Free Hunted by James Alan Gardner

venom.

Part 2

    HEARING THE CALL

9

    RETURNING TO SOLID GROUND

    Venom on my face and in my mouth. It didn’t burn or sting, but it terrified me. How long till I started shivering again? How long before I went frothing crazy-sick with poison?
    Maybe this time it’d be better; maybe I’d built up resistance. But it could just as easily go the other way, with me all weakened and sensitized from the last dose. The effect could hit me ten times harder than before.
    You can never be sure with venom.
    Out loud I said, “If I get sick, I get sick; there’s nothing I can do.” Which sounded noble and stoic and all, but didn’t untie the knot of fear in my stomach. My mouth was still puckered with the pickly aftertaste of poison…and that was more real than any brave words.

    I went to the exit hatch and hiked up theOPEN lever. That got me into the airlock, which had a peep-monitor showing the world outside the pod. I could see a stretch of water so muddy it looked like creamed coffee…but the shore was only a stone’s throw away, a low dirt bank supporting a scraggly line of trees. The trees looked shining wet, as if they’d just got doused with rain. Considering how blue clear the sky was, I figured all that drip-off had actually come from my module smacking the water. Escape pods make relatively gentle landings—they don’t come in like fireballs, and they always aim for water to avoid smushing houses or people—but even a soft landing splashes down like a kid doing a cannonball. A good slap. Much spillage.
    Too bad I missed seeing it. I bet it would have been great.
    When I looked again at those trees on shore, I noticed their leaves weren’t the nice chlorophyll green of New Earth and Troyen. Their colors ran a lot more funereal. Purply black. Bluish black. Orangey black. Yellow with black spottles. Gloss black on matte black with ebony accents.
    But it’d take more than dark leaves to make me feel gloomy. After twenty years of living inside a lunar dome, never seeing a tree except in VR sims, I was kiss-the-ground happy to be this close to the real thing. I pushed theEXIT button; the interior airlock door closed, the door to the outside opened…and I jumped into the muddy water, doing a cannonball of my own.
    Okay. Maybe the water was bone-shaking cold. And I’d swum halfway to shore before it occurred to me Celestia might have its own types of piranha or anacondas, not to mention swarms of alien germs. But nothing sank its teeth into my leg, and a short swim was exactly what I needed to wash the venom off my face. I even considered taking a glug of water to rinse the venom out of my mouth; but there was all that mud, and maybe the water did have germs, and anyway, some of the venom must have already gone down my throat. Keeping my eyes and mouth closed, treading water, I ducked my head under a few times, then wiped off my face with my hands. At least that rinsed the venom from my skin…and it made me feel cleaner in general, even if I could still taste the stuff I’d swallowed.
    When I clambered onto the bank, I was muddy, wet, and cold. It felt good. I found a spot where the sun shone through a gap in the trees and sat down to wring the damp from my uniform. While I squeezed out water, I looked around to take stock of my situation.
    Escape pods try not to put you down in a desert or an icecap or the middle of an ocean. They pick a spot with nice weather and plenty of plant life, preferably with signs of intelligent civilization.
    Me, I’d landed in a thirty-meter-wide canal. You could tell it wasn’t a natural river by how straight it ran, a perfect line in both directions. The water showed almost no current: the escape pod was floating free, but it’d barely budged since I’d left it. I wouldn’t have to worry about it drifting out of sight downstream anytime soon.
    If need be, I could swim back out and ask the pod’s computer for food rations when I got hungry—I hadn’t noticed any storage bins,