impact. It was the first sign of violence they’d encountered. The second was a razed village, a charred ruin they waded ashore to investigate. Schilling kicked through the wreckage, exposing a sad collection of pots and pans among the still smouldering timbers, but little to intimate the nature of either the attack or the community eradicated.
Johnson stood hands in pockets. Strangely, the protomen had refused to leave the hover, unnerved by this evidence of aggression. Between their cousins? Possibly. Schilling put forth no contrary explanation and the pilot was happy to go along, the burnt remains of torches and blade marks sunk into broken doorways making a powerful argument for tribal conflict. Indigenously human...
And there was a river, the village built alongside, Johnson contemplative when next he guided the hover between scorched and blackened ruins, the residues of dwellings and storehouses. Furred animals, large rats swam upstream under their bow. Mainly deciduous, the trees threatened to close, an increasing obstacle as the banks steepened, tipping branches toward the water. Squirrels flitted from limb to limb, gathering summer fruits. Johnson experimented with the fascia and eventually flooded the cabin with sound from external sensors, birdsong swelling as the forest lungs heaved.
Other noises rose, shouts and cries filtering through the steady drone of the craft’s propeller fans, made vividly real by the crack of stones or arrowheads striking the deck. The pilot upped their speed to a shaky thirty kilometres an hour in an effort to out distance the projectiles.
The windscreen flowered, a spiderweb of crystal as it absorbed the impact of a missile Schilling deemed to have been delivered chemically, a small rocket that fortunately skidded off the rigid plastic. Fired from the bank, or, more likely, discharged from a pump-gun by someone in the branches above. Whatever the source, he knew the hover couldn’t take too many shots like that. It wasn’t a military vehicle.
Soapy and Knox lay huddled, frozen in an attitude of terror.
‘Can you see?’ bellowed Schilling.
‘Enough. If the screen holds.’
‘Looks almost as if they were expecting us.’
The pilot refused to speculate. ‘Grab me a helmet from the locker,’ he said with a grimace. ‘Anything. Then knock the screen out.’
Schilling recalled seeing goggles. He made a quick search, found them, hooked a pair over his brow, doing the same for Johnson.
‘Ready?’
‘Do it!’
Using the axe he punctured the screen, crystal motes flying as he next tore it aside like the cracked lid of a sterilized container. One of the issue screamed. Knox Hog, Soapy dragging him to the relative safety of the tiny galley.
The hover bounced, slammed, lashing them with water. A rap of small arms fire caused them to duck. The river narrowed, foliage shrouding. Johnson advanced the throttle once more, ripping through a wood and rock tunnel. A blade sheared, jammed and shattered the prop. The remaining fan choked briefly on a duct full of twigs, spluttered, died, then spun back to life, its temperature soaring before they again hit open water.
Wind tumbled into the cabin, a pummelling rush of cold vapours beyond whose pressured rattle was a welcome quiet. The hover slowed under the pilot’s direction and both Johnson and Schilling exhaled deliverance, lifting their goggles to peer at each other.
‘Well, what do you make of it so far?’
Schilling wiped his nose in reply.
Johnson pushed from the command chair and scuttled aft. ‘Hey; you guys okay? Talk to me...’
He left her to it, mentally underlining the necessary pronoun, staring out the window at the placid surface of a lake ringed by trees. The hover made steady progress across a body of water seemingly anomalous, more a reservoir than a natural feature. He tried to gauge its extent from the instruments, but failed to apprehend the relevant data. Maybe Johnson could do it. For now it was better to relax. Let the pilot calm the professed dreamsporn couched in the galley. A peculiar excitement swamped him, an eagerness to come ashore and face whatever was out there. He felt a lurid expectation, an extreme desire, was a young boy on the eve of a big occasion, a birthday perhaps, and over the horizon lay the otherworldly site of his party. Clambering out to better survey the lake and its arboreal perimeter, he saw the moulded hull to be scarred and pocked with bullet holes, some the size of his fist. The surviving fan burbled along merrily, even if its bearings were noisy, a flicker in its cycle suggesting one of more blades were missing. The green blood of pithy limbs scrawled bizarre graffiti.
In the distance, sparkling as it foamed, a waterfall slipped gracefully over a rounded stone tongue. The end of the road for the hover, unless they could somehow bypass the fall to the river’s upper level. But that meant going through the forest and more than a few days felling trees. They would be forced to abandon the riddle craft, its skirt torn and shell battered, continuing south on foot at Schilling’s manic leisure.
First they ate, Johnson dangling off the port side, pale and womanly as she bathed, one hand clinging to a rope so as not to sink with a belly full of rehydrated vegetable matter. He couldn’t watch, choosing the sunnier starboard panel for his ingestions and excretions, both performed above water, a bottle filled and capped earlier. There’d be ample opportunity to wash, he reckoned, taking a perverse delight in launching turds into a lake uncontaminated as yet by human endeavour. Hosts of tiny silver fish nosed his offerings and he thought of a line, but if they were to be well inland before nightfall there was no time to waste angling.
Smoke drifted across from Johnson’s cigarette.
‘How many packs have you?’ he inquired jokingly.
‘Three more of twenty,’ answered the pilot, dressing. ‘Although I’m ignorant of their origin, they’re the brand I used to smoke back home.’
‘Home?’
‘Amy’s Cupboard. My father was a priest.’
‘But you’ll smoke them anyway,’ Schilling chided.
Johnson scowled. ‘Of course. No way round it; like the waterfall.’
He turned to regard the spuming liquid, its drum-roll rising as they drifted closer. The fall was only six or eight metres high. Might as well have been sixty or eighty for all the chance they had of getting the hover over it.
‘What do you suppose is on the other side?’
‘The other side of where?’ questioned Johnson, flicking ash, hair dripping, beard almost gone. ‘The planet?’
Soapy Farfriender stuck his head out the hatch, appeared ready to say something, then retreated.
‘How about those two. Are they fit to travel?’
‘They’ll make it. They’re main concern is you.’
‘Me?’ Schilling was rattled.
‘You’re unpredictable. They think you enjoyed what went on back there.’
The darkening man grinned, his anger quickly dissipating.
‘Well, you did, didn’t you?’ said Johnson, cigarette butt looping into the quenching water.
He turned his palms upward.
On dry land his toes quivered, receptive to the forest loam. He carried the axe in his string-pull bag, the blade covered. Johnson marched behind, swathed in waterproofs, the issue with her one moment, gone the next, chattering quietly to themselves, a conspiratorial whisper that made Schilling suspicious. He blocked them out of his mind, pushing on, following the southward course of the river. The current ran in the opposite direction, a bubbling succession of arrows. Trees flanked them, oak and alder, broadleafs whose abutment cast the flow into shimmering blackness. The pilot fiddled with a handset, static whistling, coded bursts of information briefly extant as Johnson kept her thumb on the scan button. Schilling was ignorant of the set’s range, or how it was affected by the close proximity of the trees, but the strength of the transmissions suggested an enemy nearby, perhaps dead ahead, the group’s bearing gleaned from those bandit’s on the north shore.
‘Can’t you find a music station?’ he complained.
She pressed her thumb t
wice, killing the noise. ‘I was hunting for clues.’
‘Die in ignorance,’ he told her. ‘It’s all the rage.’
Johnson swatted a fly, dropped the radio into a holdall. ‘I’m sorry you feel that way.’
He pulled his bare feet from the gathering mud with an undignified suction.
Evening descended prematurely, the waning light swallowed by the forest. The sun set over distant hills, their flanks sombre, crests purple. More hills floundered in shadow to the south, a higher range against which the trees scrabbled, lost for purchase on exposed brown rocks. Neither Schilling or Johnson spoke for hours, the night tar-thick before weary limbs demanded rest. The pilot had a flashlight among her effects, but judged it unwise to splash their whereabouts across potentially hostile retinae, a beacon for incoming fire. It grew colder. The axeman laid his hand on her shoulder and whispered he’d take first watch.
Johnson was relying on the issue for that. But let him wander if he had to, she reasoned. With luck he might not wake her till dawn. She poured a cup of water and waggled in it dry hunks of bread.
Schilling clambered up a huddle of boulders. The river spilled narrowly between them and a huge fallen trunk, crisp and noisome as it foamed. He needed such a marker. The stones displayed silvery ridges under the stars. The planet’s ring was seemingly twisted, warped like a Mobius strip above. A trick, he thought, an illusion of perspective. Near the twist was one brilliant