“ You got a death wish?”
Elsa heard the words but couldn’t believe them. She brought her good hand up and wiped the ichor from her helmet. A man stood above her. Not just a man, but the kind of man that she suspected primitive cultures worshipped as a god. She tried to release the viewport and slide it up but it was jammed. She scowled then tried to sit up.
Her first attempt reminded her of her broken arm. She yelped, then chastised herself. Weakness wasn’t allowed now, she wasn’t alone. She tightened her muscles in a show of mental self discipline and used her other arm to help her to sit up, then to rise to her knees. Her leg felt bruised and shaky, but aside from the broken armor plates grinding together it still worked.
“ Gunnery Sergeant Elsadora Quinn, of FIST team 3,” She said after she stood up.
The man grinned. She noticed for the first time he was dressed — if dressed was the right word — in animal hides. He held a sharpened stick and had a bow and a sack full of arrows across his back. “Tarn Bledsoe,” he said with a grin. “I been chasing you for a while. Could have saved you a lot of trouble if you weren’t so damn fast.”
“ Sorry to have inconvenienced you,” Elsa said. “Your name wasn’t on the list of personnel in the research station.”
“ Only a couple of them left,” Tarn said. “Look, you want to stay here and chat or do you want to get out of here before momma and poppa come back?”
Elsa swore. “Let’s go — my unit’s supposed to meet up at the research station.”
Tarn chuckled. “Ain’t much there anymore. Kira and Fiona should’ve brought the survivors from your unit back to Treetown.”
“ Survivors? What happened?”
Tarn shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. Vitalis don’t take kindly to visitors from other worlds. Your screamers fell straight into the biggest damn flock of wyverns I ever seen!”
“ Wyverns?”
“ Yeah, legendary giant flying lizard.”
“ Dinosaurs? Like a pteranodon?”
He nodded. “Something like that, except these are bigger and meaner.”
Elsa swore again, then realized what Tarn had said. “Wait, you know what a screamer is?”
Tarn shrugged. “Yeah, humans ain’t native to this planet. Well, at least not till there were some babies born back in Treetown.”
“ Babies? How long have you been here?”
“ Three years maybe? Easy to lose track of time, no real seasons where we’re at and the days kinda turn into one another. Some lawyer lady that survived the research station said the kids were natives and as long as no intelligent life was found, they owned the planet by TCS law.”
Else clipped her knife back into its sheath and wiped more of the blood from her view plate. “I still need to find my unit, I had ‘em on my radio a little bit ago, but my suit’s out of power, I need to recharge it.”
Tarn laughed. “Don’t bother, it’s beat to hell and even if it would work, it won’t last long.”
“ Why not? Each part is independent and modular.”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself, but I’m telling you technology don’t last long here. Otherwise why’d you ditch your gun?”
She turned to see where the broken weapon lay on the ground. A black spot on the side of it showed where the ruptured energy cell had destroyed the weapon. Faulty power packs weren’t uncommon, but she hadn’t heard of one bursting into flame in decades.
“ My team will wait for me.”
“ There’s something up there that you don’t want no part of. If Kira and Fiona can rescue them, they will. Otherwise we’d best stay clear of it.”
“ Fiona?” Elsa mused. The name was familiar. She went through the names of the researchers assigned to the outpost but came up blank.
“ Fiona Kate, Lance Corporal,” Tarn said. “She was part of the Marine force assigned to defend the research outpost. Ain’t much defending to be done against a Megasaur though. Like I said, only a handful survived.”
“ What’s so bad up there, the Megasaur? And is that what these were, baby ones?”
“ Naw, this are just screechers. The adults get a little over 20 feet tall. A Megasaur is damn near twice that.”
She turned to stare at the dead screechers. They were toddlers then, each around six or seven feet tall. She shook her head. “They’re Marines, they’ll find a way and they’ll wait.”
Tarn sighed. “Fine, let’s go.” He glanced behind him. “Can’t believe their momma left them alone this long. Unless maybe daddy got eaten by something bigger.”
She stared at him. Something bigger like the Megasaur, she wondered. She had a lot of questions but if Tarn was right, time and distance were more important. “If something’s bigger than daddy, I really don’t want to meet it.”
“ Momma’s bigger than daddy, and you’re right, you don’t want to meet her. The female of the species on this rock are bigger and meaner than the males.”
She’d read about some animals in Terran history being like that. Some societies had been matriarchal as well. Among her team she might have made a joke about penis envy, but with Tarn, an unknown man who looked like he could have wrestled one of the screechers into submission, she stayed silent. “Lead the way, Tarzan.”
Tarn chuckled before turning and heading deeper into the ravine.