“After sunset, our best tactic is to retreat back into the fuselage and have a fire burning in front of the gap,” she said.
“Oh, for Saints’ sake,” Orellt protested. “We’re not going to be here at sunset! The rescue crews will arrive in an hour.”
“I don’t mind you betting your life on that wish,” she retorted. “But my life isn’t yours to risk. We need a fire.”
“We do,” Ellici agreed. “This is an exceptional situation. We have to adapt to it.”
“There must be an axe in the emergency kit,” Dellian said quickly; he could see Orellt gathering himself to argue. “Janc, Uret, Xante, you’re with me. We’ll fell some of those sleeper trees. The rest of you, start gathering the bigger bushes. I’m going to check and see what else we’ve been left with, especially water.”
They started moving—reluctantly; nobody wanted to consider they would be here for any length of time—but they did it.
Dellian found two emergency cases in the rear of the fuselage. One was a medical kit, which he handed to Ellici to treat Tilliana’s eye. The second contained basic survival equipment. It was mainly thermal blankets and ropes, a couple of knives, torches, and ten flasks each filled with a liter of distilled water, along with a hand-pumped filter. He was disappointed that was the total, but the case did have a small axe.
“Not much water,” he said quietly to Yirella as he walked away from the flyer.
“No rainfall here, check the ground,” she replied, equally subdued. “And the flyer is totally dead. I don’t see how that could happen; everything is supposed to have multiple redundancy.”
He glanced up at the empty cobalt sky. Far overhead, the bright specks of the skyforts shone with reassuring familiarity. Even Cathar, the system’s gas giant, was a sharp spark just above the horizon. “Do you think…”
“The enemy? No. If Juloss was under attack, we’d see the skyfort weapons firing. They’d be as bright as the sun—at least. It’s not that. We’re living in the last days of this world’s human civilization; things are bound to go wrong. I just never thought it would be this bad. I guess we’ve lived very sheltered lives.”
Dellian scanned around to assess the sleeper trees. There weren’t many on the bleak hillside, but at least they stood out.
“I don’t want anyone to go more than a couple of hundred meters,” he told his friends as they walked toward the closest tree. “Once we chop them down, we’ve got to break them apart to drag them back.”
The sleeper trees were never more than four meters high, rising up to form twisted hemispheres of densely tangled twigs that bulged up out of five radial boughs. Dellian remembered from interminable boring botany lessons that they were desert plants native to a planet hundreds of light-years distant, with huge tuber roots that could hold precious water for years if necessary, while the branches and thick finger-leaves slumbered through the long, hot days of baking sunlight between the rains. Given the scarcity of water they received, their trunks were surprisingly hard. It took the boys a good thirty minutes to chop through, and they had to take turns. It was tough work in the cool, thin air.
They’d just felled the first one when they heard it—a high-pitched braying sound coming from farther up the mountain.
“What amid the Saints was that?” Janc asked nervously, scouring the ragged slope above them.
An answering cry came from the west.
“You mean
Dellian silently noted how easily Xante was spooked. A petty satisfaction, but the Saints would understand and forgive.
“A whole planet’s worth,” Uret replied grimly. “This is why the estate is fenced in.”
“They sound like morox. I thought they only came out at night?”
“We’re too exposed here,” Dellian said. “Let’s get this tree back to the flyer. Come on, we can do it if we all drag it together.”
They each took hold of the trunk and started pulling. Around them, they could see the other clan boys towing bushes through the boulders.
“We need a weapons inventory,” Yirella said when everyone had gathered next to the fuselage.
“Axe,” Dellian said, holding it up.
“Two knives,” Falar announced. “They’re not the best for throwing.”
“Bind them to the ends of poles,” Ellici said. “That’ll give you the advantage of reach if those beasts come close.”
“Where the Saints are the rescue crews?” Janc shouted.
Dellian lined an accusing finger on him. “Stop that. Panic just makes things worse. Help get the fire ready.”
“Wasn’t panicking,” Janc grumbled, his gaze downcast.
The boys set about preparing the fire, building a core of the driest bush twigs, then fencing it in with some of the smaller branches of the sleeper tree to work as kindling. The rest was broken apart and piled up ready to throw on once the flames were established.
Rello and Tilliana were helped back into the fuselage, where Ellici and Orellt did what they could with the small medical kit.