His name was Erasmus, the man who had pulled me from the wreckage of the ship and sheltered me in his home. I found this out when he entered the room shortly after I awoke.

“Here, I brought these for you.” He set a pair of neatly folded pants and a shirt on the bed next to my feet. “Figured you to be about my son-in-law’s size,” he said.

I managed to fumble out a thank you and then he left with a short bow, granting me the privacy to get changed. I was naked underneath the homespun quilt that covered my body. What had happened to my clothes I could only speculate.

I threw back the cover and tested unsteady legs. My charred boots sat against the wall at the base of a sparsely filled bookcase, leaving clues as to what might have become of my previous attire.

Unlike the sharp, crisp fabricated clothes I was used to, the pants and shirt Erasmus provided for me were soft and lived-in. The seams were hand-stitched and I couldn’t help but feel comfortable and a little uneasy at the same time. I must have been a child the last time I wore a set of clothes that belonged to someone else.

I was half-way through buttoning up the shirt when Erasmus burst into the room with a panicked look on his face.

“You must come with me right now,” he said, holding his hand out toward the door.

I hesitated for the briefest of moments. I’d only just met the man and had no idea what he might want from me.

The displeasure of my hesitation registered instantly on Erasmus’s face. “There’s no time to explain!” he barked. “A GR patrol was spotted heading this way. They’ll be here any minute and I expect they’ll have more than just questions for whoever was flying that GR fighter out of uniform.”

He had a point. Besides, I was at his mercy in more ways than one. What other choice did I have but to trust the man and do what he said?

Right on cue, the whining sound of the patrol ship’s thrusters grew louder and then receded as the much quieter repulsor engines took over. The ship landed close enough to the house to feel the impact through the ground.

“This way.” Erasmus didn’t wait to see if I was following. He walked through the door into the main living space of the small home. The layout of the room was a large circle with a domed roof and more rooms spaced at regular intervals around the circumference.

Erasmus pushed a table out of the way and pulled back the rug that had been underneath it. With deft fingers he dug out a narrow sliver of wood about three feet long and then pressed both hands down on the flooring beside the sliver until a panel of wood flooring slid into the gap made by the removal of the sliver. He lifted the panel out as one piece revealing a cleverly hidden trap door.

“Get in. We will hide you.”

By this point, I could hear the sounds of weapons jostling outside, most likely from the soldiers exiting the patrol ship and assembling into formation outside Erasmus’s house.

I peered into the dark opening that the trap door exposed and saw a hand dug pit that went down about 6 feet or so. A crude, short ladder leaned against the smooth clay wall of the pit.

There was a pounding at the door. I leaped into the hole, hoping the floor was level. In the darkness it was difficult to judge the distance and I felt an ankle turn as I landed. I bit down on the reflexive cry that tried to escape and give away my location to the patrol outside, but was only partially successful.

Had the soldiers outside heard me?

The heavy pounding repeated itself as I gingerly probed my ankle, attempting to assess the seriousness of the damage.

“Just a moment!” I heard Erasmus call out above me in conjunction with the sound of the table being shifted back into position.

More pounding and a threatening, but muffled, voice from outside.

I heard the sound of the latch being lifted and then the heavy wooden door creaked on its hinges.

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“Good day, officers. To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit? It’s been quite some time since we’ve had any visitors out this way. Can I offer you some water to drink? It is a custom on our planet.” Erasmus seemed to take easily to the role of gracious host.

“I’m afraid I must decline—regulations,” the officer explained in an if-you-must-know sort of tone. “We’re here investigating the crash of one of our ships that struck ground near here. Are you the only one here?”

“My wife and children are out in the hills clearing some brush. We’re hoping to run some cattle there next spring.”

“Why aren’t you out with them?” the soldier asked.

“I was feeling a little faint this morning so I returned home to lie down and see if the feeling passed. I’m not so young as I used to be,” Erasmus said, letting out an elderly groan that corresponded with the creak of one of the chairs at the table above me. “A crash you say? Had something to do with all those flashes of light in the sky yesterday, I’d wager.” He played the part of the simple, aging farmer well, I thought.

“Yes, sir, that’s correct. We put out the final dying embers of the insurrection but one of our ships was stolen in the process and we’re looking for the culprit. You’re not sympathetic to the insurrectionists, are you sir?”

“No, no, no… And please, call me Erasmus. We don’t get much in the way of political out here in the Outer Rim. By the time news of what’s going on in the Core reaches us it’s already weeks old.”

“Uh-huh…” the officer responded. “So I don’t guess you’d mind if we had a little look around your house and outbuildings to make sure this fugitive isn’t hiding, unbeknownst to you, of course?”

“By all means, you’d be doing me a favor,” Erasmus said. “If there’s a dangerous criminal around, who better to have deal with him than yourselves?”

“Him?” the officer said. “I never said we were looking for a man.”

My throat closed up and my heartbeat thudded in my ears.

“Just an expression,” Erasmus covered. “Him, her, them…whatever floats the boat as it were.”

A long silence followed as I could only imagine the officer studied Erasmus for any signs of duplicity or deceit. At last, he gave orders to his men. “Search the house for any signs of the fugitive!” And then, “Sir, you’ll need to wait outside.”

I let out the breath I’d been holding as quietly as I possibly could, relieved that Erasmus had been able to talk his way out of the verbal slip when I seized in horror.

The boots.

I’d forgotten all about them.

I heard heavy footsteps thump overhead as one of the men entered the room I’d recovered in, and I held my breath, waiting for an already terrible situation to turn worse.

“Sir! We’ve found something!”

A lone pair of footsteps made its way toward the room and then returned.

“What are these?” the officer asked Erasmus.

Erasmus laughed heartily. “My damn fool son’s…spent half a year’s wages on those damn boots. Some trader claimed he’d gotten them on his last trip in-system. Said they were all the talk of the Rivian courts and my son bought every last word.”

“They look like they’ve been in a fire,” the officer said.

“I tried to tell him they weren’t made for life on the farm. The worst pair of Affordshire leather boots from the next county over would still be ten times the quality of those Rivian pieces of shit, but the boy wouldn’t hear a word I said. Wore ‘em the next day while we were burning brush, clearing a new field and they’re damned near ruined now.”

An uneasy silence filled the darkness of my hiding hole and I prepared myself for the sound of blaster fire. What would become of me down in the hole? Could I even open the trap door from inside? Or would I die a slow and terrifying death by the very vehicle of my current salvation?

“Let’s go,” the officer said.

The sound of boots on the wooden floor of the domed farmhouse receded and then faded away to nothing. The door closed and latched with a satisfying click. The earthen walls around me vibrated again as the ship lifted off and accelerated away.

Even so, I waited for what felt like an hour, but was probably only several minutes. The silence led me to wonder if Erasmus had been taken by the search party, leaving me to die alone in this hole, or maybe a soldier had remained behind, setting a trap for anyone who might be hiding, thinking the coast was clear. But then I heard a shuffling of feet above me, and the scratching of fingers working at the sliver of wood that hid the presence of the trap door.

“Sorry, for the delay, but I wanted to be sure they were gone for good.”

I’d never heard a voice sound so good as Erasmus’s at that moment. Light streamed into the hole as he opened the trap door and my eyes strained to adjust to the brightness.

“Will they be back?” I asked.

The old man shrugged, but I could tell that he believed they would. “We covered any tracks from the wreck that would lead them here, so they’re more than likely searching the surrounding farms, checking off one after the other, looking for any signs of you.”

“And when they don’t find any?”

“They’ll be back. Which is why we should make sure they find some.”