by Ethan Proud
“But if you were exiled for wishing to bring us back to the Original Settlement, why would they accept us?” Deirde said in an attempt to deter the rest of the colony from joining someone just as crooked as the Council of Elders.
“I’m glad you asked, little bird,” Jarrod said and grinned with half of his mouth. The gesture wasn’t lost on Rio, who bristled. “The engineers and scientists at the Original Settlement believe they have found the source of the water, and that if we follow its path, we may find salvation.”
“And how are you privy to this information?” Lepiro demanded from the crowd.
“I was an engineer,” Jarrod sneered. “And in my day, I have built many of the aquifers and found water by following the maps you have produced.”
“He’s lying, we need to leave,” Deirde whispered coarsely.
“What if he’s not?” Yuto countered.
Deirde said nothing, but neither did Rio. None of them made a move.
“Then lead us to this promised land,” Taiga demanded as she emerged from her tent, a pack slung over her shoulder. She looked around before her eyes widened. “Where are the Elders?”
A commotion came over the camp as Exos began craning their heads back and forth, yelling angrily as they realized the Elders had slipped away unnoticed. Jarrod raised his hands as an order for silence.
“Settle down, they are no longer our concern. We must find the other Hydra colonies and recruit them to our cause before we find our oasis. We must be swift, however, for some from the Original Settlement may be seeking it as well,” Jarrod said, commanding the attention of the colony.
“Screw them! I say we go now!” a voice yelled from deep in the crowd.
“And subject them to the same misery you’ve been living your entire lives? I think not,” Jarrod snapped angrily, and the naysayer was silenced. “Now gather your belon-”
Before he could finish, he was cut off by a hissing sound as a canister flew through the air. It exploded in a shower of sparks and smoke before it hit the ground, and then three more followed. Not all of them detonated while aloft, some landed heavily before sending shrapnel and sand hurtling through the colony.
“Shrikers!” Jarrod yelled and pulled a long, tubular weapon from his pack. He crouched down and scanned the area for assailants. It didn’t take long before the dark figures began swarming the colony, holding the same type of weapons. From each weapon, a spark and loud percussive sound was ejected. Each time it sounded a colonist dropped.
“Now we need to leave,” Deirde said flatly and began to sprint into the darkness.
Yuto followed her wordlessly, but Rio hesitated a second too long. Something struck him in the leg with incredible force and he fell to the ground. His ears were ringing, his vision blurry. He coughed in a plume of smoke and tears streamed from his eyes from the corrosive fumes. He reached down and touched his thigh to feel gushing blood and a fragment of metal sticking out of his leg. He knew better than to pull it out, but he also knew there was no way he could keep up with Deirde and Yuto now. He would have to fight. He drew his machete and rose to find a man sprinting towards him, one of the exploding sticks in his hands. Luck was on Rio’s side, however, as the man didn’t see him before he stood and didn’t have time to level the gun at him. Rio slashed as hard as he could at the man’s torso and the machete tore a ragged opening in his rib cage and mutilated the organs in his thoracic cavity. He coughed, a liquid, laden sound, and a second later Rio was bathed in blood. Rio yanked his machete out of the man’s body, and the assailant crumpled into a spasming pile of limbs on the ground.
Rio stooped down and took the rifle from the man, he didn’t know how to use it, but he would learn. He limped into the skirmish, painfully aware of the metal in his thigh and the blood gushing down his leg. Rio saw a Shriker aiming a weapon similar to his and firing it at a Hydra Exo. He noticed that the man made a small movement with his hand that seemed to trigger the explosive projectile to fly from the barrel. Rio leveled the weapon the way he saw the man do it, but failed to find the trigger. He looked at the weapon in confusion and ran his hands over it experimentally.
Sure enough, he found the trigger and sent a bullet launching straight up into the air. Rio jumped in alarm, before he regathered his senses and aimed the weapon again. He pointed the weapon at one of the Shrikers, and pulled the trigger. The gun went off and rammed the stock into his shoulder painfully. Of course he missed, but he didn’t let it discourage him, he took aim again and pulled the trigger. Click. Nothing. He had run out of ammunition. He cursed his luck before he ran into the melee. He didn’t discard the gun, as it could be useful later if he survived.
He fought, swinging the gun similarly to his machete, and it proved to be useful. He swung it in a vicious arc and it connected with the back of an unsuspecting man’s head. The Shriker crumpled to the ground, and the Hydra he was engaged with nodded with appreciation at Rio. It was Taiga, her face soaked with blood, but it wasn’t hers. She fought with two small knives, and once the Shriker went down she pulled a smaller gun from his thigh holster. She didn’t know how to use it either, and she wasn’t about to try to learn on the fly. But much like Rio, she wasn’t going to let an opportunity pass her.
“Where’s Yuto?” she yelled to be heard over the din.
Rio didn’t grace her with a verbal response. Instead, he tightened his lips and looked right into her eyes. She understood.
“He left,” Taiga said too quietly to be heard, but Rio knew what she had said. He also knew that she didn’t particularly care, but perhaps she had expected more from him.
Their moment was cut short as a loud screeching whistle sounded. The Shrikers turned mid-combat and disappeared just before the sun began to creep over the horizon.
Rio looked around and saw that their colony’s population had been decimated. There had been nearly one hundred and fifty of them, but now it looked like less than half of them had survived the attack, if even that. In the middle of the camp, Lepiro hovered over the prone form of Jarrod.
Chapter Eight
“Where’s Rio?” Deirde said as the sun began to crest over a sand dune and bathe the desiccated landscape with its burning rays. The gonis lazily flapped circles around the pair. Yuto ran his fingers through his hair in frustration.
“He didn’t make it. He didn’t...” Yuto choked on his own voice before he turned a steely stare over to Deirde. “Why didn’t you warn us about the exiles? We could have left at night instead of waiting until morning. Rio’s death is your fault.”
“We don’t know if he’s dead!” Deirde screamed in response but didn’t defend her actions. “We should go back for him.”
“And die ourselves? Our entire camp was destroyed, I’ve never seen weapons like that before. We didn’t stand a chance against them. Don’t be thick,” Yuto snarled.
Above them, Aileen and Deirde exchanged confused glances and flapped down to the head height of their masters and stared balefully.
“I can’t just leave him to die,” Deirde said, her molla eyeliner beginning to run in thick streams down her face.
“You should have thought about that before you lied to us.”
“I didn’t lie!” she protested, even though her own false words rang in her ears.
“‘There are others. There’s no other explanation. Everyone has been drinking the piss water in this colony. There’s no way the Elders could make it out into the desert every day and take enough water in secret. What if the water is for someone else?’” Yuto mocked in her in a sing-song voice laced with stupidity. “You knew there were others!”
Deirde sank to her knees in the sand, and barely sobbed out the words, “I am so sorry.”
Yuto regarded her coldly, before he began to feel a little guilty for his harsh words. “I’m sorry for what you’ve done as well. But I suppose we have to work together to survive. I’ll apologize later if I decide I truly feel sorry.”
“What do we do now?” Deirde said, choosin
g to ignore his last sentence.
“We find the aquifers and hope that nobody beat us to them.”
“What if we don’t get there first?” Deirde asked, her voice low.
“Then we kill them,” Yuto said and patted the machete at his hip with the spear in his hand. “We can’t trust anyone anymore. You, least of all.”
“I thought you said we had to work together.” Deirde rose to her feet and snarled, spit hitting Yuto directly in the face.
“I know, but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven you. You killed my best friend,” Yuto said, his eyes welling with tears, but he blinked them away.
“He’s not dead, don’t say that again,” Deirde fumed, and Yuto opened his mouth but she cut him off. “Lead the way.”
X
Back at the Hydra Camp, Rio, Lepiro, and Taiga stood around the bound form of Jarrod. Rio had removed the shrapnel from his leg, applied an ointment, and now had a piece of cloth tied around his lower thigh as a bandage. The snuffling creature was staked to the ground, but it struggled against its bonds and stretched its greedy, shoveling paws towards the gonis. The gonis shrieked and swooped down and dived bombed the ugly creature, but their gelatinous bodies did little harm.
“What is that disgusting thing?” Lepiro asked, and nudged Jarrod roughly in the ribs.
“His name is Mycka,” Jarrod said angrily.
“I don’t care what its name is. What is it and why do you have it?” Lepiro persisted.
“It’s a sand dingo, and it does the same thing your gonis do.”
“It finds mollas?” Rio asked, looking at the odd creature as Herma dove down and spat in its face.
“Er, not exactly. We use it to inoculate our young with the bacteria necessary to survive. It hunts gonis, and then we find the molla caches the gonis have found,” Jarrod said reluctantly.
“I’m killing it,” Lepiro said and drew a dagger and stalked off towards the creature, which cowered when he approached.
“Please don’t!” Jarrod said in a pitiful tone. “The Shrikers killed my men, if you kill Mycka I will have nothing.”
Lepiro waved a hand to dismiss him, but Taiga interrupted the would-be slaughter.
“Lepiro, stop. If Jarrod was telling the truth, then he was trying to help us.” She turned to the man tied at her feet. “Keep him away from our gonis, or we will kill him.”
Jarrod nodded in appreciation of her empathy.
“Why didn’t the Shrikers kill all of us?” Rio asked, in the back of his mind replaying his conversation with Deirde and Yuto. He couldn’t figure out why Deirde hadn’t mentioned the exiles.
“They were hunting my men, not the Hydras. They need you. But your colony ended up being collateral damage,” Jarrod explained. He was missing one of his eyebrow rings and an ugly purple bruise was forming around his left eye socket and cheekbone.
“Where are they now?” Lepiro asked as he resumed his place with the group.
“Probably hunting down my men who escaped, if any. Or bringing your Elders back to The Wreckage,” Jarrod supplied, splaying his hands, an awkward gesture tied as they were.
“Why didn’t Deirde tell us about you?” Rio asked, but it wasn’t a question.
“You her husband?” Rio shook his head in answer. “Boyfriend?”
“They’re the only two who are actually in love in this colony.” Lepiro snorted humorlessly. Rio realized that the other hunter was jealous of the relationship.
“That would be why,” Jarrod said sourly, looking at the ground.
Rio felt a pang of sadness lance through his ribs and a lump formed in his throat. He understood exactly what the exile had insinuated. Anger welled within him and he slammed his foot into Jarrod’s face. Blood gushed from the now broken nose, and the man collapsed on the ground, barely conscious.
“We need him!” Taiga protested, as Rio kicked the slack figure in the ribs.
“I know,” Rio growled, tears on the verge of escape. “I’m not going to kill him.” The heartbroken hunter paced away from the group and disappeared behind one of the tents that had remained standing.
Taiga ignored the young man and turned her attention back to the prisoner. “If I untie you, will you help us find the source of the water?” She had both hands placed on her hips, surveying the broken and bruised man at her feet.
“I don’t have much of a choice, do I? But as I said, I came here to help. We need to find the other Hydra colonies first, though,” Jarrod said and spat a gob of blood from his mouth. It appeared that a molar was stuck in the congealed mess.
“No. We need to secure the water source first, and then we can hunt down the colonies. If the Shrikers know you have warned one colony, they will undoubtedly try to beat us there,” Taiga argued and turned to Lepiro. “Find what we can salvage and how many of our people are left. We leave immediately.”
“Look around, we are the only survivors,” Lepiro said gently.
Taiga didn’t respond. She was staring at the dead and dying that surrounded them. It didn’t take Taiga long before she saw the corpse of her father in a puddle of his own blood in the otherwise dry sand. Her only solace was that in his advanced age, he didn’t have much time left before the attack. She bit back her tears and scanned the destruction for her mother.
“Search for more survivors,” she commanded, and made sure her voice didn’t catch in her throat. Without another word she began methodically searching for the last of her family. She did her best to ignore the groans of the dying, and eased the pain of those who were beyond help. Tears slowly tumbled down her dusty cheeks, leaving streaky rivulets from her cheekbones to her jaw. After seemingly searching the whole camp, she noticed a strange lump underneath the crumpled and ruined canvas of a tent. With shaking hands, she lifted the fabric and saw a welcome sight. Her mother was unconscious, but breathing. The left half of her face was coated with blood that no longer ran from a jagged cut on her forehead. Taiga gingerly set her mother’s head on her lap and stroked her hair.
“Wake up,” she whispered pleadingly, and blew out a sigh of relief when she saw the dark lashes flutter.
“What?” her mother croaked, and Taiga let out a tittering laugh.
“Shh. It’ll be okay,” she said as a tear dropped from her eye onto her mother’s cheek.
“What happened?”
“We were attacked,” Taiga said hollowly.
Her mother moved to sit up but stopped as a pain wracked her leg. She reclined back into her daughter’s lap and didn’t move or speak for a long moment. “Your father?”
Taiga shook her head, and the two of them cried unabashedly as the wind began to whip the sand into a flurry around them, tearing the shattered tent into the air. Several long hours later, her mother died in her arms.
Chapter Nine
Treya and Rumo hobbled along at a surprisingly quick pace despite their arthritic joints. They followed the raiding party of the original settlers who had rescued them while destroying Jarrod’s band of upstarts. The original settlers simply called themselves Exos or Shrikers and had been in communication with the Hydra Elders for many years. When a Hydra reached a certain age and could no longer perform their duties, they were either elected as a member of the Council of the Elders or were allowed to retire. Molla hunters never became Elders as they would be furious when they learned the truth. Part of the Elder initiation ceremony was a ‘trek into the desert’ that was allegedly a molla fueled vision quest where they learned the secrets of the planet. However, it was all just a clever ruse and the Elder Initiates were given lavish gifts by the Shrikers and told the true history of human settlement on the planet. After a number of years serving on the council, the Elders would be escorted to the Original Settlement where they could live their final days in peace.
Now it looked as if a war was brewing and Treya and Rumo would not fill the twilight of their years with the wondrous food and sinful indulgences they had been promised. More than likely they would be forced into helping hunt
down the other Hydra colonies, since they had failed in their duty as secret keepers and an entire colony’s aquifer maps had been lost.
“How much further to the Original Settlement?” Treya asked, her arthritic joints starting to ache, even though they had only been walking for a few hours. Then again, walking through sand was far more exerting than walking on solid ground, not that any of the Hydras had ever seen solid ground other than the rocky formations that jutted from the dunes.
The leader of the raiding party, who both Treya and Rumo assumed was a man, pulled down the scarf covering its face and removed the goggles that protected its eyes. The raiding party leader was a woman, and a striking one at that. She had large eyes that seemed both green and grey at the same time and she had high cheekbones that accentuated her full lips. Her head was shaved close to the scalp, except for the Mohawk that arced bright red eight inches from her skull. She smiled, though it wasn’t genuine and revealed three gold teeth.
“The rovers are just over that dune. It won’t be long.” She gestured briefly before pulling her goggles back down over her face and lifting the scarf back over the bridge of her nose. Rumo and Treya both struggled to see which dune she had been referring to. There were an infinite amount of sandy humps peaking into the horizon. Treya sighed resignedly. Clearly, they didn’t garner the respect they had back in their colony. It would take some getting used to.
The ancient Exos shuffled through the sand, each step sending more of the dirt tumbling down their boots and settling between the soles of their feet and the arches of their shoes. Their old skin chafed against the irritating eroded rocks with enough friction to create a pearl in the mouth of an oyster, though the Exos had never heard of an oyster, and their feet only produced sweat which would never yield a jewel. Finally, they crested a ridge and saw the dark metallic forms of the rovers. Treya and Rumo had seen the vehicles on several occasions before, but were still awed by the machinery and secretly wondered why the Shrikers hadn’t sent the Hydras out with vehicles in the first place. Maybe the Hydras had elected to set out on foot in true pioneer spirit. Idiots.
