Half Way Home: Nobody's Hero

Chapter 2

THE TREMORS STARTED on our way to breakfast one morning. Feeling the first vibration, Mica stopped stock still and her face lit up. "Earthquake!" she said with a grin. "I didn't know this planet had seismic activity." I could see her geologist instincts coming into play as she crouched down and splayed her fingers on the ground, as if to better feel what was happening under her feet.

But my survival instincts were telling me that standing in the middle of camp gawping at the ground as it bucked and reared under our feet was probably not recommended. I grabbed her arm. "C'mon, let's get inside, it's not safe out here."

She looked annoyed and shook off my hand. "Leave me — it's not every day a geologist gets to feel an earthquake at first hand. Although," her face clouded and a furrow appeared in her brow as she stared at the more distant earth movements, "I'm not sure it is an earthquake—"

"Watch out!" I shouted, and grabbed her arm again, pulling her out of the way just in time, as a bombfruit whistled through the air and smacked into the ground just inches from where she'd been crouching. Another whistle and explosion over to our right had us spinning round, and then it seemed to be raining bombfruit; the sound of the bombardment drowning out any crunching or growling from the earth beneath us.

We started sprinting for the nearest solid object, and arrived at the server module wheezing and gasping for breath; fortunately unharmed but covered in splatters of sticky pulp from the fruit that had detonated beside us. Others were not so lucky. One girl had been hit on the shoulder, her arm hanging uselessly at her side, and a boy at the back of the module was nursing a black eye.

"Where's Julie?" I asked, thinking that our resident nurse would be the best person to help them.

"Hopefully not out there," someone said, nodding at the battlefield scene evident through the module door. But obviously not here.

"You don't think an earthquake caused this?" I asked Mica, indicating the carnage outside.

She pursed her lips. "I'm not sure."

"But what else could it be?" None of my training had prepared me for something like this.

Rubbing a thumb along her bottom lip, she looked sideways at me. "That's what I'm wondering."

-::-

The earthquake caused Colony to call a halt to all work on the farms, and we were drafted instead to work in the science workshop for the canopy clearing project. Mica was allocated to work on the electrics program, where she learned all about insulators and conductors; and I was sent to propulsion, where I found out more than I really needed to know about chemicals and propellants.

Over the next days, our escape stash of seeds, tarp and tools was bolstered by electrical wire, pliers and acid, and, for the first time, escape started to seem achievable.

-::-

Creeping through the shadows to our nightly tryst in the farms, I nearly tripped over Mica when she stopped abruptly near one of the dozers. A small group of kids were sprawled on the tractor hood, their voices ebbing and falling over the evening sounds of camp. "Wha—" I started to ask, but she clamped a hand over my mouth before I could finish. And then I heard what had made her stop, and it brought me out in goose bumps.

Through the clear night air came an ominous question: "What bullet?"

The speaker was quickly shushed by one of the others, and then there was some jostling which we used as cover to creep closer. Eavesdropping on our colleagues felt wrong, but when I recognized the voice of Kelvin, one of the farmers, recounting being instructed to make bullets and seeing others making rifling barrels, the guilt faded and was replaced by shock.

It seemed that Colony had them making guns, and the thought of Hickson with a gun made my blood run cold.