Reunion: Chapter 20

  “Alright Felix, how are we looking?” Kathryn asked, strapped into one of the shuttles.

  “It’s a beautiful spring morning in the abandoned ruins of the great city of Vancouver,” Felix reported, feigning an overly stylized media presenter voice from New Horizon’s bridge, “highs of twenty-eight degrees and not a cloud in the sky.  It’s a beautiful day to go sifting through dangerous ruins for a replacement body for your nearest and dearest disembodied simulant head.”

  “Thank you, Felix,” she replied with feigned dutifulness, indicating that she was adequately amused but not looking to indulge him any further.  “Patricia, are your explorers standing by for us to pick them up?”  Patricia had been tasked with carrying the Molly backpack and instead of one of her pristine flower print dresses, she was now wearing the Haven military issue coveralls Kathryn had lent her.  She could tell Patricia was unhappy with her attire if not outright uncomfortable in it, but she somehow managed to make even the fatigues appear somehow elegant.   Her carefully shaped big loose curls of hair and perfectly applied makeup with bright red lipstick suggested she’d taken what care she could to make up for the drabness of her attire, and the contrast was only slightly comical.

  “Yes Kathryn, they are waiting at the location we departed from the other day.”

  “Alright then, take us down Jaren.  Other shuttle, as discussed you will wait until we’ve picked up the rest of our party and then depart to meet us at our designated landing coordinates.  This shuttle is designated Alpha, yours is Beta.”

  “Understood, Alpha.” Irvina answered over the comms from the other shuttle.  “See you down there.”

   

  Teresa, Deirdre, and Elim were left behind with Felix on the New Horizon while Kathryn, Patricia, Molly’s head, and Jaren were the only ones currently in Alpha Shuttle in order to accommodate the six explorers they were going to pick up.  It would be a tight fit, but still comfortably within the shuttle’s maximum capacity.  There weren’t seats for all of them, but they would only be making a short overland flight with all of them.  This left Irvina, Keri, Xion, Nadelle, Francis, and Ana all standing by on the second shuttle.

  Alpha Shuttle raced away from the New Horizon and Kathryn, Patricia, and Molly took the opportunity to marvel yet again at the spectacular view of the planet below via the projection of the exterior on the interior surfaces of the shuttle as Jaren focused on safely bringing the shuttle down to Molly and Patricia’s village site.

  They approached the ground remarkably quickly, to the point that Kathryn could tell Patricia was becoming somewhat nervous before Jaren initiated a sharp decelerated, then slowed down more gently towards a soft landing on the extended struts below the shuttle immediately outside the village.  The wall fell away to present a ramp, and Patricia welcomed the local explorers onto the shuttle.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she told them, “they are friends.”

  The explorers were initially seemed quite distressed at the site of Molly’s head sitting strapped into a seat above the sack which her power source had been mounted in.

  “Not to worry boys,” Molly reassured them as casually as she could through her scroll speakers.  “All part of the plan.” 

  The men looked at each other and shrugged before being led to their seats on the floor by Patricia, who showed them the handholds they could use to brace themselves if necessary.

  “This is a great honour,” Patricia assured them.  “Not only will you be blessed as I have to see the lands from the sky, but our task is to find a new body for our dear Leader and help her to be restored.   Isn’t that wonderful?”  She sounded genuinely honoured to be part of the effort.

  The men didn’t seem much phased by the promise of a great view.  Perhaps they didn’t fully understand what she’d meant, but they brightened considerably and some of their tenseness seemed to dissipate upon hearing what their primary objective was.  They loved their dear leader, and they knew how much Molly lamented what had happened to her body.  The prospect of helping her be restored seemed a great honour, and what an unexpected additional blessing after only so recently being freed from her imprisonment in the damn!

  Kathryn couldn’t tell to what degree Jaren took relish in terrifying their new passengers, but he seemed to take off and accelerate into the sky somewhat faster than he needed to.  The men seemed on the verge of terror and when she saw the subtle smirk on Jaren’s face she understood.  She hadn’t herself until now, but Jaren certainly recognized two of the men they’d brought onboard as ones who had been guarding Kathryn during his botched rescue attempt.  Worse still, one of them was clearly the one who had cut into her throat.  

  She’d already completely forgotten but Jaren clearly hadn’t, and although she doubted that he’d had it in him to do much more, he seemed to be taking the opportunity to get back at them as innocently as possible by making their ascent a little harder on them than it needed to be.

  He climbed to a relatively high elevation and signaled for the other shuttle to begin their descent to the surface.  Their shuttle tilted to the side for a time as Jaren traversed the surface of the planet before beginning to descend again.  The area they’d designated for landing and setting up camp this time was a relatively flat area by the ocean with a mixed sandy and rocky beach leading up a gradual slope to a relatively open, flat grassy area.  Danger of surface instability was minimized here, and the open space would prevent anyone or anything from easily sneaking up on them.

  “How is the fuel holding up Jaren?” Kathryn asked as she undid her shoulder straps.   The explorers began to do the same upon seeing her do so.

  “Bout half, other shuttle’s probably got a bit more, so about enough for another four or five return trips.”

  “So if we needed to spend a few days or more here we’d want to set up camp here as opposed to going back and forth up to the ship every night?”

  “Yes, although… it’s a lot less fuel to go to the northern encampment than to orbit, if we’re welcome it might be best to spend the nights there if it comes to that.”

  “You would certainly be welcome,” Molly confirmed through the scroll.

  Kathryn led the others down the ramp to wait for the other shuttle, and they were immediately able to see its shiny exterior high in the sky, glittering reflectively in the morning sun.  The all watched as it descended and finally came down to a landing near them, including Molly’s head, now perched on Patricia’s back.

  Irvina led the others out of Beta shuttle and nodded to her teammates.  “Jaren, Captain.”

  “Irvina,” Kathryn acknowledged.  “We were discussing that for the sake of fuel, if we need to spend several days or more here, we’d be better off staying at Molly’s village as opposed to returning to orbit.  If it looks like we’ll be spending weeks though, we’ll have to set up a formal camp.”

  “Forgive me Captain, but if this is really going to take weeks then we are probably going to have to return to Kobol for resupply.”

  “Good point,” Kathryn granted.  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”  

  Irvina nodded.

  “Ok, Molly’s explorers please gather around.”  Kathryn fully deployed one of the large scrolls and laid it on the ground so they could all stand around and see, though she squatted down to manipulate it with touch control.  She looked up at the men though and detected a sense of unease.  “How are you all by the way, did you enjoy the flight?  Must have been pretty exciting if it was your first time in the air?”

  The men mumbled that they were well and that yes it had indeed been something to travel in a flying machine.  They hardly even had any language to talk about what they had just experienced.   She got the sense that they now just wished to get on with the mission and she was happy to oblige.  

  “This is a true aerial image of this peninsula.  Molly tells me you’ve all been here exploring for equipment and supplies before, that you’ve all been here at least once?”  Some grunts and definitive nodding answered in the affirmative for her.  “Right.   Well, this is a road map overlay of the peninsula from the archives.  As you can see, the gulleys generally map onto the ravines between the hills, but not perfectly.  This general area,” she pointed, “is where Mol-, I mean your leader, says we might be able to find a place with things we might be able to help restore her with.   Can you lead us there?”

  The men nodded while one stroked his chin pensively.  “Hills are… unstable, but inside are the best place to find valuables, but very dangerous to enter.”

  “Yes, we figured.  We have engineers who can assess structural integrity, and we have some equipment which should help when we need to enter one.”

  The men looked back at her blankly.

  “How do you suggest we proceed,” she asked them leadingly.

  “Safest way is along the water, cave ins less likely, but more vulnerable to murder cat attack.”

  “Yes,” Kathryn acknowledged as she stood and pushed the scroll closed.  “We know that much at least.  What is the best way to avoid these, um… murder cats?”

  “Luck?” one of the men offered and Kathryn laughed.  She stifled it when it became clear he hadn’t meant it as a joke.

  “Right,” she said in an adopted serious tone.

  “If we spot one,” he held up his blow dart, “we will try to stop it.”

  “Thank you,” she said.  “We have weapons too.  If you alert us, we can attack along with you.”

  The men nodded their understanding.

  “So, cave ins, murder cats, the occasional bear… anything else we need to worry about?”

  “Explorers from other tribes,” said the man who she was quickly gathering was their leader.

  “You encounter them often?”

  “Often, yes… but not always.”

  Kathryn nodded and looked off towards the tree line.  “Do you ever get along?”

  “Sometimes we make brothers,” he answered.  “Usually we make war.”

  “Which do you prefer?” she asked.  They looked at her as though they didn’t understand the question.  ‘Fair enough,’ she figured. 

  “Alright everyone, listen up.  Here’s the plan.  We walk in twos, two explorers in the front, two in the middle, two in back.  The rest of you pair off and find yourself a place in line.  Left watch your left, right your right.  One of you look out for threats above and around, the other focus more on the terrain ahead and beneath you.  Everyone clear?”

   

  They all formed into a line two by two and crossed the field together towards the wasteland of once mighty skyscrapers and streets.  Kathryn couldn’t shake the feeling of tiptoeing through a graveyard as they entered a covered area.  Once in the city, a variety of leafy and evergreen trees obscured the sky quite thoroughly, and between the trees and the moss and grasses on the ground, everything she could see had a distinct emerald green hue to it.  

  As they walked along a creek the terrain was unforgiving.  It was not a path they were traversing as much as it was wild land, a deep ravine on one side of them and a steep slope going up the other.  She knew that the hills were the remains of collapsed buildings, but only now did she realize that the creek on her other side was the remains of an underground tunnel under the roadway that used to exist there, now long caved in.

  She tried to picture what this place must have looked like once.  She imagined walking along a concrete sidewalk with a towering structure shooting up into the sky beside her, covered in glass glittering in the morning sun.  She imagined it must have been something like what she’d seen in the capital city on Kobol.   She tried to imagine seeing cars of all sorts zooming by her on one side, subway trains rumbling underfoot…   Her dreams of restoring Earth were not so grandiose or imperial as to want to exactly replicate what had once been here, but she found herself longing to be able to walk down this street for real, to know this city and its people as they had been, to know this world and its culture at its height.

  It reminded her of home, though home was several hundred years of technological development behind where Earth was at the time of the plague.  It occurred to her that Earth at some point in its past must have looked quite a bit like Haven did now, at least in the twin city.  She imagined hundreds of years before the plague, her ancestors just coming to grips with the relationship between electricity and magnetism, and developing the early rocketry which would take them up to-

  She’d stopped dead in her tracks when she noticed, causing the rest of the party to likewise stop and look at her expectantly.  Some looked up trying to see what she was looking at but couldn’t see anything.  From her perspective, a hole in the canopy of the forest serendipitously showed through the full moon as seen during daytime, a pockmarked blue-white circle begging contemplation.

  In that moment she understood something profound.  The whole time her people had been on Haven, they had looked up in the sky and seen the New Horizon up there waiting for them to return.  Its presence taunted them, derided them for having lost their ability to return, daring them to try again.  Haven had no large moon, only the New Horizon.  Seeing that moon from this planet though, she understood how it must have elicited a remarkably similar taunting to the people of Earth, that it must still today to the survivors.  It demanded notice, demanded explanation and exploration, an ever-present challenge so near but just out of reach high in the celestial sphere.

  She knew a kinship with her ancestors in that moment, the first of many such moments to come, but her first would always be the most profound.  She was able to directly relate something of her Haven experience to something of her experience of the Earth, and that moment of recognition brought her some spiritual closeness with her deep roots as a human being.  It was her first sense of truly deep connection, her first profound moment of deep understanding about of the ultimate unity of all human beings on all four worlds, they were not Havenites, Koboli, Roma, and Terrans, they were all just humans with different addresses, an extended family separated for far too long.   They were one collective force in the universe divided only in their minds.

  “What’s up?” Irvina asked beside her.  “Problem?”

  “No, no problem…” Kathryn said.  “Sorry, let’s continue.”

   

  Periodically they would find that the path they wanted to take was simply impassable.   The hill too steeply gave way directly into the ravine, or they wanted to go one direction but could only go the other, and getting to where they wanted to go even just a few kilometers in from their landing site required a lot of backtracking and careful route planning.

  They didn’t complain, but Kathryn was getting the sense that this was not how the explorers were used to operating, that they tended to reach the outskirts, and enter the first hill which presented promise and opportunity.  Regardless, their experience was proving quite useful.

  Kathryn and Irvina were directly behind the lead two explorers, and one casually fell back to walk with the two women.  “We are being watched,” he said.

  “By what?” Irvina asked.  “From where?”   The man gestured in the direction with his nose, but the two women could not see anything.  

  “They are rival explorers, but we cannot tell from which people.  We can’t say how dangerous.”

  Kathryn touched her PANEs.  “Taking a nap Overwatch?  Lead explorers report possible hostiles to the west.”

  “Scanning…” Felix reported.  “Sorry Captain, yes indeed.  A dozen targets… one point two kilometers west southwest.  Patching infra-red into your PANEs.”

  “Wow,” Kathryn uttered, startled to the point that she had to stop walking, causing the whole party to do so as well.  Now instead of what was in front of her, all she could see in her glasses was the red scanning map from orbit.  She lifted the glasses up and rested them on the top of her head, and pulled a pocket scroll out of her pocket.  She opened it up and muttered: “there’s got to be a more effective way to display… yes, there we go.”  She tapped a few more times at the panel and then rolled it up and tucked it back in her pocket.  “Much better…” she uttered as she pulled the glasses back down over her eyes.  Now instead of the orbital imaging, she had the proper view out in front of her, but with targets marked with cursors off in the distance, superimposed on the true image.  She was seeing every large heat signature besides their party through the glasses, complete with a range indicator above them.

  “Setting F7B on your PANEs if you’ve got them,” she called back down the line.

  One of the lead explorers grabbed her arm.  “Waneta,” he warned.  “I saw their colours, they are Waneta.  We are in danger.  If we have seen them then they are already planning to attack!”

  “How do they attack?  What is the best defence?” she asked.

  “They circle,” he warned, “attack from all sides.”

  Looking about her in every direction, she could see figures slowly making their way into an encircling formation.  “Is there any way to deter their attack, to make them reconsider?”

  “They have never been seen without suffering attack,” he explained, obviously quite concerned.

  “Weapons?”

  “Blades and darts.”

  “Damn,” Kathryn exclaimed, turning to Irvina.  “We don’t have the space here to get into a defensive formation against an encircling attack.”

  “I have a really bad idea…” Irvina offered, looking up the slope immediately beside them towards a clearing at the top of the hill.

  “No, it’s a great idea,” Kathryn considered.

  “Unless we all fall into a cave in and break our necks.”

  “Less likely than being hacked to bits if we don’t,” she said with a shrug.  “Oh hell, they’re almost in formation.  Everyone up the hill!!” she yelled.

  Some seemed to hesitate or start to protest, but when they saw Kathryn and Irvina along with the two lead explorers all bolt at full speed up the hill, they sensed the urgency and followed.

  “The head at the very top of the hill,” Kathryn barked, “New Horizon crew on your bellies facing out with weapons drawn, explorers out front!  Stick to the ground at distance but if they get close enough, on your feet for close combat defence!” She arrived at the top of the hill first and got into position, quickly followed by all of the others who obeyed her instructions without question, all falling into the proper formation.

  “What’s your name?” Kathryn asked as she tapped on the boot of the explorer in front of her who had first warned her about the Waneta.

  “Kirby.”

  “Kirby will they stop if they’re getting killed?”

  “They would consider it a dishonour.”

  “Understood.” she grimly acknowledged.

  A dart she never saw whistled past her ear. 

  “Balls!!” Molly cried out from the scroll in the bag below her.  “Those bastards!  My one good eye!!”

  Kathryn looked back to see a dart embedded in poor Molly’s one eye, moving about with her eye as it darted around in disbelief.

  Despite the stress of the situation, or maybe because of it, Kathryn couldn’t help but let out a mirthful grunt at the sight.

  “It’s NOT FUNNY!” Molly yelled angrily at her, glaring back with the dart pointed squarely at Kathryn in line with her stare.  This only made it funnier, but the moment was broken when she saw one of the infra-red cursors manifest into direct line of sight, and she raised her printed handgun, took aim at his chest and fired.

  She rarely missed and this time was no exception.  At this they all swarmed at once from all directions, but under Kathryn’s instructions they were ready for them.  Before long they were all taken out long before they reached a range at which they could use their bladed weapons.  Those who were shot were quickly dying if not dead already, and those who had been darted or struck by an energy blast from the Koboli wands were soundly unconscious.

  Nobody seemed in a hurry to get back up to their feet and a quiet fell upon them as they listened and watched for any subsequent activity.  All they could hear was the rustling of the trees and the ambient low cacophony of insects.  Kathryn tapped Kirby’s boot and asked: “What happens when the ones still alive wake up?”

  “If we are gone, they will leave.  If they see us, they will attack again.  They claim these entire ruins for themselves.”

  “I see.   And how long will your darts knock them out?”

  “Half a daytime,” he answered.  She figured that meant four hours at least but probably no more than six.

  “Is anyone hurt?” she called out.

  “Yes!!” Molly cried out indignantly.

  “Besides Molly?” Kathryn angrily snapped past her.

  Nobody else called anything else out.  Cautiously Kathryn pushed herself up onto her knees and dusted her hands off before standing up and cautiously walking over to Molly’s head.  She put her fists on her hips and looked down at her sympathetically as her eye along with its embedded dart looked up at her in return.

  “Pull it out?” Kathryn asked.

  “Oh no,” Molly sarcastically answered, “I like it this way.  I think it might start a fashion trend.”

  Kathryn sighed.  “Alright, hold still,” she advised as she bent down and covered most of Molly’s head to stabilize it while she as gingerly as possible slipped the dart out with the other.  Molly furiously blinked her eye several times and then looked up at Kathryn gratefully.   “Are you damaged?” she asked the head.  “Can you still see?”

  “Surprisingly… yes,” she answered through the scroll in the bag below her.   “It must have just missed the important optics.”

  “Good.   Alright, well we’d better WHOA!!”  The whole hill most of them were still laying down on gave way and slumped, falling straight down, stopping, then falling again, then again, about two meters each time.   Kathryn just barely managed to keep her footing and stay upright the whole time.

  “What was that??” she asked of anyone able to answer once it seemed to have stopped.

  “Cascade collapse,” Irvina answered, very carefully standing up. “The top floor fell onto the lower one, both of which collapsed onto the lower floor and the next.  We’re lucky we didn’t fall through.”

  “Why didn’t we?”

  “Probably too much debris and soil on top of the top floor, the weight was easier to accommodate by collapsing the floors of the original structure than to have something fall through.”

  “Right.”   Kathryn said, then knelt down to address the head.  “Molly you’re gonna have to help us out.  You said that once you were on the ground, you’d be able to guide us.  Any intuitions striking you?  We’ve been wandering around like this for too long, can you help us out?”

  “I’m sorry, nothing looks anything like…” she looked around as best she could, “what it did before.”

  Patricia thought to ask: “If you could see inside one of these ruins, could it help you more precisely locate yourself?”

  “That’s an interesting idea girl.  It might.   A lot of these buildings were residential and I wouldn’t recognize them, but a lot of them had residential businesses at street level which I might recognize.”

  Kathryn sighed, but then addressed Irvina and Francis.  “What is the safest and easiest way to get into an interior of one of these hills?” she asked the engineers.

  “Safest?” Francis asked.  “There may be an easiest way, but there is no safe way.”

  “Fine.   Suppose we wanted to get into this structure specifically, how would you do it?” she asked.

  “This hill we’re on?”

  “Yes,” she answered sharply with growing frustration. 

  “The one that just collapsed several floors?” he asked incredulously.

  “Yes.”   She could tell he wanted to simply state that he wouldn’t want to, but he declined to.

  “I’d take detailed orbital ground penetrating scans and assess the least terrifyingly dangerous level and try to tunnel into it from the side.”

  Kathryn turned to the explorers.  “What about you all?  You must get into old buildings to scavenge, how do you do it?”

  “Sometimes there are holes leading into them from the water.”

  “Sometimes there are…” she shook her head in disbelief.  “You see?” she scolded Francis.  “That’s why we brought them with us.  Let’s split up into three teams each led by a pair of explorers and see if they can find us an entrance into the building, hell any building.”  She touched the side of her PANEs.  “Felix, we’re going to need you to watch us very carefully, we’re temporarily splitting up.”

  “Understood.”

  After assigning teams, she allowed Kirby to lead his partner, Irvina, Ana, and herself down into one of the gulley creeks and follow the water along looking for a cave in the wall which they claimed might lead them into a building.

  “Teams be warned,” Francis said over the comms to all three of the groups, “there is a herd of large animals moving through one of the ravines near you.  They appear from the descriptions offered by the locals to be a herd of the herbivores they called deer.  Still no sign of any threatening animals.”

  “Here,” Kirby said.  He was pointing to an oval opening about a meter across which had a modest but steady stream of liquid running out the bottom of it, down the rest of the wall, and into the stream.

  “Oh I see, thanks.”  She touched her PANEs.  “Be advised teams, what Kirby has shown me I think is a drainage tunnel where the water that seeps into the building drains out into the ravines.  We’re going to check it out.”

  “Send one of mine,” she heard Molly strongly suggest over the comms.  “That’s what they’re here for.”

  Kathryn paused and considered.  She wanted to go herself, and if it was just a matter of putting someone else’s life at risk instead of her own she wouldn’t have considered it, but the reality was that they were indeed much more experienced in this and would more readily identify and understand dangers they might run into.

  “Alright Kirby, here.”  She took off her PANEs and put them on his face.  These will allow you to see in the dark and send back to us what you can see,” she said as she pulled her scroll out of her pocket.  “Just try not to touch it though, you might make it do something you don’t want it to.”

  Kirby looked somewhat concerned at her wording, as though she’d suggested it might blow up on his face if he touched it the wrong way.

  “Just go in and have a look around.  Your leader will see what you see and be able to say if she recognizes anything.”

  The man nodded, and bravely squeezed into the hole.

  “Heads up Kathryn,” Felix said.  “I see what I think to be one of those murder cats in the area.  I think it’s stalking those deer but its close enough that it-”

  “What?   Talk to me Felix.”

  “It’s veered off.  I think it’s heading in your direction.  It looks like it’s looking for an appropriate perch to look down on you from the opposite side of the ravine.”

  “I see it,” Kathryn said with a devious smile, drawing her gun and relishing the chance for some payback against the beast that had hurt her friend.  It didn’t seem to matter to her whether or not it was actually the same animal or not.  

  The creature was hiding quite effectively in a tree, but its eyes gave it away when she looked right at it.  She raised her gun and carefully took aim right between those two devilish eyes.   But before she could squeeze the trigger, the life left its eyes and it seemed to fall out of the tree and out of sight.  She looked over and saw that the other explorer had darted it unconscious.

  He seemed confused by Kathryn’s expression that he’d done something wrong, but Kathryn merely thanked him politely and that was the end of it.  She went back to her scroll to monitor Kirby’s progress.

  It was hard to make out exactly what was seen, especially with the red and black infra-red scanner image, but what she could make out seemed remarkably well preserved.   Very little within it was actually preserved of course, but the overall structure, the walls and ceiling (at least on that level) were still intact.  What the room used to be however, was practically impossible to tell.

  “We found another entrance,” Xion reported over the comms, “we’re going to send one of our guides in, we’ll feed you all of the raw video directly.”

  “Thanks for your help. Kirby.  You can come on out now,” Kathryn called into the black void as she brought up the other one’s feed.

  “We’ve found another one here too,” Jaren said from the third team.  “Want us to send someone in?”

  “Wait until we’ve checked out this second one.  No need to risk yours till we’ve checked this one out.”

  “Understood.”

  “Everyone watched as one of Kirby’s colleagues slipped into the drainage way and shimmied his way through the darkness.  He finally emerged into a much larger though still not terribly large open room with pillars holding up the ceiling.  He spotted an entry way into a larger area, and they watched as he proceeded into it.   The second area must have been too large and open for his scanners to be able to pick anything up, and Kathryn listened as Xion explained to the explorer in warning that they were going to remotely activate the little lights on his PANEs and amplify the light he would see in his lenses and on their remote viewing as well.

  When they did so, a large, cavernous area was revealed, and something about it seemed familiar to Kathryn, but she couldn’t immediately identify what it was.

  “It looks like the main central area from Orbital One,” Felix commented on the feed from up in orbit.  

  From what she’d seen of the station he was right, but that wasn’t it…  She snapped her fingers.  “Yes, and a larger configuration of the New Horizons dining hall as well!”

  It was a large open area extending into the distance, with elevated walkways on either side on top of a series of open spaces along the main level such as the explorer had emerged from.  The place was awash in debris, and in a number of places the upper walkway had collapsed into the spaces below but overall, it was all remarkably intact.

  “You know what else it looks like?” Kathryn heard Molly say.

  “What?”

  “Oh my god I don’t believe it!  I recognize it, I know that place all too damn well!” she laughed.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the mall!  My mall!” she laughed again.  “It’s the damn Commonwealth Pacific Mall!”

  “Does that help us?” Kathryn asked, any significance to the revelation lost on her.

  “Sure does!   I spent way too much time and money in that place, and from there I can definitely direct you to where the simulant laboratory should be.”

  “Well thank good,” Kathryn exclaimed in relief.  “Alright then, get that man out of there and let’s meet up again to plan a route to the lab.”

  “Warning Kat,” Felix communicated from high in the sky.  “I see nine creatures headed your way from the east northeast.  They look a little different from the cat and they sure aren’t moving in a friendly way if you catch my drift.”

  “Nine of them?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Good grief.”

  “Inside,” Kirby said, pointing to the hole.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Inside!” he urgently insisted.  

  Kathryn didn’t protest and pushed her way into the small opening in the Earth, and the other four followed behind her.  As she moved, she called to the other two teams.

  “Converge on our position, I have a feeling we may need your help.  Be careful though, and advance with caution.  Don’t let them get too close unless you have the clear advantage.”

  She tripped and fell into the open area, and Irvina tripped over her and fell to the ground as well.  They managed to scramble out of the way to avoid getting in the way of the other three following close behind.

  “Light?” Kirby asked, and Kathryn unrolled the scroll and set it to beacon mode, both sides of the screen lit up remarkably brightly, and the whole area they found themselves in lit up.

  “Weapons.” Kirby said, pointing to the hole they had just come out of, and she understood.   He had forced the animals into a bottleneck if they wanted to come for them, and that is exactly what they seemed to have in mind.  Ana was unarmed, but Kathryn with her gun, Irvina with her wand, and the two explorers with their blow darts took turns putting down one wolf after another as they came through, but the third one managed to get past them, sheltered from their attacks by the bodies of the previous two.  In their panic the fourth one came through as well but the explorers, having survived such an attack before, kept targeting the wolves in the tunnel until their still bodies plugged the hole too tightly for any more to push their way through.  

  The women frantically danced about trying to avoid being bitten by the two which had made it in.  Irvina relative quickly put down one of them with her wand, but Kathryn was too afraid of hitting one of her teammates if she wildly shot at the remaining one in the small space.  Instead, when it came for her she reared back and kicked it square in the jaw as hard as she could, knocking it back as it let out a yelp of pain.  She then advanced on it and kicked it several more times in the head before finally stomping it as hard as she could several time, cracking its skull to be sure that it was dead, leaving a bloody mess at her feet, and the bone chilling sound of the skull breaking apart reverberating off of the walls.

  Completely lit up with pulsing adrenaline she turned back to the others and frantically yelled in excited anger tinged with frustration, “is EVERYTHING on this planet trying to fucking KILL US!!??”   Her breathing was heavy, her chest heaving in and out with the excitement in her veins and the sudden burst of exertion.

  “Nope,” Irvina answered with a smirking twinkle in her eyes, the pale blue in them taking on a more sapphire quality in the dim light.  She also seemed excitedly worked up over the action, but nowhere near as much as Kathryn who had gotten so up close and personal with the predator.   “Only the things that aren’t afraid of us.”