Station Fosaan

by Dee Garretson

  “I wanted to see what it would try to do if we didn’t get on,” Decker said.

  “I didn’t,” Lainie said. “Besides, if there are raiders up on the station, do you really want the AIbot to report that we’re still down here? This way, it thinks it’s done its job. It won’t even bother with us. That’s the way they work.”

  “Good thinking, Lainie.” I motioned to the shuttle. “We should move around to the other side so no one notices we’re still here. We can get into the jungle where the shuttle blocks the view.” I glanced over at the Fosaanians. Most were still looking at Ansun. “Look casual,” I said, sidling around the back of the shuttle as if I was just interested in examining the outer markings on it.

  There were a few Fosaanians looking in our direction, as if Ansun’s debate with the raider woman was either losing their interest or nearly done. I feared we wouldn’t be able to leave without someone noticing. Lainie gestured to me to come back.

  “Okay, Saunder and I have a plan,” she said. “I’m staying, but we’ve decided Saunder needs to go so he can explain what’s happening. He’ll tell Gregor that I’m going to try to send a message via my father’s comm unit only. I don’t want to send up a general message that will flash on all the slips. He’s also going to provide us a distraction. Act like you are about to board the shuttle, and then when he moves, get into the jungle.”

  Before I had time to tell Lainie there was no way Ansun would fall for something like that, Saunder bolted away from us toward the shore, yelling and pointing, “Look! Did you see that? It’s gigantic!” Everyone turned to the ocean. “I can’t believe it!” Saunder continued to yell as he ran, skidding to a stop at the edge of the water, still gesturing at something out to sea.

  I was so startled I almost ran after him, but Lainie grabbed my arm and said, “Now!” It took a few seconds for me to realize this was the diversion Lainie and Saunder had concocted. The Fosaanians and the raider all moved closer to the water, straining to see what Saunder was yelling about. Some of the Fosaanians raised their weapons as if they expected something to rise out of the water.

  “Come on!” Lainie said, pulling me along with her. The three of us ran around the side of the shuttle to the edge of the jungle. Decker stopped short and I nearly plowed into him.

  “We can’t just run into the jungle,” Decker said. “Who knows what’s there?”

  “We can’t stay here.” I said. “They’re going to realize there is nothing out there soon enough. And once the shuttle takes off, they’ll see us. Just go far enough in so the plants hide us.” I moved ahead and the others followed.

  We made our way in only a few meters, and then Lainie stopped. “I have to make sure Saunder is okay,” she said. “I want to see him get on the shuttle.”

  “Don’t let yourself be seen.” I didn’t even want to imagine what Ansun would do to us if we were caught trying to make a break for it.

  “I won’t.” Lainie edged closer to the clearing, peering around a big tree fern. I followed her back. Saunder was still gesturing, but one of the Fosaanians had him by the arm and was leading him to the shuttle.

  “What if they notice we aren’t on board?” Decker whispered from behind me.

  “They won’t notice, I hope.” I said. “I didn’t think it was going to work, but it looks like it did. Ansun just wants to get rid of us all and he’s too busy talking.”

  As if Ansun had heard me, the Fosaanian leader suddenly turned toward the shuttle, staring at it. He said something to the raider woman and then began to walk in our direction.

  Chapter 8

  It is not our way to mourn the dead. I do anyway. I wish we had more who could give counsel. Ansun is so sure of himself, he will listen to no one. In his own mind, he is doing what is best for the clan. I cannot be so certain.—Erimik, historian of the Family

  “What do we do?” Lainie whispered frantically. “If they figure out we are gone, what will they do to Saunder? They’ll know he was trying to help us.”

  Saunder was almost at the shuttle, talking away to the Fosaanian with him, who wasn’t responding. I knew Saunder didn’t realize Ansun was behind him.

  “We have to get Saunder away!” Lainie said.

  “No!” I took hold of her arm. “He has to get on the shuttle. Otherwise people up on the station won’t know what’s happening down here. The more they know, the more likely they are to figure something out. Let’s wait and see what happens.”

  Ansun quickened his pace and caught up with Saunder and the Fosaanian.

  “I want to check who’s on board,” Ansun said, focusing on Saunder. I saw a look of fear cross Saunder’s face. “See if the older Earther youth are inside,” Ansun ordered the soldier, and the man walked up the ramp. He seemed to be inside forever. I could feel Lainie trembling. The man came back down, shaking his head.

  “A worthy trick,” Ansun said, staring at Saunder. He came within inches of Saunder and even from a distance, I could see the beads of sweat that appeared on Saunder’s forehead. Saunder hated any kind of conflict, and I just hoped he wouldn’t fall apart. Ansun stood for a moment and then very slowly reached down to one of the cylindrical shapes on his belt. I knew the Fosaanian was going to draw a knife. I glanced at Decker. Decker met my eyes. He knew it too.

  “We have to do something!” Lainie said.

  Ansun’s arm whipped forward, the knife ending right at Saunder’s throat. Lainie gave a tiny cry, but Decker already had his hand over her mouth and one arm around her waist. Ansun’s blade was larger than Mira’s had been and looked even more lethal. Saunder took a step back and then turned as if he were going to run. The Fosaanian soldier grabbed him and dragged him back to Ansun. Ansun grabbed hold of Saunder’s hair with one hand and yanked back his head, exposing his neck. He brought the knife back up to it.

  Decker spoke softly, his hand still clamped over Lainie’s mouth. She was struggling furiously, but he had such a tight hold on her, she couldn’t get away. “So do we give ourselves up or do we try to take out Ansun and the soldier?” he said.

  I knew there was no way we’d stand a chance against Ansun and the soldier with a whole group of armed Fosaanians behind them. We’d have to surrender for Saunder’s sake. I held up my hands and jerked my head toward Ansun to indicate we should give up. Decker nodded, but just as I was about to step out of the jungle, Ansun lowered his knife.

  “Now that I think about it,” the man said, “this is to our advantage. The Earthers are foolishly sentimental about their children.” He let go of Saunder’s hair. “Boy, make sure you tell the others’ parents about the three that have run off into the jungle. Tell them we’ll try to find them and send them up to the station, as long as everyone there cooperates. We already have enough of the children to make sure some key personnel do what we want.”

  “What if you don’t find them?” Saunder said, his voice wavering.

  Ansun laughed. “Then the tachesums will have new prey.” He motioned to the soldier to take Saunder on board. I realized we were too close to the edge of jungle. Any moment Ansun might spot us. I motioned to Decker and Lainie to move away, but Lainie shook her head angrily, trying to free herself from Decker’s grip. The soldier came back down and the shuttle ramp retracted. As the shuttle lifted off, Piper’s face appeared in one of the viewports, looking very small and scared. I knew she couldn’t see me but I waved anyway.

  Ansun gave one last look toward the jungle and then went back to the beach. Once he was talking to the raider woman again, I felt myself take a deep breath and then heard Decker give a muffled “Ouch! Did you have to bite me?” he said, releasing Lainie and examining his finger.

  “Don’t ever do that again!” Lainie pushed him away. “Who do you think you are?”

  “You would have rushed out and been caught if I hadn’t,” Decker said. “I was trying to save you!”

  “It would have been my choice! I decide what to do about me and my brother, not you! S
tay away from me.” She pushed him again.

  “I’m sorry.” Decker said, sounding like he really meant it. “I couldn’t let you go.”

  “You two are talking too loudly, and we need to do something,” I said. “We can’t just stand here. You heard Ansun. He said they were going to come looking for us.” I took a few steps deeper into the jungle.

  Decker didn’t move. “We can’t just run into that. Who knows what’s in there?”

  “Better than what’s out there.” I didn’t want to wait around for someone to discover us.

  “Let’s go to the ruin, until we figure out what to do.” Lainie said.

  “What ruin?” Decker asked.

  “It’s something Quinn and I found. It’s a perfect place to hide. Right, Quinn?”

  It was tough to think of anything as perfect right at the moment, but I couldn’t come up with anywhere else to go. We couldn’t stay in the jungle. “Good idea. Let me go first,” I said. “Without a path, we’ll have to be careful of the plants with spines. I know what some of them look like. Don’t touch anything you don’t have to.”

  The going was slow, pushing aside the foliage, trying to watch for danger, which felt like it could come from anywhere. Even a few feet in, the light was dim, filtered through the huge leaves. When I wasn’t trying to avoid certain plants, I watched the ground, not wanting to accidentally step on something. We saw nothing and heard nothing, except the large bugs that looked like a cross between a dragonfly and a cricket and made odd little baaing noises like sheep, giving off an odor of cleaning compound.

  It took us at least twice as long to get to the ruin through the jungle as it would have going by the beach, and by the time we reached it, we were all drenched in sweat. Once we were inside, Decker circled around examining the place. “You knew this was here and you didn’t tell anyone?”

  “We would have eventually,” I said.

  “Not good,” he barked. “It might be important. I can’t believe this didn’t show up on any of the planetary scans they did before we came.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. “Maybe it has something to do with the type of building material. I haven’t seen anything like this except here.”

  “Are you sure the Fosaanians don’t know about this?”

  “No,” I said. I was about to add, “except for Mira,” when Lainie spoke.

  “It really doesn’t matter right at this moment.” She flopped down and leaned her head back. “I forgot how hot it was in here. Are you sure Mick is really dead? Maybe he just went into hiding like us.”

  “I saw him.” I couldn’t meet her gaze, “what was left of him.”

  “Oh,” she whispered.

  To try to get that image out of my head, I said, “Mick had to have something to do with the communications cutoff at the station, because a Fosaanian wouldn’t have had the access. But I don’t think it was Mick’s idea. Ansun must have convinced him to do it, probably for currency. I still don’t understand how either Ansun or Mick got those MIbots down here. My mother would have to authorize them being taken off the station.”

  “Even though Mick acted dumb, he was a lot smarter than he looked, especially with bots,” Lainie said. “He’s really good with the regular AIs. We worked on one of them together one time. Since the bots communicate with each other, maybe he went through an AI to get at them. Somehow. What did Ansun mean about having enough of the children?”

  I thought the Fosaanian’s meaning was obvious until I realized Lainie hadn’t seen Ansun’s behavior the night before. “He means he’s going to threaten to do something to the children if their parents don’t cooperate. It’s smart in a twisted way, because he knows it will work. My mom will do anything he wants to avoid having Piper hurt.”

  “He wouldn’t really hurt them though, right? That’s just wrong.”

  “I don’t know what he would do.” I doubted if Ansun’s concept of right and wrong matched Lainie’s. “We need to figure out what we’re going to do.”

  “We just wait it out down here for help.” Decker was still pacing around as if he were measuring the place. He flicked on the flashmark on his sleeve and turned the light up to its brightest setting. “And while we’re here, we should make sure there’s nothing dangerous hiding in this place.”

  “There isn’t,” I said, realizing every time I’d been to the ruin there had never been a single bug or creature in it. They all seemed to avoid it.

  Decker didn’t believe me, of course, and examined every section carefully. When he was apparently satisfied the place was safe, he sat down next to Lainie and said, “Somebody out there has to realize there’s already a problem, if no message traffic is getting through. They’ll send someone to investigate. Quinn, when is your father scheduled to come back?”

  There had been so much happening it took me awhile to even figure out what day it was. “About two standard days,” I said, a sinking feeling in my stomach. “What happens if he comes back and tries to dock at the station? What if they turn some of the defensive weapons on him?”

  “They’ll probably want his supplies,” Decker said, “so I don’t think they’ll try to attack him. It’s more likely they’ll let him dock, but not let him leave.”

  If that was supposed to make me feel better, it didn’t. “We have to find a way to warn him.”

  “The raiders can’t get away with it,” Decker made a punching motion like he was envisioning a raider in front of him. “Even if the raiders are in control of the station, once someone from outside finds out, they’ll send a brigade and the station’s not equipped to fight off something like that. The military will overpower them right away.”

  “I don’t understand why raiders wouldn’t just take what they want and leave.” Lainie picked up brown leaf the size of a plate from the floor and fanned herself with it. “Load the bots on a ship and go. Isn’t that what raiders do? Steal valuable stuff?”

  “But there are only a few MIbots right now. They need to make more.” A terrible thought came to me. “It’s not just the bots that are valuable. It’s the researchers. They’re the only ones who can develop more bots at this point.” I began to get a horrible feeling that there was far more to the situation than we understood.

  “That’s true,” Decker said, “but there’s still no way the military is going to let the raiders have the space station, and the researchers can’t just do their work anywhere, not with all the specialized equipment and the iridium sulfide they need. The raiders aren’t going to take them away and expect them to work on a raider ship. And the space station can’t move far on its own.”

  “What if they are holding the researchers hostage, to get currency?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lainie got up and picked up another leaf, fanning herself with both of them. “They could be. Who knows how raiders think?”

  “The Fosaanians are in this somehow. As soon as my father figures it out, he’ll do something,” Decker said, “He’s going to squash Ansun so fast, he won’t know what hit him.”

  “Ansun may be hard to squash,” Lainie said. “He’s frightening. And that bald raider woman. If I had nightmares, Baldy would be in them.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I agreed with Lainie. Still worrying about my father, I asked, “Lainie, if we can get to a comm unit, do you think you can send a message out so that they wouldn’t notice it going through the station?”

  “I don’t know how to do that,” she said.

  “We have to think of something.” Decker went back to examining the place, like he feared something had crept in while he was sitting down. “And if we’re stuck down here we need to get to a living unit and get some supplies.”

  Between Decker moving around and Lainie waving the leaves around, the motion was making me feel worse. I closed my eyes, but then for some reason the images of us walking through the jungle came back to me, so vivid it was almost as if I was doing it again. I wished my brain would just
calm down. I didn’t like having multiple streams of memory playing through my head.

  “I do have a couple of ideas,” Lainie said. “I did figure out how your mom sent that message. If I could get to a comm unit, and if Saunder gives her the message, we could at least communicate.”

  “If we tried to get to the living quarters, they’d see us from the station.” Decker said. “The walkway is in plain view. We can keep watch and see when they leave.”

  “We can swim,” I suggested. If Mira had done it, so could we.

  “Are you crazy?” Decker shook his head. “No way. We’re not supposed to go into that depth of water. The safety field still isn’t working all that well.”

  “We’ll swim to our place. It’s not that far offshore but it’s farthest from the depot and the least visible.” I realized that was probably why Mira had chosen my quarters when she wanted to look for food. “We’ll swim so that the lava columns hide us as much as possible.” In the shallow water by the beach, tall narrow mounds of black lava rock rose from the ocean floor, some of them sticking several meters about the surface of the water.

  “Quinn and I can go without you,” Lainie said to Decker. “I’m so hot I want to get in the water anyway.”

  “No, I’ll go too.” Decker didn’t look eager, but I knew he wouldn’t want to appear afraid.

  The three of us couldn’t be seen from the station because of the curve of the shoreline, but I worried about being seen from the living quarters. If Fosaanians had come out to them and were looking out some of the openings, our position on the beach would be clearly visible. I watched for a moment and when I saw no signs of life out over the water, I motioned for the others to follow.

  Lainie dived right in, while Decker held back, and I knew he was thinking about the creature from the night before, the rheisious. I was too, but the clarity of the water between the beach and the living units convinced me to go in.