Sorcha The Alien Book One

Chapter Twelve

The trees begin to thin, their grandeur depletes, until stunted skinny trunks with white blemishes surround us. A mangey forest of diseased plants. The undergrowth, once a tangling torrent, recedes. The ground loses its squelch and hardens beneath our boots. Sky unfolds above, no longer obstructed by red leaves and the sun readies itself to dip below the horizon. But it's not the sort of sky I wish to see, grey clouds roll in, sagging with overdue intent.

There's a definite line ahead. A line plants and trees alike refuse to cross and from that point only brown rock fills the view. I step over the boundary backwards and silently say goodbye to the jungle. Since our stint in the pool, a few hours ago, Cantral and I have mostly walked in silence. Her flirty behaviour, a thing of the past.

"Jebnah was harvested by the Entara three-hundred years ago. The planet has recovered well." Cantral stamps her foot on the bare ground. "But there are some areas that will never recover, dead land that spans for miles."

"Why did they do it?" I ask, I kick a stone and send it clattering into a boulder.

"Resources, power ..." Cantral shrugs. "The Entara are a part of entra heritage, they created our species, but we are told very little about them."

The wind picks up, it whistles in my ears, and I brace myself as I walk. "Humans have a bloody history too: wars, genocide, slavery. Europeans spread across the globe and conquered lands, killed and commanded native populations."

"But you learnt to live together in peace?"

I shake my head. "Barely. I'm hard on you, but the people I come from aren't much better."

"I don't believe the entra will ever know peace, it's like there's something in our DNA that drives us to chaos."

"Good excuse to never change."

The wind dies, it quiets around us. There are no birds, no squawks from above, no shuffles or snuffles from the ground, no networks of bugs beneath our boots. Just us. True emptiness and for a moment true silence.

Cantral frowns, she glances to me. "What do you mean?"

"If I knew my body was capable of flight, I'd practice every day to reach the sky, but it's not capable so, I never try." That's not entirely true, I did used to try when I was child. "It takes work to change, your empire collapsed two years ago and billions of angry entra exploded into the universe with no one to rein them in. They've had no guidance, of course they're going to continue on a familiar path."

"No," Cantral says, firmly, "entra are bad people."

"Yeah, you are. But change is possible ..." Why am I the one sticking up for the entra? But I already know the answer before I've finished asking the question. I need to believe they can change because if they can't, where does that leave me? Where does it leave everyone? "What have you done since the empire's demise?"

"For the past two years Fendan and I have been collecting rogue fleets of entra and assimilating them into our service, we've freed planets from entra occupation."

I breathe a sigh of relief, Cantral has been doing good and in all honesty Fendan doesn't seem like an awful person. Maybe he's who the entra need. "That sounds good."

"Bad people can do good things. For now, Fendan is doing good, but if he ordered genocide don't think any entra would oppose him."

Maybe I was too eager with my praise for Fendan. "Wouldn't you?"

"One voice cannot stand against the might of the entra."

"Sometimes one voice is all it takes, but you have to speak up first."