Sand Red

41

'What?' I wasn't sure what I had heard.

'A spaceship, a rocket,' he repeated.

Speechless, I stepped forward to touch the never ending, rounded, glinting steel. It was smooth and long, shaped like a juggernaut. The thing stretched through the room, impossibly wide for something so tall, standing royally upon a lowered platform, stretching powerfully to the top of the domed hall, and the sun shone gloriously down on it through the cracks in the panels. I climbed down below to its bottom and peered down at a host of hammered steel wires plates, arranged intricately within. I straightened to behold it in its entirety. The sheer size of the rocket staggered me.

'Sorry,' Lars said, wiping his eyes. 'It's taken five generations for us to achieve this.'

I tore my eyes from the wilderness of steel and looked at Lars. 'How will you do it? Do you know how to, uh-' I groped for the word. '-drive it?'

Lars laughed. 'I built it, boy.'

'This is real,' came Yul's wonderstruck voice from behind me. Weapons and concealment forgotten, he was fingering his blade as he wandered among the parts of the machine. Aida stood watching us from the doorway.

'How many can fit in the ship?' I asked.Yul walked around the rocket, speechless.

'Maybe two thousand if packed like cattle.' His smile faltered.

'Two thousand people,' I said, awestruck. 'Surely that must be far fewer people than that.' I knew nothing about birth or death rates.

He shook his head. 'No. No survey has been carried out since the astronauts left, but I'd put the number around two and a half thousand.'

'So many people!' I exclaimed. But Lars didn't seem to think so. He shook his head again. 'There were eleven billion people. Around a million left for Cerulone and the rest of us? Killed like pigs. The scientists carried out the biggest genocide in history. Murdered ten billion people with poison.'

'Why don't we know about it, then?' I asked, perplexed. Stories of murder of that scale would have been passed down to us. I didn't know how much a billion was, but it sounded like a lot.

Lars gave me a bitter smile. 'What do you think K1 Georgia is?'

Yul stopped in his tracks. I stared at Lars open mouthed.

'It's true,' he said. He turned towards Aida. 'So how are we going to do it?'

'Set it up, leave within the week. We've really done it!'

'K1 Georgia is engineered?' I interrupted.

Lars gave a hollow laugh. 'Of course it is. Hadn't you guessed?'

I shook my head.

'Well, now you know,' he said, turning back to Aida.

My head spun. Engineered? To exterminate us? The criminal astronauts. Srijan turned Forager. All the people I'd known dead from the disease. Syenin would rather die a Forager than be consumed. To exterminate us like cockroaches. A void opened up within me.

I turned to find Yul behind me. 'Cerulone,' he said to me, his eyes wide. I forced my thoughts back to the present.

Yul looked between Lars and Aida. 'What is it you want to do?' he asked.

'To go up to Cerulone,' she said. 'When do we start?' she asked Lars.

'When we've got it powered. Three days? I have to fix some kinks.' Lars peered into the cube he held.

Her grin was the widest, happiest I'd ever seen her. 'We'd better start, then!'

'It'll take longer than that to get everybody in the Arctic Circle here,' I said absently.

They both turned to me. 'Why would we do that?' Aida said scornfully.

'It's impossible, anyway.' It was Lars.

I stared at Lars. With all his big words about the nefarious astronauts, was he really going to do exactly what he had deplored all these days?

'Are you joking?' I asked. Od, Niger, Alek, Enya. They were not going to be left behind.

'No, there's no other way,' Aida said. 'You're coming, though, so don't worry.'

'It's my brother I'm worried about, not me!' Yul shouted suddenly. He stood with his knife clenched in a fist, looking at Aida with his teeth bared. He took a step forward threateningly.

Her eyes went to the blade in his hand.

I took my knife out of my scabbard and Aida took a fearful step back. Then Yul jabbed at her with an abruptness even I was proud of, and I advanced behind him swiftly, and held Lars off as Yul held Aida hostage.

'Stop or she dies!' he yelled above our clashes. Lars fell back, panting, wielding his fists.

I stepped forward and wrenched the cubes from him. 'Careful!' he yelped as I gripped it roughly.

'Every last person in the Circle is going with us,' I commanded. 'Or I hammer these flat,' I said with some difficulty. I lifted the cubes. 'It's all of us, or none of us. Which will it be?'

'All of us,' Lars said. 'All of us.'