Chapter 10: The Forest Primeval

Time: November 25, 8235 3:56 PM

After helping to unpack the survival gear, the pilots returned to the helicopter. They quickly went through their preflight checklist, started their rotors, and then waited for me to give them clearance to depart. I waited until precisely 4 PM, the official start of the test, and gave them the expected hand signal. They saluted smartly, I saluted back, and then there was a blasting rush of wind as the craft lifted. It cleared the trees after a few seconds and then banked and tilted forward. The noise and the wind and the flashing running lights quickly receded to the south.

I turned to my wife. Except for the brief helicopter flight, this was my first moment to be with her since our wedding night, more than a month ago, and the helicopter was no place to tell her what was going on. But I was certainly overjoyed to be with her again, and I knew she could sense that. "Hi Abigail!"

She removed her veil and nodded playfully, looking a little uncertain about the situation. "Hi back Ilias! What would you like me to do?"

I smiled in admiration of her discipline. I knew she was probably bursting with questions, and I was sure she very much wanted to tell me what her month had been like. But, first things first! I broke open one of our large backpacks and went straight to the armaments.

"Abby, we have about forty minutes to sunset. I want to teach you how to fire a flechette pistol. Do you know much about them?"

Abigail stared at the large pistol I had handed her. "Well, as a girl, no direct experience of course. I have read a little. Exploding micro-darts, right?"

"That's right. Actually, here's the lever near the bottom of the breach for ammo selection..." Over the next few minutes I gave Abigail a basic course in a shooter's stance, how to hold and sight the weapon, and the lever operations for safety, ammo mode, and firing mode. "In the Holy militia, this gun has the nickname of Devil-dog. Each magazine holds eighty micro-darts, forty with exploding tips and forty without. Both types of darts will stay super-sonic for almost a hundred meters. Inside that radius and for pistol size, this is about the most deadly weapon imaginable."

Abigail practiced sighting and fire selection as I continued my lesson. "The pistol is superbly balanced, easy to control even at full auto. Firing modes are manual single-shot, slow-auto at three rounds per second, and variable-auto which will fire ten rounds per second with a fully depressed trigger. If you exhaust the supply of exploding darts, the pistol will automatically switch to the non-exploding darts. It will NOT automatically switch in the other direction. You'll have to push the ammo-mode lever to horizontal."

Abigail nodded. "Got it."

I let her practice for a while, loading and unloading a magazine, becoming familiar with the optical sighting controls, and finally chambering the first dart manually with the bolt. Abigail was then ready to test her marksmanship. I told her to use up an entire clip, starting with the non-explosive ammo. We discovered she is a born natural shooter, and she seemed to be really enjoying herself practicing with the non-exploding darts. But in the early twilight, just before it was too dark for practice, she tried automatic fire and the exploding ammo.

Abigail stared silently at the small but deep crater she had carved out in a boulder sixty meters away. I was very impressed with her control. She had stayed dead on-target for a full three-second, thirty-dart blast. The crater had a conical shape and we could probably have fit both our heads in it.

Abigail sighed. "Devil-dog, huh? An apt name..."

In the gathering darkness, we pitched our tent. Abigail watched with interest as I mounted our proximity detector on a lightweight magnesium-alloy pole. "This is a nice, open clearing," I commented. "Guard duty tonight will be little more than staying awake and making sure the sensors are operational."

Abigail nodded. "We'll sleep in shifts?"

"Oh yeah." I muttered. I was pre-occupied studying the sensor's start-up diagnostics. I wasn't anticipating the guard duty to be a problem. Thousands of years ago, modifications to the human genome had reduced humanity's daily need for sleep to four hours.

"The bears?" Abigail continued.

"Yep. A month from now they'll all be hibernating. But right now they're in a frantic mode, one last chance to stuff themselves. We'll have to stay alert the whole trip. It's likely we're going to have several encounters, probably at least one where the bears don't give up."

"Bears? Plural?"

"Yeah, they hunt in packs. You don't know?"

Abigail shook her head. "Qataban girls aren't taught much about North American wildlife." She paused for a moment. "It's sad. If the women are moved here, they're at the mercy of their husbands to leave them a note about the local dangers in their marriage books. And they'll have to relearn the lesson, every day of their lives... Ilias?"

I had just finished with the diagnostics and was switching the sensor array to operational mode. "Uh huh?"

"These bears! I remember a few vague references to them, very old, perhaps even from before the Great War. Your description doesn't fit. North American bears were described as shy, especially the black ones."

"Black?" I shook my head. "I never heard of a black bear. These are white with a mottled brown. It's a good camouflage, especially if there's any snow."

"Snow? Think we'll get any?"

"This time of year? I'm surprised the ground is still clear." I shook my head and smiled. "Shy bears?! That would be a switch!"

"I don't think they hunted in packs, either."

"Really?" I considered her words. "I don't see why not. Their main prey animals are elk and bison, and I've even heard they'll attack a herd of wooly forest hippo if they're hungry enough. Those hippo are tough, and they defend as a team! I don't think the bears could survive as solitary hunters."

Abigail shrugged. "I'm just telling you what I've read."

I finally laughed. "Shy bears?! Downright peaceful, huh? All those muscles and claws and too embarrassed to use them?!"

Abigail grinned back. "Well, it does sound ridiculous when you put it like that! I don't know. Maybe I was reading a fairy story and didn't realize it."

"Yeah, maybe." We had finished unpacking our sleeping gear. I gave a playful pat to our double bag. Abigail's face burst into a willing smile and she quickly undressed. I soon followed her into the warmth and covers. Her body felt so smooth!

I smiled at her. "If the alarms go off, be prepared to grab your pistol and dash out the door. Worry about clothes later."

"Okay. Think we'll have to?"

"We're probably okay for a while. This time of year, the bears' normal pattern is to hunt at dawn. It's the coldest time of the day, and it slows down their prey."

I felt Abigail's naked body shiver. "Yeah," she whispered. "It must have been a fairy story." She smiled at me. "You seem very familiar with their behavior."

"Of course. I've been out on Anqara survival training since my second gate. All the monastery boys were. They probably are out right now, about 400 kilometers north of here."

"Is this what this is, survival training?"

I nodded. "It's a yearly requirement for all Security members. There are no exceptions. If you're sick or injured, you just have to suck it up. And there are no rescue missions if you run into trouble."

"I had no idea! Do all males have to do this?"

"No, just the Security Guild, and the Holy Militia... Maybe some special weapons teams of the Holy Police too..."

Abigail nodded thoughtfully. "And how long will we be out here?"

"As long as it takes for us to hike back to Jericho. In a straight line, we're seventy kilometers due north of home right now, more than halfway to Cairo in fact." I was referring to another of the world's townships, built near the ancient site of Montreal at 45 o 30' N, 2 o 41' W.

I continued. "The terrain isn't bad. We'll probably wind up hiking about ninety kilometers. Part of the test is patience, knowing not to rush and do something stupid. All we have to do is hike twenty kilometers a day and we'll be back at Jericho before the end of the month. A critical error would be to hike to sundown and then not find a clear space to bivouac for the night. The sensors can't detect well in dense forest, and we'll be depending on them for our lives."

Abigail sighed and cuddled with me, curling into the warmth by my side and hugging me. We shared a few brief kisses, nothing too erotic, but we could both sense each other's desires. "I'm dying to tell you about my life," she whispered, "and to ask you a thousand questions!"