Stars Beneath My Feet

by D L Frizzell

  It took me a minute to recover from the retching, even after running further into the canyon to escape the smoke. I sat on a rock between two bluffs where the wind blew into the canyon and cleared my lungs for a few minutes. Should I go back? I wondered when I was feeling better. I thought about burying these poor souls, but then I realized that would only slow me down. The more time I spent tending the dead, the more likely others would die as a result of my delay. I agonized over the decision, kicking at the ashes of the wood that was used to start the fire. It would be better to burn the caravan where it sat, I decided. It wasn’t a proper burial, but it would suffice until their families could be notified. On the other hand, caravaners lived hand-to-mouth pretty much all their lives. Burning their wagons and their cargo would rob their grieving families of any costs they might recoup. All things considered, I’d be better off just letting somebody know what I found and let them deal with it.

  As I turned to walk back to the wagons a sense of otherly presence came over me. As certain as I’d been that I would find trouble in the canyon, I knew somebody was watching me again. When the two men stepped around the bend, their dusty desert cloaks doing little to conceal their muscular forms or their incredible height, I came to a very sudden stop.

  The T’Neth stood there, looking almost like twins in their similar ragged clothes, accented by silky blue skin suits underneath. The men were darker-skinned than me, which only intensified the eerie silver speckles in their blue-green eyes. Though they looked no older than me, their hair was already turning grey. They held swords as long as fenceposts, each with shimmering grooves along the flat sides. As magnificent as these blades were, I couldn’t help but notice their edges were smeared with blood. As I looked them over, I noticed soot on the lower part of their garments.

  The T’Neth pressed their swords into the gravel and rested their hands on the hilts. They stood calmly, their expressions conveying that they were poised to strike if I made any sudden movements.

  “You had a reckoning with these men?” I asked with a quavering voice. That was the expression the T’Neth used for massacre.

  Both of them stood there wordlessly.

  My headache, though it was already bad already, flared to an agonizing fire inside my head. My vision went red and my knees went soft, but I refused to show weakness to these murderers. This act was savage, even for T’Neth. I wanted to attack them on principle alone, futile gesture or not. They would add me to their day’s kill and think nothing of it, but how could I let them kill my own and not answer in kind?

  They stared at me, almost daring me to challenge them.

  Do no harm, a voice said in my head. Was that the creed that doctors used? I wasn’t sure what a doctor would say about the current situation, except that maybe I had an urgent need for medical care. My head throbbed so badly that my vision shrank to a murky red blur. As my legs buckled, I got a glimpse of a third giant. This one, whose face had become all-too-familiar lately, caught me as I fell. Despite my best efforts to push away from him and run, I only staggered a few meters before I fell over like a tree.

  Chapter Eight

  I awoke to see two big men standing over me. I had been moved out of the canyon and propped up in the shadow of a spherical boulder by the main trail. One of the men was Hugh Redland, his face a mask of curiosity, if not actual concern. The other man had a severely weathered face and white hair visible under his hood, the same one I’d come to know – and maybe even respect a little – over the last few days. Xiv. Fourteen. T’Neth. Cold-blooded murderer.

  “Why did you do that?” I demanded with a husky, dry voice, pointing toward the canyon in the distance.

  “Hold on a sec, kid,” Redland said. “Xiv didn’t kill those caravaners.”

  “His people did,” I said. “They were there.”

  “Go to Dogleg,” Xiv said in his flat, gravelly voice.

  “You saw T’Neth kill the fellas on the caravan?” Redland asked me, sounding confused as he looked at Xiv.

  “No,” I said, grinding my teeth as my headache surged to life again, “but it was them.”

  Xiv glared at me silently.

  “Why did you do that?” I asked again. “You saved my life, so you think I’ll ignore what you did here?”

  Xiv continued to stare. “You do not hear me.”

  “Your message is quite clear,” I blurted, wincing at the pain that flared in my temples again. “What the hell could these men possibly do to deserve that kind of death?”

  “You are the same as them.” He pointed at the canyon.

  I stared without answering, wondering if I’d just crossed the line by confronting him. But then again, I had no idea what he meant. “I need an explanation,” I said slowly, trying to keep my voice down to manage the pain in my head, but wishing I could yell at the bastard.

  “Go to Dogleg,” Xiv said once more. It sounded like a final warning.

  As I stood shakily, my head pounding, I decided to make a tactical retreat. I would be outmatched against a T’Neth on my best day, but at the moment I felt infuriatingly helpless. Live today, fight tomorrow, I told myself. But fight I would.

  “I’ll go,” I growled, “but I’m going by myself.” I didn’t need their special brand of nonsense any more than I needed to see another pile of dead bodies. I’d find Jarnum on my own. I’d kill him on my own, too. And after I’d taken his shackle back to the warden, I’d start delivering some freelance justice to the T’Neth. If Redland happened to get in my way, his demise would be his own damn fault. At the moment, I realized, he was holding my pack. I held out my hand, not willing to get within arm’s reach of him. He tossed it to me without a word.

  I walked down the trail toward Dogleg, nervous about turning my back on the two men I despised so much. Still, because there was nothing but silence behind me, I did sneak a peek over my shoulder after a minute. Redland had his hands on his hips, staring fearlessly into Xiv’s eyes as if there was a question of who was in charge. Xiv was his stoic, intimidating self. They could strangle each other for all I cared. As I walked along, it occurred to me that I didn’t know if I had all my belongings. I tapped the weapons on my legs, and then reached around behind me to find the comforting metal of my Longarm’s barrel swaying below my pack. The weapons would be enough. If anything was missing from my pack, I sure as hell wasn’t going back to get it.

  I made it back to the Plainsman Territory the next day and took a detour off the road. There was just something I didn’t like about being exposed, especially given the things I’d seen recently. The change in direction took me pretty far of course for Dogleg, and that actually made me feel better. The only drawback was that I was getting pretty hungry by that point. My luck actually improved for a bit, though. I found an abandoned farm where fields of beans and sunflowers had gone been growing wild for years. After shooting a takazelle that was grazing on the Earth vegetables, I carried its carcass to an old wooden barn where a few long-dead harvesting machines sat rusting. Though they were nothing more than steel skeletons with frayed wires dangling from their hollowed-out engine compartments, they rocked back and forth on their flat tires like boats tied to a pier in a storm. They didn’t seem to be a danger at the moment, but they might careen across the farm if another magnetic storm hit. A giant hole in one of the barn’s walls indicated that’s exactly what had happened, which might have also been the catalyst that drove the farmers off their property. Nobody liked temperamental farm implements gyrating about with nobody at the wheel.

  A hand pump behind the barn provided fresh water when I worked the handle, so I filled a pail I dug out of the weeds and took it to the house. Inside, a woodburning stove needed nothing more than a good cleaning to make it work again. There were even a few logs and some kindling sitting conveniently nearby. I prepared the meat and the vegetables into a hearty stew and enjoyed my first real dinner in a month. The only thing missing was a bottle of beer.

  After a quick salvage run through the house
– I didn’t find anything useful - I sat in a dusty recliner in front of the stone fireplace and relaxed. I hadn’t seen tracks, or traps, or any evidence that Jarnum really had gone toward Dogleg, so I could almost write off this particular manhunt. Let somebody else get this guy, I thought. He’s probably outside my jurisdiction by now, anyway. My two former companions? Well, they might have gone a different direction, too. Good riddance to them both.

  I was tired. Not just from traveling, but from being angry. The T’Neth were still murderers, and so was Jarnum, but I found that I simply couldn’t maintain such a high level of animosity. It took too much energy and wasn’t productive. No, my natural state was to keep a clear head and not fixate on problems for too long if I didn’t have to. Hell, I couldn’t even stay mad at Kate for dumping me.

  When an image of Kate appeared in my mind, I was gripped by renewed frustration. Why had she told me that she couldn’t be with an old man like me? That didn’t make a bit of sense. I was no older than she was. Anyway, if either of us had cause for blame, it would have been her. Who knows how many secrets she’d been keeping from me? She’d been a petty thief when I first met her, so I thought maybe she didn’t trust me, being a lawman and all. I don’t think I’d overlook that kind of behavior now, but back then…who knows. I would have done anything for her. She denied having any secrets, of course, but I could tell whenever she was around that something was off. It’s like she was running from something. Kate Runaway…running away. I should’ve taken the hint from her name the first day we met.

  It tore me apart when she turned down my marriage proposal. I remember finding the nearest drinkery after that, my only plan being to drown my sorrows. A rejection like that is the best reason to end a relationship, according to the bartender who listened to my story, but the worst reason to drink. That was decent advice, but it didn’t get him a tip when I left his establishment unsatisfied.

  Dammit, I thought, now I’m mad again. Not having any whiskey on hand, I begrudgingly drank water from my canteen instead. Gotta keep hydrated, I told myself sardonically. Wouldn’t want another headache.

  I stayed at the farmhouse for a few days, eating takazelle steaks and making jerky from the leftovers. I stuffed one of my pockets with beans and put sunflower seeds in another, planning to snack on them while I walked to Dogleg. With a full canteen, I set off down the road again. Jarnum was still out there, like it or not, and I was still a marshal. Might as well do the job I’m being paid for.

  With a few more days’ travel under my belt, I spotted flowing hills of well-tended wheat. A little while later I saw the town of Dogleg appear on the trail. A giant red barn– the original spacecraft that settled the area – dwarfed the sixty-or-so wooden houses around it. It had the same design as every other landing craft in the world, with angular bulkheads, thrusters pointing every direction, cooling pipes, portholes, access hatches, and lots of computerized mechanisms that nobody recognized anymore. Sitting upon its concrete landing pad, this barn had a uniqueness that separated it from all its hundreds of sisters. It had been wrapped up like a holiday gift, coated from fore to aft with a glossy red epoxy as thick as my hand. This coating was hard as steel and utterly scratch-proof. The former space vessel was entombed like a fly in amber, preserved in its maiden condition by technology we would be hard-pressed to duplicate in our current state of decay. Yet, despite the spacecraft’s immense size and complex design, the epoxy made it look like a child’s toy.

  The landing craft was both a blessing and a curse to the citizens of Dogleg. In any other settlement, the spacecraft-barn would be the source of the town’s livelihood. The interior would have been hollowed out, with the individual components being re-tasked for various agricultural or industrial purposes. Not so with this one. In Dogleg, the only usable part of the vessel was the rear cargo bay because it was the only part that was accessible. Cows came inside the inoperative high-tech bay when it was milking time, but otherwise stayed outside in the corral or grazed in an adjoining pasture. On the other hand, Dogleg had gained some notoriety for its museum piece of a landing craft, even if no one could actually get into the primary hull where the Founders’ Tech was supposedly in pristine condition.

  I couldn’t see much detail about Dogleg where I was standing, as I was still a few kilometers away, but I’d been through town a number of times and always knew what to expect. I’d never noticed how serene this town looked, though, and wondered briefly if they would make good neighbors.

  Out of nowhere, the two scavenger birds I’d found in Avaria showed up grasping scraps of aluminum. I knew it was them because they both had distinctive claws. Not that I was a bird expert, but their talons looked more menacing than other scavenger birds I’d seen. Maybe that was normal for wild birds on the plains, but these two seemed to behave in an almost domesticated fashion. They dropped their junk at my feet, hopped backward a few steps, and then cocked their heads at me expectantly. I ignored them. As I looked through my binoculars at the town, I heard a distinct tap-tap-tap behind me. I looked back and saw one of the birds tapping its foot impatiently on the ground.

  “I’m out of jerky,” I said, feeling ridiculous for even talking to them.

  The birds flew off, giving me a distinctly negative vibe as they went. Unfortunately, as they had distracted me, I was not aware of movement behind me until I heard the familiar sound of a shotgun being pumped.

  A group of six men approached through the wheat, all of them with guns, all of them crouched low. I didn’t expect this kind of welcome from an otherwise friendly town. Maybe they’d gotten word of the caravan massacre. If that was the case, the townsfolk would be understandably paranoid. To allay any suspicions they might have, I raised my hands and waited for them to get close enough for a good look at me.

  “Can we help you, mister?” a testy voice asked.

  “My aerobike went down on the Rekeire Plains,” I said. “I’m just tryin’ to get back to civilization.”

  “Identify yourself,” the man said. “And keep your hands where they are, thank you very much.”

  “I’m Marshal Vonn of the Plainsman Territory,” I said, angling my body to reflect sunlight from my badge in their direction.

  They were all pretty jumpy considering they outnumbered me. The group said nothing else until they were just a few paces away. At that point, the lead man gave the all clear signal. The rest kept their guard up anyway.

  “Marshal Vonn,” he smiled. “I haven’t seen you in a long while.”

  “Mister Hawkins.” I remembered him from my last trip through town about two years earlier. He was a rancher, not a constable. The others were dressed similarly, like farmers or townsfolk. For a town that relied on visitors for trade, their unusual wariness suggested trouble.

  “This is Alex Vonn, pride of the Plainsman Territory,” Hawkins told the others. “Put your guns down, fellas.”

  “There are some who’d disagree with you on the pride part,” I said in a jovial tone.

  “You don’t look old enough to be a marshal,” one of the men said.

  “I’m a late bloomer,” I replied matter-of-factly. It was true, I had barely started shaving by the time I turned twenty-five. Now I could manage a five o’clock shadow after about three days. “You expecting trouble?” I asked, putting my hands down.

  “Not sure,” Hawkins said. “The militia arrived with the caravan last week. They set up camp on the other side of town.” His expression turned dour. “They asked us to run patrols while they hardened their positions, but we’ve never had to worry about visitors before.”

  The way he said the word visitors sounded more like he meant attackers. “Why is the militia here in the first place?” I asked.

  “We don’t know,” one of the men complained in a muffled, nasal tone. Judging by the scars on his face and the mashed contour of his nose, he was somebody who engaged in bar fights as a hobby. “They came with that last caravan and been trampling our streets ever since,” he added gruffly, a
nd sniffed in a futile attempt to clear his blocked sinuses.

  “Marshal, I did my time in the militia like everybody else,” Hawkins added. “I know a permanent garrison when I see one.”

  “They weren’t providing security for the caravan going to Bogfield?” I said.

  “Yeah, they were,” Hawkins said. “At least, that’s the story they gave us. They outnumbered the caravaners by a good ten-to-one margin, though. Seems like they had something else in mind the whole time.”

  Well, I thought, they didn’t know that the caravaners had been killed. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be nearly so talkative. I decided to change the subject anyway. “The militia’s here on maneuvers, but you’re the ones running patrols?” I asked. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “They told us to watch for strangers,” Hawkins pointed out. “They figured we knew who our friends were better than they did.”

  “Am I a friend?” I asked.

  “As far as I know,” Hawkins said. “How about this: You think you could find out what they’re really doing here? That’d be a friendly gesture.”

  “What’s your friendly gesture in return?” I asked.

  “Not shooting you,” Hawkins laughed, shouldering his rifle. “But seriously, we don’t know what’s going on in our own town. Folks are getting jumpy.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not going to be much help,” I told Hawkins. “I’m persona non grata with the militia lately, so I’m not privy to their plans.”

  “Why?” mister broken-nose asked stubbornly.

  “It’s personal.”

  “Grisha,” Hawkins said. “Stop it.”

  “Maybe the militia’s looking for you,” Grisha accused, locking eyes with me.

  “No,” I replied, trying to keep my tone steady. I could see now why his face had been punched repeatedly by others. The guy wasn’t exactly the diplomatic type. “I’m on a manhunt,” I said.