Out of Orbit- The Complete Series Boxset

by Chele Cooke

  “We must go. We are not safe.”

  “I said we’re not leaving!” Alec snapped.

  “Run. Go!”

  “The tunnels might not survive the explosion,” Tohma said. “We must.”

  Looking back at Dhiren, Georgianna moved out of the way, letting him shuffle past her. They only had a few more minutes. He took a deep breath, steadied himself, and, while looking like it was the last thing in the world he wanted to do, wrapped his arms around Alec.

  “Come on, Cartwright,” he said.

  Alec wrestled against Dhiren’s grip, but it was half-hearted.

  “I’m sorry, Wrench!” he cried into the dark. “I’m sorry.”

  She watched as Dhiren half-dragged, half-carried Alec down the tunnel, his protests fading into the gloom. Creeping forwards, Georgianna lay her hand over Keiran’s against the shield.

  “We have to go,” she whispered. “Keiran, you can’t save him.”

  “I can’t leave him.”

  “He’s already gone.”

  “He’s not. He’s just…”

  Keiran leaned against the shield, pressing his forehead to it. A tear rolled down the solid barrier.

  “Brother,” he whispered. “My only…”

  She drew him away from the shield with the same delicate urgency with which he had let her collapse into him back in the woods. He came willingly, just like she had done—the need for something to cling to overtaking the will to be strong. Wrapping her arm around his waist, he draped himself around her shoulder and they sidled away through the dark.

  Each of his breaths came with a gasp, his wound forgotten for his pain.

  The tunnel opened wider and she urged him into a run. The footsteps of the others pounded ahead of them, marking a rhythm.

  There was no warning, no rumble or boom to announce its coming. The ground beneath them cracked and the shock of the explosion lifted them off their feet.

  Georgianna stumbled into the wall of the tunnel, sending Keiran crashing into her. Before she knew what was happening, she was face first on the ground as rock tumbled down around them.

  Georgianna prised herself off the ground, arms trembling under her weight. Keiran groaned beside her. Kneeling, she looked both ways down the tunnel. A dozen feet ahead, she could see the gloomy shapes of Dhiren, Alec, and Tohma as they moaned and peeled themselves off the floor. Behind them, a tumble of rocks had caved in, blocking the tunnel.

  Keiran looked back, and flopped onto the ground, screaming into the dirt. Edging closer, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and winced when he jerked and pulled away.

  Climbing shakily to her feet, Georgianna pressed her hand against the crumbling wall and picked her way over the fallen rocks. Tohma’s lamp shone down the tunnel, a foot from where Alec lay on his side.

  “Everyone okay?” she asked.

  Alec nodded.

  “I am fine,” Tohma said, rolling over and sitting up. “The shield worked.”

  “Too well,” Alec grumbled.

  Georgianna didn’t answer him. She crouched down beside Dhiren and reached out. He hissed and cringed away from the touch.

  “Hey, Yote,” she said. He lifted his head and glared at her. She smiled in return. “I’m not dead, so you can’t be either.”

  “Yeah,” he muttered, spitting dusty phlegm onto the ground.

  Georgianna clambered back down the tunnel to Keiran and, though he tried to pull away, helped him to his feet. He stared at the landslide of rocks, silent and shaky. His back was drenched in blood. She took his hand and led him across the rocks to the others.

  “We should get out of here.”

  Tohma was already up and he helped Alec and Dhiren get to their feet. Georgianna took the lead this time, gripping Keiran’s hand. He followed in a slow trudge, his head down. Alec, Dhiren, and Tohma held the silence, traipsing along behind them.

  Rays of light shone down from the entrance into the tunnel, dappled across the ground. Raindrops splashed around them as they climbed the steps up above ground. The cold rain felt good against Georgianna’s dusty, battered skin. It wasn’t the cold that had her hands trembling.

  In the distance, she could hear screams and shouts. A ship rumbled and passed overhead, though none of them lifted their heads to see whether it was Adveni or Cahlven. Tohma checked his cuff and began walking towards the camps; he was almost halfway down the street before he realised they weren’t following. He returned with a cautious curiosity. Without a word, they turned and headed north, back through the city.

  The shield was visible even at a distance. Inky black, it towered into the sky in a mammoth dome. It was only as they came closer that they could see it was crumbling. It was disintegrating, piece by piece, flaking off and drifting through the air with the ash and smoke.

  They crept closer in silence. Georgianna pulled her hand from Keiran’s, wrapping her arms around her stomach. The street led them straight to it; the destruction they had caused. Ahead of them, buildings fell away to nothing leaving half-shells. The smell of burning filled the air, acrid and suffocating. Still they walked until they reached the edge of the ruin.

  The ground fell away to a crater in the centre of the city. Ash and dust floated through the air, like snow on the wind. It whipped into them and stuck to their skin. Down and down, the hole drove straight into the ground, deeper than the canyon at Nyvalau. It fell in sharp jagged cliffs to a base of rubble. Rock and metal were piled on top of each other; spikes of beams and the dust of bricks. The sharp smooth lines of the Dalsaia was littered amongst them.

  With every breath, Georgianna could taste the burn of what they had done. The Adveni had left their mark on Os-Veruh at Nyvalau and now the Veniche had marked Adlai. This destruction belonged to them.

  Georgianna unwound her arms from around her stomach and looked down at her hands. Ash and dust, rain and blood; it all clung to her. She was made of destruction and death.

  Keiran’s blood, Ehnisque’s. Veniche buildings and Adveni. It was all the same against her skin.

  She was no medic. She didn’t feel like one, not any more.

  As they looked on into the ruin, none daring to speak or perhaps even breathe, Georgianna could only think of Maarqyn. Ehnisque was in that rubble somewhere, her skin incinerated, her bones dust under the weight of the rock. Yet she felt no pleasure. Ehnisque, who had murdered her own brother, was dead, but Georgianna thought only of the man who had tortured and marked her, who was perhaps still out there.

  He had said that a mark claimed a person, that they would remember who had given them the mark every day of their lives.

  They had made this mark. They had made their claim.

  And she didn’t think anyone would forgive them for it.

  - The Cahlven’s Favourite Weapon

  1. A New Uniform

  2. Back to the Tunnels

  3. A Little Chaos

  4. Impossible War

  5. Through the Shield

  6. Argument and Apology

  7. Until the Wash

  8. The Commander and Colvohan

  9. Leveraging a Deal

  10. The List

  11. Weighing the Scales

  12. Terms of Trade

  13. Intentions of the Enemy

  14. Sunset Delivery

  15. Stuck in the Mud

  16. Only One Escape

  17. A Good Nose

  18. Quite the Opposite

  19. Snake Snare

  20. Edge of a Cliff

  21. The White Field

  22. The Easier Target

  23. The Only Way

  24. Double Speak

  25. Splitting the Spine

  26. Those Left Behind

  27. Confidence

  28. A Score to Settle

  29. No More Objections

  30. Locked In

  31. Every Second

  32. The Medics

  33. Underestimated

  34. The Colvohan’s Envoy

  35
. The Changing Times

  36. Praying They’re Wrong

  37. The Last Dreta

  38. Not a Discussion

  39. Such a Little Thing

  40. The Swarm

  41. The New Volsonnar

  42. The Last Breath of Lightning

  43. In the Cards

  44. On the Trail

  45. Made Just for Her

  The Out of Orbit Series

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  As prison cells went, it wasn’t so bad. True, Beck had never been in a cell before, nor had he seen many before this one. But from what he’d heard from others who had been kept in Lyndbury Compound, this one seemed pretty decent.

  Despite his decade-long streak of breaking the law—Adveni law, at least—it was the first time he’d been caught for any wrongdoing. Ten years of hiding in tunnels and running from the Adveni; yet it had taken the Cahlven arriving for him to be captured. It had also taken the Cahlven’s arrival for the Adveni Volsonnar to be killed, with Beck doing the deed himself. So it wasn’t all bad.

  No. It was all bad. It was a mess, and only getting worse.

  Beck, admittedly, could only assume that things were getting worse. He’d been locked in the cell since his attack on the Volsonnar, the leader of the Cahlven’s supposed enemy. He’d known that they wouldn’t be happy about him going off-book the way he had, but to lock him away for far more than a month? To keep in him in a cold, barred cell as the freeze settled in, not allowing him visitors or information? That, he hadn’t expected. And if this was the way they were dealing with him, how were they treating the rest of the Veniche?

  When the First Colvohan—the leader of the Cahlven—had arrived on Os-Veruh, he had visited Beck in his cell and told him that this was merely a formality; a precaution while the dust settled after his attack. The new Volsonnar, Maarqyn Guinnyr, was after blood. But if the assurances were true, this was the longest settling dust Beck had ever seen, and it still didn’t answer why he’d not been allowed visitors, or why he hadn’t been told what was happening outside the shield. Surely Georgianna would have wanted to tell him how the attack on the Mykahnol had gone? If she’d survived. He didn’t know for certain if any of them had come back from the assault on the doomsday weapon which had kept the Veniche under the Adveni rule for so long.

  The door at the end of the row of cells opened with a bang: metal clattering on metal. Beck sat up in his bunk and watched the shadows loom down the corridor. He scratched his chipped nails through a thick beard, and peered through the bars. What did the Cahlven would want from him this time?

  The footsteps were not uniform. Unlike the usual trudge of monotonous boots, these were hurried and scuffling. A thump was followed by a groan, and two Cahlven soldiers dragged a man past his cell.

  The man was bruised, and bound in chains as black as midnight. He was tall; too tall to be a Veniche, or even a Cahlven, who were somewhat smaller by nature. Beck was sure that he was at least half a head taller than him, perhaps more. And Beck was not the shortest man. Sure enough, the captive opened his mouth and spewed a stream of vicious Adtvenis. The only parts Beck understood were the swear words; he’d heard those often enough to be able to pick them out.

  The man’s hair was as dark as the chains. Where it fell over his cheek, it was matted with blood from a wound along the side of his eye. His clothes were ripped and ragged, and a hint of a nsiloq showed through the gap in his shirt, the blue design melted into his ribs.

  The Adveni’s obscenities were met with Cahlvenese orders the Adveni either didn’t care about, or didn’t understand. It didn’t matter either way. The Cahlven soldiers didn’t wait for him to comply before they dragged him forwards and into the first empty cell; the one beside Beck’s. So far, they had been sure to keep prisoners at the far ends of the block; too distant for conversations. Either they’d run out of cells, or they no longer cared about what Beck might learn.

  It didn’t say much for his chances of getting out any time soon.

  The cell bars clanged and the soldiers locked the door. They walked back past Beck’s cell, smiling and chatting, with the Adveni man’s black chains dangling from their hands. They didn’t give Beck a second glance. The door at the end of the cell block closed behind them, and once again the long row of cells was silent.

  “So, what’s your name, then?” the Adveni asked. “I’m Lehksi.”

  From Lehksi’s cell, there was a shuffling and a clang of a bed being kicked, or shoved. Next came the soft thump of an ass landing on the mattress, and a pained groan. Beck rolled his eyes and twisted to sit against the wall, picking up the book he’d been given to occupy his time. He’d read it a dozen times already, but they refused to give him a new one.

  “Suns, can’t believe I’m here. I mean, it was only a matter of time, you know, but it’s still hard to get used to. Well, at least they seem to have finished asking questions for now. You think they’d realise I don’t know what the Vols’ is up to, but no. Just keep asking.” Lehksi’s accent was thick with Adtvenis inflections, but his Veuric was good enough to understand easily. He’d been on Os-Veruh a long time, maybe even since the beginning, though he had looked young when they’d dragged him down the corridor.

  Beck stared at the page he’d read a dozen times. He was sure that, if pressed, he could tell someone exactly what it said, maybe even word for word. But as the Adveni kept on talking, he found he couldn’t concentrate on a single line.

  “Was out on a scout. Routine thing, or so we thought. Regular scout around the outside of the shield. Look for weaknesses, unprotected spots. The shit jobs always go to the Agrah, right? Well, anyway, we thought we’d found a spot, not a person in sight, and suddenly they’re everywhere. Every one of them in Cahlven uniform, though I’m sure some of them were Veniche. Wouldn’t surprise me. Use the grunts for the low work, you know?”

  Beck didn’t answer. Lehksi’s race had long been using Veniche for the work they deemed beneath them.

  “Should have been more careful, really. Can barely move in the city for attacks now. Suns, the days we thought the worst that would happen would be a damn Belsa attack. It’s almost laughable now.” Lehksi gave a bitter chuckle. “You know, I’d barely been to the camps before this. Wasn’t my quadrant. I was lucky. Got assigned to the Dwellings on the other side. Tough luck, ain’t it, that I get given this detail and I end up here. So what about you?”

  Beck ran a hand through his hair, which was in desperate need of cutting, though he supposed it being longer would have helped with warmth for the freeze. He closed the book and laid it down beside him on the mattress. Lehksi sure was a talker.

  “Come on,” Lehksi said, after only a moment of silence. “Looks to me like we’re both gonna die down here. Might as well have a friendly person to talk to. Unless… They didn’t cut out your tongue, did they? I’ve heard of some doing that. Or they crush your vocal chords. Something that isn’t as visible if they want to trade you later. They can claim you went silent. Trauma or some shit. I dunno.”

  Beck groaned and moved the book. He laid down on his bunk, staring at the ceiling.

  “Still can’t believe the Veniche made such a stupid mistake, bringing the Cahlven here.”

  “I don’t see how an Adveni being the one in a cage for a change is a mistake.”

  Lehksi laughed, loud.

  “Ah, he does talk! How’s it going?” he asked. “So, Veniche then?”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “And you don’t think your current position is a mistake?” Despite Lehksi's current predicament, there was amusement in his rough voice. “Still liking the Cahlven?”

  “Me being in here doesn’t mean it was a mistake.”

  “Cahlven aren’t interested in your well-being. They’ll use the Veniche to deal a crushing blow to the Adveni and then they’ll turn. They only teamed with the Veniche in order to find weaknesses it took the Adveni years to find out. You guys just told them everythin
g they needed to know to wipe you out.”

  Beck’s eyes narrowed and his hands clenched into fists. He growled under his breath. “The Adveni have been trying to wipe us out for years and they never succeeded.”

  Lehksi let out a crack of laughter. “We were never trying to wipe out the Veniche. We could have, if we’d wanted. Use a Mykahnol and destroy one of your settlements, and then pick off the stragglers. No, we never wanted annihilation. We needed you, and we knew it.”

  “You needed us? You had a funny way of showing it.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter now, anyway. With the technology the Adveni have put into this planet, the infrastructure we’ve spent a decade building up, the Cahlven don’t have any use for Veniche. They have it all set. Come in, wipe out those who oppose them, and move on.”

  “You tell yourself that if it helps you sleep.”

  There was another shuffling from the Adveni’s cell, and when his voice came again, it was closer. Beck lifted his head, and saw the tips of Lehksi's long fingers stretched around the edge of the wall.

  “This isn’t the first time they’ve done it, you know,” Lehksi said. “The Cahlven. We used to have this other outpost. It was much like Os-Veruh. There was some fighting when the Adveni first got there, but everything settled down, people got on with things. As I hear it, we’d been having some problems with Tletonise pairings, needed to spread it out, and the people on this planet were perfect. Another of the groups that left here. We had arrangements with them. We helped them, and they helped us build the Adveni race up a bit more.”

  Beck felt rather sick from the story. He knew all about the Adveni’s mating rituals; their rules on who could procreate and who couldn’t. The idea of the Adveni using this planet full of innocent people to further their agenda, after they’d invaded, was disgusting. Lehksi, apparently, didn’t see it that way.

  “The Cahlven didn’t like this. They’d been fighting us for generations, and they couldn’t let us build up. They came to the planet and completely wiped out the natives. Every single one, gone.”

  Despite himself, Beck sat up and stared at the bars at the front of his cell. Lehksi’s hand had gone from around the wall, but he could imagine the Adveni sitting behind his own bars, back against the wall, maybe with his eyes closed as he told his story. Beck gulped and shuffled further down his bunk towards the bars.