The Star Bell (The Cendrillon Cycle Book 3)

by Stephanie Ricker

  “Movement again,” she said, reaching out for the rope and setting one foot against the trunk.

  “Guess my theory about the squirrels being diurnal was wrong.” When nothing happened for a moment, he holstered his pistol long enough to grab the rope in both hands and haul her up as she climbed, doubling the speed of her progress. She swept the trunk with her helm light while he untied the rope from the burl.

  “What? No sense in wasting good rope,” he said in answer to her questioning glance. She smiled to herself. Her father would have approved, she thought irrelevantly; he hated wasting anything. She jogged up the wide trunk towards their skiff, and he fell into step beside her, winding the rope around his arm.

  She stopped abruptly and made a small noise in her throat. Karl stopped short and looked at her sharply. “What?”

  “You weren’t wrong about the squirrels. They don’t come out at night,” she said in a low voice that she had to will not to tremble. She didn’t move.

  “How do you know?” he asked, matching her tone.

  “Because other things hunt at night. Look on top of our skiff,” she whispered.

  She saw the light of his helm travel up the trunk, brush over the blood-stained skiff, and cast into sharp relief the hulking creature she had seen above it. Taloned feet held the mangled carcass of a squirrel firmly in its place, draped on the roof and partway over the rear hatch. Grey-green feathers the same color as the tree leaves covered the body and head of the squirrel’s killer, which would make it nearly invisible if it weren’t moving. The owl-like animal took another chunk out of the squirrel with its hooked beak, slicing through the tough squirrel hide with ease. It obviously knew the sailors were there, and just as obviously, it didn’t care.

  Karl took a step forward, and the owl-like creature turned its head, revealing monstrously large eyes. A nictitating membrane flicked down over the right eye as it looked into the glare of Karl’s light. The eye was the size of a dinner table. Its shoulders hunched higher than its head, and its wings trailed the tree trunk behind the skiff.

  Elsa’s heart sped, but she held perfectly still. She was no stranger to large predators on Anser, and she found herself defaulting to survival instincts she hadn’t tapped in years. Aim for the eyes, she thought. That would be their best chance to disable it. If their pistols were slow to take down the squirrels, they were unlikely to fell a bird of this size. She drew her pistol slowly.

  Karl’s calm, thoughtful voice broke her concentration. “We have to get inside that skiff, but I don’t want to shoot it if we don’t have to,” he commented. “We’ve done nothing but shoot up the planet since we arrived, which is the opposite of our mission.”

  Elsa actually looked away from the raptor to stare at him in utter disbelief. How had he survived this long? “Are you kidding?” she hissed. “We’re out of time! Even if we weren’t, this thing could eat both of us and still polish off a squirrel for dessert. We need to kill it.”

  Now he looked startled, perhaps by her slightly bloodthirsty suggestion. “This is a brand new species—”

  “Karl, we are out of time,” she repeated, clipping off each word. The owl shifted its grip on the squirrel as if punctuating her statement.

  To his credit, he made his decision swiftly. “True. Let’s aim for the legs and see if we can get it to take off. If that doesn’t work,” he said quickly, forestalling her protest, “we’ll kill it.” He aimed his pistol, and she did the same. They fired simultaneously, and the bird took off with a screech of pain, spiraling upward and leaving its prey behind on the skiff roof.

  The pair sprinted forward, boots pounding against the trunk. The trunk was wide enough for them to run side by side, but Elsa’s helmet hindered her peripheral vision.

  She didn’t see the owl swoop low over them.

  Karl’s startled yell made her spin around just before she reached the skiff hatch. The owl had him by the shoulders, one talon scrabbling against the smooth surface of his helmet, and was trying to lift him off the trunk. Its wings beat mightily, but it kept losing its hold as its legs misbehaved. The legs had to be paining it after sustaining two pistol shots.

  Elsa used both hands to hold her pistol steady and aimed carefully. Her pistol shot hit the bird directly in its left eye, and with a piercing cry, it released Karl. His boots were a few feet above the tree trunk when it did so, and he hit the bark with a thump.

  He fell in a crumpled heap, but nevertheless he was on his feet in an instant before Elsa could do more than take a step in his direction. He bolted for the skiff, waving Elsa back. “Stay there,” he choked out. “Don’t give it two targets.”

  Elsa shuffled quickly backwards, keeping her pistol high, until she felt her boot hit the edge of the skiff. She opened the door swiftly, ducking the bloody squirrel leg dangling down from the roof, and fired past Karl as the bird circled around again. The shot didn’t make contact, but the bird veered away, and Karl leaped through the hatch into the skiff just as she slipped through herself. She sealed it as he slid into one of the front seats.

  She was behind him before she even thought about what she was doing, pulling her gloves off and tossing them aside. “How badly are you hurt?” she asked, breathless with fear. His suit was torn over both shoulders, and blood stained the suit and was spattered on his helmet.

  “It’s not mine,” he gasped out, powering up the skiff with one hand. He was talking about the blood, she realized. “At least, very little of it. Most of it is the bird’s.”

  “So some of it is yours.” She unclasped his helmet and pulled it off, letting it fall with a clatter to the deck. She ran her fingers over his hair, looking for a head wound. Some part of her brain was shrilling an alarm, telling her that they needed to take off before their window closed, but another, more insistent part needed to know that he would survive.

  “My shoulders are hurt,” he admitted, “but I can feel it isn’t serious. I need your help on the controls.”

  She withdrew her hand from his head, but her other hand rested lightly on his back without her remembering when she had put it there. She shoved aside her worry for him with an almost physical effort to focus on the other problem. “I’m no good with weapons,” she warned. “I’ve never flown a vehicle that had them before.”

  “I’ll take weapons if you can pilot us out of here,” he countered.

  “That, I can do.” She slipped into the seat next to him and ran through the fastest pre-flight check of her life. The skiff lurched into the air ungracefully in less than a minute as she tried to avoid the thick foliage. She winced as they crashed into a limb, feeling a new respect for Arne’s piloting skills. She could see nothing through the viewscreen due to the darkness, so she relied entirely on instrumentation to tell her what areas were clear.

  At last, they popped out of the canopy. Dim light filtered through the viewscreen from the planet’s moon, and Elsa could see moonlit clouds moving across the sky. The forest below them was a gently moving sea of darkness; she imagined she could hear the leaves rustling in the breeze.

  The skiff lurched starboard like a drunken mammut, and an alarm went off. The tip of one taloned claw screeched against the viewscreen as it slid into view. The bird had them.

  “Here we go again,” Karl said. “Throw us into a steep climb if you can. This thing can’t breathe in the upper atmosphere.” He added, “I hope.”

  Elsa struggled to comply; the controls were sluggish at best. The engines whined with the added force placed upon them. They climbed skyward, and after a moment, the bird released them with one last wrench. Its claw left a deep score on the viewscreen.

  “I’m sorry,” Karl said.

  Elsa risked a glance at him. “For what?”

  “You were right. We should’ve just killed the bird as soon as we saw it.” He sounded very tired. She worried about the severity of his wounds, but she couldn’t spare the attention from the controls, and depending on what the hostile was and if it was near the Sovereign,
they might need him on the weapons console.

  “I’m not sure I was right,” she admitted. She looked at him again. His face was pale. “You and I have had very different stories till now,” she said. “Life on Anser was a struggle. If you weren’t fighting the climate, you were fighting the lycaons and the mammut. That life fosters strong community bonds, because you need each other to survive, but it also fosters an act-first-think-later attitude. That’s not always helpful in less desperate situations, I’m coming to find.”

  The ghost of a smile crossed his face. Elsa drew a shaky breath as the skiff finally broke free of the upper atmosphere into clean space. “Being a cinder was the same. We cinders learned to rely on one another like family, but the life was still hard—and frequently desperate. It encouraged minute-to-minute living.” Elsa started a scan for any ships in the area as she talked. “But you’ve grown up in the Fleet. You’ve seen death too, I know, but daily life is less of a struggle to survive. You have room to be thoughtful and compassionate. That’s one of things I like about you and want to learn from,” she admitted, looking down at the controls fixedly. “And when it comes to our mission out here past the Periphery, your attitude is more helpful than a kill-or-be-killed mindset. We’re here to learn and explore, not destroy everything we touch on the way.”

  Karl laughed, sounding more like himself. “Perhaps. But if we had acted on your mindset, I wouldn’t be nursing a sore pair of shoulders right now, and we wouldn’t be eight minutes from our deadline to reach the Sovereign. As it is, we got off easy; that bird could’ve killed us, or there could be a Demesne ship waiting to blast us out of the sky.”

  Elsa brought up the results of her scan. “Fortunately, the only ships in the area are the Sovereign and the other skiff.” Karl didn’t respond, and she looked over at him. His expression made her ask, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Shouldn’t the Sovereign have initiated communication with us by now? At the very least, why didn’t the other skiff call us when we were delayed?”

  Elsa’s breathing quickened. He was right. Something was wrong. “The first skiff shouldn’t even still be out here,” she realized. “They’ve had plenty of time to get back to the ship.”

  “I’ve called both the skiff and the Sovereign without any response,” Karl continued. “When I spoke with the ship earlier, they said that the hostile was interfering with communications.” He narrowed his eyes, gazing through the viewscreen.

  “Then it must still be here,” Elsa said softly. “But there’s nothing on the scans.”

  They could see the Sovereign now through the viewscreen, small but rapidly growing larger.

  “Does the Sovereign look right to you?” Karl asked, frowning.

  Elsa looked. The large white ship seemed normal to her. “Yes,” she confessed. “But you know her better.”

  “Let me try to increase magnification,” Karl said, fiddling with the controls. “Arne is better at this,” he muttered. “There.”

  The Sovereign seemed to jump towards them as the viewscreen magnified.

  “What the hell is that?” cried Karl.

  At first Elsa couldn’t see it. Then the surface of the ship seemed to move. There was something large and white on top of the ship—and it was alive.

  Karl tried calling the Sovereign again, and a garbled whine filled the skiff. He shut down the commline in disgust. “That thing must be causing the interference. Do you see the first skiff?”

  Elsa checked the scan. “It’s stationary, just hanging off of the Sovereign’s port bow.” She looked at the creature again. “They’re probably afraid to go closer, especially since the Sovereign obviously can’t drop the shields long enough to let us in.”

  Karl whistled as he looked at the readouts. “The Sovereign isn’t doing so well. The creature is giving it a pummeling. We all need to get out of here.” He sat up straighter, wincing as his shoulders pained him. “Take us over to the other skiff and see if you can get them to follow us.”

  “Follow us where?” Elsa asked, altering their course to intercept the other skiff.

  Karl squinted at the magnified view of the creature, which was becoming larger still as they approached the ship. “It looks like it’s focusing on the area above the gunwale. If we go around to the prow of the ship, the Sovereign might be able to drop just the forward shield alone to let us in. Then we can go into sailspace and lose this thing.”

  Elsa looked at him doubtfully. “You think the Sovereign will figure out what we want?”

  “Oh yes.” The confidence in his tone was heartening. “My father knows we’re out here and need a way in, and he also knows he can’t keep the Sovereign here much longer. He’ll figure it out. He has quite the flair for the dramatic,” Karl added dryly. “He’ll love this solution.”

  Elsa eyed him. “You don’t possess that same appreciation for melodrama, I take it.”

  “No,” Karl said explosively, “I do not. A source of much contention between my leadership style and my father’s, I can assure you.” He seemed about to say more, but changed his mind.

  Elsa decided now was not the time to plumb the depths of Tsarevich family relations. She approached the other skiff and flew around it so that the two skiffs were facing each other.

  “Inch us forward a bit more, if you can,” Karl requested.

  Elsa eased the skiff closer—close enough to make her nervous. The proximity alarm began its whine. Space vehicles were usually trying to stay out of one another’s way, not fly up in each other’s faces. They were close enough now that she could make out Anders and Ginevra in the front seats of the other skiff.

  Karl got up from his seat and went to the back of the skiff, returning a second later with one of the portable analysis pads Louise used in her work. He used a stylus to write “FOLLOW US” in large letters, using up all of the space on the pad. He held it up to the viewscreen.

  Anders squinted and shook his head. He looked over his shoulder, and a moment later, Marraine appeared, standing between the two front seats. She looked at the message and spoke to Anders. Anders gave a thumbs up.

  Karl cleared the text from the pad and wrote, “ENTER AT PROW.” Again, Anders acknowledged after Marraine translated.

  Karl cleared the text one last time and wrote, “STAY CLOSE.” Anders nodded vigorously.

  “I think he’s got it. Marraine must have great eyesight,” Karl commented.

  All of this was taking far too long, in Elsa’s opinion. “Ready to go?” she asked, already turning the ship.

  “Aye.” Karl tucked the pad away.

  Elsa flew them to the Sovereign’s prow and crept forward until an energy field alert told her that she was right up against the shield. The second skiff crowded in close behind, near enough to trigger the proximity alarm again. Karl grumbled something about the noise.

  Elsa smiled in spite of herself. “You’re more of an old man than your father,” she teased. “How will we know when the shield is—oh.” The energy field alert vanished from her console. “Looks like it’s down.”

  She sped through the opening with Anders’ skiff hot on her trail, and a fraction of a second later, the shields slammed back up behind them.

  Now that they were inside the shield, they could feel the ship shudder as the creature battered it. Fortunately, the shuttle bay doors were on the underside of the ship, so the bulk of the Sovereign stayed between them and the animal. Nevertheless, being so close to the creature made Elsa nervous—who knew what it would do next? She zipped the skiff along as fast as she dared within the confines of the shields, pulling up short outside the shuttle bay doors.

  There was a slight delay, presumably while the bridge crew passed the word to open the doors. Just as Elsa was wondering whether they’d sent someone on foot to relay the message, the shuttle doors opened, and she and Anders flew their vehicles inside. Elsa was proud of her landing; she’d never landed a skiff before, and if it was a little bumpy, Karl had the good grace not to commen
t.

  The Sovereign immediately went into sailspace the moment that the shuttle bay doors closed. The sailors piled out of their skiffs only another moment later.

  Anders made as if to thump Karl on the back as the two lieutenants reunited, and Elsa interposed a hand between them before he could touch the wounded man. “Easy, don’t touch him; we were attacked by an owl. I’m not sure how badly he’s hurt.”

  “Not badly,” Karl said, but the statement lacked conviction.

  “Whatever,” Anders said, and he herded the lieutenant over to join Louise, who was standing awkwardly on one leg like an ungainly bird.

  The door leading to the main corridor slid open, and Hon burst through, anxiety etched on his face. “Where is she?” he demanded unnecessarily, spotting his wife even as he asked the question. He charged over to Louise.

  She stopped him with a hand laid gently upon his chest. Elsa expected bluster and possibly a tongue-lashing from Hon for allowing his wife to be injured, but both the engineer and the geologist were silent. Hon reached a hand out and cupped the side of her face, then ran his fingers along her jaw. Louise smiled and ducked her head to kiss the tips of his fingers.

  Both gestures were so loving and intimate, Elsa suddenly felt like a voyeur. She looked away. Marraine was very pale, she realized. The fay was staring at the blood on Karl’s suit, visibly disturbed.

  Elsa grabbed her friend’s arm and steered her away trying to distract her. “Don’t worry, he’ll be fine. Sickbay will have him patched up in no time. Let’s head for the bosun’s station. Bruno can give us the news on the creature. Have you ever seen anything like it?”

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Anders pounced on Elsa. “You’ve been exposed to an alien atmosphere.”

  “Is that what you think of me?” Marraine asked with a mischievous lilt.

  Elsa stared at her. “You…have definitely been hanging around Jaq too much. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you crack a joke.”

  Marraine shrugged, another gesture she had picked up from her human friends. “We’re all alive. I’m in a good mood.”