The Sins of Our Fathers by Corey James S. A

Author:Corey, James S. A. [S. A. COREY, JAMES]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

“We found them.”

“Who?” Jackson said.

“The big fuckers. The monsters,” Cameron said. He was practically hopping up and down with excitement.

Jackson made eye contact with Filip in a way that meant Can you keep the work going while I deal with this? Filip wiped the sweat off his forehead and nodded in a way that meant he could.

Jackson stood with a grunt. The food production unit they’d started taking apart yesterday, they were putting back together today. The racks that had been emptied of cylinders were almost half full now, and half of the remounts had power. It was slower putting together than it had been taking apart. Filip felt like that was true for a lot of things.

“So what are you talking about?” Jackson asked.

“Muhammed Klein? Fat Muhammed, not the one with the bent nose? He put chemical sensors on the survey drones. The reason we couldn’t track them before is that there’s another species that follows them. Little bird-things that eat the grubs and stuff that the big fuckers churn up. It’s like they’re sweeping away the tracks. Only the tracks are outgassing trace ammonia where they dig down to hibernate or whatever. So we found them.”

Filip took one of the capacitors, a flat red box a little larger than his hand, and triple-checked the charge status before he fit it into the base of a cylinder. His attention was on Cameron. The big bastards’ tracks were giving off trace ammonia. Like a freshly scrubbed toilet. Filip realized they’d had an early-warning system all along.

Jackson spat on the ground. “Where are they?”

“Everywhere. North of here. South of here. All over the valley.”

Filip and Jackson shared a look. “I can’t finish it all, but I can get it to a good stopping place,” Filip said. “I mean if you want to go see about working on the defenses.”

“Better should,” Jackson said.

“Yeah.”

Jackson smoothed their hands on the fronts of their thighs like they were wiping the palms clean, then walked off with Cameron toward the science labs. Filip hoisted the next cylinder into place, steadying it with one hand while he fixed the bolts to hold it. It was a little unwieldy without another pair of hands to help, but it wasn’t bad. At a full g, it would have been impossible.

All around the town, people were doing similar work. The false start at moving left everything half broken down. Or half put together. Depended on how you looked at it. The sky had taken on an almost emerald green. To the west, pure white clouds billowed up so high, they seemed like they’d reach orbit. Filip didn’t like looking at them. He’d gotten to where living without the safety of a ship didn’t panic him, but something about the cloud banks made the scale of planetary life harder to ignore. It was odd, the way that living in an emptiness infinitely vaster than the distance between him and even the tallest cloud could feel comfortable if there was a thin bubble of metal around him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.