Jean Preston: Sledgehammer

In the cockpit red lights blared. Soothing robotic voices relayed terrible information. There were hull breaches. The starboard thruster was offline, now adjusting . She struggled with the console, one by one systems shut down, she could no longer steer. The engine room was leaking radiation. They were losing altitude. A collision was imminent. Brace for impact.

Loma’s face was placid. The chaos erupting around her was muffled and slow. Her head was rocked by the ship violently, but she was like a statue otherwise. She looked up at her screen and saw mountains rushing to meet her. She slowly looked away.

Alana had a few medical supplies, 20 cartridges for her rifle, and 4 bullets left in her revolver. The rest of the ammo was lost, along with everything else of value. Along with Robin. The quartermaster would be devastated when she came back – if she came back. Their gear was worth more than they were, so he said, frequently.

She wondered what they would make of Kirwyn. Retragrad had no priests, no temples. She had seen mystics and preachers in her expeditions – she didn’t think much of them. Superstition. Delusion lead people to do incredible things, and insane things, Kirwyn had demonstrated both when she met him. The golem was right about one thing. Kirwyn was mad. She felt she could trust him though, strange as it sounded. He owed her, she could use him.

Alana had a rough idea of the route home, they would simply head for the mountains, then travel south, soon they would find the People’s Road which was well known to her. Luckily Alana and Robin had not made it far into their expedition. It would be only two days walk before they reached the first outpost. Kirwyn had some rations, red granulated cubes he kept in a tin case at his hip. He claimed that a man of science gave them to him – that each one offered a day’s nutrition. Alana tried one and guessed them to be placebos. She decided not to tell him until they found real food.

Kirwyn walked ahead of her, as she had arranged. She trailed from the side, keeping him in view. In this strange fashion they made it through the forests, over shallow rivers and through thickets and marshy land – areas unsuitable for pack-laden horses, but two people alone could manage. It was more out of the way. If she ever felt lost she would find high ground, or shimmy up a tree and find the mountains on the horizon.

At night, Kirwyn wanted to light a fire, but Alana insisted against it. They slept under a large tree that provided some shelter, they lay down within its massive roots, back to back again. Alana turned to face him.

“So: ‘ white is the colour of penance,’ ” she recited.

“For my order, yes,” he replied sleepily.

“What are you penitent about?”

He woke up. “A great many things.”

“Go on.”

He said nothing.

“What?” she pushed his back.

“Murder,” he whispered sadly.

“Oh,” she said. She shrugged. “Well I’m a soldier so…”

A silence lay in the air.

“Well… I was a munk. For a layperson it would be a terrible sin, but for a munk it was – I also desecrated the temple…”

“You killed other priests?” she said, sitting up, surprised.

“No,” he said. “They were thieves, bikers.”

Kirwyn chewed on the knuckle of his thumb in the dark.

“So what happens now?” she asked “You’re just gonna… wander around for the rest of your life?”

“Well, until I find atonement.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

Alana got up, rested her head in her hand. “What do you mean you don’t know? How do you expect to find what you’re looking for if you don’t know what it is?”

“I’ll know when it happens. I’ll feel it.”

She paused, eyes squinting. “ How do you know?”

“ I’ll know.”

Alana turned her back to him in frustration.

“ If it happens,” he corrected himself.

They both went silent. Kirwyn sighed sadly.

Alana turned to him again. “Those people you killed, the bikers – did they deserve it?”

“Nobody deserves it.”

“But – c’mon did they deserve it?”

“In my sect, killing people for any purpose is an abomination. It doesn’t matter if they start it, or if it’s in self-defence, or if it’s suicide, there is no justification.”

“Sounds like a pretty stupid system to me,” she offered sleepily. “So they started it then?”

“Well – yes, but if we had done nothing, they would have tortured… some of us, maybe killed a few, but we would persevere, not only did I commit a terrible sin, I put a target on the congregation’s back. Retaliation. Reciprocation. Violence begets more violence. You don’t douse a fire with gasoline. Luckily, they had many secret monasteries to retreat to…”

“So why do you carry around the sword? If you hate violence so much.”

“If I do not unsheathe it, it shows that I have learned my lesson.”

“But you can use it as a club ? Seems pretty arbitrary to me,” she scoffed. “Who decided all this? Your god?”

“Look. I am not a good arguer,” he sputtered angrily. “I do not wish to justify my people’s beliefs to you, someone who obviously mocks the very …” He turned, resolving to speak no more. But he reneged: “First of all: I did try to reason with the golem, secondly I did not kill it – you did. Also I’m not a munk anymore, so…”

“ Whatever ,” she moaned.

Kirwyn tossed and turned. “I don’t – know what I’m doing! ok? I’m just trying to do the right thing. It’s hard to tell sometimes, ” he mumbled off… “-I don’t want to talk about my life. I hate talking. Tell me about your life… How did you, uh… come to be a Ranger?”

Alana lay and stared up at the stars sleepily.

“It’s… what I always wanted to be, since I was very small.”

“Why?”

She hesitated – the mad munk had been candid with her…

“Because… when my family was killed, it was Rangers who picked me up. Looked after me.”

“Oh. I’m sorry… So you wanted to… return the favour?”

“No,” she said hollowly. “I wanted to do better . I didn’t want to clear up messes, hide away and pick up the pieces. I wanted to prevent chaos from happening in the first place. So good people didn’t need to die, and people like me, and… you I guess, didn’t have to turn out the way we did. It was a lofty goal, and I’ve more or less given up on it.”

Kirwyn didn’t know what to make of that. “That’s a shame,” he said, quietly, and then regretted it.

Tears silently welled up in Alana’s eyes, though they did not fall. She wondered what her mother would make of her now. How her sister might have been, had she lived to become a woman. She remembered that final day. How she ran, with her little sister on her back. The lights and the sirens.

“What’s Retraburg like?” He asked, hoping for a lighter subject.

She sighed heavily, wiping tears from her eyes. “Retragrad. What can I say? It’s a big city, with lots of towns and villages surrounding it. There’s food, there’s industry, there’s law. Hospitals, schools. We have an army, we have a Ranger Kor. There’s a lot worse places you could be in this world.”

“Do they let foreigners in? Like me, I mean.”

“So long as they don’t cause trouble.”

“Do you think—”

He was interrupted. A blue light, like a flare or a comet passed over them, illuminating them for a moment. Then came the sound of a dying engine. The light passed over them, leaving them in darkness, it twisted and turned in the distance, then was extinguished in the mountain, followed by a muffled crash. Alana and Kirwyn looked at each other in astonishment.