In Quaking Hills

by Kate MacLeod

  Yes, the dogs were still with her, but her bike was long gone. Not that she would need it now that she was heading into space. She had left it in the back of the rover—the rover she had crashed into a canyon wall while fleeing from the rebels. She was never going to see it again. She wasn’t sad about that, exactly; it had been a good bike, but it hadn’t been the bike her father had left her with. That bike she had loved, but she had outgrown it years ago.

  She was a little sad about her father’s hat. She wished she still had it as a remembrance of him. She wasn’t sure where she had lost it. Probably also when she had crashed the rover. The bump on the head she had gotten in the crash made everything that had happened right after it a bit of a blur, and her second escape had happened so quickly it had really been a blur.

  “Ready?”

  Liam, the off-duty galactic marshal who’d come to get her to fulfill the wishes of his recently deceased partner, had been tapping away at a computer console set in the center of the panel in easy reach of both seats. Whatever he had been doing, he had finished now and was looking over at her, his question echoed in the arch of his ginger eyebrow. Scout tucked the dogs closer to her sides and made sure the restraints holding them to the chair were tight. Then she gave Liam a nod and watched as he flipped a switch.

  The ship around them started to softly vibrate and Scout fought the urge to shut her eyes. She was somewhere between very nervous and outright scared, but there was no way she was going to miss seeing any part of this journey.

  She waited for the firing of the rockets, waited to be crushed back into the soft chair beneath her, waited for the rumbling roar of engines defeating gravity.

  Then the heavy stalks of grain that had been partially blocking the view out the window shook and fell away and Scout realized the ship was already lifting up into the air. There was barely any sound, just that soft vibration. There was nothing crushing her into her seat, just a feeling like some giant’s hand was gently lifting them up into the sky.

  “Have we taken off?” Scout asked. Even leaning forward, she could see nothing but sky out of the window.

  “Yes, would you like to see?” Without waiting for an answer, Liam touched something else on the control panel in front of him and the floor beneath her disappeared.

  Scout yelped at the sight of her feet dangling hundreds of meters over the prairie. Then she realized the floor hadn’t been breached; she was looking at a display screen that a moment before had been just another of the many chrome panels that made up Liam’s ship. They all looked the same, only the size of their rectangular shapes varying, but each seemed to hide a secret function. One had folded out into a sink, another had become a computer capable of reading the encrypted data disks Scout had brought to him.

  Scout pushed the thought of the disks and all she had been through on their account to the back of her mind. She was going into space, an amazing experience in itself, but she was also leaving her home world behind. She intended never to see it again. She wanted to give that beautiful landscape a proper farewell. Governments and rebellions and their web of secrets and lies would still be there to stew over helplessly later.

  She could see the swirling, flattened pattern in the grass that marked where the ship had been. But they were rising higher now, high enough that she could see the edge of the prairie and the beginning of the hill country. The delicate bands of color that made the canyons so breathtaking when seen from the ground were just a uniform reddish brown from this distance. But the crags and breaks of the canyon walls that had been all around her the day before were no more than a fine tracery of lines from above, beautiful in their meticulous detail.

  Scout thought she saw a plume of dust from a moving vehicle, perhaps one of the rebels still searching for her. But that was in her past now. Her future was light-years away from all that.

  Scout felt the wide smile that spread across her face at that thought. Light-years away. It was real. It was really happening.

  Liam was glancing over at her now and again when not too occupied with piloting his craft. They had met only moments before, but he had the grin of an uncle showing something amazing to his favorite niece, eager to see her delighted response.

  “Cool?” he asked.

  “Very cool,” Scout said. She could see three different domed cities dotted across the landscape spread out beneath her. They looked so small.

  “Will we be able to see the Space Farer stations when we go by?” Scout asked.

  “From a distance,” Liam said. “The point where we slip through the blockade is as far from the space stations as possible.”

  Scout nodded, but she didn’t really understand. Liam had mentioned something about a blockade and friends who had helped him get past it to get to her. Scout guessed it was all political, and she barely understood the politics of the world she had spent her whole life on. Galactic politics would be a lot to take on now, after Scout’s last few days.

  Once they got somewhere warm and safe, after she’d had a shower and changed into some clean clothes, after a couple meals’ worth of proper food and perhaps even a bottle of jolo or two, maybe then she could focus on learning the nuances of galactic politics. For now, it was enough that Liam understood it and was taking her to the life his former partner Gertrude Bauer had promised Scout.

  The blue of the sky through the windscreen was fading away, like watching a puddle drain and evaporate. Beyond it was black—inky, bottomless black. Scout’s fingers curled around the edges of her seat cushion. She felt like she was falling into that black just looking at it, but still she fought the urge to shut her eyes.

  Then the first stars winked to life and she was glad she had won that battle. She knew she wasn’t any closer to them here than on the surface, not really, but they looked like she could reach out and touch them

  The vibration of the ship around them, barely noticeable before, settled down to almost nothing, and the feeling of being buoyed up by a giant’s hand went away.

  “We’re floating!” Scout said, looking down at her feet still dangling over the floor display. The planet beneath her was all patches of blue water, golden prairie, and reddish-brown hills in long rows. But as beautiful as it was, she scarcely noticed it.

  Her shoelaces were definitely floating.

  “We’re safely out of atmosphere now, so you can unbuckle from your seat if you like,” Liam said. “We’ll see how the dogs like it.”

  Scout grinned, then unclasped the restraints. Shadow’s tense body sprang away from her almost at once, and he gave a startled yip as he sailed through the air into Liam’s waiting arms.

  Gert trembled against Scout’s side and then whimpered as she too started to float away. Scout caught her, holding her tight as the two of them tumbled slowly down the length of the ship until they bumped up against the back wall.

  “Is it always like this?” Scout asked, laughing as Gert tried to stand against the wall and only pushed herself out into the middle of the room. Scout caught her paw and pulled her back into a hug.

  “The stations are under spin; that simulates gravity,” Liam said. “The larger ships like the one that brought your ancestors here use the force of their acceleration and deceleration to mimic it. But little ships like this one don’t have anything like that.”

  “How long will we be traveling in this ship?” Scout asked. Shadow had pushed away from Liam and was paddling his feet madly but ineffectually as he tried to reach her and Gert. Scout reached out an arm, waiting for him to float close enough for her to grasp.

  “We have to get out of the planetary system before we can—” Liam began, but he was interrupted by a chiming notification sound. Liam turned back to his controls and spoke in a voice too low for her to hear.

  Scout caught Shadow, his little body trembling from perhaps too much adventure, and hugged both of her dogs while she waited for Liam to tell her what was going on. He was silent for a moment, then spoke again, still too low for her to make out any word
s. Then he tapped something into the computer between the two seats.

  “We have to make a quick stop,” he said as he touched more buttons.

  Scout bit her lip. His tone was casual, almost jaunty, but clearly fake. He was trying to keep her calm. “Nothing to worry about?” she asked.

  “No, nothing to worry about,” he said. “Just a little bureaucracy that has to be cleared up before we can go.”

  “I thought your friends took care of all that,” Scout said. “You had a way to sneak past this, I thought.”

  “It sounds like we just got caught up in a routine sweep. Something about weeding out black marketers. And since we aren’t black marketers, this should just take a moment.”

  “Are you sure?” Scout asked.

  Liam turned in his seat to look directly at her and gave her a reassuring smile. “Absolutely. I have the appropriate papers, and they have no reason to detain us. They’re just being thorough. I promise, we’ll dock for a few moments to deal with this and then we’ll be on our way.”

  Scout released her lip from between her teeth and attempted to return his smile, but she was certain her attempt to seem unbothered was even less convincing than his.

  Chapter 2

  * * *

  Scout watched the planet Amatheon slowly rotating under her dangling feet, sucking on a bulb of cool water Liam had given her after helping get her and the dogs buckled back into the seat. It had a faintly metallic taste, but it was also slight ly sweet. She was starting to feel a little less lightheaded. She had been pretty severely dehydrated before she had reached Liam’s ship.

  Liam would occasionally murmur words into his comm, but other than that, there was no sound but the soft hum of the ship, the occasional yawn from a dog, and a slight hiss of air moving through the vents. The planet was beautiful, but the swirls of clouds slowly twisting beneath her were almost hypnotic. She blinked her eyes sleepily and took another sip of water.

  She scarcely needed hypnosis to make her sleepy. Not after the morning she’d had. She had escaped her captors and made it to her rendezvous with Liam on time, but it hadn’t been easy. After the rebel who’d pursued her had tried to stop her by shooting her dogs with tranquilizers, she had been forced to carry them both for kilometers under the hot Amatheon sun. It had been exhausting.

  After losing her hat, the only other protection from the burning sun had been her shirt, which would have been enough, only she had been forced to use it as a sling to carry Gert on her back. Her skin felt prickly all over and was turning a frightening shade of red. That on top of the still-tender spot on her chest where she had been hit with a rock days before, the lump over her eyebrow from the rover crash, and abrasions all around her hips from her escape through an almost-too-narrow tunnel made her body one big throbbing, aching, exhausted mass.

  And the day was far from over.

  She hadn’t realized just how slow her sleepy blinks had become until a hulking mass beneath her startled her fully awake.

  It was massive, truly massive, eclipsing her view of the planet below. But aside from its size and its long, cylindrical shape, she could make out no details. The planet behind it was shining so brightly all she could see of the orbiting object was its outline.

  “Is that the space station?” she asked.

  “Amatheon Orbiter 1,” Liam said to her. “Formerly the colony ship Tajaki 47. Your ancestors arrived on that ship.”

  “It’s huge,” Scout said, moving Gert’s head on her thigh to one side so she could bend over. Not that that gave her a closer look, but she couldn’t help herself.

  “About the size of two of your domed cities on the surface,” Liam told her. “Of course, it was much bigger before it shed all the components you used to construct all of your cities.”

  Scout’s mind boggled. She preferred the wide-open prairies to the crowded streets of the domed cities. This, being inside a dense station hull rather than a transparent dome, was sure to be even more confining.

  A sudden vision bloomed in her mind of her and her dogs losing Liam inside that thing. Of getting lost and wandering endless corridors, unable to find him again.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” Scout asked, trying to keep her nervousness out of her voice.

  “We enter from the far end and fly up the center of the cylinder to the hangar area,” he said.

  “No, I meant, once we’re inside,” she said.

  “Oh, no worries,” he said with another smile meant to reassure her. “The bureaucracy will come to us. We’ll never even have to leave the ship. Bureaucrats always prefer it that way. They’re in control and able to easily keep track of you. We’ll be out of here in a jiffy.”

  Scout hugged her dogs closer to her sides.

  Liam guided the ship around in a slow, lazy curve as their momentum carried them past the end of the space station. When the curve ended, they were turned completely around, facing the station that had just passed beneath them. From this angle Scout could see that the cylinder was hollow in the middle, a little crescent of the planet visible through that hollow, dark sky and winking stars filling out the rest of the circle that was the heart of the station.

  Details became clearer as Liam piloted the ship closer to the station. The interior wasn’t a perfectly circular cutout. No, the surface of the inner curve of the cylindrical hull was visibly jagged. A few lights, not stars but man-made lights, became apparent.

  They were nearly inside the structure before her brain finally put it together: the jagged outlines were buildings. Unimaginably tall buildings, dotted with lights, all converging toward the center. There were other ships around them, smaller and rounder than Liam’s long, gleaming needle of a ship, some zipping between the buildings, a few traversing the open space in the center of the cylinder.

  “This is amazing,” Scout said, trying to look everywhere at once and failing.

  Liam shot her a look of surprise. “Oh, you’re not joking,” he said. “Kid, wait until you see galactic central. This is all pretty low-tech stuff. It may be your biggest orbiting station, but in broader terms it’s just a tiny speck.”

  “I can’t wait,” Scout said, although she was suddenly grateful for this unanticipated stop. Whatever awaited her at the end of her journey, she could use as many steps as possible to get used to it all.

  Liam guided his ship to the brightest collection of lights atop a tower that was not the tallest inside the station but was longer and wider. The lights were blinding at first, but then the brightest of them pivoted away all at once and Scout could see the platform was dotted with ships. Most were the small, round ones that were apparently native to the station. They shared a design aesthetic with the rovers back on the planet’s surface, vehicles built for practical durability in a harsh environment. A few were larger, more elongated, but still clearly built from the same tech and materials.

  Liam set the ship down on the landing platform and Scout heard a loud clang.

  “Magnetic clamps,” he told her as his fingers flew over his control panel. “Not really necessary since this station is under gravity-simulating spin, but protocol is protocol.”

  Scout nodded, letting the words wash over her. She had a million questions, but they could wait until she and Liam had resumed their journey.

  “Do you need more water?” Liam asked as he undid his restraints.

  “Can you fill a bowl for the dogs now that we have gravity?” Scout asked. “I tried giving them squirts from the bulb but I’m not sure they liked it.”

  “Of course,” Liam said, moving to the back of the ship and making the sink reappear from its compartment. “And I don’t have anything specifically made for dogs to eat, but I bet I can find something to tempt them.”

  “That would be good,” Scout said, releasing the buckles just as Liam set the bowl on the floor. The dogs raced to it, both gulping the water down from opposite ends of the little bowl without fighting for space. The tranquilizers must still be in their systems. But
Scout wasn’t about to complain that her dogs were too well behaved.

  She looked up from the dogs to see Liam looking at her with deep concern.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You’ve really been through it, haven’t you?” he asked.

  She looked down at her blistering skin and the tattered remains of her cargo shorts barely holding together over her hips. “It looks worse than it feels,” Scout said as Liam leaned forward, examining the lump on her forehead. “It will all heal.”

  “Yes,” he said distractedly, turning to stare at all the chrome squares that formed the walls of the ship. “There’s a medical kit in here somewhere . . .”

  A soft beep from the console at the front of the ship distracted him from his search. “Here they come,” Liam said, looking out the windscreen.

  The nose of the ship was set slightly lower than the back end, allowing them to see the surface of the landing platform in front of them. Four figures dressed in black were approaching their ship at a brisk walk. At first Scout thought they were wearing uniforms, but there was no symbol or insignia on any of them, and although all their clothing was black, the details of the tailoring differed between each of them. Scout couldn’t tell if they were men or women. They all wore black caps pulled low over their faces and walked with their heads bent.

  “They seem awfully furtive for officials,” Scout said.

  Liam frowned. “I was thinking the same thing. I’m sure it’s nothing to do with us. Just part of the general political unrest. I’ll go down and talk to them. You wait here with the dogs. Once we’re underway again, I’ll break out the food and find that medical kit.”

  “Okay,” Scout said, resisting the urge to tell him to be careful. He was a galactic marshal; he knew how to handle himself. But she couldn’t help noticing that unlike Gertrude Bauer, the last galactic marshal she had spent time with, Liam wasn’t carrying a gun or even wearing a belt loaded with handy tools.