Michael Siemsen - Exigency

“Yes.”

The sky streaked forward and she was on her back, biostats alerts flashing and buzzing. Her boot had been crushed into her foot and ankle, and each second—as fast as it could update—new damage sites appended the list.

ALERTS: BIOSTAT – Tibial shaft fracture

ALERTS: BIOSTAT – Multiple fractures

ALERTS: BIOSTAT – Severe musculoskeletal trauma

ALERTS: BIOSTAT – Circulatory

ALERTS: BIOSTAT – Circulatory Critical

ALERTS: BIOSTAT – Pulmonary contusion

ALERTS: BIOSTAT – Critical

ALERTS: BIOSTAT – Cardiopulmonary Arrest

Ish’s body rolled, flipped, twisted, and crushed—her face, for an instant, pressed into the small of her own back. Greaters’ faces and bodies flashed by in a never-ending blur until one hand pulled her from the frenzied swarm, lifted her high overhead, twirling the mangled body in the air as it was sprinted from the scene.

Wiping her sweaty face on a dusty sleeve, Minerva burst into the cave. “We have to leave. Now.”

Startled, John sat up too fast. Ribs, neck, shoulder. He gasped and cringed. “What’s happened?”

Minerva unclipped the string of bunnies dangling from her waist and tossed them in a supply bin. “Ran into some roving hunters…” She scuttled about, grabbing strewn gear and throwing it into bins. “Spread out over a few kilometers. Thought there were only three. Kept an eye out, making sure I wouldn’t be corralled in. But there was a fourth. The instant it came into optic range, they started closing— all four . Like they knew where I was. Like they were in communication—coordinated!” She began stuffing her sleeping bag into its sack.

John began easing out of his bag, eyes trained on the cave opening. “Are they… are they coming? Were you followed?”

“Coming, yes. Followed, no. I killed three of them. Tried to get the last one, but it fled. Couldn’t catch up enough for a shot. Not even close. I fully expect he’s fetching some friends at this very second. I also suspect they can smell us from a long way out.” Minerva hefted a bin and turned to go load it on the skimmer. “Ugh, always paid attention to wind before!”

John began stuffing his bag, catching a potent whiff as she breezed by, like ammonia and fresh cat urine. “I can smell you from here, actually.” She paused at the entrance, peering back—only a silhouette, but he could imagine her expression. “No really, it’s sharp… biting. Have you had any attacks? Presymptoms? Your profile indicated that hormonal—”

“Not now.” She resumed to the skimmer, murmuring. “‘Presymptoms hormonal bleh bleh’… damned things practically on our doorstep…”

John sighed. Never now. She refused to discuss it. Better to pretend it didn’t exist! And it’d remain her biggest liability, worse even than his burdensome, ruined body. He’d wanted to make her leave without him, had rehearsed the words and bolstered his resolve, no matter what she argued ( if she argued—he was fairly certain she would) or bargained. She’d believed his story about a return vehicle, but now he wasn’t so sure it’d make a difference, even if she didn’t have him slowing her down and exhausting resources.

She dashed back in, grabbed the comms unit, and filled her other hand with gear. John threw his packed bag on a pile.

Before he could utter another syllable, Minerva cut him off. “I’m serious. Not now. Just sit tight for a few minutes and keep watch.”

John bit his tongue but his mind raced on. She’d already slammed shut the medkit full of his pills. He could see exactly how this played out if he told her to leave him behind. She’d stay and argue, even as an army of Hynka stampeded up the hillside. It’d turn into a gory last stand, both of them torn to bits.

And then there was Ish and her flops of Hynka data, language, vids, and maps, as yet untransferred to the EV or Minerva’s fone. She needed every possible resource to boost her chances of surviving a trek across this continent.

Only garbage and a few empty cartons remained when Minerva stooped down on his better side. She looked in his eyes. “You ready?”

John hung his left arm over her neck and pulled his feet in close. She gathered and clutched the material in the small of his back. A count of three, nodded in sync. White and red painted the insides of his eyelids as they rose. He wanted to pause there a moment, let the burning subside, but it wouldn’t make the march to the skimmer any easier, and Minerva wasn’t wasting a second. His feet skipped and shuffled as they went, contributing but a few pitiful steps along the way, Minerva’s little body bearing the bulk of his weight.

On the pad, she crouched slowly and let him grip a handhold as they eased him down to a seated position. Her clammy face was centimeters from his. He could feel her heat radiating against his cheek. He wanted to thank her, to apologize for existing, to tell her something she’d like.

“Minerva—”

“They’re coming,” she mouthed, her gaze fixed on the panel over his shoulder—optics penetrating metal, plastic, wires, and trees, revealing an apparently disturbing scene John could only imagine. She took his hand from her back and placed it on a bar. “Hold tight.”

She jumped away—a brief panic surging over his scalp as he thought she’d run off to confront the horde, but she’d simply hopped to a second skimmer. They had two skimmers. Had he known this?

John curled one arm around a firmly strapped bin and clutched the grip bar with the other. The pad quaked beneath him, the skimmer’s pairing tones sounded, and the rumble intensified.

A few meters away, Minerva’s mouth whispered pleading, encouraging words to her skimmer.

John closed his eyes and waited for the ready tone, but never heard it. A chorus of cracking branches, thundering feet, and a single, commanding Hynka voice, roaring “Hwasso-AAAH!” eclipsed every other sound, but the abrupt crush of what felt like 10 g left no question as to whether the skimmer had been ready.

The pressure tapered down quickly, John’s gut rising in his body cavity with nauseating force. He dared a peek below. Ish’s EV already suffered in their stead. They’d left the hatch open, so white fragments, large and small, filled the air above the amassing horde like harried seagulls over chummed water. Giant bodies fought to squeeze into the cave as innumerable others joined the dark crunch. A few individuals stood down the hill, away from the swelling crowd, tracking the skimmers across the sky with unnerving composure, as if their prey, as planned, had set out on a direct course to some cunning trap.

Five-and-a-half hours of northwesterly flight presented stunning new landscapes. The continent’s largest freshwater lake stretched off to the horizon before they followed its source, a glacier and river-cut chasm where sporadic herds of dalis fed and drank in blissful ignorance of the predatory nightmare to the south—an idyllic before pic of inevitable extinction. Hynka migration models had this species wiped out within a few short generations.

A slight course deviation took the pair over one of Epsy’s renowned Wonders: The Great Bubble Bath. Eons of geothermal activity in the area had cooked fossilized organic material into a vast soup cauldron, feeding a lively population of hyperthermophiles. Foamy bubbles of saplike matter (the original matter combined with the organisms’ waste) trapped gases and frothed, rising from porous bedrock, gurgling out over previous layers, and solidified in the frosty air. The perpetual phenomena continued coating an area the size of a small city, re-melting vent walls and sinking in pockets, while adjacent lather hills remained 100m deep and growing. Gases released in the area were poisonous, and the smell was awful.