Lost Planet 02 - The Stolen Moon (19 page)

Ksenia pursed her mouth. “I saw it through the window as the ship was coming down. It's walking distance.”

It took a while to gather themselves up and scavenge what little supplies they could find. The Guard who'd taken shrapnel in his leg couldn't walk, and two other crewmembers stayed behind with him. The rest of them set off slowly across the endless mossy rocks of the Rhima landscape. Ksenia marched ahead with her few remaining staffers, her dark eyes wide and watchful. The crew of the
Kuyddestor
followed silently, casting occasional glances into the sky, as if they might see their starship somewhere up there. Derrick had torn up his own jacket to fashion a sling for Maurus's wounded arm, frowning as Chase watched him lower it carefully over Maurus's head.

Maurus kept up with the rest of them, but he walked stiffly, his face tense, eyes fixed straight ahead. The sling seemed to help stabilize his arm, but clear liquid seeped from his burned shoulder and soaked the gray fabric. “We need to find a place to keep warm,” Chase said to Parker in a low voice. “The sun's going to set soon.”

“No it won't,” said Parker. “It looks like dusk because we're at the terminator. The line between light and dark.”

“Right.” Chase nodded. “And soon it'll be completely dark.”

“No,” corrected Parker. “Rhima is tidally locked to Storros—the same side always faces the planet. It revolves around the planet, so all sides see the sun at some point, but it doesn't rotate on its own. I think I read it takes thirty-nine days to make a full revolution, so we've got a good day or two before the darkness gets this far.”

“Lords, Parker.” Lilli gave him a sideways look. “Spending time with you is like hanging out with an encyclopedia.”

Chase stifled a laugh and gave Lilli a thumbs-up as she tried to hide the smile creeping over her face. Scowling, Parker stomped away to walk in a different part of the group.

As long as they walked, the landscape never changed—gray tinged with mossy green and mostly flat, with some low rolling hills and dull skies. The twisted hulk of the
Falconer
soon lay far behind, with only a thin plume of smoke to mark where they'd left it. Chase's clothes smelled burnt, and he felt filthy. He ran his hands through his hair and looked at the sky, worrying about what was happening to the crew on the
Kuyddestor
and how Analora was doing.

“Why hasn't anyone come to look for us?” he asked. “The Storrian defense fleet probably saw what happened, didn't they?”

Vidal, walking ahead of them, glanced back. “I'm certain they did. But what do you think would happen if a Storrian ship comes anywhere near Rhima, let alone tries to land on it?”

“Oh,” said Chase, as understanding dawned on him. Regardless of whether or not they knew that there were
Falconer
survivors, the
Kuyddestor
hijackers would ensure that nobody came anywhere near their coveted moon.

Derrick spit on the ground. “We're trapped down here like rabbits in a cage.”

They stopped after an hour of walking over the monotonous land to take a short rest. Maurus sat on the ground, holding his shoulder at a funny angle. Vidal crouched beside him, talking in a low voice. When Chase approached, he saw that Maurus was shivering. “Chase, can you look around and see if anyone has any water?” she asked softly.

He went straight to Ksenia to ask. She was sitting on a boulder with her staffers gathered around her. They appeared to be arguing about something, but before he could overhear what they were talking about, the staffers left.

“No, there's no water,” she told Chase when he asked. “My staff thought to take all their personal items and electronics, but nobody took any survival equipment.”

Analora would have known what to take
, Chase thought. It was a perfect opportunity to ask Ksenia about everything—the microchip, the note, the meeting on Lumos—but suddenly he wasn't sure how to begin. Should he just ask her outright if she'd left the note? What if she said no? A musty, mossy smell blew by on a breeze, and without thinking he wrinkled his nose.

“Stinks here, doesn't it?'” Ksenia gestured at the green horizon. “Part of the oxygen production program was a surface-wide distribution of lichen spores. That's what you're smelling. Along with a blend of factory-generated gasses and liquids.” She poked at the thick, spongy lichen covering the boulder she sat on and frowned. Chase glanced at the lichen and looked up, about to ask what she'd been doing in Lumos, but he found her giving him the peculiar, intense gaze he'd seen before.

“What?” he asked.

She spoke quietly. “Chase, if the
Kuyddestor
doesn't survive this … situation, would you like to come with me? I can find you a new home. One where you belong.”

Chase took a step closer. “Are you the one who left me the note?”

She paused before giving him a tiny nod. “Yes, I am.”

Excitement started to rush up, but he dampened it with caution. “Why did you want me to meet you in Lumos?”

“I wanted to meet with you in private.” She looked over her shoulder. “We shouldn't even be talking about this now.”

But he needed more confirmation from her. “So you know who I am.” She nodded. “Did you know the ship was going to be hijacked?”

She flinched in surprise. “If you're suggesting that I somehow had a hand in this…”

“No, no,” Chase said hastily. “I just thought maybe, because it happened when…” Fearing that she might cut the conversation off, he went straight for the big questions. “What do you know about my parents? Did you work for Asa Kaplan?”

“We can't talk about that here.” Ksenia stood. “Come with me when this is over, no matter what happens to the
Kuyddestor
. I'll have all the answers for you then. I'll find you a new home.”

The reaction Chase felt to the idea of leaving the ship was so powerful it surprised him. “The
Kuyddestor
is my home. I can't leave it.”

“You don't belong there,” she said firmly, turning away to end the conversation. “We'll talk about this later.”

When Chase returned to the other side of the group, Maurus was hunched over, taking tiny sips from a flask that Parker had somehow wheedled out of one of the staffers. He managed a wink when he saw Chase's worried face. “Don't worry, I'll live. What does this put you up to now, three times you've saved my life? Soon I won't want to leave your side, Chase Garrety.”

Vidal was talking to the Federation staffers, who stood in a tight unified group. She came over and crouched next to Maurus. “The staffers have decided to go back to the ship.”

“What ship?” asked Maurus. “There was nothing left.”

“They think they'll have a better chance of getting rescued if they stay there. They're scared about getting lost.”

“We'll find the gravity mines, right?” asked Chase.

“We will.” Vidal smiled at him, but her eyes showed enough doubt to make Chase worry. She put a hand on Maurus's leg. “If this is too strenuous for you, you can go back with them.”

Maurus shook his head. “It's not as bad as it looks,” he grunted, struggling to his feet.

Vidal sighed, making a face at Chase. “Well, that's good, because it looks like raw meat.”

If Ksenia was disturbed by her staff's lack of faith in her leadership, she didn't show it. The staffers set back the way they'd come—easy enough to follow, by the path of crushed and bruised lichen they'd left in their wake. The rest of them continued on, guided only by Ksenia's promise that they were going the right way.

After two more hours of walking, they were all starting to cast dubious glances at one another behind Ksenia's back. The same endless terrain rolled out ahead of them, with no mineworks in sight. “We're just walking with no direction,” muttered Parker, his face drawn and pale under the smears of ash. “We've gone maybe ten miles, with a viewing radius of four miles at best, so we've covered about a hundred and thirty square miles of, oh, about thirteen
million
square miles total on the moon. I hope this lichen is edible, because we're going to be doing this for a while.” He spoke loudly enough for Ksenia to hear, but she didn't respond. Chase kept his eyes on the ground, ignoring Parker like everyone else.

Not one minute later, the frame of the gravity mines appeared on the horizon, a tiny blip on the flat plain. Ksenia whipped around, flashing them all a fiercely triumphant expression. It was around that time that Chase first noticed the wind—not the tepid mushroomy breeze from before, but a thin cold draft that raised the hairs on his arms. It picked up quickly, swirling through the group in chilly bursts. He shivered, rubbing his arms.

Parker looked over his shoulder. “Oh, that is not good.”

Chase turned in the same direction Parker faced, and his stomach dropped. A smudge rising off the ground had replaced the normal horizon of endless lichen, like someone had run their thumb over the edge and blurred it until there was nothing but an ominous dark grayness. “What is that?”

“Windstorm!” shouted Vidal.

Chase looked around to find his sister, panic shooting through him. His first instinct was to run, but where? There was nothing that could offer shelter on the flat moon, and they'd never make it to the mineworks in time.

“Let's move!” Derrick motioned to the left, toward a slight crest in the landscape, and everyone broke into a run. Chase checked to make sure both Lilli and Parker were there, and Maurus as well, who ran in a loping jog, his burned arm held tight to his chest.

The windstorm moved faster than they could run, and soon the air around them was swirling in fierce currents. A distant whistling roar behind them grew louder and louder. The winds came on them in full force, ripping through their ranks and tearing at their clothes. Worse were the tiny bits of debris that blew in their faces with the strength of a sandblaster—even phasing couldn't stop Chase from getting a mouthful of grit when he tried to tell Lilli to pull the back of her sweater up over her head. They jogged onward, jostling against one another as the gales alternately pushed and slowed them.

Chase tried to keep pace alongside his sister, but she stopped to wipe lichen from her eyes and then ran with one sweatered arm held over her face. They fell back to the rear, and slowly a gap started to grow between them and the rest of the group, the swirling winds blotting them out of view little by little. Suddenly Derrick appeared in front of them, squinting, and he dropped to one knee, gesturing for Lilli to climb up on his back. Once she was on, he stood, and he and Chase sprinted to rejoin everyone else.

When they reached the crest, the ground rose before them in a short incline. Derrick, who had returned to the lead with Lilli clinging to his back, paused at the top. They were at the lip of an enormous crater. The walls of the crater went sharply downhill, leading to a round, flattened bottom, like a shallow bowl. In the center of that bowl was a cluster of buildings.

Vidal gave a whoop, but the sound was snatched away by the fierce winds at their backs, and without another word everyone started running down the pebbly slope. As soon as they'd gone a few meters, the winds began to die down, and the sound of their ragged panting could be heard.

Jogging sideways, Maurus slipped and fell on his good shoulder. Chase ran to him, but Vidal was already there, helping him back up. Little bits of lichen and dirt were stuck to his wounded arm, and his face was rigid. He got to his knees and waved them both soundlessly on toward the settlement.

In the gray twilight, a motley collection of cargo trailers and smaller dome-like structures lay clumped together like a growth on the dismal soil. A few spiraling antennae sprouted up among the structures. Lichen grew alongside the buildings and up the walls in thick curly patches. There were vehicles too: a small, rusted hovercraft parked by a shed, a few dented hoverbikes leaning against a random piece of corrugated fence.

“Hello?” called Ksenia. No answer. She called again, but this time made an unintelligible noise that might have been a Werikosa dialect but sounded more like she was choking on a mouthful of nails. The translink interpreted it as “Greetings!” There was no reply, no movement.

They split up and moved among the structures, looking for any sign of life. Derrick put Lilli down and started walking up to each building and throwing the makeshift doors open with a shout. Chase followed with Lilli and Parker at his sides, peering down the streets. There had to be at least twenty structures erected more or less haphazardly in the tiny village.

Maurus hobbled down one of the bigger streets, his teeth clenched. “It's deserted. Your terraformers have left the settlement.”

Ksenia stood in between two rows of structures, arms crossed. Her voice was tight with irritation. “This isn't the settlement we built for them. We never would have put one at the bottom of a crater; they're all scheduled to be lakes in the next phase. These aren't even buildings. They're scrap material. That's a shipping container. And that's a piece of wall from the biodome garden we put in. What did they do?”

“Looks like they colonized,” said Parker simply.

Chase saw an open barrel and went over to see what was inside. It was too dark to be completely certain, but it looked like it was filled with water. Rainwater? He stepped back, looking at a long metal crate punched full of ventilation holes. He very nearly missed it, but at the last second he saw a tiny bit of movement, and his gaze zeroed in on something shiny in two of the ventilation holes. Eyes.

“Hey!” he yelled in alarm, stumbling backward. “I found somebody!”

Maurus was at his side in an instant, blaster drawn with his good arm. “Come out!” he shouted.

A harsh strange cry cut through the air, and suddenly there were Werikosa everywhere: spying down from the tops of buildings, sliding out from under structures that looked fully planted in the ground. They were shorter than Chase would have guessed—much shorter than the Storrians.