FLIGHT

 

 

Fear. Desperation. Impatience. Exercise. The four main reasons people run. Not the only reasons, but the main ones. The siblings, hand-in-hand, were running for two of those four. Overhead, the cloud-dark sky of late afternoon trembled with the roar of engines. Behind them, the trees shook with the approach of powerful, single-rider machines zipping and slipping between mossy trunks. Beneath them, the ground vibrated with the roar of larger vehicles catching up with the faster ones in an inexorable roll. Ahead – hope.

“Almost there, Dia.”

The girl nodded, unable to speak, needing her breath to fuel screaming muscles. She wondered if her brother was feeling the same level of pain and fatigue.

Several yards more, the path dodging forest plants as if itself in flight, and then. Then. The ridge. No more ground beneath them, only a steep fall. At the bottom, their ship waited. No time to second-guess, no time to hesitate, no possibility of turning back. They’d practiced this descent many times, but never at such a speed. Still, their bodies knew how to react and thereby keep them alive.

Having taken a single step past the edge, they’d leaned back against the face of the cliff into its dirt-covered surface, and slid down, down, down the insane distance, the friction slowing them enough that when they reached the bottom, their shin bones didn’t telescope into their thighs, thigh bones into chest cavities, killing them. Instead, they had exactly enough time to push away from the wall and fall forward, landing safely on their stomachs. Winded, bruised, their backs raw, but otherwise they were safe.

The ship stood ten or so paces ahead, its gleaming shell covered with netting that had been coated in moss and branches, effectively disguising it from overhead view.

“Can you run?”

“Yes, Kyva.” No more than a harsh whisper.

He nodded, gave his sister a quick, encouraging grin, and pushed to his feet. “Then run!”

The dash to the side of the ship seemed endless, but they made it, made it inside, made it to the controls, before something outside exploded almost too close to the right side.

“Ahead first?” asked Dia, aware that if they rose straight up, their poor little vessel would be an instant target.

Kyva, his face grim, nodded and tapped several parts of the control screen with practiced fingers. He didn’t even have to look at his hands. So instead, he concentrated on what was outside the main window – forest, yes, but not for long. Too many of the trees were being reduced to their basic molecules as the pursuers attempted to clear out any possibility of cover.

The ship moved, although some might not think that an apt description. Jumped, perhaps, or shifted from where it was to where it shouldn’t be in such a short time. Behind them, the explosions continued for another few seconds, then stopped. Any moment now, and – yes. As the two pilots knew they would, their pursuers had realized the prey had left them behind, and would increase the range of their weapons to catch up with the ship.

“Prepare,” Kyva said, teeth clenched. He tapped out another pattern on the dark screen, and as it sparked green and blue beneath his hands, the ship lurched forward in a blur, then spun one hundred and eighty degrees left, shot ahead again, repeated this, and finally, its engines giving a sound that could only be described as a sigh, rose into the air.

“Kyva – ”

“I see them.” One more pattern of taps, this time followed by Dia pushing something with her right foot.

Gone. The planet was no longer beneath them. Their pursuers were nowhere. Instead, they were surrounded by a profound darkness pierced with an uncountable number of lights – tiny, huge, clouds of them, clouds of something else.

“Do we have a heading?”

Kyva nodded and told her.

“Really? Where will that eventually take us?”

“I have no idea, but it hardly matters.”

“True. Laying in course.”

The spacescape changed, the difference immediate and rather startling. They’d gone farther, but only a few times, so it still filled them with the wonder and joy of new things.

“Speed?”

“The Wormhole Cross isn’t that far. We may as well get there sooner than later.”

She agreed. “Any idea which one we’re supposed to use?”

“I do. Uncle Velz told me it would bring us to a place we’d like, and where we’d be safe.”

Dia snorted. “How would he know if it was safe?”

“I asked him the same thing.” He chuckled. “Told me that as far as he knew, no one else had ever gone that way.”

And how did Uncle Velz know that? she wondered. “Well, all right. Let’s check it.”

“Hang on, little sister – not yet.”

“Stop that.” But she smiled. She was only three minutes younger. Her brother got a kick out of those three minutes. She thought he was silly to be that taken by the difference, so it always made her smile when he called her “little sister.” Crazy boy.

“I need to make sure the fuel wasn’t compromised in any way. Traveling through a wormhole is dangerous enough.” He was referring to the way a stalled ship would be torn apart within the depths of the phenomenon.

The panel showed him the tanks were full, but he knew better than to trust that. When he returned from the back of the ship, he looked satisfied.

“Set?”

“Set.”

The Cross was no more than a series of holes in space – massive holes, their configuration vaguely resembling a drunken-looking cross. When they reached it, Kyva pointed the nose of their ship toward one of the lower ones, the smallest of them, which meant only about two hundred planets the size of their home world could fit into its diameter.

“Think we’ll ever come back?”

Kyva looked at her, surprised at how forlorn she’d sounded. “I honestly don’t know. Maybe. We’ll see.”

“Okay.”

After making a few adjustments to the ship’s shields and life-support systems, Kyva sat straighter, took a deep breath, and tapped in the coordinates needed to get them through.

In a blink, the ship had left the part of space where it had been built, the part of space where its pilots had been born, the only part of space familiar to any of them, both literally and figuratively.

Two blinks later, Kyva, Dia, and their diamond-shaped silver-blue ship were beyond the far side of the wormhole, heading for a planet buried deep in the gorgeous spiral galaxy dead ahead.

Home? For now. Maybe.

 

SHIPWRECK

 

 

Atmosphere around a planet has always been – for those approaching one from space – a good and welcome sight. Shields preventing a ship from burning up as it shot through said atmosphere have also been considered good. What was beneath the atmosphere, however, was always of greatest importance to the traveler. None of this was of any less true for Kyva and Dia. Sad to say, however, their delight at finding a planet with life-readings in greater abundance than their instruments could fully record, was both intense and short-lived.

“What two problems, Kyva? I only see one – that the air might be a bit too rich for us, at least at first.”

“Here.” He tapped a different quadrant on the control display and it popped up on hers.

“Oh.” She had totally missed this, mainly because she hadn’t been looking for it. “Great. No technology. Not here, at least. But maybe elsewhere on the planet?”

He shook his head. “Checked.”

“Now what?”

“Now we find a place to land and – uh-oh.”

Before he could explain that last remark, the ship pitched sideways, nearly throwing both pilots from their seats.

“Kyva! What’s hap- ”

This time, it turned completely upside down and they did fall, landing hard on the ceiling. Before they could recover, the ship righted itself, and now they were thudding onto the controls. The ship executed a nose-dive, sending the siblings sliding into the front view-port. Had it not been for the still-active shielding, the ship would have been destroyed when, a moment later, it crashed through the top of a forest and buried more than half its length into the ground below.

In the ensuing silence, neither of the two so much as breathed. Eventually, nature took over and they did, but the sound was harsh, unsteady.

“Are you okay?” Kyva asked, his voice pitched absurdly high.

“Uh, yes. I think so. You?”

During the earlier part of their flight, they’d treated the burning scrapes on each others’ backs and changed into fresh, undamaged outfits from the ship’s lockers. Now, they began checking to see if there were any new damages.

A few minutes later, after examining his sister for broken bones and cuts, Kyva sat back on his heels – as well as he could in the tilted control room – and told her she was fine.

“Good. Your turn.” She repeated the exam on him, and was relieved to find that aside from a purplish bruise here and there, he, too, was unscathed. “Now what do we do? How do we get the ship out?”

“No idea. Maybe we should concentrate on getting ourselves out of the ship.”

“But the air, Kyva! It really isn’t very breathable.”

“For short periods it should be fine. We have to see how bad this is.”

Dia got to her feet, steadied herself, and climbed toward the door, using Kyva’s chair and the control desk for support. “I don’t suppose we could just use the breathers?”

She was referring to the devices that fit over the lower part of their faces that would afford them safe, abundant air when either under water or in the vacuum of space. Kyva thought about this, but shook his head a moment later. “I think we should save those for emergencies. In the meantime, we need to adapt to this atmosphere. I have a feeling we’re going to be here a while.” He’d reached the door, too, by this time, and when it wouldn’t open with the controls, he took out his repair tool and blasted the handle.

The air that rushed in was warm, fragrant in a way that made them both dizzy within seconds, but somehow pleasant despite its rather soupy nature.

“This…isn’t so…so bad.” Dia gripped the side of the open door and stared around at the colors. “It isn’t too…different…from our forests. Brighter…maybe.”

Panting, Kyva didn’t bother to respond. Instead, he jumped down, landing on the soft dirt, unable to do anything while he struggled to catch his breath.

Dia joined him then, and pointed up at the sky. Or what they could see of it through the dense canopy of leaves. “Blue,” she whispered. “Like ours…used…to be.”

Despite his breathing difficulties, her brother smiled, squinting upward. The skies of their world had once been a similar color, perhaps somewhat deeper, but nothing like the dull, twilight green it had become soon after he and Dia had been born. He’d seen pictures of the blue sky, but had been too young to keep the memory of its real counterpart. Now he could understand the regret he’d often heard in the voices of the elders when they spoke of their technological decisions that had eaten up that blue, replacing it with ugliness that got no better even when storm-clouds covered it. In fact, the clouds themselves were a dark, horrible shade of deep greenish-black. Not pleasant in any way, those clouds.

He lowered his gaze and turned slowly to face the ship, then wished he hadn’t. The reverse-engine ports were underground now, he realized, and if he turned off the shields, the vessel would probably fall over completely onto its left side. So be it. They couldn’t leave the power on, and at its current angle, there was nowhere else for it to go once the invisible barrier between its sides and the ground was gone.

“If it…falls any more…any more this way,” he gasped, “we won’t be able to…to access…the door.”

“I know.”

They exchanged a glance, nodded, and climbed back into the ship. Looked like they were going to have to adapt to the atmosphere a lot quicker than anticipated. Once inside, they got their breathing back under control almost instantly, but knew they wouldn’t be able to enjoy it for very long.

“I’ll start gathering the food and medical supplies,” said Dia. “We can put them in the sample-storage containers for now.”

“Good idea. I’ll start salvaging as much technology and other stuff as I can without compromising the engines or the integrity of the ship. One of these days we might find a way to get it flying again.” He didn’t sound convinced.

Over the next two days, the twins managed to remove a sizable amount of supplies, setting them well away from the ship. Once the power was shut down, it would complete its crash, and they didn’t want to risk losing anything under its weight.

During this time, they saw no one like themselves. A few creatures on four legs approached from time to time but never got too close. These were not like the forest animals they knew on their world – not entirely – but there were enough basic similarities that told them they were instinctive rather than intelligent beings. Their timidity also defined them as non-threatening.

Other creatures made themselves known by flying past their heads, landing on their arms and legs, and crawling over their shoes. Very tiny these were, compared with the four-legged ones. In fact, these had six legs. Dia watched, fascinated, as one crept across the back of her hand. From what she assumed was its head darted a needle-like projection. After several seconds, she realized the thing was trying without success to pierce her skin. She wondered why.

When they’d taken everything they could from the stricken vessel, Kyva used one of the rescued tools to shut down the engines from the outside. By now, they were breathing a little more easily. Certainly not as well as they could inside the ship, of course.

They watched with sadness, perhaps some despair, as the shield deactivated and their interstellar transportation lay down like a massive animal going to sleep, the door pressed into the dirt.

“We ought to cover it, Kyva.”

“Why?”

“So it doesn’t get damaged or found, I suppose.” She spoke slowly, having learned that this reserved enough air to keep her breathing even and comfortable.

“Hmm. Makes sense. I’d be surprised if anyone from our world came by, though.”

“You never know.”

“True. I’m thirsty.”

The water, they’d discovered, was abundant and delicious here. Near the end of the first day, which they assumed occurred with the setting of the sun, they’d found a stream not far from where they had landed. A good thing, too. Hunting for water when they could barely breathe would have been a miserable pursuit.

Before long, they were able to calculate time as it would be reckoned on the planet, and were somewhat shocked at how much shorter the days were in this place. At home, it would still be mid-morning after five of this planet’s days had already passed.

They built a shelter for themselves from various items they’d taken off the ship, then covered it with branches and leaves to make it look less strange in the primitive environment. As for the ship itself, they managed to camouflage it rather well beneath a blanket of shrubs, downed branches they’d picked up here and there, and after the days began to get cooler, the many leaves that had turned bright colors and fallen, landing in a blanket on the ground.

The colder air proved to be a blessing; for some reason, they breathed with greater ease on the days and during hours when warmth fled from before a brisk wind, or swept through the forest like an imperious overlord. Their own world was icy most of the time, so they had no problem with the weather.

When they awoke one morning to a world turned white, they remembered tales their parents had told them of a phenomenon called “snow.” After the skies had gone ugly, the storms had brought only poisonous rain. During the colder times, nothing fell from the hideous, often noxious clouds. No snow.

Ah, but here – lots of snow that sparkled and crunched underfoot, delightful, thirst-quenching, refreshing snow. They loved it. They ran and rolled about in it, laughing, forgetting for that brief while that they were stranded on a strange world, alone, almost out of food.

“One thing about all this,” Dia said on an afternoon when they’d finally tired of chasing each other around in the fluffy whiteness. They had fully adapted to the atmosphere by this time, and were barely out of breath when they sat together outside the shelter.

“What about it?”

“No plants, no food. What are we going to do?”

Kyva frowned and bit his lower lip. He, too, had considered this problem, and had thus far been unable to come up with a solution. “We might have to leave this area and try to find some.”

She nodded, unhappy. Where they were had been safe and was now familiar as well. Who knew what they would find if they went elsewhere? “Well, we have enough to last at least another, another of our own month’s time. That would be what – six hundred or so of their days, yes?”

“Something like that.”

Relief. “We’re okay, then. I believe the snow and cold will be gone long before our supplies run out.”

“I hope so. Still, I’m beginning to get curious about what else might be here. On the planet, I mean.”

“Aw, Kyva, come on. Don’t say we’re going to go exploring!”

“Why not?”

“It – it mightn’t be safe.”

“What makes you…” He stopped, an odd look crossing his features, and stood suddenly. “Sshh!”

She joined him, cocking her head as she tried to hear what had interrupted him.

Kyva waved at her to stay still, and began walking away to their left, peering about as he went. A few feet further, he stopped, and had begun to turn back toward his sister, when someone stepped out from behind a tree a few feet away.

The person spoke, her tone of voice indicating surprise, and Kyva spun back to face her, eyes wide.

This individual was wearing some kind of long, dark green garment, thick material wrapped around her head and shoulders. It was obvious this was a female, unless the males here were the ones who had larger breasts. Her face, too, bore the more delicate features of a female, but what was she doing? What was she saying?

She spoke again, smiled, extending a hand. This appendage was wrapped in something as well, each finger covered except for the tips. On her arm swung a container of what looked like woven tree bark and it was covered by a bright cloth.

Kyva had reached Dia’s side, and put a protective arm around her. The female didn’t look at all threatening, but this was an unfamiliar place, and for all the siblings knew, smiles meant danger here.

Still speaking, the female reached into the container and removed an item that even at a distance smelled like something made of miracles. It was round, brownish, thick-looking. What could it be?

Dia took a step closer, and for some reason Kyva didn’t try to stop her. “Who are you?”

The woman’s eyebrows shot up in surprise and she answered, but of course, Dia didn’t understand her.

“We don’t know your tongue,” said Kyva, needlessly stating the obvious.

Dia recognized this as her brother being terrified but working hard to hide it. Not that she didn’t know why he’d be afraid. This female was much, much older. If she turned out to be a warrior of some kind, they wouldn’t stand much of a chance. Then again, these people apparently had no technology, so maybe she and Kyva would be able to fight her off.

The female came a little closer, nodding at the object in her hand. It was clear she wanted them to take it. So Kyva stood straighter and stepped past his sister.

“Thank you,” he said, taking the thing. Up close, the aroma was almost overwhelming, and without thinking, he lifted it to his nose, taking a deep, blissful sniff. “I think it’s food of some kind,” he murmured.

“So taste it.”

He could feel that while its outside was somewhat hard, the thing had softness to it, so he carefully squeezed one end. It broke off, displaying an inside that was white and porous.

The female’s smile grew and she nodded, telling him something.

“I hope she’s telling you to eat it, Kyva, because it smells incredible and I want a taste.”

“Me first. If it kills me, run.” He took a bite…eyes closed with pleasure, he chewed for a moment, then had another. “This is amazing!”

“Must be – you’re talking with your mouth full.” Manners had always been paramount in their family. Well, back when they had one. “You going to share that?”

He passed the object to her, smiling as he saw her take a bite and almost squirm with the joy of its flavor.

The female was speaking again. They had no idea what she wanted or was telling them, but had they been able to translate, they would have heard, “You poor dears! How have you lived out here all alone? Why, you’re just little children! Please – come home with me!”

Impressum

Texte: Judith A. Colella
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 27.06.2013

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