Wildcatter

“I think I may as well die in comfort. But I’ll undress in the bedroom, if you don’t mind. My gear will be safer there.” The larger waves were coming well inside now, lapping close to the table. The castaways might soon have to abandon the lab and retreat to the dorm.

“Right. You go and slip into something comfortable,” she said.

Not knowing her, he wasn’t sure how much she was playacting or what he would do if she started making serious advances. Under normal circumstances he wouldn’t hesitate, for she was an attractive woman, but in their current predicament there was something grotesque about the idea. He had given her drugs, which would make it feel like date rape.

“Here,” he said, detaching the communicator and camera from his helmet. He handed to them on their strap, which could be worn as a headband. “You talk to the nice people upstairs.”

He clambered back into the decon room and crawled across the unsteady shower doors to the dorm. There, far from the raging storm, the air stank of rotting fish and human sweat. He removed his suit by the light of his helmet, stripping down to shorts and shoes. He was glad to be rid of the heavy suit, but now perspiration was pouring off him and he would need to drink much more water.

He had just begun to retrace his path when he heard a strange yittering noise ahead. He crawled forward across the shower doors as quietly as he could.

A herd of centaurs had arrived. Meredith had shed her bra and sarong. She was kneeling in the water that now sloshed to and fro in the former laboratory, moving her hands in a feed-me gesture, and the visitors were milling around her, as noisy as excited parakeets. Those closest to her kept fondling her hair.

They were about the size of middling dogs, black on top and white below, in the manner of penguins or fish, but their skin was as smooth as dolphins’. Like the lizard Seth had caught hours ago, they had six limbs, which must be the standard for Cacafuego’s vertebrate equivalents. They walked on the rear four limbs, but their front torsos bent upward, so that the first set of limbs looked like arms and their head faced forward, in human fashion. It was easy to see why Meredith and her team had named them centaurs.

Their hands had no fingers, being shaped like giant tongues, able to roll up to grip things. He saw three or four centaurs with spears and others carrying gourds, which must be used for storage or transport. The way they waved their hands about in gestures seemed typically human, but their faces were quite alien. The closest model he could think of would be giant pandas with muzzles full of sharp teeth. Fangs would not penetrate an EVA suit, and they were not being used to attack or even threaten Meredith. Sentient or not, centaurs were cute. They might make popular pets, except that ISLA would never allow an advanced species to be imported. ISLA wouldn’t hesitate to call them sentient.

Did he? Maybe. He didn’t want them to be intelligent! Although these hexapods would certainly qualify as intelligent by ISLA’s muddled rules, they were not building nuclear power plants yet, and their descendants never would. By terrestrial standards they were obviously marine mammals. The first step to technology was fire, and their chances of encountering that, let alone taming it, must be very close to zero.

As a first guess, this harsh sideways world would force them to migrate north and south with the sun. If permanent sea ice at the equator made that impossible, most likely they hibernated. The chimneys might serve as their winter lairs.

Well aware that Meredith would accuse him of terrestrializing again, Seth decided that Centaurus cacafuegensis was closer to marsupial than placental. Their white chests showed no nipples. Several bore humps on their backs with tiny centaur heads protruded from them, like baby kangaroos in their mothers’ pouches. But centaurs also had a resemblance to flying squirrels, because a web of skin joined all three limbs on each side. The general effect was that of a blanket draped over their backs, and very long sleeves in front. Their walk was an awkward roll, but they would be powerful swimmers, flying through water as bats flew through air. They had quadrupeds’ stability on land, plus bipeds’ dexterity. They had sharp teeth and claws to catch fish. Their overall design seemed more efficient than anything on Earth or any other planet Seth could recall offhand. Exobiologists would go into raptures over them.