Falling Forward by Judy Colella (crime books to read txt) 📕

Fear. Desperation. Impatience. Exercise. The four main reasons people run. Not the only reasons, but the main ones. The siblings, hand-in-hand, were running for two of those four. Overhead, the cloud-dark sky of late afternoon trembled with the roar of engines. Behind them, the trees shook with the approach of powerful, single-rider machines zipping and slipping between mossy trunks. Beneath them, the ground vibrated with the roar of larger vehicles catching up with the faster ones in an inexorable roll. Ahead – hope.

“Almost there, Dia.”

The girl nodded, unable to speak, needing her breath to fuel screaming muscles. She wondered if her brother was feeling the same level of pain and fatigue.

Several yards more, the path dodging forest plants as if itself in flight, and then. Then. The ridge. No more ground beneath them, only a steep fall. At the bottom, their ship waited. No time to second-guess, no time to hesitate, no possibility of turning back. They’d practiced this descent many times, but never at such a speed. Still, their bodies knew how to react and thereby keep them alive.

Having taken a single step past the edge, they’d leaned back against the face of the cliff into its dirt-covered surface, and slid down, down, down the insane distance, the friction slowing them enough that when they reached the bottom, their shin bones didn’t telescope into their thighs, thigh bones into chest cavities, killing them. Instead, they had exactly enough time to push away from the wall and fall forward, landing safely on their stomachs. Winded, bruised, their backs raw, but otherwise they were safe.

The ship stood ten or so paces ahead, its gleaming shell covered with netting that had been coated in moss and branches, effectively disguising it from overhead view.

“Can you run?”

“Yes, Kyva.” No more than a harsh whisper.

He nodded, gave his sister a quick, encouraging grin, and pushed to his feet. “Then run!”

The dash to the side of the ship seemed endless, but they made it, made it inside, made it to the controls, before something outside exploded almost too close to the right side.

“Ahead first?” asked Dia, aware that if they rose straight up, their poor little vessel would be an instant target.

Kyva, his face grim, nodded and tapped several parts of the control screen with practiced fingers. He didn’t even have to look at his hands. So instead, he concentrated on what was outside the main window – forest, yes, but not for long. Too many of the trees were being reduced to their basic molecules as the pursuers attempted to clear out any possibility of cover.

The ship moved, although some might not think that an apt description. Jumped, perhaps, or shifted from where it was to where it shouldn’t be in such a short time. Behind them, the explosions continued for another few seconds, then stopped. Any moment now, and – yes. As the two pilots knew they would, their pursuers had realized the prey had left them behind, and would increase the range of their weapons to catch up with the ship.

“Prepare,” Kyva said, teeth clenched. He tapped out another pattern on the dark screen, and as it sparked green and blue beneath his hands, the ship lurched forward in a blur, then spun one hundred and eighty degrees left, shot ahead again, repeated this, and finally, its engines giving a sound that could only be described as a sigh, rose into the air.

“Kyva – ”

“I see them.” One more pattern of taps, this time followed by Dia pushing something with her right foot.

Gone. The planet was no longer beneath them. Their pursuers were nowhere. Instead, they were surrounded by a profound darkness pierced with an uncountable number of lights – tiny, huge, clouds of them, clouds of something else.

“Do we have a heading?”

Kyva nodded and told her.

“Really? Where will that eventually take us?”

“I have no idea, but it hardly matters.”

“True. Laying in course.”

The spacescape changed, the difference immediate and rather startling. They’d gone farther, but only a few times, so it still filled them with the wonder and joy of new things.

“Speed?”

“The Wormhole Cross isn’t that far. We may as well get there sooner than later.”

She agreed. “Any idea which one we’re supposed to use?”

“I do. Uncle Velz told me it would bring us to a place we’d like, and where we’d be safe.”

Dia snorted. “How would he know if it was safe?”

“I asked him the same thing.” He chuckled. “Told me that as far as he knew, no one else had ever gone that way.”

And how did Uncle Velz know that? she wondered. “Well, all right. Let’s check it.”

“Hang on, little sister – not yet.”

“Stop that.” But she smiled. She was only three minutes younger. Her brother got a kick out of those three minutes. She thought he was silly to be that taken by the difference, so it always made her smile when he called her “little sister.” Crazy boy.

“I need to make sure the fuel wasn’t compromised in any way. Traveling through a wormhole is dangerous enough.” He was referring to the way a stalled ship would be torn apart within the depths of the phenomenon.

The panel showed him the tanks were full, but he knew better than to trust that. When he returned from the back of the ship, he looked satisfied.

“Set?”

“Set.”

The Cross was no more than a series of holes in space – massive holes, their configuration vaguely resembling a drunken-looking cross. When they reached it, Kyva pointed the nose of their ship toward one of the lower ones, the smallest of them, which meant only about two hundred planets the size of their home world could fit into its diameter.

“Think we’ll ever come back?”

Kyva looked at her, surprised at how forlorn she’d sounded. “I honestly don’t know. Maybe. We’ll see.”

“Okay.”

After making a few adjustments to the ship’s shields and life-support systems, Kyva sat straighter, took a deep breath, and tapped in the coordinates needed to get them through.

In a blink, the ship had left the part of space where it had been built, the part of space where its pilots had been born, the only part of space familiar to any of them, both literally and figuratively.

Two blinks later, Kyva, Dia, and their diamond-shaped silver-blue ship were beyond the far side of the wormhole, heading for a planet buried deep in the gorgeous spiral galaxy dead ahead.

Home? For now. Maybe.

Atmosphere around a planet has always been – for those approaching one from space – a good and welcome sight. Shields preventing a ship from burning up as it shot through said atmosphere have also been considered good. What was beneath the atmosphere, however, was always of greatest importance to the traveler. None of this was of any less true for Kyva and Dia. Sad to say, however, their delight at finding a planet with life-readings in greater abundance than their instruments could fully record, was both intense and short-lived.

“What two problems, Kyva? I only see one – that the air might be a bit too rich for us, at least at first.”

“Here.” He tapped a different quadrant on the control display and it popped up on hers.

“Oh.” She had totally missed this, mainly because she hadn’t been looking for it. “Great. No technology. Not here, at least. But maybe elsewhere on the planet?”

He shook his head. “Checked.”

“Now what?”

“Now we find a place to land and – uh-oh.”

Before he could explain that last remark, the ship pitched sideways, nearly throwing both pilots from their seats.

“Kyva! What’s hap- ”

This time, it turned completely upside down and they did fall, landing hard on the ceiling. Before they could recover, the ship righted itself, and now they were thudding onto the controls. The ship executed a nose-dive, sending the siblings sliding into the front view-port. Had it not been for the still-active shielding, the ship would have been destroyed when, a moment later, it crashed through the top of a forest and buried more than half its length into the ground below.

In the ensuing silence, neither of the two so much as breathed. Eventually, nature took over and they did, but the sound was harsh, unsteady.

“Are you okay?” Kyva asked, his voice pitched absurdly high.

“Uh, yes. I think so. You?”

During the earlier part of their flight, they’d treated the burning scrapes on each others’ backs and changed into fresh, undamaged outfits from the ship’s lockers. Now, they began checking to see if there were any new damages.

A few minutes later, after examining his sister for broken bones and cuts, Kyva sat back on his heels – as well as he could in the tilted control room – and told her she was fine.

“Good. Your turn.” She repeated the exam on him, and was relieved to find that aside from a purplish bruise here and there, he, too, was unscathed. “Now what do we do? How do we get the ship out?”

“No idea. Maybe we should concentrate on getting ourselves out of the ship.”

“But the air, Kyva! It really isn’t very breathable.”

“For short periods it should be fine. We have to see how bad this is.”

Dia got to her feet, steadied herself, and climbed toward the door, using Kyva’s chair and the control desk for support. “I don’t suppose we could just use the breathers?”

She was referring to the devices that fit over the lower part of their faces that would afford them safe, abundant air when either under water or in the vacuum of space. Kyva thought about this, but shook his head a moment later. “I think we should save those for emergencies. In the meantime, we need to adapt to this atmosphere. I have a feeling we’re going to be here a while.” He’d reached the door, too, by this time, and when it wouldn’t open with the controls, he took out his repair tool and blasted the handle.

The air that rushed in was warm, fragrant in a way that made them both dizzy within seconds, but somehow pleasant despite its rather soupy nature.

“This…isn’t so…so bad.” Dia gripped the side of the open door and stared around at the colors. “It isn’t too…different…from our forests. Brighter…maybe.”

Panting, Kyva didn’t bother to respond. Instead, he jumped down, landing on the soft dirt, unable to do anything while he struggled to catch his breath.

Dia joined him then, and pointed up at the sky. Or what they could see of it through the dense canopy of leaves. “Blue,” she whispered. “Like ours…used…to be.”

Despite his breathing difficulties, her brother smiled, squinting upward. The skies of their world had once been a similar color, perhaps somewhat deeper, but nothing like the dull, twilight green it had become soon after he and Dia had been born. He’d seen pictures of the blue sky, but had been too young to keep the memory of its real counterpart. Now he could understand the regret he’d often heard in the voices of the elders when they spoke of their technological decisions that had eaten up that blue, replacing it with ugliness that got no better even when storm-clouds covered it. In fact,