Captured and Captivated

Chapter 15

HARPER

Walking with a strange man at night through an abandoned city? Yeah, I've had better ideas. This one sounded like the start of a Stephen King novel.

There were more buildings here. Slim comfort, they were creepy as hell. Only a few of them were still standing and they were either half collapsed or looked like they would if I so much as sneezed in the wrong direction. The storm had passed in the night and now the moons were up. In their pale pink glow made the broken walls on either side of us look like bones jutting out of pure darkness. The ground here was covered in black, metallic smelling ash. Each step we took kicked up a cloud of gloom that immediately settled to obliterate any trace of where we'd been moments before.

And, just to make a bad situation that little bit worse, furrows had begun to split open the ground the further we went. Not just small tripping hazards, but some were deep enough to have swallowed whole houses or sections of road. I wondered if they'd look less like the gaping jaws of hell during the day or not?

I clung close and let my big, bad, slightly batshit crazy alien protector take the lead. There would be a time and a place to be all "brave, independent woman who can take care of herself". That time was daylight. Nighttime on S14 was all about the feminine urge to snuggle up to big muscle and hold on tight.

Another hour passed. Cold. Miserable. Creepy. My alien had finally called a break to our relentless march and coerced a toothachingly sweet meal bar into my mouth. I ate it fast, eager to both get it over with and, more importantly, to get my head back in the warmth of my helmet. The exo suit helped a lot, but even with it and the constant movement I was too cold to be very comfortable.

"I'm detecting residual electrical currents in this direction." He pointed to the left then tutted and fussed with the seal on my helmet when I put it back on. "It will add on an additional hour each way to our journey. However, with any luck, we may find a working terminal that I can get operational again."

I nodded, only half listening. Everything was utterly still around us. The silence was so deafening that even thinking too loud felt out of place. I couldn't shake a rising feeling that we were facing a calm before a storm, but I had nothing to base that on other than some deep-seated warning in my gut.

Sarhen been trying to find some sort of network communication terminal. He believed that there should have been several for a colony of this size. Unfortunately, the only unit we'd come across so far had been damaged beyond any hope of repair.

If we could find another one, Sarhen could theoretically connect to the colony's old database and locate where the repair parts we needed were. It would be a lot easier than us just stumbling across them on our own. It seemed a little far fetched to me that there could be anything useful in a world as devastated as S14 was, but he seemed optimistic. I took that to mean he'd calculated the odds and they were in our favor.

It was a solid plan in theory, and I was more than willing to try anything that got us out of here faster. Lead the way, oh cyborg baddie of mine.

Time felt like it slowed to a crawl as we progressed. Ruined buildings gave way to open darkness then back to frozen wreckage. I stopped asking what the air temperature was. It was so frigid that the ground began to pop and crackle under our feet. Sarhen told me we were walking over duracrete. Likely it had once been a road or sidewalk, but now it was just another relic of a dead world. Even the ash swirled lethargically, the air heavy with relentless cold.

Over this planet. Hating this planet.

The land wasn't flat, either. It was broken apart in wide rings, some so big they had to be at least a half kilometer or more. We were slowly heading uphill. The cracks grew even deeper as we went, and several times Sarhen detected the ground was potentially unstable and we had to make a long detour around.