Turn Back, Travelers

Rust-littered sand crunched under Bethani’s feet as she marched across the barren vista sprawling out ahead of her. Deep red starlight beamed down, stifled only by her thick infrared visor, while the planet’s harsh winds lashed against her legs in an endless attempt to sweep her off her feet. She gazed across the desiccated landscape and sighed, dropping her duffle bag and listlessly looking around for a smooth rock to sit on. The Ink was creeping into her father's agri-patch again and, surprise surprise, Beth was the first to be called to arms. Honestly, she didn't mind that it happened to be her responsibility each and every time, in her books, any time spent away from home was time well spent. What she did mind, though, was her sister getting the keys to their family's only truck just to go out and ‘watch the geysers blow’, leaving poor Beth to make the trip on foot. She sighed and stopped off for a much-needed rest on her journey toward servitude.

Beth took off her boot and gave the foot inside a gentle rub. Bliss. With a gentle shake, a pebble fell from inside her boot and landed with a small puff of dust, like a ship crash landing in a desert. Bethani watched the pebble’s cloud dissipate and lazily contemplated nothing of importance, all the while muttering rallying cries to herself “There’ll be rivers of Ink, whole lakes of the damn stuff. Please, anything to make this walk worthwhile!”

After a few minutes, another sharp lash of wind sent a hail of grit clattering against Bethani's visor, catching her off guard and prompting her to continue the dusty trek. She did feel slightly less fatigued after her rest, but no more enthused. “Responsibilities, they are what they are Beth. If you weren't here, you’d be hauling scrap or pushing papers. At least this way you’re your own boss,” she grumbled in a poor imitation of her father’s voice. It was hard for her to come to terms with her work as she trudged towards it, like a death sentence through the sand and the dirt, but she tried nonetheless. Bethani spared a glance at the spray gun hanging from her belt holster, aimlessly unclipping and re-clipping the gun’s canister, then slotting the whole thing securely back in its place. Up ahead, a chest-high ridge obscured any view of the expanse behind it; she reached up and grasped at its precipice and tried to swing her leg over the top. Following more struggling than the task required, she managed to mount the ridge and throw herself over, still briefly holding onto the edge before she rolled to the bottom of the rocky descent. Bethani rolled towards her final destination, smoothly avoiding rock shards in her tumble and ultimately settling in a slump at the incline’s base. She patted herself off and retrieved the spray gun lying several feet from her position which had detached during her descent, and gave it one final strip-down check.

“Canister secured.”

“Battery connected.”

“Airflow steady.”

With a shrug, it was time to get to work. The buttons along the spray gun’s handle glowed as she triggered its start-up sequence, with a whir the gun spat out a thick blue mist. Her targets, hidden behind the incline, were three mammoth growths of thick black slime flowing from a crack in the low rock-face, and slowly creeping across the land. These viscous streams snaked through the dirt for several metres, but luckily for Beth, they hadn’t yet become unmanageable. To the untrained eye, the living fluid seemed to utterly defy gravity, flowing uphill, pooling at the top of slopes, and drifting with no recognisable tide. The sight wasn’t as exciting to Bethani as it once was, she’d seen it a hundred times before, and knew that she would likely see it a hundred times more. Strong winds blew the mist off course, away from the bleeding crack and back against the rockface, forcing Bethani to arch downwards and angle her gun awkwardly close to what Nuevers called, Ink. The ground trembled as blue vapour condensed across the infesting ichor’s surface, it undulated, sizzled, and finally crystallized to form a solid black crust wherever the chemical landed. “They couldn’t have paid me enough to do this back when it covered the planet,” Beth muttered thinking back to her history lessons with a shudder of her own.

After spraying for around an hour she’d stop for a much-needed rest, then get back to work, and so on for several shifts. She made sure to take these regular breaks because it was far too easy to lose track of time on Orobor, the planet’s star lingers in the sky with almost no rotation, and without a day-night cycle the planet sometimes felt timeless. Moments away from finishing up, an alert came through on her tablet which stopped Beth in her tracks, with little in the way of protestation on her part. Her task was almost finished, after all, and there were only a few meters left to fumigate, so she was more than willing to simply call it a day. The message - sent from an unknown ID - was asking for the location of Nuevos, the first and only settlement on Orobor. Not everyone in the town had tablets these days, but it certainly was unusual for someone who did to still need directions, so Beth paused at the peculiarity of the message for just a moment. Perhaps their tablet had become corrupted, she knew some had gotten so unpredictable that data would just go missing without warning, just like every other automated system in Nuevos, or maybe her tablet was at fault and it was simply one of her friends trying to find their way home. Despite the fact that their tablets only showed the user’s current coordinates now, she knew Nuevos’ by memory, her father had always made sure his girls knew their way around in case of an emergency. Beth reasoned with herself, her workday was over and that she was tired, so she didn’t want to waste any more time with something so trivial than she had to. As quickly as Beth replied to the message she’d forgotten all about it and began packing her equipment away, congratulating herself on a job well done.

The way back to Nuevos was no different to travelling away from it, steep, dusty, and long, but now Bethani was tired and hot and didn’t want another four-mile truckless-walk. The trek felt more like ten miles than four as Bethani dragged her feet the whole way. Mundane as it was, the approach to Los Nuevos Ángeles always seemed to be a comforting one. Beth knew that after a day like today - when she passed through those chain-linked gates to see the kiwi vines growing along every gantry and the gunmetal containers stacked high enough to block out the star - she was due a hearty meal, a long sleep, and maybe even some cider once Carmen went to sleep. This time, however, a feeling of anxiety met her at the gates like a hidden doorman and stalked her through to the district square. Beth noted an unnerving silence in her commute that befell the town, bands of people solemnly gathered on the gantries over-head, and even the quintessential sound of children clattering through the steel town was lost.

At her home’s local square, a large rabble of people - who looked like the majority of its residents - had gathered to gaze at an overhead com-screen. Usually, the screen would be filled with reports from councillors, local weather readings, and other generic data people presumably found useful. Today though, Beth couldn’t just sail past the screen and ignore it. The President of Nuevos was airing a personally recorded impromptu statement for his citizens.

“Today, just twenty minutes ago, we confirmed that a second habitation colony is due to arrive on Orobor. After conferring with my councillors, the only viable action to avoid a repeat of the 195sl disaster is to oppose the fleet’s landing at all costs. We will not be taking appointments at this time, and if any evacuatory procedures are required, you will all be informed post-haste. Thank you, and good luck.” The screen temporarily cut back to its regular spread of reports, returning to the same broadcast five minutes later, only this time drowned out by the crowd’s growing dissent. With panic rising in her chest, Beth didn’t stand idly by to hear the statement repeat.

Before the crowd could grow any more uproarious, the young woman swiftly lugged her equipment home through the filling streets, not stopping for anything or anyone. Bethani unceremoniously barrelled through the front door of her family's home, threw her bags to the floor and charged into the living room. There at the dinner table, her family sat shrouded in tension, trying to calmly talk the situation over with each other.

“They think the fleet’s systems might be automated because they haven't managed to get a reply yet, so the ships will probably be shot down when they enter orbit if they can’t get through in time. You girls know what happened last time a hab-colony arrived like this, the crash almost cost us Nuevos! We can’t afford to lose any more of the city, and we sure as hell can’t lose any more people.” Their father spoke with an almost callous shrug as Bethani and her sister, Carmen, thought about the stories of the 195sl disaster they heard as children. The crash had happened thirty years before Beth had even been born and nearly forty years before Carmen, yet still, their more aged teachers had struggled to relive the ordeal, simply trailing off in conversations and cryptically describing it as a ‘terrible tragedy.’

Their father had raised his daughters well. Both girls had lost their mothers at an early age. He was proud that, despite this, they both had a strong sense of duty and respect. Beth’s little sister had grown into an ardent humanitarian in her formative years, it was rare for a girl of her age to help out in the care homes or the nurseries of Nuevos, but Carmen just couldn’t keep away. Because of this, she was totally absorbed by the severity of her father’s candid predictions. Bethani wanted more out of life; she wanted to run the city; she wanted to explore Orobor; she wanted to go down in the history books! Carmen continued to interrogate her father over the colony and didn’t stop until everything on her mind had been answered. “How many people are on the ships?”; “Why would it land in the middle of town like this?”; “Don't they have things we need; medication; food; equipment?” And so on and so forth. As the minutes turned to hours, their father grew weary of the third degree, he had worked all day just like Bethani and the fleet wasn’t even due until tomorrow, so he turned in. His daughters, on the other hand, stayed up for hours more, talking about all manner of possibilities and eventualities that might occur over the next few days. The pair traded points back and forth, drifting from topic to topic but always circling back to the approaching fleet. Initially, both sisters shared their father's point of view, but as time passed and tensions frayed, their opinions shifted away from his laissez-faire outlook. With her teeth clenched, Carmen passionately put the morality of Nuevos' actions on trial as if she herself was in danger, she even questioned whether the townsfolk deserved to survive at all if the cost of living would mean the loss of hundreds of innocent lives. Beth tried to counter this by explaining to her sister that the ancient settlers came to Orobor to keep humanity alive, and If this new colony threatened the safety of Orobor, they had a duty to defend themselves. In response, her sister would simply reiterate the same points on morality, growing angrier with each objection and barely really registering Beth's words.

"How many deaths Beth, damn it, think of them!" Carmen screamed, her voice raised and her tears falling freely to the table.

Bethani ended the conversation with a fist slammed against their dining room table. She couldn't take much more posturing, she watched her own mother die when she was just a girl, and then Carmen's not long after that, so she knew full well the gravity of the situation. Swiftly copying her father’s retreat, Beth went to her bedroom without another word said. She left Carmen in the infuriated silence she had entered, climbed wearily into her deprivation chamber - the coffin-like box all Nuevers used to block out Orobor’s endless starlight - and effortlessly drifted off.

While she slept, Bethani witnessed a bizarre sight. She was standing in one of her father’s bean patches, spraying swollen figures of Ink as they slowly ambled towards her. Their gurgling noise and jittering movements instilled an impending doom that she rarely felt in the waking world. As one of the freshly crystallized masses shattered before her, she suddenly found herself without warning in a one-woman spacecraft equipped with two noticeably large cannons at the base of each wing. The exterior of the ship shined like polished chrome while its interior was filled with fitted leather upholstery and gold trim running along each edge, all complemented by a fully integrated holographic interface flickering in front of her eyes. The ship's interface spoke to Beth with a synthetic - yet smooth - automated voice: “I require a location, captain, your orbital bombardment has been initiated.”

Upon hearing this request, and without hesitation, Beth waved her hand over a satellite rendition of Nuevos and pointed a finger directly at her district’s square. The dream abruptly ended there, she saw both cannons splutter into life and send a stream of ordinance down to the planet’s surface, destroying everything she called home.

Bethani woke with a start, frightened, groggy, and confused, her dream felt so real as if she had been flying over Nuevos herself. Shaking, she managed to undo her chamber’s latch as the sight of her ship destroying the lives of her friends and family forced its way to the front of her mind. It took her a while to gather the wherewithal to get out, she and Carmen had been up quite late, and what with the vividness of her grim dreams, Beth barely felt as though she could face the day. Slowly, she disembarked the chamber, taking a deep breath as the lid left its housing and sheepishly lifted itself. The deep red starlight burned her eyes each time she awoke, and today was no exception.

She gazed out across her bright bedroom and clambered to her feet. Entering the kitchen, she noticed that the home was completely empty. The others must have gone out to tend the crops, or meet with the local guards, or just to gossip, regardless, Beth embraced some time to herself. She grabbed something nice for breakfast, fruit juice and a refried bean wrap, the pleasure of cooking without interruption turned out to be almost better than the food itself. It was only after her breakfast that she spared another thought for her family, she knew her father would probably be out today, he always seemed to have a hundred tasks to take care of, but Carmen should be here. With everything that was happening, before he went to sleep her father had told them not to worry about the patches today, just in case.

Bethani shrugged and looked around the steel home’s rooms, and at the mess, they had left last night with all the bickering and stress. In a rare moment of charity, she decided to clean the home, and while she was at it she’d pack a little too, to get a head start just in case. The progress was slow, but she worked from room to room, the kitchen, the dining room, and her bedroom, one by one; she impressed herself with the efficiency and attentiveness of her work. Still, her dream plagued her, even after several hours of productivity. Occasionally, Beth would find herself reaching down to pick up a top or a magazine, only to have her dreams resurface and see her hand submerged in that flickering holographic interface, sending her jumping back in shock. Each time her mind wandered, she would give an exaggerated blink in exasperation to try and focus on the task at hand, suffering goosebumps across her arms at the memory of her dream’s realness. The world outside seemed uncharacteristically quiet for most of the morning, even peering out of the window now and then revealed almost no one on the adjacent gantries as they listlessly swayed in the breeze. As she moved in to clean her father's already spotless bedroom, Beth suddenly realised that she hadn’t checked off the equipment last night. The debates had distracted her from the moment she entered the home. The bag and its contents were probably looked over by her father before she had gotten up, but it was worth a check just to make sure it was safe.

Her father had been quite influential in his younger days, he trained as an electrical engineer and rose through the ranks to become the town’s chief technical advisor. When Carmen's mother died, he resigned from his position in favour of a quiet life of farming, all he wanted was to be there for the two of them as they grew. Because of his credentials, their father was one of a handful of citizens licenced to handle the acids used in Ink fumigation around his grounds. Beth moved into the kitchen, grabbed her key from the side and cracked open the small locked cabinet her father used to store their chemicals. From the day the girls each started to work on their agri-patches, the importance of safety was drilled into them daily. As she opened the door her heart began to race, the gun, the canisters, the holster and belt, it was all missing. Like a storm, Bethani scoured the house, though, after all the cleaning she had done, Beth knew that if she hadn’t already seen it, she wasn’t going to.

After much deliberation, worry, and attempts to forget the missing equipment - not to mention the fleet's arrival - Carmen arrived home. Her sister stormed in, just as Beth had done the day before, and sat down at the dining table. To Beth’s surprise, Carmen was carrying their duffel bag full of equipment, which she discarded on the floor as she entered similarly to Beth the night before. A brief silence hung over them. Carmen began to cry and slowly raised her face to Beth.

“I stopped the attack, Beth,” she said with an ambivalent mixture of regret and conviction.

The two women stared at one another for a while, shock preventing any response, before Beth hesitantly asked “What, what does that mean? Why did you have dad’s stuff?”

Carmen dried her pooling tears on the nearest towel, “I looked through some of dad's old manuals, one of the battery relays in the eastern district was labelled ‘orbital defence grid’,” a pause solemnly followed. Beth was already starting to piece together what her sister had done, but she needed her to admit it outright.

“Beth, I melted one of the power lines with dad’s Ink spray, the defences are gone.” She paused once again, a far more drawn-out pause than the last.

Carmen stuttered simply for the sake of carrying on conversation, and for some feeble attempt at damage control, but her sister was already lost to the moment. Bethani's face turned noticeably red - even in Orobor’s starlight - and she struggled to think of what she could possibly say next. To her, it felt as though she’d been punched in the gut and her next breath would be utter agony. Eventually, though, her speechlessness ended with an explosion directed straight at her babbling sister.

“Cut the shit Carmen for a damn second, just let me think! ” she shouted, “Dad’s going to have his patches taken for this, you know that right? Don’t you think they have cameras, don’t you think they’ll find ketrizine on the floor and link it back to him? Or are they just going to ignore what you've done and pretend it’ll be ok?” Carmen stayed silent at the table, tears pouring from her eyes and staining her folded sleeves.

“You better hope that the colony doesn’t arrive because we're fucked, you’ve ruined us!” As they grew up, Carmen never left Beth out of her plans, the two weren’t the closest of sisters but whenever something interesting went down, for a brief time they became inseparable. The feeling of betrayal was unbearable, regardless of the impact, it would have on their father’s position. The two of them sat in silence once again as Beth tried to come up with a solution, occasionally Carmen would argue her point; that rejecting the colony was unconscionable, but her older sibling wasn’t listening to a word she had to say. Bethani ran through countless possible outcomes to what Carmen had done. Once or twice she managed to concede that it might work out in everyone's favour, but more often than not her mind created images of Carmen’s imprisonment or exile, their family’s disgrace and destitution, but more importantly the sight of her father’s total disappointment.

Simultaneously, the two of them received an incoming message, to which they both sullenly checked to see what could be happening now. The broadcast, much like the one seen in the district square the day before, was from their president and released en masse to all Nuevers.

“Citizens of Los Nuevos Angeles. Despite our best efforts, the incoming colony’s trajectory still indicates that they are due to land close to the town centre, and it has been discovered that our standard orbital defensive measures are unresponsive. With this taken into account, it is my unfortunate responsibility to release emergency evacuation orders. Guards will be located at each district square to ensure a safe evacuation. Please leave behind all non-vital possessions and proceed to the nearest evacuation point within the hour, thank you, and good luck.” The message was followed by a list of possessions considered to be vital and a series of local directions. When the message ended, Beth received a similar one from her father telling her to pack a change of clothes for each of them and to meet him at the square in half an hour.

Bethani ordered her sister to pack some clothes while she gathered food supplies and a few sentimental creature comforts to help them all: a picture of her mother, and one of Carmen’s that their father always kept on the mantle, her own diary that she started the day she turned eighteen, a model of an Ink monster Carmen had made ten years ago at school. Once her sister had finished rummaging through all three wardrobes, and Beth had secured the bags for the jaunt to the North, they set off together. Before they entered the throng of people passing back and forth outside, Beth turned and paused at their front door. The young woman took far longer to lock the door than ever before, she lived in this home her entire life, Carmen was raised here, her first kiss was in that living room, all of her memories revolved around it. But soon it could be gone forever.

The two of them headed out into the street. Much like the day before, Nuevos’ streets were packed with people, today, however, they were all either looking up to the sky or running towards one of the evacuation groups. Families lugged swollen backpacks on their shoulders while dragging disgruntled children behind them in all directions. Bethani knew time was of the essence but she couldn’t help but look upwards to see what had grabbed everyone’s attention. There, in the bright red sky, was a constellation of small stars like the flock of paper lanterns released each year on Lander’s day, only looming over them ominously still.

She stared, much like her fellow Nuevers were, for far too long before finally ripping her attention away from them and back to the matter at hand. She lugged her luggage along as Carmen sped on ahead to find their father’s waiting point. Before they reached him, Beth grabbed Carmen’s hand and focused on her with an intimidating look.

“Don’t tell him what you’ve done, do you hear me? With what’s going on it’s the last thing he needs to hear.” Carmen hesitated for a moment leading Beth to grip her shoulders tighter, but finally, her sister nodded without saying a word. They moved on, both of them glancing over their shoulders at nearby guards for fear of being called out, but to their relief, no such accusations came. When they eventually reached the square they saw their father standing there, just as he said he would, deflecting careless passersby as they came close to colliding with him.

Beth noticed a look of fear in his face that she hadn’t seen for years, his eyes were reddened and encircled by dark rings, but the moment his daughters were within arms reach he grabbed them and held them as though he’d never see them again. “They couldn’t deflect the ships, they’re landing and they think it's happening right here. Come on, we have to move, give me the bags.” The old farmer heaved both of his daughters’ bags up onto his shoulders and took hold of Carmen’s hand before bursting into motion. The trio merged with the growing crowd. Their father had offered his truck to a family friend, the couple had to relocate two shaken toddlers and an elderly parent, so it seemed only right for them to make the journey on wheels. He figured he and his daughters were fit and healthy, fit enough to walk a few miles at least.

Beth, Carmen, and their father trudged alongside everyone else in a caravan heading north, covering a couple of miles in around an hour. Their father spent his time fraternizing with their neighbours, trying to cheer up anyone who had taken the news badly and occasionally carrying the bags of tired passers-by. Carmen remained silent, she gave fake smiles to anyone who tried to interact with her but nothing more, her eyes still fixated on nearby guards for fear of arrest, Bethani remained equally silent, but she was trying to be productive by writing down an account of the last few days in her diary, all the while convincing herself that they wouldn't have had time to investigate what Carmen had done. Disturbingly, the incoming fleet could be heard rolling in on the wind, like a distant roaring forest fire, endlessly rumbling overhead. The ships still hadn't begun landing, they just hung in the atmosphere as if they were watching the surface, waiting for their opportunity to descend. The herd of people gradually became more and more anxious, they didn't know exactly when the colony would descend, but they knew it could at any moment.

Over her shoulder, Beth locked onto a couple’s discussion about the sudden move, and the fear they felt for one of their missing children. "I wish we were there already, I haven’t seen Jack for ages. I hope he got the directions alright, I’ll send them again from my tablet, just to be sure.” With this, Beth almost automatically paused on the spot. She didn’t know who Jack was nor where he might be, nor did she really have the time to find out, but the comments his parents made set off a storm of ideas in her mind. "Sending directions… That message asking for coordinates, maybe it wasn’t from anyone on Orobor at all. No one responded, and the tablet didn't even recognise the sender’s ID. Did I give the fleet their landing clearance?"

She did leave the Ink spray without checking it, but surely she couldn't have summoned the colony here that carelessly? Her body fell cold with the implications of what she might have done. A few moments passed as she mulled everything over, her pace had slowed and she had fallen behind her family, her father hadn’t noticed but Carmen had already been looking over her shoulder with interest. Had Beth targeted the city for destruction and her sister destroyed any hope Nuevos had of saving itself? Her family would be labelled terrorists, traitors, and killers for this if they even managed to survive.

In Beth's eyes, there was only one way to make sure, to see if she was truly in touch with the hab-colony. She quickly activated her tablet and retrieved her current coordinates, halfway between Nuevos and the mountainside shelters, and sent them to yesterday’s unknown contact. Several moments of uncertainty passed her by, along with many of her neighbours, but to Beth, it felt more like years. The sound of the Nuevers surrounding her began to dim as they gradually left her behind. The seconds ticked by, leaving Beth so hung in suspense that her eyes couldn't leave the glowing screen, completely missing her sister's nervous approach. Suddenly, a message came through from her unknown contact, one that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand straight. "New landing zone registered. Landing sequence initializing [40 minutes 17 seconds]."

It was all her fault.

Her careless response to that message had doomed her family, and now she had redirected the fleet to the only safe place in all of Orobor. Without warning, the frantic young woman turned heel and ran back through the now thinned crowd, back towards Nuevos. Passers-by gave her concerned and irritated looks, but no one was going to risk their families’ safety or their own lives to stop a random woman from running towards danger.

Carmen tried to call her sister, but Beth ran far too fast in the opposite direction for her to be heard. She stood awash with indecision, to abandon her father or let Beth leave, the choice was clear but far from easy.

It barely took Bethani half an hour to run back to Nuevos, she knew exactly where the colony could land but she needed its coordinates and time was of the essence. Nuevos’ operating systems had degraded over the years, first, the satellite navigation failed, then the interactive maps stopped responding, now Nuevers were forced to rely on plotting out courses and memorizing directions to get around. Tablets did still display their user’s current coordinates on the desktop, however, so a sure-fire way to tell someone where to go was to go there yourself. As she ran, the crowd eventually cleared down to the last few stragglers who, themselves, were running to try to keep up with the caravan, then soon enough she was alone. Overhead, the range of bright lights sat along the horizon, more imposing than they were last time Bethani looked, but now silently drifting over Nuevos like vultures over a corpse.

She entered the town by the same northern gate she had left through nearly two hours ago. Unlike yesterday's homecoming, Beth didn’t take the time to soak in the beauty of its vine-coated gantries and shining container homes, she was there to save those sights, not to savour them. She marched through the town and out towards the southern plains. The landscape there had played victim to the last hab-colony’s arrival, scorched craters, melted earth, and radioactive dead-zones stalked the planet’s surface for miles. As she tentatively approached the hellscape, all the while considering just how devastating the explosions must have been. Ahead of her, a large chain link fence separated her from the only place she could confidently direct the fleet to, and time was growing ever more against her.

Fear gripped Beth as she scaled the sky-high barricade, but she was driven by a desire to save her family and to right their series of wrongs. She vaulted over almost without a hitch, barely scratching her coat on the nails that lined its peak. Beth stepped out onto that dirt strewn plateau, the ground beneath her crunched and shattered, as though she were walking across a desert of ground glass and charcoal. Through her tablet, a device that Bethani was blessed to have kept intact during her scramble, she copied down her own coordinates and sent them to the fleet.

“New landing site [0.232N, 1.446E, 7.884S, 4.661W].”

Her stomach twisted into knots, but she didn't have to wait very long, the response came through in moments. "New landing zone registered. Landing sequence initializing [5 minutes 33 seconds]."

Looking up, she saw ships in the skies over Nuevos rearranging into a new formation. Beth was mesmerized by the ships' motions, flitting back and forth as if they were carried by the wind, so much that she lost track of the few minutes she had to make her escape. When it happened, Beth was given no time to respond, the flock plummeted towards her with the screech of their jets gradually drowning the area in noise. As her heartbeat grew to match the pounding of her running footsteps, she saw a lone figure waiting for her beyond the fence.

Orobor trembled as if a legion of cyclopean monsters were ripping themselves free from the ground around them. High in the sky, beams of light danced in all directions, reflected in the bodies of forty-five ships of all shapes and sizes, gradually lowering themselves down to the planet’s surface. Each vessel projected a thick blue flame from its base, flames that scorched the land, boiled any creeping Ink, and incinerated stray shrubs growing unkempt and wild, they turned everything beneath them to a charred and glistening agate. The plummeting containers’ retro-thrusters blended together to form an ear-shattering chorus and a single rain of fire. They made planetfall like a string of hammers colliding against an anvil, one after the other, throwing the waiting figure to the ground.

Finally, the fleet had arrived.

A sudden, disturbing silence swept over Nuevos, the ground stopped shaking and the whines of straining metal subsided. Even inside the bunkers, infants stopped their frantic wailing and no murmurs could be heard from the huddling townsfolk. Outside, it felt as though a mighty beast had been felled by a barrage of bullets and cannon fire, and now lay prone, waiting to die.

From the southern edge of Nuevos, the lone figure gazed across a no-man's-land between the new, meticulously arranged assortment of habitation containers and her own shanty town wrought from sheet steel and hardened glass.

After chasing her sister back to Nuevos, Carmen had held her breath for what felt like a lifetime, she was forced to hold the fence just to stand up straight, the fear, the thrill, the chaos were all far too overwhelming to withstand. A new settlement had rested exactly where Beth had been standing, but through the smoke and the noise, her sister was nowhere to be seen. In front of her stood the fleet's foremost container, it was large, standing nearly as tall as the highest building in Nuevos and twice as wide. Steam and heat ripples mingled with one another as they danced across the container’s smooth surface, but from inside the imposing box, no signs of life could be heard.

Suddenly, two LED alert beacons on either side of its door burst into fluorescence. Vulgar claxons sounded from some unseen audio device as the door very gently lowered to the ground. Carmen stepped back, even though she was standing well clear of the descending door’s resting place, her mind was too busy reeling with trepidation to think rationally. Once again the air of Orobor was filled with the imposing sound of mechanical function. Each container followed its primary in unison, lowering its doors as one. Metal ground against metal and steam jets formed a forest of vapour stacks. Right before Carmen's eyes, an entire cityscape of structures opened their doors, ready to purge their inhabitants upon the land. Beth was nowhere to be seen, Carmen screamed her name until her throat ran raw, but no one replied. She sank to her knees gasping in fear and desperation as she gazed into the metal box in front of her, at what she and her sister had helped bring to the planet. She marvelled at the very thing her people had intended to destroy, but more importantly, she gazed at the future of Orobor.

End