Aurora Rising (The Aurora Cycle #1)(99)

Maker’s bits, I really like her.

And then she throws me a wink, holds up a biosuit between us. The silvery material is like water in our hands, and Scarlett just happens to be down on one knee to straighten the foot of hers at the right time to shift mine and help me get a leg into it more easily, with nobody else the wiser.

But by the time we’re all suited up, I know I’m actually in trouble. It’s hard to move, harder to walk, and my suit’s flashing warning signals at me that I silence with the press of a couple of buttons.

Zila reports there’s nothing unfriendly in the skies overhead, and Cat and I head into the Longbow’s belly to check the state of Engineering. Surprisingly, it only looks about half as bad as I feel. Peering about, I can see the rail gun round has punched through our hull like wet paper. The hole is reparable, but our baby’s heart has been cut up pretty bad.

“How’s it looking in here?” Tyler asks, mooching up behind us.

“Messy,” Cat replies, pointing at our power core. “Reactor’s totally spanked.”

“I realize being Mr. Sunshine isn’t usually my job, but it’s not all terrible news,” I note. “The hull will get taken care of by the auto-repair systems. The core’s a discrete part, so we could switch it out easy enough. Assuming we can find some heavy radioactives to replace the fuel cells with.”

“Okay, but where are we going to find some of those?” Tyler asks.

“I was aiming for the settlement as we came in,” Cat says. “It should be about ten klicks by foot from here.”

Color me six shades of impressed that she managed to even get that close. But it seems like a solid plan.

“Then we want to find the colony spaceport,” I say. “I presume they had one, and odds are good that the folks here never evac’d, or more people would know that the interdiction was a lie. That means their ships should still be on the ground. In the right conditions, and with a little spit and polish, we might get a working reactor core out of this yet.”

“Sounds good,” Ty nods.

“Yeah, sure,” Cat scoffs. “I mean, for a definition of good that includes a ten-klick forced march over hostile territory with walking wounded toward a colony that wasn’t supposed to exist, and TDF birds likely to fall from the sky and land on our heads at any moment.”

“Cat,” Tyler says, flashing a pair of dimples that could explode ovaries at twenty paces. “I keep on telling you. You gotta have faith.”

?????

Twenty minutes later we’re standing on the Longbow’s loading ramp, almost ready to get under way. Of course I’m the walking wounded Cat was referring to—I guess it’s more obvious than I hoped—but I’m also the one with the best chance of jacking a working core for us, so at least I won’t get left behind at the ship. The ocean stretches out behind us, a short stretch of sand dunes ahead of us, blue-green hills beyond. The sound of the waves seems strangely out of place.

“Which way to the colony?” Ty asks.

Cat purses her lips, tapping her finger against the visor of her biosuit. “I think it’s maybe west? Although now I think of it …”

“It’s that way,” Aurora says, pointing.

“You sure?” Ty asks.

She nods, and when she speaks, her voice is certain. Stronger than I’ve ever heard. “I studied this place for two years to get my spot on the Hadfield. I was supposed to be in cartography when I arrived. We’re about twelve kilometers northwest of the colony site. Rough ground. Maybe three hours away on foot.”

Ty nods, impressed. “We better get moving, then.”

The rolling dunes around us are eerily quiet as we trudge down the ramp, the planet around us is all smooth lines and endless sky. The air is laden with what I mistake for snow at first, covering the ground, but stepping out of the Longbow’s loading bay, I realize it’s some kind of …

“Pollen,” Zila says, peering at the semi-luminous dust falling from above.

I swallow hard, holding out my hand to the tumbling blue.

Aurora leads us over the dunes, away from the crashing waves, our wounded ship. There’s an audible hiss from my exosuit every time I take a step, and I struggle on the incline, sand crumbling away beneath my boots. Scarlett hovers nearby, close enough to let me know she’s there if I need her. But I push on, finally cresting the hill and looking out at the landscape beyond.

“Maker’s breath,” I whisper.

Past the beach, the rocks, the ground, everything is covered with a low scrub that has teardrop-shaped, juicy leaves—just like the ones we saw bursting out of the late Patrice Radke’s eye socket. It almost seems to be all one plant, a continuous, creeping spread. The trees are choked with it, long twisting tendrils rising up and spreading across the bark. There are long patches of flat, silvery grass, too—it reminds me of the mossy growths we saw on the faces of those GIA goons.

“… Is it supposed to look like this?” Tyler asks.

“No,” Aurora replies, shaking her head. “No, it’s not.”

There’s an old communications tower a few hundred meters off—the only visible sign a human colony once existed here. But it’s cocooned in that same weird plant growth, thicker stalked, heavier, winding around the supports like the tentacles of an Ospherian seldernaut. The plants look ready to pull the whole structure down beneath the dirt, like a ship vanished beneath the sea.