Drifters by Carmen Webster Buxton

Author:Carmen Webster Buxton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, YA
Publisher: Snowy Wings Publishing
Published: 2020-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

Shortly after breakfast the next morning, Jehan trudged along with Yakov and a large crowd of Drifters to a site slightly less than a kilometer from where the caravan had set down. Small hillocks and rocky mounds dotted the landscape, making the going slow. Now that the capsules his Aunt Asha had given him had taken effect, Jehan’s back didn’t bother him much, as long as he didn’t move too quickly.

The other walkers were his age or a little younger. His eldest girl cousin, Gemma, who was talking with a few friends as she walked, looked to be the youngest person present. The twenty adults assigned to the exploration team had gone ahead on speeders.

“So,” Jehan said when they arrived at the area where the Drifters had set up their equipment, “what makes everyone think there’s anything worth exploring here?”

“I don’t know,” Yakov said. “Ask your dad. He’s right over there.”

Jehan looked where Yakov had pointed and saw Isra deep in conversation with a tall, thin man, a decade or so younger, who seemed excited about something. “He looks busy.”

“Yeah!” Yakov said. “Sim’s all worked up over something. This place must be a really hot prospect.”

His cousin spoke with more enthusiasm than Jehan had ever heard him from him, and his exhilaration infected Jehan. Maybe he would see something he couldn’t have seen in New Hope. “Have you ever watched them explore one of these old cities?”

“Sure. But they aren’t cities, really. Some of them have been just a single building. Other times there’s a complex of five or six buildings grouped together, or sometimes three or four but spread out a bit.”

This didn’t sound promising. “So, what have they been like so far?”

Yakov shrugged. “Just buried rooms, mostly. Sim thinks what we’ve found so far has just been basements, that whatever was above ground didn’t survive at all.”

Jehan’s exhilaration ebbed. Basements didn’t sound exciting at all. “Why does he think that?”

“Well,” Yakov said with a grin, “to be blunt, we haven’t found any sign of plumbing. It’s hard to imagine beings that didn’t drink water or expel wastes.”

“Do we know anything about them?”

Yakov shook his head. “Not much. We call them natives, but for all we know, they were colonists, just like us. Najat thinks so, because otherwise there’d be more traces of them. All we know for sure is, they seem to have been about our size. We can walk through their doors with no trouble.”

It wasn’t much to go on as far as picturing aliens in his mind. Jehan felt a sense of frustration. It shouldn’t be this hard to find out about prior residents of Menkar VII. “What about furniture?”

His cousin held up his hands in a gesture of futility. “Nothing we’ve found looked like chairs or tables to us.”

Vaguer and vaguer. Jehan suffered a spasm of alarm that the whole expedition could be for nothing. “Dad told me we found a cutting tool, and some kind of cube things that played music. Were they scattered on the floor or anything?”

“Nope.

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