Icharus_ARC Series
Page 12
“I think I can understand your interpretation, but do you know why that happened?”
She huffed out a breath and said, “I do not.”
I was conflicted. I had the sick thought to shoot her again just to see what would happen, but something primal in me roared in opposition at the prospect of doing any such thing to her. In fact, I wanted to do things to her that I was certain no one had ever done to her before.
“Do you think you are the only one like you?” I asked.
"Seems odd everyone would be after me if I was not unique."
“Maybe you’re just one of many, but the only one that got away from them.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Did you ever see anyone else?” I asked. “Wherever you came from,” I added.
“I never saw any others like myself.”
“Who are you really?” I asked.
“I am a Kore Β5. I am just under the Council. I came from the city we are running from. I believe you call it Kinnopolis.”
“Why was Kull hiding you?”
"Gain… power… because he could, who knows what motivates men? But he was not helping me, that I can tell you truthfully," she told me with a slight tone of loathing. This was about as much emotion as I had ever gotten from her so I could not resist poking at it with a finger.
“What makes you say that?” I asked as I avoided discarded items of clothing and personal effects that people had gotten tired of carrying.
“He chained me while everyone else walked free.”
I breathed out a sigh of relief. I had thought she was going to say that he had molested her, but maybe she would not tell me if he had. I observed her. She confounded me. She had no tells that I could perceive and her words were just that words, no inflections or emotions. How was I supposed to get inside her head? My hunting skills were lost on her. The real question was why did I even want to try?
“What was it like where you grew up?”
“What was it like where you grew up?” she quipped back.
"My childhood was spent in sector O32 in Aoki. Nearly everyone is involved in farming out there, but a few families run thriving export businesses to the other outposts."
“Families?”
“Of course, I don’t know who my real family is. That is not Icharus’s way. Those who are my comrades, or friends, call me brother. My elders are my parents. Do you know yours?”
“I suppose the Councilmen are my parents, but I have no brothers.”
If there had been more of her, then the Overseers might have been satisfied settling for one of the others.
We walked onward for another ora towards the town’s checkpoint. We would be veering off course from Kinnopolis now. No one was guarding the post, and we jumped the gates. The electricity through this part of town had been turned off too so we would not have to worry about any electronics spotting us.
On this side of the wall, the land was much less developed with only a few buildings at random outcroppings. As the terrain leveled out, the light slowly intensified, casting shorter shadows from the bushes, which also grew scrubbier by the tig. There was the occasional tikus running from weed patch to brush. Once, I spotted out of the corner of my eye a grack, which was a six-legged reptilian creature. The further into the planet's interior we went, the more the land became inhospitable, and reptiles became the dominant species. It definitely was not the human population.
I estimated that we were about three oras on foot before we would come to the last gate officially separating Aoki from Senja. The familiar warmth on my face and the taste of red dust filled my mouth triggering memories of childhood, and not all of them were good ones. I recalled eating lichens and roots for dinner because anything of any real value was sold to Senja or sent off-world to one of the mining colonies where it would get top price. We lived in scrap metal houses and had to use underground holes whenever a magnetic storm blew over.
The hatcheries assigned you to regions after your fifth annos. Only one out of three children in Aoki survived to adulthood. They were still better odds than the one out of five in Torva, or in Ostrvo, the volcanic islands, where only one out of ten survived those fiery lands.
As children, we were all told of other worlds and not just the ones in our system. Notos and Urania were seen readily enough as bright discs in the skies. But the ones that required our imagination to picture, those seemed more like fairy tales to us, the generation hooked on pills who had never been beyond the three planets in this tiny system.
As we plodded onward, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I became more keenly aware of our environment. Even though I intensely scanned the drier landscape, I saw no signs of life.
"Something is tracking us," she informed me quietly.
“How can you tell?” I asked, even though I did not disagree with her.
"Something is shifting between the rocks over there."
As we walked, I looked over to where she indicated and saw nothing. “I don’t see anything, are you sure?”
“I am.”
“What do you see?”
“I never said I saw anything,” she blandly replied.
I slid a cautious glance over to her, and she stopped. She stared at me, and I saw for the first time that fear haunted her eyes. She knew that this ability was not normal, at least not for everyone else.
I looked beyond her to the surrounding brush. I still could not see anything although my skin crawled. “People or animal?”
“People.”
I acquiesced to the fact that her reflexes were simply better than my own and handed her my plazgun, not sure if it would arc back on her or not if she discharged it. Then I took out my med club and depressed the button that would release a heavily sedating injection.
“How many and where?”
We began walking again, and she said, "Four. Three on the right and one on a boulder to the left." I scanned the boulder in question and still noted nothing conspicuous.
After a tig or two of us walking and pretending that we were unaware, I quietly asked, “Are they still shadowing us?”
“Yes, they are going to move into action in the next tig or two.” She did not wait for my question when she said, “Their electrical patterns are shifting.”
I told her, “They must be tillers.”
“What is a tiller?”
“Those are people who live in the out fringes of cities. They are people who have been lost to the system and survive on whatever vestiges they can find in the in-between wastelands, usually the trash of the cities, but sometimes the flesh of people.” I took her hand and urged us onward. “We have to make it to the border. We’ll have help waiting there for us.”
“How much further?”
“Maybe another ora now.” I hoped.
"They will not wait that long." More swiftly than I would have thought humanly possible, she took a shot into the sands only a mere ten steps away, and a nearly invisible form shook and laid still. He must have been wearing enhanced camo. "That was on a stun setting. The next one will maim or kill." She never even missed a step. I was merely thankful that the stream did not injure her.
After a tig, I asked, “Did it work?”
“One is tending to their wounded. Two still remain,” she whispered back at me.
“What about the one up high to the left?”
She glanced behind us and said, “That one is one of the two.”
"I can take the one to the left, and you can get the one to the right."
“I do not think it will be necessary.” She then dropped down low to the soil and lifted the gun. Next, she rushed over to a group of rocks to our right and took one of the men from behind by surprise. She placed his neck in an elbow hold. Then she dispelled an electric charge into herself from the gun, which of course surged through him next. After sliding one hand to a device that he was still clutching in one hand, she wrapped her hand around his and pointed at the boulder towards my left.
We next heard the man nearest the boulder scrambling away from us. The other two disappeared as well. Since the man Kore was with was subdued, she stood and approached me. I looked for any lasting marks of having absorbed the charge, and there were none.
Without a doubt, several things became apparent to me. The incapacitated man was quite old, his head filled with white hair. In addition, the fact that the others did not attack us validated my theory. "We need to rush forward now, that was a reconnaissance mission. He knows who we are and they will bring something that will be able to stop us next time."
We began a run that we could sustain over the distance that I hoped would lead to our safety.
Chapter 15
Whether or not figures were fading in and out of focus near us was irrelevant, since stealth was lost long ago. We needed to get to as close to the borderline as soon as possible. I heard a click to the left of us, and we both stuttered a step, and a bolt flew past us. She motioned up with a finger, and I jumped over the rope that was attached to it. For someone who has been cloistered her entire life, she certainly knew what was coming.
In the distance, a white flare shot up into the sky, but whether it was from friend or foe remained to be seen. Once it was apparent that the tillers had dropped off from our trail, we slowed our pace. The light above continued brightening the sky. You could almost make out the ghost of Aka filling up most of the sky, but one would have had to travel to the middle of the hemisphere to see it in its entirety. Similarly, the scrubby plant life here lifted in color to vibrant browns and greens.
“Where did they go?” she asked.
“I don’t know, but that flare worries me.”
“Why?”
“It could be my people trying to find us, or it could be their people trying to warn them.”
“Of what?”
You I thought, but instead of saying that, I said, “Of us.” Another flare went up, but this time it was distinctly red.
“Do the colors symbolize anything?”
“Probably to them.”
We stopped to better evaluate the flares at a cluster of large rocks. Just then, a camouflaged man reached around the rock for us and grabbed Kore, pulling her out of sight. I lifted my med club and took off after her, but I tripped and fell into a hole. Arms reached up and pulled me further into it, and then the light from the star above twinkled out completely, casting me into an artificial darkness.
I struggled until my club was wrestled from me. After my arms were pinned, a woman's voice hissed, "Stop it, or we'll be forced to use your tool against you. There is another wave coming."
I calmed and asked, “Where is Kore?”
“I am here. Are you going to eat us?”
Several of the other people in the room laughed. “No," a woman replied. Someone turned on an old-fashioned solar lamp, and I surveyed the room. “We survive, but not on the flesh of others, or at least not in the way you think.”
“My family is coming for us. They will find us.”
“Did you know this hole in the earth was here?” a woman who appeared older than Nage asked me.
“No.”
“Then what makes you think they will know where this hole is?”
“You are all going to die,” I told them.
“Then you are too,” a man, fewer annos than my own, stated.
Time to bluff. "The Overseers are back, and they are going to cleanse the planet if I don't get her to them."
The group comprised of twelve eyed Kore more closely. The elderly woman said, “Why do they want her?”
“She is not like us.” If I made us too hot to handle they might just let us go.
“Is there a bounty on her?”
“No.”
"He lies," one of the others said. Another said, "This makes no sense. If they want her, they will pay anything to get her back."
"It is true what he says," Kore said. They all stopped and stared at her. Once she knew that she had their attention, she added, "They are threatening to destroy the world if I am not returned promptly."
“We can hand over her dead body if they want her that badly.”
"They want her alive," I added. "They want to conduct experiments with her." Although I was not sure why exactly they wanted her, it was as good a guess as any.
“Because she is different? How so?” the woman asked.
How to answer that? I had clues as to how she was different, but I did not think that they would appreciate being informed that she was an improved version of us. Tillers did not take kindly to anyone saying that they were better than they were. Their hatred for elitists was infamous.
“I don’t know exactly, but I can say that she can eat electricity.”
I got the reaction I was hoping for, “Ooh’s and ah’s.”
One of the children came forward and poked her with a stick.
“What wave is about to hit?” Kore asked while rubbing her arm where she had been prodded.
"One of the x-rays," the older woman said.
"Let's see how it will affect her," one of the others, hidden in the shadows, suggested. I was not worried about how it would affect her, because I thought I already knew how: it would not affect her at all. She was highly evolved to live perfectly on this planet. A warrior created in a lab. A super-human meant to battle the Overseers and populate the universe. As I studied her, her skin had already darkened under the increasing solar radiation, absorbing its harmful rays, but not visibly damaging it.
“They will pay dearly for her,” a man said.
"They will kill all of us, including her if I don't get her off this planet. If I can get her to a moon or even on a transport vessel, I will inform them of such, so their attention will be diverted from destroying the planet," I told them.
“They can do that?” One of the younger ones asked.
The elderly woman said, “They could.” Then she turned to one of the others, mostly hidden in the shadows and asked, “What is the current reading?”
“Only seventy-five rads.”
“Send them out,” she told them.
“Wait! It might go up!” I said.
“Your people are only about a k south of here. Go, we don’t want anything to do with her.”
We were then swarmed by her troop and pushed out through a false door in the cave into the light and ray storm.
The door was shut promptly behind us. Kore looked at me and said, “What is a rad?”
As I started walking briskly in the direction of where the flares had been shot in the air. I said, “It is a unit of radiation from the star in our solar system, Aka.”
“It is bad?”
“Yes. Prolonged exposure and high doses can cause sickness and death.” But only to normal people like me.
“Are you going to turn me over to the Overseers?”
“Of course not.”
“Why did you say that then?” she asked.
For as sophisticated and beautiful as she was, sometimes she acted like a young child. I never had to hunt children, as they were always sequestered away in education facilities. If young children were found lacking in some way, their handlers would dispose of them before their fifth anno. But she was an entirely different story. I did not know how to handle her at all, and it excited me in a way I found disturbing. "Because I knew it would get us out of there," I finally replied.
"Oh." Then we traveled onward. Where her thoughts went, I did not know, but we were pushing towards something, an understanding hopefully.
When I thought we had traveled about a k-lo, I stopped and called out, "Malik! Koda! It’s me, Jett! Let me in! There is a radiation storm, let us in!"
“They are over there,” Kore said pointing to nothing I could see.
“Show me.”
I scrambled after her and found her pace grueling. I added
a limber swiftness to her growing list of abilities that were improvements on what my species could do. When did I begin to classify her as a different species? Maybe I was wrong, and the storm’s free radicals would mutate her genes into something even more alien, or perhaps they might be her Achilles heel.
We rounded a boulder and were immediately barraged by pebbles. “Over here,” I heard a familiar voice call over to me. I quickly found the crevice under a flat slab of granite. Once we came into full view, he said, “Oh frack! I knew you would be trouble when you called after all these annos. She stays out.”
“Are these your people?” Kore asked.
“Yes, they are,” I quietly responded. Then much louder, I called out to Malik, “She will be no trouble. If she is, then you have my word that you may turn us both over to the Overseers.”
“I can’t do that, Jett. Maybe if we were alphas or even bettas that would work. If I am discovered harboring her, they will kill me along with everyone I know. They will probably suspect that anyway, being only a Ρ like you.”
“We are going to divert their attention, by going off-world. Can you help us?”
There was a long pause as he considered it. Finally, he said, “Yes, but you are not going where we are.”
“What moon are you going to?”
"Sepia." I had planned to go there as well, but that will not work now. We could go to its sister moon Senap and try to hide there, but transport ships went there less frequently. There was not much left to harvest from that moon. Kahel would have to work for us, even if so-called cryptic messages were coming from the outpost there. I suddenly wished that Kull had expounded more fully on that.
“We’re going to Kahel.”
“There is nothing there, only unmanned missions to harvest its methane from the air.”
“We have heard differently. Can you help us?”
Another long pause and then he said, “Get in here, the both of you, and tell me more about your new friend.”
• ѻ ● Ѻ • ○ ☼
“They won’t be on that moon; that’s not their style,” Malik told us. His genetically flawed white hair bobbed as he looked between the both of us. He was younger than me by about ten annos, but his pink eyes had set him apart from most Aokians that I knew. He was also influential in government, without actively participating in it. While it was true that he made significant charitable contributions to the Council, it was his balanced judgment and heart that earned the ears of our leaders.