Lost and Found, Part 1

A million eyes watched the little girl as she ran through the evening woods. A million ears heard her frantic heaving for air, a million noses smelled the terror pouring off of her in waves.

She fell against a tree and paused for a moment to pull in another shuddering breath. Her eyes, raw and red from crying, looked about helplessly for some landmark or familiar path. She found nothing, as she had for the last four hours. As her tears began to well up, a stick cracked, and she was off running again.

A million eyes watched her frantic flight, birds and bugs and some things much larger and hungrier…

“I want drones scanning every inch of that forest. Four to a segment in long sweeps, and stagger their charging cycles. I don’t want to be blind for one second in the area.”

Senator Okpan rattled off a string of orders, every inch an idol of authority. Her voice was pitched to that careful balance of professionalism and urgency that slices clean through bureaucracy. Not a hair was out of place on the impressive mane running down her back, and her face was set in the hardline expression that got voters off their seats and in the booths every time. But something, the hint of a quaver at the ends of sentences, her movements just a touch too fast, hinted at the same helplessness felt by a little girl lost somewhere out in a four hundred kilometer square of forest.

A note on the datapad clutched in a lower arm caught her eye. “Have we figured out how she got separated from the group in the first place?”

“A technical oversight, Senator. One of the children left at the start of the headcount and returned at the end. The supervisor isn’t programmed to identify specific children, so it concluded the correct number of children were present.”

“Get a recall set up. We’re not going to let this happen again.”

A male Ebrexian sat in a dark corner of the room. It seemed that every quality of the Senator was flipped and inverted in him; his expression was lifeless and crumpled, his mane disheveled and patchy, his eyes were glazed. His seldom movements were boneless and slow. He didn’t so much sit on his chair as had been draped across it, and hidden away in the shadows behind the blinking lights and flashing screens.

A keen observer would likely have noticed something very curious: for all her manic drive and efficiency, the Senator always choose a path of movement that excluded this man. It was subtle, but unmistakable. She would turn only as far as necessary before he entered her field of vision, then stop, and reverse. In the rare moments where she was forced to look in his direction, she would do so at speed, and her eyes would flick up or down to avoid the sight of him. You could almost be forgiven for thinking that the renowned Senator Okpan, intercessor of fourteen galactic conflicts, could not bear to meet his eyes.

“What’s the status of those drones?” she snapped.

“They’re up, but there’s some kind of serious interference on the bioscans. We’re getting all kinds of conflicting readings. And the foliage is too thick to see to the ground in most areas.”

“Great. Great!” She rubbed at her forehead with her right upper hand. “That’s just great. At least the search groups are deploying.”

“Uh, Senator?” said an aide from the hallway. She spun, but not too far. The hallway was uncomfortably close to a certain dark corner. “There’s someone, a human, here to see you. Says he’s Ranger Shepfeld, from the TASAR.”

She blinked. “The what?”

“The Terran Association for Search and Rescue.”

There are things you can do to help you survive, if lost in the woods. Don’t move. You’re far more likely to be found if you stay in one place than if you wander. Don’t drink water you haven’t filtered. Build a shelter. Make a fire, if you can. Don’t panic.

The girl knew none of this. She ran from a thousand unseen fears, her body locked in fight-or-flight, mainlining adrenaline to her terrified brain. She ran, stopped to rest, and ran again. She drank from rivers, ate nothing. All her scrapes and bruises, hunger and aching muscles, were burned away before the flames of sheer mind-numbing terror.

“So let me get this straight,” Senator Okpan said. “You want to help this investigation, find… this, this girl, by sending wild animals after her?”

The human made a brief sigh. He was an imposing sight, standing a full hand taller than the Senator, with a mass of hair that seemed to engulf his face, leaving only patches of skin for his nose and eyes to peer out from. He sported only a single pair of arms, but what they lacked in plurality was made up for in their tremendous size. Thick, hairy, and corded with dense muscle, they seemed a holdover from the great primates his race was supposedly descended from.

He wore the classic, world-weary expression of someone who knows that if he could spend even a fraction of the time explaining his job, actually doing his job, the world would be a much better place.

“Not wild animals, ma’am,” he said. “These are highly intelligent, highly trained units hand-picked by TASAR. They can move quickly through rough terrain and track an individual for miles.”

“And then what? Who’s to say that this creature, this predator, won’t mistake the child for prey and attack her instead?” A low whimper came from the figure sitting in the corner, for a moment heard above the hubbub of aides and computers. The Senator flinched very slightly at the sound.

“You don’t have any pets, do you ma’am?” said the human.

“I am… familiar with the concept.”

“How familiar, exactly?”

Senator Okpan hesitated. “You take a… an animal, yes? From the wild. And you remove the reproductive organs, to render them submissive. And then you use them to aid in hunting?” she said. “And fighting each other, for gambling purposes?”

“That’s… one way to spin it.” Beneath the prolific facial bristles, the human looked slightly pained. “Certainly that has been an approach. But these are dogs, ma’am. Not some bloodthirsty monster we tore right out of the jungle. The human race has been living with dogs since before we could farm, back when we banged rocks together for tools.

“You want to know why our TASAR units won’t hurt this child? There are legends and stories throughout our history, even documented cases, of wolves, wild savage predators, raising human infants as their own. We took this animal and we bred it for tens of thousands of years to suit our needs. Dogs have protected us, guarded our herds and our homes and our children, for our entire written history.

“We take the best of them, load them up with genetic and cybernetic enhancements, and train them to be the best search-and-rescue units in known space. They can trail, track, and air-scent, find their target, alert us to their location, and if necessary, protect them from threats.”

“But it’s an animal!” the Senator burst out. “We have over a hundred people sweeping the forest. We have the most advanced drones money can buy, and a few that it can’t. We just can’t trust something that primitive on a matter like this!”

“Ma’am.” The human’s voice had dropped into stony professionalism. “Your search teams are untrained for this work and ill-suited to the terrain. Your drones can’t maneuver through brush this dense, and your bioscans won’t be able to pick out a damn thing against the wildlife. You may find this girl in an hour, or a day, or a week. She may even still be alive. But it’s likely something else is going to find her first. Something that has evolved over millions of years to prey on the young and weak and helpless. And it will eat her.”

If Okpan had a rebuttal, it was cut off by a wail from the man in the corner. He started to rock back and forth, grasping at his head with all his hands. The Senator’s personal aides turned at the sound, and then went right on turning. They bent back to their tasks, tense with the active effort of ignoring him.

The Senator finally faced him, walked over briskly and grabbed his shoulders. “Pull yourself together, Gomma! I need to concentrate now and you. Are not. Helping.”

“You said she would be safe!” he sobbed at her. She recoiled, stung. He continued to rock with his arms wrapped around himself. Tears coursed down familiar grooves carved out by solid hours of weeping. “You said she’d be fine!”

“It was safe and she’ll be fine!” she snapped. “The trip was highly recommended, they’ve never lost anyone before! We agreed that it would be good for her! She’d make friends!” Her words began to pour out in a manic cascade. “Don’t put this on me, Gomma! It’s not my fault some hodunk supervisor drone malfunctioned! I am trying to get her back, do you understand that? I need to concentrate and do my job, because she’s out there, and-” she halted briefly, looking almost shocked, as if something had suddenly cracked through her composure for an instant. She tried to forge onward. “She- she’s out there, and alone, and scared out of her mind-”

She wavered again. A struggle seemed to be taking place inside her, the iron walls of her self-control being smashed apart under the onslaught of a single, unbearable thought. “She’s all alone,” she said, almost a whisper. “Oh my god.”

She hunched forward abruptly and put her hands to her face. Her shoulders began to shake. The commanding, authoritative politician was gone. What stood now in the center of the room looked helpless and frightened and very, very tired.

Surprisingly, it was her husband who rose, springing up with sudden drive to catch her before she sunk to the floor. They latched together in a complex Ebrexian embrace. For a long moment they only held each other, faces buried in the others shoulder.

Not one of the Senator’s aides dared to turn away from their stations. They stared desperately at their screens, held captive by a social paralysis that went well beyond awkwardness. Only the human seemed unfazed by the Senator’s intense vulnerability. Then again, in his line of work he'd seen it before.

As they held each other tightly, the couple appeared to gain strength. They slowly rose from kneeling to standing upright. Finally they broke apart, and Senator Okpan turned to face the human.

“Our Limmra… she’s always been afraid of the outdoors.” Her voice was flat and drained. “Of thunder, and animals, and the dark. She’d have nightmares, Gramtids and Terzixes coming to get her in the night. We thought… we thought this trip would help her get over it. Face her fears.”

She stepped forward, looked up to the human’s eyes. “Do what you can. Find our daughter.

“Please.”

It was in a gully at the base of a steep hill that the little girl’s dregs of energy ran dry. After hours running on overdrive with no food or rest, her muscles finally gave out without warning. She collapsed in the dirt utterly exhausted.

With her adrenaline spent, a thousand points of pain rose up to make their presence known. She was covered in scratches where her skin had been raked by thorns and twigs. Her mouth was swollen from thirst, and both stomachs twisted in twin protest of their emptiness. The stitch in her side stabbed fiercely with every breath. And as the pinnacle of her discomfort, her legs began to cramp and seize from their abuse.

The girl began to cry again in great dry gasps, still prone against the ground. In agony and despair, she could not imagine how her misery could possibly increase.

As if in answer, she heard a soft patter, and tiny cold pinpricks begin to dot across her body. The patter grew to a murmur, and then a roar. In minutes the gully was bombarded by sheets of icy rain.

By the dim light of the planet’s second moon filtered through the storm clouds, she managed to drag herself through the mud to a shallow crevice in the hill. It was not a particularly good defense. Occasional backspray from the drumming rain outside would lash backwards at her; but it was better than nothing. She curled up tightly in the shelter and shivered and cried.

Ranger Shepfeld walked along a line of slate-gray kennels, freshly flown in by the TASAR deployment ship. Until they would need retrieval again, the ship would circle the area in high altitude, giving what little support and surveillance an interplanetary spacecraft could provide on a small land area. Still, it had saved lives before.

He came to a crate, scanned in his authorization, released the door. A German Shepherd trotted out.

If an expert in dog breeds were present, he would likely have many points to raise against the previous statement. The coloration is certainly correct for a German Shepherd, he would say, but the dog is clearly too large for a pure bloodline. He would note the muscles as far too pronounced, the body unusually thick. Then again, he might notice the metal cables interlacing along the spine, and the distinctive shine of optic enhancements in the eyes, and bite his tongue. It may have started a purebred, but now it was a TASAR working dog.

The Shepherd walked briskly past as he moved to the next crate. This one revealed a reddish-brown Bloodhound. The wrinkled folds of loose skin on its face looked almost comical, but Shepfeld knew that it was the work of careful breeding, to trap scent particles from the air. The Bloodhound was the best scent-tracker this side of the galaxy.

The next crate held a Golden Retriever that almost bounced with energy. After that came a Malamute, a powerful arctic breed built for enduring the harshest conditions. Both had extensive augmentations, the golden sporting an entire prosthetic leg that seemed not to damper its agility or high spirits in the least.

The next three crates held the mongrels and mutts. Though usually a mixed bag of good and bad characteristics, TASAR had recognized the benefit of dogs not bound by breeding standards. Through careful screening they identified mutts with the best combinations of traits for search and rescue, and recruited them to the program.

Each dog walked briskly towards the briefing area, where their handlers would determine the best area for each dog to search. Soon they would be loaded onto the short-range transports and deployed to their zones.

Shepfeld paused before the last crate. He pulled up the unit files on his datapad, studied the case history. Technically, this crate shouldn’t have even been flown in, but it seemed the paperwork had been a bit behind and the hold hadn’t gone through yet.

He peered through the grating above the door. In the gloom of night, he could barely see the outline of an enormous body, lying on the floor. Only the rise and fall of its tremendous chest suggested it was even alive.

Shepfeld came to a decision and leaned close to the grating. “You up, girl?” he said. A head, massive and dark and close-furred, rose slowly to the sound.

He entered his authorization codes and the door slid open. “It’s time to go to work.”