Scattered Suns (8 page)

Chapter 13—ORLI COVITZ

Grieving and forlorn, Orli felt as devastated as the ruins of the Corribus colony. The girl stood by herself in the whistling breezes that picked up as soon as darkness fell. The wind careened along the narrow channel of the main granite-walled canyon, sighing plaintively. It carried the smell of smoke and burned flesh, along with moans that sounded like ghostly screams.

Orli was utterly and completely alone, the only person on an entire planet. Everyone she’d known here was dead, her fellow colonists, the few children her age, even her father. She was the only survivor of the massacre.

The Corribus settlement, once filled with dreams and possibilities, was nothing more than burned wreckage, melted debris strewn around what should have been a place of hard work and hope. Even the ancient Klikiss ruins had been obliterated. She had no place to go. And the images were fresh and raw in her mind.

Wandering off by herself, Orli had spent a day exploring isolated cliffside caves far down the canyon. From her high, safe vantage she remembered looking back toward the human town being constructed on this empty world as part of the Hansa’s new transportal colonization initiative.

Without warning, the deadly EDF battleships had swept in, using the Hansa’s greatest weapons to blow up the buildings and mow down the colonists. When the ships had landed to see the results of their devastation, black Klikiss robots had filed out accompanied by Soldier compies. Methodically seeking out the few hardy survivors who had managed to find scraps of shelter from the initial onslaught, the merciless robots had killed one after another after another, until everyone was dead.

Too far away to help, terrified for her own life, Orli had only been able to watch. A part of her had wanted to run out and fight the robotic attackers, or at least scream at them—but she was smart enough to keep herself hidden. Orli had huddled, shivering, until the evil machines packed up their EDF ships and flew away, leaving her here. Alone.

Had anyone ever been so stranded? Orli knew the planet was empty except for their tiny settlement. Their group had been the first to come through the transportal doorways and establish a Hansa presence on Corribus. Though she had to check it for herself, Orli assumed the destructive robots had obliterated the transportal too, blocking off all contact from the rest of human civilization. No one could come through to rescue her. No one on the outside even knew of the attack.

On the first night, she found the corner of a fibrous cement wall that had been erected millennia ago by the insectoid Klikiss race. Though blackened and crumbling, it formed a shelter where Orli could hold her knees and put her head down. She trembled as she waited out the night. Fear and ragged nerves prevented her from sleeping. Often she heard frightening, crackling sounds or the slumping collapse of walls as the last fires of the horrific assault nibbled away at the remaining structures. Nothing moved, nothing lived.

Though no one could hear her, she cried for a long while, wiping her nose with grimy knuckles, until she was shaky and weak, her throat raw. Orli had never been a needy person, but now she missed her father terribly. Jan Covitz had loved to make up solutions to every problem, though he managed to implement few of them. He’d had an infectious smile and a warm good cheer. Many people had liked him, but few had ever relied on him.

She wanted to be with her father, wanted him to hold her and rock her to sleep while he spun tales of his bright dreams. He would know what to do.

At that, Orli sighed, and her lips curved upward in a bittersweet smile. No, Jan wouldn’t know what to do at all. Left on his own to survive, he might have been worse off than she was. But that didn’t matter. Orli wanted him at her side.

“If wishes were horses, girl,” her father had often said to her, quoting dusty old wisdom, “then all of us would ride.”

In the darkest part of the night, still wide-awake, Orli heard what sounded like whispering voices, quickly muttered comments coming from the rubble of the long-empty Klikiss city. She sprang to her feet and ran out of her meager shelter, stumbling over broken rocks.

“Hello?” she tried to call, but it came out as more of a cough. Too much crying and too much smoke had made her voice raspy. She could barely hear her own hoarse shout. She tried again, gained a little more volume. “Is anybody out there? Anybody?”

Running as fast as she could in the darkness, barely seeing obstacles in the starlight, Orli made her way toward the alien ruins. Pebbles pattered down from the crumbling structures, then a larger stone shifted and clattered to the ground.

Abruptly, a hopeful call withered in her throat. What if it wasn’t a survivor she’d heard?
What if one of the robots had stayed behind?
The deadly machines were efficient murderers—they had demonstrated that quite adequately. They could have left one of their number hidden, an assassin, just to wait for someone like Orli to creep out of a hiding place. And then it would kill her.

Her heart thudded in her chest. Standing frozen in the darkness and feeling completely vulnerable, she waited and waited, afraid even to breathe, intent on any sound. Why had she called out? Stupid girl! She needed to be more cautious. She certainly wouldn’t survive long out here if she kept blundering around and expecting things to turn out for the best.

She tried to swallow, but her throat felt as if it were clogged with dusty rags. Inside her head, Orli counted to a hundred, but no further sound came from the ruins. Then another clatter of small stones.

Eventually she decided it was just shifting debris. Nothing emerged from the rubble, no hulking black machine, no sleek and deadly Soldier compy. The only tiny sounds in the night were from small creatures, rodents or insects.

Or hungry predators?

Orli made her way back to the shelter, picked up a rock, and hefted it in her hand to gauge how well it might serve as a weapon. It would have to do. She stared toward the dark horizon, waiting and waiting for the sun to rise...

The next morning, her eyes red and her muscles sore and weak, she picked her way through the holocaust site. She went first to what was left of the local transmitting tower where her father had proudly taken up communications duties for the colony. On their arrival here, she had sat with him as he waited for incoming signals, tracked the logs of Hansa ships, took inventory of their existing supplies, and made wish lists to give the cargo traders.

She tried to dredge up even a speck of hope in her heart, but she had seen the explosions. As she dreaded, her father’s transmitter hut had been obliterated. There was very little debris for her to sift through, only a few scraps of metal and polymer. She was glad she wouldn’t be able to find her father’s body, if it was in there.

The intense heat from the weapons bursts had melted the soil itself into glass. It reminded her of the burnt-sugar crust on a fancy crème brulè dessert she’d once shared with her father, after he’d gotten a modest windfall payment for something or other. Orli’s eyes stung, and she shook off the memory.

Next she climbed over fallen debris, smearing her hands, arms, and clothes with greasy soot, until she reached the wall that had contained the functioning Klikiss transportal. As expected, the alien machinery had been blasted to rubble. Intentionally. She would never be able to get away from Corribus.

Each time she came upon a new disappointment, another one of her remaining threads of fragile hope snapped.

Finally Orli went to what was left of the structure she and her father had started to call their home. The destruction in the settlement was so tremendous that she could pinpoint the house only by locating known landmarks, counting foundations, and tracing the remnants of paths until she came to a charred pile of collapsed support frames and structural bricks that had been her hut.

She found a few burned scraps of clothing, two cooking pots, and—mercifully—six packets of food that her father had kept to make a special dinner for them one day. Orli tore into the packets and ate the flavored protein. She had not realized how desperately hungry she was.

Under a fallen wall, she found two sealed bags of the preserved giant mushrooms she and her father had farmed on Dremen. Another one of Jan Covitz’s get-rich schemes. They had planted the fungi, which quickly grew out of control. When none of the other colonists wanted to eat the gamy-tasting gray flesh, Jan and Orli had been forced to abandon the mushroom farm and grab the lifeline of the Hansa colonization initiative. She had disliked the cold, damp, miserable world...but if they’d remained there, despite the hardships, she felt sure that her father would still be alive.

Orli held the bags, feeling the rubbery fungus lumps inside. Her stomach suddenly roiled and heaved, but she clamped her teeth shut and swallowed repeatedly, breathing through her nose, fighting off the nausea. She wanted to be sick, but she had just eaten and didn’t dare vomit up what might be her last supplies. She knew she needed to keep the food down, because she required the nutrition to survive. And Orli
did
intend to survive.

Pocketing the mushroom packets for later, she pushed herself to keep looking. She did not think about her furry cricket, the innocuous hairy critter she’d kept as a pet, until she found the smashed cage and its dead inhabitant underneath a fallen beam.

It was too much. Again, Orli allowed herself long minutes of unabashed crying, not just for her pet, but for her father, for all the colonists, for the whole obliterated settlement. Eventually her grief turned to sobs of misery—for her lost home, for her loneliness, for the hardships ahead. Suddenly she stopped. There was no one to hear her sorrow, no one to take care of her, and she had nothing to gain by feeling sorry for herself. Instead, the girl made up her mind to scrounge for anything the attacking ships had not destroyed, anything that might help her stay alive.

First she took apart her collapsed house, one brick and one beam at a time. As she rummaged through the wreckage, gathering the few intact items, she was surprised to discover her battered music synthesizer strips. Against all odds, the instrument still functioned and the battery pack retained enough charge for at least another week or two.

She spent the next day going through every burned pile in the town, picking up odds and ends—first-aid kits, a small bowl, more food packets, scraps of metallized cloth, a length of wire—never knowing what might be helpful. Toward evening, she managed to get one of the automated water-pumping stations working again and gulped fresh water greedily. Orli considered going back to the high cliffside chamber, where she could hide if the marauding robots came back, but it was too far away, and she didn’t want to be so isolated, though she held out little hope for rescue.

She made her camp in a clearing near her wrecked house, and there she waited day after day. Orli spent the evenings playing mournful tunes on her synthesizer strips. The notes wafted upward like the sad cries of a lonely bird.

Less than a week after Orli started keeping track of time—the first few days were still a blur—a figure walked out of the wilderness of grassy plains.

In the dusk the scarecrowish silhouette marched through the tall whispery pampas, unafraid of the creatures that lurked out there. The man paused and lifted an arm as if to shade his eyes, but didn’t seem to see her. He trudged closer, carrying a long stick like an old wizard’s staff, using its end to sweep the grass out of his way.

Orli crouched in the ruins, certain that this stranger was some assassin in league with the robots. But then she could tell from his movements, his shape, that the stranger was
human
. Another person on this abandoned tomb of a world?

Or did the robot attackers have human collaborators? She shuddered and ducked behind a twisted support frame from a storage hut, unable to imagine how anyone else could have survived the attack. She convinced herself that someone must have spotted her campfire, heard her music, seen her moving. Now he was coming to get her, and she would be killed just like all the others.

But he was just one man—a scrawny old man from the looks of him. She found a thin length of metal she could use as a club. It felt solid enough in her hand. Trying to look as fierce as a bedraggled and red-eyed fourteen-year-old girl could, she lifted the club and stepped out of her hiding place to face the stranger.

She immediately recognized the old hermit Hud Steinman, who had befriended Orli and her father on Rheindic Co before their group of colonists transferred here. Once he’d gotten to the colony, the old man had set off on his own, wanting nothing to do with crowds and small-town politics. Of course! His distant bivouac on the prairies would have kept him far from the attack!

Before she could think what she was doing, Orli shouted and waved, rushing headlong toward the unexpected figure. When she called his name, her cracked voice sounded like a wail. “Mr. Steinman! Mr. Steinman!”

He stopped, stunned at first by the destroyed settlement, and now taken aback by this dervish coming toward him. He propped his staff against the ground and waited for her to reach him. She threw herself into his arms with such vehemence that she almost knocked him over.

“I saw the smoke, saw the big ships,” he said, trying to hold her at arm’s length. She was filthy, her clothes torn and sooty, her face streaked with dirt and tears. “Tell me what’s going on, kid.”

“I was exploring the caves at the end of the canyon when the big EDF ships came. They blasted the whole colony—the buildings, the people, the—”

“EDF ships? Are you crazy—”

“I saw them land, and they were full of compies and Klikiss robots. They killed anybody they found.” Her voice hitched. “Everybody.” She looked over her shoulder. “There’s nothing left.”

Steinman stared toward the sheltered canyon that had once held a burgeoning Klikiss metropolis, and more recently a fresh new Hansa colony. “You’d better stay with me for the time being, kid. I wasn’t looking for company, but you’re not a bad sort. And you sure look like you could use some help.”