Scattered Suns - Kevin J. Anderson [32]
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