Children of Zanar 1: The Zanari Inheritance Read online

  ‘O-oh. Well, when you put it like that… You’ll keep in contact with us? You’ll tell us what you find?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘I guess… I guess you’re the boss.’

  Thea flashed another smile. ‘I’m told I have a rather dominant side, yes, but this is primarily for your own protection.’ Kaya found herself blushing all over again and was not sure why.

  ‘You’re taking the Sword down?’ Jay asked. ‘Or do you have shuttles?’

  Thea smiled at him. ‘No, neither. We have a much better alternative available.’

  ~~~

  ‘You’re serious,’ Jay said. ‘You really have a teleport system installed aboard this thing.’ It was a statement, because he was looking at the teleport control system and the pad beyond it which was used for transmission and reception, but still managed to come over as more of a question.

  ‘Quite serious, Sor Colder,’ Cassandra said. ‘I’m not sure what the problem is. The technology has been around for some time.’

  ‘The filarax use it extensively,’ Fay commented from her position at the controls. ‘I have a suitable landing location locked in, Thea. You should arrive in an alley off the main avenue.’

  Thea was looping a belt over her shoulder with a sword attached to the back of it. The weapon looked odd, but it was not that different from the knife she had used on Abertine, now Kaya had the chance to think about it. The metal was black, but the edge glinted as though it was unusually fine. Jinny was, of course, sporting her pistols.

  ‘You know,’ Kaya said, ‘if you two appear in town like that and everyone’s alive and well, you’re going to get arrested.’

  Thea flicked a glance at Cassandra, as though she was not mentioning something. What she said was, ‘I’ll take that risk.’ Then she walked over to stand on the pad, putting on the helmet of her suit as she went.

  Jinny followed her with a sigh. ‘I hate this part.’

  ‘Suck it up,’ Thea told her. ‘If you’re lucky, there’ll be someone bad down there for you to shoot.’

  ‘I’m not feeling that lucky today.’

  ‘Transmitting,’ Fay said. She stabbed a button with one of her long fingers and, without preamble or special effects, Thea and Jinny vanished.

  ‘Oh,’ Kaya said. ‘Somehow I was expecting… swirly lights or something.’

  Fay turned in her seat and looked at her. A human would have had to look up, but this was Fay. ‘Why would there be swirling lights?’

  ‘Who made this ship?’ Jay asked. ‘Teleport projectors are expensive, and they’re prone to targeting errors and malfunction. No one fits them in ships. Who are you people?’

  Cassandra gave him a detached sort of look and raised an eyebrow. ‘Aren’t we full of questions, Sor Colder? I could give you answers, but then I’d have to get Jinny back up here to shoot you.’

  ‘I could teleport him into the local star,’ Fay suggested.

  ‘Fine,’ Jay said. ‘Keep your secrets.’

  ‘Good,’ Kaya snapped, finding herself becoming annoyed. ‘Now shut up so we can find out what Thea and Jinny have found.’ She looked at Cassandra and found the tattooed woman looking back with a sad expression.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s nothing good,’ Cassandra said.

  Sadrine’s Landing, Sadrine’s Drift.

  The temperature outside Thea’s environment suit would have been distinctly uncomfortable. Her suit sensors noted this as they catalogued other environmental statistics. Air pressure: 97 % standard, comparable oxygen level. No toxic gases detected. Radiation levels: nominal. Acceleration due to gravity: 10.58 m/s2. Biological analysis… please wait.

  Thea was still waiting for the analysis to complete as she stepped out onto the wide avenue which ran down the centre of the town Kaya had said was called Sadrine’s Landing. Now, it was Sadrine’s Graveyard.

  ‘Oh,’ Jinny said. She slipped one of her pistols free of its holster, but it did not look like there would be any need for it.

  There were bodies scattered about randomly as though caught on the street and mowed down while trying to escape. The suits were masking the smell which was, no doubt, filling the air. Heat and dead bodies tended to result in rapid decomposition. Still, as Thea walked over to the nearest of them, the cause of death appeared obvious: something bladed had been used to carve a deep gash in the man’s back, cutting through flesh and bone alike.

  ‘Looks like they were cut down,’ Jinny commented. She was standing beside a second figure, a woman this time. ‘They were running away. All the ones I can see were hit in the back.’

  Thea nodded, but… ‘There’s something about this I don’t like.’

  ‘Not simply that this looks like filarax hunting?’

  ‘Not just that, no. Not sure. Come on, we’ll take a tour, see what we can find.’ Thea glanced at her suit display as it announced that there were no biological hazards evident in the atmosphere. Well, it had stopped looking like a disease outbreak pretty quickly. ‘It seems fairly obvious what killed them, so why the cover-up?’

  ‘No idea. I don’t like cover-ups. I can’t shoot them.’

  ‘Yeah, well… Life can’t always be that easy. Let’s get on with this. Pick a building.’

  Sighing, Jinny turned on the spot and marched off toward somewhere she thought might be worth a look.

  ~~~

  The apartment building on the northern edge of Sadrine’s Landing was just like the other buildings they had found, or most of them. Bodies could be found in every apartment, most of them showing damage from edged weapons. One or two buildings had had the added feature of fire damage, the structures burned out and the remains of the inhabitants left as charred skeletons.

  ‘This is depressing,’ Jinny commented. ‘They were really thorough, but aside from the wounds, there’s nothing to really indicate who did this.’

  ‘They were really thorough,’ Thea replied. ‘That suggests filarax. They don’t leave survivors, except…’

  ‘Except that doesn’t sound quite right to me either. Something about this is wrong.’

  ‘I’m going to get Fay to come down and look the place over in the morning. You stick with her, and I’ll take Kaya and Colder to Kaya’s farm.’ They were climbing the uppermost flight of stairs as she spoke, more for completeness than anything else: might as well check every floor now they were in. ‘Maybe Fay will spot something we–’ She stopped as the sight in the top-floor hallway hit her.

  Someone up here had had a gun, it seemed. Kaya had said that there were very few of them about, mostly belonging to old soldiers who refused to give up being armed. There were no large animals of any sort on the planet, aside from a few cattle herds, so there was nothing to hunt and nothing to defend against. There had been talk of forming a militia in case pirates attacked, but that had generally been viewed as paranoia and they had never had the spare money to equip such a unit. Someone, however, had had a gun and they had used it to pot themselves a filarax warrior.

  The dead filarax had fallen on his face, pressed against a wall. Dark blood was pooled under his head, but Thea knelt and turned him over to confirm that he had been killed by a bullet to the head.

  ‘Light anti-personnel round,’ Jinny said with but a second’s look. ‘Bullet’s probably still in there, but it likely rattled around and made mush of his brain. That seems to confirm it, but…’ She walked over to the likely source of the gunshot: the door at the end of the corridor was open and the remains of a makeshift barricade were scattered around. She looked left and right, then stepped through the door, returning a second or two later with a rifle. ‘This is not some old soldier’s weapon,’ she said. ‘This is a fairly modern light assault rifle. Four-mil, high-density penetrators and the mag’s empty. The body’s been cut to ribbons.’

  Thea frowned. ‘Empty magazine, but only one corpse. One filarax corpse. Perfect headshot, but they only nailed one and this is an honourable death, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Killed mounting an
assault on a fortified position manned by an expert marksman, unless he just got real lucky. I mean my kind of lucky.’

  ‘So why did they leave the body? If they were all dead, they’d all be here. If they weren’t all dead, why did they leave him?’ When she got a shrug from Jinny, Thea nodded. ‘Okay, I want Geo down here with you and Fay. I want these bodies checked over before we decide we’re going with the filarax raid theory.’

  Jinny groaned. ‘Geo? He is going to complain like a kid who was promised a dog for his birthday and it turned out to be a stuffed toy.’

  ‘We all have to make sacrifices,’ Thea replied as she got to her feet. ‘Yours is having to put up with Geo.’

  ‘And what are you sacrificing, glorious leader?’

  ‘I’m going to be taking a young, innocent woman to see what’s left of her family.’

  ‘Oh… Fair point.’

  Oracle of Zanar.

  Thea stretched languorously, suspended in her bed’s suspension field. She was warm and comfortable, and the images of Sadrine’s Landing and thoughts of what was to come when the day returned on the planet below had been washed away. Relaxing, she reached out, wrapping her arms around Cassandra’s naked, floating body, pulling them together.

  Cassandra rested her head on Thea’s shoulder. ‘Better?’ the tattooed woman asked.

  ‘I’ll nap now. You’ve exhausted me.’ They were also having to deal with the large disparity between ship-time and planet-time, so taking a nap had seemed a good idea.

  ‘I find that highly unlikely.’

  ‘Huh, well, I’ll sleep. Tonight is going to be purgatory, but I’ll sleep. I’m sure her family are the same as the rest. She won’t take it well.’

  ‘Mm.’ There was silence for a few seconds and then Cassandra asked, ‘Do you want her?’

  Thea frowned. ‘Well, I wouldn’t kick her out of bed… I’ve no idea whether she’d even be interested, Cassy. She’s barely old enough to call an adult and I’m–’

  ‘Young at heart,’ Cassandra said and her lips twitched against Thea’s throat.

  ‘Hardly. Some days I feel a lot older than I am.’

  ‘Not right now?’ Cassandra’s hand stroked down the taut skin of Thea’s stomach, eliciting a shiver.

  ‘Not right now, no. I need to rest.’

  ‘Not right away.’

  Thea sighed as Cassandra’s fingers reached their ultimate objective. ‘Not right away, no.’

  Meddon, Sadrine’s Drift.

  The experience of teleporting was not as uneventful as Kaya had imagined, and it was really not that pleasant. Fay had helpfully explained how it worked before sending Kaya through with Thea and Jay; Kaya could have done without the explanation. Apparently, the teleport projector worked exactly like the ability of a natural teleporter, opening a path through hyperspace and translating the subject through it. Kaya had always heard that hyperspace was not a safe place to be unless you were inside a ship, but in reality…

  Kaya stood in the street in the middle of Meddon, trying to work out whether she was still in one piece. There had been cold harsher than anything she had ever experienced, a weird, disorienting, twisting motion which she was sure had not been real, and noise. To Kaya, standing now in the silent town under the warm sun of early morning, it was the sound that stayed with her, like something had been screaming in her ears loud enough to make them bleed.

  She snapped out of it a second later, noting with some pride that she was not the only one: Jay was shaking his head to clear it. Thea, on the other hand, looked as though she got herself translated through another dimension every other hour, but she was just standing there with her hands on her hips, watching Kaya. Kaya gave her a weak grin and looked around.

  Cassandra had taken one look at Kaya after the reports had come back from the planet and had obtained a pill from Geogracus to help the girl sleep. Kaya had been ready for the sight of slashed bodies in the streets, or she had thought she was ready, but steeling herself for the sight was unnecessary: Meddon, the village nearest to her family’s farm, showed nothing of the carnage of Sadrine’s Landing. It was almost enough to give her a sliver of hope: maybe the killers had not come to this part of the planet and maybe her family remained untouched.

  That lasted until she spotted the shattered window of the general store on High Street. The name was something of a joke: there was only one street in Meddon. The village was basically a collection of stores, a school, and a few houses. The general store, actually called The General Store, sold all sorts of goods, though food was supplied by other retailers. The name had been painted onto a broad window which spanned most of the front of the building, but the glass was now lying in a wide dispersal pattern in the street. Inside, the shop was a wreck.

  ‘S-something blew up?’ Kaya suggested as she looked through the shattered window. ‘They stocked fuel in the back.’

  Thea shook her head. ‘That was a grenade.’

  ‘I didn’t think filarax used grenades,’ Jay said.

  ‘They don’t. It’s not sporting. It’s like fishing with explosives.’

  ‘Yet you found a dead filarax in the city.’

  Thea gave a nod. ‘Which is also wrong, but we’ll wait until Fay and Geo have checked things over up there before we speculate. Speculation is a waste of time when we may have facts in the near future. Which way is your farm, Kaya?’

  ‘It’s about fifteen minutes’ walk that–’ Kaya stopped abruptly, one arm raised to show the direction: she had just seen another building which was showing signs of damage. ‘Oh… That’s… That’s the school.’

  It was a fairly small school, designed to service the fairly meagre needs of the town and handle the children in the surrounding farms. It would not be doing that again because it had been burned to the ground aside from a couple of walls which were blackened with soot. Kaya ran toward it, hoping that whatever had happened had happened at night and no one was in the building, but she stumbled and had to catch herself from falling as she realised that what she had thought was a piece of wood or metal sticking up from a pile of fallen roof tiles was actually an arm…

  Biting her lips to avoid screaming, Kaya stood and stared at the skeletal limb. Now that she was looking properly, she could see other bones sticking out of the debris. Small bones. The bones of children.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Jay said, placing a hand on her shoulder. ‘You’ll be okay. There was nothing you could’ve–’

  ‘How is this ever going to be okay?’ Thea snapped. ‘Cào! I’d almost prefer it if it was filarax. At least this would make a kind of twisted sense if it was filarax. If it’s not…’

  ‘I want to see my home,’ Kaya said, her voice calm and deliberate. ‘I need to see my home. Come on.’ And she set off walking, past the burned-out school and out of town.

  Trevorny Farm.

  The extent of the damage was fairly obvious from the road leading into the farm through fields which were already high with corn or lush with some ground fruit or other. At the end of the road, the blackened, burned-out building could be seen through the vegetation and, with that sight, most of what remained of Kaya’s hope fled.

  ‘We can go in,’ Jay suggested. ‘We could check the place over before you see for yourself.’

  ‘No,’ Kaya replied flatly, and she kept walking toward the buildings which had, until recently, been most of her world.

  As they got closer, the extent of the structures, and the damage to them, became more obvious. There had been a large barn off to one side of the enclosure the farm buildings sat in. It had been burned to the ground. There were a couple of outhouses which seemed to be intact, but the farmhouse itself was a ruin. The roof had fallen in; the walls were intact but blackened. It seemed to have been built in two phases, one of prefabricated concrete panels with later stone-built extensions. All of them had been touched by the fire. All the windows had blown out while the interior burned.

  Kaya paused outside the house, sure she had to go inside,
but not really wanting to. Her home was gone. Everything she had known for eighteen years, even her school, had been burned to the ground. She stood for a second, taking it in, building up her defences for what she was bound to find inside the ruin of her life.

  Jay, apparently, took this as a sign that she did not want to enter. ‘You don’t have to, Kaya. No one’s going to think less of you for–’

  ‘I will,’ Kaya said, but she glanced around at her companions. ‘Do you think the structure’s safe? I mean, the fire… I don’t want anyone else getting hurt.’

  Thea stepped up to the front door of the house, looking through the hole left when the thing which had filled it had fallen from its burned frame. Her jaw tightened, but she said, ‘The roof’s already collapsed. There’s nothing else to fall unless the walls decide to cave and they look solid. I think they’d have come down already, if they were going to.’ Kaya started forward, but Thea held up a hand. ‘Are you sure you’re ready for this, Kaya?’

  ‘If I’m not… If I’m not, I never will be.’

  Thea nodded and stepped aside. Kaya walked up to the front door, her memory filling the gap. The door had been red. She had been there when her father and brother had last painted it. Coming home from school, she had always run the last hundred metres to the red door. No matter how her day had gone, the bright red had always seemed to welcome her, cheering her when she was sad. Now it lay in the rubble, charred black, the paint burned away, and she stepped over it to look around the family room it had opened onto.

  Kaya’s mother had been in charge of interior decoration. The family room had been papered for as long as Kaya could remember and the latest print had been a diagonal pattern of small blue flowers. The flowers were nothing Kaya recognised from Sadrine’s Drift and her mother had explained that they were a flower found on Earth, long ago, called bluebells. The paper had seemed cheery on the wall, but Kaya had looked at the flowers with their drooping heads and thought that they seemed somehow sad. There was a fireplace on one side of the room for the rare occasions when the temperature dropped to an uncomfortable level. By some quirk of fate, several of the logs that were always stacked in the grate had survived, charred but still obvious. The furniture, a comfortable sofa and two large chairs, which Kaya had sat on with her family around her, was nothing but sticks, but some of the sticks were not furniture.