Ohre (Heaven's Edge) Read online

  Ohre

  A Heaven’s Edge Novella

  By

  Jennifer Silverwood

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2013 Jennifer Silverwood

  Edited By

  Jessica Augustsson

  Cover Designed By

  Najla Qamber(http://najlaqamberdesigns.blogspot.com/)

  License Notes

  All rights reserved including the right to produce this novella and or portions of it without specific permission from the author. This novella is a work of fiction, all names, characters, incidents and places are purely fictitious. Deep within the uncharted reaches of a science fiction universe that should be fairly obvious.

  Table of Contents

  I-Rebuild

  II-Descend

  III-Atone

  IV-Return

  V-Divide

  VI-Accord

  VII-Relinquish

  VIII-Dive

  Dedication

  Connect with the Author

  I

  Rebuild

  The first time I saw Qeya was the moment my life began. I wasn’t supposed to be on third deck that day, when she came to watch the miners cook and avoid the Royals. I learned after this that she often did that, came to sit with her mealtime bowl and watched us work. It seemed strange to see so much wisdom and sorrow on a face so young.

  Living in the eternal darkness of the lower decks I had heard rumors about the Royal family. We all knew it was because of them we were stuck on Datura 3, forever sailing the stars without a port of call. Yes, there was plenty to mine and every pirate ship we came across paid us thousands for our goods. For some below it was the dream life, far better than scrapping it in the deep cave wastes on home world. But I hadn’t spent all my days on a miner ship. I still remembered the smell of salty sea air and the glow of the undersea palaces at night.

  As a boy I slipped out of the slums, past the guard and into that sea to catch a glimpse of it. Something the Royals didn’t know—or had chosen to forget—was that we all came from the sea. The underwater caverns opened up inside the abandoned palaces. I spent at least a hundred nights exploring these forbidden places. I saw the inner chambers of their temples and lost caverns filled with Royal treasures, things my land-dwelling cousins cared little for. Countless times I nearly lost my life, but the sea meant true freedom for me.

  Somewhere down the ages we forgot that; we simply dismissed the memory of our first homes. Few lived below the waves now, save the wild ones we didn’t speak of—old clans that it was said had never surfaced. When I was a boy I dreamt of joining them, but Old Brien said that was just crazy water-logging talk. Ever since the Land Wars that lasted the better part of an age and in which my kind lost their chance to rule the world above, we stuck to what we did best: mining the core. “And that’s all you’ll ever be good for, boy,” Brien would say. “Just remember that next time you go risking your neck below.”

  When I had more fool than sense, I used to argue with him. “But we were great once, weren’t we, Brien? We could be great again!” I meant it too. When the palaces grew wearisome, I slipped back to the water. The Royals could never go as deep as us, had forgotten how to breathe when the water pressed you so hard your mind saw new colors. That was when I learned the hidden truth not even Old Brien wanted to remember. My people had come first.

  “Are you just going to stare at the blowing sea all day or will you pick up a blasting shovel and help me?” Adi’s harsh voice cut me from my reverie and brought me back to the present.

  Like all miners, Adi was hairless save a thick fringe of eyelashes only the females had. Though she was smaller than me, she was swarthier than a Royal and by our standards beautiful. Her tattoos were similar to mine, of the same jagged lines beginning over her scalp and covering her face and neck, but they were lined with blue chole dust. Chole was very rare and in our journey we had only gathered a single vial of the precious mineral. Adi had chosen to tattoo herself with it because she was the miner who discovered it.

  Adi wasn’t like me. She had been born and raised in the heavens above, on this very ship we were salvaging, in fact. Even though she’d been chosen to join the Pioneer crew as their chief tactician in dealing with hostile worlds, her heart had remained on Datura 3. A part of her had died the day it was blown to bits. As terrifying an experience as it had been for those of us on board, Adi had watched from the surface of Nukvar. Half of her blood family had been on that ship.

  So while I had agreed it better to return to the caves where we could at least be close to the sea, Adi was the one pushing me to rebuild. “We are just as smart as Old Brien or any of them ever was, Ohre!” she had exclaimed. While I doubted we could manage to haul the abandoned shuttle from its watery grave, she was annoyingly confident.

  Gritting my teeth, I fought the urge to hurl up the fish we had caught and cooked for breakfast. The stench from the pile of mangled bodies waiting behind me was overwhelming to our overdeveloped sense of smell.

  For the better part of the day, Adi and I split our work in half. She dug the trench needed to bury our dead from the Datura 3, and I brought the bodies out of the deck onto the white sand. This is how we learned no living creatures lived in the sand bar lining the mountains and sea. Nothing had entered the wreckage through the hole I blasted free after the crash, leaving the bodies stinking but intact.

  Some miners would have gladly taken my job, spat on the grave and said good riddance to the Royal scabs. Others would have set the whole ruined deck on fire and never flinched from what they considered duty. My opinion lay somewhere between that thin line of hate and honor toward those who had shaped my life.

  Most of the bodies were nearly a third of my size. On this world they didn’t decay as quickly as we had expected. It wasn’t the expressions of terror frozen on their faces that troubled me, but the gills on the sides of their necks, blackened with death, open in desperation to breathe the water in. Even in the end, our bodies tried to return to our first home, the sea. For a moment I wondered if we should throw them into the alien ocean. An old legend said when we were returned to the sea we became the water and began a new and better life. If I knew the bodies would keep in these waters I would have done it.

  But if we had any hope of salvaging the technology from second deck, we had no other choice. Ever since the Royals won the wars, they claimed it as their new birthright. That meant abandoning older traditions like burning instead of anchoring them to the ocean floor. At least we could handle the work without the burden of burying our families. Qeya would have pretended to stomach it, while secretly dying on the inside. That was her way, burying her woes until I had to come and pick her spirits back up again.

  With blood-streaked hands I picked up another child and dumped him into Adi’s deep trench. All of my kind had hated the Royals, save those pampered few who worked for them in the palaces. Now that we were so far removed from home world, things had changed. Even Adi’s sharply featured, lovely face contorted in sorrow as she continued to dig. I watched as she wiped the sweat off her gray skin.

  Soon as we finished here and scrapped the parts we needed from deck two, we would search for the Pioneer. According to Adi it was still lodged deep in the shallows of the ocean. I was curious to see what this new sea had to offer. Qeya had been reluctant to leave the valley, even though she promised to come and help us. “They all count on me, Ohre,” she had said. True as this might be, I still wanted to kill her sense of duty. I wanted to slap her awake to our new reality, keep her by my side always. I wanted to make her understand we weren’t on Datura anymore. But she was so determined to help her family adapt to this new world, and that meant she wasn’t going to leave with us, even if we did mana
ge to get the shuttle running again. So it was better for me to keep away from her, now that she had her mate back. Even so, I still wasn’t sure about what I’d do if I saw her again. I would be lying if I told you I wasn’t helping Adi to keep my mind off of things, off her, the Royal I had stupidly fallen in love with.

  “That be the last of them,” Adi said after heaving the final body into the pit. Keeping her face in a controlled mask of indifference, she turned to their nearby fire pit and lifted a stick. Facing me again, her eyes shone, betraying the mix of her emotions. I understood her without a single word spoken. We had been raised to believe we were inferior to the Royals. And the generation before us acted as though it were true. Perhaps it was because every time our people tried to change things, tried to be better or rise up against the Royals’ strict rule over our everyday lives, we lost.

  Before we left Datura, and before the invasion and Royals’ betrayal, it was like they had finally beaten down our will. Even Old Brien was deferent to the Royals, to the point of letting them commandeer his ship. Living together all those years afterward changed things. Now that we’d lived so close to them, the elders saw less and less of their strengths and more of their deficiencies. But by then, we’d spent far too long on the losing side. A part of us would always hate them for besting us with their mind powers and speed, just as they would always fear us and our strength.

  Nukvar was different, I believed, or foolishly hoped. Before, an alliance between Royals and us where they weren’t in total control wouldn’t have been allowed. But ever since I saved Qeya’s life and was forced to keep the other brats alive, I felt the bad blood thin. We needed each other to survive now, and the only kind of blood we shed was to save each other.

  I was the one to ignite the blaze. We used the liquid fuel that had been contaminated by the alien atmosphere to make the flames leap highest. Adjusting my gauntlet to a lower setting, I squeezed my thumb into my palm and watched the sparks fly. Fire rose above our heads, so close I could see the black core melt into orange and yellow again. I relished in the heat. My people could handle the coldest of seas and worlds, go places the Royals never could. But we remembered the caves we lived in beneath the waves, and how heat from the core could boil so hot as to wear away skin.

  In the heart of the engine and processing rooms of our ships, we had learned to thrive in such heat, to crave it.

  With the night came the sounds of creatures that preyed on the other side of the high mountain wall nearby. The Royal children had been unprepared for the beasts and their hungers. We miners prepared for everything. I didn’t want to help them. If I could have stolen her away from them, I would have. If she had been the only one to survive, I would have sacrificed them all. But like I said before, I wasn’t showing my genius by falling in love with her.

  “How could you choose them over your own kind?” Adi said, interrupting my thoughts.

  I glanced at her from the corner of my eye and grimaced. Her rage was still on the surface. I suppressed the urge to slug her in the face to knock her grief away. Before passing judgment, know that our females carried just as much punch as males. To hold back from our true feelings would have been an insult to them. And we weren’t going to survive if she didn’t let go of the past. In many ways she was just as trapped in the old ways as Qeya. Problem was, Adi had a knack of getting under my gills in the worst of ways.

  “They enslaved our people, Ohre. They have always treated us like bilge scum, took over the one thing we had left and made it theirs. That’s what they do, make promises and break them. They promise to give but all they do is take!” Her fingers twitched towards the emitter resting in its holster against her hip. This tool had many uses and like most of our inventions, made for a slinging weapon.

  “She came below, Adi, to fourth deck. What was I supposed to do, let her burn up too?” The very thought of her red hair burning in those flames was enough to make my gills stretch and my inner eyelids rapidly blink.

  “Aye!” Adie growled, twisting to face me. She might have stood a head lower but she was no less formidable when angered. It took every ounce of control I claimed when she grabbed me by the helmet hook on the collar of my biosuit and pulled me to her eyelevel. “A true miner would have rather burned than help them! But you, you filsh-loving loon…” She released me with enough force, I might have tumbled into the fire were I weaker. “I saw the way you look at her, Ohre. You may have fooled yourself into thinking you cared, but you and I know she hasn’t the bully to handle you. We don’t mix with them because they’re not like us.

  “And soon as we find the Pioneer, we’ll find another ship to mine. But we won’t sail the heavens blind no more. No, we’ll gather the other refugees, unite the old clans and take back what be ours…” She broke at the end, choked by the water leaking from her eyes. Only females of our kind could shed water, for reasons we had forgotten.

  I breathed the smoke in deeply and tried to picture that life, the revolution we had all been itching for, ever since they were betrayed by one of their own kind and the alliance invaded home world. All I could see when I opened my eyes was a mane of bright red hair and mismatched golden eyes that glowed in the darkness. I blinked and frowned. “Qeya,” I breathed.

  “What?” Adi lifted her head and trained her ferocity on me. “You’re still talking about her? Why can’t you get her out of your water-logged head?”

  I couldn’t look away, however, from the figure standing on the opposite side of our death pit. I shook my head and pointed. “No, she be here with us.”

  Adi’s form rippled as she gathered her control into a mask to hide her hatred behind. She would simmer down later, I knew. All of her clan had whispered she spent too much time on the Pioneer with the Royals. Her talk came from guilt as much as ingrained prejudice, I think. Because she had taken every chance she could to keep off Datura 3 and less with the ones that raised her.

  Qeya was dressed in the same orange biosuit that Adi’s clan had designed. There were subtle changes about her, though. Fresh lines had given her large mismatched eyes and full lips more depth. She had grown into the role she was born to play. With the memories of her ancestors tumbling about in her head, she was instantly older and more naïve than I would ever be.

  “Come to mourn your dead, have you, Orona?” Adi spat with false frigidity.

  Qeya froze and tucked her bottom lip between her teeth. That action alone was enough to make me squeeze my fists and fight the instinct to claim her in some way. I wanted her even more, even after she had chosen him. Anyone with a brain could see the strength her fragility was hiding inside. To the others, Qeya had become more than their leader, because instead of grieving, she used it to hone her strength. Trouble was, she was like a boiler filled with too much gas. One of these days she was bound to build up too much pressure and blow.

  Her eyes flicked to mine and she lifted her chin, as if remembering herself. Her voice rang clearly, cultured and proper like all Royals. “I needed to say goodbye,” she said, answering Adi’s wrath.

  I flinched when she shifted and seemed to be standing at the center of the flames. I moved to stand beside her, unable to shake the awful images from my head.

  What would have happened if she hadn’t come looking for me?

  Adi huffed and pulled her emitter from her belt. “I’m going to have a look at those power cells.” My eyes followed her as she went inside the shipwreck. I knew she was going to watch the slides of home world again, too. Below decks, we had never been allowed to see the frames taken from home. When Adi and I came to burn and salvage, those glitched slides were the first thing to greet us.

  Qeya stepped into my line of vision, blocking my view of the ship. Her skin glowed in the firelight as she crossed her arms over her chest. “I did not mean to send her away.”

  I smirked and closed the remaining distance between us, so our arms brushed together and I could pretend Adi wasn’t right about us. Pretend that it didn’t affect me to touch her be
cause I was stronger than she believed, than any of them knew. “She blames herself for what happened on the ship; thinks if she had been there she would have sensed it sooner.”

  Qeya frowned and my smile grew with her confusion. “How could any of you have sensed what those aliens would do?”

  “Old Brien had the same gift. Adi was the daughter of his firstborn. Some is just born with the knack for seeing trouble afore it happens. Brien told me the gift was more common when they still lived in the sea. Mining on land changed that, he believed.”

  She nodded and though she didn’t realize, leaned slightly closer to me when she answered, “It’s like that for us, too. We didn’t want the miners to know our gifts had weakened so greatly in the last three generations. We only had enough in the Royal family to stop the last miner uprising…” She paused and pressed her fingers to her gills as her voice wavered. “Sorry, these memories are hard to control for me sometimes. Usually we have more time to prepare for our ascension.” She breathed in and out deeply, so even her gills fluttered. And then she said, “No one really remembers where the gifts came from, but our legends say we were strong enough to stop the bottom dwellers’ strength and even make the core seep into the sea to destroy their homes.”

  I sucked in a sharp breath and grimaced before pushing an unwanted memory away. “So is that why you pale gills work so hard to learn the scythe.”

  “Outside of the ten greatest families, the gifts had faded to nothing better than moving small objects with their minds. My brother and I, the other children that were on Datura 3, we were the last to show any promise. Our parents never told us this. We learned after their deaths when their memories fell to us.”

  We both turned our heads at the sound of metal crashing into metal inside the ruined deck. Adi’s voice echoed the cacophony. “Steam wirms!” Neither of us tried to hide our grins. But I could see the burden behind her gaze and I wanted to lighten the heavy mood. Best she didn’t think too much on something she couldn’t help now.