Pyro Canyon
Page 13
“As you quite rightly intrigued Scott and myself to return to Altimere, to take care of unfinished business, I feel I must intrigue you to take a journey of a different kind—one even further back in time. Take Lyssa with you if you wish. The two of you complement each other well, not unlike Scott and I. I think you’re destined to be together. If not, always remember the time you spent on Altimere. It will soon be a part of history, but hopefully also a part of the future.
“Attached are a set of coordinates you must pinpoint on the eleventh Forjorean moon. Once there, tread lightly. It is a tender wound in a damned place, the only one of its kind anywhere in existence, as far as we know. Hopefully you will find us there, where I bequeath you this, the answer to the riddle of Perihelion—and of Pyro Canyon.”
L.B. clutched her sore ribs as she pointed away to the right, toward a collapsed section of the rock shelf. Something big and powerful had bulldozed it, but that something was no longer there. L.B. had made a complete recovery at Med Lake, thank God; the marrow and blood transfusion and the surgery on her spinal injury had left no permanent damage. Yet the impact sustained on the stone structure here had never been tended to. It was indeed an old, open wound.
“Scott and I flew there regularly, to push each other as fliers…and if I’m honest, to get off on the thrill of cheating death. No one else flew as low or as fast or as often as us. They were the smart ones, because one time I flew too low, too fast, once too often, and my wing clipped the canyon wall. If I hadn’t pulled the nose up in time to skid into an emergency landing, I’d have bought a hot plot right then. But I crashed instead. You’ll see the external damage, but not what happened under the shelf, inside the place we didn’t even know existed then. No one did.
“Go inside now. Don’t forget to dim your torches—like I said, it’s a tender wound of a place, and will only heal while it’s undisturbed.”
He ducked under the low ceiling, shuffling until he could stand upright. The tan-yellow light inside came from the fronds of bioluminescent plants that hung from the roof, something like inverted yuccas. A thin, wispy blanket of mist lay suspended over the vast sanctum at a height of around two feet. Half-formed shapes and shadows, some moving, others almost glowing, seemingly animated inside the mist itself, appeared to be some sort of visual communication system. But from whom…to what?
Everything moved so slowly here—the throbbing light from the palm fronds, the morphing shadows in the mist. It was as though an old, sluggish pocket watch had been buried in the grave with its watchmaker—whereas the body had long since decomposed and vanished, the watch had remained, sluggish, full of memory. This sanctum was the grave.
Gus walked on, still glove in glove with L.B.
“To your right you’ll see the remains of an incubator. When my ship crashed into the shelf, it collapsed tons of rock onto this life-nurturing device, part machine, part organic. Tragically, the young creature inside, the last of its kind, was killed. The moment Scott and I found that out was the worst of our lives. These gentle subterranean creatures, which you’ll shortly meet, live permanently on the brink of extinction. They’ve existed for millions of years in the most inhospitable place imaginable. Not exactly thrived, but existed. For them, because they live such sedentary, secluded lives, existence is bliss. They have adapted profoundly.
“When I accidentally destroyed the incubator, I put an end to their glacial evolutionary cycle forever. The last survivor of each generation reproduces only once, and when that offspring reaches a certain age, it begins to split into numerous separate life-forms. Clones, if you will. An arduous cycle. When I crashed, I condemned them to oblivion, unless…
Out of the moist recesses of the dark sanctum, four figures crept forward. Gus took a half step back, squeezed L.B.’s hand as he tapped it nervously against his thigh.
“…Scott and I could intervene somehow. Figuring out how to communicate with them took weeks, umpteen AWOL flights back to these cool roots of Pyro Canyon. Ultimately, the solution we all agreed upon, the only one the creatures could make work, involved the introduction of new fertilization into the aliens’ biology. Scott donated sperm, I donated an unfertilized egg, and the poor creatures spliced them together, by some ingenious means we didn’t fully understand, with their own DNA to create…”
The startling sight rooted him to the spot. He went to whisper something to L.B. but nothing came out. Not quite human, the four figures strode with a smooth, liquid gait, almost a glide in slow motion. Inside the slender translucent body of the creature on the left blazed the Fifth Condor emblem, a kind of transient fiery tattoo that drifted across him and seemed to bleed into his neighbor, and so on, and so on, until all four had borne their parents’ insignia.
Gus gawped, slack-jawed, trying to remember where he was, why he was here.
You are you father’s son.
“Our delivery of the egg and sperm meant us having to go AWOL during a routine patrol. Little did we know Perihelion was about to happen. It changed everything for us—we never forgave ourselves for abandoning Fifth Condor, or for what we did to those innocent creatures who lived by such a slender thread. That fragile evolution of life in the shadow of galactic war.”
He crept forward, gently offered his cybernetic hand to one of the middle cave dwellers, the one that most resembled Cardie…somehow. The wide mouth perhaps. Or the wisdom behind the multiple eyes.
You have survived. You have adapted.
L.B. followed his lead, tentatively introducing herself to the creature on the right, the one who most resembled Brink. It might have been the trace of stubble on its otherwise translucent chin. Or the slouch.
The sounds of violent outgassing outside, though ever-present, seemed miles, worlds apart. Somehow, that furor couldn’t touch them in here. And the extraordinary offspring of Cardie and Brink were perfectly content to live here in peace, oblivious.
It was a secret he vowed to keep at all costs, just like they had. He owed them that much.
A coded update flashed and unscrambled itself on his visor. It read, Great news, Col. Trillion. 90 percent of colonies signed coalition treaty. Official yield figure to date: Approx. 200 million.
He closed his eyes and saw a familiar face gazing back at him from the polished floor of his room at Med Lake. The face smiled. He smiled back.
Approximately two hundred million…
Plus one.
* * * * *
Return to the final frontier: download Robert Appleton’s Sparks in Cosmic Dust today.
The final frontier is shrinking. Interstellar Planetary Administration sanctions are forcing the border colonies of deep space into extinction. Kappa Max is one of the last major cutthroat outposts, home to the lawless and the lonely. Four strangers, each with secrets that could cost them their freedom, are desperate to get off-planet. But escape won’t be easy—danger, passion, secrets and madness await. Can they survive each other to make it out alive?
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About the Author
Robert Appleton is an EPIC Award–winning author of science fiction, steampunk and historical fiction. A keen soccer player and kayaker, he has travelled far but loves the comfort of reading Victorian adventure books or watching movies at home. His mind is somewhat mercurial. His inspiration is the night sky.
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ISBN: 978-14268-9391-9
> Copyright © 2012 by Robert Appleton
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