Under Falling Skies

by Kate MacLeod

  Clementine never took her eyes off Girl. Her breath was coming in labored gasps, exertion and pain taking their toll. Scout was winded too. She lowered her hands, then slipped one behind her to palm Ottilie’s little knife.

  She was only going to get one chance.

  “Please, Clementine. It’s just a dog.”

  For just a moment, the gun started to shake. Then it began to lower toward the ground.

  But then she changed her mind, raising it again, finger starting to squeeze the trigger. Scout felt a rush of adrenaline, and for once she was the one moving with inhuman speed. She rushed to Clementine, seeing each motion as a separate frame of time. Step. Step. Grasp Clementine’s arm. Not the shooting one, the wounded one. Use the arm to pivot around her body.

  Bury the knife up to the hilt in the place where she was fairly certain the girl didn’t have a kidney.

  Clementine screamed again, then fell spasming to the floor. The gun went off and Girl yelped in alarm, but the shot was wild. In the distance, one of the mountains of junk underwent a minor avalanche of crates, tarps, and dust.

  Then all was silent. Clementine was still. It was over.

  Scout fell to her knees, then opened her arms for Girl to rush to her.

  “Good dog,” she said, sobbing into the dog’s furry neck. She was wriggling, squirming excitement. A minute ago she’d been a hellhound intent on murder. Now she was just a puppy, albeit a badly trained one.

  “Hey, Girl,” Scout said. “You need a name. And I think I know just the one.”

  27

  Viola’s bed was too soft, no doubt about it, but sometimes too soft could be quite nice. Now that she knew she was alone, she showered under the hottest water, washed every item of clothing, and hung them to dry from open locker doors, then crawled between Viola’s covers and slept for what must have been more than a day.

  It was divine.

  She woke to the sound of Girl’s bark, the cheerful yip-yip she did when she wanted Shadow to play with her. Scout felt her heart clench. All of that was gone now.

  Girl yipped again, and Tubbins made a protesting meow. Scout sat straight up, anxious to prevent another mauling, but Girl wasn’t even looking at the cat. Her butt was up in the air, her chin down on her forepaws as she bent forward to touch her nose to Shadow’s where Scout had left his body at the foot of the bed.

  Scout blinked back tears, then leaned forward to brush Girl away. “Leave him be, now,” she said. Surely the storm would end soon. Then she could bury her oldest friend beside her newest.

  From within the nest of blankets came a sleepy, protesting growl of sound.

  “Shadow?” Scout said, her hands shaking. She didn’t have hope left in her heart. And yet . . . “Shadow?”

  Shadow lifted his head to look at her. His body shook, his eyes looked strange like he’d been drugged, but he was alive.

  “Shadow!” Scout cried, fighting back the urge to scoop him up into her arms. He was clearly far too fragile for that. Instead she moved closer to press her thigh close to his still colder-than-normal body. He lifted his head enough to rest it on her knee with a weary sigh and she stroked his head as gently as she could. “Shadow, meet Gertrude,” Scout said, reaching out with her other hand to scratch the ears of Gertrude, formerly Girl. Gertrude thumped her tail, nearly striking Tubbins, who meowed in annoyance but made no effort to move out of the way.

  Scout went back to the showers to dress, then went to the kitchen. She no longer had the desire for any more jolo. Instead she set Warrior’s lens to her eye and found the device that detected poisons. She found the kettle uncontaminated and filled it with water and set it to boil, then located a clean mug and an unopened package of tea. Everything looked good through her lens. She reconstituted some freeze-dried eggs and even turned some of the stale bread from that fateful meal into slices of toast.

  Once she’d eaten, she brought more beef stroganoff for the dogs. Shadow was moving a little, but it looked like his joints pained him. He ate some, mostly licking at the gravy, and didn’t object when Gertrude turned to his tray when she was done with hers. Scout fetched a few bits of meat before Gertrude got to them and held them out for the cat to nibble at. He purred contentedly.

  “Only a half a day left,” Scout told them, consulting the readings on Warrior’s device. “Then I guess we all roll out of here in Ebba and Ottilie’s rover.”

  She reached into her pocket and took out the two data disks. Intelligence reports. The sorts of things that could change the course of a war.

  If only she knew who to give them to.

  There didn’t seem to be good guys or bad guys. She would do anything to prevent more rocks falling down on the cities, but she didn’t know what that anything should be.

  She kept turning those disks over and over in her hands, pausing only to fetch more food for her and the animals some hours later. What was she going to do?

  At last she took out Warrior’s tablet. There was another message on it. She had opened a reply window just before she had passed out from lack of oxygen. She had never typed anything, but she had apparently accidentally sent an empty message. Liam had replied. GERT, WHAT’S GOING ON?

  Scout scratched at the skin around the lens on her face. She wasn’t quite used to it being there. Not yet, anyway. She looked at the question again. WHAT’S GOING ON?

  Then she answered it in great detail. In fact, with every detail she could recall. When at last she ran out of words she touched the send command, turned off the tablet, and pulled the lens from her eye so she could wipe away the last tear she was going to let herself shed.

  She had taken action. She was moving forward. No more clinging to the past.

  Nothing was resolved, and yet she slept like a baby. In the morning she made more toast, eggs, and tea, then began searching Viola’s station for anything worth taking with her on the rover. Food, medicine, clothing. There were far more things in those crates than Scout had use for, things like children’s toys and decorative figurines from some time before planetfall.

  At last the flare detector beeped. The storm was over.

  It took a few hours to load up the rover. Gertrude was beside herself, trying to both stay close to Scout and keep an eye on Shadow as he napped. She relaxed only when Scout lifted the little dog up into her arms and carried him back to the surface to nestle him into the nest she had made for him from Ebba and Ottilie’s pillows. He sniffed all around himself but seemed to find their scents satisfactory and settled back down to resume his healing nap.

  Scout left Gertrude to stand guard and went down to Viola’s rooms one last time to scoop up Tubbins, pillow and all, and carry him up to the rover. Perhaps he’d be all right on his own in the station, living on vermin and whatnot, but somehow Scout didn’t think that would be his happiest life. She had no interest in a cat herself, but someone in town would jump at the chance of taking him in. He was certainly a handsome enough cat, bright orange with white stripes like an alternate dimension’s tiger, if a bit on the pudgy side.

  Something on her belt beeped again and for a moment Scout feared the storm had returned. But it was the tablet. Liam’s reply was direct and to the point: MEET ME, followed by a date, time, and latitude and longitude. The tablet summoned up a map for her to see. He was directing her a little further out into the wilds, but not for three days yet.

  Scout settled her father’s hat more securely on her head and brushed red dust from the tunnel from the ragged remains of his shirt. Then she detonated the last of Ottilie’s mining charges, effectively burying the remains of the nine others she had known only briefly but would never forget.

  Then she hitched Warrior’s belt a bit higher on her hips, touched her palm to the butt of the gun to make sure it was there, and pulled herself up into the rover.

  Three days until Liam came for her. Time enough to find Tubbins a home.

  Time enough to go back up into those hills and find herself a certain con artist.

  28


  Scout Shannon sat forward in the driver's seat as the ancient rover rolled over the crest of the last hill and the town of Prairie Springs came into view. If she had been on her bike she would have stopped just here for a rest and a quick sip of water, perhaps pushing back the brim of her battered bush hat to peer down at the squat buildings just visible beyond the sunlight reflecting off the metal panels of the ring of the town's low wall. It all looked so small, surrounded in a sea of reddish gold prairie grasses.

  After the last four days, she had half expected to emerge to find the whole world changed. Such a humble sight, a little town all but lost in the rolling hills of tall grass, but it nearly brought a tear to her eye. Apparently she had come out of the recent coronal mass ejection event with a newfound love of town life.

  Scout herself didn't really belong to any particular place. She had been born under the dome of a city, but that city was gone now. There was nothing there but a crater the prairie grass had not yet reclaimed. She had been just a kid at the time but she still remembered the gleaming whiteness of it, the prefabricated buildings dropped from space and assembled on the surface. Like a child's building blocks they had only come in a few basic shapes but could be combined in infinite varieties. Cities had wide boulevards with fountains and monuments, long straight roads lined with businesses grouped into districts, and endless twisting alleyways full of surprises both wonderful and otherwise.

  But Scout hadn't spent much time in cities lately. Her messenger and delivery work kept her busy in the more remote, less civilized parts of her planet. Towns weren't just like cities only smaller. Everything about them was different, starting with being open to the world around them. Cities were under domes and behind a small number of highly controlled gates. Towns, on the other hand, usually had a wall like Prairie Springs had to separate farm land from town land and to keep the wind from filling the town with clouds of dust and wheat chaff, but rather than a gate there was a gateway, nothing more than an opening in the wall with no door and no guard.

  The navigation panel beeped to alert her they were approaching the destination she had selected. She silenced it with a tap of a finger. She could get used to traveling by rover, where the long grind up a hill was no more effort than the trip back down the other side.

  She did miss the wind in her hair, though.

  She ran a comforting hand over her rat terrier Shadow's back as he fussed in his sleep. Poor dog. The other dog laying at her feet lifted her head to touch her nose to Shadow's then returned to her own nap.

  Scout had named her Gertrude, although she usually just called her "Gert". The dog had been just "Girl" for so long the full name just confused her. Scout was pretty sure the dog's namesake wouldn't mind sharing her name with a dog, especially not one so recently heroic as this one.

  Shadow gave another little moan and she put her hand on his little head until he quieted. He had been through hell during the solar storm. But then, so had she. And she knew she was not completely recovered physically from everything she'd gone through over the last few days. The bright light stabbed past her eyes, birthing splitting headaches if she didn't look away often enough, and she got tired far sooner than usual. A few more days of rest would sort her aches and pains, she was sure.

  Her mind, plagued by nightmares, that was going to take longer. She had been trapped underground with a group of strangers who had been murdered, one after the other, some by each other but others by a trio of assassins not even in their teens yet. Scout had escaped, with her dogs and the station owner's cat, but just barely. And she still didn't understand what had happened, or how she had managed to hold on to her life when the others had fallen.

  It might have been luck, but it hadn't been fate. Scout knew that for a certainty. There was no fate. She had no destiny. But she did have choices.

  She touched the belt that hugged her waist, covered in devices and yet it didn't weigh her down. She had nearly made a friend in that hellhole, nearly had found a mentor willing to take her away from this tiny world and show her an entire galaxy. Gertrude Bauer, a galactic marshal on a personal mission, it was a complete coincidence that her path had even crossed Scout's.

  But it had, then she died, and now Scout carried her equipment. Most of it she didn't know how to use. All of it she was sure she was going to have to surrender in three days when Gertrude's partner Liam McGillicudy came to pick her up. In the meantime, Scout had one last thing to do before she left the only home she had ever known.

  She was going to find the man who had ripped off Gertrude's grandmother, had taken her life savings and disappeared with it on this, the most remote of all planets from a galactic point of view. She had three days and all of Gertrude's equipment to do it with. That, plus her natural knack to get things done.

  The gate into the town was too narrow for the rover so she pulled off the road to park. Gert sleeping at her feet made it difficult to work the pedals, but she managed a respectably neat stop before killing the engine. The sudden loss of the engine's hum was almost deafening and woke both the dogs.

  Shadow yawned with a squeak then hopped off her lap to stretch himself out. He had gotten a bit thinner over the last few days, but the muscles under his white fur were as tight as ever. He looked up at her, his dark eyes all but lost in the bandit mask pattern of the black spot covering his head. Then he ran down the stairs to the back of the rover. Gert - a pit bull nearly twice his size - followed, the white tip at the very end of her tail a blur, the entire back half of her sleek black body wiggling back and forth as it powered that thumping wag.

  "You guys are going to stay here," she said to the dogs, who both started jumping excitedly the moment she put on her old bush hat. Shadow sat down, his posture straight and formal. He knew what she meant. Gert just kept wagging her tail. It thumped painfully loudly against the leg of the kitchen table, but she didn't seem to mind. She looked up at Scout as if she really wished she knew what Scout meant.

  Scout sighed. She needed to make training this dog a priority. "Sit, Gert," she said. Shadow stiffened his posture, but Gert missed the hint. "Never mind," Scout said. "I'll just be a minute." She went over to the stack of beds built into the back of the rover and leaned into the bottom bunk.

  "Hello, Tubbins," Scout said. The cat gave a soft mew. Scout gathered him up, pillow and all, and put him gently inside an empty plastic crate. She tapped the opening mechanism on the door with her elbow, keeping Gert back with her knee as the dog tried to get a better look at the cat in the crate in her arms. The cat hissed his displeasure. The two were most decidedly not friends.

  "Down, Gert," Scout said. As soon as the door was open wide enough she stepped out, dropping to the ground nearly a meter below. She turned back to the rover. "Stay, dogs," she commanded, then jabbed the mechanism to shut the door. Shadow remained as he was at stiff attention, but Gert stood at the edge of the rover with her head out the door until the closing metal hatch finally forced her to step back.

  Her eyes on Scout's were full of abandoned hurt, then the hatch clicked shut.

  Crate in arms, Scout walked through the gate into the town proper. Prairie Springs had grown since she had been here last, new homes built from prefabricated panels crowding into the spaces between the older homes built from repurposed storage containers. The Space Farer logo that had once adorned the containers had mostly been scrubbed away, but a few faded stylized rockets remained.

  If things kept going like they had been, there would be a renewed zest for removing those soon. Scout hoped to be gone long before that point. She had seen enough Planet Dweller versus Space Farer conflict in the last four days to last her a lifetime.

  When she reached the public house in the center of town she saw the massive doors angled into the ground on both sides of the base of the building had been thrown open wide to let air pass through. Scout could imagine after all of the townspeople had huddled together down there, waiting out the solar storm, it needed a good airing out.

&
nbsp; A group of children were streaming in and out of the open doors, carrying out old laundry and empty containers and bringing in canisters filled with water and food from the back of the public house. It used to be that the coronal ejection events only reached the surface during rare, powerful storms, every year or so. Now they were happening more and more often. They lasted longer and were more powerful, too intense to risk being caught out of doors as Scout so nearly had.

  She couldn't wait to leave this place behind.

  Scout climbed the steps to the public house, pausing in the doorway to let her eyes adjust to the dark interior. The public house was a common feature in prairie towns. They were the oldest part of the establishments, station components dropped from orbit to house explorers in the early days before the satellites were in place to create the protective shield against radiation. Once upon a time they had housed everyone. Now they were part meeting place, part general store, and part bar. Scout's work delivering packages on her bike had largely been from one such public house to another in a different town.

  "Can I help you?" a woman asked. Scout's still sun-dazzled eyes took a moment to pick out the speaker, a woman with massive arms and red hair pulled into something between a ponytail and a bun. She was the proprietor, Ruby Collins. She had also once been one of Scout's mother's closest friends, back before she had died.

  "Hey," Scout said, stepping up to set the crate on the counter. Ruby peered at her suspiciously for a moment before her eyes lit up with recognition.

  "As I live and breathe, Scout Shannon!" she exclaimed. "I almost didn't recognize you. I thought someone had stolen your father's hat!"

  "It's been a few years," Scout admitted.

  "More than that," Ruby said, coming around the counter to gather Scout up in a stiflingly tight hug. "You're shooting up like a weed." She released Scout from the hug but grasped both of Scout's arms to hold her still as she looked right into Scout's eyes. "You're older in lots of ways, I reckon."