by J. S. Bailey
Chumley glumly tore open his bag and popped a handful of snack mix into his mouth. Dalton could hear crunching as Chumley chewed.
He bit off a chunk of the jerky strip he brought for himself, but Dalton’s appetite had blown away with the door and the solar panel.
A raspy cough made Dalton jerk awake. He rubbed his eyes and frowned at the door above his head, and then remembered what had happened.
He sat up. Faint light spilled around the edges of the closed door. Chumley stirred beside him on the tile wall of the motorhome’s cramped shower, muttering something about biscuits.
Dalton paused; listened.
He allowed himself the ghost of a smile.
“Rise and shine,” he said, shoving open the bathroom door and clambering out into the morning light. It had been a full twenty-eight hours since the storm hit, and they’d survived.
He looked at the condition of the motorhome and said a bad word.
“What is it?” Chumley mumbled, poking his head up through the doorway. “Oh.”
Sand had drifted as high as a meter at the front of the motorhome and petered out into a fine layer of silt at the back. The passenger seat was completely buried.
Dalton pulled out his comm unit. “Carolyn? Do you copy?”
“Loud and clear, Dalton. How are you doing?”
His eyes stung with tears of relief at hearing another human voice. “We . . . had an accident. Can you send someone up here to get us?”
“I can try, but . . . ” Carolyn coughed. “Richport’s a mess right now, as I’m sure you can imagine. That’s the worst storm we’ve had in two years. Errin’s out on a plow helping clear the streets, and I’ve got about a dozen people lined up outside my office asking for favors—not to mention Naomi and her lot are still hovering around here like flies. I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to send anyone for hours.”
“Well, don’t make it take too long,” Dalton spat. “The wind ripped the solar panel off the top of the motorhome and turned us on our side. We’re completely stranded.”
“I’m sorry, Dalton, but we have to follow up with three missing persons reports and reconnect the power for half the town. We’ll get to you as soon as we can.”
“Carolyn!”
The comm fell silent, and Dalton stared at it, dumbfounded. “I don’t bloody believe it.”
He dug another box of provisions out of the accumulated sand and opened a fresh packet of jerky.
Chumley twisted his slender hands together. “Why won’t she help us?”
“She knows I can handle myself just fine.” Dalton ate his jerky, angrily.
“We can’t stay out here all day! I mean, there’s always . . . oh, never mind.”
“There’s always what?” Dalton asked.
Chumley just shook his head.
Fifteen minutes ticked by. The air grew hotter, like an oven. Sweat ran down Dalton’s scalp. He thought, and thought some more, and decided it was too much effort.
“Pip-pip! Mehelu answaa him pahare.”
The voice spoke from Dalton’s trouser pocket, where he’d tucked the comm unit after Carolyn had cut him off. He pulled it out, stared at it a moment, and pushed the button. “Hello?”
“Pip-pip! Kalaa oom himms.”
His pulse spiked as he looked to Chumley, whose dark eyes had gone round. “Hello? Can you hear me?”
“Pip-pip! Melaa’a konash.”
Dalton’s heart continued to thud. That had sounded like a response!
“What language are you speaking?” Dalton asked. Then, in what was most likely butchered Spanish, said, “¿Cuál es su lengua?”
More unfamiliar words spilled forth from the comm unit.
“I don’t think that’s a stray signal this time,” Chumley said in a grave tone. “If someone’s talking to you directly, they could be anywhere on the planet, right?”
Dalton rubbed his nose. Only a few sunburned flakes peeled off this time. “It’s got a range of up to 1,500 kilometers, I think.”
“So there might not be anyone close by to rescue us.”
“Wouldn’t say that. Although,” Dalton added, “if it is the folks whose stray signal we were picking up before, then they might be close after all.”
“It did seem to be the same language.”
“Too hard for me to tell.”
“All that pip-pipping was sort of a giveaway. I’m going outside to see if I can see anyone.”
“Have at it,” Dalton said, making himself comfortable sitting on the closed bathroom door. “I’ll stay here and not die of sunstroke.”
Chumley may have been on Molorthia Six for several days now, but the heat still smacked him like a thousand-degree croquet mallet every time he stepped into the sunlight.
As he strode down a newly-sculpted dune, he patted his pocket for his Cube and withdrew it. Casting one glance behind him to make sure Dalton hadn’t changed his mind and was following him, Chumley activated the Cube’s holographic archway and then hurried into his portable universe. He didn’t take the time to bask in the cooler air; he began yanking open drawers until he found the pair of binoculars he’d been looking for.
Chumley stepped back out into the desert, picked up the Cube, deactivated the archway, and pocketed the whole device before Dalton peeked outside and discovered Chumley’s little secret.
He held the binoculars to his eyes and made a 360-degree sweep of the desert. Tall shapes in the distance made his heart leap for a moment until he realized they were cacti, not approaching Greens.
He didn’t see any signs of people.
Chumley focused the lenses on the smoke pluming on the northern horizon. It was still farther than anyone could go on foot. Not that he’d want to get there on foot, given the resident plant life. But if he could get somewhat closer . . .
He tucked the binoculars inside his shirt, then climbed back up onto the motorhome and hopped down through the opening above the sideways driver’s seat.
“Back already?” Dalton asked. He still sat on the closed bathroom door, looking moody.
“I’m just getting a few things. I’ll walk as far as I can and then come back to report my findings.”
“I already know what you’ll find. Sand. Maybe a rock or two. Watch out for the boomstones, though; if you step on them, they explode.”
“Seriously?”
“It’s something to do with the mineral content. We clean up all the ones we can find near town.”
“Well, that’s brilliant.”
“They’re the lumpy bronze ones. Just watch where you step.”
“Is there anything else I should worry about out there?”
“You might run into a few sand serpents. They’re mostly friendly unless you get near their burrows.”
Chumley grabbed a hat and put it on before he could develop second thoughts about this whole endeavor, then slipped on his borrowed trench coat and loaded its pockets up with bottled water and food. He exited the vehicle again and set off in a northerly direction, keeping an eye out for anything that wasn’t desert.
Sweat oozed from every pore of Chumley’s skin—he’d have to take a shower in his portable universe by the end of the day. Should he tell Dalton about the portable universe? Dalton didn’t seem the sort who’d want to steal it, but you could never be too sure about people. Portable universes weren’t exactly a mainstream commodity, and it was only by pure chance that Chumley had come about getting one in the first place.
He passed a few bronzish rocks and sidestepped them, not knowing if Dalton had been kidding. He didn’t see any snakes.
As Chumley contemplated turning around and going back, a faint, whirring sound somewhere behind him made his skin prickle. He scanned the horizon in all directions, saw nothing out of the ordinary, and decided it must have been in his head.
Saguaro cacti loomed ahead on his left. Imports, Chumley thought. That’s what humans did, wasn’t it? They found a new place to live, and rather than accepting it as it was, they had to turn it into someplace it wasn’t. The ancestors of these wild cacti had probably arrived with early waves of settlers who’d wanted to emulate the deserts of the American southwest.
Something glinted ahead of him in the sunlight.
Chumley halted in his tracks and looked through his binoculars again.
The glinting thing appeared to be a metal structure, much larger than the ruined motorhome. Two figures moved about it, but he couldn’t make out many details at that distance, which was probably at least three kilometers.
Chumley grinned, turned tail, and sprinted back toward the motorhome, taking care not to step on any exploding rocks.
It took him half an hour to get there, panting.
“Dalton!” he cried, vaulting himself up onto the “roof” of the useless vehicle. “Dalton, I’ve found people!”
He heard no response as he made his awkward way through the opening into the sand-filled cockpit. “Are you still in here?”
The sheriff no longer sat on the bathroom door. Chumley negotiated his way through the mess and rapped on it. “Dalton?”
Frowning at the continuing silence, Chumley pulled the door open.
The sideways bathroom was empty.
Chumley checked inside the closet across the corridor from the bathroom, which now lay above him like a ceiling, just to see if Dalton had gotten bored and tried to defy gravity. Several boxes and a citronella candle fell on his head for his efforts.
He got more bottled water and went back outside.
There were footprints in the sand beside the motorhome. Chumley recognized some of them as his own, and another set that could only be Dalton’s. He followed the second set for several meters until it met up with two other sets that made Chumley’s blood turn to ice, for those other sets had appeared out of nowhere.
They disappeared, too.
Like ghosts.
Chumley whisked his comm unit out of his pocket and keyed in Dalton’s number. “What’s happened?” Chumley asked. “Where have you gone?”
“Pip-pip! Imruu himms a’ kolaa,” said the comm unit.
“What?”
He thought he heard a muffled groan somewhere in the background.
Chumley’s heart raced. Dalton had been rescued, dammit, and hadn’t even attempted to let him know about it! Whoever else was out there with them must have spotted the motorhome and spirited Dalton away from it.
Having no other course of action to take, Chumley headed back toward the metal building he’d spotted earlier. Maybe they’d sent someone out on a hovercraft, hence the disappearing footprints. It would explain the whirring sound, too. If Dalton was inside the metal building, then all would be well.
Chumley didn’t run this time. His reserves of energy were waning.
When it felt as though he’d been walking for two hours, he checked the horizon with the binoculars and couldn’t see the dwelling anywhere.
His forehead creased. He’d always been fairly decent with directions, and he’d passed the same clump of saguaros not too many minutes earlier. So where had the building gone? Was it not a building at all, but a vehicle that had looked like a building? It wasn’t fair they’d left him behind out here to die, just when he was starting to feel useful again.
He heard a sudden sound and whirled.
A figure dressed entirely in white stood there, holding some pistol-like weapon in a gloved hand.
“What are you—” Chumley started to say as he instinctively raised his hands, but the weapon fired, and the next thing Chumley knew, he was sitting in a beach chair wearing only what nature had given him while several handsome people waited on him hand and foot, and since he knew his luck would never allow that to happen in the real world, he knew he had to be dreaming, which also meant he was probably not dead, so at least he had that going for him.
Chapter 13
Just when he was really starting to enjoy it, Chumley’s dream changed, and he was kneeling beside the dying Green out in the desert, placing a hand against one of its blackened stumps of a limb.
A thousand images and sensations whirled through his head, some pleasant, and some far from it. Verdant fields stretching from one horizon to the next, swooping birds unlike any he’d ever seen, ranks upon ranks of Greens stretching their limbs to the sky as their song filled the air . . .
He felt a hand on his and glanced to his right as the dream made another abrupt shift like someone changing the channels.
Dalton, sunburned and hatless, huddled against a gunmetal-gray wall, gripping Chumley’s right hand in his left one. The man’s eyes were over-dilated and out of focus, and tears trickled down his weather-beaten cheeks.
Chumley tried to pull his hand away from him, but Dalton wouldn’t let go.
“Oh, Darneisha,” Dalton moaned. “I wish you were here.”
“Darneisha was your wife?” Chumley asked. He flicked his gaze to his left, spotting a sealed metal doorway, and then to the right, where two dozen school desks were inexplicably stacked against the wall next to a golden statue of Ganesh and a crate overflowing with boxes of drywall screws. Just what was his subconscious mind trying to represent here?
Dalton nodded. “Greens ate her, you know. They ate all of them.” He slid his hand out of Chumley’s and rubbed his eyes. “You know Alpha Centauri?”
Chumley could only frown—this dream was taking a particularly strange turn. “What about it?”
“Darneisha loved astronomy. She said . . . well, you know the Alpha Centauri System is the closest one to Earth. People knew about Alpha Centauri from the time they crawled out of the mud, but didn’t know it was binary until the 1600s. Darneisha told me.”
“That’s nice.” Chumley pinched his arm, wishing to wake up so he could figure out why the person in white had shot him.
“Darneisha always said, she said that was the two of us,” Dalton went on. “Alpha Centauri is two stars orbiting each other so close, you can’t even tell without a telescope. She said she and I were those two stars. And now she’s gone, and what does that make me?”
The sheriff fell silent. Chumley wondered why this dream wouldn’t just hurry up and change back to the beach one.
Time passed. Chumley gradually became aware that the place they were in was vibrating, ever so faintly. He also noticed a porthole through which he could see a bit of sky. His frown deepening, he crossed the metallic space toward the round window and held his face to it.
They were up in the air. The land was transitioning from sand to rockier terrain covered in low-growing plants that didn’t appear to be mobile. After perhaps ten minutes, the airship banked, causing the room to tilt, and Chumley gasped.
For as far as he could see, the ground was blackened with broken trunks jutting up feebly from the uneven ground, and heavy machinery trundled along shoving it into piles.
He could smell the char even from up in the air.
Chumley pinched his arm again.
Nothing happened.
Then the metal door behind him slid open.
Swallowing, Chumley turned.
Dalton, still in a daze from whatever they’d doped him up with, lifted his head when the room’s single door opened.
A figure dressed entirely in white stepped inside, and the door whooshed shut behind them. They looked exactly like the invisible intruders he and Chumley had both spotted in Richport, and Dalton knew deep down that they had nothing to do with FCU, since FCU was not known for luring people out of their vehicles and tranquilizing them for no apparent reason.
When Dalton had heard people outside the stranded motorhome, he thought someone had shown up to rescue him, which just went to show what one got for hoping.
/> The figure lifted the veil from their face, revealing icy violet eyes and pale cheeks that managed to look just as frigid.
They weren’t human.
“Greetings,” they said in a masculine voice with an unidentifiable accent.
Dalton scowled up at his alien captor. His vision doubled for a moment before resolving back to normal. “You speak English.”
“Yes. We intercepted some of your transmissions before we took you. We assume you do not speak Haa’anu.”
Chumley, who’d been standing near a porthole with a hand on his chin, looked as though he’d seen a whole platoon of ghosts. “Haa’anu?”
The man—Dalton assumed it was a man—grinned, displaying two rows of thin, razor-sharp teeth. “You have heard of us, then.”
“You’re planet-killers.”
“I’m a businessman, hardly a planet-killer. My name is Kedd.”
Dalton tried to stand up, but he must have gotten a much higher dose than Chumley, because his legs wouldn’t cooperate. “Care to enlighten me?”
A subtle sort of rage trickled into Chumley’s expression. “Haa’anu is a language of the Haa’la people of Leeprau. Loads of them make their money by scalping planets into dust. One of the news outlets on Pelstring Four broadcast a nasty piece about them.”
Dalton tried to process this—he’d heard of the Haa’la but knew little about them. “When you say ‘scalping’ . . . ”
“They sent a fleet of miners to the Gem of Antaka last year, dug out everything that made it beautiful, and turned it to ash. The Feds arrested the ones who didn’t get away. Not that it made a difference at that point.”
Kedd managed to look offended. “That was one of our competitors.”
“But now you’re doing it to Molorthia Six,” Chumley went on. “Why?”
Kedd shrugged. “We have powerful scanning equipment. Your planet is rich with raw materials, but unfortunately the resident life forms get a bit feisty if you try to get near them, so we started burning their forests to the ground for our own safety. We’ve already cleared two million square kushkims of land and installed our drills. We plan to burn the rest of this zone over the next one hundred forty-four days.”