“It means that you’re safe,” Stacia said to Skin. “As long as you don’t touch the ground.”
Stacia took a few more steps. The Wet Lisa both gave way to her and followed, keeping itself around her at all times just in case she might drop something tasty in it.
“Are you going to be able to carry me all day?” Skin asked.
“It doesn’t look like I have any choice. I’m certainly not going to drop you in it, so don’t worry about that.”
“Do you think it will go away when it gets dark out?”
Stacia thought that was a possibility. Although this was an alien planet with alien biology, the Wet Lisa’s green color implied to Stacia that it might by photosynthetic, using the energy from the sun to sustain some of its functions. That would explain why no one ever seemed to be worried about these things at night.
“Probably,” Stacia said. “But we’re going to move carefully. Do you think you can get into a more comfortable position on me? Maybe ride on my shoulders?”
The next few minutes probably would have looked comical, had anyone been around to witness it and had a dark sense of humor. Stacia did her best to rearrange her gear on her back even as Skin crawled around on her, trying to get into a more sustainable riding position without her actually being able to touch the ground. There were a couple close calls, one where Skin slipped and caught Stacia’s armor just before her toe dipped into the slime, and the other where Stacia herself almost lost her balance. Once they were finished, though, they’d managed to create something that was almost a saddle using the two 808s on Stacia’s back and her pack.
“You probably look like you’re riding a horse,” Stacia said.
“What’s a horse?” Skin asked.
“It’s something that goes good with steak sauce, if you’re desperate.”
“Oh. Uh, I still don’t know what any of that means.”
Stacia finally started trudging off across the plain, the Wet Lisa surrounding her, on her way to Roo-Soh. The creature was almost like a pet, if the only reason the pet stuck around was to eat its owner’s face at the earliest opportunity.
“This is going to get old quickly,” Stacia said.
Chapter 10
Roo-Soh
They had to make much slower time than Stacia had hoped, given that she still had a fear of slipping in the Wet Lisa and both of them being dead before they had realized they’d fallen. Even with her armor-augmented body, Stacia felt the drain of carrying another person all the way across the plains after several hours. She actually had to stop and take a brief nap at one point, a prospect that had scared the hell out of Skin. Stacia, however, didn’t actually need to lie down to sleep. There was a feature in the armor that allowed the marine inside to sleep standing up, designed for those times when the Galactic Marines had to go into swampy environments and laying down might result in drowning. When Stacia woke, she found Skin also out cold, slumped forward on Stacia in the perfect position to drool all over Stacia’s head. Stacia patiently wiped the drool away, then woke Skin up and proceeded on their way.
Late in the day, the Wet Lisa started to lose ground. Stacia found that, even at her less than hurried pace, it still could not keep up a distance of ten feet around her in all directions. Part of that was probably from the sun, which was getting lower again, but also part of it was probably because of the change in terrain. The plains were giving way more and more to rocky outcroppings jutting from the earth, and with that, the vegetation became less dense. With less light and not as much to feed on, Stacia didn’t think the Wet Lisa would continue its dogged pursuit for much longer. Finally, it stopped altogether at a place where broken stones covered the ground almost completely. Stacia stopped, waiting to see what it would do. The Wet Lisa moved back and forth over the ground like it was pacing at a fence, then turned around (or rather just reversed direction, since it didn’t have a back or front to turn) and went back onto the plains. Skin insisted on staying on Stacia’s shoulders for a while longer, just in case this was some kind of trick and the Wet Lisa would be back, but finally Stacia insisted she had to get off. Sooner than Stacia had wanted to today, they made camp in the shadow of a cliff that looked like it had been shoved up out of the planet by some relatively recent cataclysmic earthquake.
“I was told there was a lot of seismic activity on Leviathan,” Stacia said, “but I haven’t witnessed any yet. Do earthquakes happen often?”
Skin cocked her head in an expression that Stacia was coming to know very well, the look of Stacia revealing that the worlds Skin had never seen were more foreign and bizarre than she could imagine. “Of course. You mean they don’t happen all the time elsewhere?”
This led to a conversation until well after dark regarding the various worlds Stacia had visited and all the strange and amazing creatures she had seen (and very often killed soon afterward). Stacia fell asleep first, which surprised her when she woke in the morning. She hadn’t realized she’d already become so accustomed to Skin’s presence that she felt comfortable doing that. She was even more surprised to find Skin curled up not next to her, but next to a completely disassembled 808, complete with all its parts lined up in an orderly fashion. When Skin woke up, she was afraid Stacia would be angry with her. Instead, Stacia was intrigued and questioned why the young woman had done it. She said she hadn’t wanted another incident like the one where she had dropped the weapon in the Wet Lisa, and she’d figured that if she had a better idea of what was inside it, she might know how to use it better. Stacia challenged her to put it back together, which Skin managed to do before she sun had completely risen. She wasn’t as practiced and efficient with it as a trained Galactic Marine, but Stacia suspected that Skin’s long time of servitude, being forced to take care of things behind the scenes where the Shellheads couldn’t see, had given her the beginnings of all the knowledge she needed to work with complex machines. Stacia would need to remember that.
The earthquake ridge nearby, while apparently rather recent in a geological sense, was on the rough instructions Lexton had given her to reach Roo-Soh. According to them, Stacia and Skin were close to their destination. Stacia felt her first tremor on the planet while they were packing up and eating, although Skin said it wasn’t even worth noticing. Once they were ready, the two of them followed the cliff for nearly a kilometer before Stacia finally got her first sight of the town.
“What is that?” Skin asked as they got their first view of the structures in the distance.
“I’m assuming it’s the town of Roo-Soh.”
“It doesn’t look anything like Hobbes.”
“Skin, I know you were probably raised to believe Hobbes was a bustling urban metropolis, but it’s really just a pit. Wait until you see a real city.”
“Is this a real city?”
“Not quite.”
“Then I don’t understand how I’ll ever see one.”
Stacia didn’t answer that. Instead, she climbed up onto a nearby rock outcropping to get a better look at Roo-Soh. While Stacia could see now why someone had chosen to put Hobbes right at the boundary between the barnacles and the plains, this seemed like a much more sensible spot to attempt building a civilization. The people of Roo-Soh had taken a clue from certain ancient Earth cultures and carved their squat homes directly into the rocks of the cliff. Most of them could only be reached by a series of rough-hewn ladders and catwalks. There was still plenty of evidence that this was a town of former Galactic Marines in the form of repurposed drop pod pieces scattered all over.