Scattered Suns (17 page)

Chapter 32—RLINDA KETT

After Davlin Lotze departed for Earth in his commandeered vessel, Rlinda stayed on Relleker just long enough to help BeBob load the
Blind Faith
with the equipment earmarked for new Hansa colonies. Governor Pekar never seemed to run out of ways to complain about how long it was taking them, how much money she had lost on hospitality and supplies consumed by the unwanted refugees from Crenna, and how glad she would be to see them go.

With every insistent nudge, Rlinda lost even more motivation to hurry, and she would have been happy to find a nice dark hole where the governor could stuff her impatience. Once crammed aboard the overloaded
Voracious Curiosity,
the remaining Crenna colonists would be miserable; now that they were no longer fleeing certain death, the long trip would seem unbearably rough.

Still, it hadn’t taken the refugees long to recognize that Relleker did not want them around. After BeBob departed for the next stop on his supply run, Rlinda decided to stop playing games and get everyone aboard. They had higher hopes for a warm reception on Earth.

With little ceremony and only a few curt farewells, Governor Pekar shooed away the
Curiosity
. Though discouraged by the lack of human warmth on Relleker, Rlinda was not a spiteful woman (no matter what some of her ex-husbands said). She bore no ill will toward the inhabitants of the struggling colony; she just didn’t want to spend more time with them. A sense of freedom like being in zero gravity filled her as the
Curiosity
lifted off from the settlement—no bon voyage party here—and climbed to orbit.

“Good riddance,” she muttered, having no doubt the governor was saying the same thing from the ground.

She took her lumbering ship into orbit, beyond Relleker’s first moonlet, and then the second high moon. As she increased speed, Rlinda scanned the system around her while she projected the path to Earth. “There we go, can’t miss it.” She reached for the Ildiran stardrive, then toggled the intership comm. “Hold on, everybody. I’ll get us there as fast as I can. Drinks are on me as soon as we get to Earth.” She heard muted cheering from the crowded decks.

Before engaging the stardrive, she paused to take a final glance back at Relleker. Her sensors picked up moving objects, large ones approaching at high velocity. From nearby Crenna?

The
Curiosity
lurched as Rlinda cut the engines, bouncing her passengers around, but she wasn’t ready to sound the alarm yet. Grim-faced, Rlinda increased magnification on the images, and groaned. She had seen this sort of thing before—too damned many times. While the ship drifted, she made out a stream of diamond-hulled warglobes swooping into the Relleker system like glistening buckshot. “Holy crap, look at them come!”

When they’d left the dead Crenna system, Rlinda’s ship had faced the victorious hydrogue warglobes. The deep-core aliens had just vanquished their faeros enemies in the sun, and the diamond warships had hovered in front of the
Voracious Curiosity
. Rlinda still didn’t know how she had escaped destruction then, but she didn’t want to test her luck again.

The stream of warglobes came from the high, cold reaches above the planetary orbits. She counted fourteen of them, a massive assault force. Her heart sank. They must have traveled to the next sun after Crenna to fight the faeros in Relleker’s star. If the results of the struggle were the same as before, within a week or so this system would be cold and dead as well, uninhabitable.

Rlinda didn’t usually think unkind thoughts, but she wondered how smug Governor Pekar would feel when
she
had to evacuate her entire population and go hat in hand in search of help.

But the warglobes did not head for Relleker’s sun. Instead, they flew toward the planet itself. According to the
Curiosity
’s long-range sensors, the enemy ships were descending directly above the main human settlement. The deep-core aliens knew exactly what they were doing.

Within moments, Governor Pekar squawked into the comm system, sounding a general alarm and calling out for help. “Warglobes are attacking! They have begun to open fire.” The governor’s words cut off with a scream, and Rlinda heard an explosion in the distance. “Mayday! Help! We need an immediate evacuation!”

Rlinda restarted the
Curiosity
’s engines, turned about, and raced back toward Relleker, her heart pounding. She didn’t know what she could do. Already overloaded, she could take no more people aboard. Her decks were full, her corridors crowded with far more evacuees than the
Curiosity
had ever been meant to carry. Simply landing and taking off again would be a major undertaking. Without a green priest, she had no way even of calling for help in time.

The warglobes swept over the main colony, unleashed their electric-blue weapons, then dumped icewaves that crackled and shattered all trees and buildings and any humans who were in the way.

Having seen the attack from one of the observation screens, Crenna’s mayor, Lupe Ruis, stumbled into her cockpit. His round face was florid. “What’s going on down there? Don’t we have to help them?”

“Tell me how, and I’ll do it.” Together, they listened to the incessant screams. The diamond-hulled warglobes continued to unleash their fury, hammering away at the settlement, ripping up every structure. “In fact—” Rlinda shifted course and headed at an extreme angle away from the direction in which the warglobes had come, then shut all her systems down to drift without producing an energy signature. “I don’t want the drogues to notice
us
when they get bored with their attack down there.”

“But those people on Relleker...they helped us. We have to—”

She looked at him with her large brown eyes. “I’m not having a snit, Mayor. And I’m not just trying to save my pretty hide. You know I’ve put my butt on the line for every last one of you. I just can’t think of any way to assist them.”

Her scans were at the highest magnification, but thankfully she couldn’t see the devastation the warglobes continued to wreak down below. The hydrogues kept pounding and pounding.

The destruction of Boone’s Crossing, Corvus Landing, even Crenna with its murdered sun, had not been direct assaults on humans. These warglobes, however, bombarded Relleker’s towns and outlying buildings, focused their attack on the colony areas and nowhere else. The human settlement was the intended target, not just collateral damage in a cosmic war against incomprehensibly alien beings.

“Something sure pissed the hydrogues off.” Maybe the human colony was just too tempting a victim after the hydrogues finished their destruction of Crenna’s sun. Or maybe the drogues had reasons that no human could understand anyway. Then she remembered that not long ago Chairman Wenceslas had authorized the use of five more Klikiss Torches. Five more hydrogue gas planets had been obliterated. A clear provocation? “Damned fools! They had to go and light a bunch of fuses—what did they expect? No wonder the drogues are retaliating.”

The screams continued over the comm system for no more than an hour, at which point every standing structure and every living person on Relleker had been erased. Rlinda found it appalling.

She glanced at Mayor Ruis. “I hope those drogues are satisfied and don’t come hunting us for a little extra sport. We’re playing possum, but who knows how good their scanners are? As it is, we got away just in time.” Alarmed and sickened, the mayor hurried to spread the word.

Rlinda flicked switches and cut even the
Curiosity
’s running lights. She’d been in similar situations before, but her heart felt leaden, and her throat was dry. If Governor Pekar hadn’t forced them to leave, all of the Crenna refugees—and BeBob and herself—would have been down there as well, slaughtered...

The outcome of the Relleker massacre had been assured. She couldn’t have done anything to save them. The only thing she could accomplish now was to survive, keep all the Crenna refugees aboard alive—and haul ass for Earth with the news.

Chapter 33—ORLI COVITZ

Though he had not asked for the girl’s company, the old hermit took his responsibility seriously. “I always knew I needed a permanent shelter. Now I’ve got the impetus I needed to get off my ass and build my own private castle.”

Orli self-consciously brushed herself off. She felt as dirty as Hud Steinman looked. “I wasn’t complaining about sleeping on the ground.” Even so, she had to admit that the camping experience was a lot more fun in the concept stage than in the execution.

“Didn’t say you were. But my back hurts. Time to design and build a house.” He looked at her, his brow furrowed. “I don’t suppose you know anything about carpentry? Architecture?”

“Only a little bit that I read in schoolbooks.”

Steinman shrugged. “How hard can it be? We’ll figure it out.”

While he scratched out plans and chose a spot by a freshwater spring for their “homestead,” Orli helped with whatever else she could find to do. She sorted through the salvaged tools from the colony town, deciding which could be used for their task. She rechecked Steinman’s calculations, attempting to do so when he wasn’t looking. She knew he saw her doing it, but he did not object, either thinking the idea was cute, or just glad to have someone verify his math. She found a few mistakes but did not point them out to the old man.

When he’d finally convinced himself he knew what he was doing, Steinman showed her his hand-sketched plans and explained how the two of them would go about building a house. “We can cut down poletrees for lumber. We can make boards with the laser saw, and the skinnier logs will make a perfect framework.”

Orli let herself be carried away by his enthusiasm. “I bet we could weave some of the long grasses into strips, like ropes. Use it for lashing logs.” She’d already plaited a few of them around the campfire.

“Didn’t people make bricks out of mud a long time ago?” Steinman suggested. “We could probably do that, too. This world is full of building materials!”

She and Steinman easily felled one of the poletrees, and when the long trunk crashed into the grasses, two startled lowriders thrashed away. The topmost section of the poletree provided three sturdy logs that were easily carryable. When Steinman attempted to slice the thicker trunk into flat, even boards, though, he mangled the wood so badly it could be used for nothing other than patching up walls. “Okay, so I’m not a lumberjack. Never said I was.”

The second and third attempts were little better, but by the fourth poletree they had enough wood to begin. They sank the main logs deep into the ground, poured water into the holes, and packed them in with a mixture of mud and gravel. They worked together to raise the corner supports, sliding crossbars into notches that Orli made in the logs, and the shelter began to take shape.

They followed Steinman’s grand plan as best they could. When the major work was complete, the girl stared at the makeshift shelter. No doubt Steinman had envisioned a quaint and primitive palace, a rugged Robinson Crusoe home. Instead, it looked like a shack that would blow down in the first big storm.

It was the sort of poorly planned and poorly executed scheme her father might have come up with.

Stung by the thought, she lifted her chin. No matter how rickety the place looked, Orli was proud of their work. She and Steinman had built this themselves, with only the most primitive materials and under difficult circumstances.

“That’ll do,” she said. Steinman clapped her on the back.

Tired of having furry crickets to eat every night, Orli scavenged among the prairie grasses in search of other grains, tubers, or fruits that might be edible. She had no idea where to start, though. She carefully nibbled samples of leaves, berries, starchy roots. She identified and shied away from a few leaves with a powerfully bitter or acidic taste; one bluish berry made her vomit instantly. But a lumpy brown root tasted sweet enough, and she experienced no ill effects after she ate it. Some of the flowers were so spicy that they made her nose burn, but they tasted fine. Gradually, she added color and variety to their diet.

Steinman watched what she was doing and cautioned, “Spit out anything that tastes like poison.”

“And what does poison taste like?”

“I don’t know. If I tasted poison, I’d probably be dead.”

Exasperated, Orli rolled her eyes and looked up into the sky as if for guidance—and froze. She squinted until she was sure that what she saw was the burning trail of a descending ship heading directly toward the canyon and the destroyed colony.

“A ship! A ship—look, Mr. Steinman!”

Steinman clapped his hands and laughed. “Probably one of the Hansa supply ships, kid. Weren’t we supposed to get another delivery of equipment?”

As the small vessel flew high overhead, swelling from a black speck in the sky until it became recognizable as a cargo ship, Orli ran out on the prairie, waving her arms.

“Come on! We’ve got to get to the town site before he decides to take off again,” Steinman called.

The two of them crashed through the grasses. Lowriders, hearing their wild approach, scuttled away, not wanting to face this noisy stampede. Orli rapidly outdistanced the older man, but forced herself to lag so Steinman could catch up. She was anxious to see the rescuers, but on the chance it was another robot attack, she wanted the old hermit nearby.

By the time they reached the landing field just outside the canyon, Orli’s throat was raw from yelling. Beside her, Steinman wheezed like a set of giant bellows, but he didn’t seem to notice. He stumbled ahead, taking the girl by the hand.

The ship had already flown into the canyon to investigate, then circled back. The pilot must have been trying to transmit to the colony station, but heard no response. The cargo ship cruised again over the black, sooty ruins and tipped its wings to indicate that the pilot had seen the two of them. After searching for a cleared spot in the rubble, the craft set down.

Orli ran forward with tears streaming down her face. A man with wide eyes, frizzy hair, and leathery skin stepped out of the supply ship. The expression on his lean face was one of utter astonishment. Orli remembered Branson Roberts, who had delivered equipment to the colony not long before. Roberts stared at the two gasping people running toward him from the tall grasses.

Everywhere he looked there was destruction. Corribus had been entirely annihilated. Roberts opened and closed his mouth several times until finally he blurted out, “Holy crap—and crap again! What happened here?”

Orli threw herself into his arms, and the man automatically folded her in a reassuring hug. She was sobbing too much to answer him.

“We’d, uh, appreciate a lift out of here,” Steinman said, “if you could manage it.”