The Exiled Earthborn (21 page)

The car pulled away and Lucas was left in his driveway. He stared up at the sky where Xalan ships zoomed overhead like lightning bugs.

Clouds started to form above him. They darkened, then reddened.

No,
Lucas thought.
No, I want to stay.

But it was too late. The ships were gone. The house was gone. He was standing in a new crater. He forced his true set of eyes to open.

His head swam, his vision was still black, but he knew he was awake. A bizarre dream, but a welcome one. He’d often wondered in quiet moments what life might have been like had he been able to start over with Asha on a reborn Earth. Perhaps the drug cocktail gave the user a pleasant insight into their deepest desires as a programmed side effect to make the cryosleep go more smoothly. The scenario presented of the Xalans coming in peace was the furthest thing from what had happened, but it was an intriguing alternate reality.

Now awake, Lucas wanted to go back to that world. To their children. To her. A peaceful, loving Asha that didn’t seem to exist in the real world. Old pain resurfaced as he thought about her recent demonstration of mercilessness, and the fact that she seemed to be getting too close to Maston, in one way or another.

Lucas’s vision was slowly coming back. The cables had retracted from his body, leaving dabs of healing gel in their wake, and the restraints slid off of him and back into the base of the unit. He was surprised to see Natalie up near his shoulders now, rather than at the south end of the pod. He blinked and saw something he didn’t understand. The opaque glass had long cracks running through it from top to bottom, and light was flooding in.

Too much light.

Sunlight.

11

Lucas was having trouble moving inside the chamber. His arms and legs were stiff from lack of use, though muscle stimulants inside the unit were supposed to keep them refreshed while he slept. The wall controls were unresponsive when he waved his hand where a hologram should have appeared. Scouring the coffin-like environment around him, he searched for the manual release. When he found it, the lever was jammed and no amount of force seemed to budge it. The cracked lid shifted slightly, but some sort of mechanism was clearly broken within.

Panic was starting to set in now, both from claustrophobia and the clearly damaged nature of the pod. Why was it so light outside? The worst sorts of thoughts began to flood into Lucas’s mind as he banged on the glass in a frenzy. The cracks didn’t spread any further, and it was time for a last resort. He brought Natalie down from his shoulders and pointed the barrel at a twenty-degree angle toward the lid by his feet, which was as high as the gun could be raised before it met the glass. Switching to silenced mode so he wouldn’t deafen himself within the chamber, he fired one, two, three, four shots. On the final one, the weakened glass shattered altogether.

Oh god.

He wasn’t in the cryobay any more. He wasn’t even on the ship. Lying on his back, his field of vision was a thick canopy of enormous, leafy green trees. Sunlight streamed through the treetops and made its way into his quickly shrinking pupils.

Am I still dreaming?

He climbed out of the unit and staggered to his feet, his muscles burning as they were put back to work. All around him the jungle called out, chirps and screeches from unseen creatures lurking nearby, or far away.

His bodysuit was torn in a few places, and he felt bruised patches of skin all over himself as he surveyed the forest. There was only one explanation for all of this, and he had to somehow prove it. Scanning his surroundings for the tallest climbable tree, he found one a few yards away from the downed cryo unit. Slinging Natalie onto his back, he ascended through the branches painfully as his body struggled to reactivate its core functions. Star-shaped leaves whipped against his face, and the bark felt sticky, which thankfully helped him keep his grip. The ground became more and more distant below him while the white sun got brighter.

Finally he burst through the forest canopy, nearing the top of the tree. He found a branch wide enough to sit on and, shielding his eyes with his hand, he looked out onto the horizon. It was true, then.

Plumes of smoke were rising from areas all over the vast jungle, with one enormous column coming from an area a long distance away. He didn’t need to see the wreckage to understand what had happened. The Spear had been destroyed upon reaching Makari, and an unknown number of the crew with it. His heart raced and threatened to beat right out of his chest. It was getting harder to breathe.

Where were the others? Could they possibly be alive? He was. But he had the security of a cryopod. Who knew what state they were in when the ship broke apart. What the hell happened? Was there some mechanical error, or had they actually been shot down by the Xalans? The stealth drive was supposed to get them in and out of there safely. Lucas’s head was dizzy trying to imagine what might have occurred, and what the fate of everyone onboard could have been. A hundred feet in the air was not an appropriate place to pass out, and Lucas quickly scrambled down the tree, taking note of which direction the largest stream of smoke was.

He collapsed on the ground when he reached the base of the tree. Sap trickled down into his hair and onto his shoulders as he attempted to mentally pull himself together. It was still hard to believe this was actually happening.

Controlling his breathing, he slowly brought himself back from the brink of hyperventilation. It was time to take stock of the situation. First, the cryochamber.

He crawled a few feet over to it and searched inside. Immediately disappointing was the discovery that the comm transponder within was as nonfunctional as the rest of the electronic features of the unit. He retrieved Omicron’s glass square from the personal effects compartment and found a welcome bonus next to it. There was a panel labeled E
MERGENCY
K
IT
he hadn’t seen before, as it was practically behind his head. He wrestled it open and sifted through the contents of the pack.

Inside was a very small knife, but one that was exceptionally sharp. There were a few packs of powder labeled
SURVIVAL SUPPLEMENTS
and a rubberized canteen that would expand if filled with water. A few tiny vials of healing gel were there to seal wounds, and a small hollow metal circle produced a blue flame in the center when he rubbed his thumb around the outside. It wasn’t much, but it was something. And of course he still had Natalie.

Another thought occurred to him as he slung the pouch over his shoulder. If the ship had either crashed or been shot down, the Xalans here would be out hunting for survivors. He’d seen how good they were at tracking living organisms through heat and heartbeat, and for all he knew they could be on top of him in the next few minutes. It was unclear how long he’d been unconscious after the cryochamber crash landed. Yes, this was a sparsely populated colony according to Alpha, but who knew how many troops were stationed nearby that could be sweeping the area? What was obvious was that he couldn’t stay in his present location.

He did one last search of the unit and set off toward the largest column of smoke he’d seen, where he figured he’d find the bulk of the wreckage, and with it possible survivors. It was also likely he’d find Xalans there by the time he reached it, but it was a risk he had to take. Where else could he even go? He didn’t have the coordinates of their contact Zeta’s location. His only hope was to try to regroup with whoever was left before the Xalans reached them, or him. If he was alive, others had to be, right? He refused to let himself believe anything else, and he knew Asha and Alpha were alive. He felt it, as strange as it sounded, and it drove him forward with purpose.

The jungle was unforgiving. Even if most of the planet had been rendered desolate by the Xalans stripping it for resources, they’d crashed square in the middle of one of its last thriving rainforests. Thick vines and branches barred his way, and his bare feet were being shredded by the forest floor. The air was so humid it felt like he was wrapped in a thermal blanket, and he had to tear his bodysuit to his knees and elbows to avoid passing out.

So far, he’d only seen glimpses of the local wildlife. A millipede-type creature the size of his forearm slithered up a tree trunk. He swatted away clusters of what looked like tiny red mosquitoes that were equally as annoying—and presumably as disease-bearing—as their distant cousins on Earth.

His first truly bizarre encounter was with an animal that could only be described as the nightmarish union of an octopus and a snake. It was about ten feet over his head in the trees and, fully extended, probably as long as he was tall. It had two yellow eyes with black slits and four green, scaled tentacles that it was using to swing from tree to tree. As it passed over him, he could see a mouth on its underside full of razor-sharp teeth. Not knowing its intentions, his rifle remained pointed at it until it swung out of sight.

Along the way he collected water housed in nearby leaves, draining it into his canteen. Feeling weak, he inhaled one of his precious few “supplement” packs and found the chalky taste quite a bit more off-putting than the gaseous nutrients he’d had for months on the Ark. But it did spark some energy inside him, and he pressed onward, periodically scaling trees to ensure he wasn’t going in circles. The smoke was still a long way off, though he was getting closer to one of the smaller plumes nearby.

Eventually, he saw what was burning through the trees ahead. He readied Natalie. It was hard to tell what piece of the ship he was looking at when he reached it. It was a fifty-foot swath of the hull rising out of the ground, with an unknown length of it buried beneath the dirt. Moving cautiously around the wreckage, the inside revealed a control cluster he recognized; it was part of the comm unit. He waved his hand across each darkened station he could reach, but no controls flickered to life. That would have been too much to hope for, he supposed. Detached from a central power source, it was all useless. Realizing there was nothing of value to be found, he hurried back into the jungle in case the smoke had attracted any unwanted parties.

It was about an hour later when he found the first body. The cryopod was completely smashed open when he came upon it, and a short distance away lay the mangled remains of the Guardian who had broken free from the enclosure. She lay crumpled against a tree trunk, the impact of which had likely killed her, judging by its splintered base and the awkward angle of her neck and other obviously broken limbs. He didn’t recognize her. Through the blood that coated her face he could see tan skin and long dark-brown hair, the latter of which was unusual for a militaristic Guardian woman. She must have been one of those who stayed in cryo for the duration of the trip, as she wasn’t a part of either his or Asha’s training squads. He raided the emergency supplies from her pod and then, out of curiosity, opened the personal effects compartment. Inside was a tiny metal disk no bigger than a quarter. When he tapped it, a three-dimensional image shot out. A little boy with brown eyes and curly hair was sticking out his tongue in a universally recognized expression of goofiness. Lucas felt a twinge of a smile for a moment, followed by sadness as he glanced back toward the dead woman. He straightened out her body on the ground, gently placed the hovering image on her chest, and continued his trek into the increasingly dark jungle.

Lucas couldn’t shake the feeling that something was following him. He’d felt it at the wrecked comm station, and it had stayed with him since. His eyes were constantly darting all around the murky jungle, but he couldn’t see anything resembling a threat. If the Xalans were stalking him, why didn’t they just attack? What were they waiting for?

The small white sun began to set overheard and, as it disappeared, a cover of dark clouds filled the sky. Minutes later, the clouds opened up and unleashed a downpour that drenched Lucas to his core. Soaking wet and covered in mud, he hoped it would make him harder to track, but he had to stop until the rain let up; it had become impossible to move forward through the torrential sheets of water.

He used his knife to collect some of the largest leaves from the surrounding plants, some of which were as big as his torso. Laying them across a pair of nearly parallel branches, he managed to erect a makeshift shelter that gave him some respite from the hammering rain. Though he’d been sweltering earlier, a deep chill now set into his bones, and the water was creeping dangerously near the top of the small boulder he’d taken refuge on. The surrounding area was starting to flood pretty heavily, and he watched an amphibian of some kind with webbed feet and two flat tails paddle by him through the water, unperturbed. Lucas gripped his arms and shivered on the rock. Even through the rain he still felt eyes upon him, somewhere in the dark jungle ahead.

After a few hours, the rain let up, and Lucas was able to heat himself up using the tiny flame from the survival kit and a series of muscle expansion techniques taught to him in Guardian training that kept his blood pumping. Night had officially descended, and Lucas thought it wise to scale another tree to figure out where he was now and how the landscape might change as he journeyed through the night. On the ground, he was surprised to see there were still streams of light piercing through the trees, presumably from a moon. When he reached the top, his jaw dropped at the sight.

There was a moon all right, but one no less than twenty times bigger than the ones around Sora or Earth. It shone brilliantly, reflecting the light of the dwarf star Makari orbited. The surface was littered with craters, the fine detail of which could be easily seen since it was so close to the planet. Lucas stared, transfixed, as it slowly rose from the horizon. Lost in its beauty, ten minutes went by before Lucas even averted his gaze.

And then, another couple of hours later as he marched through the forest, the moonlight was gone, the sun quickly rising again. Lucas had long grown accustomed to the thirty-seven-hour days of Sora, and of course the twenty-four-hour ones of Earth. But what had it been, ten hours to complete a full cycle here? He’d have to ask Alpha about it later.