Ohre (Heaven's Edge) (9 page)

Distinctly, I heard the vaguely familiar voice of the shuttle’s captain growl over his cries, “Don’t tell ‘
em anything, Kall!” His command was brought short when the Var bashed the captain’s head in. I saw him fall before the feet of his second in command, saw the blood wash into the mud, while the Var kicked him in the chest repeatedly.

Remorse filled me because I knew this was Qeya’s uncle. But Adi would not care for the life of some bleeding Royal, especially one related to
her
. So I retreated back to the tree line behind me and, came around the other rounded edge of the largest hut. Here I was given a better view than before. And to my surprise, I saw more Var rushing forward to pull the Royals away from their soldiers. Three of the Var were female and they wept and cried as they tried to reclaim the Royal males. They didn’t stop trying to reclaim the
hunans
, even as they were slapped and whipped by their soldiers, until they released the prisoners. After the guards stepped back with disgust on their faces, the Var females threw themselves over the Royals and tenderly helped them to their feet.

I gaped, outraged that the Royals were given such special treatment. Remin had been speared by one of their crude blades, and these pale-skinned, pale-haired Royals were protected. This was so beneath the honor of any male, I wondered how the captain and his second mate could bare the shame.

Adi used the moment as a distraction and I should have expected her next move to be rash. It was her nature, after all. She was darting before the camp, leaping from hut to hut and using the cover of rain to follow the disgruntled soldiers. No doubt, she believed they would lead her to Remin. But the boomers were still in place, and if she was captured, there was the chance that the whole village was about to go up in a rain of plasma and flesh.

I hissed and prepared to bolt after her, only to feel something heavy bash into my head. I gasped as the wind was knocked from my chest next and lay on the ground after. I stared up into a pair of black eyes, set deeply within a tattoo-lined face. We had worked on different decks but I would recognize Remin anywhere. Distantly, I heard Adi’s voice before it was muffled, followed by other cries from the village. I lost consciousness when Adi and Remin came closer and mumbled incoherently that they needed to run back.

“We’re all dead,” I muttered, before blackness finally claimed me.

VI

A
ccord

“—shouldn’t have abandoned your position.” A low, rough voice was speaking overhead. I suppressed the urge to groan, not knowing where I was or who held me captive.

A familiar, annoying feminine voice answered him. “It’s not like we had any other chances. I had to find you, Remin, even if that meant us getting captured. We could have found a way out together.”

Remin
? I wondered why that name sounded so familiar, but my head felt like it had been hammered by a blasted shovel. My thoughts were mushed as a pack of field rations, as a fish caught in the leviathan’s teeth.

The male sighed and moved further away, his every sound echoing as if we were encased by rock. “That’s water-logging talk and you know it. Why did you and the wildling not blast off this rock when you had the chance?”

“Because…” she choked on her words.

I opened my eyes, against my better judgment. For I knew it was Adi, as surely as I remembered all the events that had led up to this one moment. Adi had pursued the idea of rebuilding the
Pioneer
with a sheer, mad focus. And once the idea that Remin might be alive was stuck in her head, she dragged me into her plans. Course, being the
wildling
I was always last to know of these things.

Adi and I were packing enough weapons and
chole
dust to blow half the face off this world if the wrong trigger was set off. I remembered that Adi and Remin were the only miners on the
Pioneer
and seeing them together, in this strange underground hut, made me wonder if they were more than simply shipmates.

Her hand was on his scarred arm, tracing the lines of tattoos that marked him through his torn biosuit. More than any miner I had ever met, besides Old Brien, Remin was the most marked. To any of my kind, that screamed one obvious thing: danger. To see him so subdued and worn about the gears was unnatural. Yet there he stood, accepting her touch when I would have smashed her in the shoulder by now. She would have done the same to me. Something in the way the firelight glowed in her eyes, however, told me her intentions were the opposite with this one.

Remin pulled away when she began to trace his gills, turned back to the fire he had been tending. “You shouldn’t have come, Adi. There is still a chance for you to leave and you should take it.”

“Why? So you can play the hero when these savages finally decide to attack the children?”

I started to hear Adi describe Qeya’s extended family in ways that were anything but the way she usually spoke of the Royals.

Remin regarded her with a keen eye and then surprised both of us by replying, “You know we didn’t come here for them. Have you forgotten all those nights we planned with the crew? How we were
gonna steal back our ship and dump the Royals at the first habitable world? There’s nothing we can do for the Royal brats anymore. I’m here because my crewmates were captured. I’ve managed to pass messages to them from time to time. I owe them this much, since one of their females patched me up.”

“Patched you—” Adi sputtered.
“Steam wirms! You’ve gone leaking mad out here, you know. What does it matter if two bleeding Royals decide to mate with the locals? You just finished saying we should mind our own business, Remin. What should it matter what any of them do, besides leave us be? And now you’re risking all our necks to
save
them?” Adi crossed her arms over her chest and turned her back on us, facing the draft that was kicking rain into the natural underground room.

I was meantime trying to make sense of our surroundings. Remin and the other two Royals’ gear were easy enough to spot, but this room should not exist. The roots of trees seemed to have created the gaps that Remin must have smashed further in. How long had he been living here, I wondered?

Remin stood abruptly, though the low ceiling forced him to bend over till his eyes were level with Adi’s head. “I’m not asking you to understand, Adi. But I am asking you to trust me.” He turned her around by the arm and they stood together, gazes locked and the energy humming between them unmistakable. In miner culture, such a union would have been as taboo as a miner and a Royal. Remin was one of the elders, though not half so old as Brien had been. Still, Adi was younger than me, much as she might like to forget this fact.

When their lips came together, I thought I might be sick on food I had forgotten to consume in the last day.

That’s all we need,
I thought.
More selfless, sacrificing fools in love.

I sat up, more than willing to interrupt. They parted the moment I stood and crossed the room to sit before the fire. I listened to Adi hiss and felt the exchange of silent words before Remin came to join me. I stared at the fire for a long time, unwilling to say anything about what I had just witnessed or heard. I let him break the silence, once Adi took a seat at his side.

“It’s been a difficult journey for you, eh wildling?” Remin asked with some humor.

I scowled even more darkly at the flames, if that were possible. Fire reminded me of her hair. “So, you lived.”

“Aye,” he replied after a pause, then said, “Been living alone, waiting to rescue my shipmates. As you might have guessed, the plan turned out to be a lot more complicated than I thought.”

“You said something about the Royals having females?” I cut in with a sharp and pointed glance at Adi. Her skin darkened until it was almost black and she lowered her gaze.

Remin sighed. “Aye, those would be their keepers. Var have very strange customs. Apparently, the chief’s daughters wanted to keep the Xame and Kall as…pets or something. They have very little say or rights, and they are only mistreated when the chief’s sentries get bored. The Var have been trying to squish information out of them ever since they were captured, about the vessel we came in. They don’t know much about the heavens, Ohre, but they do know we came from them. That initially made all of us almost like deities to their minds. But unfortunately, they feared us too much. We lost whatever edge we might have had.”

“You want to rescue the Captain and the first mate. Why?”

Remin grimaced and the action made his tattoos shift across his heavily marked face. “I didn’t know if any of you survived. And Captain made sure I survived. Only now does the past seem pointless.”

I nodded, understanding. “Think these Royals want to be rescued?”

Adi lifted her head again at this, frustration clearly written in the set of her mouth. Remin ignored this and replied, “I have to believe that. We don’t belong here, Ohre. The sooner we leave the better.”

The following morning, while Remin was gathering the last of the supplies we would need before setting out for the village, I dared to confront Adi with the truth.

We stood together in a silence, heavy with thoughts and feelings. Royals used to hate us for being so out of control. Better to live freely than act as though we were made of nothing but gears and nuts and bolts, though.

“You lied to me, Adi.”

She nodded. “I lied to everyone, Ohre.
Even myself.”

I tried not to speak as if I had swallowed something sour. “How did you two even…”

She glanced up at me then with a smirk and slapped me on the back. “Don’t ask.” She frowned again as she studied me from the corner of her eye. “Ohre, you know I’d do whatever it takes to get Remin to rebuild
Pioneer
, even save a couple of mangy Royals. But what are you in this for? I mean, you practically kept those brats alive by yourself. I never asked why, but, well is it…” she trailed off and I restrained the urge to sigh.

Nodding quickly, I replied, “Aye. It was. And no, I don’t care
any more for Xame or Kall than you. But, I want to do this one thing for her, before we blast out of this pit. I think I owe her this much.”

“For what?”
Adi asked.

“For pushing her into a life she never wanted.”

The Var went about their morning routine with the same speed they had in the evening. Families moved freely through the village and oftentimes, obliviously past us. We had one shot at this, Remin had said. Even though
the old
hunan
was confident the Royals would come with us, I had my doubts. Not because I had any special hidden knowledge above him, but because I could barely trust my own kind. And knowing I was about to try and do something selfless for a change, made me even more assured that something was going to go wrong today.

The hunting party we had spotted yesterday had already left to begin today’s hunt. It was the best time to attempt a rescue, because the other Var would not be expecting this. They assumed wrongly that their warriors carried the fight with them instead of bringing it back home. I learned long ago that nowhere is as safe as you imagine.

Remin and Adi waited near the huts he claimed the Royals to have been taken. When I gave the signal, they would sneak in, eliminate any resistance and make for the caves. Our best chance was to get away and not stop until we reached the cliffs. Otherwise, we risked the chance of being caught in Var territory, where the only safe place might be the trees.

I looked at my wrist and the metal brace that wrapped over it, the invisible sensors placed strategically against my palm and the skin beneath. I designed it so it could act with me, on instinct. Today I flipped open the top cover and looked closely at the wires, at the pulses of lights that traveled through the circuits like blood through the veins. It would burn red today.

I looked up and took in one last clean breath of the wet forest, drank in the other villagers’ mix of odors and listened to their voices. I closed my eyes, to bring back the image of the layout of trip wires and pit falls and other traps scattered around the village. Then, without opening them, I stood and walked into the path.

With my eyes shut, my ears could pick up sounds that most couldn’t. Old Brien said it had something to do with my living so deep under water for so long. He admitted that most land dwellers were losing their old water senses, adapting in other ways. I did not suffer from this hindrance.

The voices of children continued to shout and mothers reprimanded them. Then they quickly hushed into silence. I flexed the muscles in my neck and opened my eyes to face them when a spear came to press against my back. They gaped, dumbfounded at the stranger in their midst. I was different from most miners, but the Var only knew the Royals and weren’t prepared for me. I smirked at the thought and met the earth-colored eyes of the nearest Var.

The alien’s mouth worked and harsh words followed as it too brought up its spear in a threatening posture. I sensed five more were coming from other corners of the village, the sentries stepping from their posts to face this unexpected threat.