Lost Planet 02 - The Stolen Moon

by Searles, Rachel

  After two more hours of walking, they were all starting to cast dubious glances at one another behind Ksenia’s back. The same endless terrain rolled out ahead of them, with no mineworks in sight. “We’re just walking with no direction,” muttered Parker, his face drawn and pale under the smears of ash. “We’ve gone maybe ten miles, with a viewing radius of four miles at best, so we’ve covered about a hundred and thirty square miles of, oh, about thirteen million square miles total on the moon. I hope this lichen is edible, because we’re going to be doing this for a while.” He spoke loudly enough for Ksenia to hear, but she didn’t respond. Chase kept his eyes on the ground, ignoring Parker like everyone else.

  Not one minute later, the frame of the gravity mines appeared on the horizon, a tiny blip on the flat plain. Ksenia whipped around, flashing them all a fiercely triumphant expression. It was around that time that Chase first noticed the wind—not the tepid mushroomy breeze from before, but a thin cold draft that raised the hairs on his arms. It picked up quickly, swirling through the group in chilly bursts. He shivered, rubbing his arms.

  Parker looked over his shoulder. “Oh, that is not good.”

  Chase turned in the same direction Parker faced, and his stomach dropped. A smudge rising off the ground had replaced the normal horizon of endless lichen, like someone had run their thumb over the edge and blurred it until there was nothing but an ominous dark grayness. “What is that?”

  “Windstorm!” shouted Vidal.

  Chase looked around to find his sister, panic shooting through him. His first instinct was to run, but where? There was nothing that could offer shelter on the flat moon, and they’d never make it to the mineworks in time.

  “Let’s move!” Derrick motioned to the left, toward a slight crest in the landscape, and everyone broke into a run. Chase checked to make sure both Lilli and Parker were there, and Maurus as well, who ran in a loping jog, his burned arm held tight to his chest.

  The windstorm moved faster than they could run, and soon the air around them was swirling in fierce currents. A distant whistling roar behind them grew louder and louder. The winds came on them in full force, ripping through their ranks and tearing at their clothes. Worse were the tiny bits of debris that blew in their faces with the strength of a sandblaster—even phasing couldn’t stop Chase from getting a mouthful of grit when he tried to tell Lilli to pull the back of her sweater up over her head. They jogged onward, jostling against one another as the gales alternately pushed and slowed them.

  Chase tried to keep pace alongside his sister, but she stopped to wipe lichen from her eyes and then ran with one sweatered arm held over her face. They fell back to the rear, and slowly a gap started to grow between them and the rest of the group, the swirling winds blotting them out of view little by little. Suddenly Derrick appeared in front of them, squinting, and he dropped to one knee, gesturing for Lilli to climb up on his back. Once she was on, he stood, and he and Chase sprinted to rejoin everyone else.

  When they reached the crest, the ground rose before them in a short incline. Derrick, who had returned to the lead with Lilli clinging to his back, paused at the top. They were at the lip of an enormous crater. The walls of the crater went sharply downhill, leading to a round, flattened bottom, like a shallow bowl. In the center of that bowl was a cluster of buildings.

  Vidal gave a whoop, but the sound was snatched away by the fierce winds at their backs, and without another word everyone started running down the pebbly slope. As soon as they’d gone a few meters, the winds began to die down, and the sound of their ragged panting could be heard.

  Jogging sideways, Maurus slipped and fell on his good shoulder. Chase ran to him, but Vidal was already there, helping him back up. Little bits of lichen and dirt were stuck to his wounded arm, and his face was rigid. He got to his knees and waved them both soundlessly on toward the settlement.

  In the gray twilight, a motley collection of cargo trailers and smaller dome-like structures lay clumped together like a growth on the dismal soil. A few spiraling antennae sprouted up among the structures. Lichen grew alongside the buildings and up the walls in thick curly patches. There were vehicles too: a small, rusted hovercraft parked by a shed, a few dented hoverbikes leaning against a random piece of corrugated fence.

  “Hello?” called Ksenia. No answer. She called again, but this time made an unintelligible noise that might have been a Werikosa dialect but sounded more like she was choking on a mouthful of nails. The translink interpreted it as “Greetings!” There was no reply, no movement.

  They split up and moved among the structures, looking for any sign of life. Derrick put Lilli down and started walking up to each building and throwing the makeshift doors open with a shout. Chase followed with Lilli and Parker at his sides, peering down the streets. There had to be at least twenty structures erected more or less haphazardly in the tiny village.

  Maurus hobbled down one of the bigger streets, his teeth clenched. “It’s deserted. Your terraformers have left the settlement.”

  Ksenia stood in between two rows of structures, arms crossed. Her voice was tight with irritation. “This isn’t the settlement we built for them. We never would have put one at the bottom of a crater; they’re all scheduled to be lakes in the next phase. These aren’t even buildings. They’re scrap material. That’s a shipping container. And that’s a piece of wall from the biodome garden we put in. What did they do?”

  “Looks like they colonized,” said Parker simply.

  Chase saw an open barrel and went over to see what was inside. It was too dark to be completely certain, but it looked like it was filled with water. Rainwater? He stepped back, looking at a long metal crate punched full of ventilation holes. He very nearly missed it, but at the last second he saw a tiny bit of movement, and his gaze zeroed in on something shiny in two of the ventilation holes. Eyes.

  “Hey!” he yelled in alarm, stumbling backward. “I found somebody!”

  Maurus was at his side in an instant, blaster drawn with his good arm. “Come out!” he shouted.

  A harsh strange cry cut through the air, and suddenly there were Werikosa everywhere: spying down from the tops of buildings, sliding out from under structures that looked fully planted in the ground. They were shorter than Chase would have guessed—much shorter than the Storrians.

  They were friendlier too, approaching him and Maurus with open curiosity. One reached out and touched Chase’s arm, leaving a shiny blue-green spot on his skin. Another moved in on Maurus’s burned arm, sniffing the raw skin and burbling something that the translink didn’t pick up.

  Maurus moved back cautiously, raising his blaster. “Stay back.”

  “Put down your weapon, Lieutenant,” said Ksenia in a hard voice. She looked around at the Werikosa, shaking her head. “You won’t need it right now. These are children.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Once the crew had lowered their weapons, a few adult Werikosa began to emerge, melting out of the scenery like ghosts. They were more cautious than the children and hung back, muttering among themselves. One especially lean and leathery older male stepped out ahead of the group, dressed in ragged black attire and bare feet, with a blaster rifle slung loosely around his back.

  The adults were bigger than the Storrians, but as Chase had noticed when they spoke to the hijacker Petrod, their features were similar to those of the other civilization with tiny, wide-set eyes, flat nose, and drooping upper lip that curled over the rest of their mouths. But where the Storrians had eyebrow stalks that oozed in and out of their foreheads, the Werikosa had a hard-looking ridge of skin there that didn’t seem to move as much. There was something unrefined about their expressions and movements, and it was unsettling to Chase because he couldn’t read them and didn’t know what to expect.

  “Who are you?” Ksenia barked. “Where is Mathid? What is this place?”

  The Werikosa’s face darkened. “How do you know Mathid?”

  “He was the head of the mineworks, las
t I knew. My name is Ksenia Oriolo. I’m the Federal plenipotentiary for the Rhima terraforming project. We were just attacked by your leader Petrod—I assume you’re aware he’s hijacked a Federation starship?”

  The Werikosa simply stared at her, giving no sign whether he knew about it or not.

  “He shot down our ship; we crashed some distance from here. Some of our people were injured.”

  “We know about your ship.” He took a step back and signaled to a few of his people. “Come with us.”

  Another Werikosa, this one younger and wearing only a loose vest and baggy trousers, charged out of the crowd and pointed angrily at the Earthans.

  “These ship dwellers are the enemy, Bawran,” he said, eyeing them with his eyebrow ridges pressed back flat against his forehead. “If Petrod meant to destroy them, we should finish his task, not offer them aid.”

  Hands went to the waists of everyone carrying a weapon. Chase grabbed his sister by the arm, pulling her behind him.

  Bawran faced the group of survivors. “Do not draw your arms. We have no intention of fighting with you, but we do have the means.” To the younger Werikosa, he said, “Go clear out the central trailer. We will put them there.”

  The younger Werikosa got in his face, pushing against his chest. “These are our prisoners! Do not treat them with hospitality!”

  “Enough!” shouted Bawran, pushing the youngster roughly away. For a second, it looked like they might break into a fight, but Bawran took a long step forward, lips slightly curled back, and after a few tense moments the young Werikosa backed down and stormed away.

  As Bawran led them through the murky twilight paths of the settlement, more faces peeked out from behind cracked doors and window holes. He sent several others running ahead, and by the time the group reached the center of the community, they had emptied out a long cargo trailer that was open on one end and dark as a cave inside.

  Glancing back at the rest of the group, Ksenia led the way up into the cargo trailer. Maurus marched beside Chase, his burned arm held tight against his stomach, and grabbed him with his other arm for support. Chase checked to make sure that Parker and Lilli were nearby and found them sandwiched between Vidal and Derrick.

  The inside of the trailer was lit only with a few dim LED lights plugged into the ceiling. Thick rugs and rough blankets lay in tangled piles against the wall, making Chase wonder if they had forced someone from their home.

  Ksenia stalked through the dingy space and whirled around to face Bawran. “What is this place? What happened to the settlement the Federation constructed for you by the Yoder mineworks?”

  “Mining operations have ceased,” said Bawran, standing calmly in the middle of the room as the rest of their group entered. “A few of our people still hold the location, but the windstorms tore up the biodome and damaged some of the buildings. The craters are safer and mostly free of windstorms.”

  As Chase helped Maurus settle down onto a blanket, he noticed the back of the trailer was filled with jumbled heaps of broken electronics and other junk. Parker walked toward it, his eyes traveling over the items with a cool, almost android-like, analytical gaze.

  “You realize that these craters are destined to become lakes, don’t you?” Ksenia told the Werikosa leader. “They’ll fill with water and all these homes will be lost. The windstorms will decrease as vegetation expands and the atmosphere balances out.”

  “That is a question for the future. For now, this is better than worrying if a house will fall in on our children.” Bawran stepped toward the exit as if to leave.

  Ksenia did not relent, pushing on with her questions. “How did all these women and children get here? We didn’t arrange for families to accompany the terraformers to Rhima. Did you smuggle them over?” Bawran said nothing, and Ksenia continued. “Do you realize what a bad idea this is? This moon is not ready for settling. It doesn’t have the resources to sustain a population.”

  “Our people are not dying of the sun illness here,” Bawran said. “That is already better.”

  “You’d rather watch them starve?” she asked.

  A scowl formed on Bawran’s face, but before he could answer, a breathless, stocky Werikosa lugging a large composite chest entered the trailer. “The injured?” he asked, making a beeline for Maurus before anyone could answer him and providing enough distraction for Bawran to leave.

  Deftly the medic cut away an entire half of Maurus’s jacket, shaking his head as he turned to paw through items in his chest, a strange collection of junk, tubes, and loose wires that didn’t look particularly sanitary.

  “Do you have steamgel in there?” Maurus asked.

  The medic waved a hand at him. “No use talking—I won’t understand a word. Just sit still. This will hurt.” He grabbed Maurus’s wrist and lifted his arm away from his body, while with the other he poured a bottle of watery liquid over Maurus’s shoulder, rinsing away the sand and lichen stuck to it.

  Maurus closed his eyes and slammed his head backward into the wall behind him, yelling through his teeth. The medic pulled a jar from his chest and shoved it at Chase. “Put this on him while I locate some bandaging.”

  Cautiously Chase popped open the lid and peered at the jiggly yellow cream inside. It smelled pungent and weirdly appetizing. He glanced up at Maurus.

  “Do it. Please.” Maurus had cracked his eyes open, but closed them again, breathing in short gasps. The raw, red skin on his shoulder was visibly tightening and contracting. Feeling anxious, Chase dipped his hand into the cream and scooped out a slippery handful. Immediately his hand began to burn, and a large splat of cream hit the floor below him.

  “Careful, Chase,” said Vidal, poised at his side to take over.

  Shaking his head, Chase smeared the cream as delicately as possible down Maurus’s raw arm before he could lose any more of it. For a moment, Maurus seized up, but then he sank back against the wall, his mouth hanging open in a slack grin. He turned to Vidal. “Hey there, pretty,” he slurred.

  The medic was back at their side, shaking out a fraying piece of material that had seen better days. Glancing at Chase, he frowned. “Why didn’t you use the spreader?”

  Chase looked down at the jar and noticed a plastic spoon-like piece snapped onto the lid. He started to shrug, but the medic had snatched up Chase’s hand to scrub off the excess cream. He peered into Chase’s eyes. “Why aren’t you affected?”

  It must have been one of those involuntary self-preservation reflexes Dr. Bishallany had tested for, the molecules in his hand letting the powerful cream phase through. But what if he had needed the cream himself? “I don’t … I’m not…” Chase began haltingly. But the medic, not understanding anything without a translink, turned back to Maurus, his question only rhetorical. He hoisted Maurus back off the wall and began wrapping his shoulder tightly, while the Lyolian leaned against him, a vacant, drugged smile on his face.

  As the medic finished up with the wounded, Bawran returned to the trailer. He wore a grim expression. “I’ve alerted Petrod of your arrival. He’s ordered us to keep you here, Madame Oriolo, until the dispute has come to a satisfactory conclusion.”

  “As a hostage?” she asked sharply.

  “As an esteemed guest. The young ones can stay with you, but I’m afraid the soldiers in your company must leave their weapons and come with me.”

  “I won’t allow it. We’re not a threat to you. Some of them can barely walk.”

  Bawran looked over at Maurus, who was absently picking at a loose thread on the edge of his bandage. “They’re to be quartered somewhere else. The ones who can’t walk will be carried.”

  Several Werikosa carrying weapons, led by the young hothead in the vest, marched into the trailer and began rounding up the soldiers. Derrick, who sat on a blanket beside Lilli, gestured angrily. “We’ll stay with the children. I’m not leaving them alone here.”

  The hothead Werikosa approached Maurus, pointing his blaster at him with an aggressiveness that made Cha
se freeze. “Stand up,” he growled. Maurus stared at the ground, mumbling to himself. A lock of dark hair had fallen across his face. The Werikosa nudged him gently with the nozzle of his blaster rifle, and with his lightning-fast Lyolian reflexes, Maurus reached out and snatched the weapon, pulling it down toward himself. His eyes were bright and alert again—the cream’s narcotic effect had already worn off. How long had he been faking it?

  Chase could see what was going to happen. “Let go!” he cried. But the Werikosa moved quicker than he had expected, and before Maurus could react, he whirled around and slammed the butt of his rifle into Maurus’s bandaged shoulder. Maurus fell back with an agonized scream.

  “Hey!” Looking outraged, Derrick sprang to his feet, blocking the Werikosa from swinging at Maurus again. He grabbed at the blaster, and for a moment the two of them wrestled for control before Bawran slid up behind Derrick and grabbed his ear, yanking him away shouting. The younger Werikosa raised his blaster and hauled back as if to smash Derrick in the face with it.

  “Hotha!” shouted Bawran. “That’s enough!”

  Eyeing his superior with obvious malice, Hotha threw the blaster over his shoulder and yanked Maurus to his feet, shoving both him and Derrick toward the exit. Maurus stumbled and fell to his knees, and Vidal rushed to his side, glancing back with a face full of worry.

  “Just go,” said Ksenia. “I’ll take care of the children.”

  Cold fear settled into Chase’s stomach as he watched the three soldiers leave with Hotha’s blaster rifle aimed at their backs. If the young Werikosa really wanted to prove his loyalty to the cause, this could be the last time Chase would see them alive. He looked up at Bawran. “Don’t let him hurt them.”

  Bawran gave him a flat stare that he couldn’t interpret, and walked toward the exit. “I have no way to lock you in here, but know that if you try to run, you won’t get far.”