Judas Unchained

“Get back here,” he told Orion. As soon as the boy was back holding on to the raft, Ozzie fired a flare, deliberately angling it to the side of the flock. Without gravity holding it back, the brilliant red star flew an impressive distance before dwindling away. The Silfen flock seemed oblivious to it. Ozzie cursed under his breath. “All right then, if that’s the way it’s gotta be.” He pointed the second flare tube right at the flock and fired. This time the dazzling point of light almost reached the edge of the flock before it burned out.

“They had to have seen that!” Orion said. “They just had to.”

“Yeah,” Ozzie said. “You’d think.” But the Silfen showed no sign of changing direction.

“Fire another one,” Orion said.

“No,” Ozzie said. “They saw it. They know we’re here.”

“No they don’t, they haven’t come to help.” The boy’s voice was whiny from desperation. “They’d come and help if they saw us. I know they would. They’re my friends.”

“I’ve only got a couple more flares left. It’d be a waste.”

“Ozzie!”

“Nothing we can do, kid. They’re not interested. If there’s one thing I do know about the Silfen, you can’t force them to do anything.”

“They have to help us,” Orion said forlornly.

Ozzie stared after the flock as it soared along its twisty course away from the Pathfinder. “I wonder what’s so important they’ve got to go see,” he muttered to himself. Even with his inserts on full magnification he couldn’t see anything significant in the direction they were heading. There had to be something fairly close, surely? Not even a Silfen could survive indefinitely without food and water. Or maybe they hunted the avian creatures who lived in the gas halo.

He looked at the brokenhearted boy, then at Tochee. The big alien didn’t have body language the way humans did, but something in its still posture was universal. Their friend was as dejected and worried as he was.

“Now what?” Orion asked.

Ozzie wished he could find an answer.

Ten hours after the flock had vanished into the blue haze of the atmosphere Ozzie knew he was going to have to do something about getting them to one of the particles floating in the gas halo, even if it was only one of the hefty sponge trees. Orion had withdrawn into a massive sulk, although Ozzie knew damn well that was just a cloak for the boy’s anxiety. Tochee, though, remained his main cause for concern. The alien was in noticeably poor physical shape, with the color leeching out of its furry fronds, while the manipulator flesh along its flanks twitched constantly. Freefall really didn’t agree with the big creature. Ozzie knew it hadn’t eaten for over a day, and he was still pleading for it to drink something.

He allowed himself to drift away from the decking, and began scanning around for any large object. He’d had a few ideas about altering their course by a couple of degrees; he was actually keen to see if they worked in practice. Mainly it involved trailing the sail on the end of a rope, and using it like a very flexible rudder, with himself out there keeping it oriented in the right direction. The conditions were just about right, a gentle constant breeze that shouldn’t present too much trouble keeping the sail pointing correctly.

“What are you looking for?” Orion asked; he sounded very tired.

“Anything that’s out there, dude. We need to start making some progress.”

“Do you think we can?”

The hopelessness in the boy’s voice made Ozzie tug on his safety robe and drift back down to the ramshackle raft. “Hey, course we can. We just need some fresh resources, is all. This falling off the end of the world thing kinda caught us by surprise, huh?”

Orion nodded sheepishly.

“The trees will have plenty of water. And they probably have eatable fruit. We can use the leaves and wood to turn the old Pathfinder into something that can fly a lot better. Trust me. I’ve been in worse situations than this.”

The boy gave him a surprised look, then slowly smiled. “No you haven’t!”

“Don’t you believe it. I was on Akreos when its sun went into its cold expansion phase. Nobody had ever seen anything like that before. None of the astronomers had a clue what was going on. Man, that planet’s climate went downhill so fast it was amazing. It was like living inside an old Hollywood disaster movie. I’d got a family there, married some English girl called Annabelle; she was the same kind of age as me, or maybe older, rejuved a couple of times, of course. She was famous back on Earth even before I was. Can’t remember what for, must have dumped that memory. Real pretty, though, with a hell of a figure. You’d have loved her.