The Split Skies (The Possessor Wars, Book 4): The Possessor Wars, Book 4

by Chad Spencer

  Jeff slumped into the pilot’s chair, his head spinning. After a while, he mumbled, “I flew. Just like in the AR program. I had wings and a tail and I flew.” He stared out the window. “Eden, is this your doing? Or is this some sort of weird dream? I’ll bet that’s it. I bet I wake up in my bed soon.” But he knew that wasn’t true.

  Jeff guided the shuttle back to the Ellsworth. He watched the snake-things, which he decided to call seasnakes, using the ship’s scanners. After three days, they left the island. Jeff returned to his farm to survey the damage.

  Only his house was worth saving. All of the other buildings were destroyed. He stood there, his heart like a stone.

  “There’s no place for me here,” he told himself quietly. “I can’t live on this planet. And I can’t leave.” He heaved a sigh, feeling trapped. Jeff’s legs went out from under him. He plopped into the mud. “I’m going to die here alone.”

  How long Jeff sat in the rain and the mud, he didn’t know. Bob came to his side and nudged him. Eventually, he hauled himself out of the mud and onto his feet. He went into his house, tossed his clothes into the wash, and took a shower.

  To his surprise, he found Arvix fixing him a hot meal. He ate on the porch with Bob beside him. Harriet’s voice made happy noises from his pocket watch sitting on the bench. After a while Harriet’s image asked, “Would you like to hear some music Jeff?”

  “Yeah,” he answered hollowly. A song emanated from the watch. As the music washed over him, Jeff wondered how he could protect himself and his farm. The data crown responded with ideas from many different colonies. ‘Wait,’ thought as the datacrown flooded his mind with possible solutions. ‘That one. But how can I build it?’

  “The Ellsworth is supplied with nanobots that can build this structure,” answered the datacrown.

  “Of course!” Jeff exclaimed out loud.

  When he was done eating, Jeff went to the workstation in the spare bedroom. Working rapidly, he wrote and tested a fairly simple program. When it was functioning perfectly, Jeff uploaded the program into the Ellsworth’s computer.

  The next day, Jeff went to the ship. He made a beeline for the container of nanobots that was secured in cargo bay 1. He dispensed a single drop of the fluid containing the nanobots into a container that was about the size of his thumb. Next, Jeff took the container to a special machine in Central Computing. The machine, through tiny, was one of the most expensive pieces of equipment on the ship. It was used to program nanobots.

  Working quickly, Jeff loaded his program into the nanobots. Returning to the planet’s surface, he followed the directions of the datacrown and walked a precise distance from his house, with Bob bouncing along beside him.

  Jeff opened the small container and poured the liquid on the ground. He turned, scooped up Bob, and ran to the shuttle. Boarding the small spacecraft, he and Bob lifted off and returned to the Ellsworth.

  Using the ship’s scanners, Jeff monitored the nanobots. After an hour or so, he could see a grey stain spread across the muddy fields. Over the course of the day, the stain spread into a large circle—a twenty-acre circle. By the following day, the circle was rising into a network of jutting posts, each set two feet apart.

  As the nanobots worked, they built triangles on top of the posts. Triangle by triangle, they constructed a steadily rising dome complete with large, solid doors at the base on the north, south, east, and west. When the dome was finished and Jeff was sure the nanobots were inactive, he returned to the planet below.

  Jeff’s house was now encased in the safety of the dome. Around him was a circle of plasteel posts that were stronger than any seasnake and too close together for the giant creatures to get in. Above him rose the latticework of the dome. Even if the seasnakes could get over the beams, they still couldn’t get in through the triangles overhead. All they would encounter was the dome, which was made of the same stout super-plastic. Nothing of any size could get at him now.

  Jeff spent most of the next week fixing his battered house with parts he brought down from the Ellsworth. When it was all done, he went outside for a look. To his surprise, he heard a high-pitched whining behind him. He turned to see an onslaught of small seasnakes slithering toward him. Although he was apprehensive, he wasn’t fearful; the tiny seasnakes were only about two feet long. He went inside the house and watched them through the front window. In a determined march, they made their way to the ocean and disappeared beneath the waves.

  The following day, the rainy season ended.

  6

  Jeff basked in the sunny morning light and listened to the puddles of water drain down to the river and out to the sea. He looked over his devastated farm. “I’m going to have to rebuild sooner or later,” he said. “But I think I’ll do it later.”

  Walking slowly up the hill next to his farm, Jeff thought about what had happened. “I have super powers,” he whispered. “Like someone in an AR program. I can fly. I can make fire and lightning come from my hands.”

  He paused and looked toward the hill’s summit. “I wonder what you’ve done to me, Eden. What have you turned me into?” He continued toward the hill’s crest. When he got to the top, Jeff took a deep breath. The soggy land below him steamed moisture in the tropical sun.

  “How do I make those wings come back?” he asked the world before him.

  He closed his eyes and recalled how it felt to have wings and a tail. When he opened them, they were really there. They were exactly like the wings and tail he’d had in the AR program. He spread them, ran forward, and took off.

  Skimming over the grassy hillside, Jeff glided gently down to the dome surrounding his farm. Landing, he stood gazing up at the sky. After one more brief glance at his wings, Jeff sprang forward, leaped into the air, and then flapped his way upward.

  It was better than the AR program. It felt more real than anything he’d ever done. With the wind flowing through him, Jeff truly felt that he was a part of the sky. He reeled and danced over the green countryside and over the deep blue sea.

  When the sun was setting, Jeff finally landed. After dinner, he went to bed with a hopeful, satisfied feeling. That feeling didn’t continue long the next day. As he stood outside, he saw an indistinct but bright shape flying toward him. With growing apprehension, Jeff grabbed Bob and got into the shuttle, which was parked just outside the dome. He turned on the scanners and was appalled to find that a ball of fire was coming toward him from the mountains in the interior of the island. Turning on the shuttle’s external speaker, Jeff shouted, “Arvix! Run over here and get in the shuttle pod now!” The robot obeyed instantly. He lifted off and set course for the Ellsworth.

  Using the high-resolution scanners in main Engineering, Jeff could see that the fireball was actually a flock of animals. Looking like hideously deformed cats with the bodies of pterodactyls, each creature oozed a sticky liquid from every pore of its body. As soon as the liquid was exposed to air, it burst into flame. These creatures were literally flying balls of fire.

  “Fireflies,” he said as he watched the images on the scanner’s display. “I’ll call you fireflies. Now I know why there’s no trees on the island or other large animals. I’ll bet you’d fry them if there were.”

  The flock of fireflies was just arriving at his dome. Being made of super-strong, high-temperature nanotube plastic, nothing the fireflies did would affect the dome. But that was not true of Jeff’s house. They attacked it angrily, instantly catching it on fire. But when the heat caused the plumbing to burst, a jet of water shot up. Many of the creatures were soaked. They fell to the ground, writhing. The rest of the flock scattered in a frenzied panic.

  “Water,” he said, watching the scanner. “You die if you touch water. That’s why there’s grass. It’s wet all the time so they can’t touch it and burn it all away. And that’s probably why the seasnakes lay their eggs in the rainy season.”

  Jeff watched as his house burned to the ground. Everything he owned was gone except the clothes on his
back and the watch in his pocket. But he knew what to do. “The first thing I worked on when I got onto the Living Ship project was plumbing.”

  Getting back into his shuttle, Jeff docked at the front of the ship. For the next three weeks, he worked at Stacey’s old workstation in Central Computing. When his program was ready, Jeff obtained more nanobots, downloaded his program into them, and returned to the planet.

  With considerably more confidence, Jeff poured the nanobots out on the ground next to his dome. After a couple of hours, tendril-like vines emerged from the ground and wound themselves around the posts at the base of the dome. Over the course of the rest of the day, they continued upward until they were intertwined in the entire superstructure of the dome. The following morning, Jeff observed with satisfaction that the vines had all expanded in diameter and become pipes. In a few days, the nanobots built a network of sprinklers on the beams of the dome. He had Arvix bring out a pump he had obtained from the Ellsworth and he connected it to the shuttle’s power feed and turned it on.

  The pump, like the other colonization equipment, immediately began babbling about how wonderful it was. As it did, it used a pulse laser drill to dig its own well. It didn’t have to go very deep. Jeff connected the pump’s output to his sprinkler system.

  “When I rebuild my house,” he said, “I’ll connect the house’s power to the pump. Then I’ll program the house’s computer to turn on the water jets if the fireflies ever come back.”

  Jeff started the long process of bringing down parts for a new house, barn, and some greenhouses. After a week, Lakota returned alive. She was genuinely glad to see Jeff.

  “How did you survive, girl?” he asked as he stroked her neck. The mare just nuzzled him.

  Many weeks passed, and Jeff got everything rebuilt, replanted, and repopulated with farm animals. He even got himself another guitar from Chief Connors’ stash. This one was green, his favorite color. Since his workstation was destroyed with his house, he brought Stacey’s workstation down from the Ellsworth so he could continue working on the Living Ship.

  Weeks turned into months. Bob continued to grow until he was much larger than the dogbugs in his original colony. Jeff noticed that Bob’s front legs were getting longer than his back legs. As time went by, Bob moved in a more ape-like fashion. “I wonder why Bob looks so different than the other dogbugs?” he wondered aloud.

  His datacrown told him, “Some life forms have variable DNA sequences. An example is the Corlean bantermonkey, which absorbs DNA segments from its owner and takes on more human characteristics with long association.”

  “You mean Bob is turning into something more like me?” Jeff asked incredulously.

  “It is within the realm of possibility,” replied the datacrown.

  As time went on, Jeff could see that the datacrown was probably right. Bob quickly morphed into a cross between a bug and a gorilla. He was as tall as Jeff’s shoulders. “From dogbug to gorillabug,” mused Jeff. “I sure hope you don’t turn into anything weirder.”

  As the days passed, the fireflies returned a few times, but Jeff’s sprinklers worked perfectly. The fireflies fled in hysteria when the jets shot water into the air, soaking everything below. The flock wouldn’t get near anything that was wet.

  Bob’s front paws formed themselves into hands. He soon learned to climb, and could often be found skittering among the beams of the dome overhead as he barked happily.

  Jeff continued to develop the Living Ship. He was doing so well with it that he decided to change the design. “If I leave this planet, I want to have my own farm,” he told himself. “The Living Ship is three miles long. That’s plenty of room for a few small biodomes.” So Jeff selected five cargo bays along the top of the ship and deleted them from the design. He replaced them with three biodomes that were connected with large tubes that would enable occupants to walk directly from one to the next. Making the changes took months of additional work. But Jeff was satisfied with the result in the end.

  Working on the Living Ship was teaching Jeff a lot. Adding biodomes required him to study biology, climate simulation, and even marine biology for the fishponds he wanted. ‘I think I’m learning more here than I would in the Academy,’ he thought. He was pleased.

  Jeff was also happy with the progress on his farm. He now had a steady supply of food. He flew often, watching out for fireflies when he did. He also rode his mare often, but she was getting fat. He wondered if she was eating too much grass. “She’s pregnant,” Jeff’s datacrown explained. Jeff was elated.

  After a few more months, the foal was born. Jeff was nervous going into it. ‘What will I do? I don’t know how to help a horse give birth,’ he pondered. In the end, he didn’t have to do anything. Lakota took care of it all, and before he knew it she had a new colt. He was red like his father.

  ‘I have everything I could ever ask for,’ Jeff mused. ‘A house, land, animals, all the food I can eat, clothes, and the best guitar I’ve ever seen. And I’d trade it all for some company.’ His now-familiar loneliness crept over him like a stifling fog. Jeff shoved all thoughts of other people out of his head and tried to focus himself on the new colt. As he watched the colt climb shakily to its feet for the first time, he thought, ‘This is a special day. I should keep track of it. I wonder what day it is?’

  “Insufficient data,” the datacrown answered.

  “What do you mean?” Jeff asked out loud. “What day is today?”

  “Define day.”

  “Define day? The sun comes up, the sun goes down, it comes up again, and that’s a new day.”

  “This planet has a twenty-five-point-three-hour day. Earth has a twenty-four hour day. Which definition would you like to use?”

  “How long has it been since I arrived on this planet in this planet’s years?”

  “1.233 planetary years have passed.”

  “What is it in Earth days?”

  “You arrived on this planet on April 25, 2735. Using Earth’s dating system, today is July 3, 2736.”

  “2736! I was born in 2701! That would make me 35 years old! How old am I really?”

  “Adjusting for the time you spent in cryostasis, you turned 16 years old on June 26, 2736.”

  “You mean I’ve been 16 for a week and I didn’t even know it?”

  “Correct.”

  Jeff could hardly believe that nearly 15 months had gone by since he arrived. “More than a year. I’ve been by myself all that time. I wonder if anyone will ever find me?”

  “Insufficient data. However, it is customary in these situations to transmit a distress message.”

  “Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Insufficient data.”

  “Oh shut up. I’m not talking to you.”

  Using his datacrown, Jeff logged onto the Ellsworth’s communication system. He swiveled all of the ship’s antennas but one so that they pointed outward, away from the planet. He left one aimed toward planet Akio so that he could stay connected with the ship. Jeff directed the computer to broadcast an emergency distress message telling anyone who might be out there that he was here. ‘But it’s not very likely that someone’s out there to pick up my transmissions,’ he thought forlornly.

  Jeff thought no more about the beacon as the days continued to pass. The colt, which he named Duke, was soon prancing through the pastures. Everywhere on his farm, there was new life. The cows, goats, pigs, and chickens also had their newborns to care for. His fruit trees even bore small fruit for him.

  Jeff spent a lot of his time working on the Living Ship. Arvix did all of the cooking and housework. Jeff was able to download a lot of Sirsen Darnell’s recipes from the Ellsworth’s computer and have Arvix prepare them perfectly, so he ate well.

  To keep himself entertained, Jeff played his guitar nearly every evening after dinner as he looked up at the planet Harriet. Sometimes in the late evening, he would watch old movies on the 3V or play games he downloaded from the Ellsworth. The ship had a lot of
videos and games stored in its computer.

  Jeff was content, except for the haunting loneliness. Increasingly, his thoughts turned to his father, to Harriet, and to Akio. At times he thought of Chief Connors, José, Wendy, and the other friends he had made on the Ellsworth.

  When the loneliness got to be too much to bear, Jeff went flying. That always made him feel better. He stayed away from the craggy, volcanic mountains in the interior of the island because he knew that’s where the fireflies lived. Instead, he flew along the coast and out over the sea. He got to know the outer edges of the island pretty well.

  One day, Jeff returned from flying and put his datacrown on. He seldom wore it when flying. He didn’t know why, he just didn’t like it on while he flew. On this day, as soon as he put it on, the datacrown told him, “You have one new message.”

  “What? What do you mean, I have a message? A message from who?”

  “You have one new message from Kent Bowman. It arrived 61 minutes and 15 seconds ago.”

  Jeff went to the house’s communications panel. For the first time since he’d lived in this house, he turned it on. “Play messages,” he commanded. Immediately, his father’s image appeared on the display.

  “Jeff? Are you alive? I thought you were dead. All that stuff fell on you. I never would have left you if I’d known. I didn’t know until I got your beacon.” Tears streamed down his father’s face. “Jeff. If you’re alive contact me. Call me as soon as you can. I love you son.”

  The message ended.

  Dazed, Jeff stared at the blank screen for a while. Finally, Arvix told him, “Your dinner is ready, Master Jeff. Will you be dining on the porch as usual?”

  “Y-yeah. I’ll eat on the porch in a minute. I’ve got a message to send first.”

  “Very good, Sirsen.”

  Jeff began recording a message on the comm panel. “Dad. I-I got your message. I can’t believe you’re alive too. I wasn’t sure you’d make it in those small shuttles. I’m … ok. I live on a tropical island. I have a farm here. With animals and everything. I’m just … alone, really alone. And I’m really glad to hear from you. I … I love you too, Dad.” He directed the comm panel to send the message to the Ellsworth, and then used his datacrown to get the Ellsworth to transmit it to his father.