What awaited them on Anat? Turning her thoughts to a different subject, she recalled the pictures she’d seen of the planet—warm days, but very cold nights. The settlers, a colony of less than two thousand people, were forced to grow their crops in specially designed greenhouses as the produce would freeze at night.. No one wanted to live on Anat and only those with the worst credentials were sent there.
They’d started with a colony of a hundred and were slowly growing, even though quite a few had died, probably due to the slag. Many of the settlers didn’t realize what caused their diseases. They thought it was inherited from the Earth days or perhaps some alien bug they weren’t adapted to fighting. She wondered if any of the people on Anat were aware that it was the slag causing their problems. She tried to remember the origin of the ships she’d destroyed, but couldn’t recall any coming in without clearance from Anat.
How would the colonists receive them? Would they be willing to help? Would they give them clothing and supplies? The questions roiled through her mind until she went brain-dead. There was too much to think about. It was better to concentrate on nicer things, her childhood.
When they’d migrated from Earth, her father had chosen the planet Brinta, a beautiful planet with a temperate climate. Lovingly, she recalled the white pony her parents gave her on her sixth birthday. Within days, she was riding on her own all over their huge farm. She smiled at the recollection. She’d treasure her childhood memories forever.
It had taken her a long time to accept her separation from her family. Her mother was pregnant when she’d left. She wondered if she had a brother or sister out there somewhere. Determining to try and find out one day, she felt her eyelids droop again.
She thought about the parents she’d lost, her mother whom she resembled. After she was chosen for the program, she hadn’t seen either of her parents again. It was a rule. The chosen had no contact with family members until they were eighteen. When she was thirteen and inquired about her parents, they told her they’d died some years ago of a strange affliction. Probably induced by the damn slag, she thought bitterly.
Between dozing and thought, time passed, albeit slowly. Every now and then, one of the men looked at their timepieces using their flashlight.
“We should arrive pretty soon,” Josias said. “Good thing, too. Our tanks are near empty. It won’t be pleasant getting dumped with the slag. Be prepared to be somewhat buried,” he warned.
Isan removed his mask for a minute. “We need to move into different positions so that we fall apart. Just in case one of us is buried too deep,” he suggested.
“I agree.”
“How much of a drop do you think there will be?” Haven asked.
“I’ve never been dumped before, and neither has Isan. I don’t know,” Josias said and chuckled.
“What about the tanks?” she asked.
“They’ll just get dumped with us, but unless we can get oxygen on the planet, they’ll be useless. We have about half an hour of oxygen left,” Isan said. “We’d best get into position.”
“Is there no way to get to the back of the slag? Then at least we’d fall on top of the stuff instead of get buried by it,” Haven wondered.
“We can’t chance using that door and the walkway. It’s possibly the only one. There might not be another door further down. As you can see,” he shone his flashlight at the pile of slag. “It’s piled to the sides and to the ceiling. There’s also a thick steel automated panel the full width and height of this hold that pushes the slag out. I don’t relish getting squashed by it.”
“It was a thought. There has to be at least ten ton of it. What if they dump it all on one big heap?”
Isan answered her. “I’ve seen how they dump it. They fly very slowly and it dumps gradually over a very large area.”
A grating sound joined the loud humming of the engines and the cargo door sluggishly slid open. Haven was relieved to see a strip of light appear that slowly widened until the door was gone from sight. She was glad they’d arrived during daylight hours and not at night.
Taking off his oxygen mask, Josias warned them. “As soon as you start to slide down with the slag and you start falling, swing your body away as fast and far as you can. That’ll help to land near the outer edges of the dump rather than in the center. Haven, get closer to Isan or me, please?”
“Holy smokes, that’s a hell of a drop,” Haven shouted as she peered over the edge.
“Probably about thirty feet. I hope we make it without breaking any bones,” Isan shouted back. “Get ready. I hear the engines changing their tune so it’ll move pretty soon.”
He’d no sooner finished speaking when the slag behind them moved. Haven leaned sideways as much as she could. The door was like a giant fat slide. Isan, beside her, didn’t even make it down to the bottom as the stinking material pushed them outward. He slipped off the side almost right away. Haven took a deep breath and hoped he’d be okay. She slid to the bottom fast. Her heart thundered as she flung her body sideways as soon as she encountered emptiness. The air swooshed through her lungs as she tumbled toward the ground. She tried to straighten her body but it was hard as she gathered speed.
When she hit the ground, her breath was knocked out of her. She gagged and groaned, then gasped for air. The air whistled from her lungs until she could steady herself and take a breath. She’d fallen just to the side of the slag. Some of it had broken her fall. Gingerly, she got to her feet, shook her arms and stomped her feet. Everything seemed to be intact. No broken bones. Frantically, she looked around for Josias and Isan.
A short distance away, a hand appeared from beneath the slag. She rushed over and dropped to her knees, digging. It was Josias. He gasped and spat grey sludge from his mouth when she brushed the filthy material from his face. “That was some fall. Where’s Isan?” he asked after digging himself out and getting his breath back.
“I don’t know. He fell before me, right after the door descended, so his fall was much higher than ours.”
“Oh, my God! I hope he isn’t buried under that enormous pile.” Josias nodded toward the stinking mound.
They rushed to the mountain of slag and were about to start digging when they heard a shout to the left. Following Isan’s voice, they scrambled in that direction.
“Look, a lake,” Haven said. “It’s got some kind of crude wooden walkway built over it that leads to the slag pile. There’s wooden stairs down to the community at the foot of it.”
They reached what looked like a cliff’s edge. The water was about three feet below the flat rock surface they had stopped on. They saw Isan swimming toward shore. He tried to climb onto the edge but kept sliding back into the water. Haven and Josias hurried to him, lay flat on their stomachs and pulled him out.
“That water’s like ice,” he said, shivering, his skin a bluish tint.
“Probably runoff from the snow on the mountains. We’d better start crossing that bridge over to the other side. Looks like that’s the only way to get to civilization. You going to be okay until we get there?” she asked Isan.
Isan looked dubious. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. Let’s get going. By the way, that water is salty as hell. Couldn’t be from the mountains, unless there’s a sea up there.”
“It must connect to an ocean somewhere,” Haven said, observing Isan. His teeth chattered and she knew he was freezing cold, but there was no way they could help him. They had no extra clothing, no warm soup, no blankets. Every few minutes, they stopped and sandwiched him between their bodies to give him some warmth. It was all they could do and it helped a bit, but also caused Haven and Josias to get wet and cold, though Haven warmed up fast again thanks to her body temp control enhancement. For the first time in her life, she was glad she had all her special abilities.
On the bridge, they had to tread with caution. Several planks were rotten. Haven wondered if the settlers even used the makeshift bridge to get to the slag dumps. “Maybe they don’t use the slag,” she commented w
hile avoiding two broken planks. “There seems to be an awful lot of it.”
“You could be right. How could they move the material across this? It would collapse in seconds,” Josias said.
Haven glanced worriedly at Isan. His skin was blue. The cold didn’t bother her that much. One of her enhancements controlled her body temperature. Obviously, the men didn’t have that one. If they didn’t get Isan indoors soon, hypothermia would set in.
At one point, the supports that held the walkway creaked suspiciously. They hurried as fast as they could.
Once they raced down the rickety stairs, they stood on rough ground. Haven scanned their surroundings. The land was sparsely vegetated. There was a scattering of trees, their roots exposed above ground and the branches reaching down to the soil like an umbrella. Alien vegetation had never ceased to fascinate her. The settlement wasn’t too far away. They hurried across the almost barren land toward the houses. To the side of the settlement, she saw several large greenhouses. She pointed at them. “That answers one question.”
They headed for the first house that looked as if it was built by a mud-smith. The bricks were of crushed rock and clay. It didn’t surprise her. The planet’s soil was as hard as rock. Glancing at the other houses, she noticed they were all similar. They all had thatched roofs and smoke spiraled from mud-brick chimneys. She wondered where they found the materials and where they lived while they were building their homes.
When they’d reached the first house, Josias banged on the wooden door several times. It opened, finally. A man in his late forties greeted them, his face displaying surprise.
“Visitors! We haven’t had any visitors on Anat since I was a child! Welcome, strangers. Come in!”
He spoke with an accent. A woman sat at a crude wooden table. The man spoke to her in French. Haven understood, but didn’t let on. He turned back to his visitors. “I’m sorry for speaking in my native language. I asked my wife to make soup for you. You must be cold. Please, come close to the fire. My name is Pierre Blanchet, my wife’s is Danielle.” He held his hand out to Josias, then to Isan and Haven and they introduced themselves.
“I wonder if you have dry clothing we can borrow? Isan fell in the lake and the walk across the bridge was long. He is very cold,” Haven told Pierre.
“You walked on that bridge? It’s very dangerous.”
“We noticed,” Josias said.
Pierre took Isan under his wing. “I will help Isan and fetch clothing for you. Please, sit near the fire.”
It was deliciously warm inside the house. Danielle had disappeared through a door, probably gone to the kitchen to do as her husband had asked. Pierre returned, clothing hanging over his arm.
“Isan is enjoying a hot bath at the moment. Please, make use of these. I will ask Danielle to take care of your wet clothing, though it is hardly suitable for this environment.”
“Do you mind terribly if we bathe, too, after our friend is finished? Do you have enough water?” Josias asked.
“We have plenty. Our water comes from an underground spring.”
“How do you heat the water? You seem to have no electricity,” Haven said, glancing at the oil lamps and candles.
“The fire is kept burning day and night. One of our engineers devised a system that allows it to heat our water. Where is your ship? Are you the only crew members or an explore party?”
Haven hesitated. She sent a look to Josias who nodded. “We are escaped prisoners from the Dahkhar Mining Corporation. We came on a freighter, a slag ship. We managed to escape by hiding in the cargo hold with the slag. When they dumped the slag, we got dumped, too. That’s how Isan ended up in the lake.”
“Ah, that explains it,” he said and chuckled. “The smell. I did not want to be rude, but you all stink very bad. You were not followed?”
“We don’t know. By now, the authorities will know which ship we used to escape and its destination. I hope we’re not important enough for them to send their fleet to capture us and take us back. It would mean the death penalty or permanent banishment to the deepest mines,” Josias told him.
“I wish they’d stop dumping their toxic waste here under the pretense it’s fertilizer for our crops. It’s good we are so far away or I’m sure they’d punish us for not using it. It’s highly toxic, contaminated. Eventually, it’ll mix with the hard soil and loosen it and maybe one day in the distant future, we can till a field and during the warmer months, grow crops outside.”
Haven noticed his face take on a more serious expression and understood why when he continued.
“My father was a scientist. He was one of the first to become very ill. He spent the remainder of his life looking for answers and teaching and training several young men. We have three scientists among our people now, thanks to my father’s teachings. Just before he died, he discovered it was the slag causing the diseases, which at that time we were using in our greenhouses. He cultivated a serum for those who could still be saved and he discovered how to detoxify the slag.”
He stopped, for a moment, emotion at the memory of his father getting the better of him.
“They don’t dump that often anymore because our planet isn’t suitable to cultivate what they want mostly, the cannabis sativa, more commonly known as marijuana. A single, healthy plant is worth much gold, or for settlers, more slag, supplies. It needs a tropical climate to be grown en masse. Our planet’s soil isn’t suitable and neither is the climate anywhere on Anat. Of course, they didn’t want to spend their resources on building huge greenhouses.
“Many planets have a suitable climate to cultivate the plant. We were supplied with enough seed to grow thousands of hectares, but when the powers that be found out the seeds wouldn’t even germinate on Anat, they confiscated it all and pretty much abandoned us. They only dump slag here now when there’s a surplus and they have no place else to go with it. In the beginning, they dumped it several times a week.” He stopped for a moment to stoke the fire.
“What they don’t know is that we’ve successfully cultivated the plant in one of our greenhouses. We grow a supply, use it for medicinal purposes only and make paper and oil from it. Its oil is the purest and burns very cleanly and its fiber makes excellent paper. The seeds we can use to produce a varnish. Our plants and crops flourish in our greenhouses, without the use of slag.”
“I thought as much. When I saw how deteriorated the bridge was, I was sure you didn’t use the slag. There’s no way you could get it across that. How do you detoxify the slag?” Haven asked.
“The formula my father discovered is made from the pink and white stones he found in a large cavern deep in the mountains. He brought a bag of stones home and analyzed them and experimented. It took some time, but he hit on the right mix and since then, we’ve never looked back.
“Now, every time they dump slag, a team goes there to detoxify it. They wear protective clothing and masks then spray the whole area where the slag’s dumped. The detox team is probably there now doing just that.”
“How do you get there? Across that rickety bridge?”
“No, we have our landgliders, again, old fashioned according to today’s standards, I’m sure, but they do us fine. Our population is still small and we only have a few villages. We go around the lake to the other side. The gliders are very old, but we have managed to keep them going.” Pierre rubbed his stubble thoughtfully. His keen gray eyes scrutinized each of them. “Why were you imprisoned? What did you do?”
“We don’t know. They suspect us of being part of a resistance organization, which we are not. Although, we are against what they’re doing to the settlers. They don’t care about the people. All they want is for them to work the land and grow their crops. Doesn’t matter how many die, young or old. They take no interest in the settler’s welfare. They just want what they produce, and now that you’ve told us what the main crop is, it explains a lot,” Haven said. “It also explains the erratic behavior of many of the higher officials and the rich. I’ve
heard of marijuana—we learned about it in history class. But I thought it was banned, even for medicinal purposes because of abuse and misuse, and eradicated many centuries ago. How did they manage to get hold of so much seed?”
“There must have still been well-hidden illegal operations in various countries on Earth,” Pierre said. “That’s what my father told me.”
Danielle returned carrying a tray with steaming bowls. Haven inhaled the aroma. It smelled heavenly.
“I hope you enjoy our simple fare. We are mainly vegetarians, so there is no meat, but the soup is very hearty. We do eat fish, but not from the lake nearby. There is an ocean not too far from here. We have built boats and often go deep sea fishing. Our parents learned a long time ago how to live on this planet and to utilize its vegetation and resources,” Pierre told them while Danielle handed them each a bowl and a spoon. She set a platter on a small table nearby filled with chunks of dark bread.
“Does your wife speak no English?” Josias asked when Danielle spoke to Pierre in French.
“Yes, she does, but her English is not so good, so she is embarrassed to speak it. Our parents only spoke French. Later, when more settlers arrived, many of us had to learn the English language so we could communicate. Our children speak it fluently. As for the authorities, they’ve pretty much forgotten about us. No new settlers have arrived for a very long time, and we only occasionally get their slag dumps now, as I told you.”
“Are there aliens on Anat?” Josias asked.
“Yes. They’re very peaceful and quite friendly. We trade with them. Eat your soup before it gets cold. We can talk more, later.”
Haven hadn’t realized how hungry she was until she started eating. Pierre hadn’t lied that it was hearty. It was the best soup she’d tasted in a very long time.
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