Sanctuary Thrive by Ginger Booth

Author:Ginger Booth [Booth, Ginger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-04-07T22:00:00+00:00

31

Husna Zales was indeed out of range to overhear as Remi disconnected with Sass, riding away from him with lustrous black waves of hair streaming and fluttering behind her. Born on an airless moon considerably below freezing, then living the remainder of his life in space, Remi didn’t understand when she chose to forgo sealing her hood to let her hair fly free.

Now it looked enticing. The orange sunset glinted on her steel mount and suit, too, and made the whole barren landscape glow in a way that Sagamore’s bluish stone never did. The wild alkali tang of the lake seeped around his mask a little.

His own steed still ‘walked’ at 2 on the speed dial. Its steps grew jarring at level 3, and even more so at ‘canter.’ The contraption used a different foot sequence for each setting on the gait dial. Some of the higher settings, like ‘gallop,’ seemed to require a speed higher than he’d yet risked.

Remi feared he was not being manly enough at his sedate pace. Though he doubted Husna would be impressed by him falling off. He shrugged, and tried a speed of 4. The horse auto-corrected to that dratted canter again, scampering up the low ridge and bashing him in the butt. He tried standing a little in stirrups, but that just battered him harder on the rough terrain.

Husna stopped at the crest to wait for him, clearly laughing. He’d never seen her laugh before. Damn, she was pretty. “A lake!” She pointed triumphantly downhill to the crusty-edged expanse, quicksilver touched with gold, the far end so distant that the lake appeared to merge with the sky.

Remi didn’t mention that he knew all along where the lake was. He piloted the ship to park here, after all. He looked back to Thrive automatically, below and about a klick away, battered and collecting yellow dust. Shadow began to reach for it from another rise. From here, the ship looked small and battered, ridiculously inadequate for crossing the vastness of interstellar space.

“Hurry, while we still have the light!” Husna cried, and suited action to words. Her horse sprang down the hill.

She had a point. Remi reluctantly sped up, until she somersaulted off her horse ahead of him. When he reached her, he dismounted and offered her a hand.

“I’m fine, just got the wind knocked out of me,” she insisted, brushing yellow dust from her pressure suit. She slid a boot across some rock beside her. The stone looked smoother and more organic somehow than the terrain they’d already covered. “Carbonate deposits. Like a stalactite.”

“I don’t know this,” Remi excused, kneeling to pet the rock. Tinted pink, it vaguely reminded him of yellowed teeth and gum disease rendered in stone. “Is it useful?” At a guess, the rock was too soft to make a good kitchen counter, and bore little ore content.

“No,” Husna replied. “The horse slipped on it. The rest of the way, this rock dominates and makes footing treacherous. Probably deposited as spray from the lake during storms.

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.