Ohre (Heaven's Edge)

License Notes

All rights reserved including the right to produce this novella and or portions of it without specific permission from the author. This novella is a work of fiction, all names, characters, incidents and places are purely fictitious. Deep within the uncharted reaches of a science fiction universe that should be fairly obvious.

Table of Contents

I-Rebuild

II-Descend

III-Atone

IV-Return

V-Divide

VI-Accord

VII-Relinquish

VIII-Dive

Dedication

Connect with the Author

I

Rebuild

The first time I saw
Qeya was the moment my life began. I wasn’t supposed to be on third deck that day, when she came to watch the miners cook and avoid the Royals. I learned after this that she often did that, came to sit with her mealtime bowl and watched us work. It seemed strange to see so much wisdom and sorrow on a face so young.

Living in the eternal darkness of the lower decks I had heard rumors about the
Royal family. We all knew it was because of them we were stuck on
Datura 3
, forever sailing the stars without a port of call. Yes, there was plenty to mine and every pirate ship we came across paid us thousands for our goods. For some below it was the dream life, far better than scrapping it in the deep cave wastes on home world. But I hadn’t spent all my days on a miner ship. I still remembered the smell of salty sea air and the glow of the undersea palaces at night.

As a boy I slipped out of the slums, past the guard and into that sea to catch a glimpse of it. Something the
Royals didn’t know—or had chosen to forget—was that we all came from the sea. The underwater caverns opened up inside the abandoned palaces. I spent at least a hundred nights exploring these forbidden places. I saw the inner chambers of their temples and lost caverns filled with Royal treasures, things my land-dwelling cousins cared little for. Countless times I nearly lost my life, but the sea meant true freedom for me.

Somewhere down the ages we forgot that
; we simply dismissed the memory of our first homes. Few lived below the waves now, save the wild ones we didn’t speak of—old clans that it was said had never surfaced. When I was a boy I dreamt of joining them, but Old Brien said that was just crazy water-logging talk. Ever since the Land Wars that lasted the better part of an age and in which my kind lost their chance to rule the world above, we stuck to what we did best: mining the core. “And that’s all you’ll ever be good for, boy,” Brien would say. “Just remember that next time you go risking your neck below.”

When I had more fool than sense
, I used to argue with him. “But we were great once, weren’t we, Brien? We could be great again!” I meant it too. When the palaces grew wearisome, I slipped back to the water. The Royals could never go as deep as us, had forgotten how to breathe when the water pressed you so hard your mind saw new colors. That was when I learned the hidden truth not even Old Brien wanted to remember. My people had come first.

“Are you just going to stare at the blowing sea all day or will you pick up a blasting shovel and help me?” Adi’s harsh voice cut me from my reverie and brought me back to the present.

Like all miners, Adi was hairless save a thick fringe of eyelashes only the females had. Though she was smaller than me
, she was swarthier than a Royal and by our standards beautiful. Her tattoos were similar to mine, of the same jagged lines beginning over her scalp and covering her face and neck, but they were lined with blue
chole
dust.
Chole
was very rare and in our journey we had only gathered a single vial of the precious mineral. Adi had chosen to tattoo herself with it because she was the miner who discovered it.

Adi wasn’t like me. She had been born and raised in the heavens above, on this very ship we were salvaging, in fact. Even though she
’d been chosen to join the
Pioneer
crew as their chief tactician in dealing with hostile worlds, her heart had remained on
Datura 3
. A part of her had died the day it was blown to bits. As terrifying an experience as it had been for those of us on board, Adi had watched from the surface of Nukvar. Half of her blood family had been on that ship.

So while I had agreed it better to return to the caves where we could at least be close to the sea, Adi was the one pushing me to rebuild. “We
are just as smart as Old Brien or any of them ever was, Ohre!” she had exclaimed. While I doubted we could manage to haul the abandoned shuttle from its watery grave, she was annoyingly confident.

Gritting my teeth, I fought the urge to hurl up the fish we had caught and cooked for breakfast. The stench from the pile of mangled bodies waiting behind me was overwhelming to our overdeveloped sense of smell.

For the better part of the day, Adi and I split our work in half. She dug the trench needed to bury our dead from the
Datura 3
, and I brought the bodies out of the deck onto the white sand. This is how we learned no living creatures lived in the sand bar lining the mountains and sea. Nothing had entered the wreckage through the hole I blasted free after the crash, leaving the bodies stinking but intact.

Some miners would have gladly taken my job, spat on the grave and said good riddance to the Royal scabs. Others would have set the whole ruined deck on fire and never flinched from what they considered duty. My opinion lay somewhere between that thin line of hate and honor toward those who had shaped my life.

Most of the bodies were nearly a third of my size. On this world they didn’t decay as quickly as we had expected. It wasn’t the expressions of terror frozen on their faces that troubled me, but the gills on the sides of their necks, blackened with death, open in desperation to breathe the water in. Even in the end, our bodies tried to return to our first home, the sea. For a moment I wondered if we should throw them into the alien ocean. An old legend said when we were returned to the sea we became the water and began a new and better life. If I knew the bodies would keep in these waters I would have done it.

But if we had any hope of salvaging the technology from second deck, we had no other choice.
Ever since the Royals won the wars, they claimed it as their new birthright. That meant abandoning older traditions like burning instead of anchoring them to the ocean floor. At least we could handle the work without the burden of burying our families. Qeya would have pretended to stomach it, while secretly dying on the inside. That was her way, burying her woes until I had to come and pick her spirits back up again.

With blood-streaked hands I picked up another child and dumped
him into Adi’s deep trench. All of my kind had hated the Royals, save those pampered few who worked for them in the palaces. Now that we were so far removed from home world, things had changed. Even Adi’s sharply featured, lovely face contorted in sorrow as she continued to dig. I watched as she wiped the sweat off her gray skin.

Soon as we finished here and scrapped the parts we needed from deck two
, we would search for the
Pioneer
. According to Adi it was still lodged deep in the shallows of the ocean. I was curious to see what this new sea had to offer. Qeya had been reluctant to leave the valley, even though she promised to come and help us. “They all count on me, Ohre,” she had said. True as this might be, I still wanted to kill her sense of duty. I wanted to slap her awake to our new reality, keep her by my side always. I wanted to make her understand we weren’t on Datura anymore. But she was so determined to help her family adapt to this new world, and that meant she wasn’t going to leave with us, even if we did manage to get the shuttle running again. So it was better for me to keep away from her, now that she had her mate back. Even so, I still wasn’t sure about what I’d do if I saw her again. I would be lying if I told you I wasn’t helping Adi to keep my mind off of things, off
her,
the Royal I had stupidly fallen in love with.

“That
be the last of them,” Adi said after heaving the final body into the pit. Keeping her face in a controlled mask of indifference, she turned to their nearby fire pit and lifted a stick. Facing me again, her eyes shone, betraying the mix of her emotions. I understood her without a single word spoken. We had been raised to believe we were inferior to the Royals. And the generation before us acted as though it were true. Perhaps it was because every time our people tried to change things, tried to be better or rise up against the Royals’ strict rule over our everyday lives, we lost.

Before we left Datura, and before the invasion and Royal
s’ betrayal, it was like they had finally beaten down our will. Even Old Brien was deferent to the Royals, to the point of letting them commandeer his ship. Living together all those years afterward changed things. Now that we’d lived so close to them, the elders saw less and less of their strengths and more of their deficiencies. But by then, we’d spent far too long on the losing side. A part of us would always hate them for besting us with their mind powers and speed, just as they would always fear us and our strength.

Nukvar was different, I believed, or foolishly hoped. Before, an alliance between Royals and us where they weren’t in total control wouldn’t have been allowed. But ever since I saved Qeya’s life and was forced to keep the other brats alive, I felt the bad blood thin. We needed each other to survive now, and the only kind of blood we shed was to save each other.

I was the one to ignite the blaze. We used the liquid fuel that had been contaminated by the alien atmosphere to make the flames leap highest. Adjusting my gauntlet to a lower setting, I squeezed my thumb into my palm and watched the sparks fly. Fire rose above our heads, so close I could see the black core melt into orange and yellow again. I relished in the heat. My people could handle the coldest of seas and worlds, go places the Royals never could. But we remembered the caves we lived in beneath the waves, and how heat from the core could boil so hot as to wear away skin.

In the heart of the engine and processing rooms of our ships, we had learned to thrive in such heat, to crave it.

With the night came the sounds of creatures that preyed on the other side of the high mountain wall nearby. The Royal children had been unprepared for the beasts and their hungers. We miners prepared for everything. I didn’t want to help them. If I could have stolen her away from them, I would have. If she had been the only one to survive, I would have sacrificed them all. But like I said before, I wasn’t showing my genius by falling in love with her.

“How could you choose
them
over your own kind?” Adi said, interrupting my thoughts.

I glanced at her from the corner of my eye and grimaced. Her rage was still on the surface. I suppressed the urge to slug her in the face to knock her grief away.
Before passing judgment, know that our females carried just as much punch as males. To hold back from our true feelings would have been an insult to them. And we weren’t going to survive if she didn’t let go of the past. In many ways she was just as trapped in the old ways as Qeya. Problem was, Adi had a knack of getting under my gills in the worst of ways.

“They enslaved our people, Ohre. They have always tre
ated us like bilge scum, took over the one thing we had left and made it theirs. That’s what they do, make promises and break them. They promise to give but all they do is take!” Her fingers twitched towards the emitter resting in its holster against her hip. This tool had many uses and like most of our inventions, made for a slinging weapon.