Chapter Forty

The Dead Fields, Sun-Side Plains

Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge

4453.2.25 Interstellar

Janus drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as the convoy shot down the road at almost 200 kilometers per hour. One of the Verazlan Ranger buggies was ahead of him, and Lira was on his trail, followed by the other two buggies. Each of the vehicles from Veraz had four rangers in it—driver, assistant driver, gunner, and one of them sleeping in the back. The turreted machine guns meant any sane traveler gave the convoy a wide, wide berth.

It was nice being under escort. Fury was sitting up in the back seat, tongue lolling and head hanging out the window, and Janus had convinced Ryler to play some music from Prime Dome on the secondary team channel. The team was pretty quiet about it, but Janus knew how he felt. It was like touching a piece of home again after they’d all had the wrist comms they’d had from birth ripped out.

A day out from Veraz, the roads had gotten rougher, but the buggies could handle that, and the land had opened up. The forest had first thinned out, and then it was gone, replaced by savannah to the horizon, under a lightening sky. The few trees that held on out here were giants—building wide and six stories tall, able to command the ground and the aquifer on their own.

“The leaves open and close,” Janus said.

Ryler looked over at him.

“Back in the heart of the Twilight Valley, the plant life needs to survive off glow and even starlight. They’ve developed new pigments tuned to the Survivor’s Eye and hyper-efficient photosynthesis. But here, close to the terminator, the trees get more sunlight than they need, so the leaves open and close like butterfly wings on about a thirty-hour cycle.”

“You know a lot about this region?” Ryler asked.

Janus shrugged. “Never been here, but always wanted to.” He grinned. “This is where the really weird stuff gets found.”

Fury stuck her head between the seats to see what they were talking about, tongue out and a little slobber falling on the center console. Janus reached around and patted the side of her neck.

“You sure she should be loose like this?” Ryler asked.

“She’s fine,” Janus said, and Fury looked at the Cultist reproachfully. “Probably won’t set you on fire if you give her a treat.”

As if to make good on the threat, Fury burped a tiny puff of black smoke, and Janus chuckled.

“The two of you aren’t half as funny as you think you are,” Ryler said.

Janus grinned. “We do all right, don’t we, Fury?”

The jungle dragon chirped and slid out from under his arm to look at the window again.

They were making good time. The roads immediately outside of Veraz had been well-traveled and well-maintained. The roads out here were less so, but they had the benefit of next to no traffic or settlements to deal with.

“It’s almost daybreak,” Ryler commented, looking west.

Janus glanced out the driver-side window and saw the glow on the horizon. “That’s actually the steam-wall. There’s a huge circumferential sea that runs down the west side of the valley. Sun turns it to steam, which catches some of that light. We don’t want to get any nearer than this.”

“I was going to ask why more people don’t live out here,” Ryler said.

“You’ve heard of aberration zones?”

Ryler winced and nodded.

Aberration zones were part of the weird that made life on Krandermore possible. They were also unpredictable and deadly. “Before the Atl-Verazlan stable master told us Fury had been bred, I figured she must have migrated from somewhere out here. You get all kinds of strange come out of the sunrise strip: single-cell bacteria that could swallow a buggy, swarms of birds the size of a fingernail…”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“That’s not that weird in the grand scheme of things,” Ryler pointed out.

“Uh huh,” Janus said, nodding his chin to the front.

They passed a herd of large creatures that were grazing on a striped orange and blue bush. The big animals stared at the buggies as they passed. They looked like cows, except they had exoskeletons and a thick coat of dripping mucus.

“Just imagine when that thing molts,” Janus said. “You could make a small boat out of that shell.”

Ryler snorted. “I’d rather not think of what those things look like naked, thanks.”

Janus laughed.

The convoy pulled over for a quick meal and maintenance.

“It’s really nice having these Verazlan escorts,” Lira said around a mouthful of jerked fish. “We should have traveled like this from the beginning.”

Koni looked at her. “Lira, the diplomat, getting used to an armed escort? We’ll make a proper warlord out of you yet.”

Mick laughed, but Lira looked uncomfortable.

“That was a joke, Lira Allencourt,” Koni said, putting a hand on Lira’s shoulder, and Lira relaxed.

“If only we’d staged a failed murder attempt sooner,” Ryler joked.

Mick guffawed, and Lira giggled.

Koni sighed, but she seemed in good enough humor, considering all that had happened.

Janus kept his head down and ate, feeding the occasional scrap to Fury. He agreed it was good to have the Verazlans along, though. They were used to pushing hard—no issues there. Of course, they had four people in each buggy who could rotate through working and resting to Janus’s two or three, but they weren’t trained to run the Trials. Good, Janus thought. This wasn’t just a competition for him. It was life or death for his people.

“Are we going to run into any of the aberration zones?” Ryler asked.

“We’ll skirt east of them,” Janus said. “There’s no real way to detect them, but we can avoid areas where expeditions had to turn back or individuals have disappeared.”

“Be a good stretch to ambush us in,” Mick pointed out. “We’d be pinned between the attack and certain death.”

“Are aberration zones that bad?” Lira asked.

Janus, Mick, and Koni all looked at her in surprise.

“What?” she said. “There’s no one to trade with or negotiate with. ‘Stay away’ is all I needed to know.”

Janus was about to explain, but one of the Verazlan rangers approached the group and said, “We need to keep moving, Emissary. There’s a dangerous strip ahead, and the sooner we’re through it, the better off we’ll be.”

Mick nodded and got to his feet. “Where do you think it will happen?”

“Stretch of woods that crosses the road,” the ranger said. “We have to go through it. Going around would take us into one of the ’zones on the west, and it’s hilly rainforest if we tried to cut east.”

“Void take us,” Janus said, rubbing his chin. “We’re in for it, aren’t we?”

The Verazlan ranger laughed. “Do not worry, Emissary. You have twelve of Veraz’s finest with you. Brago and his team have been champions of the Trials, but my team was trained to fight close-in battles in the jungle. We’ll take care of them for you.”

“No battle is without cost,” Koni said, looking somber.

“My people are aware of that, honored sister,” the ranger said, placing his fist over his heart and bowing his head. “If we do not succeed, remember us to our families, but we will get you through.”

“Strength through struggle,” Ryler muttered.

The ranger beamed. “Verazlan prevails, honored wayfinder.”

***

The convoy was now heading north by northeast, curving back toward the center of the Twilight Valley and coldside beyond that. Janus was fiddling with the dashboard displays, making sure the buggies’ comm systems were interfaced between his team and the rangers so they could share information quickly, and Koni was at the wheel.

“How far?” Koni asked.

“That’s where the road cuts through the treeline,” Janus said, pointing. “We should reach it in five minutes.” He had his mask on, pistol at his hip, and his straps tightened. Fury was tied down in the back, as well, in case things got rough. “Remember, we push through no matter what.”

“I know,” Koni said through gritted teeth.

Janus did his best to stay relaxed. He’d felt this before, riding into Prometheus Base, right before they’d almost gotten engulfed by a giant herd of Triliths. It was the feeling he’d had walking into a gang ambush in Mercuria. It was the feeling he’d had when his uncle marooned him at the farming facility outside of Prime Dome with a broken buggy.

The Void was close today.

The convoy sped across the last stretches of the savannah. Soon, they would be back in the trees, and the many different paths would allow them to lose themselves in the great jungle of the Twilight Valley. They just had to make it through here. “Four minutes,” he said.

“All teams, lock and load,” the leader of the rangers said.

Janus swallowed. He could see the break in the trees. The forest-covered ground sloped up to the right, a jungle-shrouded hill that looked down over the grasslands. To the left, the bright glow of the sunlit steam-wall made the horizon look like it was on fire.

“Three minutes and thirty seconds,” Janus said.

A line of smoke drew itself between the hill and the rangers’ lead buggy, and the vehicle was knocked sideways like it had been kicked like a giant.

“Contact right!” the rangers shouted over the comm.

Koni swerved the car out of the way as another rocket struck the road ahead of them, and the perpetual dawn was lit up by dozens of tracers from the rangers’ turrets and the ambushers’ heavy machine guns.

“Push through! Push through!” Mick shouted over the comm. “We’re in the kill zone!”

Janus gripped his armrests, powerless. The compartmentalists hadn’t waited for them to enter the forest. They were engaging them in the open from almost two kilometers away with heavy weapons, and there was nothing he could do about it but trust Koni to drive fast and hope not to die.