by Kelly Jensen
“Surprise, surprise.”
“Let’s give me half an hour to die before you try it.”
“Roger that.”
Felix paced the diameter of their crater, turned and walked back to Zed. “What’s next? Apart from figuring out how to get the fuck off this planet?”
“Okay, what do we know?”
“That Preston is a psychopathic bitch. Or maybe sociopathic. I always get those two confused.”
“Bitch part fits.” One corner of Zed’s mouth lifted slightly. “Getting off this planet and communicating with the Chaos and/or Maddox are our primary objectives. We know what Preston is doing. We don’t have the tools or the manpower to stop it. We need help.”
“Agreed.”
“Preston has off-planet transport. We’ve seen no flyover patrols, probably because the atmosphere here is too tricky for navigation.”
Felix tapped his bracelet. “Building a list of possible craft in case we need a quick tutorial.” He could narrow the search based on the vague shapes he’d glimpsed on the dark side of the crater, but not by much. He looked up. “Okay, you’re our numbers guy. How many guards or soldiers does Preston have, total. We disabled seven yesterday? And we were in a quiet section of her compound.”
Zed related the details of his training session with Preston’s troops. She didn’t have a lot of people, and Zed had left over half of them hurting during their escape. That one search party might be it, unless she started recruiting colonists. How many of them were involved in her program? Rather than dwell on what they didn’t know, Felix opened a new holo, and built a virtual map of what they did: the layout of the settlement and Preston’s facility in the caves, a vague estimation of how far beneath the mountainous terrain the tunnels extended, the location of the large crater housing their escape plan, plus a couple of scenarios for how and when they might try to snatch a shuttle.
“How are you feeling?”
Felix finished making a last notation and checked in with his gut. “Alive.”
“No nausea, confusion, double vision, muscle cramping?”
Calling up the basic diagnostic tool he had, Felix scanned himself. “I’m battered, bruised, dehydrated, have an excess of lactic acid and a lowered mental acuity, which may be due to any or all of the above. I’m also fucking hungry and would happily sacrifice a basket of kittens for a ride to my bunk on the Chaos.”
“A basket of kittens?” Zed appeared torn between amusement and consternation.
“Show me a useful kitten and I’ll reconsider my options.”
Snickering, Zed knelt by the pool and swept up a handful of water. “Okay, let’s get hydrated and then walk and talk. I’d like to scout back toward yesterday’s exit, check out that landing crater a little more and see if we can’t figure out how Preston is communicating with the rest of the galaxy. She’s got to have a communications platform somewhere. An antenna array large enough to punch through the atmosphere.”
“Closest relay point is Regulus. We’re going to need a powerful signal to reach it.” Projected by something much bigger than his makeshift beacon. Unless...A quick check of their wallets confirmed they’d been on Paradise for four days, or a hundred and twelve Standard hours. “We’ve missed four check-ins. When do you think Elias would have come after us?”
Zed’s mouth twisted a little to one side. “That wasn’t the plan. Maddox might—”
“It’s not a matter of if, but when. Elias would come. We’re his crew, his responsibility.”
“This is way above and beyond...” Zed blew out a breath. “No, you’re right.”
“‘’’Course I am.”
“One missed check-in isn’t cause for alarm, but two, yeah, SOP would be to investigate after two missed calls.”
“Elias might never have been AEF, but he runs a tight ship.” As Zed would know. “Okay...”After some calculation, they had a window of arrival for the Chaos and any possible help. They could almost be overhead now. “Let’s keep our ship’s comms channel open. It’d take a miracle for him to reach us through the murk overhead, but Qek plus Ryan is a team I would not bet against.”
“Me neither.”
Felix stilled his natural twitches and the small leaps of his mind for the space of a breath. He took in his surroundings—which hadn’t changed—and his companion. He was tired, hungry and all the other things the medical app had reported. But after comparing notes and laying out a plan, a course of action, he felt...better. Not quite optimistic, but more determined. Not ready to lie down and let Paradise get the better of him.
An hour later, his determination edged toward optimism as a flash of light gave away a search party. Zed grabbed Felix’s arm and pulled him down. Crouching low, they sought the shelter of a pair of boulders and watched a group of three—the same three as the day before?—pass by a quarter of a klick away. They moved quietly, but the terrain offered little in the way of cover besides the scattered boulders. The flash that had given them away? Sunglasses. It was a rookie mistake, and matched every other detail Zed had shared about the inadequate discipline and training of Preston’s small army.
Four hours later, the ungodly heat of Paradise’s two suns had Felix revising his level of determination again. Sheltering in a shallow crater, he tried pinging the Chaos on the off chance Elias might be in orbit and setting up a comms network with the ground. He’d tried bouncing signals back from multiple sets of coordinates in the hope he’d find something out there. Nothing.
They made a thorough assessment of the accessibility of the crater Preston used as a landing pad. Getting in wasn’t necessarily the issue. Despite the depth, the crater had wide, sloping sides. Crossing the floor without being seen was another matter. No cover and a regular patrol. The settlement might have a casual outlook, but Preston obviously guarded her back door a little more carefully. Or maybe she’d added the patrol after their escape.
Next to him, Zed’s stomach gurgled oddly.
“You okay?” Felix asked. It couldn’t be the water. Too long had passed. Had they missed a parasite? Was his stomach right now crawling with tiny rock scraggler babies? God no.
“I’m good, it’s just the heat and lack of food, water, a bed with a proper pillow.” Zed offered a wan smile.
Another complication to getting across the crater, disabling guards and stealing a shuttle that might not be equipped and space-worthy.
“We need to get you something to eat,” Felix said.
Zed needed far more calories per day than he did, and though a hardened soldier, had probably never developed the habit of getting by on a swallow of spit and bile. He offered a quick nod and reclined into the shade of the boulder they were using as cover.
“I think we should keep looking for comm towers. Getting a signal off this planet is more important than saving our own asses. We need to let someone know what’s going on here just in case we get caught trying to steal a shuttle.” Felix frowned as he finished speaking, as if he didn’t recognize the words as his own. Him recommending selfless action?
Zed appeared to think it over for a few moments before offering a sober nod. “You’re right.” He gestured toward the opposite side of the landing crater. “They’re probably that way. The direction the search party went yesterday.”
“Good call.” Felix’s answering grin was brief. He turned back to his Paradise database and continued tagging entries. The craft they’d been able to identify in the crater (two—both spacefaring if not currently capable), the distance they’d already logged since the morning, and even the relative temperature changes. Keeping his mind engaged helped distract him from any remaining questions about their situations. And/or fretting over Preston’s mad plans.
Killing his holo display, Felix nudged Zed, who’d been timing the patrol. “Ready to go?”
Zed tucked his wallet away a
nd they struck out across the plateau, around the lip of the crater, making sure the distance between themselves and the patrol was always increasing. Exhaustion of every kind pulled at Felix. Beside him, Zed plodded along wordlessly. Felix’s determination, or perhaps it had simply been pragmatism, started to wane. He didn’t want to think about being stuck on this rock forever...but he was starting to think about being stuck on this rock forever. Tired, hungry, thirsty, sick of the smell of himself and thoroughly convinced planetside living was for the intellectually challenged.
“Tell me about your parents’ place,” he prompted.
Zed looked at him for a while, steely eyes dull. “What place?”
“On Earth.”
“They have an island in the South Pacific Ocean.” The place names meant nothing to Felix, but he didn’t care if Zed started speaking ancient Greek. So long as he kept talking. “There’s the main house and half a dozen guest cottages, which are pretty much small houses. Pools, terraces, gardens. A golf course.” A what? “Paths through the rainforest to the extinct volcano on the southern coast.”
“I bet there’s bugs.” Felix had given up slapping the ones taking bites out of the back of his neck.
“There are.” Zed arched a brow. “Dragonflies as big as your hand.”
“See, the golf course nearly swayed me.”
“You play golf?”
“It’s a game?”
Zed laughed. “There’s a field around the island that deflects a portion of the UV spectrum at certain times of day and anything larger than a flea.”
“That sounds more like it.”
Zed had stopped walking. He pointed toward the endless horizon. “What’s that?”
Felix squinted at the distant shape. “Holy shit!” He took off at a run only to flag after ten steps. Fucking planet leaching all his strength. But he was close enough to make out the shape of two structures jutting up from the endless rock. “Signal towers!”
Closer, they were big, ugly and surrounded by a field probably something like what Zed’s parents had around their island. Felix smacked into it and flew backward, the purple-gray sky wheeling overhead. He landed flat on his back with the hazy light of the primary sun flaring in his eyes. “Fuck.”
Zed’s silhouette blotted out the sunlight. He extended a hand and Felix grasped it, pulled up and clambered to his feet.
“You okay?” Zed asked.
“Honestly? I have no idea, but I don’t care. We found signal towers.”
“Just need to deactivate the field.”
Felix waved his left wrist through the air. “It’s a hackable problem. We’re good.” He tilted his head. “Though, you have to wonder why the towers are so far away from the settlement.”
Zed’s thought crease teased the space between his brows. “Only one reason I can think of—to keep the colonists isolated. They might not even know this little installation is here. And if someone detects this and lands, it’d take a while to find the settlement. Partitioning of resources and information.”
“So if I tamper with the field, Preston will know we’re here.”
“Likely as not.”
“We better make this quick, then.”
* * *
Flick in midhack or midtinker was something to see. His whole body became focused on whatever he was doing. The incessant fidgets stopped as his mind, his energy, was consumed by the puzzle before him. One of Zed’s favorite things was to sit in bed and pretend to read while Flick tinkered. He’d watch him out of the corner of his eye and just...appreciate him. How lines of concentration creased his brow, how his eyes narrowed, how he pursed his lips.
Not many got to see that side of Felix Ingesson. Fewer even knew it existed.
Their surroundings weren’t quite as interesting, but Zed forced himself to turn his attention from Flick and stand guard. His mind wanted to wander, fatigue, dehydration and residual pain from his Mendo’d wrist and the knock on his head all conspiring to make it more difficult than it should be to concentrate. He paced behind Flick, keeping an eye on the plateau, and waited for the go.
After about fifteen minutes of muttering interspersed with the occasional curse, Flick let out a quiet whoop of success. “Got it.” The field shimmered and faded from view.
Zed stepped forward, clapping a hand on Flick’s shoulder as he walked closer to the signal towers. “Knew you would.”
“So you think you can use the towers to boost your cuff?” Flick followed close behind.
“I hope so.”
“Just...don’t give yourself a nosebleed or anything, okay?”
Worry threaded through Flick’s tone—valid worry, Zed had to admit. The Guardian cuff was a tool, yes, but a tool he didn’t entirely understand. It seemed to be integrated into his body somehow—but not like a usual implant. It could hijack all comms frequencies, it could open locked doors and it allowed Zed to communicate with the omniscient aliens no matter where he was. Unless, apparently, he was on the surface of Paradise. He wondered if the Guardians knew where he was, or if they cared. They probably didn’t—for all that their presence in his mind reminded him of the warmth and concern of his grandmother, he knew he was as much a tool to them as the cuff was to him.
“I’ll try not to,” Zed promised. He eyed the tower, unsure if he should just stand next to it or touch it or...
Fuck it. He grabbed it and opened the cuff’s comms abilities. “Mayday Mayday Mayday, this is Zander Anatolius, Emissary of the Guardians. My ship went down on 83 Leonis Bb and we are under attack by hostile forces planetside. We require immediate assistance. Please acknowledge if you copy. Mayday Mayday Mayday.”
He repeated the message, pushing it out into the void. He couldn’t quite describe how he knew it was leaving the atmosphere—a lack of feedback in the cuff, maybe. Whatever the reason, he was sure it was reaching out beyond the atmosphere of the planet.
There just wasn’t anything out there to receive it.
“Zed, I see movement.”
The search party, or a new patrol out of the landing crater? If Preston had detected the tampering with the forcefield, that’d be the closest egress from the caves. Gritting his teeth, Zed repeated the message, rushing through the words. The whine of a laser carbine shot made him jerk down, but he kept contact with the tower and his cuff open.
“Fuck!” Flick grabbed his shoulder. “We’ve got to go!”
“Not yet!” He didn’t want to, but he needed to change tactics. They had to get off this rock and their options were getting thinner. He and Flick could still try to steal one of Preston’s ships, but they’d shown their hand by using this tower. Would they get another chance at this?
Probably not.
He closed his eyes and opened his mind. “Guardians!”
As always, the mental communication carried layers. With that one word, he communicated worry and need and please help. The effort of it made his knees shake, but he kept with it.
Faintly, so faintly he would have brushed it aside if he hadn’t been waiting for it, he heard, “Zanderanatolius?”
Zed clenched his jaw and gathered up the remainder of his strength. Flick jerked on his shoulder—they needed to run, but he couldn’t let go of the tower, not yet. “Crashed on 83 Leonis Bb. Under attack—army of Zanderanatolius.”
A shot pinged off the tower, far too close to Zed’s head for his liking. Zed ducked and rolled, and even before Flick grabbed his wrist and tugged, he was running.
“Contacted the Guardians,” he yelled at Flick as they careered down the hillside behind the comm towers, away from the landing crater and the assholes shooting at them.
“They gonna help?”
“Think so. C’mon.” He led them downslope and into the cover of the trees—such as they were—knowing that neither he nor Flick would be
able to keep up any sort of run for long. Picking a path down into the ravine distracted him from what he’d felt from the Guardians in that instance before the connection had faded.
Anger. A flash of consuming, fiery anger, an emotion he’d never expected to feel from the stoic aliens. And if they were angry...
Fuck, he didn’t want to think about what sort of hell he might have brought down on Paradise. Or humanity.
Chapter Sixteen
“Three minutes until we exit jump-space, Captain.”
“Thanks, Qek.” Elias paused with his finger over the general comm. He’d been about to announce the maneuver to the rest of the ship. Habit, and unnecessary when the only other crew member was already strapped into the seat across from him.
Perhaps sensing his moment of hesitation, Nessa reached across the narrow bridge and gripped his hand. “We’ll find them.”
He flashed her a quick smile. “Yes, we will. Hey, Qek, do you need someone at the copilot’s console?”
“Only if we meet a hostile reception in the Leonis System. Even then, it would depend on whether we face the threat of immediate destruction or have time to formulate a plan and implement evasive maneuvers.”
“Let’s go with no.” And hope. Possibly pray.
The transition from j-space to regular space was mercifully brief, leaving his gut wondering which body it belonged to, as always.
Like most remote, unchartered systems, Leonis had a deserted and unassuming feel. No jump queue, no glittering rings of station modules and docks. No ex-orbital relay point with a timely message packet. Nothing. They had emerged near the second planet of the second sun, the coordinates taken from Fix’s last communication. Near being a relative term. They were well outside the planet’s exosphere and the distance gave a good view of the visible side of the near-Earth-sized orb. It looked as if someone had sprinkled the surface with purple dust and set it spinning, then somehow trapped the dust inside a field so that it swirled forever through the upper atmosphere. Were Fix and Zed down there? If they were, the question of their lack of comms had been answered.
