The Second Storm
---
Nat was seven years old, but she was very important.
In the morning, she checked the nestboxes for eggs. Then she made sure that the fuel cells on Uncle Kert’s veto were topped up. After that, she helped her older sister cook breakfast for the whole clan, brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts and cousins. And she fed Jules, who was just a baby. Sometimes Ma even helped, but she was too sick to walk most days.
Their homestead was always filled with noise and clutter. Like most people, their relatives and closest friends all built their houses close by. For reasons Nat was too young to understand, they had joined most of their dwellings together into one larger structure. To her, though, growing up in a sprawling compound of brick and timber with dozens of people was just the way things had always been. Every now and then, when Nat was supposed to be asleep, the men would start shouting and someone would leave and not come back, like her older brother Lev. That made her sad. But she was usually happy, as plenty of little kids like her were always laughing and running around. And they had a beautiful garden.
The kitchen table was made of wood that had come from the lowland forests far away. She remembered how her father and brothers split the logs and planed them, and how her sisters sanded and glossed the wood. She also remembered that her Pa handed her the paint can, telling her to be careful in his slow, measured voice. Her eyes big, she had taken the paintbrush in her small hand and nodded. She painted the whole table dark green, the color of their clan. And she didn’t stop until it was all done. When it was finished her father favored her with one of his rare smiles, and Nat felt proud enough to burst.
When they weren’t out working, her brothers were usually hunched over the battered old family tablet, studying some boring thing called ‘agri-science files,’ or at least that was what they said. Sometimes she saw them laughing over it, but they wouldn’t let her see. She hated that.
Pa’s land title hung over the family generator in the middle of the sleeping room. It had a shiny bar code and embossed seal, and it was signed by the Territory Surveyor. “This is our five hundred acres,” Pa would always say, pointing to the seal. “Neither gods nor elders are ever going to take that away.” Nat supposed that she agreed. After all, if she went away, who would walk Tim-Tom and give him water, or leave a bowl of milk for Nina and her kittens?
Given that Nat was seven, and a big girl, she was able to do one other very important thing. This season had had very little rain, so she walked out of their homestead built along the mountainside, down the long winding path to the valley below, across the burbling stream, and then followed the wooden watercourse her Pa built to take water from the stream to the far field. There, she took her bucket and filled it up at the pool, and she dripped a small splash of water onto each of the seedlings, just the way Pa taught her. Doing this job for him made her very proud.
Nat was a loud child, but she liked the quiet too, and Lys was high and half-full in the amber skies as she walked, the flaxen cousin of bright orange Buxe. A few tiny sparkwasps with luminescent blue tails hummed and wandered past the bright green stalks, and she resisted the urge to chase them.
But when she was only halfway done with her watering the winds started to rise, and Nat coughed a little. Whipping her head around, she stared at the horizon. The clouds were all wrong. This wasn’t a good storm. This was one of the bad storms that hurt people and made them choke. Her mother had made her memorize the difference when she was very small. The masks were on pegs right next to the door, and she knew she should have brought one with her. But she hated the way the straps chafed against her face. This was bad, very bad. Dropping her bucket, she ran.
Nat ran for home as fast as her little legs would take her, braids fluttering in the rising wind. She felt a little knot of fear in her chest grow as it became harder and harder to breathe. When the clouds blotted out Buxe, she was barely across the bridge over the stream, with a long mountain path between her and home. Though she felt the tears welling up in her eyes, Nat willed herself not to cry, pressing a sleeve over her nose. She could make it. She wanted to call out for help, but suddenly she couldn’t find the air. She coughed again, and her vision started to get fuzzy. Then she stumbled, sending a shower of tiny pebbles bouncing down the mountainside.
Nat’s last thought before she lost consciousness was how disappointed her father would be with her.
---
A small caravan of vetos hummed loudly as they crested a ridge, sending birds flying in fear as they hovered over an eerie burned forest. Kia Common stared down at the devastated landscape below. Some small saplings were pushing through the ash, she observed. In another decade, this would be woodland again.
“And you’re sure there are settlements out here?” said Kia. “There’s nothing marked on my map for klicks.”
“Well, General Common, we’ve already hit most of the big towns by Lake Sivat, but you wanted to talk to the clans that were off the grid. Takes a while to get off the grid.”
“As long as you know where we’re going,” she said.
Her guide projected the regional topographical map of the Ruins Range on the right side of their veto’s windshield, zooming down from the continental view to locate their region, the caravan moving slowly across it as a small circular icon. “The main settler bands migrated here…and around here. They send outriders to trade with the towns for medical supplies and fuel but everything else they do themselves.”
“You’re pretty well-informed,” she said, slightly impressed.
The man was a frazzled old local surveyor, potbellied with a bushy beard and a wide-brimmed hat, the kind of man who treated everyone about the same, which Kia loved. “Picked up some book learning at the university to get my certification. Just hope they don’t mistake us for Commodores. Fleet men coming up here got shot up pretty bad.”
The terrain had grown progressively more rugged and began to brown out.
“The drought’s been hard here, huh,” said Kia.
“Well, most clans make do. It’s the acid storms that are worse than the heat…I’m no expert on storms, but they seem to get much worse this side of the mountains.” The stinging rain and choking clouds of nitrogen and sulfur particulates that rolled in from the Cursed Lands every season were the bane of countless settlers.
In the past couple months the Provisioner-General had been sending out emissaries to even the most isolated and hostile clans about the coming constitutional assembly. While she couldn’t speak to every clan herself, she was already sick of sitting behind a desk, dictating from on high like a Commodore. Naturally distrustful of faceless authority, many clans appreciated the personal touch. She also enjoyed shirking the hard decisions that came with ruling the planet, at least for a little. It was taking its toll on her.
“This land is beautiful, but wounded,” said Kia softly, staring out towards the horizon.
Her guide rumbled assent. “I once knew a Mernt shaman who spoke like you, General. No disrespect, he was a holy man.”
“None taken. What’s your name, Surveyor?”
“Happenstance Midrange. But my friends call me Hap.”
“I like you, Hap. Your GPS program’s better than the one that my government runs, you know.”
Hap rolled his eyes, as if it was really surprising the average Standard could do something better than his government. “Well, that’s cause I coded it myself, ma’am…but I’ll gladly transfer you the program if my office gets more funding.” He winked, wincing slightly as she elbowed him in the ribs.
She stared at the screen, pulling up the layer for land subdivisions. Their icon was moving from a grey ‘Unincorporated’ into a patch of dark green.
“Hmm,” Kia said. “What’s this now?”
“Ah, this is Everyman land. Clan Everyman’s a good sort. The usual staples and cash crops, though they also do artisan carpentry and some decent chemical treatments. Most clans in the region use their corrosion-resistant shingles.”
“Mm, shingles,” she said, obviously bored, and staring at the horizon. But then she perked up. “Is that…”
Hap put the veto on auto-pilot and activated the meteorological layer of his surveying program. “Fraid so, General. And it’s a big one.” Kia had never seen an acid storm that big. It was slightly terrifying, to be honest.
“Hap, these aren’t local vetos, are they?”
He tapped the leather armrest. “Something this posh is definitely from Larsilla, General. And I’m thinking what you’re thinking. The metal won’t hold up well if we get caught in that storm.”
“Clan Everyman, then.”
“We’re minutes away.”
They radioed instructions to the escort vetos filled with guards, and they quickly turned for where Hap had marked the local clan’s headquarters. Kia was just hoping that Clan Everyman was in a hospitable enough mood to let them cram their vetos into their clan’s garage.
A small green plain covered in crops came into view, watered by one of the upland streams that she supposed fed Lake Sivat, sandwiched between two massive peaks of the Ruins Range. It was land both fertile and defensible…and she figured it would have been beautiful, too, if not for the thick wave of yellowish sulfurous clouds rapidly bearing down on their position.
“Masks on,” Kia ordered over the comm.
They could see distinct signs of habitation now, the weathervane of the brick-domed clan homestead protruding from the side of the mountain, along with some small irrigation works. Kia peered downwards, narrowing her eyes further before a sharp intake of breath. What she thought might have been a strange rock or a trail marker…no, it was moving.
“Sages, there’s a KID down there! Hap, take us down!” He quickly worked the controls to lower their altitude, their escorts hovering confusedly while waiting for orders.
“I can’t land it, the slope’s too steep!” he shouted as he struggled to control their descent against the rising wind gusts.
“Just hold it here!” Kia had already been pulling a tether cord from her belt pouch, tying it around a metal loop inside the veto. Popping the hatch, she tossed the tether down, hastily attached it to a belt loop of hers with an auto-carabiner that would slow her descent, and jumped out as the wind whipped her hair right into her eyes. Grimly satisfied that she hadn’t forgotten her special forces training, her boots hit ground in seconds. She mentally cursed not having time to set up the auto-lift to haul her back in the ship.
They had stored extra masks but they didn’t have that kind of time. She gulped a deep breath of air and pulled off her breath mask, exposing her face to the elements. Immediately her eyes stung and her throat itched, but she ignored it, attaching the mask to the child’s face and increasing the flow of oxygenated air to maximum. Kia pressed two fingers to the child’s neck. Vitals were weak, but there.
Hap had kept the craft steady despite the buffeting winds. She had to work fast or she’d be out of breath too. Cutting off the bottom length of elastic tether with her knife, she tied the waist of the child to her own. Then came the hard part. Kia gruelingly hauled herself up the line as it swayed back and forth in the storm, carrying her own weight and the weight of the girl, unable to breathe, knowing a gasp would fill her lungs with poison. The minor augmentations of an ex-space marine gave her the extra oxygen capacity that would have made this task impossible for a baseline. After a solid minute of pure hell, she hauled them both back into the veto and sliced the tether lines.
Hap sealed the hatch door shut as she collapsed onto the floor, desperately gasping lungfuls of oxygen. “That was pretty reckless General, playing hero like that.”
She shot him a look colder than the depths of space. Placing the child in his lap, she closed her eyes, breathing deeply. “Let’s find the parents,” she finally said when her brain was working again.
“Ah…General, I don’t think that will be necessary.”
She stared at the party of heavily armed settlers in gas masks rushing down the mountainside.
---
Ace Everyman was not a happy father.
“Provisioner-General? Oh sure, and I’m the Sixth Sage. I don’t care what clan you’re from or what you want, but you’ll give me my Nat back or I swear I’ll kill everyone you’ve ever loved.”
“No, really. This is Kia Common. I run the planet.”
“You don’t run sh*t!”
“Look, calm down, I saved your girl and you can have her back. Just give us a place to land.”
“Give me one reason to trust you, Common.”
A few seconds of crackling static, then a new voice came onto the comm.
“Ace? This is Hap Midrange. The General’s alright, son. Just put down the guns and let’s talk peaceable.”
“Surveyor Hap? Well I’ll be. Okay, we’ve got a cave a quarter-kilo south of the homestead where we keep the vetos. But if I see one single weapon, everybody dies. You hear me?”
“Sure thing, Ace. We’re fully disarmed.”
“Better be.”
Ten minutes later, the settlers and Kia’s escorts warily eyed each other across the cave. With two dozen guns trained on her head, the Provisioner-General walked forward and handed the now-sleeping girl to her father. “She was caught out without a mask,” Kia said. “I got to her in time. She’ll be weak for a day or two, but we’ll give you medicine.”
Seeing his little girl in his arms once more, the suspicion and anger that had covered the rugged face of Ace Everyman slowly melted away. He brushed her hair back with a finger.
“Thank you, Common. I…would have been out of my mind with grief.”
She clapped a hand on his shoulder, smiling. “Sometimes us government types can do something decent, I guess. We also brought you some new fuel rods for your vetos.”
Everyman tilted his head to the side. “No catch?”
“Only one. Tell your neighbors we’re forming a government, and we want a rep from each clan to tell us how it should be done.”
A new realization dawned behind his eyes. “You’re…not with the Fleet, are you?”
At that, she laughed heartily. “No. No, I am not.”
“Well, in that case, can I offer you a drink?”
Kia pretended to think it over, and then grinned. “Sure can.”
