by D. W. Vogel
General Enrico and Officer Halsey huddled in the cockpit. Everyone split off into small groups, sitting on old crates and overturned shelves in the transport, which had been used as a pantry and didn’t have seats.
My cousin Rogan sat alone in the back corner.
“Hey, buddy, how you doing?” I sat down next to him and handed him a cut fruit, sticky and orange. He eyed it for a full minute before taking it and sniffing its flesh.
“I’m fine. How are you?”
I grinned. I’d missed him. Rogan was different . . . he didn’t talk much, and when he did you could tell he was considering each word before it escaped his lips. He and Ryenne were twins, brown-skinned and dark haired like me. Natural-born, not Earth Children from frozen embryos brought from our lost home planet.
“I’m fine, thanks.”
Ryenne and Shiro plopped down beside us.
“Hey, Rogan, what’s up?” Shiro said.
Rogan gave a tiny glance at the ceiling of the transport before he answered. He knew Shiro wasn’t really asking him what was above him, but the flicker of his eyes always betrayed the small moment when he worked out that what Shiro said wasn’t really what he meant.
“It’s really hot here.” Rogan bit into the fruit I’d given him, chewing thoughtfully.
I snorted. “It certainly is. Especially in this old rust bucket. But where we’re taking you it’s really cool. And safe.” I turned to Shiro. “How’s your dad?”
His eyes dropped. “He’s . . . not well. Liver cancer, that’s what he thinks it is. He’s already asleep.” Shiro nodded toward the front of the transport. “But at least he’s here. And maybe back at Carthage we’ll be able to help him.”
Rogan nodded. “Ryenne said you had a safe place. We’ll go there tomorrow.”
“Right.” Ryenne turned to me. “I’ve been telling him all day since I got back. We leave in the morning, right? Back to your shuttle and then over to your camp?”
I looked at Ryenne then, really looked at her. This girl, this skinny fourteen-year-old girl had done what no one else on this ship could do. She’d left the safety of the transport and climbed up the mountain all alone clutching a sat trans that had no satellite, hoping and praying that when she finally got a signal, someone would be there to answer her call. I thought of her as the little kid I’d known on Horizon. She was far from that now. And so are you. This planet ages us.
“What are you grinning about?” she asked me.
“Just thinking about how far we’ve come.”
She nodded. “Yeah. All the way from Earth. And still a long way to go.”
Chapter 14
I circulated around the transport, talking to each of the Seventeen crew. Officer Halsey was still nominally in command, and a guy I vaguely remembered from Horizon named Don Rand seemed to want us to think he was actually in control here. He tried to take charge of the food distribution and was quickly informed by General Enrico that his help was not required.
Sara’s sister Laura was here, and she broke down sobbing with joy when I told her Sara was safe in Carthage. Her daughter Shanna was almost four years old now, happily gnawing on a strip of dried meat.
Four years old. I looked around the little group. There were nineteen of them. Shanna was the youngest, but there were three other kids under ten, then Ryenne and Rogan. Thirteen adults. Nineteen people who had never climbed a mountain. And tomorrow we had to get them across that narrow ledge to our shuttle.
I sighed and Ryenne nudged me.
“Wanna go outside?”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “Sure. Where we going?”
She grinned and beckoned me to follow. Shiro was still sitting with Rogan and we pushed past the empty shelves that had once been filled with food, bare now. She opened the emergency hatch halfway down the transport’s port side, and we peered up and down the beach before popping outside.
“Come on,” Ryenne said, and started climbing. I followed her up the transport’s side and we sat on its roof, still radiating the heat of the day.
“So what happened here?” I asked her.
We lay down, gazing up at the stars. They seemed brighter here, flickering as the wispy clouds flowed past. “Officer Halsey went kind of crazy. We were stuck here and didn’t know where to go. The people we sent out looking for you—looking for anyone—either didn’t come back or came back so scared we didn’t want to ever open the doors again.” She nodded out toward the ocean, rising and falling over the sand. “There’s something really big and nasty out there.”
“Yeah. We were by a river. Something nasty in there, too.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the clouds stream by.
“So how did you do it?”
She shrugged. “We were gonna starve here. I figured, why not? We were all gonna die really soon anyway. And I knew, I just knew that somebody was out there. Somebody had to have survived. Officer Yi said the satellites would all be south of us, so that’s where I went. Figured if something ate me it would at least be quicker than starving to death here.”
So brave. So young. “You saved everybody on this transport. We had no idea you were here. We would never have come looking for you.”
As I said the words, I wondered. What if we did go looking? Who else might be in flight range, huddled in terror in a transport wishing for rescue? Maybe when we got back I’d mention it to General Enrico. I snorted. Like he’d listen.
“We had General Carthage. He kept us safe. I didn’t realize what an amazing leader he was until . . .” I paused, remembering the General’s last moments, gasping for breath as his throat closed, Gila venom shutting down his nervous system. “Until he was gone. General Enrico is in charge now, but we don’t really need a general anymore. We’re having elections next week and Mr. Borin is probably going to be in charge. Mayor or something.”
“Brent’s dad?” Ryenne smiled. “How is Brent?” She’d always had a crush on the older boy.
And I had to tell her.
“Brent was on a mission with me a couple of months ago. He didn’t make it back.”
I couldn’t see her face in the starlight, but her silence told me.
“I’m sorry, Ryenne. We’ve lost a lot of people.”
She sighed and turned to me. “But you’ve kept a lot of people, too. And you came for us.” She looked up at the high cliffs that lined the beach. “This place isn’t what we thought it would be. It’s awful.”
I remembered General Carthage’s words. “No, it’s not. It’s amazing. I mean, think about it.” Something called far away, an unanswered cry over the crash of surf. “Earth scientists had no idea what we’d find. They knew this was a planet in the right zone, right distance from the sun, maybe capable of supporting life. They didn’t even know if it had oxygen. Or plants, or anything. We could have gotten here and found a dead rock. Orbited forever, stuck on Horizon until the end of time. But we found oxygen and plants and animals.” I grinned. “Not exactly the animals we would have chosen. But it could have been so much worse.”
The distant ‘saur called again, and another voice answered it. I sat up, squinting in the darkness.
“I guess I never thought about that.” Ryenne sat up next to me. “I was so excited when we got here . . . and it turned out to be so awful. All that time on Horizon, I never even wondered what would happen if there wasn’t oxygen here.”
“Me neither,” I said. “But we were just stupid kids.”
We lay back down. A bright light passed into view far to the south, cresting over the cliff edge. It glittered larger than the distant stars and my stomach flipped over. I couldn’t see it from our new home in the valley. The mountains hid it from view. Horizon Alpha. The dead ship. The Ark that brought us here, with generation after generation born, living, and dying within its halls. Now it orbited this hostile planet, slowly falling out of the sky, year after year. Sometime in the distant future, maybe a hundred or a thousand years after I was long gone, it would cro
ss the atmosphere and plunge into fiery wreckage. But for now it circled us night after night, haunted by the ghosts of all those people who didn’t make it off. My father was one of them. I looked at the shining star. We’re okay, Dad. We found a safe place. And tomorrow we’re going to take all these people back there. Horizon glittered in the dark sky.
I turned to Ryenne. “We’d better get back in and get some sleep. It’s a long climb tomorrow.”
She smiled. “Yeah. But then we fly. And then we’re safe.”
Chapter 15
Ryenne’s Diary: Year 3, Day 64
Well here we are again.
The last time I wrote an entry, I thought it was going to be my last words ever. It’s funny how things can change.
So I got us help. Turns out there were a couple of other ships that survived, and they did a way better job than we did of figuring out how to live on this planet. They’ve found a safe place to live, and they’re taking us there tomorrow.
My mom isn’t there.
At some point I’ll write about my journey up the cliff, and how I finally got the satellite signal. But I’m not ready to do that yet. So for now I’m going to write about what just happened here in the transport.
We’re all packed in here, all of us who’ve been here the whole time, and some guys from the new place, including my cousin Caleb. Mr. Yamoto’s son Shiro is here, too, and he’s a lot quieter than I remembered him on the ship. Anyway, they have a General, and he’s taken control here. He just had a screaming fight with Officer Halsey that must have woke up every dinosaur for a mile around.
I couldn’t even make out all the words because they were up on the bridge and had the door closed, but I know it was about Mr. Graham. The General was yelling that she shot an unarmed citizen, and how he never imagined they’d need a jail back at Carthage, but he was sure going to build one and throw her in it forever. She was crying and yelling back at him and not making a lot of sense. At one point it sounded like he was threatening to leave her here.
We can’t possibly leave anybody here.
I’m not sure how I feel about her right now. I really think she went a little crazy there in those last days before I made the climb. We kind of all did. But when she did it, when she shot Mr. Graham, you could tell she was really sorry. Like she didn’t really mean to do it and it just kind of happened. She kept us alive here, though, and that’s got to count for something.
There’s no way he’s really going to leave her here. The rest of us won’t allow it. Maybe he’ll need to build his jail back at wherever they’re taking us, but there’s no way anybody’s being left out here to starve.
Speaking of starving, Caleb and his guys brought food. Real food. Fresh fruit and dried meat. And that’s really not going very well. We haven’t ever had anything like that to eat and . . . let’s just say, it’s a lot for us. The hatch door keeps opening as one person after another scurries out to use the ditch. I mean, the food tasted good, but I guess it will take some getting used to. Caleb promised that all the food was good, not spoiled or anything. But after our whole lives on Horizon, we’re just not ready for dinosaur meat. Caleb laughed when I said that, and wondered if the dinosaurs that ate a human for the first time got the squirts, too. His eyes weren’t laughing when he said it, though. I could tell he was thinking about somebody specific, but I wasn’t going to ask him who it was.
Okay, that’s going to have to be it for tonight.
Tomorrow we fly out of here, and by tomorrow night I’ll be safe in an actual bed. I haven’t felt safe for three years. Can’t even remember what safe feels like.
Chapter 16
Nobody on Seventeen had anything to pack, so we breakfasted before dawn on the food we had brought and set off before the sun rose. The daily parade of ‘saurs heading to the waterfall pool would begin soon and we wanted to be safely in the hills before it started.
“Why do they come all this way?” I wondered as we plodded over the deep sand. “There’s plenty of fresh water all over this planet. Why go all the way around these mountains to come up here?”
Sara’s sister Laura answered. She had been part of Horizon’s science team along with Sara. “I think it’s the minerals.” She pointed up to the top of the waterfall, out of our view in the craggy cliffside. “It looks like chalk up there. The water that pools must be full of calcite. The dinosaurs seem to come seasonally, one species after another. I think it must have to do with breeding times.”
I thought about that as we began the easy part of the ascent. The rows of overgrown fruit trees and the paintings on our cave walls were all done by an alien species, birdlike humanoids who had attempted to colonize this planet years ago. They left because their eggs didn’t hatch here. Maybe without the minerals leaching out of the rocks along the coastline, the ‘saurs’ wouldn’t hatch either.
Shiro had the same train of thought. “If the birdmen had found this pool, they might still be here.”
Ryenne grunted behind me. “Birdmen?”
I grinned. “It will be easier to show you than tell you. But boy, do we have a surprise back at our cave.”
Officer Halsey shook her head from in front of me. “Caves? We can’t live in caves. Something lives in the caves here. We lost almost a whole team.”
I offered Ryenne a hand up onto the next rock. “Our caves are safe. We’ve been there for months and nothing but us lives there. Well, us and the bugs. And little snakes. But nothing dangerous.”
Officer Halsey’s face told me she didn’t believe me, but she didn’t press the issue.
Ryenne had told me Officer Halsey had gone around the bend during the long confinement in Seventeen. She had shot an unarmed man, which was something we were going to have to deal with when we got back to Carthage. She hadn’t actually broken a law, because we didn’t have laws. The people who lived on Horizon Alpha and now in Carthage didn’t need them. We were all family. On the ship, the officers had been in charge. Everyone knew our survival depended on sharing the extremely limited resources we had, and that our safety depended on everyone being civil and polite. There had been a few scuffles over the years, when a couple of young guys fought for a girl’s attention, or when someone thought they deserved something that another person had gotten. I knew from watching old movies on Horizon that alcohol often escalated those little fights into big ones, but we had no alcohol on board, and nobody made any. But everyone had their jobs to do, and those small transgressions were dealt with by the families and friends of the person who messed up. The officers rarely had to get involved.
And then we landed here. Every moment was spent in a fight for survival . . . securing our perimeter, finding food. Staying alive as best we could. General Carthage gave the orders and nobody questioned his leadership, at least not aloud. So what would happen now? We were finally safe at Carthage. We could grow our crops in relative peace and grow our families to fill the valley. Every day was no longer spent in fear. Would we need laws to mandate the polite behavior that had kept us alive for two hundred years in space? Would we need police and judges, and jails to lock up anyone who couldn’t live by our laws? Officer Halsey and General E had gotten into a huge argument last night, but for now, she seemed relieved that he and our team had taken control of the group. And her punishment for killing a member of Seventeen’s crew, whatever it might be, wouldn’t be my problem. General E or Mr. Borin would handle it when he was elected mayor of our little settlement.
General Enrico called a halt when the path up the cliffside started to narrow. He’d been just as happy to let Shiro and me lead the group on the way over, taking the risky position of testing each step on the edge of the rocks. But now he was in front, blazing a trail for the Seventeen group who looked in awe at every rock and bush.
They haven’t seen anything of this planet. Sand and ocean and cliffs and ‘saurs. That was it. They were going to freak out when we flew out over the jungle.
“All right, let’s get the kids roped up.” Gener
al E took the remaining rope out of his pack. There was no good way to get the little kids safely over this mountain. It was a huge risk to try. But to fly the shuttle all the way around to the lower ground where the ‘saurs came over would have added almost a whole day to the trip, and the one remaining power core that ran it wouldn’t last. If we ran out of power, we’d be stuck here for months while it recharged from the solar panels on the shuttle’s roof. Those panels were never meant to fly the thing, only give supplemental power on the ground. So despite the risk, we had to climb, and the kids had to climb along with us.
Shanna looked around at the rocks with huge eyes as General E handed his pack to one of Seventeen’s men and hoisted Shanna onto his back. Laura tied her daughter’s waist to the General’s shoulders, making a crude sling out of the rope. Her hands were shaking as she tied the knots.
Trusting her child to a man she hadn’t seen for three years . . . that’s gotta be rough. But she had been convinced that she wasn’t strong enough to carry Shanna herself. General E was the obvious choice. Laura would go second in line, right behind the General.
The three other young kids were each roped to an adult with a five-foot leash between their waists. It was dangerous to rope people together on a mountain. If one person went off the edge, they could take someone else with them. But we couldn’t let the kids climb with no safety net at all. Several of us had volunteered to lead a kid on the trail, including me, but the General put me in charge of Rogan instead.
My cousin had been quiet since we left the transport, which was not unusual. Rogan wasn’t into conversation. On Horizon he’d been volatile, prone to panic attacks where he’d kick and bite, and if no one else was in reach, bite himself. He didn’t handle stress or change at all. But Ryenne said he’d been so calm since they landed here that it was like he was a different person. He didn’t even carry his hose anymore, twisting it endlessly in his hands. Maybe the tiny confines of the transport had been soothing to him. Now we were leaving, heading into a huge unknown world. He could go off at any moment. I hoped it wouldn’t happen on the mountain. I had no idea what I’d do if it did.
