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Page 24.
Chapter 7. Kion and Piri Go South
 The two men, Kion Danos and Jack Piri—recently escaped from Aerag-15 on the desert continent Manaul 5D—stood for just a moment.
They gaped at the four frozen killjaeger.
The warbots had stopped in mid-stride, while awkwardly clattering boulder to boulder down into the box canyon.
"Why'd they suddenly stop?" Piri asked. He scuffed his new boots in the dust to drive away more of the stench of the dead man's feet.
"I don’t know," Kion said, "but let's not hang around to find out. Go!" He pointed down the winding canyon in the other direction.
With a sense of impending disaster hanging over them, Kion and Piri started jogging. Where to? Kion asked himself. Good question. Free and running. Hopefully, downhill further to fresh, potable water. They were rapidly becoming dehydrated and overheated, and it was just a matter of hours before they would be finished—so Kion analyzed their situation.
For the moment, simply being free was wonderful enough, after nearly two years breaking rocks under a hot Manaul sun. Being whipped and yelled at. Drinking mineral-heavy water that tasted like bad breath. Eating stale food, at best, and wormy meal yet worse; throwing utterly black and rotting slop away and staying hungry at worst.
"There is that story," Piri said in gasps as he ran. "There's a story about people in the jungle."
"Yes, I know. The ones who got away."
"Maybe it's just a story, huh?" Piri seemed ready to be mortally discouraged.
Piri was a volatile man, Kion thought. Something about Piri made him uneasy. Probably just the difference in military cultures, as well as the vast gap in training and education. Kion's education included decision making, leadership, while the other was trained to follow orders. As an NCO, the mess sergeant was supposed to lead younger enlisted soldiers, figuring out the best way to accomplish what the officers ordered. Piri seemed to understand his role in the Treaty Marches military—but Kion detected a dark, cynical, subsersive streak. His instinct would not trust the man.
"If it's a story," Kion gasped back, "it's a good one. Let's find them, or if they are a story, we'll find something better along the way."
"Anything but back in the can," Piri said.
The run became ever more grueling, since they'd had no water in hours, and the day was getting hotter.
Even in the long, winding canyon, heat began to blow in on dusty winds. The wind smelled of low tide, or Rotten Sand as old-timers in Aerag-15 called it. Hot air and grit blew into Kion's face, blinding him. He saw Piri pull the ragged neck-rag up over his nose and mouth. Handy thing, that. Wished he had one. Strange that the man acted as if he knew his way around here. No, probably he'd sat and drunk cafir with some old timers while on a work detail amid the long dunes outside Aerag-15.
Kion's vision began to get wavy from the brightness. His head was light, and his thinking fuzzy. He almost felt as if he were underwater. Piri was the stronger man now, jogging relentlessly on strong legs. Where did he get the strength. Only pride kept Kion from calling for a rest, or even a slowdown.
Their run threaded left and right among boulders taller than the men. Greenish-purple succulents grew in the crevaces where a little night dew might pool. Like bent swords, tall yucca-like leaves stuck up at loopy angles. The way those and other plants seemed to track them, Kion was afraid they might be capable of snaring and digesting animals.
Up and down over smaller boulders in the ancient stream bed, which really broke the pace. Each such up-down moment caused Kion's pumping thighs to jam painfully against his sagging upper torso. One time, a knee whacked his jaw, and he saw stars.
"What's the matter?" Piri said over his shoulder.
"Keep going," Kion said through a throbbing mouth.
At some point, running through an S-turn, Kion's heart nearly stopped.
On a sandy ledge, halfway to the blue sky, stood a smallish, thin figure in a silvery flight suit. A Kaarrk! The brassy cube of its helmet gleamed, with its characteristic rounded corners and two heavily pressurized little polarized screwhole goggles. The creature stood stock-still, like a statue, breathing foul methane through hoses running over its shoulders to small tube tanks on its back. Its hands hung slack at its sides. It was merely observing at this point.
"Did you see that?" Kion shouted.
"See what?"
"A Swarm bastard."
"No, I didn't see nothin'."
"I must be seeing little men."
"Want to rest a minute?"
"Yeah."
Against his will, Kion allowed himself to squat in a shady spot with his back to the still-cool stone wall. Piri slumped down nearby, undid his boots, and poured sand out. Then he rested for a few minutes with the boots tossed nearby.
Kion did not have the heart to go back and look. He observed the other. Did he not fear the merks, the killjaeger, and now even the Kaarrk invisible but around them?
As Kion watched, Piri moved deeper into shade—and was attacked by several in a row of reaching agave swords. The plants grew in the interstices between cliff and river bed. Angrily, Piri swung his boots at them—and knocked one down. The plant fell as if sliced, and lay pointing away from the cliff. Its broken stem oozed liquid.
"Look at this!" Piri croaked. "Water!"
Kion rose in alarm. "Hold on!"
Piri was on his hands and knees, pawing the dying plant. "We gotta have water or we'll be dead by tomorrow."
"Stop!" Kion jumped up and ran into the deep shade under the overhang.
There a trembling Piri licked his chapped lips and eyeballed the glistening puddle before his knees.
Kion took the man by his neck-rag, and tried to pull him away, but Piri flailed with both arms. His surprising power knocked Kion back on his rear end. Kion sat half upright on his elbows, watching in horror as Piri dug his fingers into the plant's tubular stem.
Piri raised his dripping hand. In it were fat, glistening pea-like pods, each about the size of a man's index fingertip. Piri hunched over his prize, and looked back at Kion with a crazed face. "If I die, so what?" So saying, he popped one of the pods into his mouth.
The look that transfixed Piri's face startled Kion. Was his fellow traveler about to keel over; start smoking with a gut full of acid?
But Piri's look was one of joy. "Water," he said. "Tastes like grass, but wonderful."
Kion crawled over behind him. He did not want to do this, but his thoughts were in and out. He thought of a wind storm that send scudding waves of desert grit like hurling snow, blinding a person. That was his mind, overheating and dehydrated. Here it was—a big gamble. Live or die. But die free. He sat weakly on folded legs, propped against the sandpapery cliff wall, while Piri dropped a handful of the gelly, gooey pods into his palm. The pods were wet, and slimed together, but they did not burn. Caution still told Kion to avoid them. These desert plants, that could bring down an animal and eat it, must be loaded with kill-tricks. But then again, they too had to live. This wasn’t some hell world like the Kaarrk homeland. Kion closed his eyes, thought of his wife and daughter, and broke several pods simultaneously with his teeth. The outside husk popped with a soggy cracking feel, releasing their inner liquid. Kion's mouth filled with refreshing water, and his entire body thrilled with pleasure. Was it a numbing agent? A dumbing agent? So far, Piri seemed to remain strong and healthy. If anything, Piri had lost his manic edge and sat calmly, intently chewing more of the pods.
"That is good," Kion said.
"These things must grow in the shade everywhere," Piri said. "Must have some food value too."
"We're either dead, or we're saved," Kion said.
"Look on the bright side, boss."
"I know. We'll either die happy, or we'll have the food and drink we need to travel."
"At night."
"When it's cooler," Kion agreed. "The moons are full, from what I saw. We'll have light for seeing. But the merks have night vision and other technology."
"We still gotta be careful," Piri agreed. "Maybe them escapees will find us before the merks do."
"That would be sweet," Kion said.
Amazing how a little water had quenched the fires of a growing disagreement, Kion thought. Chewing the plant seeds, he felt more relaxed inwardly. Plants and animals around the cosmos were largely constructs based on water. The laws of the universe were the same everywhere, spawning an endless profusion of self-replicating bioprocesses based on mechanical reactions involving single and multiple helixes of simple genetic building blocks. Complexity grew out of laborious repetition of rudimentary linkages—tedious and assured.
Kion closed his eyes for a few minutes, dreaming of Anet and Anetena.
His reverie was brief, because he and Piri were startled two hear loud merk voices coming around the bend, seconds away and probably heavily armed. The two men were talking about the escapees. "…get us a couple of nice fat rats," one man was just saying about Kion and Piri.
We're finished, Kion thought. This is it. I sound like Piri. We're dead.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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