The Exo Project

by Andrew DeYoung

  “It wasn’t my choice,” Po said, his face going pale. “Kyne made me do it. I didn’t want to leave the village—but she’s my sister. What was I supposed to do? I have to obey her.”

  Kiva looked long at Po. She had a feeling that he wasn’t telling her the whole truth. But her anger began to dissipate all the same. All at once, she noticed the long gash that ran down Po’s cheek from his temple to his chin.

  She reached out to touch his face. “What happened here?”

  Po jerked his head back, stepped away. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Just an accident.”

  “Some accident,” Kiva said.

  Po looked at her but didn’t say anything. They waited a long beat.

  “All right,” she said at last. “So none of this was your choice. You never supported Kyne. You were just doing what you were told. Fine. I believe you. But what about the rest of the Forsaken? What about Xendr Chathe? Where does he stand in all of this?”

  Po flinched. “Xendr knew what Kyne was doing.”

  Kiva blinked once, twice. She clenched her fists at her sides. “Let me guess: he wanted to see how things would play out. See which way the Sisters would go, who they’d support, then throw his support behind the winner. Is that it?”

  Po nodded. “Yes. But only to know whose side he should take if what Kyne was saying was real—if there really were Strangers coming, and if you weren’t ready to lead the Vagri against them.”

  “Oh, is that all?” Kiva let a sharp breath out through clenched teeth. “How comforting.”

  “Don’t be angry.” Po took a step closer and reached for Kiva’s shoulder. Kiva stepped back. Po let his arm fall back to his side.

  “Okay,” he said. “I understand. But anyway, it’s over now. After what happened tonight, there can be no question. The Strangers are real. You’re ready to lead. And Kyne’s rebellion is over.”

  “I’m not so sure about the last part,” Kiva said. “But the rest is true.”

  “So let me help,” Po said. “Let us help. Let me go and gather the Forsaken. We can kill the Strangers before they even get close enough to the village to threaten it.”

  Kiva shook her head. “No.”

  “No?” Po looked surprised and confused. “But why? Kiva, don’t be foolish, these Strangers—”

  “Foolish?” Kiva cut in. “Remember who you’re talking to, Po.”

  Po stopped himself, breathed out. “I’m sorry, Vagra, I just meant—”

  Kiva waved his apology away, her anger fading. “I know what you meant. I’m sorry, too.”

  “So? Will you let us help you or not?”

  “Let me think for a moment.”

  Kiva turned and walked a few steps away from Po, away from Rehal, Thruss, and Quint. She felt their eyes following her, the wish flashing through each of their minds that she would see reason and allow them to go to the Strangers with the Forsaken at their side, weapons in hand. She felt their fear—their fear of the Strangers, their fear for themselves.

  But she still didn’t want to use the Forsaken. After what the Vagra had told her about the last time the Forsaken had protected the village, she didn’t trust them. She didn’t even think she needed them—the Strangers didn’t mean them any harm.

  And yet, there was a seed of doubt in her mind. Her most recent vision—the one she’d seen just moments before—had shown one of the Strangers holding what must have been a weapon, with fire leaping from the end of it.

  Maybe it was a good thing that Po had joined the Forsaken, after all. With him among the Forsaken, she might be able to control them—the same way the old Vagra had controlled Xendr Chathe fifty seasons ago.

  “Fine,” Kiva said at last. “You can come with us. But don’t summon all of the Forsaken. I want you and only two more. One for each of the Strangers.”

  “There are only three of them?” Po asked.

  “Yes,” Kiva said. “That’s what my visions show.”

  She looked at Po, Thruss, Rehal, and Quint, something forming in her mind as her eyes wandered across their inquisitive faces. She mentally added two Forsaken men to their numbers.

  “What?” Quint asked. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” Kiva said. “I’m just—I’m thinking.”

  “Thinking about what?” Thruss asked.

  “A plan,” Kiva said. “I think I’ve got a plan.”

  32

  matthew

  After Dunne had taken blood and tissue samples from Matthew and Sam, she returned to the ship to do her tests.

  Matthew and Sam went back out into the hills to explore. Before they left, Sam paused in the airlock and knelt near a metal chest bolted to the floor.

  “What are you doing?” Matthew asked.

  Sam didn’t look up. “Precautions,” he said.

  He snapped open the latches and lifted the lid, then reached inside and took out something long and sleek and gray. He lifted the object. An ion shotgun.

  A cold rush passed over Matthew’s body, and a sick feeling grew in his stomach.

  “What’s that for?” he asked.

  “Dunne’s got her tests. You’ve got the transceiver to communicate with Control. This is what I’m here for.”

  Sam moved sideways and slipped past Matthew, stepping out onto the grass.

  “But why would we need guns?” Matthew asked. “Why would they even send those along with us?”

  Sam walked out a few paces, the ion shotgun cradled in his hands. He stopped and scanned the horizon as if searching for a target.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “I heard you,” Sam said, his voice impatient. “And I don’t know why. Maybe they figured that if we did find a planet that could support life, there might actually be something living there already. Something we need to protect ourselves from.”

  Sam turned his head and glanced at Matthew out of the corner of his eye. “Well? Are you coming or not?”

  Matthew stepped out of the airlock and followed Sam. They moved into the hills and made their way across the prairie, Sam pressing forward as if he expected to find something to shoot over the top of each new rise, Matthew lagging behind, struggling to keep pace as he waded through the tall grasses. Though the grass covered every inch of the ground, the planet felt desertlike to Matthew. There was a barrenness to the landscape, to the way the small swells rose up with regularity in every direction, sameness as far as the eye could see. At the top of each hill, Matthew expected to see something new as he staggered up after Sam: a tree, a rock formation, something.

  But every time, all he saw were more hills. More grass.

  Until.

  Sam paused at the top of an uncommonly tall hill. Matthew made his way up behind, his feet rustling the grasses around him. Without looking back, Sam jerked a hand into the air and pulled it into a fist. Matthew stopped.

  “What is it?”

  Sam glared back and held a finger to his lips.

  “Get down,” he whispered fiercely, sinking to his knees as Matthew followed suit. Then Sam waved him forward.

  Matthew crawled on his elbows until he was almost even with Sam.

  “There,” Sam said, and pointed the way with an incline of his head.

  Matthew looked. In the far distance, some three or four hills away: something. Something different. Something that was not the barren sameness of the undulating grasses.

  Two specks. Moving.

  Sam crouched down lower and raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes. After a few seconds, he handed the binoculars to Matthew. Matthew looked.

  The image swam liquid before Matthew’s eyes as the binoculars adjusted, blinked into focus. Then he could see them.

  Figures. Creatures. Beings.

  He wasn’t sure what to call them.

  They almost looked …

  Matthew took his eyes away from the viewfinder. “Are those—?”

  “Yeah,” Sam said.

  Matthew looked through the binoculars again. The figures had come cl
oser—now they were unmistakable. Living organisms. Humanoid. Wearing clothes. Two children, a boy and a girl. They held hands, walking slowly, picking their way through the sharp blades of grass with bare feet. The girl was slightly taller than the boy. Matthew thought with a flash of Sophie—perhaps this girl and boy were sister and brother. Their mouths moved. They were talking to each other.

  Matthew’s breath came fast. “But that’s …”

  He wanted to say impossible, but he cut himself short. He had flown across the galaxy in cryogenic stasis, in a ship that could travel at the speed of light, and now he was exploring an alien planet.

  Nothing was impossible.

  “Come on,” Sam said in a low growl. He darted forward, keeping low to the ground. The binoculars clutched in one sweaty hand, Matthew followed.

  Together they slipped down into a low place between two hills. The two beings, the two children—whatever they were—slid out of sight. In the hollow, Sam paused, raised his hand to signal Matthew to stop. Matthew raised his head. He tilted his ear to the wind.

  He heard the sound of laughter, wafting over the hills like torn bits of paper blowing on the wind. The sound grew louder and more whole. It sounded like music, like the tinkling of chimes. For a moment, Matthew closed his eyes and simply listened.

  When he opened his eyes, the children had come around the base of the hill and were visible once more. They stood at a distance, but even without the binoculars held to his eyes Matthew could see clearly now that they were exactly like humans in every way but one: the color of their skin, which was a gray so deep it bled into hues of purple and blue, like bodies recently dead. But they were alive.

  Alive and—by the looks on their faces—startled, shocked, afraid.

  “My God,” Matthew muttered to himself. He held his breath.

  The boy shrank back a pace into the tall grasses, while the girl moved forward and to one side, stepping between them and the boy. Her hair was long and jet-black; her eyes were glassy with fear, but her jaw was set hard.

  Sam rose up from his crouch, the ion shotgun clutched at his side. Something in Matthew’s chest jerked.

  “Sam?” Matthew asked.

  Sam didn’t say anything. With one hand he whipped the shotgun up to his chest, brought the other across his body to cradle the stock. He held the butt tight against his shoulder and gazed down the barrel at the boy and girl. They were still, frozen like deer at the foot of the far hill.

  Matthew felt himself rising.

  “Sam, no!”

  Matthew rushed forward without thinking and threw himself at the muzzle of the shotgun, arms outstretched. His hands closed over the barrel just as the deafening report of the gun reached his ears. He lost his balance and went sprawling, but he’d done what he needed to: Sam’s shot went wide. A white orb screamed out of the gun and hit a patch of ground ten yards away from the children. Stunned at the sound of the blast and the charred circle where the ionized energy had burned the grass to ash, the children turned and fled.

  Sam lifted the shotgun to his shoulder once more, but he was too late.

  They were gone.

  Matthew pushed himself to his feet and grabbed once again at the muzzle of the shotgun. He tried to wrest it from Sam’s hands, but Sam tightened his grip and yanked it back.

  “You don’t want to do that.” Sam didn’t say anything more, but his eyes contained a threat.

  Matthew didn’t care.

  “What the hell was that?” he demanded.

  Something flashed across Sam’s eyes. Embarrassment? Guilt?

  “I saw a threat,” Sam said. “I took care of it. That’s what I’m here for.”

  “A threat? Those were kids, Sam. They weren’t a threat to anybody.”

  Sam’s jaw clenched. He looked at Matthew for a long moment, then glanced away.

  “You saw what you saw. I saw what I saw.”

  Matthew grabbed Sam’s shoulder and spun him around so they faced each other. “And what did you see, huh? What was so dangerous that you needed to pull out a gun?”

  Sam dropped the gun to the ground and shoved Matthew away with the flats of both hands—hard.

  “You touch me again, I’ll—”

  “Tell me,” Matthew demanded. “What did you see? I want to know exactly what you thought you were doing.”

  Sam paused, backed off a step, ran a hand over his mouth to his chin.

  “Look, they were—they were just things, okay? Animals.”

  “Animals my ass. They were kids.”

  “Look, you can call them what you want, but the fact is we’re on another planet, we don’t know what the hell they are. Those things may have looked and sounded like humans, but all we know for sure is that they were alien creatures. I treated them with caution because that was the logical thing to do. The doc would’ve said the same thing if she were here.”

  Matthew looked off to the side and shook his head slowly, letting out a sharp, angry breath.

  “Well, either way, they’re gone now. And regardless of what Dunne would’ve said, if there’s real humanoid life on this planet, we’re going to need our science officer with us to check it out.”

  Sam nodded and strolled back to where the ion shotgun lay in the grass. Matthew darted around him and plucked it from the ground.

  “Don’t even think about it, asshole,” Sam said.

  Sam grabbed at the stock and shot Matthew a warning look. Matthew looked back into his eyes and saw immediately that he wouldn’t back down. Sam was bigger than he was, stronger. He could overpower him. He could take the gun. He could even kill Matthew, if he wanted to. Who would stop him?

  “I need it,” Sam kept on. “You say those things were kids—fine. That means there are grown-ups too, right? And maybe they have weapons.”

  “Yeah, and because of you the kids are probably telling them that we’re hostile, that we tried to kill them on sight.”

  Sam winced. “I know. I screwed up. But you can trust me. Okay?”

  Matthew loosed his grip and let Sam take the gun.

  “All right. But no more mistakes.”

  Sam nodded, and together they made their way back to the Corvus.

  33

  kiva

  Kiva waited for Po to fetch two Forsaken men and bring them to the pit. After they came, they all began to walk to the place where Kiva sensed the Strangers had landed. As they began to walk, morning broke around them, the light of the Great Mother warming the edge of the horizon.

  Kiva stopped, lifted a flat hand to signal her followers to stop too. She closed her eyes. She sensed that the Strangers had landed somewhere to the south and east of the village; getting there from the pit, which was due north, had brought them close to the village, to the grassland just beyond its border. Kiva opened her eyes again and looked to her left, saw the rise jutting into the air some thousand paces away.

  They still had a long way to go, but Kiva sensed something right where they stood. Some disturbance.

  “What is it, Vagra?” Rehal asked. “Are we close?”

  Kiva shook her head. “Someone’s coming. They’re afraid.”

  “The Strangers?” Thruss asked, unable to hide the fear in her voice.

  But it wasn’t the Strangers. At that moment, two Vagri children came over the nearest hill, panting as they ran through the waist-high grasses, their faces streaked with tears. They stopped and cowered when they saw Kiva and the people with her.

  Kiva walked to them, a hand held out.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said to the children, a boy and a girl. “Tell me what’s happened.”

  Their eyes were glassy, looking past Kiva, and their breaths were panicked gasps. They were in shock. Whatever they’d seen, it hadn’t just scared them—it had terrified them.

  Kiva turned to the older child, the girl, and hooked her finger under her chin, tilted her head up softly.

  “Look at me,” Kiva said, then waited for the girl’s eyes to focus, her breath to
slow. “You’re safe now, okay?”

  The girl turned to the little boy and touched him on the shoulder. He raised his eyes to his sister, then looked at Kiva. Kiva gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile.

  “What are your names?” Kiva asked.

  The girl nudged her younger brother.

  “Ferrin,” he said.

  “And you?”

  “Edela,” the girl said.

  “Those are nice names,” Kiva said.

  The children angled their eyes toward the ground.

  “Now,” Kiva said, “tell me what happened.”

  The girl spoke.

  “We snuck off in the morning, before the Great Mother rose. We were out in the prairie, just walking.”

  “How far? Which way?” Kiva asked.

  “To the west,” Edela said, waving off in the distance, “maybe three or four lengths beyond the edge of the village. The Great Mother had come up, and we were about to turn back. That’s when we saw them.”

  Kiva’s body went tight. “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Creatures I’ve never seen before. They walked on two legs, like us, but there was something different about them. Something strange.”

  “I want you to be sure. Try hard to remember. It wasn’t just one of the Forsaken that you saw?”

  The girl shook her head. “No, Vagra. I’m sure of it. They wore strange clothes, blue coverings that clung tight to their bodies. And their skin was the wrong color; it was pink, like the color of the sky, but paler.”

  “How many?”

  “Two.”

  Kiva nodded. “Good. What else?”

  The girl squinted. “One of them carried something. I don’t know what it was. It looked like a stick. But fire leapt from the end of it.”

  “He tried to hurt you?”

  The girl nodded. “Yes. He pointed the stick at us and a bright light came toward us. But it missed us—it hit the ground and burned up the grass.”

  Kiva sucked in a breath. It was all so much like her vision, the one that had come over her at the pit.

  “Children, may I …” She hesitated. “I need to touch you to search your minds. I need to see exactly what you saw. May I do that? It won’t hurt, I promise.”