Minnie setup a drying rack to preserve what they hadn’t eaten. Bunny jerky would soon join their expanding diet.
As they fell asleep, cave entrance moaning with the wind, Minnie told John she still planned to track down Ish. Bring her back if she found her alive. John didn’t argue. He even suggested a method of pinpointing Ish’s skimmer even if it was completely shut down.
The next day would see no search expedition. The storm had arrived.
Neither had appreciated the power of Epsy’s major storms. Viewed from above and through sensors, sure, many were stronger than Earth hurricanes, but to experience one first hand for forty straight hours, Minnie and John shared a new respect for Epsy’s resilient inhabitants.
On the second night, after eating, John put on his earnest face. “How you doing up here?” He tapped the side of his head. “Almost three weeks.”
Minnie looked to her eyebrows, as if conducting a visual inspection. “Looking good!” No amusement in John’s expression. She exhaled. “Honest, not even a hint. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, as each day passed. Maybe my broke got fixed in the metabed on the way here. Or what if every year that went by on meds—years without a single episode—just gave the crazy glands time to heal? Nature tends to fix itself when given time.”
“You know it doesn’t work that way. What if the neurotoxins from the cave were keeping you in check? Just delaying. You might be on the verge.”
Minnie shrugged. “Could be. Or I’m cured. Time will tell. Leave it, okay? I’ll let you know if anything even slightly zany pops into my head.”
The skies cleared on the third day. Minnie set up her skimmer’s onboard scanners while John walked her through the steps from the cave.
By midday, Minnie was flying toward the other skimmer’s reactor power signature. Observing that her pathway followed along the curving course of a well-known river, Minnie was keenly aware that this route led directly to the area’s largest Hynka village.
JOHN: If we haven’t already, we’re going to lose DC soon.
MINNIE: Yeah, any second.
JOHN: I know I said it already, but if it looks like you’ll be in any danger whatsoever, abort and come back. Do not land that skimmer.
MINNIE: I know. Me and it are your only way out of this giant butt. I won’t be hasty.
JOHN: It’s not just for me. And it’s an order, understand?
Ugh. Old John back in action.
Minnie ignore his last message and, a few seconds later, saw the DC icon flash and break in two, letting her know she’d traveled out of range. Below her, the landscape shifted to an oddly beautiful plain of knobby green waves, like a flash-frozen ocean. She dropped to 10m, gliding across the surface, exhilarated. Upon closer inspection, the lumpy topography appeared to be ancient lava flow coated in lichen moss.
If not for deadly native inhabitants and another human life dependent on her for survival, she’d love to set out exploring this land from coast to coast. So much of it was entirely different from Threck Country. She didn’t know why that surprised her. The Threck lived in the geographical equivalent of New Zealand, while the Hynka had a landmass the size of Eurasia to call home. Mountain ranges to canyons, deserts and great lakes. “What a waste,” had been Minnie’s not-so-quiet original observation, especially given the fact that the Hynka stuck to these premiere upper-middle latitudes.
More fungal forestland approached up ahead, and Minnie returned to her higher elevation. The instant she passed over an especially tall stand of epsequoias, Minnie realized she’d arrived. Throngs of Hynka filled the trampled, near-barren land, moving about like worker ants without the lines. Hundreds carried water in hollowed-out shroom stalks to a vast “well” in the center of the village, while hundreds more streamed in from the forest with arms full of large nut pods, bundles of stringy black leaves, bunnies, and other bounty. Circling over the village, she saw clusters of Hynka in the river catching jellies with their bare hands.
Not so savage at home, eh? Cooperative civilized behavior like this never made it into one of Ish’s reports. Why hide it? She’d so desperately wished to convince Minnie and the others that the Hynka were these advanced people—not the frenzied pack animals everyone observed, little more than rudimentary tool-wielding wolves.
But then she was spotted and things returned to familiar territory. Five individuals yelling and pointing grew to ten, which grew to thirty, and before she could zip from the clearing, chests began heaving, heads rolled around on necks, shoulders rose and fell, guttural shrieks rang out, and bodies were ripped apart. For the Hynka, there was no time like a crisis to devour your closest neighbor. Minnie peered back just in time to see that limbs and heads weren’t being ripped asunder merely for rage management or food, but for ammo. An arm whizzed by behind her, instantly followed by a head, which actually struck the side of the skimmer.
She accelerated and shot up into the sky another hundred meters, well above body part flinging range. She pulled up the tracking screen in her fone and saw that Ish’s skimmer was only 1.5K east. The app had precise coordinates now and Minnie set them as her destination, bringing up the familiar red guide line. It was interesting to see it floating in the sky, like a game, gently arcing toward an unseen location beyond a rocky red outcropping jutting up from dense foliage.
Less than a minute later, Minnie was well away from the hordes of Hynka, but she could still hear the ruckus she’d instigated. There were no Hynka in sight here on the outskirts of the village, but it was quite clearly an area they frequented. The lack of small foragers dispersing a variety of seeds had created a monochrome landscape dominated by a single species of tall, cream-colored, martini-glass-shaped fungus in every direction.
They’d surely seen which way she’d flown. They’d be here soon enough.
Minnie crossed over the 30 meter-high sandstone outcropping, like a natural wall extending from the taller hills on one side, gradually losing height until finally plunging beneath the fungus jungle’s (Tom had brilliantly coined “fungle”) colorless canopy less than a kilometer away.
Another half-K into dense, seemingly untrodden fungle, the guide line plunged into a small gap in the vegetation. Without an obvious path to land, Minnie switched to biomag. The drab fungi disappeared, revealing the distinctive structure of a parked skimmer, shining green. Clearly the Hynka had yet to come across it.
She surveyed the perimeter, finding no signs of Ish or anything else. Gazing back toward the sandstone wall, Minnie tried to imagine where Ish would’ve gone first. Heading straight for a crowded area would be patently suicidal, but who knew if Ish would see it that way?
With a now-or-never fire beneath her, Minnie landed, hopped over to Ish’s skimmer, powered it on, and enabled pairing. After a quick glance at the small pile of supplies (and Ish’s helmet) on the ground, she leapt back to her pad, completed the skimmer pairing, and launched back out of the hideaway. The handling was slightly different than a single vehicle, but not remotely as unwieldy as she’d expected. The two ionic drives seemed to act as a single, giant propulsion surface, even seamlessly correcting for the lack of load on Ish’s skimmer.
Keeping low over the fungle canopy, Minnie returned to the rock outcropping and slowly floated above a path of seemingly cleared ground between rock face and vegetation. The trail soon widened out into an unquestionably created area.
Hovering above an apparent shrine—a massive, many-pointed star composed of what appeared to be thousands of bones—Minnie slowly rotated the skimmers. The pale bone star had been set up on a level bed of dark gravel. Large, crudely chiseled blocks rose away from the bones and pebbles toward the jutting sandstone—1-high, then a stack of 2, then 3—the initial building blocks of an as-yet unimagined pyramid. The giant steps led to a landing or stage, also built of monolithic blocks, three wide. From there, natural tiering took over, offering access to increasingly steep third and fourth levels, where semi-spherical natural cavities dented the sandstone, like docking ports for 20 EVs.