created area.

Hovering above an apparent shrine—a massive, many-pointed star composed of what appeared to be thousands of bones—Minnie slowly rotated the skimmers. The pale bone star had been set up on a level bed of dark gravel. Large, crudely chiseled blocks rose away from the bones and pebbles toward the jutting sandstone—1-high, then a stack of 2, then 3—the initial building blocks of an as-yet unimagined pyramid. The giant steps led to a landing or stage, also built of monolithic blocks, three wide. From there, natural tiering took over, offering access to increasingly steep third and fourth levels, where semi-spherical natural cavities dented the sandstone, like docking ports for 20 EVs.

The whole rock looked to Minnie like pics she’d seen of the Utah desert, and it probably would’ve been even more reminiscent a thousand years ago, before the Hynka decided to make it their own. No doubt the stone on this side had not always been so pale. Like a seabird flock’s favorite offshore rock, the tiers of formerly red sandstone had been bleached white by years of defilement—Hynka blood sheeting down the steps like a gory fountain, or some bizarre “water” feature one might find outside the HQ of the International Milk Farmers Association.

As she imagined the grisly ceremonies that must occur here, something caught Minnie’s eye above the bleached layers. On the rocky outcropping, between the highest tier and the peak, Minnie found Ish.

EV4’s stabilizer legs deployed as the sphere descended slowly toward a vast, featureless plain. Thomas Meier held his breath as he watched the altimeter count down, awaiting the jarring thud of surface contact. Through the porthole above, a mostly clear violet sky implied a beautiful Threck Country day awaited them, though sensors had warned of gusty wind in the projected landing zone.

On the panel before him, a virtual Evacuation Vehicle graphic met the ground’s jagged line a few seconds before he felt anything. For an instant, it seemed they’d stopped moving, but then the EV grazed the surface, tilting and wobbling for a few seconds as it bounced and drifted several more meters, then skidded to a stop. Silence followed, emphasizing the eerie, almost sickening sensation of zero motion.

Concerned about the wind and the EV toppling if he retracted the chute, Tom instead hit the chute release. A muffled ch-kck overhead signaled its successful detachment, and he turned his head left to see Angela’s stunned face. Eyes alert and guarded, her mouth hung open in a frozen smile. They sat there, still, for nearly a minute.

Angela’s hushed voice in Tom’s helmet broke the silence.

“Strewth… We’re actually alive.”

“For the moment,” he replied with grim earnest. A line from Outpost Iota. “Let’s see if there’s anything outside that wants to eat us.”

She glared at him and lifted her visor. He did the same and began disconnecting his helmet.

“You hole!” She backhanded his chest. “We lived! You can’t just celebrate that? Or at least let me celebrate it for more than a second?”

Tom sighed and put his hand on her knee. “Honey… shut up . That was a quote. And an awesome one at that. Victor Kant. Such a bad ass. But yeah, I wasn’t serious. What I’d like to verify is that there’s nothing that wants to eat me .” He winked and unfastened his restraints.

She pulled off her helmet. “I’m so kicking your ass when we’re settled.”

“I love you?” he said in an apologetic singsong.

They leaned close and embraced, both squeezing a bit more firmly than the other had expected. Tom planted his nose into her hair and inhaled.

She pushed him back. “No way. Don’t smell me right now. Five days of funk layered up on this nasty body.”

“I enjoy your nasty body.” A spot-on impression of Welsh actor Vale Bevan, if Tom said so himself.

He set the pod to begin equalizing with the outside air as he and Angela opened their surface survival kit’s to resume evac procedures. Tom clipped the holster onto his suit and pulled his multiweapon from its case. He held it out by the grip, pointing the business end up.