Cathedrals of Glass: A Planet of Blood and Ice by A.J. Hartley

Author:A.J. Hartley [Hartley, A.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: To The Stars..
Published: 2017-02-20T11:00:00+00:00

17

I SCOURED THE SHIP FOR ANYTHING WE MIGHT USE—extra blankets, lamps, food—but there was surprisingly little to be found. Either they had built a camp somewhere else or they had been even less prepared for survival on the planet than we had been, and died shortly after arriving. It was possible that they hadn’t been killed here at all, that they had died and then were loaded into the transport, but there was no blood, no sign of a struggle.

The boy wasn’t the only one who had been shot. I saw three other bodies with the same holes, two more with head wounds that might have been caused by rocks, and three with gashes that might have been done by claws, but looked more like knife wounds. I couldn’t be sure, but an awful possibility lodged in my gut like a blade.

They had done this to each other.

The thought made my heart thump and my skin crawl, my brain imagining their last, horror-stricken moments and projecting them onto the underside of my eyelids.

I said no more about it to Carlann and, to force my mind into the present, started examining the ship. I made only one useful discovery. As on the Phetteron, the ship had a computer station in the hold. It didn’t give access to all the ship’s systems, but through it I could access the nav log.

The story it told was eerily familiar. The Hynderon had left Home twelve years ago bound, according to its initial trajectory, for Jerem and—I was guessing—the reeducation facility there. But not long after breaking Home’s atmosphere, the ship’s course had altered. There was no sign of an incident that had disrupted the vessel’s functions, no catastrophic collision, no unscheduled rendezvous in which the ship’s heading had been accidentally reset. The ship just changed course and made for Valkrys, where it braved the asteroid field and landed. The comm system broadcast an SOS for several weeks before the ship powered down, though whether that was some automatic protocol or was done by someone on board, I had no way of knowing.

What I did know was that the nav sensor screen showed incoming signals as well as outgoing ones. Now that it had been reactivated, it was picking up a periodic blip: not from off-world, but from a broadcast being made close to our current location.

The Phetteron.

It had to be. Sevin had set the ship to send out an emergency pulse in the hope that a rescue vessel would detect us.

So the good news was that if I was reading the frozen gray monitor screen correctly, the Phetteron was only two miles to our north. We would have to be alert for predators, and we couldn’t keep the signal with us. We’d just have to use the information from the nav screen to give us to get our bearings and then hope we could keep true to course till we reached our ship.

Carlann had, predictably, mixed feelings about the news: delight that our separation

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