Born of Sand (Tales of a Dying Star Book 5)

by Kristoph, David

  The next day they visited the hangar bays that held their fleet of aircraft, each bay arranged around the outside of the central workshop area. Seven Riverhawks and two Goshawks, though only four of the former and one of the later were fully functional. The other ships stood in various states of disrepair, however they had been found and salvaged from the sands.

  Farrow led Dok to one of the broken Riverhawks, the one they suspected was nearest becoming functional. The engine compartment hung open underneath the ship like a hatch, with a fibre ladder hanging down. "See what you can do," Farrow said. "Or at least, give me an idea of what's needed to get her flying again."

  "Okay." The various pieces of machinery and metal pinned to Dok's coat clinked together as he disappeared inside the craft.

  Mira sat in the middle of the floor of the workshop, tinkering with some electroid parts while watching them. She lowered her head when Farrow glanced in her direction.

  Dok reappeared some time later, his hands and face covered in black grease. "Problems," he said. "Oil leak on the left burner. Power line corroded..." He listed several other things that meant nothing to Farrow.

  "Shit," Farrow cursed, looking up at the dented, rusted ship. "I knew we might have trouble getting them flying again, but I hoped... ahh, well. Shit on our hope. We'll make do, even if you can't fix it."

  Dok cocked his head. "I can fix it."

  "What?"

  "I never... never said I couldn't. Six hours. Seven. Maybe."

  "You're a peculiar man," Farrow said, slapping him on the shoulder. "A peculiar, wonderful little man. This one was the easiest. Let's go check the others; you might find them a challenge."

  Dok lowered his head and twisted one of the knobs on his coat, as if unsure of what else to do.

  The next Riverhawk proved to be easily fixable as well, though a full day's work, according to Dok. The final Riverhawk... not so much. Several of its batteries had broken open--or exploded in the battle long ago--and caused damage to most of the others. It was impossible to immediately tell without digging them out, but Dok suspected it would need an entire new cluster of batteries. "And that's the one resource we don't have," Farrow muttered, thinking of the scavenging parties. He still hadn't heard from Hob either, but that should be at least another day, yet.

  The Goshawk had cursory issues: shattered glass had shredded the lines to the oxygen tanks, sand had gunked up between the battery terminals, and one of the on-board computer circuits had gotten so hot it melted. "All easy," Dok said, bobbing his head. "Easy squeezy. Just need to remove the batteries one by one to clean the terminals. Someone can do that. Someone else."

  Farrow nodded absently. Even though one Riverhawk would likely never fly, repairing the other two--and the second Goshawk--would be an enormous boon to their strength. Six Riverhawks and two Goshawks. Now they just needed the pilots to fly them.

  Time to cross that dune.

  He found Geral in the kitchen. The rotund man sat with Binny, making animal shapes with his fingers. "Do you think it's a snake, or a stinger?" he asked, holding up a tangle of fingers to Farrow as he joined them.

  "It's a stinger," Binny insisted. "Look! It's obvious." It sounded like an argument they'd been having for some time.

  Geral raised an eyebrow at her. "You've never seen a stinger."

  "But I know what they look like!"

  "Do you now? And from whom did you get this information?"

  "Maggy told me."

  Geral raised his voice. "Maggy's never seen a stinger neither! One breached within a hundred feet of us on our first journey here, years ago, but she was too busy pressing her face to the sand and whimpering to see it!"

  The cook looked up from her food at the counter and glowered across the room. "You were on the ground next to me, whimpering just as loud."

  Geral bellowed a deep laugh. "I never said I wasn't! Stingers are bloody terrifying."

  Farrow put a hand on the man's shoulder. "I need to ask something of you."

  Geral's face turned serious.

  "The plan we spoke of. What you suggested two months past."

  "I remember."

  "It was not worth the effort then. It is now. Are you still able?"

  Geral stood and hiked up his pants. "Of course I'm able. I'm breathing, aren't I?"

  "I only wanted to make sure."

  "Shit on making sure. You're the boss, give the orders. I'll follow 'em until there's no one left to follow." He clapped Farrow on the shoulder. "When do I leave?"

  "Now."

  He nodded and whirled to Binny. He jabbed a thick finger at her chest and said, "It was a stinger, but you had no way of knowing that, girl!" She giggled as he left the room.

  Farrow watched him go. Kari at the graveyard, Hob in the city, and now Geral. Too many dangerous jobs all at once. They couldn't afford to lose anyone, but they couldn't afford to avoid danger. It was like being between a stinger and the sand, with nothing but unfortunate decisions.

  That night Farrow helped Mira practice shooting. "You don't have to babysit me," she said while swapping energy packs in her gun between volleys. "Once you let me in I can practice alone."

  "Maybe in a few days, after I've ensured you won't shoot your shitting foot off," he said. Mira feigned being hurt before returning her eyes to the target.

  In truth Farrow enjoyed helping her practice. Beyond working on his own shooting, it gave him an excuse to get away from the other worries and concerns of Victory Base. Food supplies, sand intake filters, broken turbines, scavenging parties... often his duties boiled down to listening to a constant stream of problems and complaints. There was always something wrong, and always a decision to make, and those decisions were rarely easy.

  Helping Mira reminded him of the old days of his Freemen, when he'd personally train his new recruits one at a time. Her skill was an immediate problem on which he could focus, with an immediate solution. The results had already become obvious, just in the few days she'd been practicing. At least true progress is being made somewhere, he thought as he watched her hit the foam target four out of ten times.

  But that wasn't true at all, anymore. They were making progress, with the help of Dok. They still needed the batteries, but their position seemed far more advantageous than when Akonai had left.

  "Dok seems to be improving," Mira said, as if reading his mind.

  "How so?"

  "His speech. The stutter is slowly disappearing, and he can string together longer sentences. And he looks me in the eye when he talks now, instead of staring at his toes."

  Farrow thought about that. "Yeah, he has seemed a little more... comfortable, I guess. He no longer flinches when I slap him on the back. What do you suppose the reason for that is? Kari said he's always been that way."

  Mira fired another ten shots before answering. She now wore the tighter-fitting semi-uniform of the Freemen instead of the rags she'd come to them with. "I suppose working at the Station cowed him. Having a man like Bruno ordering you around all day can't be good for the mind."

  "I suppose not."

  "A kind, proper leader does wonders for morale," she said. "Imagine that."

  "If that is a compliment regarding my leadership," he said, "then I thank you."

  She gave him a smile before putting her pistol down on the nearest crate. "I'm sorry for asking you yesterday. About what Akonai said. It's none of my business, and I should not have asked."

  Farrow sighed. He'd been thinking of that for the past day, since she brought it up. "It's fine. If you want to know..."

  She held up her hands. "I don't, it's okay."

  "...I had to kill a boy."

  Mira's eyes widened.

  "Well, that was my order, at least. Akonai found a family of refugees in the desert, and brought them back as prisoners. 'They're all Empire loyalists,' he said, even though they seemed innocent. Just a mother, father, a teenage boy, and an infant girl, wandering the desert looking for an escape from the Melisao." He raised an ey
ebrow at her. "As desperate people often do."

  Mira smiled weakly.

  "So Akonai drops them off in two cells--one for the parents, and one for the children--and demands that I question and kill them. All of them, even the boy and girl."

  Mira's smile faded.

  "We questioned the parents. The father was a loyalist. He worked in the ore mines, listening to his fellow miners and then whispering the names of potential rebels to the peacekeepers. Dozens died by his tongue, some for as innocent a crime as complaining about the working conditions.

  "The mother was worse. She worked as a food processor, making bread in one of the factories. She liked to collect tiny flecks of broken glass and mix it in with the dough. The peacekeepers in the factory knew, and thought it was a wonderful game, such was their boredom. Soon they were giving her bags full of glass powder to add to her batches, which became loaves of poisonous bread given out to starving Praetari."

  He paused. "Have you ever become sick after eating the food they hand out? I can see by the look in your eyes that you have. The information didn't just come from them: we had it verified by others, in the mines and the food factories. The two were well-known, and lived quite well for Praetari with the extra credits they received. What would you do with two such people?

  "I'll tell you what we did. We executed them. It was an easy order to obey. We visited the graveyard, the place we send many of our salvage teams, and tied them to a piece of metal protruding from the ground. They never had a chance to die from the heat. The stingers got them long before that."

  Mira's eyes had grown progressively wider as he talked, until they were large white balls in the dim armoury light.

  "But the children. What to do with them? Akonai insisted a poison vine bore poison flowers. The girl was maybe seven years old, but the boy was an adolescent. On the border of responsibility and blame. He'd been working with his father in the mines, but we couldn't find evidence of wrongdoing. He behaved meekly and cooperatively, even after the parents were... gone."

  The tension continued to build in Mira's demeanor. "You didn't..." she asked, unable to say the words.

  "Of course we didn't," Farrow said conclusively. "The Melisao are monsters, not us. Akonai's command over Victory Base has always been vague, and all base decisions were my purview. The boy possessed enough strength to be valuable with our salvage teams. It would have been a waste of resources, something Akonai always insisted I avoid. So I used his words against him and released the children from their cells.

  "And they were joyed to be freed. They truly were." Farrow took a long, deep breath. "Until the boy attacked one of my men a week later, when everyone had let their guard down. He stole the rifle off his shoulder in the kitchen, and shot three Freemen while they ate their soup. You'll note Maggy walks with a limp, now. The boy fled to our control room and tried sending radio broadcasts out, informing the peacekeepers of our location, strength, weaponry. Fortunately this shoddy base is only half-functional at the best of times, and our antennae have never worked." He fixed Mira with a long stare. "I shot him myself, when we took the room. And when I stood over him he looked at me with fury in his eyes, until they finally faded. I stared at him for an hour. Akonai's laughter eventually broke my reverie, when he came and saw what my mercy had bore."

  Mira swallowed audibly. "And the girl? What did you do with her?" She almost cowered, afraid to hear the answer.

  Farrow took their pistols and carefully put them back in the crate, closing the lid and locking it. "Binny has become a fixture of the base, cleaning and mending wounds. Akonai still taunts me for it, but I made the right choice with her. We're done practicing tonight." He gestured to the door and waited for Mira to go ahead of him.

  But as they moved into the hallway, Binny herself came running up. "Kari's back from the graveyard."

  Chapter 10

  "We didn't run into any stingers," Kari said in the workshop as she unslung a strap of water jugs from her shoulder, lowering the strap to place them gently on the ground. "Heard their rumbles a few times, and Jax almost pissed himself when he thought he felt the ground shift underneath him, but besides that it was quiet."

  Farrow nodded, eyes focused on the bundle that they had dumped in the middle of the room, wrapped in cloth and tied at the top, probably so it could be carried over a shoulder. "And were you successful?"

  Kari pulled her knife from her belt and removed the top of the bundle in one single motion. The cloth fell apart and spread out to reveal the contents. Seven small cylinders, about a foot tall and half as wide.

  Dok had been previously occupied in the corner tinkering with one of the artillery lasers, but at the sight of the batteries he came running across the room.

  "Seven batteries," Kari said, nodding. "Of the various models Dok said were appropriate."

  Only seven, Farrow cringed. That would power a sixth of the electroids Dok could build.

  His expression must have been obvious, because Kari rounded on him with a touch of defensiveness in her tone. "We had to search all over just for these. The batteries don't last long baking under the dunes for years. Most have cracked and split in the heat. We were lucky to find any at all!"

  On the ground, Dok ripped apart the plastic covering on the outside of a battery, revealing the metal casing underneath. He lifted it over his head, examining it from all angles. Sand fell into his eyes and he coughed and winced.

  Farrow put a hand on Kari's shoulder. "It is fine. Shit, better than fine. Every battery is a great victory, more than we had before." Gently, he pulled aside the shoulder strap of her shirt top. "You've burned."

  She swatted away his hand. "Saria boils hot this week. The attack. Is there any news? More specific dates from Akonai?"

  "Nothing new. I suspect we won't know until the day it occurs, with as little warning as possible."

  Kari lowered herself onto a nearby stool and bent forward, rubbing her hand over her bald head. A scattering of sand drifted down to the floor beneath her. The men with her stood against the wall, clothes soiled with sweat, but Kari appeared relatively fresh. "You will tell me the moment you know anything?" She looked up and struck him with her brown, nearly gold, eyes.

  "Of course," he said. Though with Akonai, we may not receive any notice at all. It would be a cruel joke to abandon Victory Base entirely and never give them the signal. A joke Farrow could picture Akonai laughing heartily at.

  The intensity suddenly left Kari's eyes and she shrugged. "I will be prepared, either way."

  "Wrong," Dok suddenly blurted.

  "Excuse me?" Kari said.

  Dok rose and carried the battery to them. "This one is wrong. Wrong." He held it up to Kari's face like a weapon. "See?"

  Surprised by his fearlessness, Kari leaned back and put a hand on the battery. "What am I supposed to be looking at? It's a DK-2, like you said."

  "The positive terminals are missing. Ripped out. Did you even try to be careful with them? These are valuable parts, not knives to fling around!" He strode back to the pile.

  The entire outburst shocked Kari. "Not so shy anymore, is he?" she muttered.

  Farrow smirked. "His temperament has improved. It seems being out from under Bruno's thumb is good for him."

  "Three of the batteries are similarly damaged," Dok yelled, bent among the parts.

  "I liked him better before." She turned to Dok and said, "So repair them. The terminals are just two small prongs of metal sticking out."

  Dok let out an exaggerated sigh. "I can't repair them. The terminals aren't just on the surface, they go all the way into the core. They're inserted before the battery is molded around them. Once ripped out, they cannot be replaced. I instructed you to be careful with them!"

  "We were careful. The batteries were like that when we salvaged them."

  "So your incompetence lies with the choosing of the batteries, not the transport of the batteries?"

  Kari rose and pointed an angry finger at the small man. "No. Y
ou told us to look for models DK2, DK3, and DK4, on batteries that showed no sign of external damage. You described such damage to us: cracks in the casing, leaking chemicals discoloring the metal. That is what we looked for, and what we brought back."

  "And basic battery functionality! How can it function without terminals?"

  "You should have specified that then," Kari growled. "We paid close attention only to what you told us to seek."

  "Because I thought it was obvious..." Dok said.

  Farrow closed his eyes while they argued. Four batteries, four more electroids. None perished in the trip to the graveyard, but the risk had yielded little return. Will anything go right in this star-damned war?

  As if to punctuate the thought, the groaning sound of massive metal gears announced the opening of the surface door high above. Everyone scrambled back to avoid the cascade of sand. Dok struggled to drag the cloth of batteries out of the way, muttering under his breath the entire time. Kari put her hands on her hips and stared murder across the room.

  Before the doors had fully opened, a vehicle appeared in the gap and began descending. With a triangle-shaped base and a sharply-angled glass shield on the front, the sand cruiser looked like something raced for sport. Hob sat in one of the two seats, maneuvering the vehicle down to their level and then across the room to land in one of the open bays.

  At a glance Farrow could tell it had no cargo.

  Bad news begets bad news, he thought, pinching the bridge of his nose. Four batteries acquired out of the forty they had needed. Whatever hope he'd had disappeared. Dok may have repaired a few of their ships and electroids, but despite that they were in hardly a better position than when Akonai left. A meager number of men and machines, hopelessly weak against the formidable, coordinated Melisao.

  Mira stood next to him, watching his face. A leader needed to keep up a strong face for his men and women, but Farrow couldn't muster the energy. "We're going to have to send more scavenging parties out," he said as Hob dismounted from the cruiser across the room. "All of us will need to go."

  Kari's face darkened. "Eight was bad enough, but more than that will surely bring the stingers up on us."