The Dregs of Empire: A Tale of the Sun Eater by Christopher Ruocchio

Author:Christopher Ruocchio [Ruocchio, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PH Media
Published: 2023-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

THE COLD

The sledge had no navigational computer, no uplink to the planet’s positioning satellite grid—only a simple compass. At Lorian’s urging, Daru had pointed the sledge almost due west, that being the direction in which the scrap fields were said to have their end. If the Outborn lived anywhere, it was in the tundra beyond, the thousands of miles of endless nothing that was most of the prison planet. For as widely spread apart as the camps were, they were but the barest footholds. The oil fields and scrapyards accounted for the smallest fraction of the planet’s surface.

Mankind had barely trodden upon Belusha. Most of the icy world had never seen the tramp of boot or felt the bite of shovel or mattock.

“You’re sure we’re going the right way?” the boy asked.

His voice had roused Lorian from dreaming, from a dull and foggy sleep. His head throbbed, whole body ached. There had been painkillers in the sledge’s console—Lorian guessed they had belonged to Dadan himself as such things were very rare. They barely helped, and time and again Lorian had to force himself to breathe deeply through his mask, knowing that not to do so was to risk infection in his lungs.

“I’m not . . . sure there is a right way,” Lorian said. “I’m hoping they’ll . . . find us.”

“Hoping?” Daru turned to look at him, still driving the sledge perhaps four cubits above the windswept surface. They were in no danger of colliding with anything—there was nothing but rolling hills all round, save where here or there the thrust of some black rock appeared from beneath the blanket of virgin snow.

Had the boy just realized there was no plan?

“An unguarded salvage sledge, out here by itself?” Lorian said. “If they’re out here, they’ll come running.”

“But how fast?” Daru asked. “Faster than the Marties can pick up our transponder?”

“I told you,” Lorian said, looking at the mutilated console in front of his seat, where a nest of glass wires hung from the open panel, “I bypassed the transponder.”

“You’re sure?”

“You can stop and rip out the antenna yourself if you want,” Lorian said, rolling against the window at his left. He did not have the energy to argue with the younger man—hardly had any energy at all.

Daru, if anything, seemed to feed off that lack of energy, to grow stronger, more frantic in the vacuum made by Lorian’s uncharacteristic lack of personality. “We don’t have a lot of food, man.”

The boy had found a half-eaten case of ration bars under the cabin’s back seat, concealed beneath a glossy quarto whose pages depicted images of young men dressed in women’s underwear.

“Don’t worry about the food,” Lorian said. There were perhaps a dozen ration bars, enough to stave off starvation for the better part of a week. “We’ll run out of power first.”

Both men had hooked their suits up to the charge ports in the sledge at the first opportunity. The suits were more energy-efficient than the sledge itself, and less power-hungry.

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