Alan Diver's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Alan walked east from the crystal shelter with his notebook open and a pencil stub in his teeth. The ground sloped down through wet moss and broken stalks. He kept his steps short to spare his ribs. Two hundred paces in, he stopped. A bootprint sat in the mud at his feet. Crew tread. Fresh enough that water still pooled in the heel. He knelt and sighted along the print. It pointed north, away from the medic's last known direction. He found the next print, and the next. The stride grew longer each time. By the fifth print the toe dug deep and the heel barely touched. Someone running. Not walking lost. Running. He followed the trail to a rusted signpost at the edge of a clearing. The metal arms had been bent by hand so every one pointed the same way north. Purple juice ran down the post in thick streaks. Someone had crushed handfuls of the rat-diverting berries against the metal and dragged them across each arm. The smell would carry for hours. Alan touched a streak. Still tacky. He wrote in his notebook: marker, deliberate, less than an hour old. At the base of the post he found a communicator. The screen was webbed with cracks, the casing split down one side, but the antenna still pulsed a slow blue. He turned it over. A name was scratched into the back plate with a knife: BREN. The junior engineer. Alan thumbed the channel wheel. Static, then a single recorded loop in Bren's voice, flat and even. "North is clean. North is clean. North is clean." It played and played. Alan switched it off and held the weight of it in his palm. He stood and looked at the prints running north. Bren had not wandered. Bren had marked a path and called others to follow it, away from the medic, away from the shelter, into ground Alan had not mapped. The berry smell on the signpost would pull every survivor who knew the trick. Alan pictured the medic catching that scent and turning the wrong way. He closed the communicator in his fist until the cracked glass bit his palm. He did not know yet whether Bren was lost in the head or leading something. Either way, the answer was the same. The trail had to go. He braced his ribs against the post and worked the arms back one by one until they pointed nowhere true. He scraped the berry pulp off with a crystal shard and buried it in the moss. He kept the communicator. If Bren was still Bren, Alan would need the channel. He turned east again, toward the medic, and started walking. The notebook had a new page now. At the top he wrote one word and underlined it twice: Bren. Below it: find before anyone else does.