Lost and Found, Part 2

Staying put is a winning strategy if you get lost. But you’re not lost, no. You’re just a bit behind the group. They’re out of sight now, but you’ll catch up once we take a break.

Did they take a left or a right here?

The girl drifted in a haze between awake and asleep, pulled both ways by equal parts pain and exhaustion. When she drifted close to sleep, a drop of rain would splash onto her, or a muscle would shift to a tender angle and protest, and she would be startled awake, to shiver in the dark until fatigue claimed her yet again.

She wasn’t sure what woke her this time. The rustle of leaves, or the crack of a twig, or one of uncountable things. She peered out into the rain.

There was something… wrong, about the gully. She couldn’t identify exactly what was unnerving, but something, a sight or a smell or a sound, was hardwired straight past logic and directly to evolutionary instinct. Warning bells unused since her species developed cities were now clanging in high alert.

Then it crossed through a sliver of moonlight and she saw it. In a split second, her mind pieced together an image shattered by darkness and rain. Boulders and brush and tree limbs refocused, became a great hunched form, knobbled claws and spindly legs ending in cruel points.

The breath caught in her throat. She froze; even her uncontrollable shivering seemed to pause. Her mouth stretched open in an “O” of horror. There was no mistaking it, it was-

“a Greater Blue Terzix,” Shepfeld said, tapping the display. Even in two dimensions it was intimidating. A monstrous, eight-limbed form, so dark blue as to be almost completely black. Sections of a leathery shell, a holdover from its evolution in the sea, protruded from its back. “The biggest threat to your canine unit on this planet. An ambush predator for the most part, but it’s big and tough enough to take down most anything around.”

The dogs had deployed two hours earlier, and until they signaled back, there wasn’t much for the canine unit to do but sit and wait. In the meantime, Shepfeld was taking the opportunity to give his cadets some on-site training.

“Standard jaws and claws, sir?” one of the cadets asked.

“No, the bite strength is significantly underdeveloped, but note the powerful pincers on the second arms, and the sharp dactyls on the others. Its standard approach is to simply crush and suffocate by latching onto the throat, but if threatened, it prefers to pin an aggressor and rake it with the dactyls.

“It’s unlikely that a Terzix would come across a lost person. They’re solitary animals with large territories, and rare in this climate. But it’s possible. They like to come out in the rain.” He glanced pointedly at the downpour just outside the tent.

“All of your units have been trained to recognize when a threat is too dangerous to handle alone, and react accordingly. If a dog encounters dangerous predators in searching, it will project a threat display. Growling, barking, short charges. If the predator is not dissuaded, the dog will disengage, and search elsewhere.”

A cadet raised a hand. “What if a predator has found the target, and doesn’t back down?”

“Good question,” Shepfeld said. “If a TASAR unit feels capable of taking down the predator, it will attack, to drive it off from the victim. Each dog has a different threshold of threats that it can handle. I suggest each of you to trust their judgment. Any further questions?”

Another hand. “Are there any units that you feel would be capable of handling,” the cadet pointed at the creature on the monitor, “that?”

Shepfeld almost smiled. “Just one,” he said.

Just as some primeval sense had alerted the girl to the Terzix’s presence, by some perception of its own the creature realized that it had been seen. The need for stealth was over. It pulled free of the concealing brush and advanced, still slowly, towards the crevice at the gully’s mouth.

The girl was huddled against the muddy back of the cave. That deep, ancestral part of her brain was in full control, telling her that as soon as she tried to break away from her hiding spot, the monster would move with lightning speed and catch her as she was clawing up the slippery hill. And then…

Her primeval brain had little to say on that part. Nothing had survived to pass the knowledge on.

It moved forward. From the mess of antenna and mandibles and dark, gleaming eyes in the shadows under its fore-shell came a rattling hiss. It froze her to her core; in that instant, she could see her own death in horrifying clarity. In a second it would charge. A claw would clamp around her neck with force enough to crush her windpipe and break her spine. With luck, she would be dead before it began to eat.

And then, in that sliver of time before the strike, there was another sound. A deep, deep growl, like dragging a cinderblock on a concrete floor, like the creaking of a tremendous tree. Like the grinding of tectonic plates. A sound like that could only be made by a chest like a barrel and lungs like bellows. Nothing on this planet had ever made a noise like that before.

The Terzix whirled, antenna waving furiously. Freed from its paralyzing sight, the girl looked up. It seemed almost as if the gully had suddenly grown a boulder; then her eyes pieced it together.

Standing on the ridge of the hill was a beast to match the Terzix in size. It was hard to focus on it; the coat was a mottled brown and black that merged easily into the darkness. All that stood out against the night were bright points of metal along its back, and the shine of moonlight off its bared fangs.

It leapt into the channel to face the Terzix, growling low and evenly. The girl still couldn’t get a grip on what the thing was; it would turn, be silhouetted against some backlit boulder, and she would gasp at the bulk of it. An instant later it would fade back into darkness and her mind would insist that it had never been.

The Terzix was undoubtedly perplexed by this astounding creature. Instinctive responses from a hundred lifeforms were cross-firing in its head. Is it prey? Is it a threat? It raised its claws, splaying itself in a warding gesture. Apparently the prominent, fiercely pointed teeth had spurred its decision.

The dog stood its ground. Now the growl began to rise in intensity, growing louder and louder before exploding into thunderous barks and snarls. Thick strings of saliva flew off its jaws. It began to make short charges, throwing its bulk forward, then just as quickly leaping back.

It’s hard to say why the Terzix didn’t retreat. Perhaps it didn’t recognize a threat display from an alien species. Perhaps it judged that it could take down the dog with minimal injury. Maybe it was just hungry. No matter the reason, it decided to attack. It ducked its head, lowered its claws and rushed in at the dog.

They met in the gully bed. From the first impact, it was clear that neither had the weight advantage on the other. They struggled back and forth in a foot of water, sending waves pulsing against the muddy bank.

The Terzix tried to go for the quick kill at first, grabbing for the dog’s throat. But this wasn’t some tiny prey or ungainly giant: the dog was descended from the ancient Molosser breed, bred by the Romans for combat more than a thousand years before humans reached the moon. That kind of selective breeding presents a number of benefits; among them, loose skin. As the claw closed on its neck, the dog twisted and pulled. What the Terzix caught between its pincers was nothing more than a fold of fur and skin. By then the dog had caught the claw arm between its jaws, and began to squeeze.

An adult male Ebrexian can exert a bite force of around 80 pounds per square inch. It’s not incredibly impressive: they first evolved from an equine species and remain mostly consumers of vegetation. The Greater Blue Terzix exerts about 95psi with its mandibles. It relies on its powerful claws to tear flesh into manageable chunks.

The Terran Human exerts 120psi of bite force. More than the Ebrexian and Terzix, but still not particularly spectacular. It lacks the Sagittal Crest of its ape relatives, which anchors the jaw muscles to the top of the skull for greater power. Furthermore, this bite strength is only effective when applied straight-on; any twisting or angling and the power falls off exponentially.

These are reasonable bite strengths for species that kill prey with tools other than their jaw strength.

The North American Timber Wolf exerts a bite force of 400 pounds per square inch, enough to crack bone. Through millennia of careful domestication and breeding, humans increased size and muscle mass, made it stocky and bulky. They shortened the muzzle, to increase the leverage force of the jaw. The end result of these efforts was the English Mastiff, with a recorded bite force of 550psi. Enhanced by TASAR cybernetic muscle-fibers, growth serums, and titanium-infused bone, this number effectively tripled.

The dog bit down on the Terzix’s arm with a bite force of roughly 1650psi, greater than a Grizzly Bear, Bengal Tiger, or Great White Shark. The closest Terran equivalent would be the African Hippopotamus. The damage to the arm was somewhat reduced by the Terzix’s tough semichitinous armor, which is to say that it was not ripped off offhand. Instead, it merely suffered massive muscular trauma. The pincers released their hold on the dog and hung limp.

The Terzix writhed under the dog’s grip. Its initial assault a failure, it seized a swath of skin at the withers with its other claw. It brought its pointed legs to bear, to claw freely at the dog’s abdomen.

Each spiny dactyl curved gently to its tip. A series of micro-serrations ran along the inside edge, to help slice cleanly through flesh. They caught and tore at the dog’s flesh now, a dozen times, then a dozen more. Dark red blood came jetting out in sprays, to mix with the mud and the rain. Only the dog’s dense muscles and tough, thick hide were keeping it from being disemboweled.

If the Terzix was expecting some respite from the bizarre creature, it was disappointed. The great beast only adjusted for a better grip and held on grimly, bearing down on the arm with those terrible jaws.

To the little girl watching fearfully from her crevice, the struggle was as tremendous and incomprehensible as some mythical battle. The shapes of the opponents, already barely visible in the night, were constantly broken up through sheets of rain. They made little sound; only the clack of a shell or a muffled grunt escaped them. What little she got from the battle came as fragmented, confusing images, flashes of coherency in a scene of muted chaos.

She tried to press herself back farther. She found no comfort in the alien creature’s sudden arrival. The Terzix was a creature that figured prominently in her nightmares; from the moment she learned about them in school, she had imagined them crawling up from some primordial slime with a host of countless smaller monsters, all coming for her. They would click and tap on her windows and scratch at her door until she would wake up in tears. She had lived most of her life in abject fear, in absolute knowledge of the creatures that awaited her beyond civilization’s walls. The Terzix she knew with the familiarity of a thousand sleepless nights.

The other one, though, filled her with terror of the unknown. It was like no animal she had ever seen before. All she knew was that it was enormous, and powerful, and it had thrown itself against the deadliest predator on the planet without a second’s hesitation. She didn’t know which monster would win the fight; all she knew was that she would be at the absolute mercy of the victor.

“I assume you’re all familiar with this equation?” Shepfeld pulled a string of numbers and letters onto the screen. “Who can tell me what it is?”

A hand shot up. Cadet Pullet again. Shepfeld gave the room a second in the vain hope that someone else might be able to answer, then succumbed to the inevitable. “Yes, Cadet Pullet?”

“Baye’s theorum as applied to search theory, used to calculate the probability of finding a lost object to be represented in a density map.” Pullet rattled off the definition with the high speed monotone and slightly glazed eyes characteristic of rote recall, then put his hand down smugly. Shepfeld resisted the urge to smack him across the back of the head.

“...good,” he said. “Search and rescue operations, as with all fields, rely on successfully combining mathematics and theory with practical knowledge and experience. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in deployment.”

He brought up a topographical map of the forest. He tapped the screen; hundreds of red dots popped up, scattered in clumps like pointillism. “This is the density map constructed using Bayesian Search Theory, updated to the point when the sectors were designated.” He tapped again; lines began to trace across the map, slicing the forest off into large squares.

“That’s all theory. Next we had to figure out which dogs would be best deployed to which area. Handler input is extremely important in this process. We can chart out each unit’s scent capabilities, breed standards, and success rates. But for all that, it’s a handler’s gut instinct, formed from years of working firsthand with the dogs, that determines where we deploy.”

Pullet didn’t seem to be picking up on the hint. A good cadet for the most part, very smart, but suffered from a severe allergy to elbow grease. In his mind, he was probably already in a cushy desk position doing pedigree paperwork. Shepfeld decided to pull out the ace he’d been saving.

“Cadet Pullet!” he snapped. The young man jerked to attention out of whatever white-collar fantasy he’d been in. “I want you to tell me which TASAR unit I deployed to Sector F, and why.”

Pullet studied the map for a moment. “Rockford,” he decided. “Although Sector F shows the highest probability for the child, the terrain is rough and varied. German Shepherds are good generalist searchers, allowing more specialized dogs to focus on areas where they would be more useful, such as bloodhound unit Moses to Sector C, which has more open areas for scent to travel.” He sunk back into his seat.

Shepfeld nodded. “Good. An analysis of the sector, the dog’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as considering the roles of other dogs. A textbook answer.

“Also wrong.”

The cadet frowned. It wasn’t often that his encyclopedic knowledge of the TASAR handbook failed him. “Is it Kobuk, sir? The area shows indicators of flooding during rain, and many of the local predators are semi-aquatic. A Malamute has the size to chase off most of them.”

“Not Kobuk, either.”

Pullet stared at the map desperately. He looked almost as if he was trying to will the screen into giving him an answer. “What about Grover?” he said.

Shepfeld suppressed a grin. Pullet was really reaching now. He was a breed purist, and hated trying to puzzle out how the mutts worked. “And why Grover?”

“Well, he’s definitely got some Komondor in him, and the corded coat will help against predators,” Cadet Pullet looked as if he was trying to bend his mind around a corner. “And, and, he’s part Labrador, so he has a good sense of smell and… he likes swimming?”

“Wrong again.” Time to drop the bomb. “I sent Daisy.”

Ooh, it was sweet. Pullet was actually speechless for a few seconds. “Daisy?” he finally managed. “But why, sir? There’s a recommended hold on her. She’s not even supposed to be moved to site until the psychological evaluations go through!”

Now he had to hammer in the lesson. Shepfeld moved to stand directly in front of Pullet, and bent forward. “Because your units are not just a line of charts and statistics, cadet," he said. His voice was low and serious. "They are living, thinking beings, and you need to understand that if you ever plan on working in this organization.

“It is because of this unit’s particular history that I believe she is the best suited for the task. Moreover, I believe that succeeding in this will help her recover. I’ve personally worked with Daisy for two years, cadets.” He paused. “I believe that she feels the need to earn her closure. I picked her for Sector F because she won’t ever give up. And that’s what this girl needs.”

The two titans separated at last, retreating to their corners.

The Terzix’s arm was a ruin. It was held on by only ragged strands of tendon and flesh. The claw spun and swung and dragged against the ground. One of its antennae had been torn off, and its shell was cracked in several places where its opponent had bitten down. Two of the stabbing legs were gone. But its left claw was held high, and it stood ready for the next assault.

The dog was in much worse shape. It bled heavily where the legs had shredded its hide, and limped from a grievous wound to the foreleg. The Terzix had gone for its eyes; deep-set in its head, they had been missed, but one of its jowls had been laid open. The torn flap of skin hung off the side of its face and slapped against its jaw with every panting breath.

There is one moment that every trainer spends months training into each TASAR unit’s head: the complete disengage. When a crisis threatens both the victim and the unit, when continued pursuit would result in the unit’s death, it must abandon the victim and seek to protect itself. It could be a landslide, a blizzard, a dangerous predator, it doesn’t matter. Protocol was clear: the chance of saving the victim is not worth risking the lives of both.

For the dog, this moment had arrived. It paused to consider this.

Then it charged.

It slammed into the Terzix, almost bowling it over with the force of its attack. The Terzix was ready for the charge, if not the ferocity of it; the working claw seized the dog’s wounded leg and clamped and twisted; there was a crack of fractured bone. But the dog’s head had ducked low, it was pressed to the abdomen amongst the flailing legs. Now it put those crushing jaws to work, sinking deep into the monster’s belly.

The Terzix was no longer silent: it made a high-pitched keening that cut through the drumming of the rain. Its legs ran along the dog’s sides, flaying the skin to ribbons. At the ribs, a patch of skin was sliced free, revealing muscle in dark red cords and lines of yellow-white marbled fat.

The dog made no sound. It had pierced the Terzix’s stomach armor, now it tore directly into its vitals. The Terzix screeched again. Blueish-green fluids spurted from the wound and matted the dog’s fur. Both creatures tore at each other in one final, awful test of endurance.

The Terzix finally broke away from the dog. Still shrieking, it staggered back to the gully’s edge. Viscera hung from its mauled belly, intestines dragging through the water in shining white loops. It waved its claw in uncertain circles at the dog, then turned and fled in a slow scuttle. In seconds it was swallowed up by the darkness and rain.

The dog watched it leave. Then the great head swung around slowly, to point unerringly at the crevice at the mouth of the gully.

The girl’s breath caught in her throat. She had hoped to be forgotten in the aftermath of the vicious struggle, but now the beast began to advance, limping badly, towards her hiding place.

Perhaps she could have escaped while they fought, but now it was too late. The strange, massive creature had already come to where the muddy, slippery walls were high. Closer now; she could pick out every place the Terzix’s legs had gashed it. Sheets of blood flowed down its sides to be churned into the mud by the stinging downpour. The thing’s breath was ragged and slow.

It reached the crevice mouth. Any meager light was blocked out by the beast’s massive frame. The enormous head came close, to sniff slowly at the girl. She shrank back and squeezed her eyes shut; any moment now, those terrible crushing jaws would close on her throat and-

Something huge and warm and damp brushed gently at her cheek. She opened her eyes. The dog looked solemnly at her, then brought its head forward and licked her again.

She burst into tears.

INCIDENT REPORT #3463

TASAR Unit: Molosser Class Unit 484, “Daisy”

Gender: female

Age: 5

Breed: imported English Mastiff (Brindle)

Modifications: standard TASAR surgical-genetic modification package for increased musculature, endurance, lifespan, and intelligence

History: 6 successful TASAR missions, 2 unsuccessful. Personally located 4 of 6 victims.

3 months prior to incident, put on service hold due to pregnancy. Lost entire litter due to birth complications.

Displays signs of severe emotional trauma. Recommended to withhold from missions until behavior is assessed.

Incident: Upon the disappearance of Limmra Okpan, seven TASAR dogs were deployed, one to each sector. It was the handler’s decision to deploy Daisy despite the recommended hold, to section F.

Four hours later, Daisy activated her locator beacon. Our retrieval units found her in a shallow gully, curled up with the sleeping child. Limmra was diagnosed with dehydration, many minor scratches, and mild shock, but was otherwise unharmed. Daisy had suffered severe lacerations and blood loss, sustained while driving off a Greater Blue Terzix. The body of the Terzix was found several hundred feet away.

Conclusion: After some deliberation, and significant pressure from multiple parties, we have decided to retire Daisy as a TASAR Unit. She has been released into the ownership of the Okpan family as a personal favor to the Senator, to her daughter, and to Daisy.