Uncharted Territory

Expedition 184: Day 4

In the morning he was gone. It was raining really hard, and the wind had started to blow. There was a stream running through the middle of the overhang and pooling at the back. The foot of Ev’s bedroll was already wet.

It was a lot colder, and I figured Carson had gone after firewood, but when I went outside his pony was gone.

I climbed up to the Wall to look for Bult. He wasn’t in any of the chambers. I went back down to the pool.

He wasn’t there, and the pool wasn’t either. Water was pouring everywhere over the rocks, white with gypsum. The ponypile Ev had crouched on was completely covered.

I climbed back up to the Wall and followed it over the ridge. Bult was at the top, looking south toward what you could see of the Ponypiles, which wasn’t much, the clouds were so low.

“Where’s Carson?” I shouted over the rain.

He looked west and then down at the oil field we’d crossed yesterday. “Dan nah,” he said.

“He took one of the ponies,” I shouted. “Which way did he go?”

“Nah see liv,” he said. “Nah gootbye.”

“He didn’t say good-bye to anybody,” I said. “We’ve got to find him. You go up along the ridge, and I’ll check the way we came up.”

But the way we came up was flowing with water, too, and too slick for a pony to have gotten down, and when I went up to the overhang to get Ev, the whole back half was underwater and Ev was piling everything on a damp ledge.

“We’ve got to move the equipment,” he said when he saw me. “Where’s Carson?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I found another overhang higher up, not as deep and tilted up toward the back, and we carried the transmitter and the cameras up. When I went down for the rest of the equipment, I found Carson’s log. And his mike.

Bult came back, sopping wet. “Nah fine,” he said.

And apparently he doesn’t want to be found, I thought, turning the mike over in my hands.

“That overhang isn’t going to work,” Ev said. “There’s water spilling down the side.”

We moved the equipment again, into a carved-out hollow away from the stream. It was deep, and the bottom was dry, but by afternoon there was a river running past it, spilling down catty-corner from the ridge, and by morning we’d be cut off from the ponies. And any way out if the water rose.

I went looking again. Water was pouring from both overhangs we’d been in, and there was no way we could get to the other side of the stream, even without tssi mitss. I climbed up onto the ridge. It was high enough, but we’d never last out here in the open. I tried not to think about Carson, out in this somewhere with nothing but his bedroll. And no mike.

A shuttlewren dived at my head and around to the Wall again. “Better get in out of this,” I said.

I went back down to the hollow and got Ev and Bult. “Come on,” I said, picking up the transmitter. “We’re moving.” I led them up to the ridge and over to the Wall. “In here,” I said.

“I thought this was against the regs,” Ev said, stepping over the rounded bottom of the door.

“So’s everything else,” I said. “Including drowning and polluting the waterways with our bodies.”

Bult stepped over the door and set his equipment down, and got out his log. “Trespassing on Boohteri property,” he said into it.

It took us four trips to get everything up, and then we still had the ponies, which were all lying in a waterlogged pile and wouldn’t get up. We had to push them up through the rocks, protesting all the way. It was dark before we got them to the Wall.

“We aren’t going to put them in the same chamber with us, are we?” Ev said hopefully, but Bult was already lifting them over the door, paw by paw.

“Maybe we could knock out a door between this passage and the next one,” Ev said.

“Destruction of Boohteri property,” Bult said, and got out his log.

“At least with the ponies we’ll have something to eat,” I said.

“Destruction of alien life-form,” Bult said into his log.

Destruction of alien life-form. I should get busy on those reports.

“Where was Carson going?” Ev said, as if he’d just remembered he was missing.

“I don’t know,” I said, looking out at the rain.

“Carson would’ve waded right in when he saw that thing and killed it,” Ev said.

Yeah, I thought, he would have. And then yelled at me for not running an f-and-f check.

“They would have done a pop-up about it,” he said, and I thought, Yeah, and I know what that would have looked like. Old Tight Pants without her pants yelling, “Help, help!” and a fish with false teeth lunging up out of the water, and Carson splashing in with a laser and blasting it to hell.

“I told you to get out of the water, and you did,” I said. “I would’ve jumped out myself if I hadn’t been so far out.”

“Carson wouldn’t have,” he said. “He would have come to get you.”

I looked out at the darkness and the rain. “Yeah,” I said. He would have. If he’d known where I was.