All my life I had battled for light, only to sink into darkness. I was born to the deep places, but secretly longed for the sun. Only after meeting her did I feel like I might have found a way to finally reach it. Now I seemed doomed to stumble through the night forever, like the dead.
Adi hadn’t made it easy for me to catch up to her. Now she gave me disgusted looks while keeping a relentless pursuit of the alien beings, but I didn’t care about that. Silence suited me best and I was in no mood to listen to her steam over something she didn’t and couldn’t understand.
The Var moved quickly atop their beasts. For a short while, we watched their backs as they moved around trunks of the giant trees and leaped easily over tangled roots and twisting vines. It was troubling to see how easily they moved, as if they were at one with the forest. Clearly they felt as much at home here on land as we did embraced by the sea.
Water fell from the sky in a mist that coated every scent on the forest floor, from roots, to creeping and sliming things, to the bright green plants we slipped around. I breathed in deeply, through my nose to my gills and savored the moisture on our skins and the scent of the mulch. Our breaths came shallow and fast as we moved like the predators we were. The mist made it easier for me, gave me strength.
I thought back to the strange sea, of the way power had flowed through me when she touched me. I wanted to feel like that again, invincible. I was lying when I told Qeya she would never see us again. I knew I couldn’t stay away from her even if I wanted to. Maybe it was better that I die in pursuit of this mission. Then she could give herself wholly to Tamn and her people and no longer would I feel like half of a hunan with her gone. The idea of dying in battle was comforting to me then. Blood lust sang through my veins, more than any other miner Old Brien claimed to have known and it pushed me to meet my fate faster.
We ran until the sun was lost over the mountains and the night forest came to life. By then I had lost track of everything, except for the smell of our prey.
Not even a pace ahead, Adi suddenly ducked behind a tree and reached out a fist to grab me. I dug my heels into the earth but still swayed from the abrupt loss of momentum. I growled when she flung me against the tree so the back of my skull was pressed between its bark and her hard body. I could tell from the brief glance she gave me that she was just as annoyed by our current situation as I was. While she returned her slanted eyes to the forest past the trunk’s shelter, I stared at the blue blood pumping through the dark veins outlined on her gray skin. Even her hands had been marked, I thought bitterly as we waited. Talk had been had among the crew, that if we’d been on home world, Adi would have been clan leader one day. I knew Old Brien would have gladly passed the responsibility on to someone, just not her. She was too rash, he told me in private; always determined to prove herself. This wasn’t the mark of a leader, he said. A leader was the kind of hunan who wore passion on their shoulders, not just forced their raging ambitions on everyone else.
“Just a league ahead,” she whispered, jerking her head back, so I followed the motion with my eyes around the tree’s shelter. When I perked my ears, I could hear them, the shouts of children and females. The scouting party had returned, and it sounded as though the rest of the village was welcoming them.
If we were so close to the settlement, there should have been sentries posted nearby. The Var preferred not to use the trees, as the Nuki told it. But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t or couldn’t. I searched the brush above us, around us, taking in every twitch of every branch as thick, hot drops began to fall from the sky.
No sentries were waiting above, and none patrolled on the ground. Were the Var so confident of their own reputation that they didn’t bother protecting their borders? The skin behind my neck itched and as I scratched, I whispered, “Something doesn’t float well with this.”
Adi nodded and interrupted her own perusal. “There’s more to it.”
“Traps?” I wondered aloud, thinking of the pit falls we had used during the invasion, taking out chunks of rock so the armies fell to their deaths or our blasters.
She paused, and then reached into her vest to pull three gray metal capsules from their clasps. “These will do quite swimmingly, I think.”
Boomers? I eyed the weapons doubtfully. Trouble with explosives was they didn’t know the difference between you or the enemy. If we weren’t out of the way, there was no chance for us to avoid being sliced by the thousands of tiny poisoned pins hidden inside.
“Let’s have a look first,” I cautioned and smirked at Adi’s obvious disappointment. “We want to get Remin out alive, aye?” I reminded her and she nodded, firming her jaw as she handed me a boomer and replaced the other two.
“Use your scanner first,” she said while turning her back and peeking from behind our tree.
I flipped open the gauntlet’s outer shell and readjusted the settings, watching the red light shift to blue. Cautiously, crouched from behind our shelter, I made a sweep of my arm, watching the invisible grid emit over the forest nearby and above, just to be certain. A quick assessment of the readings after confirmed my suspicions. There were multiple traps, pitfalls and trip wires, ready to sound off the warning if we came any closer. After showing Adi the layout, we moved in. There was no alternative but to trust our instincts and the fact that we weren’t dead yet. So maybe, only maybe, we had a chance of surviving this after all.
Rain gave us cover as I followed Adi to the village edge. Through the wide-leafed plants and vines, the settlement was so close I could count the hairs on the backs of the children’s heads. I could have aimed my gauntlet and set their wooden and mud huts to blaze with a mere flick of my wrist. But, much as I loved the hunt, I wasn’t water-logged. I wasn’t so totally unhinged that I would murder unknowing creatures. I preferred my prey capable of fighting back.
I remember as a child, running through the tunnels where Old Brien and Adi’s clan mined for bare minerals and dust. Beasts lived there too, only these had been hunted nearly to extinction, save those that lived in the deepest cracks of the world. And unfortunately for me, I preferred dark and abysmal to light. Most of my scars came from stepping into another creature’s territory. I was air-kissed to make it out alive, but the very first time I went below I lost my way.
I was much smaller then and the dark reminded me more of my home beneath the sea than the too-bright, too-clear caves the clan indwelled. I was used to hunting, not mining, and I brought my old bone blade with me, determined to face the terrors I had heard haunted such places.
The creature came from nowhere. I had followed the sound of the slight scratches of its claws against the cave walls, the slither of its belly on wet stone. It clawed me in the gut first, but I ended its existence swiftly and with relish. For a moment I could pretend I was with my blood clan, before the liquid heat ate them alive. I lifted the beast over my head and let out the same ancient cry as those who came before had over countless kills. But the creature was much smaller than I anticipated. When I looked better at it, I realized it was a child I had murdered. Other soft, mewling cries came from the same corner it had sprung. Its brothers and sisters, I recognized with cold clarity, and the knowledge its mother must be somewhere close by. In this way, I had killed my own kind and for the first time, wished I could weep over it.
“Ohre!” Adi hissed so faintly, no land-dwelling creature could have heard it. But we were used to the tight pressure of the deep, and our ears needed to hear further and better. I blinked and focused on the gray-skinned, tattooed face of my shipmate and remembered our mission. I was one step from a pitfall, her gloved hand the only thing keeping me back.
I grimaced and nodded once to her before spreading out to the left while Adi took the right flank. We would sweep either side and knowing her, she would plant the boomers, ready to set off just in case. I rubbed the one she’d handed me with my free hand, while testing the settings of my gauntlet with the other. The sensors were working correctly, and as I had programed, rea
dy to react to the subtlest twitch, in case we came under fire.
The children’s voices grew louder then, as they played with some kind of hooped stick along the main pathway across the village. It was odd, I first noted after sidestepping a tripwire, that the Var settlement was so small. From the way Qeya said the Nuki’s had told, these alien beings were monstrous beasts who swarmed as a pack and destroyed everything in their path.
I wished I had not thought of the youngling creature I had killed as a boy. Many star years later, I had eradicated all remorse from my mind. After everything I had been through and seen, little could move me. And my first impulses were so often violent in nature that I was forced to keep a tight mask at all times. Old Brien taught me mechanics as a way to channel that energy and his son taught me to fight on land. Now that the elder was dead, I could acknowledge the truth I had been unwilling to look at. I had changed. I wished that Qeya had not made me soft and weak enough to question my killer instincts.
I nearly stepped into a snare masked by brush and hesitated. The line appeared loose on the forest floor, but nearby it was tautly tied to a stick that when snapped, would unleash a log hovering high above. The impact would crush my bones together and mix it with the mud at my feet. I crawled lower, the closer we came and checked my biosuit to make certain the environmental settings were working. Another Royal invention and something they didn’t steal from us, the skin-tight protective layer was able to keep our bodies hydrated and cool in any environment, while providing camouflage. I blended well with the mud, the rain and shadows I was treading in, enough that they didn’t see me approach the edge of one of their mud huts in the fading light of day.
There were at least twenty huts clustered together through the forest edge, made of the earth, chopped wood and brush all slung together. A single hole was cut at the top that allowed smoke to filter up and out of the roof. Inside, I could hear their shouts and laughter, similar to what you might have heard outside a Clan dwelling. The children and women who had been outside moments before, headed inside when the first stars appeared through the rain clouds. Sentries came out to their posts at the edge of the village, and others skinned their kills for the day, soon to be brought inside their homes and roasted. It was all so familiar, so similar to something a hunan would have done.
I hesitated before edging around to another hut, and caught a flash of movement at the opposite end of the camp. Adi’s frame was instantly camouflaged once she settled against the edge of an earthen lodge. It was the gleam of her blaster I had seen, and the scanner she held ready, to unleash her terror on these predators.
Even predators have kin, I reminded myself. Even I had, once.
Still, I pushed aside that voice in my head that sounded so much like her and pulled out Adi’s boomer. Twisting it, I listened for the third click before setting it against the largest of the huts, close to the heart of the settlement.
The forest stirred behind me, then and I planted myself against the lodge and narrowed my eyes until they were barely visible slits. The alien grunted as they hefted something into a better position on their shoulder before continuing into the main path. I could feel the heat and stench of fresh kill fume from its skin as the bulky male passed me by. It was one of the furred ridge-backs, I realized.
After expelling a breath of relief, I crouched lower to the wet ground and crawled closer. The alien set his kill outside the hut I had been backed against, obviously more concerned with skinning and gutting his meal than looking out for intruders. Once again, I had the impression the Var weren’t used to visitors. Concentration crossed his alien, yet familiar features as he pulled out a stone cutting tool and began his work. It was too close.
I eased back into the shadow, only to freeze at the sound of pain that met my ears. The alien male didn’t turn to pursue the noise, but when I returned to my former position, I could see the outlines of shadowy figures returning from the forest edge. The white-haired Royal, another member of the Pioneer crew was shoved into the mud, and the alien being standing over him was shouting wildly while slashing at his open back with some kind of whip.
Distinctly, I heard the vaguely familiar voice of the shuttle’s captain growl over his cries, “Don’t tell ‘em anything, Kall!” His command was brought short when the Var bashed the captain’s head in. I saw him fall before the feet of his second in command, saw the blood wash into the mud, while the Var kicked him in the chest repeatedly.
Remorse filled me because I knew this was Qeya’s uncle. But Adi would not care for the life of some bleeding Royal, especially one related to her. So I retreated back to the tree line behind me and, came around the other rounded edge of the largest hut. Here I was given a better view than before. And to my surprise, I saw more Var rushing forward to pull the Royals away from their soldiers. Three of the Var were female and they wept and cried as they tried to reclaim the Royal males. They didn’t stop trying to reclaim the hunans, even as they were slapped and whipped by their soldiers, until they released the prisoners. After the guards stepped back with disgust on their faces, the Var females threw themselves over the Royals and tenderly helped them to their feet.
I gaped, outraged that the Royals were given such special treatment. Remin had been speared by one of their crude blades, and these pale-skinned, pale-haired Royals were protected. This was so beneath the honor of any male, I wondered how the captain and his second mate could bare the shame.
Adi used the moment as a distraction and I should have expected her next move to be rash. It was her nature, after all. She was darting before the camp, leaping from hut to hut and using the cover of rain to follow the disgruntled soldiers. No doubt, she believed they would lead her to Remin. But the boomers were still in place, and if she was captured, there was the chance that the whole village was about to go up in a rain of plasma and flesh.
I hissed and prepared to bolt after her, only to feel something heavy bash into my head. I gasped as the wind was knocked from my chest next and lay on the ground after. I stared up into a pair of black eyes, set deeply within a tattoo-lined face. We had worked on different decks but I would recognize Remin anywhere. Distantly, I heard Adi’s voice before it was muffled, followed by other cries from the village. I lost consciousness when Adi and Remin came closer and mumbled incoherently that they needed to run back.
“We’re all dead,” I muttered, before blackness finally claimed me.
VI
Accord
“—shouldn’t have abandoned your position.” A low, rough voice was speaking overhead. I suppressed the urge to groan, not knowing where I was or who held me captive.
A familiar, annoying feminine voice answered him. “It’s not like we had any other chances. I had to find you, Remin, even if that meant us getting captured. We could have found a way out together.”
Remin? I wondered why that name sounded so familiar, but my head felt like it had been hammered by a blasted shovel. My thoughts were mushed as a pack of field rations, as a fish caught in the leviathan’s teeth.
The male sighed and moved further away, his every sound echoing as if we were encased by rock. “That’s water-logging talk and you know it. Why did you and the wildling not blast off this rock when you had the chance?”
“Because…” she choked on her words.
I opened my eyes, against my better judgment. For I knew it was Adi, as surely as I remembered all the events that had led up to this one moment. Adi had pursued the idea of rebuilding the Pioneer with a sheer, mad focus. And once the idea that Remin might be alive was stuck in her head, she dragged me into her plans. Course, being the wildling I was always last to know of these things.
Adi and I were packing enough weapons and chole dust to blow half the face off this world if the wrong trigger was set off. I remembered that Adi and Remin were the only miners on the Pioneer and seeing them together, in this strange underground hut, made me wonder if they were more than simply shipmates.
Her hand was on his scarred a
rm, tracing the lines of tattoos that marked him through his torn biosuit. More than any miner I had ever met, besides Old Brien, Remin was the most marked. To any of my kind, that screamed one obvious thing: danger. To see him so subdued and worn about the gears was unnatural. Yet there he stood, accepting her touch when I would have smashed her in the shoulder by now. She would have done the same to me. Something in the way the firelight glowed in her eyes, however, told me her intentions were the opposite with this one.
Remin pulled away when she began to trace his gills, turned back to the fire he had been tending. “You shouldn’t have come, Adi. There is still a chance for you to leave and you should take it.”
“Why? So you can play the hero when these savages finally decide to attack the children?”
I started to hear Adi describe Qeya’s extended family in ways that were anything but the way she usually spoke of the Royals.
Remin regarded her with a keen eye and then surprised both of us by replying, “You know we didn’t come here for them. Have you forgotten all those nights we planned with the crew? How we were gonna steal back our ship and dump the Royals at the first habitable world? There’s nothing we can do for the Royal brats anymore. I’m here because my crewmates were captured. I’ve managed to pass messages to them from time to time. I owe them this much, since one of their females patched me up.”
“Patched you—” Adi sputtered. “Steam wirms! You’ve gone leaking mad out here, you know. What does it matter if two bleeding Royals decide to mate with the locals? You just finished saying we should mind our own business, Remin. What should it matter what any of them do, besides leave us be? And now you’re risking all our necks to save them?” Adi crossed her arms over her chest and turned her back on us, facing the draft that was kicking rain into the natural underground room.
Ohre (Heaven's Edge) Page 6
