The Ninth (14 page)

Gently lowering Hiroko’s gurney, Brent motioned for Owen and Dante to continue while he stood by, waiting for the line of recruits to pass him.  When he got to the rear of the column, he matched the pace of those recruits dragging the unconscious.  After inspecting the two unconscious recruits and making sure there were no wounds, he removed their pins.  A couple of minutes passed, and there was no change.

Brent began to wonder if his hunch was incorrect, when one of the unconscious started to stir.  Those who had been supporting the unconscious could only stare at one another as the two regained consciousness.  His guess had been right, he had to get back to Hiroko.  He was running in slow motion with the gravity pressing against him as he rushed back to the front of the column.  Ahead of the column, in the distance, the clouds moved with sudden intensity.  Brent had discovered the secret, and now the god of this world was angry with him.

The clouds overhead swirled faster and faster as their color shifted ominously.  He had made it halfway back to Owen and Dante when he saw it.  The horizon was no longer a smooth gradient where sky and ground melted into one another at impossible distances, but now a single solid object.  A wall of impossible size the same color as the desert they marched through slowly consumed the sky above.  It was moving toward the recruits with ridiculous speed.

“Fasten your helmets!” Brent bellowed.  “Gather!  Sand storm!”

Recruits feverishly fiddled with their headgear as the first gusts of wind raked over them, knocking several over.  The force was incredible.  The wind felt like a giant claw ripping into them.  The winds howled with the intensity of a monster from one’s deepest, darkest nightmare.

“Huddle up behind Owen!”  Brent shouted between howls.

Owen and Dante kneeled, turning their backs on the wind.  In the small windbreak they created, Brent scrambled to reach them.  The recruits filed in as closely as they could, but the windbreak was not large enough for many.

“Owen, take her,” Brent barked as he unsecured Hiroko.

Owen caught Hiroko as she fell from the gurney.  He shot a look of confusion and anger at Brent.  Ignoring the gaze, he lifted the unbelievably heavy gurney and stood against the wind.  With all his strength, Brent took a step ahead of Owen and Dante and slammed the flat plate between the recruits and the shredding winds.  He leaned against one edge as Dante took the other.  Owen took the center with Hiroko still in his grasp.

“Quickly, dig out as big a hole behind the windbreak as you can,” Dante shouted over the wind to the recruits huddling up.

With the fanatical movements of hunted prey, the recruits shoveled out pile after pile with their hands.  Before long they had finished a foxhole large enough for all twenty to hide from the winds.  Brent searched the floor plating he was supporting until he found a hole he could look through without moving away from the plate.  Glancing through the hole, he could make out the enormous wall of sand bearing down on them.  It would hit in only seconds.

Gesturing wildly, Brent ushered the strongest looking recruits to assist holding the plate in place.  Those who understood his meaning leaped up and propped their entire weight against the makeshift wall.  The last thing he saw was an immense shadow engulfing the foxhole.  Pain swelled in his back, as if another drop ship full of recruits had just crashed on top of him.

Complete void surrounded them; not a single speck of light could be found.  Movement became impossible.  Brent knew that even if he could still move his head, there was no light to be found.  The storm had hit them and shrouded the world in a dense fog of shifting sands.  The pain in his back subsided but did not completely vanish.  He took this as a good sign.  Pain was preferable to losing all sensation.  Movement was almost impossible, but every moment it grew easier.  Lifting his arm was harder than every step he had taken so far.  After reaching his helmet, Brent lowered his goggles.

After a couple of moments of pure black, a small grain of light emerged in front of him.  He turned his head to see if he could find more glints of light, only to find the light followed his meager movements.  It was a dim light that increased its size at a painfully slow rate.  When the light had encompassed about half of his vision it started to show patterns and variations.  When it reached three quarters, it began to shift from a single color to gradients.  Gradually the gradients formed shapes, and by the time the light had completely filled in his field of vision, Brent could recognize the recruits in the foxhole.

The image he saw was horribly pixilated, but there was enough detail that he could make out the recruits, with several still struggling to hold the barrier in place.  Brent found the hole he had used to view the oncoming storm was a stream of sand.  As he examined the stream, he found it to be falling directly down without much force.  If the sandstorm was pelting the metal barrier, he expected the sand to be rocketing out of the hole.  Of course, Brent knew nothing about high gravity, so it might be responsible for the weakness of the stream.  He had to make sure.

With all his remaining strength, he leaned to push his head out from behind the barrier.  Expecting to be met with winds as powerful as falling buildings, Brent braced himself for the worst.  Once his head was around the barrier the goggles took a few moments to readjust.  In the momentary darkness, all he could make out for sure was the stinging pain of sand whipping against his face.  Finally, the goggles adjusted.  What they showed was a swirling static that seemed to have a life of its own.  It danced and played before him.

Slowly, Brent could make out details in the static.  The ground was solid, but where the sky should have been the swirling static continued on endlessly.  Moving his gaze around, he saw a huge mass leaning against the barrier.  Assuming the static was how the goggles dealt with moving sand, he guessed the solid mass in front of the barrier must have been the front edge of the sandstorm that piled up after slamming into the wind guard they had set up.  He turned back to face the recruits.  Movement was hard and even slower than it had been before, but possible.

While the sandstorm was still raging, it was not coming from any one direction.  It shifted, pushing recruits this way and that.  Brent brought his pad in front of the goggles and was almost blinded by the white light.  Closing his eyes, he waited for the goggles to adjust to the illumination.  When the light on his eyelids was tolerable, he opened them to find the display of the pad appearing in perfect clarity.  Brent guessed the goggles and the pad had linked to share information somehow.

They were within throwing distance of the structure now.  If not for the sandstorm they would have already reached the structure.  He knew staying in the foxhole was not an option.  The being with dominion over this world was angry with him.  The longer the recruits were in the open, the worse it would get for them.  Brent found speaking was impossible, not only for the volume of the wind, but also for the sand that forced its way into his mouth the second he opened it.  Covering his mouth to limit the sand that entered, he tried to get the attention of the nearest recruit, to no avail.

Forcefully grabbing the nearest recruit, Brent lowered his goggles.  For a few moments the recruit struggled in the dark.  As the goggles adjusted, the recruit met his gaze.  They were limited to hand signals and gestures, but Brent managed to instruct the recruit to start lowering goggles.  The pair started working, and within minutes the recruits could all see again.  Brent gestured for those in the foxhole to disperse and leave the hole they had dug.  Reluctantly, the recruits started leaving the safety of the foxhole.  Tapping the shoulder of one of the recruits struggling to hold up the barrier, he motioned to grab the next recruit supporting the wall.  It took a while for all those holding the barrier to get the idea, but finally they were all holding onto each other, forming a human chain.  Brent then slowly started moving away from the makeshift wall; hesitantly the chain followed.

As soon as the last few recruits leaped away, the wall collapsed, spilling into the now empty foxhole.  Without the barrier, the winds were more fierce, but manageable.  Brent motioned for the other end of the chain to grab more recruits as he did.  Again he met with a slow response as the chain realized his aim.  Once all twenty were linked in one large chain, Brent checked the pad again.  Once more the blinding light hit him, but it adjusted faster this time.  With his bearings secure, he started slowly toward the structure.

Every few steps the human circle would be shoved in a random direction, knocking over a few recruits.  The progress was slight, but every time he endured the blinding pad, they were closer to the structure.  Brent scanned the horizon for any indication of the structure, but all that registered on the goggles was static.  Gazing behind him, he could make out the silhouettes of the recruits moving in strange pauses and lurches, with a few struggling to help those who had been blown to the ground to stand again.

Moving into the endless abyss of static, his mind found it hard to believe that not long ago he had been on a station floating peacefully in space.  The sandstorm had made him completely forget about the heavy gravity.  Brent chuckled to himself as he thought about his first painful fall and the accompanying thoughts about how things couldn’t possibly get harder.  Abruptly, he slammed into a wall.  His goggles showed nothing but static, but when he raised his hands he felt a strong, solid wall.  They had reached the structure.  Without warning, the goggles went dead; once again Brent was surrounded by black nothingness.

“You can take off your helmets now,” came an old voice that was pleasantly familiar.  “Do be careful, though.  It will take your eyes a while to adjust to the lighting, although I’m sure it is safe to wager that a little bright light will be a comfort to you all.”

Removing his goggles, Brent was bathed in an ocean of warm light.  For a few moments, he found himself in a white eternity.  There was no visible horizon, only white space stretching out farther than he could walk in a lifetime.  The howling winds were gone, the sand scratching at his very essence was removed, and while the white infinity was void of all life and movement, Brent felt at peace.

Familiar voices called at the outermost boundaries of his consciousness.  As the white faded and the details of reality started to reform, he found himself saddened at the loss.  Blinking to refocus his eyes, Brent found the old instructor deep in thought while staring piercingly at him.  Memories of where he was and what he had just gone through flooded back into his mind.  Turning, he found the recruits still dazed by the light, some rubbing their eyes, others examining the floor plating with their hands.  A few were even hugging the station walls.  Dante was holding onto Owen while his free arm swept the floor disbelievingly.  Owen was oblivious to Dante and the instructor; he was still holding tightly to Hiroko.  Slowly, the recruits got to their feet and started dusting themselves off.  Facing Brent and the instructor, they waited expectantly for the verdict of their ordeal.

“You know, young man, you certainly made my job difficult.”  The old instructor focused solely on Brent.  “Several recruits were on their way to failure, and then you interfered.  Over and over, I placed obstacles to trip you up, and you jumped over them.  I have to say it’s rather annoying, but I suppose if my job is to test you, yours is to pass.  Although I cannot say this will do my reputation any good.  Some already think I’m losing my . . .”

“Excuse me instructor,” Dante interrupted with annoyance in his voice.  “We have wounded, can you save the rant for after we are all back on our feet?”

“A fair request.  If you would take off the young lady’s pin, I can get back to my
rant
,” the instructor said with small grin.

After Dante gently shook Owen, he carefully removed Hiroko’s pin under the watchful eyes of everyone in the room.  Several agonizingly long moments passed before Hiroko started to stir.  Her eyes opened sluggishly, and she looked about with a drowsy expression on her face.  As alertness entered her eyes she stared up at Owen.

“Are you
crying
?” came Hiroko’s voice weakly.

Without a word, Owen embraced Hiroko tightly while the other recruits turned away in a gesture of offered privacy.  A couple of recruits were chuckling, and a few others had moist eyes.  After a while, Dante helped the two to their feet and turned expectantly toward Brent.  He took out the pin from his pocket and faced the instructor.

“They can administer a sedative with a command from you, I take it,” he said as he tossed the pin to the instructor.

“Among other things, I’d make it mandatory for you all to wear these, but that might hint at their purpose.”  The instructor examined the pin in his hand.  “If recruits know ahead of time no one is in any real danger, then how can we test for their real reactions?  Although, you removed them from the recruits at the end, so I suppose you already figured that out.  Smart boy.  They monitor your vitals but relay that information only to me. The information I sent to your pads was staged, made everyone look worse.  A scraped knee would appear on your pad as if the recruit had fallen off a cliff.  Well, maybe not that extreme, but much exaggerated.”

“And a serious injury would appear terminal.”  Brent nodded toward Hiroko.

“Precisely.  Although her wound was not overly serious, she had lost more blood than I had expected.  The pins can administer some medical treatments, antibiotics, and other internal medicines, but patching an open wound is beyond their scope.  If they could do that, we wouldn’t need medics, I suppose.  Although, if we did rely on devices for
all
medicine, our general knowledge of the art would suffer, like being unable to perform multiplication because we had always used a machine to do it for us,” the instructor said thoughtfully