All The Frail Futures: A Science Fiction Box Set

by J Battle

  ‘D’you think so?’

  Andreas shrugged sympathetically.

  ‘I need to get down there, man.’

  ‘I know; I know. But… don’t be too hasty. There might be nothing you can do.’

  ‘No. I mean I need to get down there, off these speakers.’

  ‘Just let go, son. Just let go.’

  Chapter 13

  Crutches first, then left leg, then right leg. Then repeat; ad nauseum.

  It was hard work; even going downhill, and he was already on his second oxygen bottle, with Helen on her third. But, somehow, his body remembered the hard work of his glory days; the endless 300 meter reps on the track, the mind numbing hours in the weights room.

  He endured.

  Helen didn’t have the benefit of those glory years and she was well past the wilting stage, and there was a definite clock on this enduring business.

  The lines disappeared whenever they passed over hard rocky ground, and sometimes they had to stop, fearful that they'd lost the trail, until a declivity covered in sand or dust presented the parallel lines to their view again.

  Despite the intense physical effort, he couldn't hide from the nagging in his brain about what did he think he was doing, following this trail and not getting any closer to his intended destination? What did he hope to achieve? Why didn't he turn to the north and be sensible for once in his life?

  He glanced at Helen from time to time, sure that she must be thinking the same thing, though neither had the wind to voice their doubts.

  There was a simple answer to those nagging questions, but he didn't want to make it real by thinking about it, not for a long as he could avoid it.

  But at some stage soon, they’d both have to man up and admit the obvious.

  They had no hope of reaching the nearest settlement; not before their oxygen ran out. With a lot of hard work and more than a little luck, they’d still collapse from lack of oxygen half way to the pole.

  These lines were their only hope. They must signify life; here, within reach. If it was human life, they would help them; they would have to. If it was something a little more exotic, then it might be of no use to them whatsoever, but they still had to try, and maybe they'd see something special before they died.

  He could see the weakness of his reasoning, but it was his own reasoning and he was sticking with it.

  Why she was sticking with him, he couldn’t say.

  So, on they went; crutches first, then left leg, then right leg.

  Then repeat.

  ‘What was that all about? Up on the station.’ He said, out of the blue.

  ‘What?’ she looked up at him.

  ‘You know what I mean. What were you running from?’

  ‘Who says I was running?’ She looked away. How could she tell him about Jake, and the diamonds, and the knife?

  ‘We might as well be honest with each other. There’s just the two of us now.’

  She stopped suddenly. ‘OK, Dan. I’m not going to lie anymore. I’m going to be honest with you and say that I’m not going to tell you why I was running, or what I was running from, because I don’t want you to know. How’s that for honesty?’

  She started forward again.

  ‘OK, I guess,’ muttered Dan as he followed her.

  The sun was beginning to set behind them as it neared the end of its 32 hour day, casting long, stretched shadows ahead of them. The ground was hard and they'd lost the trail, so Dan released himself from his harness and began to walk back and forward in wide arcs as he attempted to pick up a trace of the lines. Helen took the opportunity to relieve herself of her burdens and lowered her aching body to the ground. She didn’t even have the strength to rub her aching feet.

  After an hour or so of gradually more and more frantic searching, Dan stopped, with his head down as exhaustion finally caught up with him, and he glanced back at his sleigh.

  He stared for a long moment, his eyes squinting against the light from Tau Ceti, then he nodded and began his less than elegant movement towards the sleigh. He reached it, and passed it, and carried on, re-treading his steps.

  ‘Where are you…?’ She was too tired to finish her question.

  Earlier, they had dragged themselves down the slope to this slightly flatter area, and they’d not thought to look back, but now he had, and there it was. Just to the side of the path they'd taken and hidden by the slope was a dark opening, a cave of some sort, the opening smoothly curved at its apex, supported by straight vertical lines that were not in the least natural.

  He paused for a moment, trying to make the only possible decision, then he turned and went back for Helen.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, as he bent to help her to her feet, ‘I think we’ve found them.’

  Chapter 14

  ‘Wait here for a moment, while I have a quick look.’

  It seemed to make perfect sense, to him, if not to Helen. She followed right behind him.

  ‘You’re not leaving me out here, on my own,’ she hissed.

  ‘You could stay with the sleighs?’ he suggested.

  ‘No; we’ll take them with us. We might need our stuff.’

  He sighed and shook his head, but to no effect. She was still coming with him.

  ‘OK, then. Follow me, then.’

  He dragged his sleigh into the entrance of the cave, across the smooth, worn, strangely dust free floor. He left his lamp unlit as there was still enough light for him to see for now, and he'd probably have greater need for it later.

  As he walked away from the entrance, he could see that the cave narrowed to a low wide tunnel that took an immediate 90 degree turn to the right. The ceiling of the tunnel was too low for him to stand upright, so he groaned and struggled down to his knees.

  He paused at the corner and looked back at Helen. Holding one finger to his lips, he shushed her. She settled back on her knees and raised her eyebrows at him. In all honesty, he was making the most noise.

  Slowly, filled with sudden trepidation, he brought his head around the corner, thinking ‘this is when their guard takes me out.’

  But all he felt was a cooling breeze coming from the other end of the tunnel, so he switched off his Cool-flo air temperature modifier and slipped his backpack off and fastened it to the sleigh along with his crutches. He waited whilst Helen did the same.

  Then it was time to start.

  He leant back on his heels for a moment. He really should be thinking this through before he went any further, he told himself. Not just plough on regardless and see what happens next, which seemed to be the way he was working now.

  They could still go back to their original destination; it might work out OK; if they were unbelievably, lottery winning level lucky. There might be survivors, and they might be running patrols 100 kilometers south of their base, and the patrol might turn up just as they reached the top of a hill and became visible to the searchers.

  Or they might all be dead, or hiding in their bunkers, or not in the least bit interested in the straits of other survivors. Every man for himself might be the order of the day.

  ‘Are we doing the right thing?’ he whispered.

  She shook her head and said, ‘Yes’, which didn’t help at all.

  ‘It’s the only thing we can do.’ That was a little better, though it still left him desperately searching for an alternative that didn't involve crawling on his hands and knees down this narrow tunnel into the unknown.

  He didn't search for long; she was right; there wasn't an alternative. At least the tunnel appeared to be sloping downwards, and the breeze was a cool caress against his cheek.

  He began to crawl, slowly, placing his hands and knees carefully so as not to damage his wrists as they were required to support his weight.

  The way was too narrow for them both to travel side by side, so Dan took the lead, with Helen following on behind.

  He found that he kept stopping to look back over his shoulder at her, to make sure she was still there; she mad
e so little sound as she moved.

  It was much easier than he had expected. With his weight evenly distributed, and the floor scrubbed smooth by possibly millennia of traffic, there was considerably less strain on his frame than incurred by walking upright.

  Of course, the idea of millennia of traffic set his mind going. Who were they? What were they? More importantly, where were they? Was he likely to bump into one of them anytime now? How would that go for him? He wanted to think that they might have left 1000's of years ago, but the tracks outside had been fresh, so he'd have to think again.

  He stopped suddenly and listened. He was making so much noise that he would never know if they were being followed by a creepy crawly, tunnel making, human devouring alien, just waiting for lunchtime. It was rather less than gallant of him to think that they’d get to Helen first.

  He listened, but there wasn't a sound; just the hammer of his heart.

  It probably should have struck him earlier, but he did have a lot on his mind. It wasn't dark; not completely. Not as dark as it should have been.

  There was a very faint glow to the walls, and a slightly brighter dotted line running along the floor of the tunnel. The floor itself was absolutely spotless; not a speck of dust, or grit or dirt marred its pristine surface.

  Not a situation you'd expect to find in a long disused passage.

  He carried on for a few meters, then he stopped again, to listen. Still no sound that wasn’t being made by him, so he started again. He could tell that Helen was beginning to get annoyed with him. But she wasn’t the one about to stumble into the lion’s mouth.

  They travelled for hours; stopping and starting, listening and holding their breath.

  The way became a little wider, so Helen was able to move alongside him. For some reason he couldn’t explain, this made him feel a little more secure.

  Shortly afterwards, they came to another corner, and the gentle slope suddenly increased, the floor seeming to drop away from them.

  Dan sat up on the edge of the sudden decline and rooted for his lamp in his backpack. With it hanging around his neck and switched on, he was able to get a clearer view of the way ahead.

  It wasn’t quite as bad as it had appeared in the dim light of the glowing walls. As far as he could see, the floor dropped something like 1 meter in height for every 3 meters in length. Not a precipitous slope, but it would make it difficult for them on the return journey; in this gravity on such a smooth surface. But what about the sleighs? They couldn't drag them along after them, and they needed the food, water and oxygen they carried, so they couldn’t leave them behind.

  ‘There’s really only one way to do this,’ he said as he undid his harness. ‘We’re going on a sleigh ride.’ It was the first time he'd smiled since before the attack.

  ‘What do you mean? No, that can’t be safe. You can’t do that.’

  As she spoke, he pulled the sleighs closer and, using his harness, began to strap them together.

  ‘Here give me yours, will you?’

  When he was satisfied that the pair of sleighs were as secure as possible, he took a deep breath and smiled again at Helen.

  ‘Ready?

  He crawled around to the back of the sleighs and draped himself over the top of the right hand one, leaving his heavy boots to drag behind to give him some degree of control over their descent.

  He looked up at her concerned face. ’Don’t worry. It’ll be fine. It’s not that dangerous.’

  ‘Looks bloody dangerous to me.’

  ‘No, I’ve done this sort of thing before. It’s easy.’

  ‘You’ve done it before? Tobogganed down a dark underground tunnel on an unknown world with gravity nearly twice Earth’s?’

  ‘Well, it was out in the open, and there was snow involved, but the principles the same. And it’s not that dark.’

  She glanced at the sleighs, then down the slope, then back the way they’d come.

  ‘Sod it! What have we got to lose?’

  ‘That’s the spirit, girl.’

  As he climbed along beside him, she gave him a sharp prod in the side with her elbow. ‘Don’t call me girl, boy.’

  When she was settled, he nudged them over the edge and they began to move slowly downwards, their homemade runners screeching as they scraped against the hard smooth rocky surface of the tunnel floor. Their speed gradually increased as he lifted his boots from the floor and gripped the sleigh tightly.

  After 20 or 30 meters the slope leveled off and they almost came to a halt, then it dropped again and they were flying along. He pressed his face against the nearest backpack and tried to think of appropriate last words. Beside him, he thought at first that Helen was muttering quiet prayers to herself, then he realized that it was no prayer; not with all those expletives.

  When the sleighs came to a halt, they lay still for a long time without lifting their heads.

  ‘Told you we’d be fine,’ he said as he rolled off the sleigh and lowered himself to the ground, flat on his back.

  The first thing he noticed was that he couldn’t see the roof; it was no longer just a few centimeters above his head. He lifted his lamp and shone it upwards; there it was, maybe 10 meters above him, curving up from the wall of the tunnel. Only it wasn't a tunnel anymore. It had opened into a wide high chamber, dimly lit by the glowing walls and his garish lamp.

  What was that slapping sound? He rolled over and pushed himself to his knees. It couldn’t be; could it? He shuffled closer on his knees. Then he stopped and moved back to his sleigh to retrieve his crutches.

  Upright, his lamp’s circle of light was wider. At its very edge he could just make out the first straight line of the water course as it split the cavern in two.

  ‘Come and look at this,‘ he whispered as he moved closer to get a better look. The banks of the underground river, or canal, or whatever was the correct word, were dead straight. Anywhere else he would have said they were manmade; but not here. Whatever cut this course through the rock was certainly not a man.

  ‘Now, I didn’t expect that, ‘said Helen as she joined him.

  He was about to respond when something gripped his insides. He wasn’t sure what it was at first, then he understood. It was fear.

  He took her arm and they moved away from the water, back to the sleighs. He switched off his lamp and they knelt behind the sleighs. In the semi-darkness, they crouched as low as they could, trying to make themselves as small as possible.

  It wasn’t the water that had inspired this reaction. It wasn’t the darkness, or the thought of the billions of tons of rock above their heads; or even there just being the two of them, alone on this strange planet so far from home.

  What had caused the fear to wash over him was the sound. The simple sound; the unmistakable sound, of someone coming towards them. Of something coming towards them.

  Chapter 15

  The lifeboats that escaped from the Hru-argh command ship before it was destroyed were considerably more sophisticated than the brick that had carried Dan to this hot and heavy planet.

  They were able to fly in a controlled manner through its atmosphere and land, more or less together, on a sloping plain just a few kilometers south of the northern pole.

  Sublan stepped from the small craft's doorway and walked out into the hot dry air. The heat was not an issue for him, or for any of his kind, but they would soon need access to water. The gravity also would cause little in the way of inconvenience; they were squat, sturdy creatures and would not tire easily.

  He gathered his people to him, in a loose circle, and examined them carefully. They were mostly unharmed, with only a few minor injuries from the brief skirmish onboard the command ship, and they seemed ready for anything. There were 49 of them in total; only seven females, but they should be sufficient to provide the required eggs to bring forward future generations.

  It was his responsibility to ensure that nothing stopped that future from becoming real.

  'Friends,' he began, fee
ling that some rousing words were in order, 'fortune calls us friend and has given us this new home, where Sherdling will live and thrive. You are the Fathers and Matrons of the future; the blessed ancestors of their future glory. They will name you in their thoughts for the next thousand years.'

  He stopped and brushed his tail through the dirt; his small forelegs grasped together.

  'Before we reach that auspicious future, there will be hardship to be suffered. But the work will carry us forward, and disasters will be brushed aside, for we are renewed. For we are free. For we are un- subjugated. For we are Sherdling.'

  Julllie walked up to him and stood by his side. He moved slowly, for his great size was not an advantage under the weight of this planet's gravity. He studied the crowd automatically, gauging their reaction almost without a conscious thought. Soon, it would be his time; he could see that clearly. When the hardships that Sublan had mentioned began to wear his people down, when their enthusiasm waned, then they would have need of him.

  For now, he'd bide his time.

  'The words of Sublan resonate with truth and clarity. Let us follow him where he will lead; let him be the Father to our children.'

  The crowd moved forward as one and nuzzled their leaders, butting and shoving in a show of support and affection.

  Later, Sublan led his people down from the plain towards the devastated human settlement.

  The remains of the buildings were no more than fragile, jagged teeth, grey white against the rust colored ground that surrounded them; broken and lifeless. And it seemed that there were no survivors.

  The only chance they would have had to live through the Hru-argh assault would have been some deep, underground refuge.

  If that was the case; if there were facilities beneath the hot dusty surface of the planet, then the Sherdling would make use of them, and count their fortune good.

  Sublan was fairly sanguine about the reception they might receive from the original settlers of this planet, if there were any survivors. If possible, they could work together; it was a big planet, after all. If they resisted the will of the Sherdling, if they did not accept their just right to occupy this planet, then he was sure that they would prevail, for they had a past to put behind them, and a future to draw to them, and they would not be gainsaid.