37 Dead Planet
Dead Planet
Baby. Baby. Baby.
The word rings in Orion’s ears.
The mewling little bundle is trying to crawl. Trying to crawl back toward her doomed parents.
Baby. Baby. Baby.
Orion’s gaze finally snaps up to meet the man’s eyes.
He won’t last more than a second or two longer.
Orion has seen enough of these deaths to know.
The man knows it, too, but he’s not hanging on for himself.
But time stretches. For a second, Orion shakes out of his primal fog.
He’s no longer just prey. Suddenly, it’s bigger than simply run, hide, survive.
Other instincts rear their heads. Family. Protect. Brother. Sister.
Orion has a glorious and terrible second of dueling emotions. Life feels vivid and clear, yet death seems only seconds, only inches away. But he is something more than prey, more than a simple animal again. Orion isn’t alone anymore. There’s someone right there, someone else to live for.
The man dies with relief in his eyes as Orion darts forward, snatching the baby clumsily in his jaws as he’s seen countless parents do throughout his young life.
But he’s no parent; he’s inexperienced, and his jaws are too small, and the baby squawks in discomfort. A Beast looks up, screeches, pursues.
Orion runs and runs. Ignores her frantic squalling and flees for his life.
For her life. He hasn’t moved this fast in ages, every pounding heartbeat reminding him he’s alive.
Orion feels everything—every struggling breath and every screaming muscle.
Orion ignores it all. He stops only when he can no longer run—when he can no longer ignore her incessant whimpering, can bear her weight no longer.
Without his usual careful selection process, he darts into the first hidey-hole he can find.
“Be quiet,” Orion snaps as soon as he drops the child. She tries but can’t stop the snuffling noises entirely. She shifts nervously, crackling debris so loudly that surely the Beasts will come. “Be quiet!” he says again as quietly as he can. She’s terrified and crying, and he’s so angry with her.
The Beasts are outside. Orion can hear them.
Searching, rooting through rubble, digging.
They are always everywhere, and they can surely hear her.
He’s seen now she’s more toddler than baby.
No wonder she was so heavy. Young but not stupid—she can’t be, to have made it this long, and now his survival depends on her understanding the way of things.
He grabs her roughly, wraps her tightly in his arms, but covers her mouth and hisses in her ear.
Of all the terrible things, this is the most terrible, what he does next.
He whispers in her ear, “Those Beasts, out there. They killed your parents. They ripped them to pieces and ate them. You heard them scream. You saw what the Beasts did. Do you want that to happen to you? They will kill you slowly and rip you apart and eat you like they eat everyone.”
Orion continues whispering in her ear, long after she’s totally silent.
Even so, that night she curls up next to him to sleep.
Guilt overwhelms him, creeping in to replace his usual numbness.
Orion hates it. He hates the Beasts, the stink that lingers in the air, the creatures all around him that can’t stop dying.
Orion hates everything at this moment. He hates himself most of all.
But he can’t hate her as she tucks into a tight ball next to him.
He lets himself appreciate her warmth, her company.
Wraps her up in his arms more gently this time and doesn’t wake until much later in the morning than he’s grown used to.
She doesn’t speak again. Not that night, not the next day.
Not the day after that. Orion doesn’t hear her speak again.
He never even learns her name. He settles for calling her what she is, Baby.
She deserves a name, but he can’t bear to come up with something when he’s sure she’ll die soon anyway.
Orion can’t let it hurt more than it already will.
Orion doesn’t merely tolerate her, although emotional distance was meant to be his watchword.
He grows to love her fiercely, perhaps more than he’s ever loved anyone.
A brush with death here, a close call with injury there, it cements them together as closely as any family bond, closer.
As they travel long miles, hungry, cold, exhausted, they only have each other.
She tries to keep up, but she’s small. He gets stronger, better at carrying her, and she never makes another peep even when his clumsy holds leave bruises.
The fiery-hot coal of hope turns to guilt and settles in his stomach like a stone with every day she remains stoic and silent, heavier even than the baby is to carry around.
It’s hard to find enough food for one, let alone two.
Orion makes sure he goes hungrier than Baby, but even so, she’s always hungry.
The Beasts lurk everywhere, and they destroy everything edible they find.
If they don’t make the planned evacuation in time, he doesn’t know how they’ll make it through the cold season; the nights are already colder every passing day.
Maybe it would have been kinder to let the little one die with her parents.
Hope flares to life again when they make it to the evacuation point.
Dying embers stoked back up into a roaring blaze.
Orion has been so worried they’d be too late, but somehow, against all the odds, he’s done it.
Not just for himself, but for the both of them; he found the way and kept them alive and found enough to eat, and now here they are.
Ten thousand seats per evacuation ship. The evacuation ships are full of individual stasis pods, genetic banks, and embryo incubation vaults.
They were supposed to have ten evacuation ships, but the adults say only four remain that can escape the planet and meet up with Mothership exploring the galaxy.
Mothership, which is too far away to help them, carries a small team that at least guarantees the survival of their species, even if the worst happens on planet.
There’s a plan; there’s a safe place to sleep; there’re enough food and adults.
It’s a grim plan and fraught with new dangers, but at least it’s a future to look to.
Even their low population number isn’t enough to dim Orion’s newly ignited hope.
So few have made it to this outpost even after all this time, but Orion struggles to grasp the scale of deaths.
He remembers learning that there were billions of them before the Beasts arrived.
But this evacuation center holds so many more people than he’s ever seen in one place; his town was small.
He hears the numbers, but he can’t grasp them. Surely it can’t be that bad.
Roll call assigns numbers 338 and 339 to Orion and the baby.
They count the children and adults separately.
There are so many adults, several thousand at least. Orion isn’t sure how many, but it feels like a safe number.
And the Helpers, the robot race. There’re at least five for every person.
The Beasts don’t find them as tasty to eat, apparently.
But they, too, have suffered losses, fighting for their beloved friends.
The adults look grim at the count, lament how few children they could save, how far from capacity the ship still is.
How long do they risk waiting on planet?
But Orion doesn’t care. Adults worry endlessly; they always have and always will.
Surely this plan to leave will save them.
These spaceships, equipment, and gear, robot friends everywhere—it all means they will be okay.
He’s wrong. The Beasts come, a coordinated force of them, overwhelming numbers, before Orion has a chance to catch his breath.
The children are prioritized for evacuation first, boarding by order of age.
Orion should be later in the queue, but he slips past, determined to get his little charge to safety without being separated from her.
He expects the adults at the door to stop him.
But it’s worse than that. They give him rushed instructions, station him at the spaceship airlock, show him the steps for closing the doors, the protocol for emergency liftoff; they then return to the fight, leaving him alone.
His brain desperately tries to retain all the information.
I can’t fly this ship. I can’t do it, he wants to scream.
But he stays silent because he knows by now what he wants doesn’t matter.
“Can’t” doesn’t matter; “can’t” doesn’t make a difference in what he has to do.
He can’t depend on anyone but himself for his survival, so he listens and learns faster than he ever thought he could.
One eye on the battle, one eye on the numbers, the count for how many souls on board.
The number ticks so slowly upward as children are shuttled onto the spaceship.
The screaming and bloodshed grow closer.
He waits as long as he can, but he knows triage by now.
Ninety-seven is the roll call total. Not even a solid hundred.
Ninety-six, he gives to Baby, who sticks to him like glue.
Ninety-seven, he gives to himself. Then he shuts the door.
Orion leaves the scraps of his childhood behind with the Beasts.
Thankfully, the ship itself and the robots help him enough to get off planet and along the way somehow.
The first and last time he sees his planet from the windows of a spaceship, it’s beautiful and terrible all at once.
But he turns away to the task at hand: escape, evasion, survival.
Some of the Beasts follow; space around the planet is a war zone, surrounded by the Beast ships.
They can afford to send a few after him.
Orion jettisons the embryo pods and the genetic banks when it becomes clear they won’t make it without distraction and less weight.
It splits the force following them into deep space.
Orion watches the last hope for his race’s future spinning off into the vacuum of space, pursued by monsters, and tries to tell himself there’s a chance.
Maybe someone, anyone, will find them unharmed someday.
Hundreds of years, millennia later when they’ve floated their way somewhere peaceful, maybe a benevolent race of aliens somewhere will take pity on them.
He’s the oldest child on a ship of babies, the oldest orphan among a ship full of them.
It’s up to him to console and coerce almost a hundred youngsters into stasis pods.
He clutches number ninety-six, Baby, to his chest the whole time.
For a while after the rest are asleep, he stays awake with her.
They wander the ship, watch the stars and planets twinkle in the distance.
He delays her stasis bedtime as long as he can.
Before he tucks himself in, he sets a course for a hopeful planet on the list of possibilities he has.
Where he is to await rescue. Where he is to hide and await Mothership’s arrival.
A friendly green-and-blue planet with no spacefaring life.
He picks it on chance and whim. He watches Baby sleep for a while before he, too, enters his little stasis pod, and leaves the navigating to the race of sentient robots, the last of the symbiotes that made it to the ship.
He hopes he won’t be the oldest person left of his species when he awakens, that the adults will escape, find them, take care of them.
He hopes his fate isn’t floating through space for an eternity, asleep on a ghostly ship full of robots and orphans.