Queen, p.2
Queen, page 2
part #1 of Hidden Earth Series
Ember looked out at the patchwork desert forest she’d grown from Petri plates. The trees were maples mostly, reds and silvers, but a few white aspens took the genetic modifications well too. They couldn’t grow upright with the winds, so they branched more like bushes, staying low to the ground and fanning out their crowns to make the best of the perpetual morning. They caught sand and died when their leaves became too covered for photosynthesis. But, well, that was job security if nothing else.
TOPA chirped. Another tooth click brought up a readout.
Wind dropped to 14 knots.
Funnel increasing in diameter by 0.35 meters per 5 seconds. Shape unstable and likely due to animal interaction.
Probability of human origin: 95%
“Well, yes, noting the data, that would be the obvious conclusion, wouldn’t it?” Ember muttered to herself. The adrenaline hit like a punch anyway, snapping her body to attention. She stopped walking and watched the funnel continue to bloat across the horizon like a wave on a long-dead ocean. The wind wasn’t strong enough to kick up that much sand, but giant beetles definitely were.
“TOPA, can you get a heat signature?”
The face shield blanked momentarily before a heat diagram splayed across it. Human signatures weren’t discernable from the sand, but the five-legged beetles native to Queen ran colder than their surroundings due to a quirk of planetary genetics Ember didn’t understand, likely because she’d managed to completely avoid entomology in her undergrad.
Beetles: two.
Her face shield blinked the words, and Ember pivoted. The beetles swarmed, were seldom solitary or in pairs in the wild. Her suit’s artificial intelligence quickly confirmed her suspicion.
No ID sent. Not of the colony. Strong possibility of mella attack. Retreat or find cover.
Two riders on beetleback exploded from the sand.
Shit.
Ember ran.
Her face shield blasted packets of data at her as she did so. The beetles had shells of Earth-dirt red-and-brown on the sun side of the planetoid, and palest ivory on the cold side. The colonists had never bothered to do much with the damn things since they couldn’t live in the temperate zone and had a huge appetite for plastic, which was the only material, outside of rabbit leather, that lasted longer than two seconds in the winds. The beetles could move faster than any of the colony’s mechanical sand flyers. Watching the scrolling feed out of her left eye as she ran into the wind and around a short, sloped dune, Ember recalled their resemblance to Earth click beetles with their rectangular bodies, squarish heads, and funny antennae. Click beetles, however, were never ridden by pirates.
Two beetles three chains away.
Ember cursed again, crested a small dune, and slid behind it, panting in the dry air. She drew an avalanche mortar from the thick hide pocket on her right hip and tapped the tube to make sure it was clear. She had twenty seconds, maybe, before the beetles reached her, and she’d no desire to see their mandibles up close. Still, avalanche mortars didn’t have great range. At the very least they’d have to get close enough for her to hear their clicks. That meant close enough for the pirates’ weapons’ range and maybe being blasted into sand herself.
Ember crouched into the dune and waited, peering around so her suit could get readings. The surface of her face shield clogged with grit, cleared itself, then clogged again. Five seconds passed before her interior shield again read Riders: 2, and another five seconds before they were close enough to make out distinct features.
The beetles and their riders swelled out of a mahogany sand funnel. The riders wore wraps upon wraps of canvas, cotton, and nylon—all scraps from supply ships since Queen didn’t produce any plant or animal capable of generating textiles (the imported angora rabbits had all died of heatstroke) or have the mechanisms for synthetics. They’d have weapons though; that was a given. The riders’ arms and hands were bare for some asinine reason, which meant not only sunburn but sand and windburn, too, if they weren’t careful. Their beetles toddled more than scuttled toward her, drunk on never-ending sunlight.
Drunk was a condition Ember would have preferred.
The riders pulled up on the leather reins as they approached, slowing the beetles to an awkward sidestep. One of them waved in an almost friendly way. So, they clearly knew where she was, and she’d likely get robbed before she got killed. Lovely.
Ember stood and ran up the dune to face her attackers. “You’re trespassing,” she yelled, amplifying the sound through her suit’s speaker. She loaded the projectile into the tube and tried to steady her breathing. “You have to show official colony badges to move past an outpost. What the hell are you doing out here?”
The riders didn’t stop, but she really hadn’t expected them to. Why should they? The presidium wanted the tech that allowed the pirates to survive outside the colony, but it was two against one, and Ember didn’t have a beetle. She was a sentry, not a flyer. She was supposed to watch and report, not get close enough for an altercation no matter how much she might have wanted a little action. Extenuating circumstances aside, she was still expected to follow the rules.
The beetle clicks finally registered on her face shield, though Ember couldn’t hear them. Screw the presidium. Altercation it is, then. She pointed the tube, waited for her face shield to confirm angle, and let the projectile fly.
A BOOM echoed and smothered the soft clickclickclick of the beetles, and the dune the riders were cresting yawned with sinkholes as the explosion collapsed the beetle galleries underneath. The riders shrieked. The beetles screamed. Ember’s suit trilled happy notes of success and Nice work! scrolled across the face shield as the dune sucked the beetles and riders down. Ember briefly reconsidered activating TOPA’s personality protocol just so she’d have someone to feel smug with.
Instead, she watched the struggle, the beetles with their legs and little sharp toes, the riders with useless hooks and ungloved hands. The wind began its warning keen, which meant the sand would soon be flying too fast to see, and Ember stayed rooted to her dune. She probably should have felt bad about it all; on Earth, you didn’t kill people for sneaking up on you in a desert. But Queen had taken Taraniel. Queen’s complete lack of resources had taken Taraniel, and the mella pirates stole what few resources the colony did manage to store. If the mella wanted to stalk sentries in the sand and live by their own code, well, they could die by it too.
Death, however, was apparently not on the schedule for the day. The beetles climbed from the sinkholes, perfectly adapted for their environment, and half trampled a rider in the process. That particular swathed head sank below the surface, and Ember remembered she’d need to ping Nadia to dig up the potential GPSs later. The second mella had a grip on one of the low, wind-bent maples that strangled the sand out here, but the sinkholes were still growing, and the small amount of stable ground she’d found would give in another minute. Still, the mella grabbed at the tree, trying to pull herself into its branches. Her head turned to Ember, eyes wild. Ember shivered in the heat.
Recovery? the suit asked.
“No,” Ember said. “These aren’t the ones I’m supposed to find, and there’s no backup for days. Let her die. The colony can send a flyer later. Send the visual data to Dr. Nadia Anne-The-Frying-Pan O’Grady.”
TOPA’s screen blinked twice as it sifted through the database of seven hundred scientists, trying to decode a childhood nickname. Earth was a wasteland, Ember mused, and computers still couldn’t do sarcasm or rhyming.
Confirmed. Data sent.
Ember resumed walking, giving the sinkholes a wide berth.
“Dr. Schmitt!”
The name caught in the suit’s auditory sensors, and TOPA piped it both to Ember’s ears and scrolled the text across the screen. Ember pivoted, scanning both her face shield and the horizon for the caller.
“Dr. Schmitt!”
“TOPA, where is the audio feed coming from?”
TOPA’s response came instantaneously. Audio external to suit. 72 degrees west. Follow arrows.
Arrows, blinking and marginally patronizing, flashed on her face shield, pointing west and…down. Ember turned her head until the shield lit up bright green, to the mella centered in her vision, clinging desperately to one of Ember’s gnarled silver maples.
“Dr. Schmitt, we came for you!”
“Errr,” Ember managed, forgetting to tell TOPA to turn off the speaker. The mella shouldn’t have known her name. Sure, there were only a few thousand humans on-planet at any given time. But Ember certainly couldn’t name any mella, though half had their faces plastered all over the rec spaces with WANTED under their chins and, occasionally, bad mustaches drawn on in marker.
Ember hadn’t drawn a good handlebar mustache since Taraniel’s march into the dunes. Bottom line, there was no way this mella knew who she was unless Taraniel had told them about her. But that was ridiculous. It’d been two months. Taraniel had been less than a day from multiple organ failure. She was dead.
“Just die already!” Ember yelled into the wind.
“Wait!” the mella shouted back. “Look.”
As Ember watched, the mella surrendered precious security on the branch to reach one hand into a shallow pocket. She pulled out a piece of hide dyed deep blue, ocean blue, Earth blue, and looped it around the thick branch, giving herself a better handhold.
Shit. Again.
Ember had no breath. The sand swirled red around her, and the sky was the same hot, unending fire, but all she could see was the blue leather—a headband she’d given Taraniel for their fifth wedding anniversary. Ember had drawn the dye from a shawl she’d brought from Earth. The color had come from a rare fungus Queen would never know. Taraniel had lived on the Pacific shore before the Collapse. The ocean filled her dreams and her paintings; the ocean was her heart. Though Ember had also grown up near the waves, they’d never captivated her the same way. On Queen, she couldn’t give Taraniel the ocean, but she could give her blue.
Taraniel had worn the headband the day she walked from the habitable zone, taking an unrecoverable part of Ember with her. They’d dreamed of leaving Queen together, both of them breathing and alive. Now, here Taraniel stood—if only in spirit, if only in some grave-robbing pirate’s scavenged clothing—about to die again.
Well, screw that. This time, Ember wouldn’t let her.
Chapter Two
June brought hurricanes, tornados, floods, and tsunamis. The glaciers finished melting, and seawater turned brackish. The oceans died.
Ember
Operation not recommended.
Ember ignored the TOPA. “Hold on!” Her words sounded tinny, suddenly, through her suit, but that was irrelevant. Ember ran toward the woman, toward the tree, down the dune, into the sand funnel and death. “If you let go, I will kill you.”
She’d started higher than the mella, but her boots slipped, skidded, and she rolled down the dune side, too fast to have any control. The opening of the hole she’d created drew closer, swallowing the world. Her suit and left leg registered chitinous impact, and an unidentified root grabbed at her elbow, but she couldn’t see anything except red sand.
ABORT ABORT ABORT
TOPA flashed the word over and over across her face shield. A hideous klaxon, one part fire engine and three parts angry two-year-old, blared in Ember’s ears. TOPA had never made that sound before, and if she survived this fall, Ember swore she’d pay the upgrade fee to make sure it never did it again.
She kept slipping, past the opening, sand pulling her legs down. Tiny little air jets whirred into action. Ember’s shield cleared, then darkened again with sand. The air intake valves clogged. Red flashed across her face shield. The interior of the suit turned damp with her breath, and she had to take deeper and deeper breaths to get enough oxygen. The sand under her gloved hands went soft, giving her the disturbing thought that she was about to be sucked down a giant funnel.
Ember kicked like she was clawing her way up from a dive off a diving board, an Earth activity she’d been passably good at until pools were banned due to water rationing. One of the intakes cleared, and fresh air blasted through the suit. The mella’s ungloved hand grabbed her, bringing the bent tree into focus as the suit’s air jets finally caught up. Ember’s vision cleared.
Bless maple trees and their stubborn desire to grow anywhere. Ember swam up the side of the funnel and flailed for a branch, the mella’s pants, anything that might hold her in place. Trust looked really different when you didn’t want to turn into beetle fodder. Ember’s fingertips brushed something firm and slipped off, just to have the mella grab her wrist, yank hard enough that Ember was certain something popped, drag her up the side of the funnel, and wrap Ember’s fingers around smooth, sand-worn bark.
“Taraniel,” Ember demanded as she tried to pull her knees up. The sand sucked at her legs, and the blue leather punched her heart, and the only thing that mattered in this godforsaken moment was her wife’s memory.
“Later. Wrap!”
The mella pointed at Ember’s leg, but Ember shook her head. There was barely enough soil to shore up her knees. Sand had wormed its way past a popped seam at her elbow, and bits of spiked, red granules static-clung to the inside of her face shield.
“Where did you get it?” Ember yelled back, trying to be heard over the growing wind. “Is she alive?”
The mella growled and grabbed Ember’s thigh, fingernails pressing into the leather of her suit. The face shield scrolled warnings about pressure and other seams. It was conscious work to not let go of the tree and slap the mella’s hand away. “Wrap,” the mella said again and pushed Ember’s leg up until her heel hit the trunk. The mella’s own leg came up next, and she wrapped it around the tree, twisting her leg between branches.
“Oh.” Realization smacked as fast as the sand, and Ember did the same. The silver maples had impossibly long taproots, anchored to a lower base layer, and wouldn’t be going anywhere. The sinkholes were already slowing filling in. If they held on for another few minutes, the ground would be stable, and they could walk away. They could walk to Ember’s wife, or her body, or whatever remained of her out in the dunes.
Four minutes to ground stability.
That was a long time to spoon a woman she didn’t know, especially on the edge of a sand funnel. The mella apparently agreed and released as soon as the ground stopped sinking, and the sand in the wind settled to only slightly shitty visibility. That meant the sun was that much brighter, the temperature back to brick pizza oven levels. God, Ember missed pizza.
The mella tested the sand, straightened, and walked far enough from the edge that 1) Ember couldn’t readily kick her, and 2) she wasn’t likely to fall back in if she stepped wrong. She brushed sand from her mismatched clothing tatters, rewrapped the layers of leather and cotton around her feet and ankles, unwrapped the headband from the tree, and shoved it into her pocket. She oozed defiance in a way that caught Ember’s attention and would have held it if they weren’t in danger of actually baking to death.
Ember scowled, though there was no way the mella could tell through the reflective sapphire-reinforced glass of the face shield.
Send report to Dr. Nadia Anne-The-Frying-Pan O’Grady?
“No,” Ember said, making sure to click off the speaker this time so she couldn’t be heard outside the suit. “Just record. We’ll wait until we have more data.”
Confirmed.
Ember clicked the speaker back on. The ground no longer swirled like a budget funnel cake, so she dismounted the tree and stood, prodding sand with her thickly booted toe every few pivots, keeping her face toward the mella.
The woman still didn’t say anything.
Ember kicked a plume of sand at her midsection.
“Give me the headband,” Ember demanded. “And then I promise not to kill you, and I’ll take you back to the outpost.” She blew upward, trying to clear more clinging sand on the inside of her face shield. “It’s nicer there, anyway, than a dune.”
