Spectra Arise Trilogy

by Tammy Salyer

  The barrier’s rusting plates of metal and discarded junk give way easily under the tracker’s relentless pressure, and we hit the grassy plain outside, slowly gaining speed until we max out at the vehicle’s limit, forty kilometers per hour. The earth is bumpy and uneven, and a long, slow whine clanks from the tracker’s undercarriage after we’ve gone a few klicks.

  “Looks like this is as far as we go for now,” I tell Vitruzzi.

  She barely dips her head in acknowledgment and continues staring through the window at the scrubby hills beyond.

  Pulling to a standstill, I leave the engine running. “Look.” I have to speak with more force than I normally would just to get her attention. “V. We’re out of the woods. Those crab-things aren’t going to get this far, and I highly doubt there’re any more scavs in the area. And the best news…” I pause, hoping for a reaction, but get none. Sighing, I finish, “Is that they have a receiver, maybe even a transmitter. They said they heard chatter after we went down. Which means there’s a working satellite up there somewhere. I propose running a recon back to the camp later on and see if we can find their unit. We have a better chance of getting rescued if we can send a message. Are you reading me?”

  She nods.

  For a second, I just stare at her, trying to assess what had put her in this wicked state of mind and what I can do to change that. She’s just sitting there like a zombie, and finally, I snap. “I don’t know what the fuck your deal is, Vitruzzi, but you need to get your head back in the game. We’re in some serious shit—”

  She slaps me so hard my opposite temple whacks into the back of the cab with a dull thunk. Fury and boggled disbelief paralyze me, and I stare at her with my hand pressed against my burning cheek and reopened split upper lip. Almost immediately, her face relaxes from the mask of rage that had slipped over it to genuine regret.

  “I’m so sorry, Aly. I don’t know…”

  I finally find my voice. “What the hell was that for?”

  “I don’t know,” she repeats, sounding completely believable. She really doesn’t know what she’s doing, or why. Vitruzzi, for all her stalwart and controlled composure, has cracked.

  A knock at the window behind me draws my attention. It’s the kid.

  “You think we’re in the clear?” he says, his voice muffled through the window’s composite material.

  Shooting him a thumbs-up, I return my attention to Vitruzzi, a hundred different thoughts about what to say to her tumbling against each other in my head like sand on a stormy beach. She’s leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, her hair coming loose from the braid it’s normally held back in and sticking to her damp and salty cheeks. My stomach does an uncomfortable flip-flop at the sight.

  Unable to conceal my anger, I say, “Let’s check on our passengers.”

  ELEVEN

  “God, what a fucking mess,” one of the refugees, a youngish, dark-haired woman named Cari, says as she looks over the cannibal camp. “I don’t think we have to worry about the scavs anymore.” She tosses a disgusted look in my direction.

  The tracker’s night beams wash over the inner courtyard, glistening off puddles of viscous fluid that look like oil, but which we all know are blood. A few mangled bits and pieces of the scavs dot the area. And that’s it. The crabs must have dragged off the bulk of their victims. I shudder, not at the gore, but at the memory of the creatures. If the critters back on KL give me the creeps, those crustaceans were enough to make my blood freeze. I’m just hoping they stay gone until we get gone.

  When we’d made our escape I’d hardly been worried anyone from the camp would chase us. It seemed the whole entourage had been out trying to fight back the crabs. If any had survived, they had more to worry about than trying to hunt down us escapees. Regardless, with the extra two weapons I’d found in the tracker’s cab, a pistol and another carbine, and help from the passengers, we’d stayed put and set up a watch until dark, keeping our six covered.

  The kid from the other Galatea salvagers—I finally got his name, Ryan—turned out to be a big help with the tracker. The engine was fine, but its fuel cell was low on water. He told me we could use seawater if we needed to. Lucky for us, we’d only been a klick from the high-tide line. After a discussion with the rest of the refugees, some who’d seen the Admin ship drop into the ocean, our best guess is that the disturbance caused by the crash may have been what sent the crab-things onto land. Apparently the cannibals weren’t the only predators in the area with a taste for human flesh. The most important thing is that it looks as if they’d returned to their normal hunting grounds before we came back.

  We’d lost the unconscious woman just before dark. With no medical supplies, there was nothing Vitruzzi could do for her, and the swelling on her brain went critical. The two men with her explained that they’d been abducted by the cannibals while out on a long-range search for resources, downed ships, scraps from orbit, things like that. Vitruzzi bandaged the arm of the man who’d been shot by the guard—a superficial wound, fortunately for him—while they described their own settlement that lies over six hundred klicks to the northeast. Others from their group had run into the cannibal enclave months earlier but escaped without being detected. These three had been desperate and foolish enough to travel on their own without sufficient firepower and been hijacked. The price could have been all three of their lives instead of just the one woman, but I hadn’t needed to offer my opinion on it. They already knew.

  “Ryan—you stay on my ass and hold that Max at the ready. Cari, keep that ’bine tracking along the edge of our light. Anything that moves gets a bullet. Copy?”

  Ryan nods, and Cari waves the affirmative from the tracker's roof. I glance back inside the cab, where one of the dead woman’s friends is driving, and give him a nod. We push forward, walking slowly while the vehicle follows in our rear. Our destination is the main building—or rusted shack—where I’m hoping the former inhabitants’ communications equipment is kept.

  The camp is eerily quiet, the air heavy with mist. Despite that, the disquieting stench of dead bodies lingers lightly, as if the back of my nasal passages have been permanently stained by the smell. The tracker makes the only noise. I have to admit that I admire how quietly the kid walks over the packed sand and rock. Nothing moves in my periphery, and I keep us moving forward. Only twenty meters to the shack.

  A carbine being fired explodes through my focus. A blossom of dirt spikes up about eight meters to my left and lingers in the thick air and light of the tracker’s beams.

  “Cari?!” I yell, needing to know what she’s firing at.

  “I thought I saw movement,” she replies as the tracker halts.

  “Thought or did? Now is not the time for guesswork.” Keeping the irritation out of my voice takes more energy than I can spare. I’m tired, hurt, hungry, and at my limit. The fact that everyone else is too doesn’t reduce my frustration. At all.

  “Uh…thought.”

  “And now?”

  “It’s, uh, clear.”

  Swallowing my suggestions for what she can do with the next round of guesses she may have, I wave my free hand at the kid and start moving to the shed again.

  Before we reach it, I note that the door hangs ajar on slightly bent hinges. It looks deserted, the inside blacker than the barrel of the pistol I carry. There’s no way I’m walking in there without light. No way.

  “Kid, go to the back of the tracker and ask Vitruzzi for her VDU.”

  He hurries around the vehicle, and I keep pressing forward until the tracker’s front end is only a couple of meters outside the doorway. Movement is limited to a few shadows bouncing around the interior, which only increases my nervousness. Shadows? Or men with guns? Or worse—critters with pincers the size of my forearm?

  Ryan comes back and hands V’s wrist communication unit to me. Turning the display on and setting the screen to full bright, I press up against the shed’s exterior wall, crouch, and flick the VD
U inside. It comes to rest near the shack’s center, throwing a strong white glow up to the ceiling. Nothing moves. This could go well, after all.

  The kid tries to move past me, apparently judging the lack of movement to mean all clear, but I grab his arm and pull him up beside me. Pressing my fingers against my lips, I stare hard at him, making sure he stays put. I cup my hand behind my ear to indicate he needs to wait and listen, and we hang tight for three full minutes before moving again.

  Finally, I pick up a nearby pebble and toss it in, waiting for any response. Still nothing. After turning the display on my own VDU up and cautiously moving inside, I strain my eyes to catch any surprises.

  The place is trashed. Consoles lie scrapped on the floor, toppled from makeshift workbenches, their wires jutting in every direction.

  “Sonofabitch,” I whisper, dropping my arm, still holding the pistol, to my side. Our chances for contacting the scouts just dropped to zero, and I don’t have the most positive outlook about spending what could amount to weeks on this rock waiting for them to find us.

  The kid steps over to a cracked screen and picks it up, eyeing it critically. He puts it back down and looks over the heap, then moves toward the back wall behind the workbench. “Huh,” he grunts.

  “Jubels,” I shout at the driver of the idling tracker. “Back up. There’s nothing in here.”

  Could the day get any worse?

  “There never was.”

  Turning back to the kid, my expression makes him flinch. “What?”

  “There never was anything in here. This”—he sweeps an arm over the broken equipment—“is all just junk. There’s no power coming in.”

  “You’re saying there may be another com setup somewhere?”

  “Well, yeah. If they were telling the truth about picking up a transmission, there has to be. Right?”

  Right. But where? Everything in this camp looks as stripped and bare boned as their recent meal du jour. Before I open my mouth, he says, “What about that wrecked lander? It has to have a comsys. Could be what the scavs were using.”

  Where did I find this kid? Once more, he could be right. This camp looks like no more than a junkyard where even the junk is too run-down to be considered refuse. Besides the tracker, the only other thing that isn’t totally derelict is that landing craft.

  Waving him forward, I reply, “Let’s check it out.”

  * * *

  I know I’m not the only one that feels a monumental sense of relief as the landing lights of not only the Orika but also the Teibo descend out of the sky like twin dei ex machina.

  The kid was clever, just as I’d originally thought. The lander’s receiver worked just fine, but the transmitter had required some TLC and very ingenious jury-rigging of the tracker’s fuel cell to feed power to the lander before we’d been able to send a signal. My electronics skills are enough to help me arm an explosive device or short out a lockpad, but Ryan turns out to be a jack-of-all-trades. He figured out what the transmitter needed and how to get it done within minutes, and now that his shock has worn off he hasn’t shown any signs of fading in the twenty or so hours since we’d met aboard the Galatea. I grow happier with every passing hour that I hadn’t shot him. His kind of handiness is the mark of a true survivor, someone who’d made it through the war by being adaptable, smart, and quick on his feet. Just the kind of asset—and person—we could use on KL. Depending on what kind of provisions are left on the scouts, and whether or not this kid has anywhere else to call home, I may make a case for bringing in another stray.

  Our ships locked on to our signal within a couple hours of Ryan’s magical fix-it skills. The junction box kept overloading, so we couldn’t maintain a conversation with Zeta on the Teibo, but we had managed to give them our coordinates. We’ve rotated standing watch, two per shift, since then. This isn’t the first all-nighter I’ve pulled, and I’m still on watch while the suns’ glow begins tracing the scouts’ hulls as they drift onto a flat landing area just outside the compound.

  David and Karl are the first ones to come through the main gate, where we’d cleared away the hastily piled-up obstructions.

  “I can’t even tell you how glad I…oooph.” This is all I get out before Karl has me in a hug so tight I think he might dislocate my ribs.

  “Dammit, Aly,” he says. “Don’t do that to me again.”

  My right arm is pinned against the spikes still embedded there, and I suck in a breath as he squeezes me tighter.

  “Shit, are you hurt? Let me see your lip.” He pulls back and stares squinting into my face. His hand comes up and gently cradles my cheek as he glares at my upper lip. “Where else?”

  “Nowhere. Just these…I don’t know…crabby, spikey things in my side. I’m okay. Really.”

  David’s face rearranges into that frustrated-at-having-been-freaked-out older-brother smirk, and he steps up. “I’m glad you’re safe, Twig. You said V isn’t doing well? Where is she?”

  Indicating the tracker with my chin, I answer, “She’s back there. Been sleeping all night. She’s not hurt, didn’t take a hit or anything, but she’s just…off. You know, the twenty-meter stare in a ten-meter room type of off.”

  “What the hell happened down here?” Karl asks, finally looking around and taking in the scenery.

  TWELVE

  “Whoa! Hey, get a room.” As I walk inside the Orika’s main cargo bay, Zeta and Desto have themselves entwined in an amorous embrace so flamboyant it could make a kagema blush. “There’s a kid present for God’s sake!”

  Desto lets his hands fall from Zeta’s ass, and she turns to smirk at me. “Kid here? C’mon, Aly, I know you’re not that puritanical. This kid”—she pats the small bloom of her three-months-pregnant belly—“isn’t going to grow up with any illusions about where she came from, anyway.”

  “And what’s wrong with the room we’re in?” Desto adds. “Plenty of space for everyone in here. What do you say, sweets?” He winks at me.

  Zeta laughs and gives him a playful slap on the cheek. “You’re going to embarrass her, Bomani.”

  “I swear, Bomani, I can’t believe you’re breeding, especially since every other ex-Corpsmember in the galaxy still shoots blanks.”

  “Ha!” He snorts, gently taking one of Zeta’s hands in a gesture I find surprisingly sweet and protective. Desto may be a letch, but there’s no doubt of their love for each other, or that he would do anything for her. “The Corps should have known better than to think they could drown the power of my epic swimmers.”

  I pass by, shaking my head. “A soldier can’t even walk through her own scout without feeling like she was just violated when you’re around.”

  “Aly, you quit being a soldier the first time you saved someone’s life,” Desto says, and his deep laughter follows me through the inner hallway as I make for the locker room.

  I’ve just finished filling the two crews in on everything that had gone down during these last few hours for V and me. No one was surprised; we’ve all seen or heard the stories about camps like this one. After I introduced them to Ryan, Karl woke Vitruzzi, and Desto and Zeta came back aboard to start the preflight routine, freeing up the rest of the crew to begin attending to the mostly low-priority wounds, mild dehydration, and extreme hunger of the remaining fugees. We are all exhausted, even the crew that had been searching for us. The word relaxation doesn’t exist when your friends are in trouble and you’re not sure where they are or how to help them. It had all turned out for the best—this time. The scariest part, and the one we all work hard to ignore, is that if anything were to happen to us out here, no one on KL would ever know.

  Once in the locker room, I drench a towel in hot water from the reserve tank and grab the hem of my shirt, already gritting my teeth against the pain I know is coming when it brushes over the embedded crab spikes.

  “When we're ready to launch, it may not be easy to keep them off the ships.”

  I spin around and find Quantum standing in the doorway,
his unreadable gaze assaulting me. His comment catches me totally off guard. “What?”

  He moves to the window port that gives a view of the exterior and flicks his hand at the group of eight adults and four kids still milling around the tracker outside. “The fugees. We don’t have provisions, or room, to bring them all with us. We’ll run out of food and water at least a week before we arrive at KL.”

  I take a seat on one of the benches. Fatigue is beginning to make my limbs heavy. “Have you said anything to V or Karl?” I look back through the port, where my view settles on Ryan helping one of the children with the lid of a water bottle.

  Quantum’s right, and he knows I know it. However grudging and hostile our understanding of each other is, Quantum and I are similar in our pragmatism. In a world that has come to rely on fact over feeling to survive, this shared quality has made us ideological, if not actual, allies.

  “Erikson, Vitruzzi is not capable of being trusted with the kind of decision that has to be made about them. She’s—”

  “Hold it, Quantum. You watch what you say about her.”

  His eyes flash with anger, but intelligent anger. The man is genius, and not just intellectually. He’s clever and cunning. “Look,” he continues, “you know I’m right. She needs a…vacation. Some time away from the pressure she’s under from running her personal little fiefdom.”

  “She doesn’t need a vacation. She needs a shrink. But that doesn’t matter. She’s the leader on KL, her and Brady. They call the shots, that’s how it is, and this conversation isn’t happening without her. Come on.”

  Fucking stingers aren’t going anywhere for a while, it looks like.

  Once outside, I lean against one of the Orika’s ramp struts and catch David’s and Karl’s attention, waving them over. When they get close to us, I say quietly, “Quantum just brought something up. I want to get your opinions on it.”