Stranded on a Storm Moon

by Adam Carter

  “I have no answer to that.” Looking to Arowana, she said, “Did you know any of that, Iris?”

  “Wasn’t listening.”

  “Maybe you could share something about your parents,” Hart suggested. “Might break the ice better than a severely hard-boiled egg.”

  “My parents are dead.”

  “Sorry. How did they meet?”

  “No idea. How’s the work coming on the computer?”

  “Slowly. It doesn’t help that I don’t know where this pod came from. Every culture does things differently and I’m fumbling around in the dark.”

  “Need a hand?” Hawthorn asked.

  “Yeah, that’d be good.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on things outside while you do that,” Arowana said. “Never know when trouble might come knocking.”

  “Dragons like shiny things,” Hawthorn said.

  “The robot might not have been alone,” Arowana said.

  Hart watched the two of them speak, her eyes flitting from one to the other as they did so. It occurred to her they were not talking to each other, that they were only engaging with her and that she had become something of a go-between. It was not only pathetic, but it threatened their chances of survival.

  “Would you two stop it?” she said, bolting to her feet. “I haven’t come out of my cupboard so I can watch the two of you bicker and then refuse to talk to each other. So you were in a relationship and it didn’t work out? Big deal. Get over it or get back together. Either way, stop trying to score points off each other. Iris, you say there’s a crazed killer robot out there somewhere that tortured you and cut off your finger? Well, clearly something happened, and the existence of this pod proves it. Gordon, accept what she says is true. And while he’s doing that, you can accept the dragon’s real as well. It burned down the cabin and nearly killed us. After all the things the two of you have been through together? Dinosaurs, pirates, that slaver vessel, the incident with the exploding pie … you haven’t gone through all of that just to get stroppy over something as silly as how you feel about each other.

  “Don’t stop me,” she warned as they both went to speak. “I’ve never had what you two have. My life ended when I was nineteen and I’m only now starting to pick up the pieces. My studies, my work, took up most of my life before then and I always figured I’d have time for everything else later. When I was through university, when I landed a top-paying job, when I had enough money to retire. Then look what happened. I’m not saying you should feel sorry for me, that’s the last thing I’d ever want anyone to do, but look back on what you two had together and be mature in what you’re going to do next.

  “You had good times and, whatever happens now, those memories can’t be taken away. You’re lucky: you have memories. So stop sniping at each other, stop ignoring each other, stop breaking the only things that can possibly get us home and go back to believing each other when either of you says anything. I’ve already wasted two years of my life and I refuse to waste any more on stupid things. And that’s what you’re doing: wasting what you have, even if it’s not quite what either of you wants any more.”

  They both went to say something again, but Hart narrowed her eyes and neither of them dared. Hart wanted to say more, she had a lot more to say, but she was burning inside. Not with fury, but shame and embarrassment. Her brain was yelling at her, part of it was laughing, and she could not believe she had managed to string together so many words at once.

  She had no right to say any of what she had said, she had no right even to have an opinion. Hawthorn wanted her back with them but she had pushed her boundaries too far. She closed her eyes and, amidst her welling tears, saw the innocent vessels she had been forced to destroy as a pirate – the vessels she had chosen to destroy.

  “Beth,” Hawthorn said softly and her eyes snapped open.

  She backed away, shaking her head, her eyes misting. She opened her mouth to say something, but was overpowered by a deep feeling of guilt and confusion.

  Turning, she ran from the pod and into the winds. The storm was not bad, the winds did not instantly tear her from the ground, although she would not have blamed them if they had chosen to do so. Hart ran without purpose, without a destination, and when she could run no more her legs gave out and she fell to her knees, shaking. Wiping the back of her hand across her eyes, she cursed her weakness and placed her palms to the dusty ground while she fought to catch her breath. Her heart was pounding loudly enough to explode, but she knew she would not be so fortunate.

  They had not come after her. After what she had said, perhaps they were glad she was gone. Or maybe they felt she needed to be alone for a while. Perhaps, though, they were talking. It was a long shot, but it would have made her tirade worthwhile.

  She stopped thinking of them when she noticed something on the ground between her palms. It was a footprint, but it was not hers. It was deep and looked like it had been left by a metal boot, as though a soldier had recently walked across the moon. Looking up, she saw a trail of prints leading off over the next hill. If there was an armoured soldier somewhere on the moon, he or she could have belonged to a unit which had landed on Valetudo for some reason. If they were just stopping off, they could already be on their way out, which meant she would have to hurry if she intended to catch them. If she could arrange for their escape from Valetudo, perhaps Arowana and Hawthorn would overlook her angry speech.

  Running after the footprints, she passed over the rise and slid down an incline where she picked up the tracks again. The strength of the footprints was fading, for the winds were quickly blasting them away, and before long Hart ground to a halt, having nothing more to follow. Straining her eyes, she tried to make out any sign of a spacecraft, or a platoon. Even a single person would have been something.

  A noise sounded behind her and she turned excitedly to confront the soldier.

  The figure’s armour was coloured a creamy white, with black rubber around the joints. Its head was tall and angular, with horns, while its face bore a snout and a single red strip for an eye. One of the horns had snapped off, the armour was dented and blackened in several places and the red strip was cracked. Hart knew one thing for certain.

  It was not a soldier.

  “Iris’s CKR,” she gasped.

  “Iris, I know,” the robot said. “Explain: what is CKR?”

  “Probably best I don’t tell you.”

  “Accessing. Searching. Crazed killer robot.”

  “No, no, it’s … uh … cute cuddly robot.”

  “Cuddly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Checking. Double-checking. Result: cuddly begins with C. Conclusion: subject is lying.”

  “Subject is joking,” Hart said, extending her hand. “Bethany. My friends call me Beth.” She could have run, she wanted to run, but Arowana had already tried that and failed, and Hart was not half the fighter that Arowana was.

  “Beth,” the robot said. “Friend.”

  “Yes, friend,” she said hopefully.

  “Searching. Definition found.” It paused. “No.”

  “No? No what?”

  “No,” the robot said, its red eye blazing behind the cracked screen, “we are not friends.”

  It struck out with such speed that Hart did not even manage to release a cry.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  She was only twenty-one years old, but Bethany Hart was right.

  Arowana had never truly known her. When Hart had joined them on Jupiter’s Glory, the only person she had latched onto had been Hawthorn, and Arowana had more than enough to deal with to be bothered with her. Hawthorn did his good deed by visiting her, talking with her, trying to break her out of whatever mental problems she had. Hart had been through so bad a trauma it had scarred her, and Hawthorn was her only chance at recovery.

  Arowana felt terrible that she worried her man was spending so much time with a younger woman.

  It was only now, when Hart had fled the pod in tears, that she fel
t ready to tell him that.

  “Oh,” was Hawthorn’s only response. “I didn’t know.”

  “I never told you.”

  “I knew about Cass.”

  “What did you know about Cass?” Arowana asked icily.

  “I knew you were jealous of Cass. I never knew you were jealous of Beth as well.”

  Cassiel was another member of their small crew on the Glory. At eighteen, Cassiel was even younger than Hart and she clearly had a thing for Hawthorn. “It’s a bit difficult not to be jealous of Cassiel,” she said.

  “No? Or you could just, I don’t know, trust me?”

  “I do trust you.”

  “Sounds like it. Iris, I don’t want to have to go through all this again, but you know full well I don’t like women. You know I blame women for every bad thing that’s ever happened in my life. You know I think they’re scheming, manipulative, domineering and always have to get their own way. That’s how I feel about women. You know that’s how I feel about women. Against my better judgement, I happened to fall in love again, but why would I complicate things by having an affair? If I did, I promise you it wouldn’t be with a woman.”

  “Well that’s fine, because Cassiel’s barely a woman anyway.”

  “And we’re back to that again.”

  Arowana inhaled deeply, mainly to calm her down, because she knew if she responded straight away she would destroy everything all over again. “Forget Cassiel,” she said at last. “She’s not here.”

  “Nor’s Beth at the moment.” He paused. “This jealousy you have for her, it was unconscious, right?”

  “No, it was very conscious. I’d see you going off to her forge with a tray of freshly baked cookies and my blood would boil. I’d think about following you down, think about cutting off the air supply for the forge for a while, thought about a lot of things. I know it makes me a bad person, Gordon, but I can’t help it. What you’re doing with Bethany is a wonderful thing and I’m ruining all of that.”

  “Please don’t say you don’t deserve to be happy, Iris. I could do without two of you doing that.”

  “I don’t do relationships, Gordon. I hardly have any experience with them and I keep screwing things up.”

  “That’s why relationships go two ways. You’re angry, Iris, you’re always angry. Is it the database?”

  “No,” she replied angrily. “Yes. Partly.”

  “I love you.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know. I don’t want to love you, sometimes I want to hate you. I want to spend the rest of my life fixing broken machinery and listening to motors running. Instead, I can’t concentrate on my work because all I can think about is you – about how anxious I am whenever we fight, and how happy I am when things are running smoothly.”

  “I need to make an effort, don’t I?”

  “You need to stop assuming I’m going to jump into other girls’ pants. That’s not making an effort, that’s just accepting I’m not a beast. Look at me.”

  Arowana did not realise she had looked away, but she obeyed. His eyes were stern and she knew whatever he was about to say would be honest.

  “I will never cheat on you,” he said. “Whatever you think of me, whatever you’re afraid of, the one thing I will never do is cheat on you.”

  For the next few moments, the only sound was of the wind picking up outside.

  “I have a feeling,” Hawthorn said, “there could be some tumbleweeds out there. You’re supposed to say something back.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Afraid?”

  Arowana bit her lower lip and hated herself for feeling like this about anyone. “That stuff about your family. Was it true?”

  “Yeah. Unfortunately.”

  “Did they have any regrets?”

  “Sure. Sometimes. But then they’d sleep on it and accept they’d made the right decision. Otherwise they never would have had the magnificent seven.”

  “You have six siblings?” she asked, shocked.

  “We really don’t talk, do we?”

  Arowana’s tension flowed from her and she laughed. “We make a very bad couple, Gordon.”

  “So did my parents.”

  He took her by the shoulders and Arowana tensed all over again. “Iris, are we going to make a go of this?”

  “Do I have to start trusting you?”

  “Probably a good start, yeah.”

  “Then it’s all or nothing.”

  “If I knew what that meant, I might agree with you.”

  She looked in his eyes for several moments, then disengaged the hands holding her shoulders. “Let’s talk about this when we’re off Valetudo. It’ll give us something to look forward to.”

  “Yeah, because I love talking about my feelings.”

  “Then think of Beth. She doesn’t want to have to go through the ups and downs of our love life. You know, for someone who has trouble identifying with reality, she sure has a blunt way of putting her feelings into words. Many, many words.”

  “Where’s she got to anyway?”

  “You want me to go look for her?”

  “I’ll go.”

  “You stay and repair that console. Each to our strengths, Gordon.”

  He scratched the back of his head. “Problem is, I don’t think it can be repaired. The equipment’s not just foreign to me, it’s shielded with passwords every step of the way. I’m not making much progress. Whoever built this pod was paranoid.”

  “Whoever built this pod was being stalked by a robot.”

  “You know, I’m beginning to worry about Beth.”

  They grabbed a little food and water and shoved it into their pockets. They had found no warm clothes in the pod’s compartments, but it was not terribly cold outside at that moment. Even if there was a blizzard out there, they would not have stayed in the pod, because they both had a suddenly awful feeling that Hart could have been in trouble.

  Once outside, there was no indication as to which direction Hart had taken, but Valetudo was not a large moon and they knew if they just picked a direction, they would eventually come across something. They decided to start their journey on a direct course out from the pod, under the assumption that since Hart had been upset, she had probably just run in a straight line.

  Topping a rise, they slid down and Arowana tried to get her bearings, but everywhere was sand, rock and despair.

  “Tracks,” Hawthorn said.

  Arowana moved to his side. “They’re pretty deep.”

  “The wind’s blowing sand over them, but they’re deep enough to be here for a while longer. They don’t belong to Beth.”

  Arowana swallowed nervously. “They could have been left by boots. Or by Borissa.”

  “I thought you said the robot went over a cliff.”

  “Maybe it survived.”

  “This isn’t good. There’s no sign of Beth’s prints, but hers would have been covered over sooner. If that robot survived, Beth could be in serious trouble.”

  “So we’re believing in the robot now, I take it?”

  “This is no time to get snide.”

  “I’m not getting snide. Right now I’m hoping you’re right and I imagined Borissa. That robot tortured me, or at least I think it did. I remember it torturing me, but then I remember it taking off my finger as well.” She looked down at her hand and wished she knew why she thought she had lost the finger. “Beth’s only now beginning to recover from what happened to her. Being tortured all over again is going to destroy her.”

  “We’ll find her before it gets that far.”

  They set off, following the tracks as best they could, even though there was little sign of them at some points. The annoying day cycle of Valetudo soon put them back to early evening, and Arowana became wary because she recognised the area.

  “Watch your step,” she said. “The trench is around here.”

  “Would Beth have followed your robot back to the trench? Why would the robot be here a
nyway? Reliving bad memories?”

  “Borissa was already malfunctioning. The fall from the cliff wouldn’t have done it any good, so maybe it thinks this is where it needs to be. No idea, I’m not a homicidal robot.”

  They managed to find the trench easily enough and Hawthorn peered down it. “I can’t see the bottom.”

  “That’s because it’s dark. It can’t be that far down. We need a torch and a rope for me to get down there.”

  “And why will you be the one going down?”

  “Because you’re physically stronger than me and I need you up here to hold the rope.”

  She could tell he wanted to argue with that, but what she said was logical and nothing he could have said would have made him win the argument. She knew it was yet another example of where she was right about something and tried to see it from his point of view. She could imagine what it would be like to be wrong all the time – in fact, imagine it was all she could do.

  “I’ll double back to the pod,” Hawthorn said. “See if I can scrounge up what we need. You stay here in case Beth hasn’t come this way yet. We wouldn’t want to miss her.”

  A great gust of wind almost knocked them both over, but they were used to such things and managed to stay on their feet. Arowana frowned, for it had not been like anything she had ever felt before. Valetudo was filled with odd weather patterns, but she had never before been blasted with a single gust of strong wind, followed by calmness.

  Above, she heard a strange sound, like a bear clearing its throat.

  They both looked up. There was a dark shape circling in the evening sky. It was not too dark to entirely block it out, and Arowana stared astonished as the bulbous winged form gazed down at them. Its tail was thick and long, its neck like a snake, ending in a vicious beak with ears like bat’s wings.

  She could almost feel the creature’s cruel eyes upon her.

  “Gordon,” she whispered. “It’s a dragon.”

  “I don’t want to say it.”

  “Say what?” she asked, staring at the sky in fright.

  “I told you so.”

  “Did you just …?”

  “No. I said I wasn’t going to say it.”

  “And then you said it.”