Barbarian Prince (2 page)

Noelle frowned. “What do you mean by that?”

“
I didn’t mean to be insulting,” Monica snapped. “I was just pointing out that I wouldn’t have to have a degree in xeno-sociology to ‘guess’. I need hard facts! I don’t know how the hell I’m going to get them cooped up in here!”

Noelle
completely
empathized with her—she was desperate to do some ‘real’ research herself—and yet the moment Monica expressed a desire to leave the safety of the colony she felt a shiver creep up her spine. “We haven’t been here even a month—well by this world’s time.” She frowned, thinking. “By Earth time ….”

“
What difference does Earth time make when we’re here, damn it?
This
time matters!”

Noelle huffed an irritated breath. “Ok, already! Don’t bite my head off!”

Monica looked vaguely uncomfortable. “Sorry! But don’t try that ‘holier than thou’ attitude on me! You’re bored stiff, too! We don’t have any fresh material and I’ve studied that shit the probes collected until I feel like puking every time I look at it!”

Noelle shrugged. “The delegation is bound to be back any time now. As soon as we know for sure that we have a peace treaty with the natives, we can leave the colony and do a little real exploring. It isn’t like either of us could really do our jobs without the treaty, you know.”

“
I
can’t! You’re a xeno-biologist. There’s plenty of biology you could study.”

“
Hey! You can study the social behavior of the lower life forms just easily as I could study the biology! We just can’t tackle what we’re really interested in.”

Good point. Monica still wanted to argue that she was worse off than Noelle and had more room to complain. They both knew that the social behavior of the lower life forms wasn’t nearly as important to the future of the colony as studying the natives.

The problem was that Noelle had already made that point—none of the alien life forms were as important as the natives—because they were intelligent and could create more problems than pretty much any of the other life forms.

Of course the chances were high that they were going to run into problems with all sorts of things. They could upset the eco balance if they weren’t careful. They didn’t belong in this particular food chain.

The impulse to skip out on their afternoon shift had been a poor one. Noelle and Monica had reason to be glad they had rethought the impulse and headed back once they’d had lunch at the apartment they shared. If they hadn’t, they would very likely have been written up as displaying rebellious and/or irresponsible behavior and that could have had all sorts of unpleasant repercussions. The most important being that they wouldn’t have been there for the ‘special treat’ everyone was allowed late in the shift.

The department head had managed to wrangle permission to leave the compound to collect new specimens for study.

Noelle and Monica were both instantly nearly hysterical with excitement and sheer terror and struggling to hide both as they left the facility with the small group of ‘chosen ones’ and headed toward the main gates of the city, lugging specimen containers and equipment.

Noelle was inclined to think that was a punishment of sorts in and of itself. They had robots for god’s sake—a
lot
of them! Eighty percent of the construction bots that had built the sprawling complex that made up their first city while the colonists themselves were en route to it had been ‘decommissioned’ and reassigned other duties once they weren’t needed for construction anymore—ten of the twenty percent held in reserve for future construction projects and the other ten reprogrammed for maintenance.
All
of the robots hadn’t been reassigned to handle security—most, but not all.
One
could have been spared to haul equipment!

But the colony president, when contacted, had decided that the request for a carrier violated the self-sufficiency pact the colonists had sworn to when they’d signed up.

Noelle was damned if she could see that scientists exerting themselves physically was beneficial to the colony and
not
exerting themselves wasn’t! What if somebody strained something and wasn’t able to work? What if they dropped something heavy on some body part and it was damaged? It wasn’t as if they had
everything
that was available back home! They were living on the edge—on a primitive colony! It seemed to her that there was the possibility of a lot more bad things coming of them hauling the damned heavy equipment than good!

What if somebody fell down and damaged irreplaceable equipment?

They’d arrived on Gemini less than a month earlier. Nobody was completely acclimatized to the gravity and pressure of the new world! She weighed
twenty
pounds more than she was used to! And she was one of the lucky ones—smaller and lighter than average and fairly athletic due to her passion for dancing. Some of the colonists wouldn’t even have qualified for inclusion due to their physical condition if not for their expertise in their fields. They were carrying around an extra forty pounds or more—
without
the damned heavy equipment they had to carry!

“
If you don’t quit muttering under your breath …,” Monica hissed.

Noelle glanced at her in surprise. “I was talking out loud? I thought I was just thinking hard.”

Monica gave her a look but since their supervisor called a halt at just that moment, it redirected their attention from each other to their surroundings.

Noelle felt a prickling sensation creep up her spine and lift the fine hairs on the back of her neck. An involuntary shiver skated through her.

“
You cold?” Monica whispered in surprise.

Noelle glanced at her friend, her mind tumbling the question around while she ‘felt’ with her senses. It was winter, but they were close to the equator and so far the winter on their new home world had been mild—mild enough it hadn’t actually caused much of a die off of the plant life. The wind was cool, true, but they were working on the plane and there was little there to cast shade and shield them from the sun’s warming rays. Finally, she shook her head. “I’m fine,” she lied. “It just feels … weird to feel wind against my skin after so long.”

Monica looked irritated—as if Noelle had unnerved her and she felt like it had been a false alarm. She grunted but since she had leaned down to set her equipment down Noelle wasn’t sure if that was a comment or just an expression of exertion. She settled her tote full of specimen containers on the ground and looked around.

She didn’t see anything that would account for her reaction. They hadn’t moved more than a few yards beyond the main gate. She could already hear a few muttered complaints from some of the others that they weren’t far enough from the colony to make it likely they were going to catch any specimens that could run.

The botanists were already busy, however.

Noelle was in no great hurry to follow suit and chase bugs. Instead, she studied her surroundings for many moments, trying to decide what her primal instincts had been trying to warn her about—if there really was some threat or if it was purely a reaction to the alien environment. After thoroughly examining everything around her, she finally decided it was the latter. All of her senses were screaming at the strangeness of her surroundings.

The force field that protected the colony allowed them to see through it. Sounds could also penetrate it, but nothing else. She hadn’t, she realized abruptly, truly experienced the new world before now. The sights and sounds of the busy colony itself prevented her from really seeing or hearing the world beyond it and the smells they’d captured with their specimens had been corrupted over time with the chemical preservatives and even scents from their own environment.

She was so bombarded so abruptly by everything of an alien nature she was just stunned that no one else seemed as effected as she was. Even the warmth of the alien sun felt completely different.

And yet, she could see living proof all around her of panspermia.

Which had been accepted as scientific fact at least a decade earlier, but she didn’t think she’d fully appreciated what it meant until now.

Because as alien as everything seemed in some ways, it was also familiar in others.

Gemini certainly wasn’t Earth’s identical twin, but it was close enough to be a sibling, or maybe a half sister? The bottom line was that everything about their new home was close enough to make the place suitable for them—for Earth life—and, because of panspermia and predictable factors in the evolution of living things, and Gemini’s similarity to Earth much of the life they’d discovered on Gemini was also similar to life forms on earth.

That didn’t mean there wouldn’t be dangerous deviations, unfortunately. There were also bound to be things that simply didn’t seem logical.

The higher life forms, for instance.

No one had been able to come up with a solid theory as to why the natives were androgynous or at least seemed to be.

Or even why they appeared to be fairly primitive.

Gemini, as far as they had been able to determine, had been around at least as long as Earth had—and some speculated that it was a good deal older.

Of course the appearance and development of a species of higher intelligence could have come at any time. Maybe, despite the age of the solar system/planet, the species had emerged far later than humans? Maybe they’d experienced more catastrophes and those had forced the species to start over, building from the bottom up repeatedly? Or maybe there’d been an earlier civilization that had been wiped out completely and the current natives had arisen since?

That didn’t seem to hold water, though. There didn’t seem to be enough time for that possibility to be likely.

Humans had been brought to the brink of extinction several times by natural disasters on Earth. There was no reason to think that might not be the case on other planets. The universe was a dangerous, unpredictable place—likened more than once by cosmologists to a cosmic shooting gallery.

Shaking her thoughts finally with the reflection that she wasn’t going to figure it out without some data, Noelle turned her attention to trying to find a specimen of something they hadn’t already examined since she hadn’t been particularly intrigued by anything their probes had brought them.

And, in any case, most of them had already been snatched up as pet projects of the senior biologists in the group.

She’d just crouched down to examine what she’d first dismissed as a rock covered in something like lichen when a noise she’d only been vaguely conscious of finally reached an identifiable level.

It sounded like a herd of something heavy coming their way!

Noelle shot to her feet, glancing quickly around to try to identify the direction of the threat. Despite her focus in trying to identify a threat and the direction of it, around her, she was dimly aware that some of the other scientists had also looked up, although she was the only one who seemed alarmed enough to have abandoned her pursuit of specimens. Regardless, and somewhat insensibly since no one knew what was making the noise or if it was a threat or not, she felt her adrenaline kick up to a higher level of alarm when she saw that the sounds had also caught the attention of the others.

Just as Noelle was beginning to feel the discomfort of the suspicion that she might have reacted to a threat that didn’t exist, a scream—a human scream—abruptly rent the air around them. It sent a shockwave through everyone on the plane and, hard on the heels of that, blind panic. Unfortunately, most of them were so shocked they were paralyzed and those not paralyzed with fear seemed confused as to whether they should run or not since no one else seemed inclined to run.

“
Open the gates! Open the gates!” the man in the lead bellowed as he came into view.

“
Run!” the man behind him yelled when he spotted the group gaping at them.

Both screamed orders, Noelle discovered, came from the delegation barreling toward them at the best speed they could manage—the delegation that had left days ago to hike over to the nearest village to try to negotiate a treaty with the natives.

And directly on their heels was an army of Amazons, who abruptly began screaming like banshees the moment they spotted the group, Noelle’s group, just beyond the safety of the colony!