Read Online Undercurrents by Robert Buettner - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Robert Buettner
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thousand square miles of brackish coastal swamp that would, in a couple of hundred million years, provide this planet with more coal than Trueborns had hubris.
The “trees” were cycads, meaning their trunks had the proportions and texture of pinecones, with palm-frond branches feather-dustering from their tops. The biggest land animals in the Barrens were dog-sized, bow-legged, flat-bodied amphibians that sunned themselves on the trunks of fallen cycads that were as mottled brown as they were. My visor display measured ambient temperature at ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit with ninety-four percent humidity.
Inside my suit I thanked Mr. Eternad, if such a person existed, for climate control, like a million other GIs had over the last century.
Unfortunately, no smiling friendlies waited to greet me. Fortunately, the drone lay just a hundred feet away, orange fuselage crumpled but otherwise whole, on a mudflat.
Whatever equipment had spilled out during free fall was lost to me forever, scattered and splattered over square miles of this swamp. But the drone contained, if it was still inside, a heliograph signal mirror with sight and tripod mount. I could use it to signal the friendlies of my whereabouts. If I could change my whereabouts to the seashore. If the friendlies were close enough and vigilant enough to spot a signal. And if they were really friendly.
There was also a meds kit that would allow me to make a field reduction of my dislocated wrist. The kit also contained happy pills more serious than the ones in my helmet dispenser. The happys would allow me to keep going, since I couldn’t wait for the wrist and shoulder to improve.
First I had to escape my chute harness. I tried to punch the chest release plate, but with the bad wrist all I did was demonstrate how loud a human scream sounds inside an Eternad helmet.
The branches of the cycad from which I dangled drooped beneath my weight as I struggled. I now splashed knee-deep in the swamp.
My good hand was free enough to tug my bush knife from its thigh scabbard so I could cut away the shroud lines. After thirty seconds of sawing, I plopped into waist-deep water.
The plop stung enough that I popped a couple of helmet happys, pending a dose of the hard stuff from the meds kit.
I slogged toward the drone, shoulder and wrist throbbing, knee-deep in opaque water, across a slick mud bottom. Ten minutes later I reached the drone. By the time I crawled up onto the mudflat, I was wheezing like a plasteel lungfish and my sweat had maxed my ventilators.
A flat-headed amphibian the size of an alley cat had beaten me to the drone, attracted, I suppose, by the friction warmth generated by the drone’s passage through the lower atmosphere. The flat-head squatted in the recess that housed the drone’s remaining access-panel release. She—enough females have ignored me that I just know—squatted there, oblivious to my approach.
I didn’t know what to expect from her. The Tressen Barrens faunal brief mostly lost my attention because Barrens operations were labeled “I.S.,” for “Improbable Scenario.” Or, as case officers restated the acronym, “Ignorable (I’ll just say here) Stuff.”
The amphibian turned one glassy frog eye to me, decided I was no threat, and looked away.
I stepped forward, shooing her off the drone. Finally she plopped onto the mud and waddled off. Then I dug gauntleted fingers into the hinge-release recess and tugged the pin. I touched something squishy, jerked my hand from the release recess, and glanced down. Before the amphibian had left, she had deposited a load of (I’ll just say here) stuff.
While I swore and wiped my fingers on ground moss, the drone banana-peeled itself open, and I catalogued what equipment I had lost.
My heart sank. Where the uplink case had nestled there was now a bare socket and two torn tie-down straps. The uplink encrypted messages, searched the sky for, and then locked on to, receivers aboard any cruiser
The “trees” were cycads, meaning their trunks had the proportions and texture of pinecones, with palm-frond branches feather-dustering from their tops. The biggest land animals in the Barrens were dog-sized, bow-legged, flat-bodied amphibians that sunned themselves on the trunks of fallen cycads that were as mottled brown as they were. My visor display measured ambient temperature at ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit with ninety-four percent humidity.
Inside my suit I thanked Mr. Eternad, if such a person existed, for climate control, like a million other GIs had over the last century.
Unfortunately, no smiling friendlies waited to greet me. Fortunately, the drone lay just a hundred feet away, orange fuselage crumpled but otherwise whole, on a mudflat.
Whatever equipment had spilled out during free fall was lost to me forever, scattered and splattered over square miles of this swamp. But the drone contained, if it was still inside, a heliograph signal mirror with sight and tripod mount. I could use it to signal the friendlies of my whereabouts. If I could change my whereabouts to the seashore. If the friendlies were close enough and vigilant enough to spot a signal. And if they were really friendly.
There was also a meds kit that would allow me to make a field reduction of my dislocated wrist. The kit also contained happy pills more serious than the ones in my helmet dispenser. The happys would allow me to keep going, since I couldn’t wait for the wrist and shoulder to improve.
First I had to escape my chute harness. I tried to punch the chest release plate, but with the bad wrist all I did was demonstrate how loud a human scream sounds inside an Eternad helmet.
The branches of the cycad from which I dangled drooped beneath my weight as I struggled. I now splashed knee-deep in the swamp.
My good hand was free enough to tug my bush knife from its thigh scabbard so I could cut away the shroud lines. After thirty seconds of sawing, I plopped into waist-deep water.
The plop stung enough that I popped a couple of helmet happys, pending a dose of the hard stuff from the meds kit.
I slogged toward the drone, shoulder and wrist throbbing, knee-deep in opaque water, across a slick mud bottom. Ten minutes later I reached the drone. By the time I crawled up onto the mudflat, I was wheezing like a plasteel lungfish and my sweat had maxed my ventilators.
A flat-headed amphibian the size of an alley cat had beaten me to the drone, attracted, I suppose, by the friction warmth generated by the drone’s passage through the lower atmosphere. The flat-head squatted in the recess that housed the drone’s remaining access-panel release. She—enough females have ignored me that I just know—squatted there, oblivious to my approach.
I didn’t know what to expect from her. The Tressen Barrens faunal brief mostly lost my attention because Barrens operations were labeled “I.S.,” for “Improbable Scenario.” Or, as case officers restated the acronym, “Ignorable (I’ll just say here) Stuff.”
The amphibian turned one glassy frog eye to me, decided I was no threat, and looked away.
I stepped forward, shooing her off the drone. Finally she plopped onto the mud and waddled off. Then I dug gauntleted fingers into the hinge-release recess and tugged the pin. I touched something squishy, jerked my hand from the release recess, and glanced down. Before the amphibian had left, she had deposited a load of (I’ll just say here) stuff.
While I swore and wiped my fingers on ground moss, the drone banana-peeled itself open, and I catalogued what equipment I had lost.
My heart sank. Where the uplink case had nestled there was now a bare socket and two torn tie-down straps. The uplink encrypted messages, searched the sky for, and then locked on to, receivers aboard any cruiser
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