The Station, Part 16 cont.

I’m almost there now. There’s a cawing noise from around the bend, not unlike a crow, but deeper. I’m slowing down, going to be cautious about this. There’s the reason for the caws. Scavengers. Like a cross between parrots and pterodactyls, blackish feather like covering with naked, heavy beaked heads. Black even in the atmosphere of deep red. They are about a meter high. No eyes but deep recesses in their beak that must be nostrils. They have flippered feet and arms. I suppose they swam here. Some float out in the surf. Some are on the beach. All of them are pulling and tearing at the corpses. Another parallel to earth ecology at work. Nothing goes to waste. One of the vulture-analogues just literally appeared from inside one of the bodies, holding in its beak some morsel of viscera. It’s all very calm. No internal squabbling more the tastiest bits. I suppose there’s plenty to go around. No reason to get testy with each other. There’s even some kind of crustacean lurking about as well. They seem to be satisfied with stating on the sidelines, at least for now. Perhaps they wait for the vulture things to have their fill, and then move in for the other parts. They have heavy claws that look like they could crack bone. That is, if the dead giants have bones. I think I’m done here, but I feel strangely satisfied that I came here. Like it was the right thing to do. I needed to know more. I’ve seen enough of this particular world, at least for now. I need to get back to the real task. Frontier is just beyond one of these tunnels. And I will find her—today. Now I really need to decide my method. This place is finite in size. It’s only a matter of time.

The beacon is doing just fine, putting out a strong signal. Back into the tunnel I go. Damn it, I’d forgotten I was going to be a steep climb back. This is going to use a lot of oxygen. Hold on, I’m going to stop for a minute and think this through. Bear with me. I know that back the way I came, where Frontier should have been was a grove, no more like a forest of tree-like creatures, although they were more like animal than tree. No, they were animals. Nothing like trees. Feeding off of tiny floating creatures. Do I really want to go back there? Yes. I need to retrace my steps. Get my bearings. I’m reading the beacon at the other end. I’ll bite the bullet on this one. Oxygen be damned. If Frontier is nearby, which she should be, it won’t matter that I’ve used too much O2.
Damn, I’m tired. Wheezing like an old man. Feel like one, too. But I made it. Goddamn it, I fucking made it. I hope I never have to do that again. Here I am again, back in the darkness. Odd, it doesn’t seem as dark as before. There’s a bluish cast to the chamber, allowing me to better see the spread of the land. The feathered trees are here and now there seems to be more of them. Probably just because I can simply see more. No station of course. That would be too convenient.

This has got to be the same chamber. Has to be. The inner walls are the same, at least they look the same. But the rest, well, I don’t know. But how can an entire comm. station just disappear like this? Okay, granted I don’t know how I got inside here in the first place, but there was no sign of a mechanism of any kind, like a crane or something, that could lift it. Nothing…unless…hold on, forming a thought here. The crevasse. The crevasse. It could have slipped down. It didn’t look wide enough to swallow Frontier whole, but I didn’t count on it being able to widen. If that’s true, where the hell did the non-trees come from? And there should be an even wider crevasse. Time for a stroll back through the grove to test out my theory.