Castaway Resolution: Chapters 14, 15, and 16!

Holiday stuff plays merry heck with my other schedules. Here's a three-for-one for everyone, as we get back to the Castaway action!

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Chapter 14.

"You're sure this is a good choice?" Campbell directed the question to Sakura, even as he stared up at the column.

Having Campbell ask her sent a maybe-unreasonable thrill of pride through her. "We're pretty sure, Sergeant. Dad's been doing as much studying of the ecology here as he could, and it seems that some of these columns aren't used as much. We already chose one that is, but this one's actually got a floor on it. For some reason the continent's sealed it off."

"Really?" Campbell rubbed his chin, still studying the concrete-like tower in front of him. "Why d'you suppose that is, Akira? I mean, sounds ideal for us, and your own tower's working out well, but I'd hate to buy into something that turned out to have problems that even the continent rejected it for. Not like there's a building code around here."

"I don't think it's for anything to do with structural integrity; you know that I borrowed Xander and Maddox and went over this one in detail with some of your equipment last week. My best guess is that as the continent grows, the needed number and placement of vents changes, and ones not needed are simply walled off."

"Hmm. And yours is active, but this one isn't. Could it be un-walled off later?"

Sakura nodded. "We saw how the structure of your island responded to thinking you were a threat; probably the same kind of thing happens, more slowly, as the island adapts to change. So it could probably re-open this one."

She saw Campbell's gaze run up the column into the canopy and look around. He nodded, thoughtfully. "Well, Saki, could you and Tavana start checking out the configuration on the 450? Looks like we're gonna start cutting soon."

"Me?" Sakura said with surprise. "But Xander and Maddox know a lot more than –"

"Exactly why you and Tav should do it," Xander said, somewhat abruptly. He was also looking up, studying the column and the canopy. "Maddox, you can help out. We've got plenty of time, so this can be a lot of learning as well as working. Right, Sergeant, Dr. Kimei?"

Her mother had frowned when Xander interrupted, but her face cleared some when Xander directed the question to her. He may be their Captain, but my mom is boss. "I suppose so. Yes, go on, Sakura. It can't hurt for all of us to understand how to run all of our equipment."

Sakura didn't mind, to tell the truth. The JD-CAT 450 Universal Excavator, to give the machine its full name, was a really impressive and massive vehicle, with a fully-shapable "blade" that could be anything from a bulldozer to a bucket loader and more.

As she and Tav, along with the smaller Bird brother Maddox, headed towards the big yellow-painted machine, she heard the sergeant say, "and Whips, maybe you could work with Mel to figure out how we could put in a floor at the bottom level that'll support itself, just in case the island decides to pull the rug out on us?"

"Sure thing, sir!" Whips said cheerfully, and Mel followed him over to a large exposed rock which the Bemmie liked to sit on; it was smooth and comfortable for his belly-pad.

Sakura was glad they didn't have to watch the younger kids; Caroline had stayed behind in Sherwood Tower with both Hitomi and Francisco.

She felt a faint, welcome tingle go up her arm as Tavana took her hand while they stood for a moment, looking at the 450. Maddox glanced at that and just grinned at them; Sakura smiled back. "So what do we have to do, here?"

"Okay, well, we need to cut holes in that column, right? So that means the 450 needs a cutting array."

"Oui, that is clear enough," Tavana said. "But can it do that? Bulldozer blades and excavators, that is what we have used it for. The cutting, I did not know it could do this."

"I'll bet it can. JD-Cats are used for road work, and you have to cut up roadways sometimes, right?"

"You sure do," Sakura said. She remembered seeing such a machine with what looked like a huge rotary sawblade slowly grinding its way through the pavement, back on Earth. "So is that just another mode we have to switch on?"

"It is not an option in the menu," Tavana said after a moment of staring at the interface; Sakura brought up the same connection; there were a lot of configurations but not that one.

Tavana grinned. "But then, I do remember having a tool that lied about what menu options it could give me. Maddox, is this another handholding limit?"

Maddox laughed. "You don't get fooled twice, huh? I'll bet it is. Let's start digging into this interface!"

Sakura tried to watch what Maddox was doing, along with Tav, but she wasn't really an engineer or an interface jockey, so some of it was out of her league.

She glanced over at the others. Mel was waving her arms animatedly as Whips projected something in front of her; Pearce Haley was using what Sakura thought was an acoustic echo probe on the column, probably gauging its thickness at the bottom, while Mom and Dad looked up at the column itself, talking. Xander was staring up into space, maybe looking at an omni projection, while Sergeant Campbell had stepped back about ten meters, taking a different perspective of the column.

That was why she was looking straight at him when, without warning, a tree kraken plummeted from the branches, heading straight for the Sergeant.

Before she—or anyone else—could cry out or even break their shocked paralysis, Sergeant Campbell whipped around, the automatic rifle that had been slung over his back suddenly in his hands, and a chattering snarl ripped through the sunlit green air of the little clearing.

The details of armaments had changed over the centuries, but chemical propellants shoving carefully-designed pieces of metal down barrels was still one of the most devastatingly effective ways of stopping anything hostile. Sergeant Campbell fired in three-shot bursts, one set after another, and alien blood and flesh and bone spattered from the impacts.

The creature stumbled and crashed to a halt, giving a whining screech of pain, fury, and dawning fear. Even as it turned to flee, Campbell raised the rifle, aimed, and fired a final burst that took the thing through its tiny head, dropping the tree kraken like a load of cement.

No one moved as the echoes of the shots dwindled away into the distance; the forest of Lincoln were unnaturally silent, still, shocked into quiet by the violence of that unknown sound.

Akira Kimei was the first to speak, as the Sergeant slowly lowered the weapon. "My God. Are you all right, Samuel?"

Campbell grinned as he re-slung the rifle. "Never got close. Been watching it stalking me for the last ten minutes, as you know."

Sakura was relieved and puzzled. "But Sergeant, then why didn't you tell us? We could have tried to discourage it, maybe run it off."

"He did tell us," her mother said. "Over the private circuits, which is why the rest of you were moved well away from the column. I would like an explanation for why you didn't scare it off earlier, though, rather than letting it try to attack you. That scared the daylights out of me, even though I knew it was coming."

"Scared me more than that," Tavana said, with a frown. "My heart, I thought it would stop."

"Same here," said Pearce. "What about you, Xander?"

Xander's cheeks were touched with pink. "Well, it did scare me, even though Sergeant Campbell had warned me too. As his Captain, silly though that still sounds."

"The explanation, Samuel?" Akira said, in the deceptively gentle tone that told Sakura that her father was near the boiling point. "I hope it is a good one. We just scared almost all of us, and killed an animal that we could have, in all likelihood, chased off without injury."

"And we'd have had to do that again and again and again," Campbell said bluntly. He was examining the corpse carefully. "You've probably studied colonial operations, Akira, Laura, but—no offense—you've never done the initial colony setup, and sure as hell none of you were in on the first landings and clear-cuts.

"One of the first things you have to do is scare the living hell out of the predators that have a chance of learning to stay away from you. You have to establish that your people are the biggest, baddest living things on the planet, and you do that by killing the ones that come too close or—especially—the ones that try to attack any of you. Sometimes you have to wipe out the entire population in range of your people."

He looked at Sakura's expression, saw it mirrored on a lot of the others, even the people from his own crew, and shook his head. For an instant, Sakura saw his age on his face as it went both stony and somehow sad. "Yeah. I know. Back on Earth we just about wiped out not just the predators but thousands of other species, but you have to understand this: we could start trying to save them, to conserve and protect them, because we ended up dominating that planet. We became the danger, to pretty much anything else. That was a long time after we had to spend our waking hours wondering if we were gonna be someone else's meal."

Akira bit his lip, then gave the most reluctant nod Sakura had ever seen. "I. . . I believe I understand, Samuel. And . . . much as it pains me. . . I am afraid I have to agree with you."

"Akira!" Sakura felt a pang near her heart; she'd never heard her mother sound so shocked. "Are you serious? We have ways of setting up safe perimeters, we could have chased even this one off with –"

"It's establishment of territory," Akira said bluntly. "Predators rarely attack each other unless they have no other choice; the potential cost of attacking something that is as well armed as you is far too great. But we are new creatures; we are not clearly recognized as what we—honestly speaking—are, the greatest apex predators in the Galaxy. Samuel is right. We have to treat any incursion into the territory we intend to live in as any predator would—driving off or killing any intruders that might threaten us and our children, until they learn to fear and respect us as a group."

Tavana stared at the still shuddering corpse and nodded, muttering something in French. The running translation from her omni showed that it was mostly curses.

Pearce Haley drew in a deep breath. "Well, that was sure a good first lesson. You'd killed one before, right?"

"Yes," Sakura said, overriding her embarrassment at the memory. "Twice, actually. But the first was more a matter of running into the middle of something without thinking, and the second we'd started it by bashing the column they were in. We've just kept away from the krakens as much as we could."

"Well, given the weapons you had to hand, that was probably the right approach," Campbell said. "But now there's more of us, better weapons, and we're going to need more space. And since we know from our prior island and Akira's studies that we'd be really ill-advised to go around doing a clear cut and burn to make a perimeter, that means we gotta establish ourselves as the most badass things on this continent so we don't have to do this more often."

Thinking about it, Sakura realized he was probably right. "I guess. But I still don't like the idea of just killing things, even the krakens."

Campbell's smile was more natural and sympathetic. "Saki, I hope to god you never like the idea. I don't particularly like it either. But I don't know any good alternative, and I think we all agree that we'd rather shoot a few hundred of these things than let one of them get the drop on Hitomi or Franky."

Sakura had no disagreement with that.

"All right then," Akira said briskly. "Let's get back to work, shall we?"

 

 

Chapter 15.

Whips pulled himself up as high as he could, then dropped back to the floor in a flopping landing that stung his belly pad. The thud transmitted itself loudly, echoing up through the column. "How's that?"

"Looks great!" Maddox said, squinting at the readout in his omni. "Mel?"

Melody Kimei— ten centimeters taller but just as thin as she'd been when they landed—nodded. "Well within strain parameters, and Whips outweighs any two or three of us. That floor will hold just fine."

"How far below it is the column floor?" the Sergeant asked, sticking his head in the newly-cut doorway.

"About half a meter," Mel answered. "Makes sure we weren't relying on it even indirectly for support."

"Still nice to know it's there. Will we be able to check on that if we have to?"

"Oh, easy. We had to make a hole in it anway," Whips answered, gesturing with a flick of tendrils at a large tube already in place at one point of the floor. "Some of the Nebula Drive dust was perfect for monitoring stuff like this."

"What'd we need a hole for. . . oh."

"Unless you want to have a lot clumsier waste disposal, this is the best we've got," Whips confirmed, flickering his own colorful grin at the Sergeant. "Dumps everything into that hundreds of meters deep volume inside the island. We've been doing that all along in Sherwood Column."

"And with the screens and monitor dust we can make sure nothing comes up in either column," Maddox said proudly. "Added some of that to Sherwood Column's disposal, too."

"Good work. How long you figure before we'll be ready to move in?"

Whips checked the display in his omni, ran some work calculations, and blinked, then checked it again. A rippling laugh emerged. "Wow. You have no idea how long it took us to build the first one, but with the tools that Emerald Maui brought, and the extra manpower, and all. . . I think if we all pitch in and follow the plan, we could get everything else set up in a week and a half, two weeks tops. Then put together stuff like additional furniture, stuff like that, over the next week."

"Then we stow away the shelter, huh?" Maddox asked.

Campbell rubbed his chin, then shook his head. "You know, I don't think so. Not yet."

"Why not?"

"Well, once we have our own tower, then each of us has our own home, but even small towns, it's nice to have gathering places that ain't home. I figure we'll build us a town hall or market or church or whatever, but until then, a full-size shelter'll do just fine. Enough room to have a few different setups—little gaming room, a theater, something like that. Okay, so our choices of social partners might be a little limited, but the more stuff we can do, the more it'll feel like we're living somewhere civilized."

Whips had to agree, though a part of him felt more left out than ever. The arrival of the survivors from Emerald Maui had been a godsend—that much he couldn't argue. But none of them were Bemmius. A lot of socializing of his people took place in the water, and even the best of the humans—Sakura and, to his surprise, Francisco—couldn't even begin to keep up with him in the ocean. He'd spent more time on land, dragging himself from point to point, in the last year than he had in. . . well, probably the whole rest of his life.

True, that did mean his arms were stronger than ever, and his belly pad was so tough it was practically armor plate by now, but it just wasn't the same, and what was really annoying was that Sakura wasn't around nearly as much, hanging around almost all the time with Tavana, which was. . .

He froze, unaware for a few moments of what everyone around him was saying, as what he was feeling finally broke through his thoughts. Vents Below and Sky Above, am I. . . am I feeling jealous of Sakura?

He hated that thought, but as soon as he allowed himself to recognize it, the truth was there, staring him down with the human's metaphorical bright green eyes. Sakura had been his best friend since they were both so much younger. He remembered her even as a toddler, walking in a confident but stiff-legged thumping gait ahead of him as he tried to drag himself after her, his second-growth griptalons not even in yet, and then her turning back, draping his arms over her shoulders and pulling, dragging him along so they could both get where they were going.

And they'd always been that close. They played together, and worked together, and . . .

It occurred to Whips that even back home, he'd spent more time with Sakura than he had with anyone outside of his own family. He'd hardly ever gone for even a casual swim with some other of the people. He'd never thought. . . never thought of a time where she wouldn't be there.

Depths, I'm going to have to think this out.

He became aware that something had called Campbell back out. Mel and Maddox were checking the floor mountings one last time and arguing about the details of the next steps, even though the basic plan was already set. Whips undulated over to the exit and saw Campbell talking with Akira.

"What's up?" he asked. "You look serious, Akira."

"Well, yes," Akira said. "In the last week or so I've noticed a marked downturn on traffic along our accustomed gametrails. I think I've noticed some others, but they're farther from where we currently are, which means a longer walk to get there and back."

"Well, a lot of animals ain't dumb; if you're killin' them at the same general place, they'll tend to stop going there," Campbell pointed out.

"But we've been doing this for, oh, six months at least, and I've been careful to avoid making it obvious. Give me some credit, Sergeant; I may not be a hunter by training, but behavior of alien species is my speciality."

"Oh, sure. No offense. So you think something else is up?"

"I'm fairly sure of it. The problem of course is that we haven't been here nearly long enough to understand the long-term behavior of species. We've been here slightly longer than one Lincoln year now, but that's hardly a guarantee that we've seen anything close to all their typical behaviors. Various species on Earth and other planets go through cycles that are multi-year in span."

"You know," Whips said slowly, "things . . . smelled a little different this week. When I was in the water, I mean."

"Day before yesterday? When you dragged in that golden-sided fish thing?" Campbell asked. "You did mention you hadn't seen one of those before."

"I hadn't. And Finny and his friends seemed a little more energetic. Though it's hard to tell with them."

"Finny" was the name Campbell had given to a streamlined predator which seemed to include a large streak of curiosity in its makeup; Finny and some others of his species had followed Campbell's crew all the way from their doomed island to the Kimei's floating continent, and now stayed in and around the semicircular bay that Emerald Maui had arrived at. Whips didn't think the "Finnies" were actually intelligent, any more than the capys probably were, but he wasn't sure. They were smart for animals, that much was for sure.

Campbell laughed. "Yeah, 'energetic' is pretty much their default. But when you say it smelled different, you mean the water wasn't the same?"

"Yes." He thought back. "Might have been a little different in temperature, maybe warmer?"

Campbell rubbed his chin again, then suddenly looked at Akira. "Oh."

"Easily checked," Akira said at almost the same moment.

Whips looked between the two, and suddenly got it. He sent a query up to the satellites, and displayed the data on his omni.

What he saw made him draw in a breath with a faint hoot. "Oh," he said, unconsciously echoing Campbell.

The outline of the floating continent they were on had moved. For most of the prior time it had been monitored—several months now, since the Maui crew had dispersed its cargo of satellites into space—it had wobbled back and forth but stayed, generally, in the same general latitude, straddling the equator.

But now it had drifted noticeably, heading northward at a slow, but definite, pace. Already the northern edges of the island were edging towards the borders of the tropical zone. Enhancing the image in different spectra confirmed what Whips was now suspecting.

"We've moved into some kind of current," he said finally. "It's taking us north—not very fast, the currents here are going to be pretty slow given the depth of the ocean and other factors—but definitely north."

"Ahhh," Akira said. "And we know most animals on the islands are adapted to be able to evacuate the islands, move from one to another. It would be unsurprising to find that there are entire populations that move as landmasses enter other climatic areas. That is, our familiar flora and fauna may shift as we move."

"Or it may just leave," Campbell said, "meaning we'll be most of what's left here."

"I would tend to doubt that. As is said, nature abhors a vacuum, so a big empty landmass is a huge vacuum begging for new animals to fill it up. But either way we have to be ready for changes."

"Big ones, maybe. Wonder what would happen if we end up going far north? Think these trees will survive?"

"Hard to say," Akira admitted. "They have thus far seemed to be tropical in their type and behavior, but if they cannot move and such movements of islands are common, they must have some form of adaptation to such extremes."

"Either way, we should prepare for significant changes," Whips said, thinking about what he knew about different biomes and the challenges of survival in territory you didn't know. In this case, the island might suddenly become territory they didn't know.

"Damn," Campbell said with a slanted grin on his face. "This world's quirks keep throwing funny curveballs at us. Akira, how about the island continent itself? Is it going to be okay if things get colder?"

Akira didn't answer at once, and Whips recognized his expression: he was considering a whole host of possibilities at once and trying to get an answer out of them.

Campbell apparently recognized that expression too, because he didn't prod; just let Akira Kimei think.

At last, Akira nodded. "I think it should be fine. We have evidence that these islands persist for extremely long time-scales when left unmolested, and given the nature of wind, currents, tides and such, I cannot believe that these islands do not commonly wander across the globe. While the population of the island's top surface may well change, I suspect the core animals, including key symbionts, are well able to adapt to wide changes in temperature, some in salinity, and so on. They may reinforce areas prior to entering colder waters and then go dormant, but the drift patterns likely take them out of very inhospitable waters in reasonable time."

"What's 'reasonable time', though?"

"Hard to say. Caroline and I will have to work on that, see if we can get a model going now that we have more data on the whole planet. It's not out of the question, though, that we could spend a year or three in high latitudes before exiting them. I doubt we'd spend decades there, though."

"Why's that? Not that I want to spend decades up north, but why do you think we won't spend lots of time there?"

"I can answer that," Whips said, and the omni displayed the whole globe, rotating. "Take a look; most of our floating landmasses range from the equator through the subtropics; you don't see too many of them far north or far south."

"Huh. Currents?"

"It would have to be, I should think. Wind naturally will play a part, but the vast majority of these islands' mass and area is underwater." Akira tapped the side of his omni absently. "The physical topology underwater would ultimately guide a lot of the currents and their courses, but as that is tens of kilometers down we have no way of knowing what that topology is and modeling it, thus we're going to be discovering its effects, well, this way."

Sergeant Campbell studied the display for another moment, then nodded sharply. "Right. I'm with you two, we do need to prepare. Stockpile, in case some of our food sources dry up. Figure out heating options for our columns—we can stock up on firewood but since wood's the minority population in this forest, we don't want to overharvest. Have to watch that."

"Find a good way to ensure water sources, too," mused Akira. "We have no certainty that we'll have regular rainfall if we're in different latitudes. Weather patterns will undoubtedly be disrupted by something this large entering different climatological boundaries."

Whips was playing worst-case scenarios in his mind. "Can I make a suggestion?"

"Of course, Whips," Akira said.

"Well. . . I don't think there's any immediate danger of anything, but it occurs to me that if the worst does happen—I mean, maybe the island separates into chunks when it gets too cold, or island-eaters get it, or something—we should be ready to move. We'd all fit on board Emerald Maui, right?"

Sergeant Campbell looked at him with a bemused expression, then grinned. "Son, you are thinking with Murphy in mind, aren't you? I like it. Sure, those shuttles were meant to carry up to fifteen plus a pilot. Plenty of room for emergency evacuation and moving."

"And if we keep some of the equipment on the island, and some onboard, we'll have space onboard for survival supplies," Akira said. "Excellent thinking, Whips. I think you should take point on that project."

"Me?"

"Sure thing, son," Campbell said, still grinning. "The reward for thinking of more things that need to be done? That's you, getting more work!"

 

 

Chapter 16.

"I don't see anything," Xander whispered.

"To the right of that big white rock," Caroline said quietly.

Xander concentrated on the indicated area and his omni activated his retinal displays, causing the metamaterial lenses to realign and provide an effective ten times zoom. At the same time, it shifted the viewing spectrum slightly to take advantage of the dim light of Lincoln's night—mostly provided by one of the huge comets that currently stretched across a quarter of the sky.

Shadows lightened and Xander suddenly saw motion. "I think I see! One. . . two. . . um, about five?"

"I see six," Caroline said. "But the sixth is off to the side."

"Got him." The lone capy, a bit larger than the others, stood on a small rock, his forequarters raised up rather like those of a rat, sniffing the air. "Sentry, I bet."

Caroline nodded, then looked at him expectantly.

Xander called up the map overlay. "Yeah. . . they're almost to the edge of that rocky area that borders the swamp. If they keep going they'll have to trek right through the bogs, and from what you told me that's not safe."

"Not if the hillmouths are still there. And I think they are."

Xander remembered the briefing on the various dangers of the Kimei's continent; the hillmouths were semi-crocodilian ambush predators, massive things that could disguise themselves as small hillocks of marsh vegetation. A capy would barely make a decent meal for a small one.

On the other hand, the tree krakens apparently stayed in forested areas when they could, so it might be a case of trading one predatory threat for another. "But this is part of the same group?"

"Sure. Here, call up the reference patterns. See?"

"Hard to make out in this light. Um. . . oh, okay, yeah. Pattern matches on these three, that's for sure. So they're part of the herd you usually saw near your column area?"

"Yes. And now they're almost out of our walking range, and moving at night as well as day."

Xander grimaced. "Slow, but even if they only do a short distance every day they'll still be moving a long way in a few months. Guess your dad was right, they're migrating."

"Looks like it."

"Are we taking any more of them before they leave?"

Caroline pursed her lips and pushed her brown hair back as she studied the group. "We could use more supplies, but it's a long way back home from here. We'd have to clean the carcass quick then make the hike back, and there's nocturnal predators around we don't want to meet up with if we can avoid it."

And if we're carrying a lot of meat, a predator's going to smell it. "So no?"

"So I think we need to think hard about it. Dad hasn't seen any replacement species show up yet, but that's probably more a matter of months. There's still plenty of fish and other sea creatures around, but capy meat's one of the most nutritious things we've found on Lincoln, and it's pretty tasty too."

"No argument there!" Xander actually thought capy steak might be one of his favorite foods.

But his stomach wasn't the most rational decisionmaker; the real question was whether it made more sense to kill one and take the time and effort to dress the carcass and haul it home than to forego the opportunity but be able to return more quickly and safely.

"I'll leave it to you," Xander said finally. "You guys have lived here the longest."

"Thanks, drop it all on me," Caroline said, but the visible flash of white teeth showed she was smiling as she did so. After a few moments of silence, she sighed. "There's only six of them in that group, and I have no way of knowing how many of their herd's around. I think we'll have to let these guys go."

"Okay." He stared after the little herd, which was moving off into the shadows. "Just as well. I dunno about you, but I'm not sure I'd be able to make the shot from here, at night, even with my omni helping."

"Oh, I'm sure we could. I could do it with a bow if I had to."

"You've gotta be kidding me. They must be close to sixty, seventy meters off."

"I didn't say I'd want to do it," Caroline admitted, "but with a good bow like we have now, I'd try anything up to a hundred meters if I had to. Rather be a lot closer, though. If we were going to do it, we'd stalk the herd until we got closer—ideally about thirty meters or less."

"You think we could do that?"

She scanned the terrain and seemed to sniff the air. "Probably. I'd head down the hill, that way," she indicated where the ridge they were on curled slightly south-east, "which would keep us out of sight, and once we were at the bottom we'd be downwind, so we could work our way up to the next ridge and a better vantage. Maybe get into one of the trees."

She definitely knew what she was doing. No surprise—they'd told him that Caroline was one of their best hunters. Xander could tell he had a lot to learn. "You'll have to show me someday. But since we're not doing it tonight, maybe we should head back?"

A few quick flashes of light—meteors—illuminated her as she nodded. "Sure. We've found out what we wanted to know."

 

They made their way back through the darkened jungle carefully; Xander remembered Sakura recounting her terrifying run through this forest after her mother was hurt, and her heart-stopping encounter with a creature like a cross between a hunting cat and some kind of predatory beetle. It wasn't likely such a thing would come after them, though; there were two of them, adults, and armed.

That did trigger a thought. "Caroline, there's something that's been bothering me about this island."

"Yes?"

"Well. . . it definitely has a lot of life on it, of all different types, but somehow it seems to me—especially after all the scary stories you guys have told us—that there's, well, too many predators around. Are there really enough prey animals around to sustain all the things you've talked about—these tree krakens, hillmouths, that panther-insect thing that Sakura ran into, the," he gave a shudder, "raylamps?"

Caroline laughed softly. "You'd think not, wouldn't you?" she said. "Dad thought the same way, but it's not that simple, it turns out. The raylamps were actually the clue. There weren't that many of them, and then they just kept coming. They're opportunistic predators, but they're also scavengers, something like pretty dumb sharks. They were coming in to attack us from a long way around, probably out into the ocean nearby. We started keeping track of individual predators when we could, and you'd see a pattern of them coming in, and then leaving."

Light dawned. "Oh. You mean, their hunting grounds aren't all that limited. Because they're aquatic—well, amphibious."

"Right. They get to use the ocean to move around the continent better than they could on land, they can hunt (at least some of them can) in the water as well as on land, and they can even go to other nearby islands or other faraway parts of this floating continent, way far away from us."

"So you're saying that some weeks or months there's probably hardly any big predators around, and others there are way too many."

"Something like that. At least, it makes sense of what is, as you say, hard to explain."

They walked a bit farther in silence. "So. . ." he finally said, "how do you feel about staying here? I mean, if we're really marooned here for good?"

An indrawn breath and a pause answered him. He could see her profile, silvered by comet-light in the night, turn to him and then away. "Well, if we're really marooned for good, what does it matter what I feel about it?"

He grinned. "I suppose it doesn't make a difference to the world, but it still matters to how we think about it. Right?"

"Hmm. Yes." She was quiet a few moments. "I don't think I'd mind it too much, as long as things keep going pretty much as they are."

"How do you mean that?"

"I mean. . . well, recovering as much civilization as we can, building more of a sort of community than just surviving." Another flash of her smile in the dark. "I mean, we were proud as hell of discovering iron ore and making our own metal on this floating coral-continent, but having you guys come in with all your equipment and extra know-how? Boy, does that make a difference."

Xander hadn't gone through all that with them, but he could remember everyone's relief at knowing there was a real doctor available. "Yeah. Like. . . your family proved you could survive without anyone's help, if you had to. But you don't want to go back to having to."

"Right! That wouldn't be fun." Her voice was serious now. "It. . . almost broke us, once. I remember that. We hit a low point that really did feel like we were shattering into pieces. As Sakura said to me later, from outside it might have been almost silly; after all, human beings on Earth lived for generations without even as much as we were shipwrecked with."

Xander nodded. "But they hadn't lived their lives the way we do, so it's a lot harder on us to go back; we expect so much more as, um, just normal life."

"Something like that." She paused, glancing around.

"What is it?"

"Something was following us. But when I stopped and looked at it, it gave ground."

"Should we run it off, or what?" Xander squinted in the indicated direction; the omni's enhanced vision showed a faint infrared glow, but he couldn't really tell much about how big or what shape the creature was.

"Let's see if it follows us any farther," Caroline said. "It did back off when I looked at it; maybe letting it know we're aware will be enough to make it go elsewhere."

Continuing to walk with the knowledge that something might be following them gave Xander an itchily creepy feeling between his shoulderblades, but if Caroline could walk on as though nothing bothered her, so could he. "Is it still following?"

"A little longer." They went on for a few more seconds, then she nodded. "It's gone."

"You've got really good ears or something. My omni wasn't showing me much of anything."

"Good hearing and more practice. I'm still the best hunter here, and if you don't get good at listening and hearing in this jungle you'll end up dead."

"I'll have to practice more, then. We can't afford to lose any of us, that's for sure."

She was quiet for a while. He noticed her looking up often.

"What are you looking at?"

"The place where the Sun should be," she said.

For an instant he wondered what she was talking about—it was the beginning of Lincoln's extra-long night, so the sun wouldn't be up for a long time. "Oh. That's right, Sergeant Campbell said that Lincoln's star wasn't visible from Earth."

"Which seems really odd to me. Maybe a small nebula, at just the right distance, could be blocking the light without heating up and giving away the fact that there was a star behind it. . . but that seems really unlikely to me."

Xander thought about that. "Maybe unlikely, but what other explanation is there? Aliens like the Bemmies hid it somehow? Why? And if you were going to do that, wouldn't you try to hide it from all directions?"

"I . . . don't know. It just seems awfully unlikely to have happened by accident."

"True," Xander conceded, "and we do have proof there were ancient alien civilizations, but even so. . . everything in life's pretty unlikely, right? You and me having this conversation, for instance; means that all the factors in the universe came together to have me—and not all my parents' other possible kids—be born, the same thing happen for you, both of us to end up on the same colony ship on the same trip, both of us to be on separate shuttles that somehow survived and made it here. . . right?"

Her laugh had a faint embarrassed air to it. "Yes. And the fact that our Earth has a moon that's just the right size and distance from it to provide a perfect eclipse is pretty unlikely too. Your point; the fact that something's unlikely isn't a great argument. But I would like to know what it is that's blocking that light. I'd really like to know."

"If we're ever rescued, I'll bet we'll have a chance to find out," he said. "But we didn't bring any astronomy gear with us, so I guess we're stuck not knowing as long as we're here."

"Unless," she said slowly, "it does have something to do with Lincoln itself."

He looked at her; in the dimness he almost missed the slight turning-up of her lips. "Stop that! You're trying to creep me out."

"Maybe just a little," she said, and laughed.

A distant spark of light caught his eye, a momentary flicker as it became visible then hidden behind the trees. "There's Sherwood Column," he said.

"Oh, good, we're almost home!" He saw her touch her omni. "Hi, Mom? Yes, we're not too far out now. What? Oh, goody. See you!"

He found himself walking faster, trying to keep up with her. "Hey, what's the rush?"

"Mom says there's dinner waiting for us—plus some hedral-and-vineberry pie!"

That sounded delicious. He started jogging. "First one there gets the bigger slice!"

"What are you, six?" she demanded, but she was laughing. And then she was sprinting ahead of him, her omni's vision letting her avoid obstacles as though it were daylight.

"Hey!" Xander took off after her, laughing himself.