Olokee left school in near darkness. The evening clouds had robbed him of seeing the moons rise. A shame… it was his favorite park of the walk home. In the course of his studies, he’d learned about the rotational periods of other worlds. He couldn’t begin to fathom just how onerous the twenty-four-hour cycle on Earth must be. Twelve hours each of daylight and darkness, what did they do with it all? The madness on Celhesru was another matter entirely. For as much of it as he understood on a technical level, he still shared in childish amusement with his peers when a new foreign teacher would appear in front of their class, bemoaning the ‘short’ days and nights which to him were so natural.
The sky was black by the time he’d finished his trek uphill. He stepped through the front door and smiled at the warmth awaiting him. His little brothers and sisters played on the floor in the front room. When they saw him, they abandoned their game and rushed to hug their oldest brother. From the back of the house, he picked up the pleasant and familiar aroma of whatever his mother and grandmother were cooking. There was only one piece missing from this quaint scene. Olokee looked over the gaggle of siblings surrounding him and called aloud for his father. His mother responded that he’d left early that night for his shift at the mine, and that he’d been in a hurry. The lad accepted the mundane answer easily enough, comfortable in knowing he would see the man for whom he was named in the morning again. The thought soon vanished from his head, evaporating almost as quickly as the vapor trail left by that unsettling, completely ordinary ship from before.
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“As you can surmise, we start them early around here,” said the Iolite man who’d driven the group of six up the hill and now led them on a tour of the mine’s front-of-house. “The twelve-year-old boys have surpassed the size of an adult almost anywhere else, and are just brimming with energy to boot. They’ve learned about all they can academically at that point. One in two hundred might have lower management potential, but you know how it is…” he trailed off, continuing to gesture mildly at this or that.
He wasn’t trying very hard to impress Nash and her checkered cohort. Even so, he and his fellow managers must have known something was amiss if they were receiving visitors from the home world. Working for the centuries’ old Roamgild was as steeped in tradition as it was thankless. The higher-ups only tended to make their presence known through vague gestures, and only if something wasn’t going well. Silence was the norm when a site’s performance was good.
Nash walked beside him, listening, and nodding along politely, all while keeping her head on a swivel and her nose in the air for whatever form corruption might take. Greg was right behind her, maintaining the effortless fa?ade of professionalism as he carefully planned his next pithy remark. Behind him, Mia, Zol, and Kory stuck together, each noticing in turn the wayward looks and shifty glances the passing Larlac employees shot in their direction. Sohrab brought up the rear, forming his own picture from stray thoughts picked up here and there. Though he soon passed the others, intending to get Nash’s attention. He didn’t like the look of the tapestry being woven before him by the threads of words unspoken. Just as he reached the front of the group and caught her eye, Greg opened his big mouth.
“So, I mean the size of these guys is just…wow. Do they know about basketball yet?” Greg asked the manager loudly.
“Oh no, we don’t speak a word of that here.” The man replied hurriedly. “We’d lose half our workforce if they knew.”
“Makes sense, of course, but surely they have some sort of… native sporting event to fill a similar niche?” Greg asked, semi-successful in diverting the man’s transient attention. The two went on a tangent of their own for a moment, discussing each of their favorite sports in turn, being sure to point out in which ones height would provide an advantage.
Sohrab saw his chance and took it, pulling Nash to the side as the group’s forward momentum slowed to a crawl. “How do you want me to play this?” He whispered. “Subtle or bold? And you have to pick now because things are much worse here than they seem.”
“You said that on New Galveston,” she shot back.
“Worse by orders of magnitude. We’ve been dropped into a cup that’s spilling over.”
“Then do whatever you think the situation demands,” she whispered back. Nash had assumed wrongly things would go better because it was her own people she was dealing with. But these didn’t seem to be her own people anymore. They’d become somebody else’s.
“A more generous allowance than I’m used to,” he drew away from her, a wicked gleam in his eye. “Breaks off then.”
“Wait,” Nash urged him. “Do you not usually have a speaking role!?”
“Darling, please. My employers know better than to let me do more than I’m good for.” He smirked and made his way over to Greg and the manager, catching the end of their sidebar conversation. Nash stood frozen in fear of the coming collapse, while knowing that protesting it would only hasten the inevitable. She cursed herself once for not being firmer with Sohrab, and a second time for even bringing him at all. To her right she saw Mia and Zol staring straight ahead at the gathering mass of Larlac mine workers who lingered just a little further down the hallway. Their number grew; a few too many to be a coincidence at this point. Kory shot her an urgent look, then shook her head ‘no’ in a grave manner. The spark reached the powder keg.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
“…so, when we think of height being a limiting factor for jockeys, what if we asked ourselves, ‘is the horse the problem?’ You get one of these guys on a giraffe, I bet you they smoke those short kings and thoroughbreds… and speaking of!” Greg clapped Sohrab on the shoulder as he arrived. The two laughed performatively together, before the mood turned deadly serious.
“This right here…” Sohrab pointed at the increasing crowd of disgruntled men who milled about before them. He looked from Greg to the manager and back again, unsettling each of them in turn with his mad gaze. “… is a worker’s uprising, trust me, I’ve seen a few of these by now. This man…” he jabbed the startled supervisor in the chest with a long, pointed finger. “…knows about it, and so do his fellow office-trolls, staff, and the whole rest of the plant too.” Sohrab lowered his hand from the man and turned to face the others. “They knew we were coming. They don’t plan to let us leave. And yes, they’ve been stealing for years. However much you thought it was, double it.” He walked with his head held high back to his place at Nash’s side and gave her a less-then-subtle wink, confident in the little ‘cherry-on-top’ that was his exaggeration about the figures being twice as much. “I think I nailed it,” He beamed to her.
“I don’t believe you did,” Nash’s voice went flat, in full realization that besides the last part, everything Sohrab said had been true.
The Iolite manager turned to face the unfortunate visitors, opening his mouth to address the accusations when he was cut off by another. A deep voice called out from the Larlac crowd in laborious English. “This. Is. Ours.” He turned to see who had spoken when a luminous blue rock whizzed by his head. It careened directly towards Mia, who remembered her recent training and raised a hand in the air to zap the thing out of the way. When her bolt of electricity contacted the object, it flared to life, filling the whole room with a flashing blue-white glow, before disappearing entirely. This reaction could only mean the projectile had been a piece of raw Vercoden ore, rendered void by the application of power.
When the light from outside of time abated, everyone in the hallway stood still, struggling to process the realization. One by one a collective awareness pierced through the fiery eyes of the Larlac men, who homed in on the intruders, and charged at them with a shared battle cry, trampling Greg and the manager in the process.
“Wait!” Kory cried, stepping between the advancing horde and her sister. She raised her hands, fully intending to stop them with words, when her lips were sealed from within by a voice not her own.
“Light them up!”
Before the thought had time to mature, sparks appeared at the tips of her fingers. She caught herself and clenched her fists to hold back the power, but it was too late. The crowd had one end in mind. It took her right forearm being snapped in two under the rough hands of a miner for her to finally fight back of her own accord. Zol and Mia joined the cacophony with searing current of their own. Somewhere in the midst of the brawl, Nash telekinetically dragged the unconscious body of Greg across the floor, protecting him in a force-field she no longer cared if anyone saw.
In less time than it started, the altercation ended. The hallway lay littered with the charred, smoldering remains of at least three dozen Larlac miners, and their unfortunate boss as well. Nash gazed at the destruction all around her, frantically calculating what, if any, next moves remained. Her shock was met by unsettling, blank stares from the rest of her compatriots. Only the sputtering she heard from Greg’s bruised face at her feet shook her back to reality. He was injured and barely aware but fought his way to life all the same. “We have to go,” he coughed. “It can’t end here.”
His words cut through to Nash. At once she snapped out of her haze and took control. “You!” She pointed at Zol, then back to Greg. “Pick him up.” Without a word, the stronger man rushed forward and flung his roommate over his shoulder as if he weighed nothing. “The rest of you, run, now!” She led them at a breakneck pace back to the exterior of the building, where the vehicle from before remained. The deceased had been correct, no one else was coming.
Nash jumped into the driver’s seat and the rest piled in after her. They sped madly through the dark city, grateful for the absence of pedestrians and onlookers. In the middle row of seats, Greg sprawled over the laps of the sisters. Mia cradled his head in her hands as his lips uttered nonsense. His bloodied, blue eyes peered out into nothing, and his gangly legs were draped over Kory, who grimaced through the pain of her snapped arm. Zol sat silent in the back row of the vehicle, looking sternly all around them, on guard against something that wasn’t there. It was Sohrab who took the place of honor next to Nash this time, stumbling over his words to explain to her why he still thought his decision was a good one. She didn’t hear any of it. With gritted teeth and white knuckles, she steered down the stone streets as best she could remember to the space port, resolving to deal with him and the rest of this mess once they were safe beyond the orbit of this wretched place.
They must have been quite the sight to the skeleton crew who manned the station overnight, rushing through the quiet landing pads like a herd of zebras fleeing the ghost of a lion. That self-confident Earthling man who’d been putting on the Ritz at arrival now hung like a ragdoll on the shoulders of others. Once inside the Stardust, Nash took her place at the front and barked at those besides Greg to: “Get him upright in a seat and then sit down! I’m shutting off all exterior comms. We will not be taking direction from the tower this time!”
“But he needs help!” Mia insisted, gripping Greg’s hair by the roots to keep his head from flopping forward.
“We can’t use the float tanks during takeoff or jump, only once we’re underway,” Kory winced, sliding into the seat beside Nash while taking care not to use her mangled right arm. Mia started to argue, but her sister wasn’t having it. “Just sit him up, he’ll be fine a little longer. Feel that? We’ll be up any minute now!” Beneath their feet the ship’s engine roared to life. It vibrated all around them as Nash taxied to the launch zone as fast as possible without arousing further interest. Thankfully, this wasn’t a big port.
They were soon in warp, blanketed by waves of sound and gravity which rang out alone in the blissful radio silence. Kory leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes to the pulsing sky just outside the windshield. A tear rolled down her cheek as she remembered the odd impulse which caused her arm to be broken in the first place. The memory of the thought echoed in her head over and over again.
