Chapter Two: Echo

The little fishing village lay in a pitch-black valley of snow and wind. Round yurts huddled together in twos and threes under blankets of snow. The paths from one group of huts to another were disguised by outcroppings of snow-drifted rock, and the clustered brambles of tube worm trees. No visible light escaped and so, in the darkness of a storm, a desperate traveler might pass within a dozen meters of them, and never know they were there.

Inside the double-layered walls, electric hearths gave a pale red glow to the people working on fishing nets, playing games, or sharing cups of tea and telling stories in hushed voices. Storms were a good time to cozy in, get a bit a handiwork done, and talk with friends. The people of Kerguelen didn’t go outside during storms if it could be avoided.

Zeroe sat quietly by the hearth, reading a book. But she wasn’t just reading it. Books were rare enough, and it was nearly unheard of among her people for an individual to own one. They were mostly kept in the dusty libraries in cities like Geoduck or Petra. But this was Zeroe’s book. With the mangled cover, and the torn pages, and the scorch marks on one corner, it was her book. She kept it in the leather case Pika had made for her. She’d read it a hundred times, from the publishing information on the first page through the notes about the author at the end, and even the list of other works by the author, all a mystery beyond her reach. She spent hours looking at the picture on the cover, feeling the pages beneath her fingers, and even smelling the paper. But most of all, she picked up the book again and again to gaze at the handwritten inscription on the inside cover. “To my Little Beloved, may you find all the joy between these pages that I have, and so much more. All my Love, Simon.”

She had just turned a yellowed page, her eyes not yet focused on that first word, when something startled her, a sound growing quickly out of the storm. Even with the storm muffling the sound, the scream of jet engines tore the sky in half above the little fishing village. The jet was flying low. Inside the snow-covered yurts, most eyes looked toward the sky, as if they could see through the hides and through the storm to the source of the agonizing sound. Most eyes. But Tenten Mai looked at Zeroe instead. He wanted to see her reaction.

“You know that sound?” he asked her.

Zeroe did not speak, but nodded slowly, looking up into the middle distance, listening. Some of the others were looking back at her now, just as curious about her reaction, as they were about the jet flying so low overhead. The small hearth in the center of the room did little more than highlight their gray faces in the dark. Their white eyes seemed to float in the gloom, considering her.

“Is it landing, or crashing, do you think?” someone asked from the gloom. “It is definitely crashing,” said Pika, looking up from her leatherwork. “I remember that sound too.”

The gray faces and white eyes watched Zeroe even more closely. She rose from her seat by the hearth, carefully putting away her book, and headed over toward the entryway. “I’m going to check it out.”

“The storm hasn’t lifted,” Tenten said, listening the sound of the wind outside. “If you choose to go out, you will be alone. I won’t send anyone until the winds lift.”

“If any of them survive the crash, the Harii will find them as soon as the storm is over. They’ll be killed. You know there are already owls scouting this area looking for me, and the otters will move quickly once word gets around,” she said, pulling on her tall boots over her brown leather pants.

Tenten nodded gravely. “As soon as the gale subsides, I’ll send a hunting party to track you.”

“Tenten, you can’t let her go alone!” said a young man from the corner.

Tenten’s big shoulders turned in the gloom to regard the young man with a dark, but kind face, “I don’t think even I could stop her, Raimi. Would you care to try?”

“That’s… that’s not what I meant,” he stammered, looking back and forth between Tenten’s eyes, and Zeroe’s figure near the door. “I’ll go with her” he managed, standing up.

“No you won’t, Raimi” Zeroe smiled. “I have a price on my head, and the Harii might find the crash site the same time I do. They would kill you just for being with me. If you come with Tenten’s hunting party, you can claim you were just hunting, and you didn’t even know I was there.”

“Zeroe,” Tenten grinned at her, “try not to break the truce if you can help it.”

She gave him a smile and a nod, pulled on her mask, and stepped through the entryway. Her heavy overcoat hung with all the other gear in the outer shell of the double-layered yurt. She shouldered her pack, tucked her pistol inside her coat, and picked up her long-riffle. Finally, she pushed her way between the overlapping door flaps and into the stormy night.

The wind was blowing from the Southwest, cold and full of ice. Which, on Kerguelen, was another way of saying it was the middle of Waxing. Every 400 hours, Twilight raced in its orbit past Caliban, the gas giant, and in the waxing phase, the rising tides churned up snowstorms.

Zeroe made her way the to dogs’ yurt to talk to her team. She hoped she could convince Morrigan to go with her. The old bitch could be very stubborn, but then, that’s probably why they usually got along so well. Dogs weren’t housed in a separate tent out of any desire on the part of their more humanoid companions. They simply had a culture and habits of their own that they didn’t like making excuses for. Morrigan wasn’t much for excuses either.

Zeroe could hear pups yelping playfully when she moved into the entryway, but the adults were silent. “Zuroh! Zuroh!” the pups yapped, proud that they knew who was coming. She walked past the sleds and stepped through the inner flap to receive their greeting jumps and nuzzles, nearly knocking her over with the force of their enthusiasm. They were also almost as tall as her waist, even on all fours. The huge adults, bulky, layered in fur and a healthy amount of fat, lay in their dens arranged around the central hearth in the middle of the room.

They weren’t just dogs, of course, like the pets on Ancient Earth, or that some Twilighters still kept. These creatures were made and bread for the night side. Mostly dog, hand picked genes, but a little bear too; some wolf, some raccoon, and just enough hominid to enlarge the cerebellum and give it a voice box. The biologically constructed opus of a long dead geneticist, they were one of his living and breeding legacies to Kerguelan. And the dogs were proud of their heritage. They were made for this land.

Morrigan regarded her without surprise from a far corner of the room. She made her way, by their custom, around the room, allowing any who wished to greet her, smell her, while she bared her neck. When she finally made it to Morrigan’s den the old she-wolf simply asked in her gruff voice, “Out in the storm then?”

The dogs had heard the jet as well, of course, and they never saw the point of reviewing the obvious.

“I have to see. I have to know,” Zeroe tried to stick to their Spartan phrases.

“Huff! Huff, huff,” Morrigan laughed. “Need to stay warm. Need food. Need to stay clear of the Harii. Need to have pups. You want to see the Twilighters, even if they are just meat and bones. But you won’t eat them. They don’t know you. Humans always confuse need and want.”

It was a long-winded speech, even for Morrigan. Zeroe bared her neck again, conceding the point. “Will you go with me?” she asked.

“Huff. A warm, well fed dog with a dead master has no honor.” She nodded to the other two members of the team, and they all made their way out to ready the sled, greeting the other dogs as they went.

Harroh and Logan worked silently over the sled, laying out the harnesses and strapping themselves in. They never questioned one of Morrigan’s decisions. The tribal leaders declared Dogs free during the revolt, but the dogs themselves never made much of an issue of it. Ill-use angered them, but they treasured good and loyal service. Morrigan had refused hunts when the larders were full, and refused expeditions she felt frivolous, but she considered herself bound to Zeroe, and she wouldn’t let her go into the storm alone if Zeroe was determined to go.

They slipped out of the village in the hissing snow and into the remains of the storm. At the crest of the first hill, Zeroe focused on the ocular interface in her mask, and started cycling through the spectrum. The heat signature of the crashed jet was easy to pick out. Easy for owls and otters too, she thought with resignation. If I’m lucky there won’t be more than a small patrol in the area.

They were close to the border of the empire, and the jet had gone down somewhere on the North side of the Looking Glass. The fishing grounds were considered neutral, but that meant patrols wandered through merely as a show of force. She sighed with resignation and gave Morrigan the heading. They could probably reach the crash site in an hour or two.