Zenn Scarlett

by Christian Schoon

  Liam turned his face to her. He mouthed the word: “Nexus?” Zenn just shrugged.

  The other voice said something, then the skirni, “I know because I… felt the nexus, felt it reach into my mind. It reached into my thoughts in her room at the Ciscan stronghold. And it permitted me to see, see into this human. She is unaware. I saw this in her. She has no idea what is happening, that the fate of worlds lives within her. How could I know all of this, unless the nexus is waking?”

  A pause, the skirni pacing. “No. I cannot risk remaining on this planet. The goat-woman has been apprehended. The man Dokes attempted to escape. I am told the local enforcer Jakstra confronted him. This Dokes failed to comply and was shot in his leg with a gunpowder weapon. They will both be imprisoned, I am sure. They have been told of the consequences if they speak of me, but I cannot trust in their silence. I must leave.”

  Another pause, then the skirni: “No, this does not matter. If the boy is found, he knows nothing… Yes, he told me of the girl and her communing with the animals, but he knows nothing of the nexus. He is of no importance.” It was Zenn’s turn to give Liam a questioning look. He didn’t meet her gaze.

  The skirni went on: “I will return to the Helen. We will decide then what to do.” A short burst from the other voice. The skirni stopped his pacing, shouted, “I am not to be blamed for her vanishing. It is not Pokt’s error.”

  No further words were spoken. The skirni’s footsteps receded, the door opened and shut.

  “Any idea what that was all about?” Liam said as he helped lower Zenn down from the crate. “Something… inside of you?”

  Zenn shrugged. “It’s… nothing I can really explain.”

  “Yeah, fine by me. Less talking, more leaving.” He was at the door again. He opened it, scanned the area outside. “He’s gone. Come on.”

  “No,” Zenn said. He turned back to her.

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “I mean… I’m staying.”

  “Staying? Here?” Liam said, incredulous. “You can’t stay here!”

  Zenn walked back to stand next to the sandhog’s shipping crate.

  “Gil’s hog is being shipped back to Sigmund’s Parch on the Helen of Troy.”

  “So?”

  “Liam, before you got here, I heard the skirni say they… have my father.”

  “Warra? Why would they have Warra?”

  “They took him. Kidnapped him. On Enchara.”

  Liam gave her an indulgent smile. “Yeah… um… why would anyone kidnap your father?”

  “I don’t know. But they’ve got him. And my only chance of helping him is to follow that skirni.”

  “Alright. Let’s say you’re not as looney as you sound, and that these guys have your dad. How are you gonna…” Zenn turned to the hog’s container. “No. Scarlett, you aren’t serious. You are not gonna…”

  “The skirni said he’s going back to the Helen. This crate is going up there. I’m going with it.”

  “This is crazy, Scarlett. Wait, what about Otha? We’ll go to him. I’ll go with you. He could help.”

  “My uncle wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Sure he would.”

  “Liam, I told you about what’s been going on with me lately, the… mental thing with the animals at the cloister. Otha thinks I’m… Wait a second.” She reached out and took the boy’s arm, turning him to face her. “What the skirni said just now. About you telling him about me and the animals. What did he mean?”

  Liam turned his face away, then back to her, his expression pained.

  “Scarlett… Pokt, the skirni…”

  “So you know his name?”

  “Yes. He…was asking lots of questions, right? About all kinds of stuff. Some of the questions…”

  “Were about me? About my linking with the animals? Is that it? You told him about that?” He nodded, and she dropped her hand from his arm, fury rising inside her. Fury and regret. “Then that’s how he knew I had it inside me. This… nexus thing. I can’t believe you did that.”

  “Scarlett… Zenn, I didn’t know! I told you. He was asking everybody at the ranch about all kinds of stuff.”

  “It doesn’t matter now. It’s done,” she said, staring hard at him, then turning to look up at the crate. “And I don’t have time for this. Once the Helen leaves orbit, that’s it.”

  Zenn hoisted herself back atop the hog’s crate. A moment later Liam had joined her. She told herself she didn’t care if he followed her, she didn’t care if he left to save his own skin. She knew what she had to do and she was going to do it. Liam Tucker was no longer part of the equation.

  She knelt next to a square, metal plate at one corner of the container’s roof.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Feeding chute hatch. All crates like this have them.” She tugged at it. “It’s jammed. Help me open it up.” He stood looking at her, swiped the hair out of his face.

  “You’re insane. That hog’ll rip you to shreds.”

  “You going to help or not?”

  With both of them pulling on it, the door finally flipped open. As soon as the hog spotted them, he launched himself to crash against the ceiling of the crate, shaking the container so violently they both fell to their knees.

  “There. Now he’s really mad,” Liam said, getting to his feet. “Convinced? Can we get outta here now?”

  Zenn said nothing, but went to her vet kit. Katie had buried herself inside, and she gave Zenn a small “yip” of annoyance when Zenn nudged her to one side. She pulled out the portable seda-field unit. Not bothering to extend the dish’s tripod, she held it in one hand, aimed it down through the open feed hatch, dialed it up to seven and switched it on.

  The sedation took effect, and the sandhog’s body drooped backwards on its tail, the enormous digging claws folding inward on its belly. Finally, it sagged to the floor of the crate, and fell over on one side. It lay there in a slowly heaving heap, emitting a gurgling snore.

  “I shoulda known you’d have something like this up your sleeve,” Liam said. “Damn you, Scarlett. Guess now I got no excuse not to go with you, huh?”

  Zenn wasn’t sure what she’d expected of Liam. But she realized this wasn’t it… This was more than she could ask, even if she didn’t care.

  “Liam. You don’t have to do that. I never meant you had to do that.”

  “Who cares what you meant?” He was smirking his familiar, annoying smirk. “What?” he said, “I don’t get a vote? Look, Graad is pinched. He’ll do time at Tharsis. I stick around here and… well, we already hashed that out. Nope. Mars isn’t a safe place to hang around. A free trip to Sigmund’s Parch?” He walked over to the hatch. “That’s just what the doctor ordered. Doctor.”

  Zenn almost smiled at this, but didn’t.

  “Liam, I…”

  “Yeah yeah, save it. Let’s go before I lose my nerve. Or Tiny down there wakes up.”

  “Alright.” There wasn’t time to discuss it. “Go ahead.”

  “Oh sure. Send the dumb towner in. He’s expendable.”

  “I need to keep the seda-field focused. Go on. He’s asleep.”

  “Easy for you to say…”

  Liam sat down, scooted his legs over the edge of the hatch and with an apprehensive glance back at her, disappeared from sight.

  “I’m fine,” he said from the darkness. “Thanks for asking.”

  “Here.” She handed down her vet pack. Then, trying to hold the seda-dish steady, she sat down at the hatch and angled her legs into the feed chute opening. Gripping the inside hatch handle with her free hand, she slid down into the darkness, pulling the hatch door shut as she fell.

  She landed in something soft – the hog’s most recent ration of sandy soil.

  They both retreated to the corner of the crate farthest from the hog. Zenn kept the dish aimed at the slumbering animal while Liam gathered bedding straw for them to sit on.

  “Whew.” Liam complained as they settled into t
heir respective mounds of straw. “That’s one rank animal.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” she said dryly.

  “Damn, I hope we’re not in here that long.”

  Any further conversation was cut short by the clanking sound of the building’s large, metal loading door being rolled open. This was followed by the putter of an engine. The engine noise got very close, and there was the grating of metal beneath the crate, the sensation of being lifted into the air and moving. Some kind of forklift? After a series of bounces, sharp bangs and more screeching of metal, the crate came to rest.

  “We must be inside a ferry’s cargo bay,” Liam whispered. Zenn shushed him.

  She wasn’t sure how much later it was that the ferry’s engines ignited, but the noise made Katie spring awake and scurry up out of the pack into her arms.

  “Whoa,” Liam muttered as the ferry’s engines powered up. “Here we go…”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  At first, the launch wasn’t as loud as Zenn had feared, but the sound quickly built to a frightful roar, making crate vibrate alarmingly. She felt the ferry lift from the ground, and quickly an invisible force began to press on her body.

  “Scarlett?” Liam had to shout to be heard over the thundering engines. “You sure this was really a good idea?”

  She wasn’t remotely sure, but didn’t say so.

  Katie was too frightened to sign now, and simply buried her head in Zenn’s lap, blended and vanished from sight. The engine’s noise at last overwhelmed their ability to shout, and she and Liam could only give each other encouraging looks… and wait.

  Zenn struggled to keep the seda-unit aimed at the hog. But it really didn’t matter – nothing could move under this kind of acceleration. The pressure continued to build, until Zenn was forced down flat in the straw, with the invisible Katie pinned in position on her stomach. It occurred to her maybe she’d made yet another bad judgment. Maybe it was not, in fact, possible for something as fragile as a human, or a rikkaset, to survive a ferry launch in an unprotected cargo-crate.

  But, of course, it was too late to reconsider. They must be miles above Mars by now. Miles beyond the familiar world of the cloister walls and her animals, beyond Otha and Hild and Hamish. And despite what she felt, or didn’t feel, about him, at least Liam was with her, at least she had the company of another person. She wouldn’t let it mean anything beyond that. After all, Liam had his own reasons for leaving Mars.

  As the ferry hurtled skyward, Zenn told herself she also had still another unspoken, but crucial reason to follow her abductor. She had no clue what the skirni meant by the term “nexus.” But it had to be connected with her sudden capacity for linking her mind to the minds of others. It meant she hadn’t imagined it all, dreamed it up, that she wasn’t losing her grip on reality. There was a logical, real-world explanation for what was going on inside her. And the skirni knew what it was. If nothing else, she would make him tell. If she survived.

  A knot of doubt materialized and tightened within her. Would she survive? Would any of them? Maybe she should’ve gotten herself and Katie out the crate when she had the chance. Maybe she should’ve listened to Liam.

  Too late now. She tried to lift her hands, to comfort the rikkaset, to stroke her and make the sign that it would be alright. No, that would be a lie. But she could sign she was sorry. Her hands weighed too much to raise them more than an inch or two. She gave up.

  Her helplessness spawned a fresh wave of fear, and the fear grew quickly, like a dark blossom opening. She saw her younger self, terrified beneath a flapping canvas tarp, breathing in dust and fumes in the back of Otha’s speeding truck, saw herself boarding the ferry that would bear her aloft to witness the inconceivable wonder of a living Indra, to witness her mother’s final moments within the creature’s impossible body.

  As the rapidly mounting g-forces of the ferry’s violent ascent threatened to tip her into unconsciousness, an unbidden memory rose up through Zenn’s fear and doubt: the honeyed scent of apricot blossoms, laced with just a whiff of antiseptic. She heard her mother’s voice, the words spoken years ago, ages ago, in another lifetime:

  …sometimes Zenn, doing the right thing… is the scariest thing of all.

  Something brushed her fingertips: Liam’s hand, fighting gravity to edge its way slowly onto hers. With her entire world reduced to shuddering chaos and noise, it came as a sudden, almost refreshing shock: the touch of another, at this moment, in this place, was something, maybe the one thing, she needed to feel more than anything else. Liam’s fingers closed around hers. She allowed her fingers to tighten in reply.

  Then, the rushing, black oblivion pressing in on her faltering awareness pushed its way beyond her final measure of will power. She had no choice. She let it in. And in her last instant of knowing, one last thought:

  Never… leave… the cloister.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to:

  …my mother Betty and sister Sue, the former an English teacher who simply expected all her children to love books, so we did; the latter a sibling who helped me appreciate the power and magic in language and art.

  …every teacher or professor I’ve ever had. Teachers. They rock.

  …Dr Jenni Doll, DVM, who let me look over her shoulder and ask many, many questions as she ministered to our farm-full of animals or worked on her own menagerie of domestic and exotic beasts. The same goes for her husband Torben, whose extensive herpetological knowledge I also mined. Any mistakes or questionable extrapolations in this book are, however, mine alone.

  …Adam Schear of DeFiore & Co, the genre-savvy agent who rescued the book’s manuscript from oblivion while cleaning out his Kindle files, and then dove into the story to help me polish the novel until it was ready to be exposed to the light of day.

  …Amanda Rutter, my editor at Strange Chemistry Books, who thought the book might be worth publishing and, following its acquisition, immersed herself in Zenn’s world, then applied her formidable expertise to ensure that world was prepared for visitors.

  …my wise and patient wife, shield-maiden and best friend Kathleen, whose encouragement, willingness to listen and deep affection for all creatures great and small made her both an inspiration and the ideal companion as I wrote Zenn Scarlett.

  ….and all the dozens of animals who have ever shared, brightened, saddened and/or complicated my life.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Christian Schoon grew up in Minnesota, and worked his way through college in a succession of rock bands before earning his degree from the U of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Journalism.

  Following a stint as an in-house copywriter/scriptwriter at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, he supplied freelance copy for the entertainment industry and scriptwriting for live-action and animated TV.

  Currently, he writes from his 150-year-old farmstead in Iowa which he shares with a fluctuating number of horses (generally less than a dozen, but not always), 30 or so cats, a dog, three ferrets and a surprisingly tolerant wife.

  The Zenn Scarlett books are his first novels, however he admits to being an unrepentant fan of science fiction and fantasy ever since discovering the tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs in the fifth grade. He can be found at his blog: www.christianschoon.com and on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cjschoon

  STRANGE CHEMISTRY

  An Angry Robot imprint

  and a member of the Osprey Group

  Lace Market House

  54-56 High Pavement

  Nottingham NG1 1HW

  UK

  4301 21st Street Suite 220B

  Long Island City

  New York

  NY 11101, USA

  strangechemistrybooks.com

  Strange Chemistry #10

  A Strange Chemistry paperback original 2013

  1

  Copyright © Christian Schoon 2013

  Christian Schoon asserts the moral right to be

  identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue
record for this book is available

  from the British Library.

  UK ISBN: 978 1 90884 454 5

  US ISBN: 978 1 90884 445 2

  eBook ISBN: 978 1 90884 456 9

  Cover art by Steven Meyer-Rassow (www.smrphotoart.com)

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

  otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by

  way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or

  otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in

  any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is

  published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and

  incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or

  localities is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Zenn Scarlet

  Dedication

  Before

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Acknowledgments