Perdition's Child

Chapter 1

 It wasn't a change in the light that woke Mehk. No, you'd have to wait weeks to notice even the slightest change in daylight on this nearly tidal-locked planet where a single day inched through the equivalent of six Earth years.

Since they lacked a regular day and night cycle, the sensible natives of Lequin slept when they became tired and woke when their bodies told them to.

Mehk, meanwhile, pawed ineffectually at the mute option on his coms' holograph as it blared a wake up tone. By the time he'd succeeded in silencing the alarm the pleasant haze of sleep was long gone. It was with only a little grumbling he unlocked the tether that kept him from sleepwalking off into the desert before he stretched and slid over the side of his hoverbike into soft golden sand.

Scratching himself idly, Mehk scanned the area for changes since he'd gone to sleep a couple hours earlier. The binary suns balanced on the horizon, blazing orange and gold in a drawn out sunset. They aimed sharp daggers of light at his eyes when he glanced that way, but his pinprick pupils ignored the toothless threat.

The harsh golden light tinted the sand as far as the eye could see in every direction, broken only by the husks of trees curling up for their long night of sleep. The impression of absolute isolation was misleading, however. This was a small planet with a short horizon and you never knew what lay beyond it, but even aside from that was the ever-present clicks, trills, chirps, and hisses from countless desert creatures and insects. Things shuffled under the sand either preparing for the three years of darkness and cold ahead or scurrying ahead of the terminator line to stay on the mild edge of twilight. Out of sight beyond the close horizon mobile cities made their way across the planet, always ahead of the encroaching dark.

Mehk shuffled through his morning rituals, ending in a brief sprint up and down his sand dune to work off the wake-up jitters. Panting, he started back towards his bike while sending a rushed prayer towards the binary system. "Peace to all the directions, please don't let me fuck this up and I'll be a better Sihda, okay?"

The proper prayer was a bit more involved with a greater emphasis on self-reflection and less on asking for miracles, but he assumed the gods understood he had a deadline here and wanted to arrive a bit early.

He hopped back into his one-man hover bike. It was a deceptively old and beat-up machine that hid a suped-up mag-drive, backup nuclear battery, and all the hardware to make a living as a mechanic and scrapper near the terminator... Not to mention the closest thing he had to a home.

Two storage tanks welded to the sides held water and canned goods, while dried food, cooking implements, and his tools sat in the sheltered recess behind the seat. His clothes were in a pack strapped to the tail, and he had a folded up blanket and rain tarp for extreme conditions on the seat. He simply sat on them to give himself a bit of extra height and save space. To sleep he leaned the seat back and stuck his long legs on the dash.

Still panting from his morning exercise, Mehk again wondered how in hell his species had managed to survive before being introduced to superconductors and the resultant hovercraft that floated and zoomed across the mostly arid planet. The horizon may have not been as distant as it appeared, but the idea of walking all that way under the twin suns was still daunting.