Nano Writing Month, 2017.25

[mc776]

Every day, write some bit of fiction. Preferably over 50 words, but there will be no standard beyond "something". Posting is entirely optional.

Finkelstein picked up a husk and blinked. "These are tree moults."

It finally clicked. All day we had been seeing these decaying husks of brittle bark-like material, overgrown with some kind of fungus crawling with tiny ants. (After a few planets you stop trying so hard with the strict taxonomy.) They had seemed related to the trees, but we couldn't put a finger on just why they seemed so familiar.

The trees themselves were covered in thin, bendy, incredibly slippery, chewy-looking green or purple needles, length and colour depending on the species. The twigs these needles sprouted from were much rougher, not quite brittle but definitely breakable if you tried hard enough, some greyish pinkish purple that ranged from tongue-coloured to almost black. They were segmented regularly all the way down to the branches, which curved slowly and eerily consistently until they reached what looked like a skeletal joint, then continued again alternating between curves and joints, getting bigger and bigger until they got to a central, flower-like trunk.

Except now with the "M" word stuck in my head, that middle section all the branches were coming from no longer looked like a flower at all. "I could totally go for some Alaskan king crab right now."

"Wonder why they call them that when they're all native to Mars?"

It's not often that Finkelstein doesn't know something that I do. "Actually, they were native to Alaska way way back in the day! Crazy to imagine now, but Earth used to have its own large arthropods!"

"Oh yeah, I remember reading about those! They had these hundred-year-old lobsters as big as a dog..."

"Guys," said Gunnerbot in his normal speaking voice, "I don't think the captain appreciates us making this racket while she's trying to be all sneaky."

"As you are, you three," whispered the captain in our earpieces. "I've been proceeding on the basis that you'd be drawing all the attention with your chatter and noise. Whether it's him or them, we won't ever be able to sneak past anyone but the more they think you're all there is the better I can blindside them. Just keep an eye on that motion sensor!"

Which brings us to the most disturbing finding so far in the forest: we had seen none of the expected "attention" at all. We could only assume they had eaten all the megafauna, so not running into any wild animals was no surprise, but where were they? Come to think of it, things had already quieted down significantly by the time we were planning: assuming an even distribution of them we would have expected at least a couple to have wandered over to our base randomly, but the base team was reporting exactly zero hostile activity since we left at dawn five hours ago.

In fact, we hadn't seen or heard a live one of them this entire day, nor seen one the night before.

Based on Ai's information and footage from the Phlogistroni we had narrowed it down to the following possibilities:

1. Jean was using his power, or rather the power of the alien rod he was trapped in, to lead them away from us.
2. Guillaume was using the rod's power, bypassing Jean entirely, to amass an army to attack us.

Neither of these, however, could explain another phenomenon. After we had secured our base late in the evening we began to hear their howling from somewhere deep into the forest: but this was nothing like the aggravating cacophony that we encountered in the city. One voice bellowed out, then many seconds of silence, followed by another. The pattern repeated, and it became apparent that there were two of them, one responding to another. This went on a few times, and then a third voice, and a fourth, and they began to overlap, and soon all the forest was a great polyphonous assemblage of howls. The harmonies were ugly and dissonant in my ears, but I felt nothing of the raging emotional noise that had hit me back in the city every time those ones vocalized. It sounded like something was missing, like another voice should have been there but now something else had to fill in for it, and something better that could have been was lost.

I lay in bed thinking about Gunnerbot's concerns after we had first landed. That got me thinking about E.E. for some reason (who would never have had any moral qualms of this sort), and what Orgoth must've been going through whenever Gunnerbot said anything that reminded him how different he was from her.

I thought about my own strained relationship with my father. That whole deal with my boyfriend at the time, the shouting matches, the nights I lay in bed helplessly listening to my mother cry herself to sleep in the other room, the time I've yet to forgive him for when he outed me to Sergeant A'Thaz and nearly got me disqualified from the Corps, when after that all cleared up I was leaving for basic training on Charon Prime, when I ripped my baptismal cross off my neck and threw it in his face, ... only to find it again years later when they were taking the body away and the nurse handed it to me, wrapped in a small, yellowed square of paper, on which was written in the shaky handwriting of a half-blind old man in a language no one at the hospital spoke:

FOR MY DEAREST SON - WHENEVER HE MAY RETURN.

The howls were still going by the time I fell asleep. When the following morning we set out and I found I could still look Gunnerbot and Finkelstein in the eye, I started to wonder if there was something wrong with me.