Bo wondered to himself how long it would be before he stopped underestimating how long it should take other people to accomplish a simple task.  The survey crew were three days into his “three-to-four-day mission” and they weren’t even half finished. The leader of the survey crew stubbornly insisted that they not stray from their predetermined route, even though that put them dozens of kilometers away from Bo’s intended target. It was all Dan could do to keep Bo from grabbing the helm away from the team leader Bartram had assigned and making a beeline for the beacon.  Dan, as usual, was the voice of moderation. “Let’s help them however we can,” he advised. ”The faster they get finished, the faster we find the beacon.”

Bo trusted Dan’s read on the situation, but did not share his nearly obsessive drive to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings.  He helped the team however he could, downloading media chips, prepping gear and running sensor sweeps for the survey crew, until his patience had exhausted itself.   “I’m going nuts,” he finally admitted after three days of restraining himself. “I’ve gotta get out of here.”

Dan looked up from the rack of test tubes he was sterilizing.  “How were you planning on doing that?” he asked, as he carefully exchanged one rack of tubes for another.  He was hardly surprised that after three days of obedience, Bo was itching to break out. He was far more surprised that the varius had lasted this long.  Maybe a little patience was finally rubbing off on him.

“Nobody’s using the skimmer,” Bo said, looking toward the small, two-man vehicle sitting tethered to its solar charger. The crew sometimes used it to run between stations when doing large territorial surveys, but today it was dormant. It could comfortably carry a hundred kilos of equipment and a pair of full grown men, so he thought that it should be sufficient to lift one battle varius and a backpack with a radio in it. He vaguely waved to a distant ridgeline. “I could hop over there and triangulate on the beacon.”

Bo’s main job today was to read technical manuals while keeping an ear on the radio in case the survey crew needed them for something, and that was a task that Dan could take over with ease. “I don’t see why not,” he said, amiably, “as long as you get it back on its charger before the crew sees it missing. I can hold down the fort until you get back.”

Bo pecked Dan on the cheek and practically ran to retrieve the signal locator pack from the equipment locker.  After Dan helped him strap the receiver to his back and erect the antenna, Bo disengaged the skimmer from its mountings and ran it through its startup routine.  He was in charge of equipment maintenance on this trip so he already knew the little vehicle was in good condition, with sufficient fuel to take him anywhere on the planet his heart desired, as long as he wasn’t in a hurry.  It wasn’t a fast ride, but it was exceptionally sturdy.

Not bothering with protective equipment on a vehicle this slow, Bo jumped on and gunned the throttle.  At least, he tried to gun it; on something this small, the verb hardly seemed appropriate.  The anti-gravity unit did its job by keeping the skimmer off the ground, but jamming the throttle to the peg didn’t generate much thrust; it only drove the thruster’s whine to a more annoying pitch and sent buzzing shivers through the handlebars.

Bo felt like a circus bear riding a moped, but he did eventually build up a decent amount of speed and soon, scrubby vegetation whooshed past him on both sides.  He tried his best to be aerodynamic, experimenting with different positions in an attempt to increase his top speed. He found lying prone on the seat with his legs behind him to be particularly effective until he was almost bucked off by an uneven patch of ground.  After that, he settled for pulling his legs in and leaning over the control yoke.

The whining of the single thruster was sufficiently annoying that he barely noticed his mental connection with Dan weakening with each passing kilometer.  Their bond had an uncommon range which seemed to be growing as they exercised it, but it was not without its limits. When he stopped to check his bearings, Bo was mildly distressed that he could not feel Dan’s presence in the back of his head. He shook off the feeling and went about his business, chiding himself for being childish.

There wasn't much to see, out where he was, but being free of that damned transport and its mundane duties was still a tonic to Bo’s mood.  Another hour’s travel brought him to the foot of the mountain range, and he parked the skimmer next to a group of large boulders at the edge of a gentle talus slope.  Careful not to get the straps on his pack twisted this time, he strapped the pack’s display to his wrist and set off at a jog to find the highest point.

The terrain beneath him grew more rugged with each passing kilometer, and before long he was challenged to find paths through, under, or around objects he was not equipped to climb.  His type had been designed as scouts who were theoretically capable of surmounting any natural obstacle, but an unexpected genetic quirk had made his type twice the size they’d been intended to be.  His mass distribution made unassisted vertical climbs dangerously impractical. His barrel chest put his center of gravity far enough away from a cliff face that physics instantly had the upper hand, fighting to peel him away from the rock face unless he had some way of counteracting it.

Fortunately, sandy rocks and a million years of wind erosion had provided him with a good number of handholds, and few of the surfaces around him were purely vertical.  He made better time than he was expecting after finding a number of natural bridges connecting the lower-elevation peaks, and by lunch time he had almost arrived at his destination: a tall, almost ethereal-looking, natural spire from which he’d have an unobstructed view in all directions for at least a hundred kilometers.  The readings he’d get from that position would tell them exactly how close they were to the mysterious locator beacon. If he were near enough, he might also discover metadata inside the signal that would give him more information, such as which shuttle it came from or whether there might be survivors.

From where he was he could see a large wind bridge connecting the spire to a nearby formation.  That formation happened to be on the other side of the spire and reaching that point would add another three or four kilometers to his journey, but Bo didn’t care.  It was where he needed to be, so he plugged the travel plans into his brain and then, following the best practices of a stoic, stopped thinking about it.

But his incessantly active mind was still at work on other things.  He had consciously not discussed the possibility of survivors with anyone, especially Victus.  It had taken the Kenzine almost a month to get over the loss of Lucas, and Bo thought that another shock like that just might kill the man. That was one of the things that made Victus seem so different to Bo.  Bo had faced down the death of loved ones many times before, yet it had never shut him down the way it did Victus. Bo took no moral position on this - it was simply one fact among the thousands that he had put in a basket marked, “Victus Entrades.”  

When Bo experienced loss, he compartmentalized it and locked it away.  Victus, on the other hand, appeared to feel the loss as intensely as humanly possible.  In an attempt to understand it? Perhaps to wear it out?  Bo couldn’t say, but they were definitely different on that front.

Too, Bo’s military service may have reinforced his baked-in tendencies, encouraging him to lock down on his emotions in times of need. Victus had not served and had grown up in a highly sapiens-centric world that encouraged him to treat feelings and facts with equal measure.  No stoic was he, although this certainly didn’t seem to make the man any less effective when push came to shove. Now, Bo wondered if that alloy of emotion and logic might not be be beneficial - a warm heart might temper sharp edges created by the mind’s cold machinations. Even though a part of the man had inarguably shut down upon the death of someone who wasn’t even his mate, he’d still proven to be effective. In fact, since the landing, Victus had been a tireless workhorse.

The locator radio’s pack began flopping back and forth on his back, and almost without thought he adjusted the straps to make it stop.

Bo’s childhood had been a tumultuous storm of loss and redemption. Due in large part to his  mother’s comings and goings, he had grown a protective emotional shell around his heart that had remained unpierced until Dan Blocker had come into his life and made him whole again. Until then, there seemed never to have been a time when Bo could rely on his circumstances to remain static.  As soon as he began to trust that his grandmother would be the one to make his breakfast and pack his lunch, his mother would come back into the picture. And when he finally had begun to trust in her stability, off she’d go to chase the next star on her emotional compass.  

For all his mother’s faults, at least Bo’s mother had stuck around until their maternal bond had naturally decayed. From what Dan had shared with Bo, Victus had endured a totally different life experience.  When he was very young he had enjoyed the ultimate stability of a supportive, loving family who would have done anything for him. But unlike Bo, the Kenzine’s maternal bond had been severed unnaturally. Many, if not most, varii would have been irreparably damaged by this, but Victus had hung onto his sanity even as he was thrown into an orphanage on a world quite alien to him.  It took a few years, but eventually he was found by a kind stranger who took him in and raised him as his own, somehow restoring the balance in Victus’ life.  

It seemed to Bo that although Victus had traumatic experiences in his life, those points had been corralled by a sense of certainty.  As an infant, he knew without doubt that he was loved. As a child, he knew that his parents were dead and would never return. As a youth, he again had immovable love to push against and eventually, to form new attachments.  To Bo, the Kenzine’s life path seemed like a car on rails as it passed through its high and low points, not at all like his own aimless floating through a nebulous lack of structure. It was another among the multitude of differences between them.

Bo’s mind had been created to make tactical decisions, and it could not stop now.  

Was Victus a foe?  No.

Was he an unwitting danger to Bo or his loved ones?  No.

Could he be relied on?  Yes.

Would he be an ally in a fight? …Tabled.

Was he a trusted friend? At last, Bo’s mind felt comfortable in answering. Yes.

Was he stronger than Bo?   

Was he stronger than Bo?

Was he stronger than Bo?

At this point, Bo’s mind locked up.  This was the last question his brain always asked, one which was often a determining factor in his relationships. He told himself it was a logical effort to assess the strength of his allies, but lately he had begun acknowledging, to himself at least, that it was (and had always been?) driven by ego as much as anything.  Bo had become quite accustomed to always being the strongest person in a room, and that factor had wormed its way into his self-worth. Was Victus stronger than Bo?

In raw physical strength?  No. Bo was comfortable with that, but strength was not measured by physical ability alone. Could Victus best Bo in a fight?  Loathe as Bo was to admit it, the answer was probably ‘yes’. Victus was in possession of skills and techniques which could put Bo down like a baby on a changing table.  Their difference in mental strength, however, might tip the scales. At their cores Bo had iron, but Victus had a silk rope. In a given situation either could prove beneficial, so neither was necessarily better.

In a flash of insight, Bo realized he’d been asking the wrong question.  Bo was definitely stronger and could protect Dan better with Victus at his side. Together, each could provide what the other lacked, so logically they should work together.  Once this decision was made, the reduction in Bo’s stress levels convinced him that he was correct. At the next opportunity, he would invite the Kenzine into their circle.

He was sure Dan would agree.

His mind now clear, he saw that the terrain around him had changed.  The scrubby little trees had disappeared, replaced with low, solitary grasses that looked more dead than alive.  The rise in elevation had driven off all but the hardiest of plant life, and he was running across sandy stone which provided good purchase.  During his mental gymnastics he’d traveled to the base of the wind bridge, and he was pleased to see that the crossing should be easy. It appeared thin in spots, but if it hadn’t fallen down in a million years, it wasn’t likely to do so in the next few minutes.  

Bo’s genetics dictated the retractable, cat-like claws on his fingers and toes, but it did nothing to impart him with a cat’s unshakable sense of balance.  In this, he remained disappointingly ursine. When the base of the bridge was still wide he experimented with a quadrupedal gate to lower his center of gravity, but even with the belly strap attached, the pack on his back threatened to launch itself over his shoulders.  The weight shift was distractingly uncomfortable, so Bo abandoned the attempt and went back to walking on his hind legs.

Logically he knew he could walk on any surface that was as wide as his feet, but that knowledge did little to bolster his confidence on the bridge’s narrow parts. In the center of its span it narrowed alarmingly, and for a few meters at the center it was less than thirty centimeters wide.  It was plenty thick in cross section, but Bo could easily look around it and see the desert floor a hundred meters below. It was damned unnerving. The lack of anything meaningful to listen to encouraged his brain to create sounds. At one point over the thinnest section, he could have sworn that he heard the ground under his feet crack and crumble. Ears unconsciously tucked close to his head, he began whistling tunelessly to give his brain something else to think about.  The cracking noise immediately disappeared.

The instant the bridge began to widen he picked up his pace, and by the time he reached the natural platform at the top of the spire before he was able to breathe normally again.  Over millennia, the constant efforts of wind and sand had blasted the sandstone beneath him until its surface was nearly smooth. The wind had quieted, and Bo felt little discomfort approaching the edge of the formation.  From here he could see hundreds of kilometers in every direction, and the view was utterly magnificent. He strove to store the memory away so he could share it with Dan when he got back.

Task accomplished, he pulled up the data dump on his wrist display and recalled the beacon’s bearing from his first location.  Using that information, it was quick work to determine its bearing from his second location. After locking the new numbers into his computer, he carefully unslung the radio pack and dug out his map.  Working methodically to keep the rising wind from snatching away the precious laminated map, he used a grease pencil and a straightedge to draw a line from his position, extending in the signal’s current direction.  It crossed the line he’d drawn at the colony at a point less than a hundred kilometers from his current position.

Huh. That seemed improbable, at best.  He checked his figures a second time, then a third, coming up with similar results each time.

Bo sat down and repacked his map, fighting to keep hope at bay.  The surface area of their new home planet was nearly 425 million km, of which a little over half was water.  It was nearly impossible for him to believe that a distress beacon had survived in the first place. For one not only to have survived the drop from space but to have landed so close to their pre-arranged landing site purely by chance was patently absurd.  But if there was conscious intent? If the beacon had been installed in a ship whose pilot was trying to make it to a specific spot?

Bo shook his head.  The odds were still a million to one, and they had no guarantee that if the ship landed, it was the one piloted by Lucas MacKenzie.  It could just as impossibly be the other lost ship instead. He would not get his hopes up. Not yet, anyway.

The metadata! He’d forgotten to check that.  He powered up the receiver and oriented it so that the signal was strongest.  Extending a claw, he used it to tap, swipe and page through the menus on his wrist display, all the while cursing its maker for not making data decoding a top-menu item.

When he finally arrived at the correct function, he was disappointed to find that there was nothing to see.  Every emergency beacon he’d encountered had at least encoded the signal with the ship’s ID. This one was totally blank.  It went beep beep beep but that was it, which steered Bo to believe that it was not a military beacon after all. He tried not to feel disappointed.

He got to his feet and struggled into the pack, his task made more difficult by the fact that the wind was whipping the straps back and forth in his face.  Belatedly, he realized that the wind had really picked up in the short time he’d been ruminating. Now it threatened to unbalance him, as well as the hundred-meter tall structure he was standing on.  He had counted on the fact that a million years of erosion had not topped this formation, but he hadn’t plugged his own aerodynamic drag into that formula, or the calculation determining the strength of the wind bridge he’d crossed to get here.

His steps as light as he could make them, he loped to the wind bridge, wondering how much damage his crossing had caused.  Had an extra two hundred and fifty kilograms caused invisible cracks to form in the fragile sandstone? Would it support his weight, or would it fail and send him tumbling to his death?  The fact that the path was now along a downward slope did nothing to make him feel more secure.

As he watched, a tiny piece of the bridge broke loose, skittered across the rock surface and fell off the edge. The thought that that could just as easily be him falling to his death set his heart to pounding in his chest.  He’d had nightmares about this scenario, of clinging to a rock face, mere moments from falling to his doom.

He shook his head, angrily.  He had options. There were always options.  He was completely capable of jumping over the thinnest portion of the bridge, but the gusting wind would probably blow him off his planned trajectory.  He backed away from the windbridge and felt the panic in his chest ease. He could also just curl up here and wait for the wind to die down. Surely it rose and fell in accordance to day/night temperature cycles, so of course it would die down at some point. And, he thought, walking down the formation was far more intimidating than walking up it.

Bo lay down facing into the wind, making himself as aerodynamic as he had on the skimmer.  Then, he’d been trying to go faster. Now he was trying to keep the formation underneath him from toppling over and crushing him underneath it.   Around him the wind was howling, and at times he was certain he could feel the wind-eroded formation swaying back and forth underneath him. Plastered to the stone, he could feel occasional vibrations working to fool his subconscious into thinking he was at death’s door.

The fall of night brought no relief from what had turned into gale force winds.  With nothing else to do, Bo ruminated over the tongue lashing he’d receive after the survey party came back and found the cart missing.  Surely Dan was taking the brunt of the abuse right now, a thought that left him feeling more ashamed than ever. Dry lightning shot through the sky, giving Bo something else to worry about.  He thought that he was probably the tallest conductive surface in a hundred miles, and his death by natural electrocution must be imminent. A joke ran through his mind about the anus being the best place to take a lightning strike, but it didn’t seem as humorous to him now as it once had.  Eventually his exhaustion won and he fell into a fitful sleep.

When he awoke the next morning the wind was gone, taking the lightning and blowing sand with it.  Bo felt too relieved to feel foolish, but he also felt the press of time working against him. The entire survey team would be waiting for his return, or worse, wasting valuable time and resources looking for him.  

He brushed sand from his pack, took a drink from his canteen and amused himself by peeing over the precipice.  His urine disappeared into the distance as if it had never been, and he wondered if, in this dry climate, it was evaporating before hitting the ground.

He pulled his man-parts back inside his sheath, zipped himself up and arranged the straps so the radio pack was again comfortable against his back.  He hustled to the landbridge, cursing himself that he could not remember whether it was right or left of the platform where he’d spent the night. He would have sworn that he’d turned right to get to the top, meaning that the bridge would be to his left as he descended.  But it wasn’t.

He turned and looked in the other direction, but the bridge wasn’t to his right, either.   The plateau he was standing on was large, but not large enough to conceal an entire natural formation.  With a sinking feeling, Bo eased himself to the edge of the plateau and looked down. Sure enough, he saw a new pile of rubble at the base of the formation; a pile about the size of the missing windbridge.

Bo shook his head, bathing in the irony of the moment.  A recurring theme among his childhood nightmares was finding himself on a high spot with no way down.  In his dreams he’d fallen off roofs, tumbled out of trees, and similar to today, been stranded halfway up a rock face with no way down.  That’s me, he thought, wryly, living the dream.

Now, what?