Solbidyum Wars Saga 5: Desolation (11 page)

Four large tubes ran along the hull fore and aft, two near the top of the hull and two near the bottom.  Above the top set of longitudinal tubes, two tubes ran across the ship, one set near the bow and the other near the stern.  This pattern was repeated below the bottom longitudinal tubes.  The hull of the ship seemed to wrap  itself around these tubes so only the open ends of the tubes could be seen.  As I observed this ship, I could see mirage fighters and other ships flying out of the tubes on one side and into the tubes from the other side; I realized that these were hangar areas and flight decks for the many ships aboard this space version of an aircraft carrier.  On the underside of the ship between the network of launch tubes I noticed a large open hangar bay that only extended part way into the ship, where Frigates and Corvettes were docked.  I watched the ship move away from me toward three points of light and just when it seemed to be centered between them, it instantly vanished, and I woke.

I immediately realized that this was the type of war ship the Federation needed.  While the huge star ships of the Federation served as carriers and war ships, they also had become more like luxury liners and though they carried hundreds of patrol ships and fighters, they were limited in their ability to launch and retrieve them quickly.  The design in my dream would allow the continuous launching and retrieval of ships in a combat situation with no delays.   As for the three points of light and the vanishing ship, I had a pretty good idea what that was, and I made a mental note to get with A’Lappe as soon as we were rescued.   While I was mulling over the ship in my dreams, Kala entered, “I thought you were going to check out the nightlife outside.”

“I am, as soon as the sun sets.”  I answered.

“Tibby the sun set over an hour ago.  Have you been sleeping?”

“Aww, I guess I was.”  I said as I turned on the vid screen and tuned to the signal of the monitor outside.  At first, everything appeared dark until I set the light sensing level to bring the images into view, as though they were in day light.  The first thing I noticed was how many Sisoma trees now appeared around the valley. It seemed like a forest of them had sprung up in the past several days, and I began to wonder if there were all newly produced trees or if these trees had migrated into the area from some other place.  I still call them trees, even though I knew now that they were actually animals, or rather a collection of animals.  The trunk or host animal had a symbiotic relationship with the budlike leaf animals that lived on it.  It sucked up water from the ground that it moved up its stalk-like body and delivered it to the leaf animals.  In turn, the leaf animals filtered pollens, insects and airborne nutrients in the dust that they converted into food, which they digested and produced wastes which benefited the stalk plant.  How the buds and stalks found each other and became attached was a mystery the scientists who had studied the planet before had never figured out.   As I looked, I could see the ball-like bat creatures flying around and swooping down from time to time, trying to grab one of the leaf creatures while it was exposed. Most of the time the leaf creatures sensed the attacking ball/bat creature and rapidly retreated into their shells; those that didn’t make it in time were quickly ripped from their shells and eaten.   I was so absorbed in inspecting the Sisoma trees that I nearly missed seeing a muralam moving stealthily about the base of the Sisomas, digging in the sand around their roots.   I would see it pick something up and place it in its mouth, sometime eating what it discovered and other times spitting it out.

“What do you think it is finding?”  Kala asked.

“I have no idea, some sort of seed or small animal, I suppose.”

All of a sudden, the muralam sat up and looked about, its ears twitching and turning as it did.  I could also see that it was sniffing the air.  Then, abruptly it dropped to all fours and took off running away from the area.  It only took a minute to see what had caused its rapid departure, a larger creature, nearer the size of an Earth tiger came bounding across the desert heading in the direction the muralam had gone.  As it got closer to the vid sensor, I noticed that while it appeared to have a mammal-like shape and movement, it also looked like it had scales.  Its overall body color was a light tan, but it had dark black stripes that were thinner than those of a tiger and fewer in number than a tiger would have.   The head was massive and looked like a cross between a cat and a wolf.  Its ears were larger than one would expect for its head and were long and pointed and stood erect at the side of the head and seemed to rotate to focus in on sounds.

Kala gasped and said, “I don’t remember seeing anything like that on the vids of this planet.”

“Neither do I, I have a hunch though that the tracks I saw earlier were made by a creature like this.  It doesn't look too friendly.”  I had barely gotten the words out of my mouth than the creature stiffened and sniffed the air as it raised its head peering off in the direction the muralam had run, and then it took off in a burst of speed.  In the distance, the muralam apparently had spotted its tracker, and it now was running away hastily.  While the smaller creature was more agile in making turns, dodging and weaving, than its pursuer, there was no doubt that the greater creature was faster.  Just as I thought the larger animal was about to catch its prey, but then the muralam precipitously dropped from sight.

“What the…?”  I exclaimed, and then I realized that the place where the muralam seemed to have vanished was at the edge of the canyon.  “It must have jumped over the edge.”   I watched as the tiger sized creature came to an abrupt halt at the precipice edge and peered over the side.  It stood there a while gazing down into the canyon before turning and retracing its tracks back toward the ship.  It walked right up to the vid sensor and sniffed around the base of the unit and my tracks in the sand, and then it looked in the direction of the ship. 

“What’s it doing?”  Kala asked.

“I think it’s trying to figure out what my scent is.  We’re probably as new to this thing as it is to us.  I just wonder if it has seen us and been observing us or its just now discovering us.  As I said this, the animal sat up on its haunches, and sniffed at the vid unit, providing me a terrifying view of its head.  This was not an herbivore by any means.  It had teeth that reminded me of a cross between a killer whale and a shark, both creatures of my home planet.  I also noticed that it had large, flat molar-like teeth about half of the way back its long jaws, and I imagined that these were easily capable of crushing bones.    The creature backed away from the vid sensor and moved off toward the ship, its head swinging and looking from side to side as it walked.

“Tibby, I don’t want you leaving the ship without a weapon.  I don’t think that animal is very friendly.”  Kala said with a concerned tone.

“I’m inclined to agree with you,” I answered.

As we watched, the animal followed my tracks right up to the hatch at the side of the ship.  It sniffed around on the ground and the side of the ship, then it did something that made my jaw drop.  It crouched down and leapt a good three meters through the air and up onto the curved hull of the ship.  “Wow,” I exclaimed, “I never would have thought that it could leap that far.   I’m definitely going to need to maintain distance between me and it, if I ever encounter it in person.”

“I would prefer you never encounter it, Tibby.”  Kala said in a worried tone.

The animal walked down the length of the hull pausing to sniff here and there and at one place, it pawed the hull like it was trying to scratch it.   “It looks like it’s trying to figure out what the ship is,” Kala observed.

“Yes, it’s definitely showing some signs of intelligence beyond that of most animals.”

Kala said, “It reminds me of a creature from scary stories my dad used to tell Lunnie and me when we were kids.   He called a woewe, and he used to tell us it ate small girls.  My mother used to get really angry with him when he told us these stories, as Lunnie would always get scared and wouldn’t sleep all night.”

“Do woewes really exist?”  I asked.

“No, I don’t think so.  Mom always said there was no such thing and that dad just made them up to scare us.”

“Well now, they do exist because from this day forwards that is what we will call this beast, a woewe."

After sniffing about some more, the woewe jumped down from the ship and ran off in the direction of the gully where I had seen its tracks the day before.  I finally lost sight of it when the ship blocked its view.  About an hour later, after watching some of the bat-like animals feeding on the Sisoma trees, I observed a couple of small animals that reminded me of armadillos back on Earth, only these animals didn’t have any tails, and their noses were longer and articulated like an elephant’s trunk.  They possessed feet with long claws, and I could see them digging with their feet and prodding around with their trunks, under and around rocks.  They also prodded at the
r
oots of the Sisoma trees.  While I assume they were foraging for food, I never saw them actually eat anything, if they did find something.  I also saw a few of the trilobite type creatures moving about through the sand.  One was particularly close to the vid sensor when a muralam came rushing into view carrying a small club that he used to hit the animal.  The shell cracked and immediately the muralam rolled the animal over and whacked it again, then it began picking the meat out of the shell and eating it while it looked about, obviously watching out for predators.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” I said to Kala.  “During the day everything out there appears to be dead and lifeless, but once the sun sets things come to life, just the opposite from most other worlds.”

“There are a number of nocturnal worlds throughout the galaxy,” Kala responded.  “Most of them are mining worlds where the sun is too hot or the radiation too high during the days for exposure, but once the sun has set it's possible to move about and accomplish things outside. Granted, they are not the norm, but they are not that rare, either.”

“I guess that makes sense, it’s just one of those things I never really thought about.”

From back in the ship we could hear the sounds of a crying duet.  “Sounds like its feeding time again.  I swear, Tibby, your children want to eat all the time.  I’m glad we have a food synthesizer, because I don’t think I could produce enough milk to satisfy those two.”

After Kala left the control room, I sat watching the events outside for a few hours more before I found myself nodding, and I decided to get some sleep.

The next morning when I went outside, armed this time, I found the desert looking as dead and barren as always.  I located the dried empty shell of the trilobite animal that the muralam had killed and eaten the night before.  There were a few small insect sized life forms scouring the last few morsels of flesh from the shell when I turned it over.  Once exposed in the light, they quickly scurried away and buried themselves under the sand.   After they were gone, I looked at the shell more closely.  During my time in the Navy back on Earth, I was stationed in Norfolk Virginia for a period.  While there I had seen a number of horseshoe crabs that had washed up on the beaches.  These animals on Desolation reminded me of those horseshoe crabs, inasmuch as the shells were alike and had the same thin quality an appearance.  Even the legs, or rather what was left of them, as the muralam had cracked and sucked the meat out of them, appeared to be very similar.  However, unlike horseshoe crabs of Earth, these animals seemed to be able to live on land.

I looked around the area and was surprised to see that even though there had been numerous animals moving about, there was almost no sign of tracks this morning; even my tracks in the sand from the day before were gone.  As I watched I could see my tracks from this morning disappearing, only in places where there was some dampness to the sand did the tracks remain.  I took a small handful of sand and looked at it closely, and I realized why.  Most sand that I had seen back on Earth had rough edges on it, but these grains of sand were rounded on the edges, meaning they would collapse easily and not hold the shapes of tracks for long, especially if dry.  I had been able to track the woewe the day before because the sand was still damp from the earlier storms, but now the sands were rapidly drying out.  I wondered just how often rains fell on this planet.

I walked over to the edge of the narrow canyon where the muralam had vanished the night before and looked over the edge.  Just about a meter below the edge I noticed a small ledge sticking out that ran down a slope of the cliff face leading lower into the canyon.   It was only about 300 millimeters wide, not big enough for the woewe but certainly ample for the muralam to have escaped safely.  I wondered if the woewe had gone down through the gully I had discovered the prior day and into the canyon to find the muralam, or even if it was intelligent enough to realize that by going that route it would take it to where the muralam would reach the canyon floor.  Somehow I suspected the woewe fully understood where the muralam was going and how to get there.  It was possible that the muralam didn’t descend all the way to the canyon floor.  Probably there were small caves or holes in the canyon walls where the muralam was hiding or even lived.  Certainly that would make sense.  It would provide protection from predators like the woewe and would shelter against the frequent solar flares, as well as moderate rains and flooding.  Though, a storm like the one a few days earlier would have required seeking higher ground.  If the muralam did live in caves or holes in the cliff face, how did they survive the flooding of the day before and just where did they go?