Modesitt, L.E. - The Forever Hero 1 - Dawn for a distant Ear

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Dawn For A Distant Earth
L.E. Modesitt Jr.
Chapter I
In the west wing of the tower of time, abandoned as it is by the keepers of the clock, lies an
ancient key. Not an impressive long steel shaft is this key, but a small volume, a compendium of
pages enameled against the ravages of the decades and the centuries.
The book has no title, no preface, no table of contents, nor any title embossed on its black
spine, nor even printed pages evenly matched and marching end to end.
What is it, you ask? That question must hold for another. The other question? What is the tower
of time? For there are no towers left on Old Earth, only the rambling farms, the sweep of grass,
the ramparts of the west mountains, and a few score towns nestled into their restored places in
history. There is only a single shuttle field . . . without a tower.
This tower of time rears backward into history, not into the dark starred nights that are so
cold to one used to, the light-strewn nights on planets that once belonged to the Empire. Backward
into history, you say? How far?
Far enough. Back to the time when purple landspouts raged the high plains, back to the time
when boulders fell like rain, and when the devil kids were the only beings who dared to run the
hillocks outside the shambletowns. . . .
Yes, that far. Back to the days of the Captain. . . . ,
The Myth of the Rebuilding
J Alarde D'Lorina - New Augusta, 4539 N.E.C
Chapter II
Step . . . pause . . . listen. Step . . . pause ... listen.
The boy crept through die thin bushes and scattered patches of ground fog toward the
shambletown wall. The leathers of his tunic were ripped, and the thonging where the skins were
joined was loosening. The rain stung his skin, as the chill wind froze the droplets before they
struck.
Overhead, the thick clouds were barely visible in the gloom that passed for twilight.
Most of the torches on the shambletown wall had blown out and would not be relighted until the
wind and rain abated. That would not be long. Beneath the west mountains, on the high plains east
of the shambletown, the rains seldom lasted. Nor did the purple furies of the landspouts usually
penetrate into the hills and gullies.
A single torch by the gate flared back to light, and the boy ducked behind one of the few
grubushes left near the walls, just below the outcropping of old brick, powderstone, and purpled
clay on which the shambletown had been raised.
In the gloom downhill from the wall, he would not be seen. Even if a sharp-eyed guard did sight
the small shadow created by the torches, that darkness would be blamed on a skulking coyote, or
even a king rat scuttling for his hole.
The boy's left leg hurt, still stiff from his encounter with the she coyote. He needed food,
better food than he could grub from the plains and the hills, food without the poisons that the
wild plants springing from the sickly soil carried.
Most times he could eat the yuccas and needle pears, but the coyote wound and its infection had
lowered his body's ability to digest the wild food.
He froze behind a thicker grubush and peered through the scraggly leaves at the wall. Too high-
more than twice his height, and even with a healthy leg, beyond his reach.
That meant the Maze. He had known that from the beginning, but had hoped ... He shivered, but
there was no escaping the need for the cleaner food that lay beyond the shambletown wall.
Tightening his grip on the jagged blade he carried in his left hand, he dropped farther down
the hillside and edged eastward, bit by bit.
Slide . . . pause . . . listen. Slide . . . pause . . . listen.
The pattern was nearly automatic, his ears straining for the click and scrabble of the rats, or
the pad and click of a foraging coyote seeking a shambletowner out alone after dark.
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The scattered grubushes grew more thickly as he neared the tangled mass that comprised the
Maze. While they never crowded closely enough to provide a thicket or a constant cover, their
numbers and sharp leaves and twigs slowed his progress. He checked each before sliding toward it
to insure that no rat lay concealed there, no female coyote on the prowl for hungry cubs.
At last, the Maze towered above him.
He stopped, letting his breathing smooth. He sniffed, the thin nostrils in the narrow nose
dilating to catch the scents nearby, and those from the Maze.
Crouching by one hole, he edged away as he caught the pungent odor of rat, all too fresh. A
second entrance he rejected for the musty smell that indicated neither rat nor the air circulation
necessary for an access to the less closely guarded eastern wall of the shambletown.
A third and fourth hole were each rejected.
A fifth was too low and reeked of land poison.
Click, click, scrabble.
The blade flashed. The rat darted-but not quickly enough.
The rat's purpled gray coat was scarred, streaked with silver.
The boy nodded. The rat, half the height to his knee, had been slow. Not sick, but old.
He left the carcass. While the hide might have been useful, only the shambletowners had the
ability to turn it into leather. The meat was inedible, even for him.
Checking the hole from which the rat had emerged, he rejected it, and continued his slow
movement along the Maze.
Deciding that none of the lower openings were likely to provide the access he needed, he
switched his attention to the higher holes.
At last, he located a promising entrance, slightly above his head, but with easy handholds. He
climbed to the left side, to avoid appearing in front of the dark opening. He let his nose test
the scents, catching the mixture of free-flowing air, overlaid with the scent of shambletowners
and their excrement, and the faint hint of omnipresent rat.
Blade in hand, he eased into the Maze, his hawk-eyes dilating farther to adjust to the gloom
that was darker than the blackest of the clouded nights.
From behind him, he could hear the wind whistle as it shifted more to the north.
The passage branched, one dark pit stretching below, from where the scent of rat oozed upward,
the other darkness twisting leftward, away from the shambletown. With the slump of his shoulders
that passed for a sigh, he silently took the left opening, which, as he had hoped, again forked.
From his right came the definite smell of shambletown, although he could detect a gentle
incline which bothered him. The last thing he wanted was to pop out high on the Maze wall in clear
range of the shambletown guards and their slings.
Two more branches and he squatted just inside an exit overlooking the eastern wall of the
shambles. He was higher than he would have liked-more than a body length above the wall and three
body lengths above the uneven clay expanse between the Maze and the wall. His exit was to the
north of the small eastern gate and the majority of the torches.
He shifted his weight to relieve the nagging ache and the pressure on his left leg and studied
the wall. He would have to slip over the wall roughly opposite his vantage point. Unlike the
northern wall, which was higher, the eastern wall, behind the bulk and protection of the Maze,
also sloped outward as it dropped to its stone base. The slope might be just enough to let him
make the climb quickly.
By now, it was as dark as it would get. The frozen rain pelted down in a desultory click,
click, click that might cover any noise he made climbing down to the clay.
Only a single torch by the gate was lit, and the boy decided that the sooner he moved the
better.
With a single fluid motion, he slid out of the hole and let his bare feet search for the
outcroppings he knew were there, careful to let the bulk of his weight rest upon his good right
leg. That brought him within two body lengths of the hard ground.
Ears, eyes, and nose all alert for rats, coyotes, or shambletown guards, he began easing
himself down the Maze's rough surface as quickly as he could.
The animals avoided the freezing rain when they could, as did the shambletown guards, and he
reached a position under the wall without an alarm being raised.
Again ... He stopped and listened, straining to hear, to see if he could sense anyone on the
far side of the wall. Had he judged his position correctly, once over the clay bricks he would be
opposite a narrow lane leading deeper into the lower shambletown.
No sound came from beyond the wall-just the click, click, click of the frozen droplets hitting
the hard surface.
Flexing his fingers, toes, he sprang, scrambling quietly to the top, the abrasiveness of the
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sandpaint giving his extremities just enough purchase to support the effort.
He vaulted over-and down onto a covered clay barrel.
Boom!
Even as the sound of his impact on the empty container rumbled down the cleared area next to
the wall toward the guard post, he was dashing for the alley.
"Hear that?"
"Storm, stand?"
"No storm!"
The boy did not stay to hear the debate between the two guards, but slunk down the narrow
alleyway deeper into the dark, sniffing and listening.
He sought an empty dwelling. In all those he had passed, he could sense shambletowners mumbling
to each other after their evening meal. Either that or sullen silence.
Dark was the shambletown, lit but by a few ratfat torches set behind salvaged glass, and by the
dim glow from deep within the claybricked homes.
Another alley lane, across a wider street and to the left, beckoned. The boy darted a look,
then melted back into the gloom as two figures trudged down the street, not looking to either
side. The muted clanking told him they were the replacement guards for the eastern wall, and he
shrank farther into the darkness.
Once they disappeared from view, he skittered across the dimly lit thoroughfare, such as it
was, and vanished into the darkness again, more like a rat than a boy.
Three dwellings down, he found a likely place. Like all the others, at this time of night the
window was sealed with a patched hide cover, but there were no sounds from within, and not even
the faintest touch of heat radiating from the hide.
He looked up and down the alleyway, then raised his sharp and jagged blade. One cut ... two . .
. three . . . and the bottom flap of the hide was free.
A glance under the hide and inside told him that no one was within. He needed no further
encouragement to scrabble up the flaking sandpainted wall and through the narrow aperture.
The enclosed space was small, just two rooms plus the alcove used for food preparation and
cooking, and the flat shelves in the now-covered front window that contained the plant beds.
As he saw the plants, despite the smell of excrement used as fertilizer and the musty smell of
unwashed shambletowners, saliva moistened his mouth.
He checked the cooking area and found a small bin with three shriveled and raw potatoes. He
took a bite from one, forcing himself to chew it slowly. One swallow of the mealy substance was
all he could take, although the taste told him it was free of landpoison.
While he finished chewing, his eyes surveyed the two rooms. In the sleeping room was a single
pallet wide enough for a man and a woman, centered on a raised clay platform. In the clay brick
alcoves behind the platform where there should have been a few tunics and personal belongings,
there were neither.
In the main room were only a table woven from grubush branches and two matching stools.
His eyes darted back to the pallet made of ground cloth, newly pounded into shape, and with no
scent of shamble-towner to indicate it had been used.
The boy padded over to the largest plant flats, but only sprouts broke the surface. On the far
left was a narrow flat with older plants. He sniffed, and could detect no landpoisons. Then he
pulled a single leafy stem and attached bulb from the damp soil. Wiping it on his tunic, he
studied the rounded white bulb and narrow leaves.
Finally, he nibbled on a leaf. While slightly bitter, the taste was better than yucca. Next, he
took a nip from the bulbous part. Nearly tasteless, it was crisp and swallowed easily.
He could have wolfed down the entire plant on the spot, but he knew that that much food that
quickly, even poison-free food, could cause his guts to rebel, and he contented himself with a
series of small and careful bites.
Leaving the remainder of the bulb by the flat, he retreated to the sleeping quarters and
slashed a section off the unused pallet, carefully cutting it to keep one comer of the bottom
double-thonged section intact as a bag. After bringing his makeshift bag across the nearly pitch
dark room to the slightly lighter area behind the leather hide front window cover, he began to
pull out the bulbous vegetables one at a time until he had a small heap.
He shook his head. While he would have liked more, he could carry only so many. If he stayed,
he ran the risk that the shambletowners would find and kill him, as they had his parents.
He hoped what he could carry would be enough to get him through the weakness. If not, he would
have to come back, and that he scarcely wanted to do.
Every concentrated scent in the shambletown, every odor from the Maze, was an assault, an
assault that made i( difficult for him to concentrate fully and increased the danger of being
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discovered.
After loading the bag, he gathered it and tied it shut with a piece of leather cut from the
rear window cover. Then he used another loop to hang it around his neck and under his tunic. That
left his hands free, although it created a bulging outline- a dead giveaway were he seen. There
were no fat people on the high plains . . . anywhere.
A check of the back alley indicated no passers-by, and he eased himself out through the narrow
window and onto the uneven stone pavement with only a slight scratching and muted thump. He
replaced the window cover as well as he could.
Retracing his steps up the back lane, he came again to the single street he had crossed, and,
again, he checked both ways, listening carefully, before he slid across into the darkness of the
other side.
Whussshh!
Instants before the cudgel struck, he saw it and tried to drop away, away from the flat-faced
man who hammered it toward his skull.
Hands grabbed for his thin arms.
Fire burned down the side of his face, but even as his knees buckled his own blade slashed at
the four legs around him.
"Fynian! Hold devulkid! Hades! £";"•!"
The boy whipped the knife from leg level toward the man with the cudgel, his legs recovering
and supporting his spring. Though off center, the jagged edge ripped a thin cut in the underside
of Fynian's left arm as he brought the cudgel around for another attack.
The fingers grasping him loosened, and the boy broke clear, avoiding the deadly club, and
scrambled behind both men, running, regardless of the noise and the growing pain in his left leg,
full speed toward the wall.
"Devulkid! Devulkid!"
"Devulkid!"
Still clutching the blade, his bag thudding against his chest, he pounded across the open space
before the eastern wall and leaped onto the clay barrel just ahead of the two pursuers and a wall
guard. Without slowing, he scrambled up and over the rough bricks to slide to the bottom of the
wall with a thump, his left leg buckling under the impact.
His breath hissed from the pain of the fall, but he lurched to his feet and half ran, half
scrambled the distance to the Maze, where he began to climb. Halfway up toward the hole, his
fingers slipped as an old brick snapped in two under his weight, and he skidded down, the rough-
edged rubble abraiding his already injured left leg, which collapsed again as his feet hit the
purple clay:
Fssst! Another wall torch flared into flame. Then a third, and a fourth.
The devilkid ground his teeth against the pain from his leg and scrambled up the Maze toward
his escape hole, forcing himself to make sure the handholds were firm before trusting his weight
on them.
Crack!
A slingstone plowed into the rubble next to him, shattering a brick. The chips stung his
uncovered right shoulder.
He forced himself upward toward the narrow hole that he knew the large shambletowners could not
and would not fit into.
Crack!
Another slingstone shattered under his feet.
He could see the hole just above him, could scent the odors he recalled from his entry and
squirmed the last body length to it.
Crunch!
"Ooooo!" The involuntary exclamation was forced from him, expelled by the force of the
slingstone that had hit his side as he had twisted inside the dark passage.
"Got devulkid, Fynian!"
Now it hurt not only to use his left leg, but his left side was bruised.
He slid farther down the winding way and behind an ancient beam to catch his breath.
While an occasional slingstone rattled part way down the hole, he could tell from the outside
sounds that the shambletowners were not about to chase him tonight, not with the still-freezing
rain, and not into the higher Maze holes. Not this time.
He rested. But before long, he began to pick his way back out of the Maze. He had to be clear
of the shambletown, well clear, before the lightness of dawn.
Fynian, the broad man, he would remember.
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Chapter III
Screens. Screens and their images were what dominated the bridge. Every console on the
Torquina's bridge had at least three, and each was tied to an accompanying seat that doubled as an
accel/decel couch, despite the fact that such usage had never been required.
The main screen displayed the image of a planet, a planet swathed mainly in clouds, except for
occasional clear spots over the oceans. The Torquina swung in an almost geocentric orbit to allow
the sensors and data relays from the exploratory torps maximum analytical time.
Some of the officers and techs watched. Some paid no attention. Some looked periodically.
The data flow centered on a single console with but four screens, in the innermost comer of the
bridge. Had the captain wanted, he could have duplicated or monitored the flow. He did not so
choose.
The Imperial Interstellar Survey Service officer facing the console continued to juggle the
inputs, often manipulating two screens simultaneously.
"What does it look like?" asked the engineering officer who stood behind her.
"Worse than you can imagine. Worse than I'd believe. Some are still alive. Don't see how."
"How can you tell?"
"Patterns. Patterns. Look." She pointed to the top screen in front of her. "See the square
here? That's built on top of the ruins. Then there's the background heat. Wouldn't be there if it
were deserted."
She shook her head, and her short red hair fluffed out above the silver and black of her watch
uniform.
"Background contamination is high."
"How high. Lieutenant Marso?" asked the captain from the command console across the bridge.
"Until we get the sampling data back. Captain, I can't provide figures. There are areas of
widespread erosion and a total lack of vegetation in places where by all rights there should be
trees, or at least grasses, especially by some of the streams and rivers. First class ecological
disaster, ser."
"We knew that," commented the engineering officer. "We knew that before we came."
Lieutenant Marso ignored the comment, not even turning her head in his direction.
"Any hopeful signs?" pursued the captain.
"Some. Some areas of habitation. Mainly in the high plains areas and places where there is
drainage. Sedimentation areas look the deadest. I can't tell about the oceans, although they
should have been affected last and should have been the first to recover."
"Place will never recover. Like Marduk," observed the chief engineer.
"It's not like Marduk. Nothing at all lives there. Here you can see some recovery."
"A few savages, a few thousand square kays where they can eke out a minimal survival. That's
recovery?"
The ecologist bit her lip and shifted the image from screen three to screen four, bumped four
into memory store, and took the latest torp data on screen three.
As the temperature data began to register, she frowned, then checked the parameters again.
"Trouble, Lieutenant Marso?"
"Not exactly. Captain. But it's cold, a great deal colder than the old records would indicate.
The ice caps are larger, and the high plains temperature, where it should be mid-summer local,
shows a high of less than ten degrees Celsius. Even taking into account unusual variations, that's
more than twenty degrees below either the old records or our modified projections."
"Recovery!" snorted the chief engineer under his breath as he clumped from the bridge back to
his own control center. "Recovery indeed."
Lieutenant Marso's fingers continued to flicker over the console controls as the data in her
files built, as the ship's torps continued their transmissions, and as the purple landspouts
traversed the continent beneath.
The captain waited, and the Torquina crept along her surveillance orbit.
Chapter IV
First, to the south of the small wilds and east of the Maze was the shambletown square, purple-
gray clay hard-packed over the jagged rubble of the buried city. Around the square was the
shambletown itself, a mass of old stone and clay brick structures threaded with winding ways.
Last, around the shambletown were the walls of clay brick painted rough-smooth with sandpaint and
backed with walkways for the handful of guards.
East of the shambletown was the Maze, that jumble of toppled buildings of the ancients that
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crowned the long ridge top, and to the west, below the space cleared by the shambletowners, rising
from scattered grubushes, was a marble hulk, once domed, that had been a capitol.
As for the Maze ...
The boy darted from it, from grubush to grubush beneath the northern edge of the smooth
shambletown wall, until, at last, he could see the cracked and tumbled walls of the old structure.
He rested more weight on his left leg than his right, and when he walked, he limped. The limp
was less pronounced when he ran. Even in the dark his blond hair glinted, as if with a light of
its own, to match the hawkish brown-flecked yellow of his ever-searching eyes, eyes that also
seemed to glow in the darkness.
"Hsssst . . ."
His eyes tracked the sound, his body turning. As he saw the plume of dust rising on the
downslope to his right, he checked the wind direction, then relaxed.
The breeze was still blowing toward the mountains and would carry the chokeplume down into the
clay-filled rubble that spread across the valley.
The area had been spared the worst of the landspouts and the concentration of landpoisons had
kept the scavenging down, but little enough was left of the old city, little enough that few would
even have recognized the desolation for what it had been.
The blond boy let his eyes trace the faint outline of what others could not see at all in the
night, from the jagged and sand-scoured peaks of the west to the flattened hills to the north and
the rolling plains to the east. The ground fog was building in the depressions, gathering its own
poisons as they sifted from the poisoned ground, and though the swirls caused by the joining of
mountain and plains winds could not be seen, the boy could sense them, as he always had.
"Essst!"
A new torch flared on the shambletown wall.
"Devulkid!"
"Where devulkid?"
The jumble of voices registered in his ears, echoing and rumbling off the rubble of the Maze,
off the rough-smoothed walls of the shambletown. To both the north and the south, the Maze
dwindled into low mounds, sometimes little more than humps of clay and sand and brick. From the
larger mounds protruded here and there rusted or black metal beams twisted into shapes never
designed by their makers.
The thin and golden-haired boy darted a look back over his shoulder, as a gate began to creak
open.
The oily smell of torches wafted toward him, ahead of the pursuers who still gathered their
courage, but who had waited for him to return.
Taking a last look over his shoulder at the puddle of light outside the shambletown wall, the
hawk-eyed youth began to trot to the east toward the diffused and yet-to-appear glow in the sky
that would be all that usually represented the sun.
His breath left a ghostly plume that faded into the darkness and into the beginnings of the
ground fog.
The leader of the shambletown pack carried a long staff and lumbered to the edge of the
downslope just above the point where the last vestiges of the chokeplume trailed away. He looked
northward into the darkness and raised his head as if to scent out the interloper.
A second man joined him, carrying both cudgel and torch.
"See devulkid?"
"No. Think went wilds?"
"Too smarmy."
The two turned toward the east. To their right was the higher mass that rose into the Maze, and
ahead were the rough hummocks through which their quarry had departed.
"Track out?"
"East, then south," offered a third man.
"South, back to desert," affirmed the man with the cudgel.
"More than desert. Ships."
"No ships! Never ships! Ships brought the death!" The first man laid his staff across the arm
of the second. "Never!"
The leader shook his head at the unseen devilkid and pointed his staff back at the gate from
which they had emerged.
"Back!"
The wind blew the steam of his breath, like a chokeplume, down the hillside toward the river of
groundfog that wound its poisoned way toward the north along the thin trickle that had been a
river.
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Then he turned and began to retrace his steps toward the shambletown, the oasis of hoarded
warmth and frugality that represented the only order left on the high plains.
The second man flexed his sore arm and lifted the cudgel, looking eastward into the darkness.
"Gram saw him. Me. Devulkid." He spat at the ground and made the hope sign in the air.
In turn, he dropped his head, turned, and plodded after the other two as they retreated behind
the safety of their wall.
Chapter V
Build with honest iron; build with stone; build with wood. If you cannot build with those, do
not build.
For while what you have built may last, while it may tower into the night skies and mirror the
sun by day, you cannot afford the cost.
And, in time, your children will grub for their lives in the wilderness, or pay their
sustenance to the warlords, if they survive at all.
Jane-Ann D'Kerwin Nitiri Philosophies of Rebuilding Scotia, Old Earth, 4011 N.E.C.
Chapter VI
The boy loped across the after-dawn dimness south of the shambletown and north of the windridge
toward the hill cave that served as home.
The hide bag he had taken some days earlier from the shambletowners bumped against his chest
under the worn, frayed, and ripped tunic that once had been left unattended by a careless owner.
Inside the bag, itself held in place by the pressure of the tunic and the loose thonging around
his neck, were a handful of the reddish fruits that grew on one scattering of hills south and east
of the shambles. The hills were far enough from the shambletown, nearly onto the rolling plains,
to discourage casual foraging and open enough to keep the rats from exposing themselves to the
coyotes.
The boy had been lucky. Although his battered blade was sharp and his reflexes quick, his leg
was not fully healed. But he had not had to test them during the night's trip to the fruit trees.
He feared the foraging parties of the shambletowners far more than the coyotes. The four-footed
beasts often traveled alone, almost never in packs, and preferred to avoid him unless they were
close to starving.
The towners took whatever they could find from wherever they found it, but avoided foraging at
night and generally stayed close to the foothills and the higher ground where the landpoison was
less intense.
The boy's eyes never rested, flicking from one hummock to another, from one patch of grass to
the next, from one grubush to the one behind, as his untiring and uneven steps covered the ground
between him and his cave and the relative safety it .offered.
His ears strained for the telltale rustle of a coyote returning to its den, or for the
hiss/squeal of a rat, and his eyes periodically checked the clay for the even rarer trace of a
firesnake.
"WWWHHHeeeeeee!"
The intensity of the whistling sound jolted him to a stop, and he covered his ears to block the
pain. As the intensity dropped, he uncovered them and tried to localize the source. He sensed that
it had started above the clouds and had crossed nearly overhead.
He dropped behind the nearest grubush and waited, waited until the whistle dropped to a
whispering from the direction of the hills.
A brief glint of sunbright light flashed-again from the west-and was gone.
The silence was deeper than before as he trotted toward the hills and the light and the
whispering sound that had died to nothing. The source of the noise and glare was on his way back,
and anything that noisy should have frightened off anything likely to bother him.
Though not counting his steps, he had gone beyond what numbers he knew, far beyond, when he saw
the silvery arc above the grubushes.
He slowed his trot and began to slip from bush to bush, from bush to hummock, and from hummock
to bush as he angled toward the object that had dropped from the sky.
The smoldering grubushes, the charcoal smell mixing with the faint odor of grubush oil, both
told him of the heat the object had created. His feet told him of the rumbling in the clay
underfoot, and his ears could sense vibrations he could not hear.
As he neared the silvery object that towered higher than a shambletown wall, he slid behind a
mound of clay that reeked of old brick and corroded metal. Beyond the mound, the bushes and other
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cover were too sparse for a safe approach, not to mention the steaming ground heat.
He waited, but the whining and the vibration did not stop.
Finally, the golden-haired boy peered over the mound again at the source of the sounds. After
looking at the shining mass of metal, he blinked. Though the whining sound had not changed, a
section of the metal wall had peeled back, and a ramp had been extended.
Thud.
He could feel the force with which the ramp settled onto the ground, and flattened himself as
well as he could behind the mound, trying to keep himself above the ground fog while not letting
the plume of his breath show in the increasing light of dawn.
He shivered, wondering what the metal machine on the desert plain meant. Was it one of the
ships that the sham-bletowners always talked about?
Ships. He shrugged and snorted faintly, ignoring the white plume that trailed behind him.
Always there were the ships that would come to save them. Even his parents had wondered. But no
ship had come to save them from the shambletowners.
If the metal machine was a ship, or from the ships, would it spend the time to save anyone,
devilkids or shambletowners?
The whining sound stopped, and the boy peered back over the top of the mound.
Rrrrrrrrrrr.
The sound echoed across the emptiness as a smaller object positioned itself on the top of the
ramp and began to move down toward the ground,, tracs clanking on the metal of the ramp.
No sooner was the armored tractor clear of the ramp than the whining began again as the ramp
lifted and began to retract.
The tractor began to roll directly toward the mound which . shielded the boy.
He scuttled sideways to another mound that barely covered him, but he could tell from the sound
that the tractor had shifted direction and still headed toward him.
He looked left, then right, for another cover, making a quick dash to the left, scampering as
low as he could, even breathing the ground fog that caught in his lungs like fire.
The roaring increased, louder, and he darted a glance from his hiding place.
Once more, the tractor had switched directions and was headed toward him, now less than a
hundred body lengths away from him.
He ran, ran as fast as he could, with the practice of years and the spur of fear.
The pitch of the roaring increased, and the armored tractor increased its speed.
Could he make the gully he had passed earlier, the dry one where the poisons and fog were
thinner?
He turned directly east and increased his stride.
In turn, the tractor's roar increased.
Although he refused to look back, concentrating on avoiding the grasp of the grubushes while
staying ahead of the machine, he knew that the gap was narrowing, bit by bit.
His breath came raggedly, and the cold air he inhaled tore through his throat, burning like
fire. His breath plumes trailed him like banners as he felt the ground begin the gradual rise
before the drop-off that was the gully ahead.
Thrumm!
He felt a tingling sensation as something sleeted past his left shoulder, but refused to stop,
forcing his legs to keep moving. He could see the drop-off just ahead.
Thrummm!
The strange energy barely cleared his head as he ducked just before the sound. Only a handful
of steps remained to the gully.
Thrummm!
He tried to duck and twist, but the blackness rolled up around him, and he could feel himself
falling even as it did.
Chapter VII
Corson paused outside the portal. As the chief engineering officer, he had the absolute right
to enter any duty space on the ship, but he still hesitated. Marso had the kind of tongue that
could strip flesh from bone.
He frowned, then squared his shoulders and keyed the portal with his own code, the one that
overrode all but the captain's locks.
"Nooo!"
Corson saw the streak of blond, bent, and spread his arms.
Thud.
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摘要：

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