EARTH 2.0: PRISON PLANET
By William Crow JohnsoniUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 William Brian Johnson
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4759-4018-3 Chapter One
September, 2442 Transported
Alexander Khan came aware in a howling blizzard. Driving snow billowed before him like the veils of a dream. Bitter wind lashed his skin, and he realized he was standing naked in thigh-deep snow. He did not know how he had suddenly come to be here. He shook his head to remember, but it wouldn't come.
Commando training kicked in. He turned his back to the wind and cupped his hands between his legs for warmth while he surveyed his environment. Blinding snow stretched away in front to a far suggestion of mountains. A kilometer or two to the right loomed a tree line. To the left and behind, the horizon fell away. No trace remained in the snow of how he had arrived. The overcast sky had a pinkish tinge, suggesting a red-giant sun. Or a large, Martian-like iron-oxide desert somewhere on the planet.
The planet. Yes. It was coming back. The trial. The sentence.
Too numb to be sure, he pulled a foot out of the snow and checked. No boots. No clothes, and no knife strapped to his waist. Urban myth was wrong. Nothing. He permitted himself one sardonic smile. Transported. Earth Central Government had replaced execution three hundred years ago with the more humane banishment to Prison Planet. In practice, lower-level bureaucrats had dumped him naked in a blizzard to die.
In the cold gale, he had thirty to forty minutes before he froze. And it seemed to be getting darker by the second. He shook his head again to clear the cobwebs and took an experimental step. The snow was uniformly deep. It wasn't going to get easier the farther he went. But at least there was grass under the snow instead of rocks. And the snow was dry powder. Could have been worse.
He made for the tree line. There was a chance there of finding or building shelter. He strode quickly, rhythmically, almost a run, counting on his body generating heat from fighting the deep snow to counterbalance the cold. He did not run for fear of damaging his numb feet on sharp rocks under the snow. Even with the strenuous activity, the wind sucked the warmth out of him fast.
The tree line turned out to be 1232 strides away. Roughly a kilometer. It guarded a declivity sixty or seventy meters deep and was mainly leafless deciduous trees. But usefully, there were some firs similar to white pine, with long, soft needles.
He was sweating slightly under the arms from the exercise, but the rest of his body was growing numb. He could not decrease his activity level or he would freeze. He immediately began stripping off small pine boughs, shaking off the snow, and piling them up under a large pine with a bed of pine straw beneath it. The tree itself was heavy with snow but bare beneath.
When he had a pile roughly waist high, he took a couple of deadfall branches and plunged back into the snow. He used the branches to uncover the heavy grass beneath, a patch roughly four meters square. Then he began pulling large tufts, shaking them free of snow, and piling them beside his pile of pine boughs. After a couple more such squares, he had a pile of dry grass roughly half a meter deep and a meter and a half wide.
He was starting to shake uncontrollably. Without further delay, and with only an occasional wary glance down into the cut to look for predators, he made a bed against the trunk of the pine tree. First he heaped up pine needles fifteen or twenty centimeters deep. Then he laid pine boughs over them to keep them in place, followed by dried grass to lie on. Finally, he lay down on this bed and covered himself first with dried grass. Then as a last step, he pulled the rest of the pine boughs over him to hold the grass in place and to insulate himself from the cold air.
It wasn't comfortable, but within ten or fifteen minutes he was much warmer. He wouldn't freeze to death for at least the next few hours, and he would have time to think. And now that he was warmer, his brain was on fire.
No longer was he Major Alexander Khan of the galactic-arm-ranging Internal Movement Control, but Alexander Khan, criminal. No longer Alexander Khan, scion and board member of Khan International, mission-driven developer of freedom technology, but Alexander Khan, pauper. And no longer son of a vital, living Lucian Khan, but son of a man brutally murdered by an ECG operative.
The memory wipe started immediately after the sentence – Prison Planet – so he couldn't remember how he had been brought here. But he did remember the courtroom reading of his crimes: Distribution of Contraband Technology, Conspiracy to Destroy Harmony, Failure to Condemn Wrong Views, Failure to Initiate Positive Statements, etc., etc. And of course, there was that other charge that would have put him here by itself alone.
ECG controlled and tracked all interstellar missions, and had kept Prison Planet's location secret for 300 years. Even he as an officer in Internal Movement Control hadn't known where it was, or whether it truly existed. But people had always whispered of it, and urban myth provided details: 10,000 transported per year, tech development prevented by laser satellites, ECG operatives never went to the surface of the planet, just dumped prisoners, and no one knew if transportees survived or not. And here he was.
So the goals of his life – fully avenge his father's death, and set the people of Earth free from its bonds – no longer looked reachable. Even survival looked uncertain. But in his mind he heard the voice of Pierre, his childhood tutor in all things from Latin to martial arts: "Every environment has in it the tools for survival. You just have to recognize them." He would have to recognize them on his own, though, because there was no UAI on this planet. The dead link to his implant was like a black hole in his brain.
Warmer now and tired from his efforts, he grew drowsy. His mind began to run down. He resisted awhile, then gave in to sleep. He hoped it wasn't the deceptive warmth and inviting sleep of those who are freezing to death.
* * *
He awoke to a terrifying roar. Surrounded by darkness, he took a moment to realize where he was. – In survival mode, he remembered quickly. And his feet were freezing because in his sleep he had thrust them out of his carefully arranged cover. But the rest of him was warm and almost certainly generating scent. Whatever had roared sounded big enough to consider him food.
A twig snapped maybe twenty meters below in the cut. Then silence. The wind had subsided, but there was no starlight. His eyes had not yet adjusted. He could barely see.
He didn't even have a sharp stick. Suddenly he could hear quiet breathing no more than five meters away, slightly downslope. He strained to see. A massive dark shape crouched up toward him along the slope. It was two meters long and massed at least three hundred kilos. No physical details were visible, but he didn't need any. It clearly intended him as dinner. Soon. There was no reason for stealth and no more time.
Reaching down through the pine needles, he grabbed the hard object that had been sticking him in the back. It was a limestone shard twice the length of his fist. He pulled it from the soil and found one end sharper than the other. Better than nothing.
He slipped into the genetically enhanced intuitive zone he always entered when his life was in danger. His heart sped up. Time slowed to a standstill. He rose from his warm bed and faced the beast. The tree trunk was on his right, his bed to his left, and the beast in front.
The beast did not charge. It raised the front of its body from a crouch into a challenge posture, but kept its forelegs on the ground. It roared again, showing white fangs the size of commando-knife blades. Khan caught a glimpse of eyes. With no sudden moves, he crossed ever so slowly in front of the tree trunk while the beast watched, ready to spring, perhaps waiting for him to roar back. Then he abruptly moved on around the tree, out of the predator's sight. Behind the tree, he heard the animal give a low rumble, moving to intercept him when he came clear around the tree.
He counted, thousand one, thousand two, thousand three. Then, gripping the rock like death in his right hand, he leapt back out the way he had come, and charged the beast's left side, bellowing like a bull. As hoped, the beast was surprised, and hesitated for a split second. He jammed the point of the rock down into what he hoped was the creature's left eye, then quickly again where he thought the right eye should be, then the nose. Blood spurted onto his hand.
The beast screamed a loud falsetto shriek that belied its size and grabbed him with two small but strong arms and hands that unfolded from under its massive head. Feeding arms, he thought with a shudder, as they pulled him to within inches of the terrifying teeth.
His arm windmilled, striking over and over, hammering once each what he thought were ears, then actually breaking one of the fangs. Then the other fang sank through his left triceps and it was his turn to scream. He felt his bladder void.
The animal sensed now that it had him and began backing up, dragging him downhill. It was going to drag him back to its den and eat him there, he realized. The pain in his arm filled the whole left side of his body like molten lava, and because he was being dragged face down, the pain in his groin from being dragged over rocks and bushes was like a fury of knives. He was weakening, and for a brief moment was tempted by despair. But he still had the rock, and he could still use his right arm. Straining up, he jammed the rock into what he believed to be the beast's left ear hole. Then again. Again. Again. The beast gave him the predator's killing shake, but it didn't kill him because it had only his arm. It did, however, rip the fang through the muscle on the back of his arm and set him free. He sprang to his feet. At this point, they were on a steep part of the slope facing a drop-off if they continued downhill.
Traversing the edge of the drop-off was a dimly visible game trail, apparently the beast's objective. To Khan's right was a pin-oak-like tree, with many dead branches three to six centimeters in diameter. Familiar with such trees from the family's forest operations, he grabbed a branch and broke it off. It was dense, hard wood, and the break was sharp. He jammed the break into the same ear hole he had been working on. Then again, and again, and again. Finally the branch sank ten centimeters into the animal's brain, and the beast settled onto the ground like a balloon losing air. Then because it had backed too far during the final fight, it slipped over the edge of the cliff and fell. There was a two-second silence, then a crash from far below. Thirty meters, he calculated. Good enough to finish the beast off, since gravity felt close to normal, perhaps a bit light.
He now had two priorities: bind his arm so as to lose as little blood and function as possible, and find and butcher the beast. It was food and clothing. But first he had to quiet the uncontrollable shaking, from cold or adrenaline, it didn't matter.
He returned to the top of the slope and crouched in his bed for a few minutes to warm up. He took some grass fibers from the bed and used these to bind his wound. The pain had subsided slightly, but the wound hurt unbelievably when he cinched it up and tied it. He worried that he might go into shock, so he needed to keep moving.
There was no possibility of waiting until morning to skin the beast. The corpse would quickly attract carrion eaters and perhaps more dangerous predators. He had to find it first and somehow get the hide off and get a few pounds of meat, all in the dark. He had field-dressed and butchered his share of deer and wild boar on youthful hunts, but he had always had good knives, cleavers, and saws. He had to find some sharp stones. There was no time to search for chert and flint-knap himself a knife blade or two. He would have to make do with what he could find.
The height and peaked nature of the mountains in the distance had suggested a granitic/basaltic geology, but he sensed that the plateau-like area he was on had a limestone substrate. He couldn't see well enough, but was pretty sure some of the pain of being dragged downhill had been edges of limestone outcroppings. –Which suggested that the stream that was likely at the bottom of the cut had limestone outcroppings and shards.
He found the stream before the carcass. It still flowed, which suggested that the bitter cold was recent, maybe temporary. The stream bed was indeed limestone, and more luckily, had shale shelved between the layers. He selected as many sharp shale and limestone wafers as he could carry and went looking for the carcass.
The beast lay in a twisted heap about five meters upslope from the creek. A coyote-like creature was easily shooed away to a distance of twenty meters, where it sat on its haunches to watch. Khan went to work with his right hand, using his left hand only to hold. Soon the arm was numb and aching, and he wondered about deadly infection. Had he done enough to clean and dress the wound? He could wash it in the stream, but he wasn't sure about the water. On second thought, the teeth of any carnivore probably carried more harmful bacteria than a snow-melt mountain stream, so he decided to gamble. He took a few minutes to untie his grass-fiber bandage, kneel streamside, and wash the wound in the clear, cold water. The washing and the rebinding hurt astonishingly, but he gritted his teeth and refused to let it slow him. He went to back to work with the shale wafers. The sky was beginning to lighten, and he could see his work better. The water looked clean.
Had the animal been a deer back on one of the family estates, he would have field-dressed it, cutting it open from breast bone to pelvis and removing all entrails. Then he would have hauled it to a place more convenient for butchering and freezing. In this case, all he wanted was the skin and a few pounds of meat. So, tempting as it was to cut open the gut and thrust his icy hands and feet into the animal's warm blood, he didn't want to contaminate any cuts with whatever was living in the animal's system. He simply started at the neck to skin it. It was slow work because the shale wafers weren't very sharp and crumbled easily. However, they held their edge reasonably well, so if he found a good one, he stuck with it.
In an hour he had the skin off and a couple of kilos of strong-smelling meat tied in a piece of skin. It was cold, nasty work, but at least the wind didn't reach into the cut. Thin vines hanging from bare tree tops worked well as twine for tying bundles, though they were impossible to break and tough to cut.
Shelter was the next priority. The bed under the pine tree was too exposed. He needed a place where he could at least get his back to a wall. If a whole pack of the coyote-like creatures were to surround him in the dark under the pine tree, he wouldn't stand a chance. And of course, warmth was a pressing priority. His hands were in good shape because they had been busy, but his ears, knees, feet and privates were numb. He wasn't sure he'd ever have the chance to use the latter again, but he would certainly need the former. He couldn't afford frostbite. He needed a place where he could hunker down and not lose body heat.
The stair-stepped limestone shelves in the creek bottom suggested the possibility of a cave or a hollow in the side of the cut if he went downstream. Indeed, he found a two-meter deep hollow on a nice shelf a hundred meters downslope. The coyote had padded softly behind him, keeping its distance. Now it sat down at the edge of the shelf, looking more curious than dangerous. He tossed it a piece of meat, which it rose and snapped out of the air with skill. Then it sat back down on its haunches, licked its chops and looked to him for more.
"Forget it," he said. The sound of his voice surprised him. He realized he might never need it again. He assumed if there were survivors from other transportings, they would be few and far between. Even if three million prisoners really had been transported over three centuries, they could be spread over the entire planet. He might search for the rest of his life and not find anyone. And of course, there was the very valid question: did he want to find them? Not all would have been political prisoners. Some would have been murderers, kidnappers, anarchists, terrorists, rapists and thieves. Those probably hadn't changed their ways on this new planet, if they had survived. No, the best course was to survive on his own awhile, get good at it, and then begin carefully to explore.
He threw an end of twine-like vine over a scraggly tree that thrust out at an angle from the stone wall above his hollow. Then he pulled up his bundle of meat so an animal would have to jump nearly three meters to get it. The coyote-like creature gave him a reproachful look. "Sorry, I'm not your meal ticket," he said. "I'm not your meal, either, in case you're a lot tougher than you look." Then he took the skin and went in search of more pine needles and boughs.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from EARTH 2.0: PRISON PLANETby William Crow Johnson Copyright © 2012 by William Brian Johnson. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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