Conflagration

Product of Horse Gone Crazy

For Erin, the first few days of her captivity had settled into a routine. She would wake up with the Fourthers before dawn. Though her friend, Lyssa, awoke moodily every morning, waking early was no big deal for Erin, since that was her normal habit anyway.

Erin had been assigned chores and her days started with collecting eggs from the chicken coop for breakfast and milking Sister Judith's cow. Then, she would cook breakfast for herself, Lyssa and Sister Judith. All of this was familiar to Erin, as she'd grown up in an agrarian community very similar to Pilgrim's Rest.

After breakfast, a mercenary called Matty Moss whom Lyssa had befriended would come from their small camp on the outskirts of the village to escort Lyssa to the steam barge. Erin didn't trust Matty. But then again, she didn't really trust anybody...except, oddly, Lyssa. Somehow, Lyssa's unconquerable charisma had broken through all of Erin's defenses an earned her trust. Erin marveled at Lyssa's uncanny ability to make friends so easily, especially considering the mechanic's swaggering, prickly facade. Once you saw through that facade⁠—and most people did pretty quickly⁠—you couldn't help but like the caring, selfless person hidden underneath.

The first full day of this new routine, Erin had worried over Lyssa all day. When Lyssa had returned that evening, she'd reported that she'd spent the whole day supervising the repairs on 788NC and working on the modifications to the HEVA suit. Erin was relieved to hear that the pirates had more-or-less left Lyssa alone. For her part, Erin was put to work during the days with a myriad of menial tasks from the care of animals to occasionally assisting Sister Judith in her duties.

Erin quickly learned that although the matronly Sister Judith's official title in the village was "Midwife," she did much more for the village than just assist women with childbirth. The small village of Pilgrim's Rest didn't have anything as ornate as an actual doctor. Almost all injuries and medical concerns were, therefore, referred to Sister Judith.

The midwife, it turned out, was a full-fledged, college-educated nurse with battlefield experience. Originally from a Fourther settlement in Olost space, Sister Judith had been trained at Cook's Dell University School of Nursing on the Olost home world.

Olost has been in a perpetual cycle of war and peace with the Kell Republic for centuries. Shortly after Sister Judith had graduated from nursing school, war had once again broken out between the two regional powers and she'd been drafted into the Olost military as a battlefield nurse. Sister Judith could have fought the draft as a conscientious objector (as most Fourthers did) but she explained to Erin that, "I was young. I wanted adventure, I admit it. If they'd been expecting me to kill, I would have refused the draft. But I was a nurse and they were wanting my skills as a healer. I wanted to do what I could to help end the suffering. So, I went to war."

"What was the war like?" Erin had asked naively.

Sister Judith looked Erin directly in the eye, her countenance a mixture of severity and sadness. "It was war." was Sister Judith's simple, curt answer. Erin had known better than to press the issue.

While assisting Sister Judith was interesting, most of Erin's daylight hours were occupied with helping the village women in the low-altitude fields near the village. Erin loved being outside in the open air and sunlight. She hadn't realized how much she'd missed being outside since she'd left her home planet of Promisedland a few years ago. But living in a space station⁠—even one as large as Gonaways⁠—felt cramped and enclosed in a way that planetside life didn't.

Pilgrim's Rest had a strange division of labor where agriculture was concerned. The women tended the low-altitude fields near the village while the men ventured into the nearby hills every morning to tend the high-altitude fields. The phraseological distinction between "high-altitude" and "low-altitude" fields was a bit of a misnomer, as the planet's thin atmosphere made all fields effectively "high-altitude."