Free Transcendent (9781311909442) by Jason Halstead

without
thinking twice.”
    “They didn’t,” Mig argued. “The soldiers
did. I got no problem with fighting them and doing what needs to be
done; it’s fighting civilians that don’t sit right with me.”
    “Doesn’t,” Krys said without thinking about
it. “It doesn’t feel right to me either.”
    Mig raised an eyebrow at Krys’s correction
and then smirked. Janna looked at Angelo just as he looked away.
“Killing civilians didn’t bother them any.”
    “Let’s change this up,” Mig said. He looked
at all of them before asking, “What do we not know that we need
to?”
    “How we’re going to survive the winter,”
Stef offered.
    Mig winced and then chuckled. “Well sure,
but I meant that the people living in our town could tell us?”
    They glanced back and forth at one another,
looking for someone to speak. Krys considered the question and
realized that there were a lot of things he’d like to know, but
nothing that was necessary for his survival. He frowned and glanced
up at the sky and picked out the faint twinkle of stars near the
western horizon. That was where Lily was. And anyone else who had
been taken away. Somewhere up there. Safe, or so he imagined.
    “They can’t tell us that,” Mig said,
startling Krys. “I have no idea why they took them. Reeducation? Or
brainwashing? Maybe just slave labor. It don’t make sense, killing
all of us off and only taking the kids in the right ages that they
could get.”
    Krys nodded. “I’d been wondering that. Where
did they come from? Earth? Mars? Some of the orbiting
habitats?”
    Mig rubbed his chin as he considered it.
“That’s a lot of hardware. Too much for a habitat, I think. There’s
what, fifty some ag colonies here? All those ships alone, let alone
the tanks and bots. Maybe Mars, but does that make sense? I mean,
they’d need Earth, right? Earth is between us and Mars.”
    Krys frowned and glanced at the powered down
infopads sitting under his lean-to that protected them from the
occasional shower. If he hooked one up to a power cell, he could
find out where Earth, Mars, and Venus were at in their orbits, but
he wasn’t sure it was worth the effort or the waste of power.
    “Hard to know,” Kerry said. “I don’t think
any of us has any idea where the planets were when they showed up.
I don’t even know how long it takes to get from Mars to here. The
trip from Earth took me and Stef almost three months. I remember
hearing somebody say going to Mars instead was only a couple weeks
longer.”
    “As long as the planets are lined up and you
take advantage of momentum,” Krys added.
    The adults glanced at him and then away.
“Good point,” Mig admitted. “All that astrophysics or astronomy or
whatever it is confuses me.”
    “It’s all about speed and distance,” Krys
offered. He opened his mouth and froze as another idea came to him.
“Hey! I know what to do!”
    “What to do? About what?”
    “About us and winter,” Krys said. “Venus has
sunlight for one hundred and seventeen Earth days, depending on how
close to the equator we are. Then the same amount of time spent in
the dark. It doesn’t get too bad out, but we usually see some snow
halfway through the night cycles.”
    “Right, and we don’t have the clothes for
it,” Janna grumbled.
    “We move. Be nomads,” Krys explained. The
stunned and confused looks he received prompted him to continue.
“At the equator, Venus rotates around thirteen and a half
kilometers an hour. That’s a hard pace to keep for very long on
foot, but if we head east we can prolong our daylight until we
can’t beat the sunset. Then we turn and head back, cutting the
night in half.”
    Angelo was the first to speak up. “None of
us have been to any other colonies. Where do we go? Where do we get
food?”
    Krys turned to the pads. “We have maps.
There are mountain ranges that might slow us down but there are
roads through them. It’s going to be hard, yes, but can we survive
even a