Chapter 1
Lucas gazed out the narrow eel-shaped transport’s bow screen, his nose practically pressed up to the barrier; he always liked to be the first to get a glimpse of home. He, Kyra and Tank sat one behind the other, like peas in a pod. He’d felt the seats vibrate to life on take-off with some relief; their tech was getting less and less reliable, particularly around the Bowl.
To his surprise, Kyra reached forward and gripped his shoulder just as the glittering golden light of Gâta, their home, came into view. The vertical crevasse formed a sudden bright spear in the darkness, and the sight calmed him. Gâta had started as a shallow vertical crevasse tucked to the folds of the gigantic sandstone skirt which formed the Bowl’s perimeter. Settled due to its proximity to the Starsand, over the centuries their ancestors had gradually hollowed out the cleft further and further. It now sheltered their community of some five thousand people, sand-dwellers all.
Kyra’s hand tightened on his shoulder just as Lucas noticed it, too: something was not right. The normally bright glocaves which dotted the sides of Gâta’s entrance – and had formed the cross-bowl communication system before Tol’s wavelength comm tech – were all dark. Tension in the cockpit rose, Tank dousing the hull lights on instinct as they slowed their approach: what should have been the entrance to a teeming golden township now emanated the ominous storm-wreckage quiet of a tornado-struck village.
“Um,” Tank’s voice came over the comm, “what do we think?”
There was a brief and awful silence, as both Kyra and Lucas assumed the same older-sibling protective instinct towards Tank. Even though Kyra was the one related to him, Lucas knew she would be running a mental calculus which minimised harm to Tank, whatever the outcome. Though now six-foot-four, dark and beefy to Kyra’s willowy and muscular six-one, she would always see him as the little golden-ringleted child who had followed her around for ever.
“Go dark, land the ship topside,” they both said in unison, then stopped, almost smiling. Lucas twisted in his seat so he could see their faces illuminated in the greenish glow of their instruments: his love, his family, his people. He would protect them at all costs.
“Let’s land the ship, but just over the lip there. We’ll take the back way in,” he said, assuming command, glad they both acquiesced to it. There was never any guarantee, with those two.
They coasted above Gâta’s entrance in a wide arc, staying well out of range of anyone watching with the naked eye; not that they’d escape any sensors. His darkdrive would have to come back online for that, but it was low on Presvar. If there was even anyone alive down there to read a sensor. Lucas willed himself not to make any judgements until he had all the facts.
“Didn’t Yâna tell us a story like this once?” Tank whispered uneasily, as they approached the upper landing zone, slightly removed from Gâta’s lip.
“Yeah…” Lucas replied, lost in thought. In his grandmother’s day, Gâta’s sister settlements around the bowl had aggressively enforced their ancient honour-cultures in an effort to survive. Virulently clan-obsessed, they jealously guarded their homes and shot first, always. Why they had chosen a benighted mountainous bowl with nothing but a Starsand lake chock full of ravenous un-killable beasts with Presvar-coated scales, when there was an infinitely more liveable garden-variety desert fifty kilometres distant, was beyond Lucas. But he knew Kyra got it. She lived, she breathed, she yearned for the Starsand: its massive, constantly shifting peaks and troughs, its sinister, roaring beauty.
The transport lowered itself quietly to earth and they disembarked, creeping in formation over the windswept folds of rock. Dropping further, they crawled on their bellies to the edges of Gâta’s skylights, cut into the cavern’s roof. The scene which greeted them had that same eery, emptiness; Gâta’s streetlights which hung over the walk and streetways and criss-crossed through the cavern were on, but flickered insubstantially.
“I’m going in,” Lucas said, “wait–”
“Don’t even think about being all noble,” Kyra hissed, one beat ahead of Tank, whose shoulders had taken on the same mutinous set. “This is our home too,” she said, pushing up on her forearms and wriggling back down the slope, the way they had come.
They inched back from the cavern’s peak, treading lightly as its sandstone roof was thinnest here. Tracking the rippled sandstone curves towards their transport which idled like a landed blowfly, the first of their planet’s three huge, golden moons rose over the Bowl’s furthest peaks. It was followed by its sister moons in quick succession. While thin, the atmospheres of all three moons varied in chemical composition such that they all had an outer ring of blue, like an iris. The first sister, Cerulean, was followed by her twin Cobalt, and youngest sister, Periwinkle.
The moons’ rays lit a path for the three almost-growns, throwing their shadows out, long and insubstantial. Their sudden appearance was fortunate, too, as Gâta’s rear entryway was cunningly hidden in a crack. Almost invisible by day, it was impossible to locate by moonless night.
On the far side of their transport, the companions reached a spot where two up-thrusting whorls of rock shaped like whipped-cream spires. Kyra ran her hand down one and pressed her fingers into three shallow depressions at its base. A deep click sounded in response, and a rectangular section of rock fell away, sloping down and in, revealing a tallish person-sized tunnel in a matter of seconds. Greenish light spilled out like mist, cast by the thousand-thousand glo-worms, which lived along the tunnel’s roof.
Kyra slid down the slope, followed by Tank. Lucas took one last look around himself, willing the furtive shadows flitting in the corners of his vision to be tricks of the light. He followed Kyra and Tank downwards, and as soon as his foot left the edge of the ramp it ascended, soon leaving them all cast in gentle greens.
They navigated the tunnels quickly, always slanting downwards, and after about twenty minutes of twists and turns, came out at the base of Gâta, the narrowest part of the settlement which was crammed into the crevasse’s end. Edging between towering homes hewn from sandstone and so close together that they touched, they made their way into what had been the rear town square. Gâta’s cavern walls reared up on each side, civilisation jammed in like honeycomb right to the soaring roof three hundred metres overhead. The skylights admitted the cool bluish light of Cerulean, now directly overhead, and it showed a ghost town. A child’s bicycle lay abandoned on its side, and loose pieces of cloth blew intermittently around the square on odd gusts of wind.
Several hundred years before, Tol had landed from the skies on its so-called escape mission with its alien diseases and rhythms, and for a while it seemed their way of life had no future. But their family had discovered a way to mine Presvar, and suddenly, life in their settlement flourished. Tol both needed Presvar and seemed uninterested in producing it for itself. The Gâtans had tried to unify with their sister clans, but alas: only a few remained, stubborn as rocks dotted around the hillsides. Honour killings were a thing of the past: what had happened here?
Tank furtively approached the gold water emitter which formed the space’s centrepiece. Towering and covered in massive gems, it sprouted tree-like from the ground, with alien curvature and six large spouts which curled over themselves to point downwards. It had been the strangest thing discovered by their people, following their burrowing efforts: simple, wide circular spaces with nothing in them but these strange, jewelled protrusions from the ground, the fresh water from which was quickly drunk freely.
“Tank! Keep to the shadows!” Lucas ordered urgently into the comm.
“Mate, I don’t think there’s anyone here,” Tank replied, looking around them at the square, its asteroid-like inertness sighing from the gaps between its many buildings. “It’s giving me the creeps. Like a post apocalypse holo-game.”
Lucas looked around and had to agree; from the nod of her head, Kyra agreed, too.
“Tank!” squealed a voice, and a bright blonde scrap of girl hurtled towards him from the opposite side of the square, colliding with his bulk before he’d had a chance to blink.
“Tania?” Tank exclaimed, nonplussed. “Tania!” Cried Kyra, running over as well as Tania, Lucas’ little cousin, wrapped her arms around Tank’s middle, her height and proportions indicating athleticism and a person on the cusp of womanhood.
Lucas took one last look around the perimeter before joining them, still not able to shake the sense of being watched. Every time he turned his head, small dark smudges receded from view, as though he had Starsand-blindness.
Tania was shaking with silent sobs, her head on Tank’s chest. Tank patted her awkwardly on the head, looking at Kyra with a desperate a little help? look which, in any other circumstances, would have been hilarious.
“Tania, where is everyone? What happened here? What—”
“They took them all,” Tania said in a muffled, sticky voice, “they took them all. I was in our cellar when they came. Something about Presvar, I don’t know,” she wailed, arms tightening around Tank, who had finally returned the embrace.
Kyra turned to Lucas. “We need to—”
From overhead, the newsprojector clicked on, triggered by their movement.
A silvery-green screen flickered to life, extending several metres from the ceiling, and they all looked up with distaste. Tol tech, installed by some bright spark from Gâta - Read: Tol sycophant-come-sympathiser - to “facilitate communications” between their civilisations.
“Please be advised,” said a computerised female voice with a disorienting, friendly-threatening tone, “You are in a restricted area,” the three looked at each other, eyebrows raised. Tania lifted her head from Tank’s chest but didn’t let go of him. Restricted? By whom?
“This property is now under the ownership and laws of Tol, Brightbringer in the dark,”
They all looked at each other, aghast, as the announcement went on. “Any trespassing will be punishable by imprisonment, with immediate effect.”
“Let’s g—” Lucas started, just as one of the drifting shadows he’d been trying to focus on suddenly resolved into a slight, but heavily armed figure which strode out from between two of the buildings. They must have had some sort of night-vis distortion shields up, Lucas’ engineer mind remarked with admiration. He’d heard rumours of such tech coming out of Tol.
“What have we here?” the man drawled in guttural Tollese, as, to Lucas’ dismay, three more appeared from the shadows. He was glad his mother had made them all learn the language of the parasitic vine which had slowly taken hold around their civilisations’ body, and now neck. Knowledge is power, she’d whispered to him in that conspiratorial way they’d had, giving him an extra sweet with a wink behind his father’s turned back.
He and Kyra immediately shielded Tank, who in turn put Tania behind him and formed the other side to their alert triangle. Lucas felt the warmth of his shoulder, Taina’s slight tremble, and gave Kyra’s forearm a warning squeeze. Assuming these assailants were from Tol, they would not take kindly to a woman speaking back to them.
“We used to live here,” Lucas said calmly, “we just want to collect a few possessions and then we’ll be on our way.”
“Not today you won’t,” not tonight, Lucas’ inner pedant answered irritably. Why were these Tollen security guys always so ground meat-minded? “Everything here is now under the jurisdiction of Tol.” The leader stepped forward, a sneer on his fleshy, mean face. Lucas counted three separate plasma blasters amongst the security force, and many blades on them besides.
“You’ll be coming with us,” he said, stepping forward, his companions following. Gremost, read the patch on his left breast. Lucas thought frantically as they advanced, but all escape routes were cut; the screen was too high to climb up, the only other route out of Gâta had been blocked by a rockslide which, he remembered with a pang, his father had been railing at the city council to clear, as increasing amounts of Tol credits had made their way into the pockets of its members.
Tank shifted behind him, and Lucas shut his eyes, remembering the shortrange rock taser he had been tinkering with and carrying everywhere like a grandstanding idiot. Lucas hoped against hope that he wouldn’t do anything stupid.
“Don’t try anything heroic,” called Gremost, who had noted the shift in body language and halted a few metres away, his blaster raised. “Come quietly and we won’t direct your life assignments towards the Presvar mine,” he went on, “And you, pretty one,” he said with an oil slicked tone and a further step forward, speaking as a big-game hunter might speak to a cornered tiger, “We won’t send to the Fleshpot.” Lucas stiffened, rage building up underneath his icy calm.
“Go fuck yourself,” Kyra said, her chin raised, and Lucas had a moment to feel a flash of fierce pride for this his–? wildest and most incredible of women before he was shoved forward by Tank, who’d barrelled through them both, taser aloft.
Tank landed a strike in the ensuring moment of surprise, its electric rope casting out like a whip and striking a glancing blow to Gremost’s shoulder, normally accurate aim probably knocked askew by the same quivering rage Lucas was holding in his chest. Tank’s hit threw Gremost’s reply shot wide, his body twitching and vibrating with a forceful current as one of his companions landed a shot on Tank’s thigh, hitting home with a solid thunk. Kyra ran forward to catch him as he fell with a shout of pain, and a small, surprised “Oh!” sounded behind Lucas.
Lucas spun around, dread clawing up his throat. Tania had a fist-sized hole blown right through her chest. She collapsed immediately and Lucas reached forward to slow her fall, feeling like he was underwater. Her eyes were already sightless. It seemed the leader had kicked his blaster up to kill level, rather than the stun/maim which Tank had suffered. Tank now had both hands gripped around his thigh, tendons standing out in his neck as Kyra crouched protectively in front of him, baring her teeth and brandishing Tank’s modified rocktaser.
“Kyra–” Lucas said brokenly, and she and Tank glanced back, horror sliding down their faces like slime. Kyra looked back at the leader as he struggled, panting, to his feet, lifted by two of his comrades. She lowered the taser.
“Smart, for a girl,” he said, his face slick with sweat and malice. “You’re lucky we need able bodies more than we need paperwork. Come quietly, and we’ll spare you the fate of your little friend there.” She bared her teeth again but kept the taser lowered, then bent and hooked an arm under Tank, who stood with a gasp and grimace, leaning heavily on his older sister.
Lucas rose, lifting Tania, whose wound seemed curiously cauterised. She looked as though she’d purchased an optical illusion shirt, which gave the appearance of a hole. He held her to his chest, her slight form so light and impossibly cold in his arms, his chest constricting once in a dry sob, his eyes moistening. Tania, who’d had the world’s biggest crush on his best friend Tank for ever, Tania with pilot’s aspirations and a fondness for purple, was gone.
“We’re not bringing that,” Gremost said as his companions advanced with ringcuffs, binding both Kyra and Tank’s hands behind their backs as they stood stiff with eyes full of hate. “Hurry up,” Gremost added tersely.
Lucas lowered Tania gently onto her back next to the water emitter, folding her small hands one over the other so they covered up the wound. As he straightened up, his stricken face stared back at him from one of its smooth, gem-studded sides, wibbling strangely in the surface of a dinner-plate sized opal. No doubt these, too, would be pilfered now that Tol had stopped playing nice with its prey. Suddenly, the entire tower pulsated once with a warm green light, before going dark again. Lucas stood rooted to the spot; the only thing they’d ever managed to get out of this strange, alien tower was pure cold water.
“Come on,” the leader’s voice sounded right behind Lucas as his hands were roughly drawn back and tied with ringcuffs. He allowed himself to be dragged backwards and pushed towards Kyra and Tank, who wore identical looks of shock at the tower’s behaviour.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” the one with a blaster trained on Kyra muttered to his companion, both shifting on their feet like spooked animals.
The security forces bundled Kyra, Tank and Lucas through to Gâta’s main front entrance. Their transport had been landed in the main thoroughfare, crushing several small terrace houses and market stalls, the town’s apple-shaped desert fruits left scattered everywhere.
They boarded and Lucas looked back, once, at what had been his home, his haven, before the transport’s ramp closed, its belly shuddered with lift-off, and they flew out into the desert night.
Chapter 2
I stood transfixed, and suddenly my brain caught up with what my stupid body had just done as the courtyard erupted with an ear-splitting ROAR of sound somehow doubly as loud as before. I ordered my legs to RUN, FLEE – but had not taken more than two steps back towards the pillars where we’d landed before I was hoisted up by my ankle and held, upside down, in some kind of tractor beam. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t think as the spotlights continued to blind me, and blood rushed to my head.
A nearby man in a light grey robe had his right hand raised in the shape of a strange glyph. He wore a huge mooncollar, which traversed his shoulder blades left to right and formed a severe crescent behind his head, with a deep hood over his brow. I hadn’t seen anything remotely like it outside of the ancient history feeds which still played sometimes on Rim educational channels. He moved towards me, and as he turned his claw-like hand to the left I was set right-side up, still floating several inches off the marble flagstones. Whatever force he was holding me in applied such pressure to my chest I could barely breathe, let alone expel the angry words which were fighting to get out of my chest like wetted cats. What the fuck? How dare you- were first cabs off the rank. An outraged look had also crossed the woman in white’s face, but she stayed silent as he came closer and peered at me, his greyish eyes glimmering in a way which suggested reflected illumination from another source: like coins at the bottom of a sunlit well.
The remaining dignitaries – all men – closed ranks in a circle around us and the spotlight winked out as another artificially projected voice boomed out at the crowd: “Our Dark Sky Guardian must now take her rest. She’s journeyed far.”
“What do you think you are doing, Vyper?” Hissed the woman, leonine eyes darting between us as he continued to stare into my eyes, “That is the next Dark Sky Guardian. Without her we are lost.”
“That would be true, Klyte,” he said in a smooth voice, with the intonation and relative interest of someone inspecting a side of meat in a market stall, “If she was one.” There was a collective intake of breath from the surrounding males. On the other side of the barricades, it sounded as though the crowd had turned mutinous and was having to be shepherded away. Violently.
Vyper ran his eyes thoughtfully up and down my body, still taking his time, my continued struggles against his bonds as effective as pushing on a brick wall with my bare hands. I was starting to sweat profusely.
“She has spirit, mind you,” Vyper went on, his tone now slicked with an oily aspect which made my skin crawl.
“She is to undergo training,” said Klyte.
“What makes you so sure?” Vyper returned, in the tone employed by parents with precocious children. Instinctive rage built further under my skin.
“It has been Seen by the Oracle.” she said shortly, raising her hand to make another alien-looking glyph in front of her forehead. “To question a Seeing is to court death.” At these words, a slight tremor passed through the flagstones and the men in the surrounding retinue exchanged uneasy glances. I noticed that none of them were standing within a foot of her.
“You won’t mind, then, if I test her a little?” I had no time to wonder what he meant, because at that moment the entirety of my nervous system was set alight. It felt like white-hot fire was crawling from the crown of my head, spreading quickly underneath my skin to cover my neck, and then my shoulders. I let out an agonised yelp, registering somewhere in my mind that the woman in white was shouting at Vyper, had started towards me and was being held back by many arms. As the fire spread to my chest and stomach, some steely part of me forced my lips closed one over the other, refusing to make any further sounds.
I cracked an eye open and through streaming tears of agony I saw his hate. I saw his rage. And just as the small part of my mind which was still functioning registered that deep down in those dirty wells was a well-covered upthrust of fear, the fire stopped. Whatever had been holding me up also gave out, and so did my legs. I passed into unconsciousness before my head hit the ground.