The Galaxy, and the Ground Within Becky Chambers (books to read to get smarter .txt) 📖

fair, even if she didn’t like it. His house, after all.

‘Why do Humans—’ Tupo stopped talking with a jolt. Xyr eyes grew huge.

‘Bite your tongue?’ Pei asked. The talkbox had delivered the question teasingly, but as soon as the words left it, Pei realised the kid wasn’t looking at her. Xe was looking up.

‘What’s that?’ Tupo shouted.

Pei followed Tupo’s gaze, and turned toward the horizon. Her cheeks flooded with colour, her blood with adrenaline.

‘Captain Tem, what—’

‘Stay here,’ she said, getting quickly to her feet. ‘I’m gonna—’

‘What is it?!’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. Her first instinct was to reach for her gun, but of course, she didn’t have it. She took a step forward, in between Tupo and the sight that was making xyr freak out, trying to understand what she was seeing.

Far above the dome, way up at the edge of the sky, something in the atmosphere was burning.

SPEAKER

Looking upward in a mech suit was difficult. The cockpit window allowed Speaker some degree of peripheral vision, but swinging her view properly up required manoeuvring the suit so that it would tip her seated body backward. She wouldn’t have thought to do this if she hadn’t glanced up from the engine compatibility specs she’d been reading and seen the aliens in the garden pointing and shouting.

Speaker hurried the suit out of the shed and tipped the torso so she could see. Gaseous white streaks now criss-crossed the sky. Clouds, was her first thought, followed quickly by the realisation that Gora didn’t have atmosphere enough to get clouds. This fact was confirmed as one of the streaks’ edges shifted from billowing white to the unmistakable colour of flame. Another like it appeared elsewhere, then another, and another, an ever-growing chorus of far-away fires in free fall.

Heavy as the suit was, it could run pretty quickly.

‘What’s going on?’ she called as she ran to the others. The words exited the vox on the outside of her suit, but were lost in the din of everyone else yelling things of the same nature.

‘What’s happening?’ the Quelin cried.

The Aeluon came running over with the Laru child close by her side. ‘Mom!’ the youngster said, rushing toward Ouloo.

‘Does the planet have emergency comms?’ the Aeluon demanded.

Tupo wove xyrself under and through Ouloo’s legs. ‘Mom, what is it?’

‘Some kind of alert system?’ the Aeluon said.

‘I – I—’ Ouloo stared at the sky in shock, her mouth open and eyes wide.

‘There’s so many,’ the Quelin said. ‘Could it— oh, shit.’

A large explosion joined the fray – silent at this distance, but stomach-twisting all the same. Tumbling debris scattered from it, mere flecks in the sky, deceptively small. Something big was breaking into pieces, and it wasn’t the only thing up there doing so.

Everyone reacted in their own manner: the Aeluon turned red as gore, the Laru’s fur fluffed, the Quelin threw each of his upper legs out to the side. Speaker sat motionless in her cockpit, every muscle tense, one thought piercing through the dozen tangled questions racing through her own head and in the voices of everyone around her.

Tracker was up there.

The Aeluon took charge. She moved decisively to Ouloo, looked her in the eye, and said, ‘Where’s your sib tower?’

Ouloo gulped air and pointed a paw down one of the paths.

The Aeluon ran.

Speaker followed her.

The ansible tower wasn’t far, and Speaker caught up quickly, arriving just a few steps behind. The Aeluon opened the manual access panel, pulled her scrib free of its belt holster, and looked around, searching for something not present. Her cheeks speckled purple with frustration.

Speaker understood; the Aeluon didn’t have the tower’s wireless access code, and therefore needed to plug her scrib directly into it. Speaker dug the suit’s hands through the storage compartments attached to its midsection and retrieved a standard intermix cable. ‘Will this work?’ she said, extending the cable forward.

The Aeluon looked up with obvious surprise, as though she were only now registering Speaker’s presence. ‘Uh, I think so,’ she said, grabbing the cable with her long silver fingers. She held both it and the scrib up, inspecting port and jack. ‘Yeah, yeah, that’ll work.’ She made the connections, giving Speaker a brief glance as she did so. ‘Thanks.’

Ouloo hurried up behind them, having seemingly pulled herself together. ‘Try the emergency beacon network,’ she said. ‘The channel is 333-A.’ Her child was nearly attached to her side, and the Quelin was close behind.

A broad streak of flame tore across the morning sky, and Speaker felt as though her heart would burst from her chest. She had to get out of there. She had to get to Tracker. Whatever was happening, she and her sister needed to get away from it, now.

The Aeluon gestured at the scrib’s screen. It responded to her command, displaying a dizzying stream of polychromatic flashes. This had meaning to the Aeluon, assuredly, but Speaker winced at the sight, unable to look directly at it. The Aeluon gestured again, and said aloud, ‘Disable colour translation. Enable Klip audio playback.’

The scrib obeyed; a voice emerged. ‘—advising everyone to stay calm as we assess the situation.’

‘I can’t stay calm if you don’t tell me what the situation is,’ the Quelin huffed.

‘Quiet,’ the Aeluon said.

The Quelin’s frills bristled at that.

The emergency broadcast continued. ‘—refrain from calling emergency channels unless you are in actual need of assistance. We are aware of the situation and will have more information once we have properly assessed the—’ A burst of static cut the voice off. ‘—is ongoing – don’t – halt all launch – for the time—’

‘I just had this tower serviced,’ Ouloo said frantically. ‘I don’t understand; it should be working.’

‘It’s not the tower,’ Tupo said. Speaker turned the suit toward the child. Tupo was craning xyr neck out from under xyr mother’s legs to face the sky. Xe still clung to Ouloo, but xyr voice possessed the calm of a person who’d come to a terrible conclusion. ‘Look.’

The adults all looked.

The sky was nearly choked with smoke by now,