Transcendent (9781311909442) (8 page)

Krys tipped the quad fan machine up and
reached for the access patch on the bottom. He pulled the carbon
shim out from his worn pants and fumbled twice before he seated it
against the five-pointed screw head. He had to angle it to get
enough contact and torque as he twisted it. His makeshift
screwdriver twisted free.

“Krys! You need this?” Angelo called up.

Krys glanced down and saw the control pad
for the picker. His eyes widened. “Not yet. Take it. I need the
tools. Check the maintenance hatch behind the seat.”

Angelo turned and growled at Stef to get out
of the cab. She hopped down without a word but offered him a
gesture that spoke volumes. Kerry and Angelo both chuckled. Krys
frowned. “Hurry up!”

“Relax,” Kerry said. “This guy’s down for
the count!”

“For the what?”

Kerry sighed. “It’s an old saying. Means
he’s not waking up any time soon.”

“That doesn’t mean a patrol won’t come
by!”

Kerry shrugged Krys’s warning off and turned
back to watch Angelo. He glanced at Krys and then the sleeping
worker.

“Need the whole thing?” Angelo asked as he
yanked out a satchel full of tools.

“Just a star bit driver,” Krys said. “Looks
like a four-millimeter.”

Angelo stared into the bag and snorted. He
closed it and stepped up on the access ladder. He hoisted it up and
set it on the edge of the open topped front bin. Krys had to
balance the picker and scramble around the machine to get to the
satchel. He yanked it open and fished around until he found the
tool he needed. He grinned when he pulled out a powered driver.

Less than a minute later, he had the hatch
open and used a chip puller to remove the tiny locator chip plugged
into the picker’s circuit board. He tucked it into his pocket and
secured the hatch. “I’m good!”

“Should we take the transporter too?” Kerry
asked.

Krys stared at it and started to grin.
“That’s a great idea!”

“No,” Angelo said. “Too big. Can’t move it
and hide it. Plus they can track it.”

“I can pull the locator chip!” Krys
protested.

“Don’t matter—that much metal, they’ll spot
it from space.”

Krys wanted to argue but he saw Kerry and
Stef both nodding in agreement with the large man. He pressed his
lips together and turned away. His eyes fell on the top of the bins
again and then widened. “There’s a bunch of coconuts in here!”

Angelo grinned. “Those we can take!”

“Front bin’s full,” Krys said. “I’ll carry
the picker if—”

Angelo snorted. “I’ll get the flitter; you
grab some nuts.”

Kerry and Stef burst out laughing while Krys
blushed at the thought of grabbing his nuts. He grinned in spite of
his red cheeks. “It’s ready; come get it.”

“Anything else we can salvage?” Stef asked.
“We got a spare power cell, tools, the control pad, the picker, and
some nuts.”

“I’d love to tear the transporter down for
parts, but we don’t have time.”

Kerry frowned and glanced around but the
others nodded in agreement with Krys. “All right,” Stef said.
“Let’s go. Mig’s waiting for us.”

Krys tossed down several coconuts to the
others before he grabbed the satchel and climbed down. “Good job,
Krys,” Stef said with a smile as he gathered up some coconuts.

Krys smiled back and turned to look at a
transporter. He noticed a crack near the front wheel well and
froze. He’d cracked that transporter by running it into another one
when he helped his dad do maintenance on them last winter.

“Krys? You okay?” Stef asked.

He shook his head and nodded. “Yeah, sorry.
I just—never mind, it’s nothing.”

“What is it?”

He blinked the tears out of his eyes and
coughed. “Let’s go.”

“Krys?”

He turned and shook his head. “Let’s go.
We’ve got to be gone before they can follow us.”

She stared at him for a few more seconds
before nodding. She turned to the others and said in a clear voice,
“Come on, boys. Let’s get out of here.”

Chapter 14

“We should have brought him back with us,”
Krys muttered. “We don’t know anything about what’s going on!”

“No good,” Mr. Strain said with a shake of
his head. “We might learn some things, but so would he. And then
what, we kill him so he doesn’t report back?”

Krys felt a chill run down his back. “Kill
him? No! I mean, um—”

“Why not?” Janna asked. She was another
farmer who managed to escape and join up with them. When everyone
turned to look at her, she shrugged. “They killed us without
thinking twice.”

“They didn’t,” Mig argued. “The soldiers
did. I got no problem with fighting them and doing what needs to be
done; it’s fighting civilians that don’t sit right with me.”

“Doesn’t,” Krys said without thinking about
it. “It doesn’t feel right to me either.”

Mig raised an eyebrow at Krys’s correction
and then smirked. Janna looked at Angelo just as he looked away.
“Killing civilians didn’t bother them any.”

“Let’s change this up,” Mig said. He looked
at all of them before asking, “What do we not know that we need
to?”

“How we’re going to survive the winter,”
Stef offered.

Mig winced and then chuckled. “Well sure,
but I meant that the people living in our town could tell us?”

They glanced back and forth at one another,
looking for someone to speak. Krys considered the question and
realized that there were a lot of things he’d like to know, but
nothing that was necessary for his survival. He frowned and glanced
up at the sky and picked out the faint twinkle of stars near the
western horizon. That was where Lily was. And anyone else who had
been taken away. Somewhere up there. Safe, or so he imagined.

“They can’t tell us that,” Mig said,
startling Krys. “I have no idea why they took them. Reeducation? Or
brainwashing? Maybe just slave labor. It don’t make sense, killing
all of us off and only taking the kids in the right ages that they
could get.”

Krys nodded. “I’d been wondering that. Where
did they come from? Earth? Mars? Some of the orbiting
habitats?”

Mig rubbed his chin as he considered it.
“That’s a lot of hardware. Too much for a habitat, I think. There’s
what, fifty some ag colonies here? All those ships alone, let alone
the tanks and bots. Maybe Mars, but does that make sense? I mean,
they’d need Earth, right? Earth is between us and Mars.”

Krys frowned and glanced at the powered down
infopads sitting under his lean-to that protected them from the
occasional shower. If he hooked one up to a power cell, he could
find out where Earth, Mars, and Venus were at in their orbits, but
he wasn’t sure it was worth the effort or the waste of power.

“Hard to know,” Kerry said. “I don’t think
any of us has any idea where the planets were when they showed up.
I don’t even know how long it takes to get from Mars to here. The
trip from Earth took me and Stef almost three months. I remember
hearing somebody say going to Mars instead was only a couple weeks
longer.”

“As long as the planets are lined up and you
take advantage of momentum,” Krys added.

The adults glanced at him and then away.
“Good point,” Mig admitted. “All that astrophysics or astronomy or
whatever it is confuses me.”

“It’s all about speed and distance,” Krys
offered. He opened his mouth and froze as another idea came to him.
“Hey! I know what to do!”

“What to do? About what?”

“About us and winter,” Krys said. “Venus has
sunlight for one hundred and seventeen Earth days, depending on how
close to the equator we are. Then the same amount of time spent in
the dark. It doesn’t get too bad out, but we usually see some snow
halfway through the night cycles.”

“Right, and we don’t have the clothes for
it,” Janna grumbled.

“We move. Be nomads,” Krys explained. The
stunned and confused looks he received prompted him to continue.
“At the equator, Venus rotates around thirteen and a half
kilometers an hour. That’s a hard pace to keep for very long on
foot, but if we head east we can prolong our daylight until we
can’t beat the sunset. Then we turn and head back, cutting the
night in half.”

Angelo was the first to speak up. “None of
us have been to any other colonies. Where do we go? Where do we get
food?”

Krys turned to the pads. “We have maps.
There are mountain ranges that might slow us down but there are
roads through them. It’s going to be hard, yes, but can we survive
even a single night cycle? One hundred seventeen days where it gets
colder and colder. Snow will come. The trees won’t bear fruit. If
we kill many vison, they’ll know we’re here and come after us.”

“They know we’re here now,” Mig pointed out.
“After that stunt we pulled with the highpicker.”

“Right! And we can use it at other colonies
we find to gather food.”

“You’re talking about being on the move all
the time,” Janna said. “That’s no way to live!”

“And this is?” Stef asked her. “Look around,
Janna. There’s six of us here and two more keeping watch. If we
don’t do anything, we’re going to die. Then everyone we loved will
have died for nothing!”

Krys glanced at Mr. Strain and saw him
staring back. They shared a secret hope for Lily, at least. It
bound them together but didn’t make the approaching night any
warmer.

“If we’re always on the move, will we have
time to gather food?” Kerry asked. “If we’re more active, we’ll
need more to eat too.”

Mig cleared his throat, drawing everyone’s
attention. “It’s late and Krys brought up a good idea. I don’t know
if it’s the right idea, but it’s a good one. Odds are we’re not the
only survivors, too. There’s bound to be other bands of refugees
out there. Maybe we can team up with them. Pool our resources.
Gather enough strength to fight back.”

“Fight back? Against tanks and robots and
soldiers?” Janna snapped.

Mig nodded. “An army’s only as strong as the
fear it puts in the people standing against them.”

“Guns help,” Janna quipped.

“They help make us afraid,” Mig corrected.
“But with enough people, they can’t shoot us all. If they did,
they’d have no one left.”

Krys lifted his head and stared at Mr.
Strain with a newfound respect. It made perfect sense. Convince
people to stand up and eventually even the people holding the guns
would have to realize they were in the wrong. Wouldn’t they?

“Get some rest and think about it, that’s
all I’m asking,” Mig finished. “Come up with new ideas if you can,
but if not, we’ve got to make our minds up quick or we’re going to
have to settle in for a long and cold night.”

Lily stopped on her way back to her quarters
by the small classroom that Palla had gotten assigned to them as a
study area. She wasn’t ready to be alone yet in her quarters and
she figured if there was anyone she could talk to, it would be Trix
or Kami. She didn’t know if she should tell them about Krys; she
didn’t want to upset them if they’d lost anybody. Even though she
was aching to at least talk about him.

She found Kami going over an infopad with
Palla beside her. Both looked up as she entered. Kami dropped her
eyes back down almost as quickly. Palla’s lips curled up in a smile
that was part smirk and part sneer. “Was the attention shifting?
Did you need a new way to stand out?”

Lily felt the words hit like a slap to her
cheek. “I didn’t ask to—”

“What sort of punishment do they hand out
for that sort of rude behavior?” Palla asked. “I’ve always
wondered.”

“Punishment?” Lily’s eyes widened. Palla had
no idea about President Ondalla! “Oh, that? Sorry. Well, I’m not
going back to that class.”

Palla shook her head and sighed. “All that
potential and your mouth ruined it. You need a serious lesson in
serving your fellow man!”

Kami lifted her head back up. “What are you
going to do?” she asked in a timid voice.

For Kami’s sake, Lily tried not to sound too
smug when she said, “Coordinator Sykes is moving me into classes
with the sixteen-year-olds.”

Palla’s lips fell open and a few choked
sounds emerged.

Lily drove the nail home. “I guess it was
President Ondalla’s idea. He told me to work hard and challenge
myself—everybody was going to be watching.”

Kami shook her head and glanced back down at
her pad. Palla managed to close her mouth but her nostrils flared
twice as she breathed through them. Finally she managed to ask,
“The president sent you a communication? Personally?”

Lily shook her head. “No.”

Palla’s shoulders dropped as she released
some of the tension in her back.

“He told me in person.”

Kami jerked her head up again and Palla
resumed her imitation of a fish out of water gasping for
breath.

The door opened behind Lily to admit Trix.
“Did you guys hear the rumor about the new president being here? Do
you think—what’s wrong?”

Lily turned to face the other Venerian girl
and offered her a weak smile. “I met him a few minutes ago.”

“You met—no way! That’s so—so—I don’t even
know. I mean, it’s cool and all, but this is the guy who sent an
army to take over Venus. He killed almost everyone we know,
right?”

“He’s very passionate about his beliefs in
sacrifice and the future of humanity,” Lily said. What she kept to
herself was that she didn’t share his beliefs. Her family had been
ranchers, not idealists or terrorists. They could have kept on
ranching just fine regardless of who wanted to be in charge.

“That’s unbelievable!”

“You don’t believe me?”

“No! I do! I mean, yes, I believe you. It’s
just amazing. We’re just kids, right? And you got to meet the
president!”

“I don’t think we’ve been kids for a few
months now,” Lily said. “Not since I watched one of my best friends
get blown up and saw my village destroyed.”