“Where shall we begin our explorations?” he inquired with great cheer. “Is there a temperate place with more vegetation we might visit?”
“Didn’t you hear what I said about this being the nice part of the planet?” I asked him.
“Still, perhaps someplace indoors, with an eatery . . . ,” he mused.
“It’s an abandoned planet.”
“I have been to abandoned places where there were once eateries.”
I steadied myself and gestured toward an area below, through a maze of jagged rocks. “Somewhere around here is where Captain Qwlessl was digging for Former artifacts. We’re going to try and find the site.”
“Why did you not land the pod precisely where you wished to go?”
“Because the rocks give us cover. If there’s anyone already at the dig site, we can sneak up without their seeing us.” I gestured with a nod of my head. “This way.”
He considered the landscape ahead of us. “It’s much too rocky.” He pointed off in another direction. “We should go that way.”
“Is this a joke?” I demanded. “Are you trying to be funny? I’m not walking off into the middle of the desert because the ground is level. We’re actually going to look for things we can use, not to stretch our legs.”
“You have a habit of explaining your ideas at great length,” Villainic noted. “On my world that’s often a sign of insecurity.”
“On mine,” I said, speaking slowly to control my frustration, “it’s a sign of being trapped in a discussion with someone who needs basic concepts explained to them. I’m heading that way. You can go wander off into the desert for no good reason and get captured by Jawas if that’s what you want to do, but otherwise, come with me and keep quiet.”
He looked like he was about to say something, but thought better of it, and he followed along as I moved toward the outcropping.
It was, admittedly, a difficult path to follow. The jagged rocks along the ground made each step uncomfortable, and there were many points at which I had to stop and use my hands to help me climb down steep drops. The sun, which seemed to grow more intense by the minute, glowed a fiery orange like a massive Eye of Sauron. Heat blasted me from above and radiated from the ground below us. As a Rarel, Villainic was a much better athlete than I was, and apparently he was more resistant to heat. He handled these challenges with an ease I could only admire and envy.
After about an hour, having made relatively little progress, I proposed we take a rest beneath a shady overhang. I pressed my back against the cool stone and slid down to a rock that served as a reasonable bench. After taking a few minutes to wipe the sweat off my face with my sleeve, I fished in my bag for a moisture pack and drank down the concentrated hydration.
“An excellent idea,” Villainic said. “May I have one of those?”
I stared at him, unable to believe what I was hearing. “You didn’t bring any moisture packs?”
“You did not say I should expect to get thirsty.”
“It’s a desert.”
“I have very little experience with such places,” he told me. “My father says desert inhabitants are uncouth.”
“You were with us in the Forbidden Zone,” I reminded him. “That was a desert.”
“And you provided the moisture packs.”
I’d brought more than I would need, and there were plenty of packs left on the pod, but I still resented his failure to bring his own. Still, as much as I enjoyed the idea of his passing out from dehydration, the next image that popped into my head was me having to drag him to the pod and then nurse him back to health. Giving him a pack was the better option.
I handed it to him, and he placed it in his bag. “I shall save this for later,” he announced cheerfully. “Should I grow thirsty, I now have recourse. You see, Zeke, I am every bit as capable of planning ahead as you are.”
Soon we were under way again, and after another two hours we reached the bottom of the slope, which was protected by a series of natural pillars that jutted out from the ground like the jagged claws of a monster. By this point I was exhausted. Only the dry air kept my clothes from being soaked through with sweat. I felt myself dragging, but Villainic, infuriatingly, seemed no worse off than when we’d left the pod.
Further downhill from where we stood lay a roped-off area, marking the entrance to the dig. A hole in the cliff face wound underground, much like the cave entrance we’d found in the Forbidden Zone on Confederation Central. This was clearly where we needed to go.
I was no longer the sort of person willing to enter an enclosed dark space without a ray gun at the ready, so I pulled my PPB pistol out of my back. “Better grab yours,” I told Villainic.
“Was I supposed to bring one?”
I turned to him. “We’re talking about basic supplies for an expedition. Did you bring food?”
“No, I was not hungry when we left, though all this exercise has worked up an appetite. Do you have any?”
“No food, no drink, no guns. What exactly did you put in that bag?”
“A change of clothes,” he said, “in case these get soiled, which they have. Also, my stomach has been bothering me a bit, so I threw in some toilet paper as well as—”
I held up my hand in a stop gesture. “I really don’t want to hear any more. You can go first. Use your bracelet for illumination.”
“What if something jumps out at me?” he asked.
“Duck, and I’ll shoot it.”
He studied my face for signs that I was joking. Finding none, he resigned himself to my strategy and we entered the cavern.
As with the entrance to the Hidden Fortress, this cavern had a set of stairs, which were dangerously small and descending sharply. The ceiling was high enough that I didn’t have to worry about hitting my head, and somewhere in the distance I could hear the drip of water. That was good to keep in mind for the future. Also, the cave was about thirty degrees cooler than the outside air. When I stepped into the shade and breathed in the scent of earth and damp rock, I felt reenergized.
Villainic, though larger than I was, had less difficulty moving down the stairs, probably because Rarels can see better in the dark than humans. He also seemed not terribly concerned about what we might find in an ancient cave on an alien planet. Other than a comment about how pleasant the temperature was within, he had little to say.
It had taken us a long time to descend to the bottom of the Hidden Fortress, but this location was clearly not so far from the surface. We reached the bottom of the stairs within half an hour, and the cavern we found was small by comparison. Perhaps thirty feet high and a quarter mile across, it was still very spacious, but it was also mostly empty. I found no signs that Captain Qwlessl’s team had been here, but that did not surprise me. I’d hoped they might have left equipment and provisions behind, but I also knew it was likely they would have been careful to clean up after themselves.
We began to search the area—or, at least, I did while Villainic trailed after me. There were the crumbling remains of what appeared to be very ancient stone structures—really just remnants of walls, sometimes close enough together to give the impression that they’d once been a room of some kind. These ruins were entirely empty. We found no robots, computers, communication devices, or anything else that could be of use. Whatever had been here, either from the Formers or those who had come looking for them, had been cleared out.
I bit the inside of my cheek, trying to keep my disappointment and sadness under control. I knew that finding an operational spaceport was too much to ask, but I’d been hoping for something, some hope for getting off this planet or making contact with my friends. The only thing we’d discovered was shelter from the heat.
There was nothing to do but head back up with Villainic. The two of us could look forward to sitting in the pod together, eating our rations, until there was nothing left but to scrounge for vaguely edible plants. After all I had been through, all I had endured, I was now completely and utterly out of opt
ions for either saving my friends or being saved by them. It was now time to face the very real possibility that everyone I cared about was in enemy hands and that I would spend the rest of my life on this planet.
CHAPTER TEN
* * *
Did you find what you were looking for?” Villainic asked as we climbed back up the stairs.
“Yes, Villainic,” I said with a sigh. “I was looking for absolutely nothing, and that’s what we found, so I’m super pleased.”
“Ah, I see. So you were hoping something you did not wish to see would not be there, and now your wishes have been answered. That is excellent.”
“No, it’s not excellent,” I growled. “There was nothing there. And nothing’s exactly what we have now. Whatever we have on that escape pod is all we have to live on until it runs out, and then we die.”
Villainic was quiet for a moment. “I have been thinking, Zeke. As I was the one who thought to launch the escape pod, does it not seem more logical that I should have more of the supplies? After all, your being here is a mere accident. It seems unfair that my chances of survival should be endangered when you have no wish to be here in the first place.”
Keep in mind that I was standing behind him, and holding a pistol while he said this. I suppose I might have been angrier, but I’d grown used to Villainic being clueless, and his idiocy was really the least of my problems.
I would need to go back through the supplies on the pod as well as do a more thorough scan of local plant and animal life. I now believed that finding a source of water would not be too difficult, and there was a purification unit on the escape pod, but food would be an issue, and I didn’t want to wait until we were starving to find a new source of things to eat.
What would I be surviving for, though? I supposed it would be the eventual hope of rescue, but if my friends weren’t able to come back here for us before the supplies ran out, I wasn’t sure they would ever be coming. The best I might hope for would be to live out my days with Villainic as my only companion.
The more I thought about it, the more miserable I became. Still, I couldn’t give up. I would not let myself. There had to be a way. I was on a planet, an entire planet, and if Captain Qwlessl was right, and the Formers had lived here, that meant there had to be more archeological sites somewhere. And I knew that the Formers always kept hidden ships on their planets. That was what Smelly had told me.
That’s when it hit me. Smelly! I still had the little metal disc that would let me signal my completely unreliable AI buddy. I could call Smelly, and it would be here in an instant through some kind of ancient technological wizardry. The way I understood it, when I activated the device, the quantum entanglement with its counterpart would not only relay the signal, but do so in what, to me, would seem to be the past, so that Smelly would receive my request in time to show up pretty much the moment I pressed the button.
There were a couple of reasons to hold off on using the signal, though. First of all, Smelly could be kind of a jerk, and while it owed me a favor, it had warned me not to use the device unless my life was in genuine danger. If I called it asking for rescue, it might say I’d bothered it needlessly and leave me here—or leave me here until I was in real danger of starving. If I waited until the food ran out, it might show up with supplies but refuse to transport me. Smelly wasn’t evil, but it enjoyed messing with people, and the idea of trapping me forever with Villainic might prove too funny for Smelly to resist.
Finally, I didn’t want to call it unless I had no other choice, because an ancient Former AI is a powerful ally, and, until recently, I’d actually been at the center of a major galactic conflict. If something went wrong and I needed a get-out-of-jail-free card to help bring down Junup or save my friends’ lives, I wanted to have Smelly in my back pocket—so to speak. I needed to take some time to think about this, and time was one of the few things I had.
We came up the stairs with Villainic lurking just behind me. The desert heat began to warm the chamber, and the bright light streamed through the cavern’s entrance. Villainic suddenly put a hand on my shoulder. In general, I didn’t like him to touch me—or speak or look in my direction—but the expression on his face was fairly serious. His ears kept pivoting toward the entrance. “There are voices ahead.”
Rarels have superior hearing, so the fact that I didn’t hear anything meant nothing. I held up a hand, indicating that Villainic should stay put, with the implied additional meaning that he should not do anything stupid. I crept forward, keeping my back to the wall and deep in shadow. Anyone peering into the cavern would see nothing but darkness, but I could see out.
Approaching the entrance to the cavern, still about a hundred feet away, were three Phands.
They appeared a little odd to me, and it took a moment for me to figure out what it was. They were the only Phands I’d ever seen in anything other than military uniforms. All three wore what I could only imagine to be Phandic casual wear—button-down long-sleeved shirts tucked into loose pants held up by suspenders, and over that, ankle-length coats with high collars. Their clothes were all muted colors—what people back on my home planet called “earth tones”—as if they wanted to blend in with the desert. Most surprisingly, they wore gigantic, wide-brimmed hats that were almost like cowboy hats.
These looked ridiculous perched on top of their big, rectangular heads, but I’d never seen a Phand who hadn’t filled me with horror. Their corpse-gray skin and jutting tusks made them look fierce, but it was their cruelty, their drive to conquer and dominate, that made them terrifying. I also disliked the fact that every single member of their species seemed dedicated to dumping as much misery on me as possible.
I stayed in the shadows watching them, making sure it was only those three, and waiting until they were turned away so that I had the best chance of retreating without anything catching their eye. I knew I would not have been able to see anything in the cavern’s mouth, but I had no idea what Phandic vision was like or how these particular Phands might have been augmented.
Having three Phands coming toward you is almost always a bad thing. Almost, but not in this case. Well, the fact that they would probably want to kill or capture me on sight was bad, but less bad was that they were here on this planet. That meant supplies, shelter, and at least one ship. In other words, I now had at least a hope of getting off this world and finding my friends.
I crept back toward Villainic, who was leaning against the wall, looking less concerned than bored, like I was keeping him from something he’d much rather be doing.
“There are Phands out there,” I said in a hushed voice. “Three of them. We need to wait until they go away, but if it looks like they might be entering the cavern, we’ll head deeper inside.” I was going to have to figure out where they were camped, but I would do that later, and preferably without Villainic leaning over my shoulder. Right now I had to make sure we weren’t captured or killed.
Villainic put down his pack and began to rummage through it. “I may have brought something that can help us should they decide to come in here,” he whispered.
“Like what?” I demanded, unable to hide my frustration. He hadn’t brought food or water. I seriously doubted he had brought anything of use. “You didn’t happen to bring a stun grenade, did you?”
He pulled his furry hand out of his bag and held up a metallic sphere about the size of a baseball. It was a Phandic stun grenade.
Had he activated the grenade and, you know, actually stunned me, I could not have been more stunned. That is admittedly an exaggeration, since if he’d done that I would have been unconscious, but the metaphor was sound. Villainic had brought something useful, and my brain was having trouble dealing with this turn of events.
“I thought you said you didn’t bring any weapons,” I hissed.
“No, you said that,” he answered. “I said I didn’t bring a pistol. I didn’t bother to correct you because you get very irritable when someone says you are wrong.”
&nbs
p; I grabbed the grenade out of his hand before he could do something more Villainic-like and activate it or toss it into the dark for no reason or retract his jaw and swallow it whole. I put nothing past him, and I knew this moment of competence would be brief and unstable. “Why did you bring a stun grenade?” I demanded. “We’re on a deserted planet. What possible use could a stun grenade be?”
“Obviously the planet is not deserted,” Villainic said. “And the use would be to incapacitate those Phands. Clearly this is another example of how you must always be right about everything.”
I swallowed a couple of dozen responses. Villainic had brought something that should have been entirely useless, but it turned out to be something that could save our lives. My mother has a saying: Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I decided that was as good an explanation as I was going to get.
I crept back along the wall, keeping in shadow, and watched the Phands. They had completed some kind of survey of the dig area and were now in the process of pointing at our footprints and discussing them. They were too far away, and the wind was blowing into the cave, creating a whistling sound, so I couldn’t make out any of their words. Pointing toward the cavern was explanation enough, though. They were coming inside.
Ideally I would not have to use the grenade—I’d rather retreat back to the escape pod without their knowing we were here—but if they were going to enter the cavern, I didn’t see that we had much of a choice. I’d rather they knew someone was here than for them to know our species and our number. Most of all, I could not let them know who I was. There was no way I was going to let myself be captured. I’d rather die of hunger and thirst in the desert than let them parade me all over their news outputs.
The three Phands were about twenty feet from the entrance when I armed and tossed the grenade. They stared at it as it landed by their feet, kicking up a little cloud of dust. Then it detonated, with a flash and a rumbling blast that rattled my bones even though I was outside the area of effect. The Phands fell over, unconscious, like someone had hit their off switch, and that was good enough for me.