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If you like this book, please consider buying it:
The Island of Hope by Andrei Livadny
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The sky came crashing down around him, its song angry and deafening.
The two-year-old boy would never hear it again, but it forever remained imprinted in his subconscious: engines roaring, ashes hissing, rocks crumbling overhead.
Dark shadows were chasing after him, unyielding as Fate itself.
He was running on his feeble feet, crying at the top of his voice and trying to escape the roaring terror falling from the sky.
What could be more awful than such helplessness?
Huddled between two boulders, he was still crying, and the earth was shaking under the weight of interstellar spaceships landing. Then, in a sudden and deafening silence, roared the spiteful staccato of machine-gun fire; after that, all was quiet, and for good.
Exhausted, he stopped crying. He simply couldn't cry anymore; only his body trembled occasionally. The world had changed.
Nobody came to take him into their arms, to give him some warmth, food or comfort. He was too little, his mind too immature. Therefore he couldn’t perceive all the horror around him.
He sat huddled. The boulders exhaled cold. The small body was gradually overtaken by the cold and, finally, it stopped quivering.
A blue grass blade swaying in a breeze, the sound of heavy footsteps, the rattle of metal — these were what he remembered. There was also within him a sense of great offence at the warm world which had suddenly become cold and strange.
He didn't hear the spaceships wail and scream, soaring to the sky.
He didn't perceive the silence that wrapped smoking ruins in a heavy shroud.
Slowly and unconsciously he was leaving that world, freezing between the two boulders, and the swaying blue grass blade, burnt and broken, was a kind of lullaby for him.
That happened in the year of Galaxy Calendar 2607.
Humankind was aiming for the stars.
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Heavy jackboots with grooved soles were crunching on the hash of broken glass. The barrel of a pulse gun was looking into the darkness of ruined corridors, scrutinizing the devastated offices with its single black eye.
"Bastards," the word escaped someone's lips, heavy like spittle.
Nomad sat down wearily on a plastic windowsill.
The colony was dead. Its inhabitants, slaughtered. The mines had become desolate.
The wind howled through the openings of broken windows. All of a sudden, Nomad was seized with a bitter helplessness though he didn't personally know anyone of those who had perished here.
He lit a cigarette while he gloomily examined the frames of burnt mechanisms that one could see through one of the office building’s windows.
Nomad had been watching the flame of galactic war arise for some years already. The old wanderer incessantly moved from one stellar system to another. He saw the Second Expansion Wave splash out of the boundaries of the solar system and break against the colonies ring.
For four hundred years the colonists of the First Dash, left by Earth to the mercy of fate, had been fighting for survival on uninhabited far-off planets.
So, finally they'd heard from their legendary Alma Mater. The new "settlers" were a rather diverse contingent scooped up from the bottom of fetid sewers of super megalopolises: the ancient homeland of Humankind held to the worst traditions of the past. But now millions of these superfluous people were united by military discipline and cast into space with a practical and far-reaching purpose. Earth having spent all internal resources was in need of more space for colonization.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
The second wave of mankind's space invasion kept to the beaten tracks: the vector lines of space anomalies hadn't changed, after all, so at the end of their journey the new colonists inevitably came across one of the surviving old colonies.
Nomad threw away the stub and smiled wryly, remembering that not so long ago, the authorities of some planets used to qualify Ernie and himself as criminals. 'Not only they are dealing in all kinds of junk but also avoiding taxes! Thank you very much!' Surfing the galaxy in his own spacecraft pieced together from some junk, that’s all he’d been doing. He'd never actually killed anyone.
He looked around himself again.
What was the crime committed by these people? Certainly, they didn't want to accept new colonists from Earth. However, there were thousands of unpopulated planets in the Galaxy. Did Earth really need this planetoid and its little mine begotten in sweat and blood?
The answer was obvious to Nomad. The war. Earth was overpopulated again. The solar system looked like an empty worm-eaten nut. They wouldn't colonize unexplored planets any longer. They wanted to live comfortably now.
He spat and rose from the windowsill. Time to clear out before the spacecraft of the Second Wave arrived and began tackling the forsaken mines.
Going outside, he narrowed his eyes from the bright light. Ernie Hugo, his partner, was standing by two granite boulders, apparently bewildered.
"Nom? Come here!" he called.
Nomad approached, looking around mechanically. His strong hands were squeezing the warm rifle butt. He gave no credence to the quiet, to the idle wisps of smoke and the bodies lying about.
The universe was seething with madness.
Ernie struggled to breathe. "Look!" he wheezed.
Nomad took a step towards the boulders and saw the small huddled body of a child between them
Shocked, he stared at it for a few seconds, then bent over and put the rifle aside. He touched the child's cheek with his trembling fingers. It slightly shivered under his palm. He shrank back as though burned.
"Is he alive?" Ernie asked, squatting down.
Nomad nodded, picking up the frozen little body.
"But what... what are we going to do with him? He's practically a baby!"
Nomad didn't reply.
Some minutes later, he was already making his way to the spaceship, awkwardly clasping to his chest the frozen and helpless lump of flesh feverishly thinking of something on board that could be turned into a comfortable enough bed.
He understood nothing in the impending madness.
Tears were streaming down the old smuggler's cheeks.
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Books by Andrei Livadny:
The Island of Hope
Phantom Server series (complited)
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