by Scott Moon
“Will these people be safe in the Ror-Rea?” Kin asked.
“Some will,” she said.
Kin waited for clarification until it was evident that Clavender would offer none. “What does that mean?”
She tilted her head, then swept her gaze along the canyon, looking at the people of Crater Town, her own people, and the walls of the passage. “Most will be happy in the Ror-Rea, I think. It may be that I am mistaken.” She faced Kin. “Do I truly understand the descendants of Earth?”
“Do the descendants of Earth understand the descendants of Earth?” Kin asked.
Clavender laughed and it warmed his heart. “Walk at the front of the procession with my father. It is a place of honor. Seeing you at his side will put the minds of your people at ease.”
Kin nodded but looked toward the rear guard. They seemed ready for anything. In fact, they acted as though they had seen something.
“Could Droon follow us?”
Clavender looked concerned. “Why would he? There is nothing for him in the Ror-Rea.”
“Can you honestly tell me that the Reaper venom no longer links the two of you? Not even in your dreams?”
Clavender stared past Kin to study anything but his face.
“Could all of his Kindred follow? Clingers? Crashdown wolves?”
“Why do you ask these things?” Clavender asked.
“I don’t think Droon is finished with either of us. And I suspect there is a creature on Crashdown that he fears. If the Reaper King can follow us, then he will. The Slomn-Reaper will be right behind him.”
“I can block passage into the Ror-Rea.”
Kin didn’t think she sounded confident.
THERE came a point in the journey where Kin was certain he had never been this way during all of his exploration of Crashdown. Finding evidence he was still on the harsh planet became an obsession as he convinced himself the Ror-Rea was terrestrial. From the moment Clavender told him they had left Crashdown behind, the flora and fauna of the place changed, as did the season. He hadn’t been this cold for a long time. Those of the Ror-Rea who walked instead of flying drew their wings about them like cloaks and lowered their chins against frigid winds coming down the pass. Crater Town children were given the few cloaks the Ror-Rea army had to spare.
Kin found himself looking for a woman who wasn’t there. Laura would turn into a real bitch if that was what it took to get her people the proper clothing and supplies. He wanted to be angry with her; instead, he felt weak and tired — missing the sound of her voice most of all. By the expressions on the faces of the remaining Crater Town people, he wasn’t the only one wanting her back.
He shivered against the wintry air, moving up and down the line seeking stragglers and looking for an attack he felt must come soon. In a way, it was ridiculous. Who would see Droon first: the flying Ror-Rea scouts or a paranoid former soldier with no armor?
Plants of vibrant colors covered the slopes of the pass, which opened wider as days slipped by. Colors and textures jumped out from the white background. A field of green grass drank from glaciers in the pass. There were trees thicker than a dozen men and fields of flowers that danced in the wind. The strangest thing about this first valley of the Ror-Rea was the undeviating straightness and steady incline.
“Will we ever stop going up?” Kin asked, breathing hard in the thin air.
Clavender laughed like a girl. Several of the warriors frolicked in the rainbow meadows. “We will soon make the descent.”
“Why does that worry me?” Kin asked, but she was already running ahead with several men and women of Dax's army. When she reached the abrupt horizon, she leapt into the air and sailed out of view.
Kin knew that the landscape must drop away; the Wingers loved to leap into flight. The people of Crater Town would have a much more difficult descent to the valley floor. That wasn't what dominated his attention and made him feel like a vulnerable child. On the horizon, rising like a giant moon, was a planet that could only be Crashdown. His maps of Crater Town Bay had been accurate despite his primitive surveying tools. He marveled at the sight, fought vertigo, and went to one knee as a world loomed above.
The sky was Crashdown. Huge. Majestic. Encased in a layer of color that reminded Kin of the wormhole he had stared at for nearly ten years before Earth Fleet and Droon fell from the heavens. There was so much more to the planet than he had guessed. He couldn’t believe the size or diversity of the landscape. Oceans and mountain ranges seemed alive and vibrant under twisted weather systems that were farther away than they seemed, yet not as distant as they should be.
All wormholes are one, Kin Roland. He smiled at the memory of Clavender in her Crater Town domicile. It was easier than dwelling in the present where he felt the entire universe must exist on the planet of Crashdown and the Ror-Rea was but a heavenly satellite like a way station for weary travelers.
Kin surveyed the sky and spotted small moons stretching away to his right and left. Perspective was something he didn’t quite trust. The moons that had soared above him for years now seemed pinched between this place and Crashdown.
Rickson moved slowly to his side. “I am not sure I can get used to this.”
Ogre looked oblivious and full of energy.
Kin didn’t know what to say.
“I never understood Clavender,” Rickson said, blushing.
“None of us understand,” Kin said.
“Kin Roland, you are needed,” a Winger said.
Kin turned away from Rickson and Ogre to see Ceana, the fierce young champion who always smiled.
“Come this way. You must hurry,” Ceana said.
Kin looked toward the horizon where Clavender had disappeared, then turned to accompany Ceana back the way they had come. “What is it, Ceana?”
“Droon and his horde.”
Kin frowned. “The Reaper King only had a few monsters and a score of followers last time I saw him. That isn’t a horde.”
Ceana paused, staring at Kin as though he didn't want to be the bearer of bad news. “When you saw him last, there were only a score of the Warlocks?”
“That’s what I said. How many are there now?”
“A lot more than a score,” Ceana said, then smiled broadly without conveying humor or reassurance.
The revelation stung Kin’s pride. He understood Admiral Shield’s game all at once and suspected the man had coordinated it with the Mazz Emperor. He wondered what they would have done had Kin not chosen to enter the Ror-Rea with Clavender’s people.
Now that Droon and all of his Kindred had followed him, Clavender would have no choice but to use her power to send them away. Where would she send them? To their home, of course. Kin wondered how Shield expected to get Kin to Hellsbreach and how he would make sure he died there.
“The Warlocks will not poison the Ror-Rea,” Ceana said.
Kin moved down the trail until he saw the Reapers. They didn’t march as the humans and Wingers had marched; they bounded forward like hungry cats in search of prey.
“We’re in big trouble, Kin,” Rickson said.
“You don’t know the half of it.”
Kin’s keen ears heard the Reapers in the front of the horde howling and clicking their throats. He also detected a disturbing, un-Reaper-like sound from farther away. Something was following Droon’s horde and scaring the hell out of them.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Slomn-Reaper
LIGHT shimmered between the Ror-Rea and Crashdown. Illusion protected Clavender’s home as much as physical separation. Kin couldn’t decide if he was on a Crashdown moon or something like a Crashdown moon. He understood what Clavender meant when she said some could not adjust to the Winger homeland. The sky felt more like a ceiling. There were times when he saw not only Crashdown, but Hellsbreach, Earth VIII, and Hector’s Mountain. Imagining all these places at once caused his head to spin and spots to dance in his vision.
Direct sunlight did not seem to exist in the Ror-Rea but
reflected from smaller moons, and to a certain extent, the oceans of the huge, wormhole-swathed planet of Crashdown. Kin missed the twisting shape that had been a fixture in the sky since the Goliath was marooned near Crater Town. The energy of the anomaly wasn’t gone but diffused somehow, spread across the planet like a nearly invisible mist. Clavender would not speak of it.
“Rickson,” Kin said. “If I catch you following me this time, I will shoot you in the face.”
“Dax gave me guns from the battle plunder.” Rickson spread his cloak to reveal two handguns on his belt. “His warriors don’t seem to understand how bad-ass these things are.”
“I am not going to dignify that with a response. Your job is to find and watch Clavender.”
“Sure, Kin. I’ll be right behind you.”
Kin spun, tripped the overgrown boy, and put his knee on his stomach when he hit the ground. “Not this time. I’m serious. You will never be a soldier until you can learn to follow orders.”
Rickson gasped from the pressure Kin was putting on his diaphragm. Anger and diminishing pride changed into increasingly desperate sounds.
“When did I join your private army?”
Kin stood and walked away. “I need you to not follow me.” He waited for a response but heard nothing. When he turned to look back, Rickson was walking the other way.
It was a simple thing to allow the Reapers to pass. He had been avoiding their kind for what seemed a lifetime. He understood that his ordeal in the Reaper birthing pit had changed him. The blood knowledge of their kind had been forced into him and then ripped free by Droon. The Mazz Emperor claimed that Kin’s ancestors were cousins to the Reapers.
His survival on Hellsbreach made more sense. Orlan was the only man he knew to have lasted more than a day alone; he was the only other person to return from Reaper captivity. There were days when he missed the brutish killer — his FSPAA armor engraved with lions and his profane vocabulary coloring his speech. Today wasn’t one of them, despite what he faced.
The Reaper-like super-Slomn crouched over the corpse of a Crashdown wolf, considering it as though it might be from another dimension.
Kin looked around for Droon. You fought a delaying action, didn’t you? Droon’s gradual adaptation to human war-fighting methods was more frightening than Dax’s suggestion that Wingers in modern gear would be more than a match for Earth Fleet or the Mazz. Kin moved to a forested hilltop and settled down to watch the Slomn-Reaper and plan the best way to get himself killed.
The monster poked and prodded the wolf, then opened his massive jaws just like an imitation of Droon except he covered half of the animal. Kin had seen Reapers eat using small bites, and he had seen them choke down a meal like a giant snake. He wasn’t sure what caused them to vary their dining habits. He did understand that the sight of this thing devouring the wolf’s head and shoulders made him want to back away and run.
There came a point during the meal when the wolf was simply too big. The Slomn-Reaper paused. Fire glowed white inside of his maw until the Crashdown wolf was reduced to something smaller. Smoking ash drifted from the sides of the creature’s mouth as it choked down the rest. Kin closed his eyes against the macabre spectacle. His mind was so tormented that his memory of the creature flipped between Reaper and Slomn. The images alternated rapidly. I can’t take much more of this. He took a perverse pride that his brain held out this long without hallucinating.
Slowly, not wanting to draw the monster’s attention, Kin looked around for Rickson and Ogre. If the two of them were near, they were well hidden.
Kin flinched, then cursed his lack of control. It is looking at me. Peering between frosted leaves and branches, he stared into the eyes of the Slomn-Reaper.
“Well, I guess there is no time like the present,” Kin said as he moved into the open area on higher ground.
The monster was already stalking toward him, moving in a direct path that was unlike a normal Reaper. The size of the thing caused Kin to grimace. Long, powerful legs promised speed and crushing strength. The claws flared like cutting torches. Eyes burned without pupils or irises and flames trembled around the edges of the monster’s teeth.
“You are a nasty-looking thing,” Kin said. Nearly two hundred meters separated them, but it felt as though he was within arm’s reach. He aimed, fired, and watched the Slomn-Reaper flinch.
Ceana and his Winger squad split the air above Kin as though fired at the monster from a crossbow. The six Wingers kept their arms and weapons back and close to their sides until the last moment. Kin had never seen them move so fast. Ceana was Dax’s best warrior.
He was also messing up Kin’s plan to test the creature and then withdraw.
Ceana reached the Slomn-Reaper first and was smashed sideways by a casual, lightning-fast backhand. Kin watched the Winger spin out of control and plow backward into the side of a steep foothill. By the time he looked back, four of the Ror-Rea warriors were dead — cut to pieces that smoked as though suffering laser damage or a nuclear blast. Another staggered away, missing a wing.
Time to test my Reaper heritage. Kin willed his words into the strange monster without getting a response.
“Fine. Let’s do this the old-fashioned way.” Part of his mind scolded him. There were hundreds — perhaps thousands — of Reapers running from this thing. Droon had fought it, lost a wolf, and fled. What am I doing here?
Kin aimed and fired on the move. The Slomn-Reaper flinched as the bullets struck, then advanced faster than Kin could run. He reached Ceana and shoved him to his feet. “Get out of here. Tell Dax what has happened.”
Ceana nodded, ran down the incline toward the Slomn-Reaper, then soared over him at the last instant. The creature watched him go. Unfamiliar with the area, Kin pushed higher and tried to plan a miracle.
High ground is always better. He understood it wouldn’t be enough. The summit of the hill revealed a faux valley between the foothills and the mountains proper. The water was covered with ice and looked less than inviting. He sprinted toward the ice, onto it, stepped on several bobbing blocks of white and silver, then fell in.
Survival tactics taught long ago by a training sergeant emphasized that he had about a minute to get out of water this cold. All the Reapers and Slomn and duplicitous Fleet admirals in history wouldn’t matter if he didn’t swim to win.
The shock of the cold water, or whatever it was, stunned him mentally and physically. His lungs stopped working as though he had never been a living person but merely a mock-up of one. Blind with system shock, Kin dove deep and came up someplace that felt like he had swum under an ocean of fear and misery.
He climbed onto the ice, realizing he had traveled only a few meters.
On the shore there was only the oddly colorful winter landscape of the Ror-Rea. The Slomn-Reaper was nowhere to be seen. Trembling, every muscle in his body aching, Kin worked his way to the shore. Time passed before he found a position high enough to look back on the scene where Ceana and his companions had attacked the monster.
The corpses of the dead were nothing but charred streaks across the ground now. Ceana was gone. The monster was gone.
Across the small lake, squatting on a rock, Droon was covered head to knees in Clingers. Reapers and wolves stood around him, looking toward Kin. “Thanks for nothing, Droon. I thought we were friends.”
He expected some kind of psychic reply. Droon could insert himself into Kin’s dreams, sometimes quietly and sometimes with the subtly of an Earth Fleet planetary assault. Sometimes the Reaper King didn’t wait for him to go to sleep first.
Pain flared from Kin’s shoulder. He twisted his head to look at the wound, realizing then that the Slomn-Reaper had gotten a lot closer than he realized. The wound smoked and hurt like hell. If fire could transfer poison, Kin knew that was what the monster had done to him.
I will need to be faster next time.
KIN searched out a place to hide for the night, aware that Dax and his people were moving farther away and that
he might never see them again. The Slomn-Reaper stalked just out of sight, intrigued by Kin, and not in a good way. He wished that Droon would jump on the creature and that the deadly killing machines would destroy each other. His life would be so much simpler with both monsters dead.
Night in the Ror-Rea brought a disturbing view of Crashdown. Like most moons, the Ror-Rea was gravity-locked to its large neighbor, always facing the same direction. Don’t look up, or down, or whatever. Kin moved until the reflected light of the night sky over the Ror-Rea gave out completely.
A lake of mild luminescence glowed on Crashdown, reminding Kin of a city on Hector’s Mountain just before the planetary assault. The natural lights he saw now didn’t resemble a city; it was more the mood and the sight of them that inspired memories. He had been young before the assault on Hector’s Mountain — wondering if he would survive, wondering if he had made good decisions, wondering if he was a decent human being or just a selfish killer trying to get noticed.
Kin turned away from the vision of untouchable hugeness. Crashdown loomed above like a titan. When he looked again, it was hard to find the glowing lake that was hundreds of miles from any place he had visited during years of being stranded on the surface. Once he got past the terror of seeing something so huge in the sky, he appreciated the night songs of this place despite the alien cacophony of distant Reapers. Droon’s hordes screamed, howled, and throat clicked their way toward human and Ror-Rea nightmares. Somewhere closer than he would like, the Slomn-Reaper destroyed prey with fire and hate.
Beyond the sounds of the invaders, he heard birds and nocturnal creatures communicating with anxious songs. He listened to the wind and discovered there was a different melody to the softness than he was accustomed to hearing. What he didn’t hear were Earth Fleet patrols or Mazz war machines.
That was a good thing until he needed their help.
Kin-rol-an-da.
