IronStar by Grant Hallman Read Free Book Online

thirty-liter deposit on the ‘grass’, which went, Kirrah
noticed, a long way toward explaining that ‘tiny pungency’ she had detected
last evening.
    Sunlight, I need sunlight ,
she thought. And water. And food. Not in that order, though; where’s the
damned ladies room, the suit’s honeybucket is full …
    An hour later, with her beamer
happily sucking up energy from the photovoltaic sheet spread over a low bush,
Kirrah got down to the serious matter of food. Water was not a problem at the
moment: a shallow pool in a small depression had filled her suit’s reservoir,
and fresh, clean water was even now filtering through its recycler. So far, the
suitpack’s analyzer had rejected samples of grass (indigestible), three kinds
of leaves (all indigestible, one mildly toxic), a vine, and, to her secret
relief, a pale ten-centimeter slug-thing she had found at the base of the bush
(digestible but toxic). She was beginning to wonder whether “Matey” (she was
already thinking of the huge beasts as woolly mammoth analogs) had any smaller
cousins. And another thought from Survival 101 was seeping disquiet into the
back of her consciousness: If a herbivore as large as ‘Matey’ needed to (a)
travel in herds and (b) carry a three-meter circular(!) horned weapon on its
head, then what in Murphy’s name did this planet use for predators ?
    Time to move on, she decided. She
allowed herself a bite of the tasteless but nutritious food carried in a tube
stitched to her suit’s leg coverings. Enough nutrients on its own to keep a
foolish sailor alive for a month, or a smart sailor alive for two hundred and
eight days, if it was supplemented by native food, and used as a source of any
essential vitamins the local ecosystem was thoughtless enough to leave out.
Make that two hundred and seven days, she recalculated, one down already. With
the photocloth draped around her like a cape, she could walk and maintain some
recharging for her beamer, now up to twenty percent - call it seventeen shots
at full power. Hmmm, those moving mountains of herbivores seemed to be
pretty well focussed on mowing their way across this endless plain , she
considered… as long as I don’t startle them… If anything one four-hundredth
their mass can startle them . Apparently whatever predators they
knew, didn’t look much like a forty-two year old, 162 centimeter, 51 kilogram,
rather plain woman, wearing a Model 3G Survival Suit.
    Giving a wide berth to the herd of
mammoth analogs, one Lieutenant Kirrah Katherine Roehl, Navigator First Class,
Helm-qualified on Regnum military vessels up to Light Cruiser, most recently
Helm One on a Scoutship capable of speeds in excess of a highly classified 2300
times lightspeed, set off on foot across the rolling green plains.

 
    ‘Foot’ was the operative word, she
decided ruefully some time later. The spongy grass analog, while uniform and
resilient, seemed to absorb energy with every step she took. The day was
warming quite nicely too, thank you, and it was all very pretty… and after the
ninth or tenth gently rounded rise in the ground and sparse clump of trees,
pretty boring . After an hour of trudging, she’d spotted nothing more
interesting than a second herd of ‘mastodoids’ as she thought of them, at a
distance, and the occasional sparse patch of spiky gray plants, sticking up
about knee-high above the not-grass and each looking like a pair of
mating tripods. On impulse she squatted and picked one of the gray plants,
which promptly shrilled a high wail, stabbed one of its sharp “stems” hard
against her suit’s forearm covering, and bit her hand. All the other “plants”
promptly pulled up their pencil-thin legs and made a small clattering stampede
away from her, making the same soprano ululation.
    Kirrah shrieked in surprise and
dropped the small creature, which scuttled off after its fellows. A few
moments’ attention from the suit’s first-aid kit cleansed the modest laceration
and