Orion Colony Complete Series Boxed Set J.N. Chaney (books for new readers .txt) 📖

I looked over to my left, where he intently stared at the ground. We all converged on his spot, minus Stacy, who stayed behind the wheel of the crawler. Ricky stared down at the ground, where a portion of the rocky mountain soil was clear of any debris. Sure enough, a pair of footprints were in the dirt.

They were large, looking like they could have belonged to a man or even Captain Harold himself.

“What do you think happened to them?” Ricky asked.

“I don’t know, but that footprint means they made it this far,” Arun said. She looked up at the Orion, then to either side, searching the area again.

Unlike the previous day, the sky had cleared and the suns gave us a clear line of sight with plenty of illumination.

“Captain Harold?” Arun shouted to the area around us. “Captain Harold, can you hear us?”

No one responded.

“Perhaps we should see if we can follow the prints,” Tong suggested. Iris had been right. His English was nearly perfect now. “With so much debris, it will be difficult, but perhaps we can pick them up again.”

“It’s the best lead we’ve got,” I agreed, following the trajectory the prints were headed.

We continued, finding a print here or there for the next fifty meters before I stumbled on a book in the debris. It wasn’t the book itself that caught my eye, but rather the dried blood on its cover.

I knelt down to examine it and confirm it wasn’t something else, but there was no denying the substance was blood.  There was more of it splattered on the ground near the book. I was sure of it now. Being a gladiator, I’d gotten to see my fair share of the stuff.

“I don’t think there is any doubt they were here and something went wrong,” Arun said as she, Ricky, and Tong peered over my shoulder.

“What did you find?” Stacy asked over the comms.

“Dried blood,” I answered. “A lot of it.”

“Where the heck did they go?” Ricky asked. “What happened to them?”

Something Tong said in passing hit me like a ton of bricks.

“Tong, what did you call these mountains?” I asked him. “When we brought them up for you to see on the map. You had a name for them.”

“The Mountains of Death,” Tong said. “However, they earned that name for the bloody conflicts my people had with the Rung here during the Blood War. There shouldn’t be anything vicious enough to take out a group of your kind. The only creatures that could pose a threat are the werelions, but they travel alone and would not dare confront a group.”

“Ahead of you.” Stacy’s voice sounded dry in disbelief. “Look up.”

I knew something was wrong by the way she said the words. Stacy was a leader like Arun and Elon, not easily shaken.

I looked back at her through the windshield of the crawler. Wide-eyed, she pointed with a finger to the ceiling. I looked up, following her gaze. Hanging from the underside of the Orion were bodies.

15

The corpses were definitely human colonists. Each one was hung upside down by their feet, swaying gently in the wind. They were grouped together in a tight circle. It was easy to miss them amongst the debris hanging off the Orion. There were cords, doors, wires, and everything else you could imagine hanging from the ceiling above us.

They also had to be four or five stories overhead. The moment stretched on as we all fought to comprehend what our eyes were telling us. They were too far to see exact details, but it was easy to tell they weren’t moving.

“We must go. We must go now,” Tong said. He wasn’t looking at the ceiling above us anymore; he was searching the mountainside all around us for anything that moved. His eyes darted this way and that in paranoia. “I was wrong. I do not know how they know, but I was wrong. We must go now. Please, we must go now.”

“Who?” Arun asked. “Who were you wrong about? Are they here now?”

“The Rung, the faction of Remboshi who worshiped technology and broke off from my kind.” Tong pointed a finger to the bodies hanging overhead. “This is how they claim their territory. This is what they do to their enemies. Somehow they must have found a way to hide from or fight off Legion. They are here.”

While Tong spoke about the Rung, I examined our area for the hundredth time. Still nothing. The mountainside we were on sloped steadily upward to our right. To the left, it went down before the next mountain began its own upward ascent.

“Well, I think we have our answer as to what happened to Captain Harold’s group,” Ricky said under his breath. “We should cut them down. It doesn’t feel right leaving them like that.”

“How did they even get them up there to begin with?” Stacy asked.

“We should go. We should go now,” Tong said.

“You said the Rung created Legion to kill your kind, but then the virus became self-aware and tried to overtake everyone,” I said, looking to Tong for his thoughts.

“Yes, yes, that’s right,” Tong said, nodding. “We could not defeat Legion. The Remboshi went into hyper-sleep to wait for a time when the Dawn would come. I awoke when you arrived.”

“Can we assume the Rung did the same thing?” Arun wondered out loud. “Perhaps they too went to sleep. When the Orion crashed, it triggered them to wake as well.”

“It is possible.” Tong wrung his hands together. “Please, we must go now. The Rung possess weapons of great power. If they are here in these mountains, they will be back soon.”

I looked over to Arun. The Eternal caught my eye. I knew we were thinking the same thing.

“I don’t like leaving them here either, but it’ll takes hours to scale that thing and cut them down,” I said.

“The communication section of the Orion was destroyed in the crash as well,” Arun said. “I can be sure of that