That evening, Sam sat on the Willow’s front porch bouncing Claire on his knee. His rifle was propped against the handrail, within reach. He told her a story about princesses and castles as the sun lowered over the horizon and painted the landscape in hues of red and gold. He kissed her forehead. “You know, you’re my princess, right? You always will be.” He lifted up her chin and gave her a kiss on the lips, tickling her with the scruff on his chin until she squirmed and tried to get away.
Sam set Claire down on the porch and sent her inside. He saw Jem standing in the doorway. He held out his hand and waved for the boy to join him. “You look like a man with something on his mind, son.”
Jem shrugged and looked down at the porch’s floorboards. “I keep seeing it.”
“Which part?”
“The look on that savage’s face when my gun went off.”
Sam nodded silently and rocked back in the chair. “Someday when you’re an attorney out on some big Metropolis-Class planet, you’ll look back on all this with amazement, I bet. All this fighting and killing over what? A barren bunch of land with the misfortune of having some of the rarest stones in the galaxy buried underneath it.”
“What if I said I’m not going anywhere? Maybe I’ll be a Sheriff just like you.”
“Just like me?” Sam said.
“That’s right.”
He smiled and pulled Jem close to him, lifting the boy onto his lap. He grunted and said, “Won’t be long before you’re too big to sit on my lap.”
Jem put his head on his father’s shoulder and didn’t speak. Sam played with the boy’s hair and said, “Why are you moping? I won’t be gone long.”
“Okay. That’s good.”
Sam put his head against his son’s shoulder and said, “I don’t know why I’m about to tell you this, but here goes. That security gate was opened from inside. I checked it after we chased the Beothuk back through it.”
Jem’s eyes widened. “Why would somebody who lives here want to see the place attacked?”
“Probably the two most dangerous qualities a man can possess, son. Stupidity and greed. Put them together and it’s bad news, every time. I need you to keep your eyes on the place while I’m gone. Tell me what you hear.”
“When you get back, I’m going to help you figure out who did it and we can put them in jail.”
“That sounds like a plan,” Sam said. He kissed the top of Jem’s head and told him it was time for bed. Jem helped him collect his gear and set it by the entrance so Sam could get dressed at first light and ride out.
“Goodnight, Pa,” Jem said.
Sam put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and stopped him from going up the stairs, “When I get back, we’ll ride out to the canyon together and get a few leapers. We’ll camp out and cook ‘em over a pit. Claire can stay with these folks. Just you an’ me.”
“You promise?”
“I said it, didn’t I?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s better than a promise.”
Several hours later, Jem Clayton heard his father downstairs strapping on his guns and riding gear. He listened to Sam’s spurs jingle on the floorboards and the slow creak of the front door open and shut. Jem went down the stairs to peer through the window, watching as Sam climbed onto the back of his massive destrier.
In the years that followed, Jem relived those last moments of his father riding away. He sometimes convinced himself that Sam stopped and waved at him before departing.
In reality, Sam Clayton thought his children were both asleep inside the Willow’s house, and he didn’t want to disturb them. He rode his mount around the back of the house to hitch the cart containing the dead bodies of the Beothuk warriors.
Clayton rode across Seneca 6 toward the Halladay property. Royce Halladay had not been seen since the raid. Sam stopped at the rear door and knocked several times but there was no answer. He quit the house and got back on his mount to leave the settlement through the same gate that the Beothuk savages had snuck in.
He looked back in the direction of his own home and thought, there is nothing in the world that can keep me from coming back here.
He was wrong.
Sam Clayton was murdered in the wasteland beyond the confines of Seneca 6 just two days later.
4. Outlaws
The distance between the Seneca 5 and Seneca 6 mining colonies was approximately 400 miles, separated by a wasteland filled with burned out shuttle hulls that leaked radiation and tall energy mills that stretched so high into the atmosphere their tips appeared to spear the low, hovering moons. The well-heeled traveled by shuttle, making short hops from colony to colony aboard small-passenger craft that were stocked with fine beverages and enough shielding to prevent the outer hull from melting in the atmosphere’s intense heat.
Regular folks travelled by land, which sometimes meant renting space on rickety locomotives still powered by compression engines. They made good time but ran the risk of sucking up too much dust and muck into their manifolds and dying in the middle of nowhere. There were numerous stories about passengers setting up flares and waiting for weeks to be found. Not all of them always were.
Most preferred the planet’s best source of transportation, the destrier.
Massive, fast moving, four-legged beasts covered in thick, coarse fur that kept them insulated from the heat. They retained water like camels and responded to direction and training easily.
Entrepreneurs invested in large wagons and two destriers and rented out seats to passengers. There were bandits and Beothuk in the wasteland, and bad things happened to the unprepared.
Mrs. Wilma Alcott and her son Jesse rode aboard a carriage bound for an observation outpost forty miles into the wasteland, where her husband worked collecting energy cells from abandoned vehicles. A handsomely-dressed merchant sat across from her clutching his suitcase on his lap. Ralph Brenner, the wagon’s owner and driver, sat inside a fortified chamber at the perch, overlooking two sturdy destriers fitted with bridles and thick metal shafts.
Wilma looked out at the wasteland through shatter-proof windows that were covered in red dust and grime. Two masked riders came leaping over the sand dunes, heading directly for the front of the wagon. Wilma opened her mouth to shout to Brenner, but one of the riders lifted a pistol and fired at the nearest destrier pulling the wagon.
The animal collapsed into the dirt and they spun sideways, nearly flipping over as the carriage skidded across the ground. Wilma slammed into her son and they both hit the carriage door. The merchant rolled onto the floor, clutching his case, screaming louder than Wilma did.
They slid to a stop and Wilma covered her son’s mouth, pleading with him to not make a sound. The carriage door opened and a man wearing a black cloth over his nose and mouth looked in. Only his eyes were visible under the brim of his dark hat and he looked over the passengers with his gun in his hand, his finger off the trigger. “Everyone all right in here?”
“No we are most certainly not!” The merchant struggled to get up from the floor without letting go of his case with either hand.
The bandit nodded and said, “Well, why don’t you all step outside and we’ll assess the damages.”
“I absolutely refuse,” the merchant said. He had the case held to his chest like it was a shield.
“That a fact? All right, then. Ma’am, you and the boy come on out then so he and I can discuss this in private.” The masked man held his hand out and helped her down from the wagon.
When he reached for Jesse, the boy slapped his hand away. “You touch my mother and I’ll kill you. I heard about men like you. I ain’t afraid.”