Under Falling Skies

by Kate MacLeod

  Scout fetched her bottle and sucked another few drops into her mouth. She probably should just collect her dogs and go, but leaving without knowing what this woman was up to would drive her mad. No one came to these hills except her and the rebels. Everyone else traveling between the two cities took the ferry around the point. Scout made a nice enough living moving things over land that people wanted delivered without questions from officials or intrusive inspections. She knew what she did was not technically legal, although she was very good at playing dumb when caught. And it’d been years since she’d been caught.

  This woman had nothing sizable on her. She could be delivering a message, as Scout sometimes did, but she doubted that was what she was doing. No one dressed so finely delivered messages.

  “Are you looking for the rebels?” Scout asked.

  “Why, do you know where they are?” the woman asked, that slight quirk back to the corner of her mouth.

  “No, no more than anyone else knows,” Scout said. “Everyone knows they’re in the hills.”

  “Indeed, I had heard that,” the woman said. “But your local politics aren’t really my concern.”

  “Local?” Scout repeated. “They are organizing to destroy the Space Farers. That’s global politics.”

  “To be sure,” the woman said. “Local to this globe.”

  Scout’s mind boggled. Where was this woman from?

  “I can help you find the rebels,” Scout offered. There couldn’t be another reason for a stranger to be out this far from the cities. And she was so out of the ordinary surely someone would come out of hiding to confront them

  “You said you don’t know where they are,” the woman said.

  “No, but I know where they’re not. That can shorten your search.”

  “It’s kind of you to offer, but I’ve got this,” the woman said. “And again, not here for your little rebellion.”

  “But you’re a Space Farer, aren’t you?” Scout’s eyes swept over the woman’s outfit another time. “You must be.”

  “Everyone who isn’t a Planet Dweller is a Space Farer,” the woman said, not a question. Scout nodded but stopped as the woman shook her head with a sad smile. “No, there are many, many more people in the universe than fit in your two little groups.”

  “But if you’re not from here, why are you here now?”

  “I’m not the only one here not from here,” the woman said.

  Scout frowned. Was she talking about Scout? Well, she wasn’t from the prairie, but the city she was from no longer existed, so it wasn’t so odd to find her where she wasn’t from, was it?

  Or was she talking about someone else? Scout opened her mouth to speak when something on one of the woman’s belts beeped and she glanced down at it. She frowned and tapped it to make it stop beeping, then stepped up to the top of the ridge next to Scout on her bike. She changed the angle of her hat to block out the midmorning sun and looked down the path that wound through a steep channel snaking back and forth on the far side of the hill. Girl looked up at her, her tail thumping loudly in the dust.

  “I need to get going, kid,” the woman said. “You’re heading back to the capital?”

  “Maybe,” Scout said.

  “Perhaps I’ll see you again before I head out, then. I’ll probably have some time to kill waiting for my ride to come pick me up. What’s your name?”

  “Scout.”

  “You messing with me, kid? That’s not a name, it’s an occupation,” the woman said, mouth quirking again.

  “I don’t scout, I deliver. And Scout is my name.”

  “Suit yourself, Scout.”

  “And you?”

  “You can call me Warrior,” the woman said, and Scout had no doubt that wasn’t remotely close to her real name. The woman turned the full glare of those mirrored lenses on Scout but Scout refused to play along.

  “Warrior,” she repeated as if it were the most normal name in the world. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “And your dogs?”

  “That’s Shadow,” Scout said, still annoyed at Shadow’s betrayal.

  “And this one?”

  “Girl,” Scout admitted. “She’s not really mine.”

  “She seems like yours,” Warrior said.

  “Shadow is my dog. I trained him from a pup. My father helped before he . . . well. Shadow has been with me for six years now. Girl, she just turned up one day a month or so ago. Shadow and I were camping near a mining town and when we woke up she was just there, curled up with us like she was part of our family. Haven’t been able to get rid of her since, she just follows us everywhere. She’s not that bright, barely trainable. Not much point giving her a name. I’m sure she’s just going to wander off again at some point.”

  “I see,” Warrior said. There was an undertone to her voice, like what she was agreeing to was not quite what Scout had said. Scout was about to call her out for being condescending when another one of Warrior’s belt gadgets started beeping urgently. Warrior pulled it off the belt and silenced it, frowning at the screen on the device.

  Something else was beeping too, something in Scout’s saddlebags. She twisted on the bike seat to reach behind her. She only had one electronic device, one thing that would beep, and she always kept it in easy reach in a separate pouch sewn in the top band between the two bags.

  Sometimes it went off for no reason, cheap piece of crap that it was, but Scout was certain this wasn’t one of those times. Not if Warrior’s had gone off too. Still she forced herself to swallow back the rising panic and look at the dial.

  The needle was buried beyond the red zone. She had seen it flirt with the darker edge of the orange zone, but it never moved so far as to touch the red zone. Certainly never passed into it.

  “Solar flare,” she said, her voice a dry croak.

  “Coronal mass ejection. Or, as you say, solar flare,” Warrior agreed, putting the device back on her belt. “Well, kid—or, rather, Scout—time to run for our lives, yeah?”

  3

  Scout looked to the hills. There were caves they could shelter in, but would they be deep enough for a flare of this magnitude?

  She looked out over the prairie. The dome of the capital city was easy to spot, the midmorning sun reflecting back like a second, setting sun. But the brightness was deceptive; it was much farther away than it looked. They could never get to it in time.

  In between where she was perched on her bike on the hilltop and the nearest city gate was nothing but grain, kilometer after kilometer of nodding grasses that might keep the sun off for the hottest hours of the day but would do nothing against a rain of charged particles punching through the magnetic shielding the original colonists had installed in space before making planetfall. The sun these days was throwing off ever-larger ejections, these shield-overwhelming proton storms becoming more and more frequent.

  But never anything close to this.

  “We have to get to shelter,” Warrior said, clipping her gadget back on her belt and regarding Scout’s bike. It wasn’t the bike her father had given her oh so many years ago. That bike had been partly motorized with wide tires capable of carrying heavier loads. But two years ago, she’d hit a growth spurt that made pedaling that thing awkward as hell. She had traded for a larger but less tricked-out bike: no motor, tires adequate for the hilly terrain she biked over, but not meant for heavy loads.

  Warrior threw a leg over the rack that supported the saddlebags and the back tire nearly flattened beneath her weight.

  “What are you made of, iron?” Scout asked.

  “Never mind, let’s get going,” Warrior said. “Lean over the handlebars and I’ll lean over you, distribute the weight better.”

  “Sure,” Scout said. The vision of the two of them screaming across the prairie with the cannonball speed their combined weight was going to generate gripped her mind but she ignored it, leaning over the handlebars and pushing off.

  Warrior’s long legs kept them from tipping over, her toes
brushing over the ground as Scout worked the pedals. Then, all too quickly, momentum took them and they were rolling, bouncing over the uneven ground, flying into the air when they launched off a rock and landing hard but not slowing. For the first third of the slope the dogs kept up with them, running with tongues lolling and then with mouths closed as they focused on their sprinting. Then it was only Shadow who kept up, his lithe form working with total efficiency. But at last even he fell behind, out of Scout’s view.

  The bike raced along the narrow track between two endless fields of grain. Scout had taken her feet off the pedals during the descent but she put them back now, first matching the pace their momentum had set and then adding muscle on the downstrokes to keep them moving.

  But soon the momentum was gone and she was just pedaling hard. She kept it up as long as she could, but Warrior was extraordinarily heavy and Scout, who always carefully matched her efforts to the amount of water she’d be able to hydrate with, started to feel lightheaded and regretted every drop of moisture she was losing in sweat.

  “Stop,” Warrior said close to her ear and Scout readily complied, all but flopping over her handlebars. Warrior swung off the back of the bike, another device in her hand. She kept her eyes glued on the tiny screen of the device as she made a slow 360. Scout fought to get her breath under control and tipped her head to look back behind her, anxious for a glimpse of her dogs. Shadow knew the road well and Girl would stay with him. They would catch up, but she didn’t like not having them in her sights.

  The sky brightened, the prairie building up toward the white-hot intensity it would reach at midday, but this was more than that. Scout held the brim of her hat to block the light of the sun and gazed up at the rest of the sky. Yes, she could see them now, the occasional streaks of white light arcing across the sky, but more now than she’d ever seen before. The shield was still working, protecting the planet below from the worst of the flare but not all of it.

  “We’re not going to make it,” Scout said. “I can’t pedal us both back to the capital in time.”

  “We don’t need to get to the capital,” Warrior said, eyes still on her gadget.

  “I hate to break it to you, but there’s nothing else out here. Nothing but grass. Maybe we should’ve tried for a cave,” she said miserably. No way was she pedaling back up that hill now.

  “You know those all would’ve been too small,” Warrior said. Scout felt a sudden chill. Had the strange woman been reading her mind? She wasn’t looking at her now, although even if she were Scout would get no read on her, not with those lenses over her eyes.

  “So what, then?” Scout asked. She looked back again and her heart did a happy leap as Shadow came into view, too tired to sprint but still managing a brisk trot. She looked at her own solar flare warning device, cheap as it was. “We usually get more warning than this. Why would that change? It’s not like the sun got any closer.”

  “Good question for a later time,” Warrior said. “This way.”

  “What way?” Scout asked, but when Warrior plunged into the field south of them Scout followed, leaning back as she slowly pedaled. Shadow had seen where she was going, and Scout was certain the dark smudge at the edge of her vision back up the trail was Girl, plodding along after him.

  Warrior kept marching forward, gadget in her hand held high. The sky over them was filling with more and more streaks and Scout tipped her head so that the brim of her hat blocked all that from view. Those were the particles the shield was actually catching. The ones getting through, those were silent and invisible. They could be bombarding her body right now and she wouldn’t know. Penetrating her bones, making subtle changes in her marrow that would mean cancer years from now.

  And that was just the slow death she could look forward to if she got out of the storm now.

  “Where are we going?” Scout asked, looking back at the wake her bike was leaving behind, grass bent by the passage of her handlebars, broken stalks trampled under Warrior’s feet and her tires. The dogs were in the grass too now; Shadow apparently had waited at the edge for Girl to catch up and the two were walking shoulder to shoulder, noses close to the ground as if they needed the scent trail to find her.

  “Catching a ride,” Warrior said, pushing through the last row of grain and emerging into a clearing in the center of the field. The grass had been smoothed down in a large circle.

  “Is this where you landed?” Scout asked, looking around the perimeter of the circle. Nothing but grass all around them, but here it had been almost gently flattened over, the grass still growing, the stalks bent but not broken.

  “Are you kidding? Do you see scorch marks?”

  “Then what is this place?” Scout asked.

  “Hell if I know,” Warrior said.

  “Then why—”

  Warrior raised a finger, needlessly as Scout had already fallen silent, head tipped as she listened to a distant rumble. Farm equipment? She hoped there would be room enough for both of them and the dogs along with the farmer. Only what farmer would still be out in an active solar flare?

  “There,” Warrior said, raising her gadget high once more as the rumble drew closer.

  “What is that thing?” Scout asked, pointing her chin at the gadget. Warrior grinned, one side of her mouth quirking up more than the other.

  “I use it to catch rides,” she said.

  “Like hitchhiking?”

  “More like commandeering,” Warrior said, lowering the gadget as the rumble grew louder still, sounding for a brief moment like it was coming from all around them. Then the top of a rover came into view from the depths of the fields to the south of them, rolling into the clearing and coming to a halt in front of Warrior. Warrior reached out, patted the nose of the vehicle, and put the gadget back in its place on her belt.

  “Neat trick,” Scout said, leaning back on her bicycle seat to take in the sight of the rover from nose to stern. She’d seen something similar back in her school days in a sim but never in real life. The original colonizers had used rovers like this for long-range scouting missions. A half-dozen colonists could fit inside with supplies enough to last them for months without having to go outside. “Nice choice.”

  “Luck,” Warrior said, walking around the side of the rover to the door on its side. “I just summoned the nearest thing that was moving.”

  “Do we knock?”

  “You’d think that would be redundant, given how I brought them here,” Warrior said, but she pushed back her hat to look up the length of the door before rapping her knuckles on the metal. The rover was like a shuttle on wheels, larger and thicker hulled than the vehicles in routine use on the planet these days. Aside from the trains and ferries that ran from city to city, transportation planetside was bicycle, auto-rickshaw, or your own two feet.

  “Your gun won’t penetrate that,” Scout said after what was more than a reasonable wait for a response from within.

  “Don’t need a gun,” Warrior said, grabbing something else from her belt. She set it under the door panel and it pulled itself the last bit of the way to the metal hull to land with a metallic clang. Something magnetic, Scout guessed. Warrior touched a fingertip to it like she was trying to encourage a small animal to do something in exchange for a bit of food. There was a soft whir and then a louder clang as the door unsealed, moving several centimeters forward, hinges and all, and then stopping.

  “Let’s get inside,” Warrior said, retrieving her device from under the door panel. “Sling your bike into the cargo hatch there between the treads in back. Come, dogs!”

  The dogs looked up at her but didn’t follow, preferring to stay close to Scout as she dismounted her bike and shoved it inside the narrow space in the back between the wide treads and under the rover floor. If there was anything else inside she saw no sign of it. She shut the door with a little click, then ran around the side to the door Warrior had left hanging wide open. The dogs followed close at her heels but hesitated at the sharp step up to get inside.<
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  “Hurry it,” Warrior said, close at hand but quite out of sight in the shadowy darkness of the rover’s interior, especially to Scout’s sun-dazzled eyes. Scout bent and scooped Girl up into her arms, hoisting her up to the doorway. Shadow was half Girl’s weight but needed not a bit of help. Once he understood what Scout wanted he leapt neatly inside, nails scrabbling on the metal floor as he disappeared further inside. Scout gripped the handhold in the doorway and pulled herself up after them. She felt Warrior reach past her to pull the door shut. Then the door on its own rolled into Scout’s backside as it resealed itself, hinges once more tucked away as the edge of the door overlapped the doorway and all four sides.

  Scout pressed her hands back against the door, sensing the presence of others in the rover but forced to wait for her eyes to adjust. Warrior with her neat little reflective lenses could probably see as clearly as ever, but for the moment Scout was quite blind. Blind among strangers.

  And at least one of them was someone Shadow didn’t like.

  4

  When Scout’s eyes started to adjust, she could make out Shadow’s form first. His name had always been a misnomer; with that brightly white fur he glowed in dark places like a ghost. Or at least like a ghost with a few dark patches, wearing a bandit mask to obscure its eyes. He was standing, muscles rigid, the hair over his spine standing on end like a dinosaur’s bony ridge.

  Scout realized she was still standing in a doorway that created a niche off the main body of the rover’s interior, the one open spot along the windowless walls, and stepped out from between the two cabinets that bracketed the space. Warrior had moved all the way inside and was leaning one hip against a counter that was part of a kitchenette with a microwave over a tiny sink and a little bit of countertop over the mini-fridge. Behind her, against the back wall of the rover, was a stack of bunk beds, each large enough to hold two people if they were a bit friendly.