Life seed, p.1
Life Seed, page 1
Table of Contents
Blurb
Dedication
Chapter 1—The Wurl
Chapter 2—A Heartfelt Whisper
Chapter 3—Hanging Up Banners
Chapter 4—A Safe in a Safe Room
Chapter 5—The Journal of Dr. Thomas Wright, Part 1
Chapter 6—The Journal of Dr. Thomas Wright, Part 2
Chapter 7—The Midwinter Feast
Chapter 8—Thief
Chapter 9—The Wilderness of New Skye
Chapter 10—Uneasy Companionship
Chapter 11—Freezing and Warm
Chapter 12—Sick
Chapter 13—Obsidian and Metal
Chapter 14—Iridescent
Chapter 15—Trapped
Chapter 16—Sizzra
Chapter 17—Torn
Chapter 18—The Flower
Chapter 19—The Valley
Chapter 20—Evolution
Chapter 21—Isolation
Chapter 22—The Mating Dance
Chapter 23—Fishing
Chapter 24—Emergence
Chapter 25—Change
Chapter 26—The Calm Before the Storm
Chapter 27—It’s Time
Chapter 28—Aftermath
Chapter 29—Home
Chapter 30—Approaching Thunder
Chapter 31—The Storm
Chapter 32—Dresde
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Copyright
Life Seed
By Albert Nothlit
Wurl: Book One
They came to New Skye in search of a better future. The colonists, descendants of the brave people who set out to reach a new planet, found a beautiful world, rich beyond their wildest expectations.
Except for one thing. Crops will not grow in the soil of New Skye—not the way they should—and humans cannot eat the native animals. Desperate feats of botanical engineering have kept the colony alive, but time is running out as food becomes more scarce.
Elias Trost will not sit idly by while his colony starves. The one hope for a solution is the Life Seed, a dormant plant organism kept under lock and key at the heart of the colony.
In desperation, Elias steals the Life Seed to return it to its rightful place, making him an outcast in the unforgiving winter world. Pursued by colony soldiers armed to the teeth, including his former best friend, Tristan MacLeod, Elias soon runs afoul of a far greater threat. The wurl, the deadly reptiles that besiege the colony, are tracking him too, and they appear to be more intelligent than the colonists ever knew….
For Chris and Graham, who helped me more than they will ever know.
Chapter 1—The Wurl
ELIAS TROST was on his way to the old lab when the wurl attacked.
The harsh electronic siren boomed throughout the entire colony, a terrible sound with which everyone was all too familiar. Elias knew he should get indoors, preferably at his parents’ house, but he was already close to the laboratory. Maybe he could sneak past—
“Citizen!” a youthful, booming voice called. “You cannot be outdoors. Not unless you actually want to help.”
That last sentence had been spoken with open scorn, and Elias was forced to stop in his tracks. The youngest member of the Colony Patrol approached him, clutching his shock spear in both hands. His helmet’s visor was open, and his intense brown eyes stared daggers at Elias from beneath bushy eyebrows.
“Leave me alone, Tristan,” Elias said. “Go poke some wurl with your giant stick.”
Tristan’s frown deepened. His mouth was set in a thin straight line, and in spite of himself, Elias had to admit that Tristan MacLeod was attractive. He was sixteen, just like Elias, but he looked far older wearing the uniform of the Colony Patrol. More dangerous.
“You could come with me, get some hands-on experience,” Tristan told Elias, dropping the formal speech altogether and stopping a couple paces away. Elias refused to back down from the unspoken threat. He was tired of being bullied by Tristan at every corner.
“No thanks, soldier boy. I’m a scientist, not a knucklehead.”
Tristan twirled the shock spear casually in both hands, almost hitting Elias. “You wouldn’t even be alive if it weren’t for us knuckleheads. What would you do if the Patrol wasn’t here, huh? Wet your pants in a corner of your abandoned laboratory, waiting for the wurl to pepper you with spines?”
“Violence is the resort of a weak mind,” Elias retorted.
“Tell that to the wurl who attack us all the time. Oh, that’s right. You’ve never stood your ground in front of one of them. You’re a man now, of an age to contribute to the colony, and instead of helping us you waste your time reading old records. You’re a coward.”
“Says the guy holding the weapon,” Elias said, biting down his anger. As much as he would have liked to punch Tristan in the nose, he knew Tristan was a far better fighter—stronger, quicker, and taller.
The alarm changed tone to a repetitive keening.
“They’re inside the perimeter,” a tinny female voice said from Tristan’s helmet. “All units, converge next to the generator array. We have three juveniles, very aggressive.”
“Sounds like fun,” Tristan said into his mike, grinning at Elias. Then he muted the channel. “Go hide in your laboratory, scientist. I’m off to save your life.”
He left before Elias could think of anything cutting enough to say. Now alone, Elias ran the rest of the way to the abandoned laboratory. He hated to admit it, but Tristan was right. He had to go hide unless he wanted to be impaled by one of the wurl’s spines.
But I’m not a coward. I’m working to save the colony, just like Tristan. Only in my own way.
The entrance to the dilapidated compound that had once been a laboratory was well hidden. The entire building had been built against the slope of one of the hills closest to the colony, about three kilometers away from the main cluster of prefabricated homes. Elias had uncovered it three summers ago, almost by accident. He had been gathering interesting bits of scrap metal to use for his latest project when his terrain surveyor had told him that the ground beneath him was hollow. Getting in that first time had been hazardous, but since then he had improved and reinforced the structure of the narrow chute that served as his main entryway. Now he barely thought about navigating the intricate way down, deeper into the hillside, and into the buried laboratory.
The familiar, comforting smells of wet earth and burnt circuitry greeted him as he stumbled upright at the end of the chute. He walked precisely four steps forward and two to the right, felt around briefly, and hit the switch that started up the generator he had installed two years ago. Light flooded the space, flickering down from several retrofitted neon tubes that Elias had hung from the ceiling, connected directly to the generator’s output lead. The harsh white light revealed a single large room partitioned into smaller spaces by weak drywall divisions. Many of them had long since crumbled into dust, the fragments joining the piles of broken machinery, desiccated plant life, dust, and garbage that littered the floor.
He sat down at the one workstation that had been thoroughly cleaned. He kept most of his notes there, as well as one barely-functional computer terminal, which served as his data repository. He picked up where he had left off the day before, trying to puzzle out the location of a hidden room in the lab that Dr. Wright’s notes seemed to hint at. At first he couldn’t concentrate, however. The incessant whine of the alarm siren echoed even in the lab, and Elias felt a momentary pang of guilt.
Should he really be out there, fighting against the overgrown reptiles of this unforgiving winter world? Or should he be poring over notes that had to be at least a hundred years old, trying to find a way to save the colony?
The alarm died away. Grabbing a thermoisolating blanket he had brought from home, Elias tried to ignore the cold and set to work.
It was not long before he was fully engrossed in what he was doing. The laboratory had belonged to Dr. Thomas Wright, one of the founding members of the colony. That meant that Dr. Wright had been one of the original crew members on board the generation ship Ionas, which had made planetfall 113 years ago on the world they had named New Skye. As always, Elias couldn’t suppress a faint but pervasive feeling of awe as he navigated the intricate virtual labyrinth of the doctor’s files. He was reading reports, log entries, and experimental data written by someone who had traveled through the stars, someone who had probably grown up surrounded by technological marvels Elias could only imagine. It was fascinating reading, all the more so because Elias had seen no mention of him anywhere else in the colony’s archives.
It was strange, in a way. All the original colonists were larger-than-life figures in the history books. There was Captain MacLeod, who had founded the first and only settlement in New Skye: Portree. An obelisk dedicated to him had been erected in the center of the colony plaza, which Elias saw every day. There was the chief engineer, Ileana Jones, whom the Colony Patrol had elevated to near-goddess status because it was she who first designed the shock spears they used to fight off wurl. Prayers were still said thanking virologist Ai Hino, the gifted medical officer who created the engineered virus with which she infected the entire fledgling colony, allowing the human immune system to adapt to the alien environment and all its microorganisms. And so on and so forth.
It was odd that Elias had never heard of Dr. Wri ght, even more so since Elias was certain that the doctor had been an important scientist for the colony of Portree. He appeared to have been a biologist, since most of the notes Elias has found were detailed accounts of the flora and fauna of New Skye, each one carefully labeled in the terminal mainframe and linked to a series of incomprehensible spreadsheets that presumably listed all the properties of each new life form. Elias had spent nearly the entire summer reading those notes, fascinated by the wealth of knowledge of the early colonists. Nowadays, people barely left Portree for any reason, but it appeared that in the past there had been expeditions to the far reaches of the continent, and the creatures they had found were marvelous. The doctor appeared to have been an agronomist as well, given the thorough stacks of files which covered things such as food output, average plot yield, chemical composition of fertilizers used, and many other things Elias found fascinating. He would have suspected the data to be fabricated if not for the obvious professionalism of each report. It was hard to believe, though. Portree as a thriving colony with a surplus of food each year destined for long-term storage? It sounded like a fairy tale.
Elias spent nearly an hour reading about the suspected medicinal properties of a flower endemic to the high mountain passes of the west before he remembered that he was supposed to be looking for a blueprint of the laboratory or something that could tell him where the secret room was located. He immediately switched focus, plugging one of the auxiliary drives he had found in the lab into the mainframe. The computer drive was full of errors and unreadable code, a far cry from the perfectly preserved files in the mainframe, but Elias had developed a parsing algorithm that allowed him to at least extract simple text blocks to analyze. It was boring, repetitive work, but his curiosity had been piqued. He discarded irrelevant data files, his fingers dancing on the tactile interface, until he found something promising. It looked like an efficiency report of a heat generator located in the lab, and Elias quickly extracted all the useful bits of information. As he had hoped, the report had been broken down into two separate areas, one for the main laboratory building and the other for the secret room. The document even listed the room’s location: the northern wall.
Elias looked around the frigid laboratory with mounting excitement. The northern wall was half-buried in debris from a landslide that had happened sometime in the past, so he had left it alone. Now that he knew a hidden room was there, though, things were different.
He stood up and walked to a spot near the entrance where he had stashed a shovel. Time to get to work.
Clearing out the debris was a brutal endeavor. Before an hour had gone by, Elias had taken off his jacket and shirt, sweating even in the chill of winter. Most of the debris was hard-packed, some of it even frozen solid, and if it hadn’t been for the monomolecular edge of the shovel’s autodeploy function, he wouldn’t have been able to clear even a tiny segment of the blockage. Elias didn’t give up, though, and little by little his progress grew. His stomach rumbled with hunger, but he was used to that. He came across a pile of broken concrete and spent another hour dislodging each fragment from the mess and piling it against a nearby wall. After that was done, there was more dirt and ice to go through. He kept going. He was in the lab for so long that the generator began to whine, protesting its extended work period. Elias’s arms were trembling with exhaustion and his lower back was hurting by the time his shovel finally clanged against something metallic, big, and solid.
On all fours, Elias cleared out that section of the wall and sighed in exhausted relief at seeing the unmistakable outline of a metal door. He continued working with renewed effort and soon was rewarded with the sudden collapse of the remaining layer of dirt and debris, which fell off the door like a discarded skin.
Panting and leaning on his shovel, Elias regarded the secret door of the lab.
It looked heavy, imposing, and mildly threatening. There was no sign of rust or corrosion on its frame, which told Elias that it was of pioneer build, flawless and efficient. The handle on it held in one piece when Elias tugged, but the door did not budge. Above it, an input panel waited patiently for the right code. Elias tapped some of the number keys experimentally. The panel lit up, startling him. Anything that was still working after a hundred years had to have its own power source somewhere. That was incredible. It also meant that whatever was in the room was really important.
There were ten number keys to try, and the display panel above had space for four integers. Doing some quick math, Elias realized that meant ten thousand different codes to try if he wanted to gain access. Too many. Elias stepped back from the door, tired and disappointed. He wiped the sweat from his brow and got dressed again. A quick glance at his wrist link, a flat computer interface with a holographic projector, showed him that it was almost time for dinner anyway. And he was starving.
He shut down the terminal and covered everything in case of any unexpected water leaks. He put the shovel aside, tried to wipe some grime from his hands, and walked back to his entry chute. Getting out was a little more complicated because there were no stairs or ladders to use to climb up. Instead, Elias had hung a rope from a sturdy metal latch at ground level. He grabbed his rope, tested it with a couple of yanks, and started up.
Even though his arms were tired, he was able to pull himself up the three or so meters that separated him from the surface easily if he helped himself along with his feet against the walls of the chute. As soon as his head cleared the hole in the ground, a frigid blast of wind greeted him, making his teeth chatter. Elias climbed awkwardly out, wincing at a faint ache in his left shoulder, and rolled away from the hole until he was lying on his back on the gentle slope of the hillside, looking up at a dark, cloudy sky. The light of the moons struggled to shine through, bathing everything in a dull silver twilight. It was even colder now that the sun had set, and Elias knew he had to get home quick if he didn’t want to get into trouble yet again.
Grunting, he sat up—and saw the wurl.
The beast was standing less than ten meters away, and it appeared to be as startled by Elias’s sudden appearance as Elias was at seeing it. There was a brief, brittle moment of mutual regard as both of them looked at each other, breathless, immobile.
Then the wurl roared.
It was a terrible, earsplitting sound, a screech like two sharp metal plates grinding together, amplified and overlaid in a guttural, threatening boom. Elias jumped to his feet and tried to run in the direction of the colony, but the wurl was much faster. It jumped up in the air, tucking its six legs into its underbelly, and rolled like a needle-spiked donut downhill, cutting off Elias’s retreat.
Elias was forced to stop, terrified, as the wurl halted and uncoiled into a graceful, predatory crouch. The silver moonlight glinted off the obsidian plates that covered a slender, sinuous body almost five meters long and nearly as tall as Elias. Its arrow-shaped head stayed low to the ground, its jaws half-open, showing row after row of jagged white teeth. On the top of its skull, the wurl had three eyes, red, luminescing faintly and locked on Elias, watching him with a disturbingly intelligent look.
Elias was very close to panicking. He wasn’t prepared for this. He tried running to the right, but the wurl slithered on the ground, faster than thought, to cut him off, its tail hissing through the air from the speed of its motion. The moonlight threw sharp reflections off the spines that covered the creature’s back. Each of those spines was as long as Elias’s forearm and nearly as thick. Elias knew the wurl could launch them from distances of nearly ten meters with enough force to punch through anything not armored. Including human flesh.
“Help!” Elias shouted, abruptly remembering he had a voice. “Somebody, help!”
The wurl growled low at the sound. It was only a juvenile from the looks of it, but that made it even more dangerous. The older wurl were big and lumbering. This one looked quick. Deadly.
The lab! Elias could hide in the lab. He turned around without a second thought and dashed uphill. He could see the entry chute now. It was just—
Schwook.
An obsidian spine hissed through the air and punched into the ground right in front of Elias. He stopped in horrified shock and jumped out of the way as a volley of three more spines impaled the dirt exactly where he had been standing. He rolled down the slope, out of control, for nearly three seconds before he was able to stop himself. Then he stumbled upright, chest heaving, and looked back.
