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Freenet
By Steve Stanton ECW Press
Copyright © 2016 Steve Stanton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77041-229-3
CHAPTER 1
Simara woke flat on her back on a hard surface, panting for breath under a smothering weight of gravity. She reached for her hammock straps and flayed empty air. What the hell? Nausea and unfamiliarity gripped her as she peered at a craggy stone ceiling in musty, murky darkness. A cloying humidity filled her nostrils and throat, the smell of something mouldy and putrid. She gasped and sat up with alarm as an afterimage of trauma filled her mind — her escape shuttle screaming through stormy clouds, a lightning flash, an explosion, the dark face of doom. Her remembrance seemed splintered and sparse, broken fragments lacking in detail, and her memory backup was mysteriously offline. She tapped her earlobe amp to login to the V-net and got a dead blank. Mothership was gone and all her omnidroid chats were quiet. Even the newsfeed was down. Shit.
A handsome young man stared at her from under auburn ringlets, sitting cross-legged on the rocky floor beside her, barefoot, wearing strips of animal skin over muscular shoulders and a leather loincloth at his narrow waist. He smiled at her with peaceful good nature. "Hi," he said. "How are you feeling?"
Simara could not place his strange accent — not trader-space, for sure, probably a virgin grounder, a primitive cave dweller by the look of it. His words seemed slurred, his tone serene. His eyes were brown and beautiful. "Where am I?"
"Bali," he said, "second from the sun. I brought you in from the desert." He shook his head. "It's not safe out there."
A string of pin lights revealed a gloomy cavern enclosure. She was imprisoned in rock, trapped underground at the ugly bottom of the gravity well with no V-net signal. Simara patted her hips under the thin padding of a zippered sleeping bag. "Where are my clothes?"
The boy pointed behind with his thumb. "Soaking. You soiled yourself." He shrugged with complacence.
The air rumbled with thunder in the distance to match her rising temper at his indecency. "You wiped my bare ass?"
The boy pouted in consternation at her outburst. "Um, I guess so. I thought you might be dead."
Simara grimaced as more memories flooded her consciousness, the sexual assault from her stepfather, her fight and flight for freedom, the loss of mothership. She was alone now on an alien planet with no technology, a vagrant fugitive cut off from her friends and social network. A sickness welled inside her, a coiled spring that demanded immediate and commensurate release, and she hung her head as tears spilled onto her cheeks.
"I barely peeked," the boy said. "I didn't mean anything." He rose to his feet and took a few cautionary steps back. "I was just trying to help."
"No." She waved a hand to brush away his complaint. "My stepfather tried to rape me." She wiped her nose with a sniff. "Not the first time. His wife died a few months ago in a vacuum breach. The whole damn ship is a rattletrap." She sobbed again and resigned herself to a good cleansing cry.
The boy dropped his gaze. "I'm sorry. I saw your shuttle coming in fast and trailing smoke. Your cockpit blew out the top just before the crash. I followed your failsafe chute and found you unconscious two days ago. My name is Zen."
Simara blinked back sorrow and looked up at him in surprise. "Two days?"
"Yes. Are you sure you're okay? No broken bones or anything?"
She patted herself more carefully now, fearful of injury, checking for pain or inflammation, every movement a push against the heavy gravity. She was wearing socks and a bra and the signal amp on her earlobe, all she had left in the world. She tapped her ear, but the grid was still dead. Even her subconscious psychic connection was gone.
Thunder rumbled again, and the rock seemed to tremble. A cough rasped in her throat. "Do you have any water?"
Zen ducked through a rocky archway and returned with a ceramic cup. Her eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light. The cave walls were dry and the floor sandy, the low ceiling decorated with spiny creatures like sea urchins hanging upside down. Simara pointed. "What are those things?"
Zen glanced up. "Argonite clusters. Stone flowers, we call them. Iron impurities in this hill give them that pinkish hue."
Simara studied the strange rock garden on the cave ceiling. Perhaps some weird magnetism in the iron was scrambling the V-net bandwidth, blocking her signal. Zen wore no earbug, probably living without a brain implant in these primitive conditions, a digital virgin. How the hell did he communicate? "Don't you have the net?"
"A net? No, I use a spear for fishing. The carp in the deep caverns are blind, so they're not hard to catch."
"Not a fishnet. A communications network. You have no wristband, no eyescreen, no tablet?"
Zen nodded his understanding. "My father had a wristband, but it only worked in orbit on the dark side. All radio signals on Bali are scrambled by solar flares. We have computers in shielded installations underground where thermal energy is converted to electricity, but nothing on the surface. Even at night we can't get a stable connection through the geomagnetic storms."
Simara grimaced. She was net-dark and -deaf on a desert planet, and mothership was gone. She took a sip of water and spit it out with disgust. "It's salty!"
"You don't like salt?"
She handed the cup back and rubbed her tongue against her teeth. "Do you have anything else?"
"I have guava mead, but it's fermented."
She shrugged. "Please, anything to get this vile taste out of my mouth."
Zen bowed and ducked again into darkness. He returned balancing the brimming cup, and she sampled his new offering, an exotic mix of warm beer and fruit juice. "Don't you have refrigeration?"
Zen shook his head. "We're out in the badlands. This base is a minimum campout, just bare-bones. The lights are solar powered, but the voltage is low. Sorry."
"That's okay. This is good." She saluted him with the cup and took a long drink.
"So," Zen said as he resumed his seat beside her, "no broken bones?"
"I'm fine. Thanks for saving me. My name is Simara." She held out a hand in greeting, and he stared at her fingers in confusion. Didn't people shake hands on Bali? Was the boy some sort of fanatical recluse? He hesitated for an awkward moment and finally took her palm with a gentle caress. That was weird.
"We're an hour from the main community cave," he said. "There's a doctor there and cold drinks. We should get someone to check you over."
"I don't need a doctor. Just some food and a walk outside. I can't stay long in this coffin cave. I like to be high up in the air where I can see everything at a glance, preferably weightless in space. Gravity sucks, you know?" She offered a smile at the old trader joke, but it went unrequited.
Zen shook his head again. "You can't go outside during the day on Bali. The solar flares are too hot, and the rads will scramble your brain. Even at night you can't go out without a breather. Cactus spores will clog your lungs."
Simara frowned. What an awful situation. "Why do you live in such a horrid place?"
A hint of indignation clouded his features. "This is my quadrant," he said sternly. "I have native salvage and mineral rights on my heritage claim. I'm third-generation landed, which is rare, 'cause it's not a great place for humans to breed."
Oops. Simara spread her palms for peace. "I'm sorry, Zen. I hate to be such an idiot, but my system is down and I don't know the first thing about Bali. We were just passing by to offload some merchandise at Trade Station."
Zen pressed his lips and nodded. "Hardly anyone comes to the surface. Bali is strictly a mining colony — volcanic minerals, gold, copper, zinc. The equatorial zone is a treasure-house of magma."
"Is that the rumble I keep hearing? Volcanoes?"
"No, that's dry lightning from the geomagnetic storms. We get it all the time here in the desert, and sometimes a bare sprinkle of rain, hardly enough to keep the lizards wet."
"I think I got hit by lightning on my way in. I saw a blue flash and my board went black. Autopilot must have failed. I thought I was going to die."
Zen's face was grim. "Those new escape pods have failsafe eject on the altimeter when the power is off, but it's a hard way to go. I think you pull about six-g in reverse to cancel your downward acceleration. You probably blacked out even before you hit the ground."
Simara stared with curiosity at this muscular caveboy. "You seem to know quite a bit about rocketry."
He raised broad shoulders at the compliment. "I've claimed a bit of salvage in my day. Not many shuttles get in past the lightning. Not many pilots survive."
A memory flashed back to the dead instruments on her shuttle dashboard, her helpless feeling of panic in the darkness. "I'm lucky you noticed me in the sky."
"You were like a paintbrush stroke across the heavens," Zen said as he moved his hand in a slow arc, "a shooting star from the desert god Kiva and sure sign of his destiny. He brought you here for a reason."
Simara boggled at the notion of patriarchal deity and tilted her head at him. How could he speak of providence to a woman who had just been sexually assaulted? Why would any god orchestrate an attempted rape? Weren't gods supposed to be loving and righteous? "I'm sure you don't mean that to condone domestic violence against women."
Zen winced with discomfort. "No, of course not. What your stepfather did was evil." He sighed a gentle whisper. "And I'm sorry about your stepmother. But Kiva brings good out of bad, and reconciliation between light and darkness."
Simara glanced away to calm her spirit. "That sounds wonderful, Zen," she said quietly, thinking him a harmless acolyte of some grounder folk religion. "Thank you."
"I know it sounds like superstition at first, but that's okay. Every onion has many layers."
Simara smiled. "You have onions in the deserts of Bali?"
He grinned at her and nodded. "They grow in terraced gardens on the windward side of the mountains."
"Anything else to go with them?" She held up her empty beer mug. "I'm famished."
Zen took her cup and rose to his feet, his brown legs rippling with strength as he towered over her in his leather loincloth. "Would you like to soak in a hot geyser while I make breakfast?"
She gaped. "Really?"
"Sure." He pointed to a crevice in the wall where a string of pin lights twined past a jumble of craggy boulders. "There's a grotto down the tunnel to the left. That's one of the reasons I picked this cave. Natural hot springs."
Simara wondered if her bad luck could finally be changing. A handsome grounder boy with a hot tub? It sounded too good to be true. "Well, that sounds wonderful, but I didn't bring a swimsuit."
Zen slapped his forehead in a pantomime of stupidity, then held up a single finger and disappeared through the archway. He returned in a moment and handed forward a pair of raggy turquoise boxers, faded and frayed. Simara hesitated for an instant, but public nudity seemed an unwise option in the company of a primeval caveboy dressed in a thong, so she tucked his boxers into her sleeping bag and wrestled them awkwardly up her legs, like a butterfly working in a tight chrysalis. She extricated herself with a bare modicum of self-respect and tested her bra for decency with her fingers.
Zen crawled into the rocky crevice, and she followed him down a narrow corridor encrusted with glinting salt crystals that felt sharp and granular on her forearms and knees. A pungent, briny scent wafted up from the depths as they burrowed their way downward following a single strand of pin lights. A moist heat collected on her skin like dew. Finally the tunnel opened up into a huge cavern hung with stalactites and murky with fog. Simara rose gratefully to her feet and stretched aching limbs. A foamy pool bubbled with promise in the grotto, and Zen crouched to feel the water with his hand. "It's almost scalding today, so be careful."
"Thank you, I will." She took off her socks and dipped in a foot. "Whew, that's hot."
"You'll get used to it once you're in. I'll bring breakfast in a few minutes." Zen ducked back up the tunnel as she nestled slowly into the hot spring, inch by burning inch until she hit her belly. She reached with her toes for purchase, feeling a promise of buoyancy in the saltwater, and found a ledge on which she could crouch in up to her chin. Soon she was floating freely in weightlessness — home again in her natural state, liberated from gravity in blissful relaxation. She revelled in abandonment to the heat as her face flushed with blood and pebbled with a cleansing perspiration. This was great. She had survived a crash in the badlands of Bali and ended up in a luxurious spa retreat!
Did she dare trust this native caveboy? He seemed nice enough at first glance, but could she ever feel safe with a man again? Her own stepfather had betrayed her. The drunken oaf had treated her with vile disrespect, called her a slut, a tight pussy. She was still shaken, still wary.
Zen returned with a wooden bowl and dangled his powerful legs in the water from a rock shelf. He plucked a morsel with his fingers to show by example and held the bowl out with invitation.
"What is it?" Simara asked as she pulled herself up beside him.
He shook his head. "It's a secret."
Simara pursed her lips in thought. Probably cactus and sand lizards, maybe bird or snake. Oh well, it should certainly be better than starving to death. She tasted a salty, chewy bite of meat. Not bad, not raw, so Zen must have cooking facilities of some sort. She tried another bite, a mushy, stir-fried vegetable, and together they settled into a steady rhythm of eating. Everything was too salty, but she didn't dare complain. "Great," she said as Zen watched her with open fascination. "Thank you."
She wondered if he was ogling her breasts through wet transparency — probably so, after untold weeks living alone in a cave in the wilderness with no V-net. Beer for breakfast and now wet lingerie for brunch! At least her pool-boy was handsome and pretended civility — she was thankful for that and damned grateful for everything else. Maybe it really was destiny, a change in her fortune from the grounder god of Bali, the Kiva spirit. By any measurement, it was totally better than a fiery crash in the barrens of the desert. She turned to Zen for eye contact. "So what are we doing today?"
He smiled with good-natured charm. "It's almost dusk. We can go outside safely now with breathers. I have a full charge on my buggy, enough to get us back before morning. We'll salvage your crash site."
"Will there be anything intact?"
"I made a quick inspection and camouflaged the wreckage after I got you safely home. The control capsule is mangled beyond repair, but there may be some working components. The angle of entry was oblique, and the sand dunes pillowed the impact. You can always find treasure at the end of a long furrow."
"Really? So that's how you make your living?"
"Oh, I do okay." His face was tanned and rugged, an outdoorsman with purpose in his eyes. "The scrap metal in the circuitry will be valuable, platinum and refined silver, maybe gold or rhodium. We're going to be rich, Simara. You're a skyfall princess from the stars!" He reached for a morsel of meat and placed it on his tongue as he relished the moment.
Simara tilted her shoulders back at Zen's strange notion. A princess? No way. Her skin might be pure from her years in space, but her soul had been bruised and blackened by sin. She carried a scar of betrayal deep inside, a wound still raw with anger.
Simara shook her head and glanced away, pretending to study the cave walls as she considered her situation. She had narrowly escaped death and been dragged underground by a scantily clad aboriginal in the desert. Now they were a team, about to be partners in business, and she had nowhere else to go. She slipped back into the hot spring and drifted with languor for a few more minutes. She could do worse.
"Time to get moving," Zen said. "Our window of opportunity beckons. You sure you're okay?"
"Much better. A little exercise might get the stiffness out of my bones. I'm not used to this heavy gravity."
Zen studied her for a moment, nodding. "Okay, let's go."
The breather turned out to be a full facemask with bug-eye goggles, a monstrosity that made her feel claustrophobic at the very sight. "You've got to be kidding," she said when Zen showed her.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Freenet by Steve Stanton. Copyright © 2016 Steve Stanton. Excerpted by permission of ECW Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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