“For the others it’s not as bad. Even Arvex doesn’t have to listen if he doesn’t want to. He’s always been better about relying on his instincts. But everything I was taught makes me reach inside myself and they’re always there, waiting for me.”
My wild ideas about abandoning all of this and making a new home in this alien sea, returned tenfold. I wanted to take her there so we could both escape. Maybe the deeper she dwelled, the harder it would be for the memories of her ancestors to get through.
I wanted to reassure her, but everything that came to mind only sounded like filsh wastes. So instead I held her tighter, with a scythe pressing against my side and a knife between our suits and the fire too hot against my thigh.
Adi’s tinkering had stopped long ago, but I ignored the scathing look she was sending me from the other side of the flames. She could go shove her opinions up a leviathan’s tail for all I cared. And if she made any more jokes about the Royal in my arms after this, I swore to myself, I was going to make her pay in blood.
While Qeya slept, I returned to the gaping hole that had been the deck’s hull. I dragged my thumb over my gauntlet and watched as a soft light emitted from between my webbed fingers and illuminated the wreckage inside. Qeya had avoided coming on deck two since she came to us. When I looked at it, I tried only seeing parts and plates hiding the gears inside. The projected images of home world no longer flickered against the walls. Adi had tasked me with draining as much excess power as I could transfer to the Pioneer.
I knew if I didn’t busy myself, after what Qeya had told me, I would start to lose it again. I would be unable to resist the urge to kiss her or grab her and drag her into the sea. But now that I knew about the others and their memories, I knew she would never come willingly. Stealing her from them without her consent would make me the beast. And this time there weren’t any monsters waiting to be slain out in the wet forest. I would have to focus my inner savage nature in ways other than fighting. I approached the power grid that I had grabbed hold of the moment second deck split from the main ship and began to fall into Nukvar’s outer sphere. Clenching my jaw, I pushed past the memory of the children screaming and gripped the edge of a closed section. The rip of metal echoed through the hollow hull. After tossing the metal aside, I lifted my gauntlet to look at the pulse of blue energy traveling through wire coils and circuits.
I had always had affection for metal and inventing things, always known where the wires went, how they came together like a nebulous web. Never could stand to mine dust and gasses like the others. Fixing things was something I understood. I couldn’t fix her. I couldn’t fix any of the others. But the ship I stood a chance with.
As I connected the cable to my gauntlet, Adi appeared.
“Don’t speak of Qeya,” I warned as she came to crouch down beside me. Her eyes gleamed like tiny twin leaves as they met mine.
“Good to see you working for a change,” she gruffly replied.
I ignored her and hoped she would leave me be. Any other sane miner knew to leave me to get rid of the darkness in my own way, or send me away. Adi had been living with Royals for too long. She might skin me for telling her so, but she was a lot softer than I remembered, before she joined the shuttle crew.
“Ohre, you know we must send her back. She doesn’t belong here with us out here, away from her kind. And from what I heard tonight, she sounds a stone’s throw shy from going mad…”
“Told you not to say anything,” I grunted low as I twisted the cable free and clenched my fist. More energy was in my gauntlet than there should be and the pressure gave my skin a faint buzz. If she kept talking I might plant it in her chest.
“They all sound cracked,” she said. “I noticed it when the ship crashed. Captain, Remin and Kall seemed hale enough, aside from their shock. But Min, Qori and Tamn were…off somehow, worse than water-logged.”
The lights from the console faded and I ripped another panel free, and then threw it so it barely missed her leg. Adi was silent until I started to drain the last power cell. Her hand on my arm startled me. She had never touched me before unless necessary, or to maim me. If I weren’t the mistrusting miner I claimed to be, I’d have said she was trying to be gentle with me.
“You’ll fry your gears if you don’t get rid of the last batch.” Her grip tightened for an indeterminable moment.
I nodded and stood, then braced my hands on the edge of the consol. A fine layer of dust and grime already coated the once pristine screens and buttons and levers. I stared at Adi’s reflection beside mine.
“We have to let her go, Ohre.”
“I don’t want her to go alone.”
After another pause, she motioned to an even darker corner of the tilted deck. “Come, let me show you something.” We walked over old training equipment and avoided the empty barracks, in favor of gray and white checkered panels. Here was where the projections of home world had constantly played, a leaking reminder of what they would never return to reclaim.
Adi shared a secret grin with me before she placed her fingertips over the panels, reached for the creases. “You never cared much for how Datura 3 was made. You came to us after and for so long you were nothing more than a wild sea urchin,” she laughed roughly at her own joke.
I rolled my eyes and studied her movements, waiting for her to tell me something useful.
“Royals took over our ship, Ohre, but they couldn’t take our imprint. We were the ones who made it, savvy? Don’t you be forgetting that.” A light emitted from the cracks in the paneling. I stepped back when the gray ones pushed out from the hull and watched as Adi pried a square metal sheet from an illuminated box.
“What did you do?” I asked her, frowning and gaping at the stash of gasses, chole dust reserves, data pads and weaponry waiting inside.
Adi snatched a compressor and grinned at me. “We hid these here before the Royals came on board, back when this was our quarters.” She passed me several more reserves and I shoved them into the various pockets in my tool belt. There was enough power in one of these tiny vials to travel 80K leagues in the heavens. And then I looked up, realizing just how many more storage units there were.
“What else have you hidden?” I thought of the transmission against my wishes, heard the panic in their voices once more. What bothered me most was the fact our scanners picked up chole dust on a solid world, when usually they were only found on gas worlds. It made me wonder if my adoptive clan had other reasons for planting the Royals on this hostile alien planet. What if they wanted to manipulate the Royals into colonizing so they could take back control of the ship and leave them behind?
Adi twirled a blaster between her fingers. “Something’s been on my mind that I kept from you, mate.”
“Besides all this?” I asked dryly and motioned to the rest of the units. Her grin made her slanted eyes even narrower and reminded me why I had stayed away from the females of my kind in the past. All of them tended to be too conniving anyway, more likely to bite your head off than kiss you.
“I told you to forget about the Royals, but if we want to get Pioneer off the ground, we’re going to need Remin.” Before I could question her further, she turned her back on me and began to shove more supplies into the sack she had brought in with her.
Remin was the other miner on the Pioneer and had not only designed the shuttle, but all of Datura 3. He was so brilliant the Royals took him from his clan and made him build more ships, more weapons, and more technology they could steal from us. He was also the miner I watched get speared by the Var, the same day we found the shuttle crew and lost half of them.
“You’re the one who’s leaking in the brain,” I finally said.
Her voice hardened and her shoulders stiffened but she didn’t look at me. This was a bad sign. “There are things about ship crafting I have no knowledge of. No way a miner couldn’t survive a splinter wound like that.”
“He didn’t show with Tamn, Adi.”
“Tamn’s weak!”
she hissed, rounding on me and snatching me by the metal collar of my suit. “He blacks out and wakes up alive, means he’s lucky. Don’t mean the others are dead. And fact is, unless you want to spend the rest of our lives trying to make a bird fly that can’t, we’re going to solve both our problems. We’ll escort her royal highness back into that valley and once we send her on her way, we’re going after Remin.”
IV
Return
As a boy, I used to have what Old Brien called “night terrors.” Most miner younglings dreamed about mining and adventure in the heavens, anything to get them off the clustered caves the Royals assigned us to. Their bad dreams might carry them to the Royal palace or strip them of their clan so they were totally alone.
My terrors were darker in nature. I dreamed of leviathans deep in the darkest reaches of the sea, of blood smoking the water and explosions of white hot heat seeping from the core. In my dreams I could never swim fast enough to escape that bone-melting fire. And when it did swallow me whole, after the pain, I found only blackness.
I learned how to live without sleep quickly. Still, I would lay in rest, but never let my mind drift totally. That had worked for years. I thought I was free from night terrors until our ship was attacked and we crash-landed on a hostile world.
In the Nukvar Valley, there lived night terrors that didn’t exist in dreams, but attacked while sleeping. I needed to always be on my guard when living with the other survivors in our cave. After slaying that first four-legged stripe-back in our cave, I realized we were living on the edge of predator territory. I decided the Royal younglings didn’t need to know about that, though it might have helped me to have another pair of hands to hunt. The longer the days were spent in hopeless search for the missing shuttle crew, the more I began to crave those nightly hunts.
Only after she chose him and the tree village did I realize what I had become. I was no better than the monsters of my night terrors. Seeing her Tamn, a Royal that seemed to breathe the qualities I could never claim, made me see how less of a hunan I could be. Tamn was Royal superiority without the cruelty some of them showed us. He didn’t lord over us the fact that he was considered better than miners. The whole time she was dead to the world between life and death, he rarely left her side. I watched them from the shadows and guarded the door to her tree hut and couldn’t help but listen. That’s how I knew she was better off with him than with me, much as I wanted to claim her for my own with every part of my gray gills. I was the night terror.
I wasn’t excited to return to the hidden valley the Nuki’s called Nukvar. We had crashed much further up the beach not so long ago. Adi had liked the caves when I showed them to her on our way back to the crash site. She said it was the perfect defensive position in case the ones who fired Datura 3 from the heavens came back. But every space of that cave carried memories for me. I didn’t want to remember the Royals I had left behind.
The cave bled out into the sea and it was through the sea we swam up into the mountainside. We climbed out to the caves Qeya and I had claimed from the beasts. I wondered, as we drew closer to the ledge opening overlooking the valley, if I was coming to live or to die.
Adi’s mission was just short of a death stroke. I knew she wanted to leave Qeya once we were close enough to the Nuki village. Then she wanted us to find our missing crew member. If we couldn’t—and if we made it out of this pit with our heads attached—we’d have to find another way to fix the Pioneer. But there was more to Adi’s reasoning to find Remin; maybe something having to do with her clan’s original plan. Would they have really dumped the Royals on Heaven’s Edge?
At least we all had fresh weapons. Even Qeya was armed with one of our mini-blasters, though I knew she was good enough with her scythe to slice through drops of rain. This gave us better odds than the first time we came to Nukvar Valley.
When we arrived at the cave, much had remained untouched. I was surprised none of the beasts, whose territory we had invaded, had come to reclaim this place. But the piles of decimated bones and the used fire pit might have been enough to ward any lesser predator away. It also helped that I had smeared the entrances with the creature’s blood that first night. The Royals complained of the scent, but even they knew it was better to use the beasts’ hide than offer up ours.
We camped that first night of our return to the cave in our old spot, just shy of the ledge overlooking the forest below. Adi made herself busy checking over our supplies and starting a new spark for the fire pit. Qeya stared at Jymee’s rock etchings for some time, while I rummaged through the piles of forgotten items. Looked like the Royals hadn’t come back to retrieve their things. Not so strange, considering the trouble we went through to get to the Nukis village. How Qeya had managed the journey out to us on her own made me wonder if the others knew she had come after all. Surely Tamn and Arvex would have never allowed her to come alone. When she first showed, I half expected the others to come blasting into camp with her.
Adi sat hunched over a handful of data pads and explosives. I had a few ideas of what she had planned once we sent Qeya back to her kind. None of them sounded good to me. It wouldn’t be the first time I disagreed with my own people.
“Ohre?” Qeya’s voice pulled my gaze from Adi and back to her startling eyes. “Did you hear what I said?” I nodded and checked over my personal arsenal one more time. She sat beside me, curious as she had the first time she asked me about my weapons.
“You were telling me something about the younglings and the Nuki?”
Her smile brightened the darkness of the cave and the mission ahead. “They finally finished mending their abandoned section of the village. It’s been difficult keeping everyone disciplined to their studies when there is so much to do. Gem wants to learn to hunt from the trees. Bruv and Kahne spend all day setting up traps in case anything tries to attack us again. Jymee has grown close with some of the Nuki children. They’re such strange creatures and can barely speak as we do, but they have other ways of talking. They speak with their hands, like this, see?” She motioned with her hands and arms as though weaving patterns in the air, like a dance.
Adi scoffed nearby but I ignored her and asked, “Have they told you anything more of their enemy, the Var?” I wanted to know what kind of trap Adi was insisting we walk into. If all went to plan, Qeya would be long gone by then.
Qeya shuddered, her inner lids closing over her golden eyes. “No one speaks of them. Arvex has been trying to learn the language so he can speak to the chief, but there is little contact between the two species, except in death.”
“I’m going to get some fresh air,” Adi announced, twisting her blaster and shoving it into the holster tied to her thigh. She marched out the cave entrance and merged with the darkness outside. I was glad to be rid of her for the moment. I knew she must be thinking of Remin and the other adults.
I glanced at Qeya while keeping my eyes on the cave we had called home for too short a time. Now we were alone, I wanted to ask her more questions, about this valley, and especially why the Nuki stayed in the interior. I squashed the harder questions that insisted on rising to the surface, like why she chose to stay in her village instead of coming with us. Not that I didn’t agree with her choice. But maybe I was regretting leaving without asking her first.
Being the miner I was, I blurted out the first blubbering thing that came to my head. “We could have stayed here, you know.”
Qeya’s breath hitched, startled, “Wh-what?”
I waited to answer, to better sort my thoughts before something equally blithering came flooding out of my trap. I picked up my little collection of left behind artifacts, Jymee’s drawing rocks and Menai’s collection of dagger teeth, Kahne’s leaf and twig samples and the jaw of the beast that Gem kept and had often used. Qeya reached out to touch Bruv’s ruined dagger, a left over from home world.
“We could have stayed here, all of us, instead of dividing.” I didn’t bother to add that I would have been fine to see the litt
le ones safe in those trees. Part of her belonged with them, I knew. But another part of her, the part that had kept them alive with my help, belonged to the wild things, to the savage power hidden inside of her.
To me.
She pursed her lips together, glared at the pile of crude mementos of a time her family seemed to want to forget. Was this why she had come? Not just to learn the truth of what happened the day we crashed, but to bid that day farewell forever? Something feral and wild raged inside of me at the thought.
“They don’t know you came, do they?”
“No,” she whispered.
I growled low and clenched my fists to keep from doing anything stupid. “Why?” I asked hoarsely.
Why did you come?
Qeya looked up and swallowed thickly before affirming my fears. “To say goodbye.”
After Qeya was fast asleep, I ordered Adi to guard the Royal, caring little that each barely tolerated the other. Qeya could hold her own against Adi in a fight, long as she kept her retractable scythe on hand, which she always did. It was time that I went to work. I pressed my middle finger into the gauntlet to activate it and as the metal bits shifted and opened to reveal the inner settings, I switched it from something suitable to blasting through rocks, to something better suited to killing. I climbed higher than the cave entrance to a narrow outcropping that hung just above the ledge overlooking the valley below.
For a moment I let the night air carry scents from the forest beneath us, and the stale smell of old kills that lingered around our cave. I could see the tiny spotting glow of fires now, as I occasionally had before when we searched half blindly for the Pioneer. Somewhere out there, the Royals were living their new lives. Elsewhere, the Var waited. Unlike Adi, I had little hope that the adults, Remin particular, were still alive. Unlike Adi, I now had nothing to live for. Nothing but the hunt, but the sea and the freedom it promised.
Ohre (Heaven's Edge) Page 4