Scattered Suns - Kevin J. Anderson [33]
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