Earth 2.0: Prison Planet

EARTH 2.0:

PRISON PLANET

William Crow Johnson

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

EARTH 2.0: PRISON PLANET

Copyright © 2012 by William Brian Johnson

Cover art © 2012 by Frank Wu

Maps © 2012 by Earl Phillips

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-4018-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-4019-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-4081-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012913356

iUniverse rev. date: 08/01/2012

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

For Will,

who as a boy asked, Why can’t life be more like the movies?

CHAPTER ONE

September, 2442

Transported

Alexander Khan came aware in a howling blizzard. Driving snow billowed before him like the veils of a dream. Bitter wind lashed his skin, and he realized he was standing naked in thigh-deep snow. He did not know how he had suddenly come to be here. He shook his head to remember, but it wouldn’t come.

Commando training kicked in. He turned his back to the wind and cupped his hands between his legs for warmth while he surveyed his environment. Blinding snow stretched away in front to a far suggestion of mountains. A kilometer or two to the right loomed a tree line. To the left and behind, the horizon fell away. No trace remained in the snow of how he had arrived. The overcast sky had a pinkish tinge, suggesting a red-giant sun. Or a large, Martian-like iron-oxide desert somewhere on the planet.

The planet. Yes. It was coming back. The trial. The sentence.

Too numb to be sure, he pulled a foot out of the snow and checked. No boots. No clothes, and no knife strapped to his waist. Urban myth was wrong. Nothing. He permitted himself one sardonic smile. Transported. Earth Central Government had replaced execution three hundred years ago with the more humane banishment to Prison Planet. In practice, lower-level bureaucrats had dumped him naked in a blizzard to die.

In the cold gale, he had thirty to forty minutes before he froze. And it seemed to be getting darker by the second. He shook his head again to clear the cobwebs and took an experimental step. The snow was uniformly deep. It wasn’t going to get easier the farther he went. But at least there was grass under the snow instead of rocks. And the snow was dry powder. Could have been worse.

He made for the tree line. There was a chance there of finding or building shelter. He strode quickly, rhythmically, almost a run, counting on his body generating heat from fighting the deep snow to counterbalance the cold. He did not run for fear of damaging his numb feet on sharp rocks under the snow. Even with the strenuous activity, the wind sucked the warmth out of him fast.

The tree line turned out to be 1232 strides away. Roughly a kilometer. It guarded a declivity sixty or seventy meters deep and was mainly leafless deciduous trees. But usefully, there were some firs similar to white pine, with long, soft needles.

He was sweating slightly under the arms from the exercise, but the rest of his body was growing numb. He could not decrease his activity level or he would freeze. He immediately began stripping off small pine boughs, shaking off the snow, and piling them up under a large pine with a bed of pine straw beneath it. The tree itself was heavy with snow but bare beneath.

When he had a pile roughly waist high, he took a couple of deadfall branches and plunged back into the snow. He used the branches to uncover the heavy grass beneath, a patch roughly four meters square. Then he began pulling large tufts, shaking them free of snow, and piling them beside his pile of pine boughs. After a couple more such squares, he had a pile of dry grass roughly half a meter deep and a meter and a half wide.

He was starting to shake uncontrollably. Without further delay, and with only an occasional wary glance down into the cut to look for predators, he made a bed against the trunk of the pine tree. First he heaped up pine needles fifteen or twenty centimeters deep. Then he laid pine boughs over them to keep them in place, followed by dried grass to lie on. Finally, he lay down on this bed and covered himself first with dried grass. Then as a last step, he pulled the rest of the pine boughs over him to hold the grass in place and to insulate himself from the cold air.

It wasn’t comfortable, but within ten or fifteen minutes he was much warmer. He wouldn’t freeze to death for at least the next few hours, and he would have time to think. And now that he was warmer, his brain was on fire.

No longer was he Major Alexander Khan of the galactic-arm-ranging Internal Movement Control, but Alexander Khan, criminal. No longer Alexander Khan, scion and board member of Khan International, mission-driven developer of freedom technology, but Alexander Khan, pauper. And no longer son of a vital, living Lucian Khan, but son of a man brutally murdered by an ECG operative.

The memory wipe started immediately after the sentence – Prison Planet – so he couldn’t remember how he had been brought here. But he did remember the courtroom reading of his crimes: Distribution of Contraband Technology, Conspiracy to Destroy Harmony, Failure to Condemn Wrong Views, Failure to Initiate Positive Statements, etc., etc. And of course, there was that other charge that would have put him here by itself alone.

ECG controlled and tracked all interstellar missions, and had kept Prison Planet’s location secret for 300 years. Even he as an officer in Internal Movement Control hadn’t known where it was, or whether it truly existed. But people had always whispered of it, and urban myth provided details: 10,000 transported per year, tech development prevented by laser satellites, ECG operatives never went to the surface of the planet, just dumped prisoners, and no one knew if transportees survived or not. And here he was.

So the goals of his life – fully avenge his father’s death, and set the people of Earth free from its bonds – no longer looked reachable. Even survival looked uncertain. But in his mind he heard the voice of Pierre, his childhood tutor in all things from Latin to martial arts: Every environment has in it the tools for survival. You just have to recognize them. He would have to recognize them on his own, though, because there was no UAI on this planet. The dead link to his implant was like a black hole in his brain.

Warmer now and tired from his efforts, he grew drowsy. His mind began to run down. He resisted awhile, then gave in to sleep. He hoped it wasn’t the deceptive warmth and inviting sleep of those who are freezing to death.

He awoke to a terrifying roar. Surrounded by darkness, he took a moment to realize where he was. – In survival mode, he remembered quickly. And his feet were freezing because in his sleep he had thrust them out of his carefully arranged cover. But the rest of him was warm and almost certainly generating scent. Whatever had roared sounded big enough to consider him food.

A twig snapped maybe twenty meters below in the cut. Then silence. The wind had subsided, but there was no starlight. His eyes had not yet adjusted. He could barely see.

He didn’t even have a sharp stick. Suddenly he could hear quiet breathing no more than five meters away, slightly downslope. He strained to see. A massive dark shape crouched up toward him along the slope. It was two meters long and massed at least three hundred kilos. No physical details were visible, but he didn’t need any. It clearly intended him as dinner. Soon. There was no reason for stealth and no more time.

Reaching down through the pine needles, he grabbed the hard object that had been sticking him in the back. It was a limestone shard twice the length of his fist. He pulled it from the soil and found one end sharper than the other. Better than nothing.

He slipped into the genetically enhanced intuitive zone he always entered when his life was in danger. His heart sped up. Time slowed to a standstill. He rose from his warm bed and faced the beast. The tree trunk was on his right, his bed to his left, and the beast in front.

The beast did not charge. It raised the front of its body from a crouch into a challenge posture, but kept its forelegs on the ground. It roared again, showing white fangs the size of commando-knife blades. Khan caught a glimpse of eyes. With no sudden moves, he crossed ever so slowly in front of the tree trunk while the beast watched, ready to spring, perhaps waiting for him to roar back. Then he abruptly moved on around the tree, out of the predator’s sight. Behind the tree, he heard the animal give a low rumble, moving to intercept him when he came clear around the tree.

He counted, thousand one, thousand two, thousand three. Then, gripping the rock like death in his right hand, he leapt back out the way he had come, and charged the beast’s left side, bellowing like a bull. As hoped, the beast was surprised, and hesitated for a split second. He jammed the point of the rock down into what he hoped was the creature’s left eye, then quickly again where he thought the right eye should be, then the nose. Blood spurted onto his hand.

The beast screamed a loud falsetto shriek that belied its size and grabbed him with two small but strong arms and hands that unfolded from under its massive head. Feeding arms, he thought with a shudder, as they pulled him to within inches of the terrifying teeth.

His arm windmilled, striking over and over, hammering once each what he thought were ears, then actually breaking one of the fangs. Then the other fang sank through his left triceps and it was his turn to scream. He felt his bladder void.

The animal sensed now that it had him and began backing up, dragging him downhill. It was going to drag him back to its den and eat him there, he realized. The pain in his arm filled the whole left side of his body like molten lava, and because he was being dragged face down, the pain in his groin from being dragged over rocks and bushes was like a fury of knives. He was weakening, and for a brief moment was tempted by despair. But he still had the rock, and he could still use his right arm. Straining up, he jammed the rock into what he believed to be the beast’s left ear hole. Then again. Again. Again. The beast gave him the predator’s killing shake, but it didn’t kill him because it had only his arm. It did, however, rip the fang through the muscle on the back of his arm and set him free. He sprang to his feet. At this point, they were on a steep part of the slope facing a drop-off if they continued downhill.

Traversing the edge of the drop-off was a dimly visible game trail, apparently the beast’s objective. To Khan’s right was a pin-oak-like tree, with many dead branches three to six centimeters in diameter. Familiar with such trees from the family’s forest operations, he grabbed a branch and broke it off. It was dense, hard wood, and the break was sharp. He jammed the break into the same ear hole he had been working on. Then again, and again, and again. Finally the branch sank ten centimeters into the animal’s brain, and the beast settled onto the ground like a balloon losing air. Then because it had backed too far during the final fight, it slipped over the edge of the cliff and fell. There was a two-second silence, then a crash from far below. Thirty meters, he calculated. Good enough to finish the beast off, since gravity felt close to normal, perhaps a bit light.

He now had two priorities: bind his arm so as to lose as little blood and function as possible, and find and butcher the beast. It was food and clothing. But first he had to quiet the uncontrollable shaking, from cold or adrenaline, it didn’t matter.

He returned to the top of the slope and crouched in his bed for a few minutes to warm up. He took some grass fibers from the bed and used these to bind his wound. The pain had subsided slightly, but the wound hurt unbelievably when he cinched it up and tied it. He worried that he might go into shock, so he needed to keep moving.

There was no possibility of waiting until morning to skin the beast. The corpse would quickly attract carrion eaters and perhaps more dangerous predators. He had to find it first and somehow get the hide off and get a few pounds of meat, all in the dark. He had field-dressed and butchered his share of deer and wild boar on youthful hunts, but he had always had good knives, cleavers, and saws. He had to find some sharp stones. There was no time to search for chert and flint-knap himself a knife blade or two. He would have to make do with what he could find.

The height and peaked nature of the mountains in the distance had suggested a granitic/basaltic geology, but he sensed that the plateau-like area he was on had a limestone substrate. He couldn’t see well enough, but was pretty sure some of the pain of being dragged downhill had been edges of limestone outcroppings. –Which suggested that the stream that was likely at the bottom of the cut had limestone outcroppings and shards.

He found the stream before the carcass. It still flowed, which suggested that the bitter cold was recent, maybe temporary. The stream bed was indeed limestone, and more luckily, had shale shelved between the layers. He selected as many sharp shale and limestone wafers as he could carry and went looking for the carcass.

The beast lay in a twisted heap about five meters upslope from the creek. A coyote-like creature was easily shooed away to a distance of twenty meters, where it sat on its haunches to watch. Khan went to work with his right hand, using his left hand only to hold. Soon the arm was numb and aching, and he wondered about deadly infection. Had he done enough to clean and dress the wound? He could wash it in the stream, but he wasn’t sure about the water. On second thought, the teeth of any carnivore probably carried more harmful bacteria than a snow-melt mountain stream, so he decided to gamble. He took a few minutes to untie his grass-fiber bandage, kneel streamside, and wash the wound in the clear, cold water. The washing and the rebinding hurt astonishingly, but he gritted his teeth and refused to let it slow him. He went to back to work with the shale wafers. The sky was beginning to lighten, and he could see his work better. The water looked clean.

Had the animal been a deer back on one of the family estates, he would have field-dressed it, cutting it open from breast bone to pelvis and removing all entrails. Then he would have hauled it to a place more convenient for butchering and freezing. In this case, all he wanted was the skin and a few pounds of meat. So, tempting as it was to cut open the gut and thrust his icy hands and feet into the animal’s warm blood, he didn’t want to contaminate any cuts with whatever was living in the animal’s system. He simply started at the neck to skin it. It was slow work because the shale wafers weren’t very sharp and crumbled easily. However, they held their edge reasonably well, so if he found a good one, he stuck with it.

In an hour he had the skin off and a couple of kilos of strong-smelling meat tied in a piece of skin. It was cold, nasty work, but at least the wind didn’t reach into the cut. Thin vines hanging from bare tree tops worked well as twine for tying bundles, though they were impossible to break and tough to cut.

Shelter was the next priority. The bed under the pine tree was too exposed. He needed a place where he could at least get his back to a wall. If a whole pack of the coyote-like creatures were to surround him in the dark under the pine tree, he wouldn’t stand a chance. And of course, warmth was a pressing priority. His hands were in good shape because they had been busy, but his ears, knees, feet and privates were numb. He wasn’t sure he’d ever have the chance to use the latter again, but he would certainly need the former. He couldn’t afford frostbite. He needed a place where he could hunker down and not lose body heat.

The stair-stepped limestone shelves in the creek bottom suggested the possibility of a cave or a hollow in the side of the cut if he went downstream. Indeed, he found a two-meter deep hollow on a nice shelf a hundred meters downslope. The coyote had padded softly behind him, keeping its distance. Now it sat down at the edge of the shelf, looking more curious than dangerous. He tossed it a piece of meat, which it rose and snapped out of the air with skill. Then it sat back down on its haunches, licked its chops and looked to him for more.

Forget it, he said. The sound of his voice surprised him. He realized he might never need it again. He assumed if there were survivors from other transportings, they would be few and far between. Even if three million prisoners really had been transported over three centuries, they could be spread over the entire planet. He might search for the rest of his life and not find anyone. And of course, there was the very valid question: did he want to find them? Not all would have been political prisoners. Some would have been murderers, kidnappers, anarchists, terrorists, rapists and thieves. Those probably hadn’t changed their ways on this new planet, if they had survived. No, the best course was to survive on his own awhile, get good at it, and then begin carefully to explore.

He threw an end of twine-like vine over a scraggly tree that thrust out at an angle from the stone wall above his hollow. Then he pulled up his bundle of meat so an animal would have to jump nearly three meters to get it. The coyote-like creature gave him a reproachful look. Sorry, I’m not your meal ticket, he said. I’m not your meal, either, in case you’re a lot tougher than you look. Then he took the skin and went in search of more pine needles and boughs.

He found another pine not far away. He made several trips back to the hollow, each time with the skin full of needles, which he dumped on the stone floor, and with as many feathery pine boughs as he could carry. When he had enough, he made himself another bed on the flat stone in the back of the hollow, with twenty centimeters’ worth of needles between him and the stone, and with pine boughs on top for cover, and for insulation from the stone back wall. Then he pounded the rest of the pine needles into the raw side of the furry skin for thirty minutes or so, bundled it up, and hung it also from the protruding pole.

Nearly exhausted, and with his left arm completely numb, he took care of one last item before he permitted himself to get into his new bed. He found a stout piece of oak-like deadfall about five centimeters thick. Finding a forked tree, he stuck the branch between the forks, leaving a long end as a lever, and pulled. It split longitudinally, as intended, leaving a long, sharp point. That would be his weapon.

Then he went to bed, such as it was, with his weapon beside him, and hoped that tomorrow, which was in fact already here, would be a better day. The coyote-like creature huddled three meters away. Stay the hell away from me, Dog, he said. Or I’ll eat you, too.

He slept fitfully, waking several times with a start. In his dreams, he could still smell the beast’s breath and feel its teeth. Once when he woke, Dog was gone. Another time he was only a meter away, watching, and Khan shooed him away. Finally he slept soundly and woke to light. Dog was again nowhere to be seen. Dog of course was no dog, or coyote, or wolf. His snout was too long, his canines too small, and his tail too parallel to the ground behind him, like a fox’s. But he was not a fox, weighing at least thirty kilos, plenty large enough to give a good account of himself. He looked meant for preying on small game like rabbits or turkeys if such lived here.

The snowy ravine looked much less threatening in the light. The trees looked much as they would have on Earth, though without the snow storm going on, the sky was a pronounced reddish color in the direction of the sun. Evening red and morning gray sets the traveler on his way. Evening gray and morning red brings down rain upon his head, he remembered. He wondered if it was a harbinger of more snow.

But the immediate concern was that his left arm was swollen to twice its normal size. The grass binding was cutting into his flesh. He found more grass for a better binding, then gently retied the binding with a new wad of soft grass for a pad over the wound. It hurt amazingly. He tried to force himself not to worry. It either would or would not become gangrenous and kill him. There was little he could do except try to maintain his strength. Certainly he couldn’t cut it off if it came to that, because he had no tools to do so. Even if he had a knife, there was the bone to deal with. He had no saw. And of course, there was the brachial artery, which would bleed him out quickly if not tied off. And there was the doubt that he could manage the pain and horror of cutting his own arm off. So the only thing he could do was try to prevent the growth of the anaerobic bacteria that caused gangrene. Which meant keeping the wound open to the air and washed. On this thought, he laboriously removed the binding and painfully laved the wound one more time in the clear, cold water of the stream. The cold actually made the wound feel slightly better. Then he rebound it, but much more loosely this time. The key issue was the loose triceps, which by experimentally extending his arm he discovered had partially survived. Only part of it was bitten through.

He forced himself to eat a small amount of the meat from the bundle. He gagged repeatedly, not only from disgust at eating raw meat, though this meat was frozen, but because the meat smelled strong. The animal had been a predator, and its meat smelled like it. Carefully suppressing thoughts that might make him gag and vomit, he knelt by the stream and drank his fill. This helped, because it washed the taste from his mouth. He resolved to find another source of protein soon – nuts, fish, eggs, something – and to make fire to cook his meat.

First priority was to scout the area, but he needed protection for his feet. They were bruised and swollen. He would have appreciated a coat, but his naked body seemed to have adjusted to the cold. He wasn’t shivering. But feet used to shoes would not last long in this rocky environment.

The skin of the lion, as he thought of it, might serve to make boots as well as a coat, but it would take several days to cure. And he wasn’t sure there was enough tannin in the pine needles to do the job. He might have to go back to the animal’s corpse and get its brains for their tanning agent. But tanning would take days. He needed foot protection now. He had once seen five-thousand-year-old dried-grass sandals in the Egyptian Museum. He would use those as a model.

Two hundred meters downstream, where the cut began to broaden into a valley, he found dried sedge grass growing beside a gravel bar. He knelt to pull it. As he worked, he noticed looking downward through the trees that the cut extended for hundreds of meters, then took a steeper turn out of sight. But he also caught a glimpse through the trees of what looked to be a broad plain at least a kilometer below his current level. And it was not covered with snow!

Excited, he began to make plans. He would descend onto the plain where it was obviously warmer, and look for people. Surely there were some survivors from the tens of thousands of other transportees. – Survivors who might help him.

He pulled an armload of sedge grass and took it back to his lair. Then, gingerly tiptoeing to protect his feet, he returned to the corpse. Though badly gnawed upon, its skull was intact. He smashed it open with a large rock and scooped out the brains. Disgusted but determined, he took the brains back and smeared them thoroughly into the hide. Then he replaced the coating of pine needles and hung the rolled-up hide once again from his flag pole. If the tanning efforts worked, he would have a hide to keep him warm for some time to come. He washed his hands perhaps longer than necessary in the creek.

The museum shoes had been made of grass braided into rope-like cords. He immediately understood the importance of this idea. The tightness of the cords would impart toughness and durability. As he braided dried grass into cords and set them aside, he developed respect for the skill of that ancient cobbler. By the time he had completed weaving and tying one sandal, that ancient workman had become a veritable master artisan. By the end of the day, he had a pair of sandals with soles two centimeters thick, and a band over the toes that would afford some protection and warmth.

Carrying his sharp stick for protection, he tried out the sandals by exploring downstream half a kilometer or so, looking for fish, edible roots, and chert beds. From Ancient History class at the Academy, he knew chert was a silicon-based rock used by stone-age people for arrow heads, spear heads, and knife blades, and that it occurred in limestone geology. The creek bed was a stair-stepped series of limestone shelves, so chances seemed reasonable. He marveled at the similarities between this planet and Earth, and thought again what a shame ECG’s policy was, of limiting space travel to only government entities like the Space Navy and Internal Movement Control. This planet had possibilities.

The policy drummed into his head in Academy classes and in countless indoctrination sessions was that humanity was to achieve a self-sustaining Great Equilibrium on Earth before going to other planets and plundering them as humans had done on their home world. Perfect the species and the process on Earth before marauding into the galaxy. Only ECG could manage humanity to the Great Equilibrium.

A second reason for the policy, whispered among his less doctrinaire fellow officers, was the Encounter. This supposedly occurred shortly after the first star travel in 2062. The Eridani – from Epsilon Eridani, the star system where they had been encountered – had warned Earth explorers not to venture beyond certain nearby confines in the home galaxy. Frighteningly superior, they were from a distant star system they would not identify. They had only small outposts in Epsilon Eridani’s asteroid belt, but they were clear: violate the ban and Sol would be destroyed. Fifteen star systems were permitted, all those closest to the Sol system, starting with Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri. The problem was, according to Navy surveys, no easily habitable planet existed in any of these systems, and the government didn’t want self-appointed explorers venturing outside the permitted area and causing Earth’s destruction. Thus, no space travel for the masses, and no colonization.

This all begged the question: where was he now? On Prison Planet, for sure, but this planet was clearly habitable. It certainly appeared, as he and many others believed, that ECG had made up the Eridani story. They used it to justify controlling the population, preventing people from developing colonies outside Earth’s immediate control. Supporting this theory was the fact that the government had never broadcast pictures of the Eridani, or proof of their existence. It was hard to tell what was true. Under ECG’s cloak of repressive secrecy, conspiracy theories sprouted like weeds.

But that was all behind him now. Indeed, if he didn’t stay with it and learn to command his new environment, everything would be behind him.

He found a pool with two treasures: a chert bed on one side, where gravel had washed down, and in a tidal pool on the other side, something like cattails. Military survival training had taught him that cattail roots were edible, so he pulled several plants to see if the roots were still alive. They were. He washed one off and took an experimental bite, chewed, and swallowed. That would be enough for a test. The taste was earthy with a suggestion of onion, but it settled on his stomach with no pangs or twinges.

The chert wasn’t as satisfactory, but better than nothing. With one exception, the pieces were small, suitable only for arrow heads. The one piece with promise was about twelve centimeters long and nearly as thick as his wrist. Big enough for a knife blade or a spear point if he didn’t screw it up.

He took his treasures back to his lair and settled in for a flint-knapping session, starting with a small piece. Learn first, then try the big piece. The process turned out to be quicker than imagined, but every bit as demanding of skill. He ruined three promising arrow heads before completing a good one. He decided to make several. He had found no suitable bow wood, and he didn’t yet have a knife to carve a bow with, but he could at least use the arrowheads to skin with. Compared with the razor-sharp arrow heads, the shale flakes he had used on the lion had been entirely unsuitable. And when he did find good wood for a bow, he would already have arrow heads.

After an hour he had several crude but usable arrow heads. His stomach had not yet rebelled, so he ate more cattail root. He considered eating some more lion meat but the thought palled.

Suddenly he sensed a presence. Reaching slowly for his sharp stick, he looked up to see Dog sitting on his haunches at the perimeter of his little camp area, with a furry creature in his mouth. The two regarded one another for some time. Finally, Dog cocked his head, much like a real dog, and took an experimental step closer. Khan reciprocated by scooting half a meter or so toward Dog without rising up. Experimentally, he extended a hand. But Dog was unwilling to come closer. He gave a slight growling whine, sounding very much like an earthly dog, though there was that unearthly long snout. He dropped the furry creature on the stone slab and retreated three meters to the edge of the stone slab.

He was offering to share.

Deeply moved, Khan got up slowly and approached the furry creature, white on the bottom, gray on top, much like a rabbit/hamster mix. Gingerly he reached down for the animal while Dog watched. Dog did nothing when he picked up the creature, which did in fact appear to be a hare, oryctolagus cuniculus, but with rabbit markings, sylvilagus floridanus, details flooding back from Khan’s youthful wildlife biology studies. Before the military. Either he was on Earth in a different time, the planet he was on had fostered parallel evolution, or Earthly creatures other than humans had been introduced here and had interbred with local creatures and evolved. The latter seemed more likely.

Watching Dog out of the corner of his eye, he skinned the rabbit, carefully saving the skin, then dressed it using one of the new arrowheads as a scalpel. It worked amazingly well. When the rabbit was thoroughly field-dressed, he took the carcass down to the stream and washed it. Dog watched with interest, moving toward him with some apparent concern when he put the carcass into the water, but still stopping at a distance.

Satisfied that the meat was clean, he cut off a hind and a fore leg for himself and approached Dog with the remainder. Dog retreated a step for each step he took, so he put the carcass down and backed away. Then he sat down and took a bite of the raw meat himself, stifling again the disgust of eating raw meat. Dog approached the carcass and made such short work of the remaining meat that Khan quickly rethought his impression of the animal. The speed of movement was extraordinary. This animal could kill and eat any dog before the dog knew what was happening. And Dog had made a clear gesture of friendship, which was not only welcome, it made him wonder if the beast was much smarter than the average dog.

The sun glowed red in evening clouds, so he settled down in his nest to rest. His meal would make him sleepy, but he did what he could to be less vulnerable. He sat with his back to the wall, his sharp stick beside him, and a wary eye on Dog and the perimeter.

He relaxed, thinking tomorrow he would search for more food sources: roots, nuts, fish, game runs where he could snare rabbits, and maybe some overwintering berries like multiflora hips. Then he would concentrate on hunting tools – fishing gigs, knife blades, spear points, maybe a bow and some arrows – and a fire-making bow and spindle. His swollen left arm hurt any time he flexed it, but he could at least hold the firebow spindle with it while he bowed with his right. He marveled as he dozed at what a full-time effort survival was. He got an inkling of how the first farmers must have regarded a full year’s supply of grain laid back: leisure to think.

Good night, Dog, he said, and Dog tossed his head, gave an answering whine, and licked his chops.

Khan went to sleep thinking of his plans. When he had weapons, fire-making tools, a portable supply of meat, and some description of clothes, he would set off down onto the plain to search for others like himself.

He awoke with a start to see Dog silhouetted directly in front of him in the darkness, dark against the snow downslope. Alarmingly, the animal’s front feet were planted between his ankles. He was instantly wide awake. Was Dog preparing to attack, or trying to warn him? He had his right hand on his sharp stick, and was pretty sure he could bring it up before Dog could be on him. But he sensed no aggression. Looking upward, Dog made a strange double exhaling sound, similar to the warning sound deer use, but quieter. Khan wasn’t sure of