by David Liss
“What happens if we step over the line and explode?” Mi Sun asked.
“That would be bad?” I suggested.
“She raises an excellent point,” Villainic said. “It may not be safe. I strongly urge that we turn ourselves back in to Junup and beg for his mercy.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to strain things any more than I had to with Tamret. I hoped one of the others would pick up the slack for me.
“It is well for you to say,” Charles told him. “You are still hoping to be sent back to your world with no consequences. You’ve already seen Junup attempt to kill you, and yet you don’t learn. But now you’re one of us. You’ve stolen a shuttle, and there is no way to go but forward.” And so saying, Charles stepped over the line.
And he exploded. There was a bright flash of light, and then a plume of ashes mushroomed in the air as fragments of what had once been Charles drifted upward.
I’m totally messing with you, Smelly said.
Before I had a chance to react to Charles exploding, my vision changed, and there he was, on the other side of the line, shrugging.
“Don’t ever do that!” I shouted, before I could control myself.
“Someone had to go,” Charles said, looking at me like I was crazy.
Mi Sun put a hand on my shoulder as she walked past me. “Chill,” she said, and she stepped over the line.
She did not explode. I gritted my teeth. My heart was still pounding, and my stomach was somewhere up in my throat. I tasted sharp bile on my tongue. Nothing to do, I decided, but to keep going. I stepped over the line.
It was instantly forty degrees warmer. Forget warmer. Hotter. I felt the sun beating down on my neck, and the glare hurt my eyes. My mouth felt dry, my skin dusty. I would have given anything to still have my climate-controlled supersuit.
Villainic folded his arms. “I am not going, and neither is Tamret. We’ll find another way.”
Tamret looked at us. She looked at Villainic. She stepped over the line.
Villainic opened his mouth. He closed it again. He then stammered a little. Finally he graduated to coherent words. “You have just directly disobeyed me.”
“We have to help our friends. You said that Zeke is your brother now. Are you going to abandon him?”
Villainic did a bit more stammering here. “He does not choose to side with me, so I feel no obligation to side with him. I don’t want to have to command you to come with me,” he added, his voice sounding like an exasperated parent.
Tamret met his gaze. “Then don’t.”
Villainic sighed. He turned around and looked at the rough land behind him, and the city in the distance. Then he glanced up at the jagged line of arid mountains before him. He sighed again, and he stepped over the line.
“We shall speak of this again,” he told her.
“Yeah, I kind of figured,” she said.
We stood for a moment, no one saying anything. At least the spat between Tamret and Villainic had helped get the sight of Charles exploding out of my head. I shrugged, looked at the impossible expanse of desert, and began to walk forward. A beat later everyone followed, none of us knowing what we were doing or where we were going.
• • •
The border behind us was a distant blur. The mountains ahead seemed no closer. We were thirsty but determined to ration our moisture packs. Our legs were tired and getting crampy—walking through sand is much harder than walking on solid ground. I was beginning to regret having talked everyone into this, even if I still couldn’t figure out what our alternative might have been.
I wanted a moment alone to confer with Smelly, but I hoped that if it had something to tell me, it would pipe up. I had to trust that Smelly did not want to die in the desert, and that it would not let me die either.
Charles had taken on what he called the Mr. Spock role. He had configured his data bracelet to scan for life—”like a tricorder!”—and every few minutes he waved his arm in an arc across the horizon.
We all trudged on, the colonel the most determined, taking the lead, having to slow himself to keep from outpacing us. Villainic lagged farthest behind. At first Tamret kept pace with him, but somehow, without my noticing, she drifted ahead until she was walking directly next to me.
She let her shoulder brush against mine. It was a quick, gliding touch, but even in the desert it felt warm under my shirt.
“I’m sorry for what I said before,” she told me, though she didn’t meet my eye. “It wasn’t fair.”
“It was fair,” I said. “That’s why it hurt. I promised to come for you.”
“You did, Zeke,” she said. “I was mad because I wished it had been sooner, before things became so . . . complicated. But you did what you said you would. You got me off Rarel.”
“Like that worked out so well.”
“You are such an idiot,” she said, now looking right at me. “Don’t be mad at yourself because you couldn’t find a way to cross the galaxy fast enough. Most people are happy to do the impossible. You want to do it on a schedule.”
I almost took her hand, but I held back. I wasn’t afraid of Villainic. When it came to Tamret, I wasn’t afraid of anyone except Tamret herself. Still, I didn’t want trouble—especially not here, in the desert. I glanced back, and Villainic was staring at us, his eyes narrowed as he struggled to walk faster.
“Can’t you just tell him to get lost?” I asked. “Maybe more nicely, but you know what I’m saying.”
“It’s not that easy,” she told me. “I can’t break my vow, but maybe I can void the contract. Caste customs require particular circumstances to break a marriage promise, but I think there’s a way to do that. If we are going to your home, then you can challenge his right to marry by claiming you can provide for his betrothed better. Then you would have to press your claim.”
“By doing what?”
“I probably should have said something before. You might have to fight him.”
I glanced back at Villainic again. At the moment he didn’t look like much of a challenge—he looked like a freshly caught fish flopping on the dock—but he was a Rarel and I was a human. It would be like a moderately athletic turtle fighting the world’s wimpiest gorilla. The turtle might give it his all, but in the end the gorilla smashes him against a rock.
“Yeah, Tamret, that is exactly the sort of thing you might have mentioned sooner.”
“Why?” she asked, looking directly at me. “Would it have made a difference?”
I looked back at her, and we both knew the answer. She wanted to get away from Rarel. She wanted to go with me. “No,” I said. “I’m not letting you go. Not again.”
I spoke maybe a little too loudly. Alice, I realized, was listening. And then Tamret realized it, and the two of them were glowering at each other. I wanted to dig a hole in the sand and bury myself.
“This is odd,” Charles said, interrupting my special moment. He stopped walking, and he was studying a text display rising up from his bracelet. “The data bracelet is picking up on two beings about a hundred feet in front of us—one humanoid-size, the other massive.”
The colonel put a hand to his eyes. “I don’t see anything.”
We all stood still and stared into the empty desert. We saw nothing but sand, and no movement but that caused by a slight breeze that kicked up small clouds that rippled the dunes. The reflection of the sun made it hard to look out for long, but I felt sure that if there were a massive creature lumbering out there, we would see it.
Villainic caught up with us and planted himself between me and Tamret. He took her hand, and she let him, but it hung slack in his grip.
Then an inexplicable shifting of the sand caught my attention. In one spot the sands began to swirl and pour downward, like a sinkhole had opened far beneath the surface. For a moment it all stopped and there was stillness and quiet, and then sand shot up, spraying like a geyser. It rained down on us as the massive thing appeared before us, rising up from below. It was
a sandworm. It was a great, big, semi truck–size sandworm.
I froze in panic. I knew from Frank Herbert’s classic novel Dune that, in addition to having great size, the sandworm was horribly destructive, known to eat any creature in its path—in spite of the fact that it lived in an environment in which there should have been nothing to eat.
This one turned toward us, and it did not look how I’d imagined Frank Herbert’s sandworms. It was big and white and grubby-looking, yes, with ringed segments so pale they were almost clear. I could see its blue veins, each the size of a tree trunk, beneath its thick skin. On its back was a vaguely humanoid figure, strapped to some sort of massive saddle. I could tell nothing about the rider because it wore stained white robes and a head covering that revealed no features.
All of this was significant, but what made me unafraid was the worm’s face, which wasn’t what I would have expected from a giant subterranean monster. It looked almost like a dog—the kind you want to pet, not flee from in terror. It had a long snout that ended in dozens of undulating whiskers, each no thicker than one of my hairs. It had no eyes, but thick patches of feelers on its forehead. The creature’s mouth was long and turned into a natural grin, containing a series of interlocking teeth that formed some kind of filter when its mouth was closed. Now the mouth was open, and the creature spoke.
“Over there!” it shouted in a deep voice that betrayed a simple kindness. “Beings. Oh, there are beings! Smell the beings! New beings! Let’s meet the beings!”
The cloaked figure patted the worm. The beast began to undulate through the sand like a snake sliding along the surface of a pond.
The worm pulled alongside us like a bus coming to a stop. “Beings!” it cried in a voice deep and full of delight. “New beings come to visit!” It moved its feelers in our direction. “Sniffing! Sniffing the beings!”
The rider patted the worm’s sides. “New beings,” agreed the voice, decidedly female. “Good boy.” She began to unwrap the scarves around her neck to reveal a head of brown scales covered with pointy ridges. She looked like a desert lizard from Earth.
“Greetings, travelers,” she said.
“Greetings, worm rider,” Steve said.
“I am Uolomd, daughter of Racvib. This is no place for outsiders.”
“It is pretty hot,” I agreed. “And kind of dry. It could use some roads, and maybe a vending machine. Or a rest stop. A rest stop would be nice.”
“It may be no place for you in particular,” Uolomd said.
“No argument here,” I told her.
“What seek you in this place?” Uolomd asked.
“Seek us the Hidden Fortress,” I said.
Uolomd shook her spiky head. “Ugh. Another idiot after the Hidden Fortress. Let’s drop the formal talk, okay? I’ve been on patrol for almost six hours, so I’m heading back. You want a ride to my village?”
“We’d love one, ducky,” Steve said.
“You promise not to cause trouble?” she asked.
“We promise not to intend to cause trouble,” Steve said. “I think that’s the best this lot can offer.”
“Good enough for me.” She reached into a box embedded in the saddle and threw down a rope ladder. “Climb on up,” she called.
Steve nudged me in the side with his elbow. “Oi,” he said quietly. “She’s cute. For an alien.”
• • •
We rode on top of the worm, whose name was Minti, for almost three hours, until we came to a settlement alongside a mountain that had produced an overhang, giving the locals some permanent and much-needed shade. The buildings seemed to be carved directly into the cliff face and were accessible though staircases that were also built into the rock. It had a 1970s-sci-fi-film vibe that I really liked.
Not all the inhabitants were the same species as Uolomd, though at least half were. There was a beetlelike race that walked upright and had its face on its chest. On its head were a series of tentacles it used with incredible dexterity. I also saw a few representatives of a small species, no more than three feet high, that were covered with fur the color of the sand and had mouselike ears. All the beings of the Forbidden Zone seemed generally friendly to outsiders, though they regarded us with something that I could only describe as exasperation.
“Why do you live here?” I asked Uolomd once we had made it down from the worm, some of us more gracefully than others. I was one of the others.
“Why do you live where you live?” she asked me in a way that made it clear she found the question insulting.
“That’s a fair point,” I said, “but if I were living in a desert and there was a much more, uh, temperate place only a few miles away, I’d give some thought to moving.”
“I do not know of this temperate place you speak of,” she said. “All I know is that this is our home. We have lived here for as long as any of us can remember.”
“So you have no record of how your people came to the station?”
“Station?” she asked, sounding genuinely perplexed.
I opened my mouth, trying to figure out what to say, but Uolomd was already laughing.
“Sorry, we always pull that one on newcomers who can’t quite seem to figure out why we don’t choose to live like they do. Look, we’re all desert species. We’re comfortable here. It’s hot. It’s dry. No one bothers us. Out there it’s so humid and cold. Maybe you like that, but it’s not for me.”
“You’ve been out there?” I asked.
“Of course. What do you think, we’re some primitive savages living on the fringes of civilization because we’re too ignorant to make a more civilized choice?”
That was exactly what I’d been thinking. “Of course not,” I assured her.
“Why don’t you come inside, clean up, and have something to eat,” Uolomd said. “You can sleep in our guest rooms for the night, and tomorrow we’ll show you the way.”
“The way to what?” I asked.
“You want the Hidden Fortress, right?” she said. “We’ll tell you how to get there.”
“I guess it’s not as hidden as advertised,” Steve said, “if you know where it is.”
“I know where the journey begins,” she said. “After that I can’t tell you much. Supposedly in my great-grandparents’ time beings came looking for the Hidden Fortress all the time—two or three a decade. Things have slowed down since then, but I do know one thing.”
Steve grinned at her. “I’ll bet you know more than that.”
“I know of one thing that might scare you silly, then. How about that?”
“Point taken,” Steve conceded. “What is this one thing?”
“I’m told that no one who goes looking for the Hidden Fortress ever comes back.”
• • •
Uolomd lived with her mother, Racvib, who was the leader of their settlement. The house that was dug into the cliff didn’t look like much from the outside, but inside it was a comfortable and modern—by Confederation standards, not mine—structure with much of the same tech I’d come to expect from other places on the station. The only real difference was that it was much hotter and dryer inside than I liked. The guest rooms had thermostats that allowed me to lower the temperature all the way down to about eighty degrees.
We bathed, changed our clothes, and sat down to a meal with Uolomd and her family. While they did have access to most Confederation technology, they did not seem to have a food-generation unit, which I understood to be large and energy-consuming. After asking us about our preferences, they served me, the Rarels, and the other humans an assortment of roasted tubers and a stew made from mushrooms, beans, and cacti. Steve joined the family in eating a bowl full of hard-shelled things that looked like four-legged grasshoppers, though each one was about as big as my fist. I’d seen Steve eat living things, of course, many times, but they were always just synthesized protein that our nanite implants made to appear to be alive. This time he was actually putting living things in his mouth and chewing on them.
“They’re not sentient, are they?” I asked.
“There’s some debate about that,” Racvib asked. Then she and her daughter burst out laughing.
“Okay, what’s your story?” Uolomd said after a few minutes. “Why are you looking for the Hidden Fortress? I’d like to know a little more about you before you vanish forever, never to be heard from again.”
“I am afraid we can’t discuss that,” the colonel said. “It might put us, or you, in danger. I can only tell you that it’s a matter of great importance.”
“They all say that,” Racvib told us.
“Who says that?” I asked. “I thought Confederation citizens can’t enter the Forbidden Zone.”
“They say that, too, but a few find a way around that limitation. I’m not sure how, exactly. I think they have to undergo some kind of genetic treatment that’s both expensive and illegal. It’s worth it to some, though. Just a few months ago we had a visitor at this very table—the first one to come looking for the Hidden Fortress in years. This being was muscular and hairy, with tusks growing out of its face.”
“Sounds like Urch,” Charles said.
“He’s not the only one of his species,” I said. “Besides, if he never returned, how did we see him recently?”
“It does seem awfully suspicious that one of the visitors to this area should be a being who wanted us to come here,” Charles said.
“Is whatever you have in mind worth risking your life?” Uolomd asked, looking at Steve when she spoke. I got the feeling that she thought he was kind of cute too. For an alien.
“I wish we didn’t have to, love,” Steve said. “But that’s the situation we find ourselves in. Some right nasty people are looking to get rid of us because we know what they’re up to. We’re running for our lives. I’ll tell you that much. We’ve been told that the Hidden Fortress is the only place we can go to escape and get to safety.”
“Why not take a ship from the surface spaceport?”
“I don’t want to get into the specifics,” the colonel said, “but the people who are looking to stop us control the spaceport and the ships circling it.”
