by Letts,Jason
Leaping over the stream, Loris circled up the hill over the cave’s entrance. The horned beetle scampered up behind while Loris grabbed a thin trunk and bent it back around another. The horned beetle raced toward him. He released the tree, and it snapped forward. The trunk struck the beetle head on, knocking it back toward the precipice above the cave’s mouth. Some of the legs dangled over the side, but it looked like it was going to scuttle back away from the edge until Loris charged forward and slammed his shoulder into its hard shell.
He watched the large insect tip over the edge and slam into the ground on its back. Its legs flailed and mandibles twitched. Quickly, Loris hustled to some loose stones near the edge, pushing them over and letting the force of gravity strike the hardest blows.
Soon enough the threat had passed and Loris had time to catch his breath and take stock of his surroundings.
He didn’t have time to register before, but he remembered spotting something shiny in the clearing among the grass. Curious, he went over to investigate. On the way, it seemed like his path led back around closer to the village. From the edge of the clearing he could see smoke from its campfires in the distance.
The shiny object was the last thing Loris expected to discover around here. It was a circular handle of titanium alloy, an airlock hatch from a space ship. Loris marveled at it and looked around for anything else, but no other signs of a ship could be found. Judging from the clean handle and the lack of any nearby overgrowth, Loris had a hunch that this was seeing regular use.
He wondered if an entire ship was hidden below ground or just a part of it. Either way, he sensed that the Novan’s pious stance toward technology wasn’t as genuine as it seemed. Placing both hands on the wheel, Loris attempted to open the hatch but found it locked shut.
Whatever this hatch was being used for, he wouldn’t be able to find out today. In case they were looking for him, he headed back north where the encounter had been rather than return straight to the village.
The muggy nights made it impossible to sleep, and that in turn made it impossible for Loris to resist thinking about the purpose of that hatch. Under the guise of a late-evening walk, he ducked into the woods and crept to the edge of the clearing, where he waited to see if anyone would come by. He hadn’t told any of his peers from the Magellan about what he’d seen.
But nightly stakeouts for a week brought him no clues about what was going on, and by that time the next load from the Magellan was set to arrive. Along with Iotache, Gallow, Kid, and Erina, Loris trekked out to the landing space to greet Panic and Lopez among them.
The Hudson landed, the cattle filtered out, and Gallow went through the same spiel with Iotache about their vision for Nova. Soon enough Loris got a chance to meet up with his two favorite crew members who couldn’t seem to muster the same enthusiasm he did when they saw him wearing clothes made out of the same reeds and bark they used for roofing.
“Tell me you didn’t make that yourself,” Lopez said, unable to keep from chuckling. “You look like a drowned rat.”
“Do they at least have showers? I really can’t stand being unclean.”
Panic’s fretting brought a smirk to Loris’s face. It had been a hard week and their companionship made the outlook much brighter.
“If you’re looking for modern conveniences, you’ve come to the wrong place,” he said.
Unlike Panic, Lopez was able to muster some optimism.
“I’m going to find a spot to build a castle. Or maybe I’ll do some exploring, get myself a ship named after me in a few hundred years when I’m dead and gone.”
“Everything I’ve heard from the people around here suggests ships are going to be a thing of the past, and trying to build a castle might run into steep resistance as well. There were plenty who threw a fit when Stayed and I built a double-tent. They almost made us tear it down,” Loris said.
“You and Stayed together in a tent?” Panic asked.
“When you see the plot sizes, you’ll understand the advantage to having a little more space. And he’s really not that bad.”
“You want to pitch a tent with me?” Lopez asked Panic, looking up at her with a wide smile.
“In your dreams,” she said.
They walked through the forest until they came to the murky pond where Gallow told them they all had to get in. Panic took one look at the soupy algae that had collected along the top and cringed.
“You’ve got to be joking!”
When she came out, her blond hair looked like it had been washed in pea soup.
Loris spent the rest of the day helping them get settled and even found out that Brina was expected to be on the next shuttle down. Even though he had only been here for a week, he had a strange perspective on the challenges of the newcomers, many of whom struggled with the lifestyle in ways he had but didn’t fully realize.
But when the sun began to set and the shadows grew long, Loris again crept out of the village to scout out the hatch. The forest was quiet, and the temperature on this day wasn’t all that hot, but something aroused his suspicions as he approached the clearing. To his surprise, the hatch had been left open and bright light streamed out from within.
Excited, Loris tucked himself into the brush to wait and watch, but after a while his ravenous curiosity got the better of him. He slunk closer to the light, hoping to hear something that would tip off what was going on within. Only silence followed, and there wasn’t much more space to go before he’d have to decide if he was going to climb in and have a look around. He didn’t really believe that the buried ship could be vacant.
A hard blow and a sharp pain struck Loris behind his left shoulder, knocking him on his hands and knees. A spear thudded against the ground next to him as the cut’s searing pain echoed around his entire body. Hobbling, he turned enough to see Gallow running at him from the woods with all the speed and ferocity the horned beetles had.
He’d been baited by the open hatch. He fell for it.
Loris grabbed the spear and held it out in front of him, fighting through the pain. It was enough to make Gallow break stride just a few steps beyond the tip of the spear. From where he stood, Loris could see that the craziness had taken over his eyes.
“No one is above the law here, Eric Lorado. The punishment for subverting the tenets of the Crossroads is death. They’ll burn me if they saw what you’ve seen,” he said, spitting out his words in fury.
The implication to Loris was clear. Gallow didn’t intend to be caught.
“Let’s see if you can swing that spear any better than you can throw it,” Gallow said. He feigned rushing forward twice, nudging Loris back closer to the hatch each time. He grinned wildly.
Gallow’s next move wasn’t a feint. He rushed forward, swatting the end of the spear away and slamming straight into Loris. The man had a scary toughness and strength from living in the forests, and Loris was in so much pain he could barely exert any force with his left arm. He staggered back, trying to use the spear to hold off Gallow, who was also gripping the spear and pushing.
Loris lost his footing and fell backward, but he managed to yank on the spear enough to pull Gallow over him and to the left. Gallow’s head collided with the titanium plate at the base of the hatch, knocking him over on the side. A pained wail escaped from his lips, and when he rolled over Loris saw blood spilling out of a cut in his forehead.
Trying to take advantage, Loris leapt on top of him and took a swing at his face, but Gallow managed to knock him off and get the upper hand. They flailed and swung at each other from the ground, snarling and gritting teeth, until Gallow reached back for his leg and withdrew a cutting stone and swung it for Loris’s left side.
Loris’s left arm crumpled at the force of the blow, but he managed to get his right arm over in time to grab Gallow’s wrist. The big man, putting all of his weight into it, attempted to drive the sharp edge of that serrated stone down into Loris’s chest. Both of Loris’s hands pushed back as hard as they could. Gallow’
s crazy eyes seemed as threatening as the dark edge.
As the tip pushed closer, nearly touching Loris’s porous clothes, he managed to knee Gallow hard in the kidney, knocking him off. His next move was to smash his left elbow into Gallow’s nose and then knock away the stone with his right hand.
Gallow grasped to get the stone back, but Loris managed to get there first. Their hands fumbled against each other, and before he knew what was happening the stone had cut into Gallow’s stomach.
Rather than try to repel the knife, Gallow wrapped his hands around Loris’s neck, clamping down hard in a way that reminded Loris of the Silica on his leg. Choking, Loris withdrew the stone and used it to slice at Gallow’s arms enough to be able to take a breath. That murderous look from Gallow was still there despite his serious injuries. There was no getting away and no going back.
Loris sunk the stone’s sharp edge into Gallow’s chest, forcing him back against the ground. Gallow’s mouth hung open, but he used what strength he had left to try to fend Loris off. But it was no use. The blood welled through the wound. All Gallow could do was grasp Loris’s shirt and attempt to attack with his menacing eyes.
The adrenaline, the rush coursed through Loris’s veins. Even the cuts he had felt good in this moment.
“My name is Loris Roderick, son of Corinna Roderick,” he said.
Gallow’s eyes flared one last time and he grunted, sputtering blood. Then he was gone.
CHAPTER 11
Loris knew he had a problem on his hands. Also blood.
Between the nearby hatch, ten thousand Novans, and the body of their presumptive leader, finding a way to spin the circumstances in a favorable way seemed like an impossible task. For a moment, Loris imagined what would happen if people emerged from the forest right then and heard his entire tale of self-defense. That imagined scene concluded with Loris getting burned alive, as Gallow himself had feared.
No, now that he survived against Gallow, he wasn’t going to throw it all away by giving the rest of his people a good reason to kill him. Besides, it might put the rest of the passengers of the Magellan in a tough position if the Novans decided to take it out on everybody. One hundred against ten thousand wasn’t likely to work out well.
A better resolution would be if everyone concluded that Gallow had been killed by one of the planet’s many ferocious creatures while on a solitary excursion, which he had such a propensity for. Ideally, this would mean transporting the body to somewhere it would never be found, but Gallow’s substantial weight greatly limited Loris’s options.
He got to his feet and grabbed the dead man’s hands, straining to pull him down the slight slope through the clearing and towards the cave with the stream running through it. When they got there, he noticed that the horned beetle carcass had mysteriously disappeared. Wouldn’t that be something if some carrion-feeding critter got to Gallow after he was killed to tighten the story? There could be anything living in this cave. Using the last of his strength, he pulled Gallow into the stream and dropped him.
Taking a minute to wash his hands and wounds, Loris decided he’d staged it as well as he could. Even if none of the local wildlife got to him, the running water would do the trick eventually.
With that unpleasant business taken care of, he could finally get around to finding out what was in the hatch. Some hip pain he’d received during the fight left him with a slight limp, making him anticipate the source of the golden light longer than he wanted as he hobbled over. He reached the hatch and finally got a good glimpse of the interior. It was a standard airlock, as he expected. A Novan rope tied to the inside of the handle dangled into the empty space below.
Loris climbed in and used the rope to swing down, awakening some new aches and pains in the process. Only now when he looked back up at the exit did he realize how hard that cut behind his shoulder would make climbing out.
The interior of the airlock was well-lit, and Loris immediately began noticing that the markings around him were different than anything he’d seen before. One look further into the ship’s interior was enough to make the shocking determination that this wasn’t a Unified ship. None of the countries outside of Unified were thought to possess the means of space travel.
He stepped into the ship’s main compartment, which was lodged into the ground on its side. Nearly thirty sleeping bunks lined the walls, but considering the minuscule size of the vessel, if even five people had spent ten years locked in this metal box to get here, they would’ve all gone bonkers. Had the bigger ships that brought over the bulk of the Novans really been destroyed, or were they hidden like this one?
The name of the ship was the Space Mole, and it had been designed to be able to dig through the ground.
What was even more puzzling was as Loris looked around he saw containers and pieces of equipment that clearly were of Unified origin, lending some credence to Iotache’s assertion that the secret colony did constitute a scandal for Unified. It wasn’t hard to tell what Gallow had been using the space for. Food wrappers were piled in a corner and when he fired up the ship’s outdated and sorry excuse for a console, pornography came up instantly.
But Loris had limited time and couldn’t spend it investigating that. Instead, he managed to dig up communications between Gallow and Iotache from as recently as a few months ago. Loris’s jaw dropped when he saw how the two had brainstormed ways of throwing him out. It was infuriating but perplexing too. In all their communications, Iotache never mentioned the destruction of Earth. Gallow hadn’t attempted to contact anyone other than Iotache in years, and the Space Mole had very limited sensory capabilities, if Gallow knew how to use them at all.
Digging deeper in the message archive, Loris began to get a sense of how the colony on Nova came to be. Some Unified engineers, led by a man named Todrick Zand, fed secrets about how to build ships like the Space Mole to a group outside of Unified territory. It was called the Virgin World project, a provocative name probably intended to get the attention of sexually frustrated officers.
They had enough supporters inside Unified that they were able to commandeer several of the larger transports and tourist ships. Nearly half of the Novans were kidnapping victims aboard these ships. Rather than shoot them down, and without much ability to chase, Unified had little choice but to let them go. They’d manufactured stories about explosions in space and held sham mass funerals, then scrubbed most of it from the records. Loris had been young then but not so young that he wouldn’t have remembered.
It painted an unseemly picture of the nation he loved. Cover-ups, limited press visibility, and then a stream of distractions allowed Unified citizens to forget about thousands of people. There was no mention of Loris’s mother anywhere on the Space Mole’s console. She must’ve known about this, but she hadn’t even said anything. Did she feel she had no choice but to go along with it?
Todrick Zand died in transit to Nova, while Armand Iotache and some others remained behind to continue plotting from Earth. The plan was to continue bringing people to Nova, against their will if necessary, for as long as Virgin World movement had the ability to do it. Before Earth’s explosion, some officers even younger than Loris, were involved in developing schemes to get to Nova that would take the rest of their lives to come to fruition.
Feeling disturbed in more ways than he cared to think about, Loris switched off the console and scrambled back through the ship toward the hatch. It was getting late, and minimizing his absence as much as possible could make things easier later.
He endured the pain of climbing out of the ship, collected the weapons scattered about, and disposed of them along the way back to the village. Only a few remaining campfires cast light across the quiet settlement upon his return. Loris crept back to his tent without being seen, not even by Stayed who was fast asleep and snoring lightly. That was the good thing about Unified officers; they could sleep through anything.
It didn’t take them long to realize someone was missing.
The firs
t rumblings occurred the next morning, when Loris, Panic, Lopez, and a smattering of other newcomers were camped around a fire pit having breakfast, which consisted of jerky meat of unknown origin coated in meal ground out of some tree roots. The menu was enough to give anyone misgivings, and Panic was taking the transition harder than most.
“I don’t know how much longer I can take this. I’m not sure if you all have been out to the lavatory, but it’s basically a vine running along the edge of a short hill that you hold onto while taking a shit off the side. Just a few meters away is a mound of years’ worth of festering filth. While I was using it, the vine adjusted against the tree and I almost fell in!”
“The moral of the story is you should all learn to go without excreting any waste,” Lopez said.
“Can’t we at least find a way to get some running water through here?” Panic went on. “There are so many streams. It would not take long at all to create an aqueduct people could use to wash their hands that ran through the middle of Crossroads. Even the Romans had that.”
“The trouble is when people start using the aqueduct as a substitute for the lavatory,” Lopez said, drawing a sharp look from Panic.
“Anyone who does that can get thrown in the lavatory, as far as I’m concerned. But really, there’s a difference between living a simple lifestyle free of technology and being disgusting. Or better yet, how about we don’t destroy the greatest achievement of mankind orbiting around the planet and continue to live there? Then we could just come down here when we feel like getting bitten by these little pink bugs.”
It sounded preferable to Loris, but he knew well enough from all of the Virgin World messages he’d read that loudly voicing opinions that deviated too far from their vision was going to lead to more trouble. He made a mental note to warn her in private.
“I don’t think Iotache would go for that. He’s all for living down here. He’s the only one of us mingling freely with the Novans. In fact, he seems more comfortable with them than with us,” Loris said.