Earth 329 opened up around them the way it always did. Clean air. Blue sky with nothing wrong in it. Grass stretching out toward the bluff in the distance.
Colt didn’t stop to take it in. They’d been here enough times now. He just got his bearings and started walking.
They were maybe two hundred yards from the bluff when the shot cracked across the plain.
Both of them dropped into the grass without thinking.
Clay was flat beside him, head up just enough to see. “That was close.”
“Yeah.”
They looked at each other. Then Colt started crawling toward the low rise ahead of them, staying on his elbows, Clay right behind him.
He got to the top and peered over.
A group of people stood in the grass maybe a hundred and fifty yards out. Six of them, gathered around something on the ground. One was crouched over it with a knife already working. The others stood back watching, one of them still holding a rifle.
Colt squinted.
He recognized the hair first. Then the way she stood.
Dani.
He pushed up to his feet. “Hey.” He waved an arm over his head. “Hey.”
Clay stood beside him and put both arms up.
The group looked over. One of them raised a hand. Then another.
Colt and Clay walked toward them through the grass.
Dani saw them coming and her face changed. She walked out from the group to meet them, moving past Colt with a quick nod and going straight to Clay. She took his hand in both of hers.
“Didn’t think I’d see you so soon,” she said. She was smiling. A real one.
Clay looked at her hands holding his and his mouth opened and nothing useful came out.
Dani turned back toward the animal on the ground. It was big. Some kind of deer, bigger than any Colt had seen back home, with a rack that spread wider than a man’s armspan. The one crouching over it had the field dress half done already, working clean and fast.
“Some of our youngest hadn’t even eaten meat before coming here,” Dani said.
Colt looked at the group. A few of them were teenagers. One looked no older than twelve, standing at the edge of the circle watching the field dress with wide eyes. Not scared. Just taking it all in. Learning something for the first time.
Colt thought about the boy in the lodge. Tied to the post with the violet thin in his eyes. Same age, maybe. Different Earth, different ending.
He looked away.
“I’m real happy this place is working out for y’all,” Colt said.
Dani turned to him. “It is.” She said it simply. No more than that.
Two of the men had pulled rope from their packs and were tying off the deer’s legs, getting it ready to carry back. Dani watched them for a moment then looked toward the bluff.
“We were just heading back.” She started walking, still holding Clay’s hand, pulling him along without seeming to think about it.
Clay went without a word. He looked back at Colt once with an expression that was equal parts helpless and pleased with himself.
Colt fell in at the back of the group.
He watched Dani up ahead, the way she’d walked right past him to get to Clay, the quick nod like he was someone she recognized but didn’t need to talk to.
He leaned toward Clay’s ear as he caught up. “Don’t think she likes me too much.”
Clay grinned. “Can’t blame her. You ain’t as pretty.”
They followed the group across the grass and up to the base of the bluff. Someone had rigged a platform against the rock face, cables running up to the top with a hand crank system operated by two of Marcus’s people waiting up there. Simple but solid. The kind of thing people build when they need something to work and don’t have time to make it pretty.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
They loaded the deer on first, lashed it down, and sent it up. Colt watched it rise against the rock face, slow and steady.
Then it was their turn.
Clay stepped onto the platform and grabbed the cable with both hands. Not casual. A grip that said he wasn’t letting go for anything. His jaw was set and he was looking straight at the rock face in front of him, not down, not up, just straight ahead at the stone a foot from his nose.
Colt looked at him. “You good.”
“Fine,” Clay said. Too fast.
The platform started moving.
Clay’s knuckles went pale. He didn’t say another word the whole way up.
When it stopped at the top he stepped off onto solid ground and rolled his shoulders like he was working something out of them. He didn’t look back at the platform.
At the top, stretched across the cave mouth on a frame of lashed timber, was the bear hide. Full spread. Massive. The fur had been cleaned and treated, the hide pulled tight enough to show the size of the thing properly. It caught the light coming off the plains and threw a shadow across the cave entrance like a door.
Clay stopped walking.
“Holy shit,” he said.
Dani glanced back at him. “That’s the bear you told us about.” She held his eye for just a second. “Figured it earned a spot.”
Clay looked at it for another moment. Then he followed her inside.
The cave ran back the way Colt remembered, torches mounted at intervals along the walls throwing orange light across the stone. But it felt different now. Lived in. The smell of smoke and food and people moving through a space regularly. Voices echoing from somewhere deeper in.
When they reached the corridor the change was obvious. The labs and offices that had been empty and dark on Colt’s first visit had light behind their doors now. Blankets hung in doorframes. Someone had propped a hand-drawn sign on one door that said FAMILIES. Another said MEDICAL in block letters. A woman leaned out of one of the rooms and said something to Dani in passing and Dani answered without slowing.
Colt thought about what Marcus’s people had been doing three days ago. Huddled behind sheet metal and an RV, rationing whatever was left, listening to shamblers press against the gate all night. Now they had rooms with signs on the doors. Now they had something worth labeling.
These people hadn’t just moved in. They’d taken over.
***
They took the elevator down to the hangar. Colt watched Clay’s jaw set the moment the doors closed. He didn’t say anything about it.
The door opened up ahead of them and Colt could hear it before he saw it. The sound of people working. Metal on metal. Voices calling back and forth. They came through the doors and he stopped for a second taking it in.
Marcus’s people were everywhere. Some had set up workbenches along the far wall and were taking apart equipment Colt couldn’t identify, laying the pieces out in rows. Others moved between the mechs with measuring tools, documenting. A few stood near the damaged ship’s hull section with torches, looking up at the scorch marks.
And some of them had guns.
Not revolvers. Not rifles. Something else entirely. Long barreled, with a body that didn’t look like any weapon Colt had seen. Smooth. No wood anywhere. A few of Marcus’s people carried them on their backs like they’d been doing it for years.
Dani led them to a room off the main hangar floor. The door was open.
Marcus was behind a desk that had clearly been dragged in from somewhere else, mismatched with the military style table beside it that had probably come with the room. A monitor on the wall threw pale blue light. Papers covered the desk surface, handwritten notes and what looked like hand-drawn maps. A coffee mug sat on top of one of the maps. No artwork on the walls. No personal effects. Just a man who’d been too busy to make a room his own.
He looked up when they came in and stood.
“Colt.” A nod. “Clay.” Another nod.
Then the grin came. Wide and easy, not something Colt had seen much on Marcus’s face before.
“Have I got a lot to show you,” he said. “Come with me.”
He walked past them without waiting.
He brought them back out onto the hangar floor and through a door on the far side that Colt hadn’t tried before. It opened into a long room that ran the length of the wall, and Colt stopped in the doorway.
Weapons lined the walls floor to ceiling. Long guns racked in rows. Smaller sidearms in cases below them. All the same material as the ones he’d seen on the hangar floor. No wood. No steel. Something else.
“Sahhweet baby Jesus,” Clay said. He walked straight in like he’d been invited.
There were three people in the room already. They each had a clipboard. One was moving down the wall calling out numbers while the other two checked them off. Taking inventory. They glanced up when Marcus came in and went back to their work.
Colt pulled out his revolver and turned it in his hand. “Any .45 caliber in here. Bullets, I mean.”
Marcus laughed. A real one. “No. No bullets at all.”
He reached past Clay and pulled one of the long guns off the rack. He turned it in his hands, then held it sideways so Colt could see the side panel.
A screen had lit up. A horizontal bar sat at the top, about three quarters full, glowing faint blue. Below it a row of five dots. All filled. ?????
Marcus looked up at the hole in the roof where it had been blown open, the open sky showing through. He cupped his free hand around his mouth.
“Clear above.”
A voice from the hangar called back. “Clear.”
Marcus raised the weapon and fired.
It kicked less than Colt expected. Energy bolts punched up through the hole in rapid succession, fast enough that Colt lost count, the sound more like a hard crack than a bang. Gone before the echo finished.
Marcus lowered it and held the screen toward them.
The bar had dropped by half but was already climbing back, ticking upward while they watched.
“Recharges,” Marcus said.
He tapped the row of dots. They cycled down to three. ???
He raised the weapon again. Three shots. Pause. Three shots. Precise and controlled.
“Burst mode,” Marcus said. He looked at the other settings along the side of the panel. “Got a few others I haven’t figured out yet.”
He handed the weapon to someone walking by. “Put that back in armory fifteen.”
Colt looked at him. “Fifteen.”
“Yeah.” Marcus set the gun down. “Fifteen.” The grin faded. He looked at Colt the way he’d looked at him across the compound gate the first night. Reading him. “You two come all the way out here just to chat?”
