Chapter 04 #2
I glance over to where Vera is unlocking the nearest split-wing, which is a one-seater. “Vera doesn’t have room for me.”
“There’s a cargo trunk.”
I blink. “You’re not serious.”
“I fly alone.”
He pushes a button and the skimmer’s hood slides closed, effectively ending our discussion.
“It’s all right.” Vera’s voice echoes between the deck’s metal rafters. “I’ve messaged Jester. He’s coming, too. We’ll take the Sky Runner. That way we can each have a seat.”
Together, Vera and I raid the uniform closet, which is stocked for moments such as this.
I find a pair of boots, gloves, a clean set of whites.
I’m zipping up my flight jacket when Jester appears, his visor tipped back to reveal a pair of large, thickly lashed eyes.
He gives us a salute, then pulls the visor down so he can say, Lament is pushing his luck with this one.
“Again,” Vera grumbles. Then, more gently: “Thanks for coming.”
Partners don’t fly alone.
Vera glances at me. I am suddenly very interested in my jacket’s zipper.
We pull ourselves into the Sky Runner, which is a midsize craft designed for speed over comfort and features a collapsible trunk that is not, by any means, large enough to fit a grown man.
No gunner’s seat. No guns, for that matter.
The craft’s body is wide and low with twin engines at the back. It smells brand-new.
Vera hands me a headset. Her expression says she still deeply disapproves of this entire undertaking, but she’s resigned to whatever may come. “Buckle up.”
I do as she says, tucking my ray gun under one leg (my holster is still in the library) and pulling the harness over my shoulders. It’s not until I hear the click of the belt plate driving into the buckle that it finally hits me: my first mission.
An unapproved one.
That could very possibly land me a red card to match Lament’s.
Oh, the adventure.
The Sky Runner’s chamber closes, sealing us in.
A moment later, the flight deck’s back wall slides away to reveal a dazzling scene of distant stars and planets and an endless, endless black.
I don’t sense the change in pressure, but I do feel the Sky Runner hum to life as Vera fires up the engines, gives us a countdown, and (with what appears to be a single push of a button but actually involves a complicated series of foot controls) blasts us into space.
It’s always a bit strange, riding passenger.
I’m used to cramming myself into a gunner’s seat, which is typically stationed at a spacecraft’s nose.
The seat itself is never comfortable, but something about that position has always felt good to me.
Right. Nothing like it is here in the back seat, helplessly exposed, without any way to see what’s ahead or defend against it.
Luckily, the planet Lament has in mind isn’t far (at least not in hyperspeed terms), and soon we’re descending through a hazy atmosphere toward a dusty red landscape.
I press my cheek against my small window while Vera takes us down, though there’s not much to see.
An ocean of sand, random tufts of yellow grass, a distant ridge of caves sloping out of the earth like plates on a dinosaur’s back.
Lament called this place Purvuva, but I’m surprised it even has a name.
This is a no-man’s-planet—an uninhabited wasteland.
“There’s an extra holster for your ray gun under your seat,” Vera tells me as she types a code into the Sky Runner’s dashboard, scanning the air quality report before opening the cockpit.
Wind whips through the cabin, battering us with sand.
“And bring your headset,” she adds in a raised voice. “It’s breezy out there.”
I pull my headset around the back of my neck, grope for the holster, then scurry out after Vera and Jester. Lament has already parked his skimmer and is halfway to the caves. He throws us a look that I take to mean, Hurry up or I’m leaving you behind.
“You sure Lament wasn’t always like this?” I ask Vera.
“You know,” she replies with a frown, “I can’t say I am.”
As we walk, the breeze shifts direction, tossing more sand into our faces.
I use my arm to shield my eyes, but it doesn’t really help, so by the time we approach the mouth of the largest cave, I’m blinking away tears and grit and a fresh wave of apprehension.
Lament and I were barely able to tackle one rabid raptor between the two of us.
And okay, yes, I was unarmed and surprised, but what if Lament is right and the mist somehow infected an entire colony of those things?
Vera is a split-wing pilot, and Jester is an intelligence officer—they’re not trained for ground combat.
Lament might have some weapons experience (he seemed to know his way around a ray gun), but I’m the only one here who’s truly qualified.
How are we supposed to fight them all at once?
In the end, it isn’t an issue. The raptors are already dead.
The smell hits me first, a putrid mix of blood and excrement. I hear Jester’s feet grind to a halt beside me, Vera’s quick intake of breath. It takes a second for my eyes to adjust to the cavern’s darkness, and when they do, I gape.
The earth is piled with bodies. There must be hundreds of raptors here, some gutted, some beheaded, some so ravaged there’s hardly anything left.
Bones jut from broken limbs, the sand glittering with cracked scales.
There’s blood everywhere, pooling around the bloated carcasses and darkening the earth.
I’ve got my ray gun in my hand, but there’s nothing to shoot. Nothing left alive.
“They’ve murdered each other,” I say raggedly, my words echoing off the coarse walls of the cavern.
Lament’s voice is tight. “So it seems.”
“To death.”
“Murder typically implies death, Hartman.”
“But … why?”
Lament walks over to the nearest raptor and crouches for closer inspection.
The reptile’s teeth are sunk into one of its brethren like it died midway through the chomp.
When Lament reaches out, Jester, Vera, and I make a collective sound of disapproval that does nothing to stop him from thumbing open the dead creature’s eyelid. My heart gives a hard lurch.
The raptor’s eye is glowing blue.
“It’s like you thought.” Vera’s words are squeaky. “The raptor colony, the blue eyes … I can’t—I can’t believe you were right.”
“Your confidence in me is inspiring,” Lament says.
“I’m with Vera,” I offer. “This is … hard to believe.” My heart is thumping like I’ve just run a mile for time, like my body senses the wrongness of this scene even as my mind struggles to understand.
“You really think the space mist did this? Infected this raptor colony and made them attack their own kind?”
Lament pushes to his feet. “Yes.”
“But what is the mist? And where is it coming from?”
“If I had those answers, we wouldn’t be here.”
We walk around the aboveground hollows, keeping within sight of each other while hunting for more clues to explain where the mist originated or where it went or why it infected these reptiles.
The light grows weaker as I pick my way toward the back of the caves, so I pull a flashlight from one of my utility pockets and click it on.
The beam is cruel, illuminating every bloody angle, every shattered tooth and gouged, glowing eyeball.
I’m no naturalist, not like Master Ira, but even I feel the weight of so much death. The senselessness.
We search until we’ve seen it all, then search some more. I’m on my third pass around the perimeter when Vera, Jester, and I start exchanging looks. None of us is willing to tell Lament what we’re thinking: If there were any clues, we’d have found them by now.
At last, Vera breaks the silence. “Anything?”
Nothing, Jester replies.
“Nope,” I say aloud for her benefit, glancing at Lament. He doesn’t seem to be paying attention.
Vera spreads her hands in a mute plea, What do we do?
I clear my throat. “Lament?”
He’s standing near the cavern’s center, staring at a particularly messy pile of raptor bodies. His expression is closed, quiet. Lost in thought.
“It’s getting late,” Vera tries again. “What do you think, Lament?”
At last, his attention catches. “What?”
“If we’re going to make it back to Skyhub before the sergeant wakes up, we need to get moving. We can debrief on the way.”
“Oh,” he says faintly.
“I’m going to get the Sky Runner started,” she continues a little redundantly, like she’s not trusting him to get it. “We’ll wait for you, but don’t stay too much longer, okay?”
Lament nods. Vera and Jester head out, but I don’t like the idea of leaving Lament here alone among all this gore, so I hang back, biting the inside of my lip and considering my next move.
He’s still just standing there, staring at the bodies.
Or at nothing. Hard to tell, really. I step closer until we’re almost shoulder to shoulder, trying to read his expression. “What are you looking at?”
He tenses. “What do you think?”
“Sorry.” I scratch the back of my neck. “Stupid question.”
Discomfort crosses his face. “No, I didn’t…” He gives a sigh that’s more movement than sound, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “It wasn’t a bad question. I just … have this feeling.”
“What feeling?”
He drops his hand. “We’ve left tracks in the sand.”
I glance around at our footprints stamped into the earth by four pairs of boots. “Ah. Good point. Indeed.”
He looks at me like I’m being purposefully obtuse. “We’re the only ones who’ve left tracks.”
“Yeah, but we’re the only ones who’ve—oh, wait.” I see it now. Around the raptors there should be claw marks, body gouges, pad prints, but the sand is smooth. The only footprints in this cave are ours. “The prints could’ve been erased by the wind,” I offer.
“Do you feel any wind?”
No. Despite the gales whistling outside, the air within the cave is calm. “So if not the wind…”