On the pad, she crouched slowly and let him grip a handhold as they eased him down to a seated position. Her clammy face was centimeters from his. He could feel her heat radiating against his cheek. He wanted to thank her, to apologize for existing, to tell her something she’d like.
“Minerva—”
“They’re coming,” she mouthed, her gaze fixed on the panel over his shoulder—optics penetrating metal, plastic, wires, and trees, revealing an apparently disturbing scene John could only imagine. She took his hand from her back and placed it on a bar. “Hold tight.”
She jumped away—a brief panic surging over his scalp as he thought she’d run off to confront the horde, but she’d simply hopped to a second skimmer. They had two skimmers. Had he known this?
John curled one arm around a firmly strapped bin and clutched the grip bar with the other. The pad quaked beneath him, the skimmer’s pairing tones sounded, and the rumble intensified.
A few meters away, Minerva’s mouth whispered pleading, encouraging words to her skimmer.
John closed his eyes and waited for the ready tone, but never heard it. A chorus of cracking branches, thundering feet, and a single, commanding Hynka voice, roaring “Hwasso-AAAH!” eclipsed every other sound, but the abrupt crush of what felt like 10 g left no question as to whether the skimmer had been ready.
The pressure tapered down quickly, John’s gut rising in his body cavity with nauseating force. He dared a peek below. Ish’s EV already suffered in their stead. They’d left the hatch open, so white fragments, large and small, filled the air above the amassing horde like harried seagulls over chummed water. Giant bodies fought to squeeze into the cave as innumerable others joined the dark crunch. A few individuals stood down the hill, away from the swelling crowd, tracking the skimmers across the sky with unnerving composure, as if their prey, as planned, had set out on a direct course to some cunning trap.
Five-and-a-half hours of northwesterly flight presented stunning new landscapes. The continent’s largest freshwater lake stretched off to the horizon before they followed its source, a glacier and river-cut chasm where sporadic herds of dalis fed and drank in blissful ignorance of the predatory nightmare to the south—an idyllic before pic of inevitable extinction. Hynka migration models had this species wiped out within a few short generations.
A slight course deviation took the pair over one of Epsy’s renowned Wonders: The Great Bubble Bath. Eons of geothermal activity in the area had cooked fossilized organic material into a vast soup cauldron, feeding a lively population of hyperthermophiles. Foamy bubbles of saplike matter (the original matter combined with the organisms’ waste) trapped gases and frothed, rising from porous bedrock, gurgling out over previous layers, and solidified in the frosty air. The perpetual phenomena continued coating an area the size of a small city, re-melting vent walls and sinking in pockets, while adjacent lather hills remained 100m deep and growing. Gases released in the area were poisonous, and the smell was awful.
John choked. “Beautiful, but can we go?”
“Sorry,” Minnie said, observing John’s pallor.
She released the skimmers’ hover lock and steered them upwind toward the nearest fresh air. Once clear, she resumed west and engaged the autopilot, opting for low altitude travel. The frigid air this far north was cold enough without adding the icy insult of higher elevations. The skimmers would consume more energy, but it’d be worth it.
Combing through the data John had uploaded to her fone, Minnie had identified a sizable swath of land where Ish had never observed Hynka. Adventurous (or lost) individuals had been spotted roaming higher latitudes, but Minnie wasn’t concerned with the odd loner.
According to Ish’s recent maps, Minnie’s target campsite’s nearest village was a three-week journey at top Hynka running speed. Serious peace of mind. A full night’s sleep awaited them. A night free of anxiety, and, if Minnie had her way, a night without more lecturing from John. He’d been relentless for the first couple hours. Minnie’s bittersweet triumph at proving Ish’s guilt had been short-lived. She’d earned but a few fleeting minutes of gloating before the subject veered.
She shouldn’t have admitted to the episode. The man didn’t need more things to worry about. Despite his troubling, repetitive assertions that she could and should carry on without him “if anything should happen,” Minnie’s convictions were unshakable. She’d get them to the coast. She’d build them a sturdy boat. They’d make it to Threck Country.
As if she needed more motivation than mere survival, John had tried to reignite her love and fascination with Threck culture, clumsily quoting proverbs, and sending her her own pics. But she didn’t snub his efforts. She thanked him and oohed, aah’d, even gasping at pics that had never left her consciousness, as if viewed for the first time. “Wow, is that one of mine?” Because she got it. He felt like baggage. A liability. He needed to contribute to the task at hand, like stuffing a single survival bag among a hundred other tasks.
Fortunately, she’d rewarded his inspiration efforts enough to satisfy him. Either that, or his meds had taken over. His back leaned against the access panel below the other skimmer’s console, he’d been mostly quiet for hours. Eyes attentive, observing the transient scenery, but with nothing to say.
She wondered if he was watching more Ish vids or reading journals—ones he hadn’t copied to Minnie’s fone. Despite that whole privacy rant, he was the type that wanted every minute detail. It wasn’t yet clear how long Ish had been sunk in her game, living a second life as God-Queen of virtual Hynka. Minnie didn’t care. What happened happened, and she needed no additional explanation, no analysis of the root psychosis, missed cues, or turning point. If Aether was still alive she’d no doubt blame herself, but Minnie was now satisfied with what they’d learned, and content in the knowledge of where Ish’s plot had led her.
As knowledgeable as Ish had been about her beloved beasties, she died for lack of the very depth-of-field diversity Minnie was trying to evangelize. “Context is everything, context can be nothing, scale is infinite.” Ish wasn’t some noob overlooking a subtle detail. She’d fully immersed herself in that society, and yet missed the very underpinnings of Hynka spirituality. They didn’t fear and respect their gods. They despised them. And like any other external power they beheld, they wished to conquer the gods. They’d hung their vanquished Goddess of Floods above the shrine to Death. “Warning: We’re stronger than you.”
John had been quick to highlight that Ish’s scheme hadn’t worked out as planned—as if her ghost needed a lawyer—emphasizing that she had no intention to injure, strand, or kill other station crew. The pod was only supposed to strike the Backup Habitat, not the main station (how sweet of her!). Apparently, without a functional BH, frontline safeguards were automatically removed from the EV’s. Whenever the dust settled, days or weeks later, Ish would isolate one of the EV’s systems, hack in a bogus exigency event, and launch solo to the surface, free to bring her twisted fantasies to life.
Minnie sent John an M.
MINNIE: You awake?
He peered over at her, eyes squinted against the sun. For an instant, he looked like a little boy.