Chapter 5
Warm orange
On the first day of endweek, Keelic was allowed, after homework, to make another trek to the cave. He walked through the forest, suit hood off, smelling the pungent scents of alien flowers and the earthy-sweet aroma of rotting Ermolian vegetation that was unlike anything. The wind played among the trees, making the long leaves bob and sway. Above, the sun shone distant and bright between intermittent clouds. There was no one to tell him what to do. He could go where he pleased. Say what he wished, when he wished. And there was the rifle. He smiled.
Pushing through the stringy underbrush beneath the trees, he came to a letrul’s trampled path. It was one of Keelic’s favorite Ermolian animals. He followed the easy way and soon found the animal. It pushed through the underbrush with its slow, backward, eight-legged gait, eating as it went, its head at the rear of its body. The round head rose slowly, and took a long three-eyed look at Keelic.
Warning beeps sounded, and Keelic felt the tingling sensation that meant the stunner had fired. The little status screen on the stunner folded out. One glance upward, and he scrambled away.
Hanging limp from a fiber in the top center of its body was a spiked pouncer. Four jointed arms tipped with curved spikes dangled from the corners of a roughly square body. Multifaceted eyes that reflected metallic green in the dappled sunlight gazed blankly from between the legs. The creature’s fiber winch in its upper body was slowly letting the stunned animal sink to the ground.
"What happened?" Keelic’s mother asked through the communicator.
"It’s just a pouncer, Mom," said Keelic trying to sound indifferent, but his heart was racing.
"Are you okay?"
"Yes."
She sighed and said, "Give me a visual, Keelic."
He attached the communicator to the recorder, and raised the recorder to his eyes.
"Oh my. Carl, link Keelic’s visual."
"That is a large one, all right," said Keelic’s father. "Looks to be at least a meter across. Are you okay, Keelic?"
"Yes, I’m fine," said Keelic, as he struggled to keep the recorder from trembling.
His mother said, "You’re in a letrul’s path, Keelic. You’ve been told not to follow them. Pouncers always hunt there. Do you have your hood on?"
"No, but..."
"Wear it from now on."
"But..."
"Now."
Keelic touched the control pad on his arm. The hood emerged from behind his head as the face plate slid up from his chest. The plate curved on top and sides, and sealed above his head.
A faint breath of cool air blew across his face as the suit began filtering outside air. Keelic replaced the recorder and communicator on his belt. He checked his map and compass. Only one more kilometer to the cave. One more klick to his secret. He pushed ahead.
He found the tree where he had hidden the rifle, and pulled it from the trunk. Sunlight glinted off the scratched gray surfaces of the weapon. He found a rock and sat down with the rifle on his thighs. He could feel its weight through his suit, and he wondered. Why was the rifle here? Who had left it in the cave, and where were they now?
Looking forward to getting the rifle was different from having it. Having it was much more serious. And more powerful. He touched off his suit hood and stood, facing a phantom lineup of Quat-lat Kay-ku commanded by the Chief Instructor. He brought the rifle up, aimed it, and pretended to fire, but it was too heavy. Ducking, he dashed to a Patamic tree.
"Admiral Travers, last survivor of the Ermolian slave camps, prepares his last stand." He set the rifle in the crook of a leaf stem and pretended to fire rapid patterns at the forest. "...vaporizes the attacking mob, but only has three charges left...the Chief Instructor sends in a Tritzbagian armored seeker...Travers sights on it..." He raised the sight, and tuned the Target Finder to filter on metallic, penetration, variable-range search. The viewfinder zoomed, and zoomed, and finally stopped at twenty klicks inside what looked like dirt. He forgot his game and swung the rifle back and forth. The range shot back to a few meters and started searching out again. The range leapt out to four klicks and lit up with targeting lines. Pressing his eye close, he centered the gun on what it had found, then snatched his hand away from the control pad.
The screen showed, at precisely 4.143 kilometers, his home. Holding the rifle steady was difficult, and the image kept slipping out of view, but the targeting lines were locked and guided him back. Unease made a knot in his chest. Another set of smaller targeting lines appeared. Gingerly, he tapped the target selector to cycle to the next target, and the view zoomed out to 30.2 klicks, focusing on the next target that matched current scanning criteria. Targeting lines tracked a small hover shuttle across the view finder.
Keelic touched off the Target Finder, and let the rifle lean on the tree. His palms were slick. This rifle was far more powerful than those in the vids. More powerful than anything. Well, not more powerful than a Lasiter Attack Frigate—nothing was stronger than those, not even the newest ships.
He looked at the sky. What if he was being monitored from space? Or what if Anny or his parents were scanning him? No, if they were, he’d already be in so much trouble he would never get out of it. His parents liked Anny to support their lives, but not interfere without specific instructions, which was fortunate. Keelic considered what to do. If he told of his discovery, everyone would be amazed, and then he would be ignored as the adults pursued the mystery of it being here. If he was to keep this secret, he would need to be more careful. He picked up the rifle and climbed into the cave.
After hiding the rifle at the back of the cavern, he walked out into the sunlight. The purple-blue sky was empty to his eye, but he knew that the catcher-nets were up there, and beyond them the outer-perimeter defense sats. All his life he had lived under a catcher-net security blanket. Every populated world had one, and all inhabited planetary systems were seeded heavily with anti-superluminal mines. The catcher-net defense grid protected the world from the weapons of starships, and the mines kept a world from being destroyed by a superluminal weapon or misguided ship. Taught for as long as he could remember that the powerful defense grids were his friend, watching sky and planet, he felt uncomfortable sensing a threat from them now that he had something to hide.
There was one other thing he wanted to see today. With the map zoomed in to display the bluff, he left the cave and walked east along the base of the cliff until he found what he was looking for, obscured by vegetation. It took some effort, but he pulled aside vines and dead leaves to expose the base of a steep ramp about one meter wide cut from the bluff face. He looked up and could see evidence of the ramp as it rose, hugging the contours of the bluff.
He didn’t know what the ramp signified, but he felt it was important, and if not important, it was fun to discover things nobody knew about.
"How’s the recording going?" asked his father.
Keelic twitched and said, "’Kay."
"Sarah wants you to start home now so you won’t be late again. You are not wearing your hood. Put it on. Your mother was serious about that."
Keelic sighed. "’Kay."
After dinner he went to his room and looked up the rifle again. Nothing that he found hinted at the abilities he had discovered in the weapon. He longed to tell Anny about it. She kept his secrets, but this was different somehow. He wondered how Leesol would react. Of course, he had to meet her first. But how?